They took it in turns to choose. On Ned days, they went by train to street markets and to stock-car racing, with shandy and fish-paste sandwiches in a plastic bag, and on Franny days, they drove to Windsor or Henley and picnicked on chicken breasts and Chardonnay. By the end of the week, Franny was buying shop-made Cornish pasties and Ned had tried his hand at making pâté. It was a sort of holiday. Magda stayed at Viv’s, and Frances told lies about doing freelance work in London for a week. And yet Magda was the reason for it all.
Every time they met, they started with Magda. It was the first part of the ritual, which excused and justified the rest. With Magda away, Frances could hardly remember why the child had seemed so unendurable. She’d cleared away her things, which had strayed all over the house; her comic books littering the drawing-room, half-eaten bars of chocolate stuffed in the sideboard drawers. She sent her clothes to the cleaners, first removing stones and chewing-gum from torn and grubby pockets. It seemed wrong, in a way, to be rifling through the girl’s possessions. And yet it was only because she longed to know her better, find some vital clue to this reserved and secret creature. The child was like her father, both of them closed and secretive. Magda had arrived with almost nothing, no photographs or books, or treasures, nothing personal, revealing. The things she owned now were mostly gifts from Charles: the leather-bound stamp album, the set of encyclopaedias, the French course on cassette. There was nothing else, except a letter in a cheap blue envelope. She recognized the writing – it was Viv’s. Why in heaven’s name was Viv in correspondence with the kid, when she had her in her house half the time? It was shameful to read other people’s letters, something not even Frannys did, let alone Frances Parry Jones. The letter looked like Viv herself, sprawling, untidy and badly put together. She unfolded it uneasily.
‘Darling Wombat’. A double shock, a darling first, and then a nickname. She herself never called Magda darling, and even her Magdas sounded wary and steel-tipped. But Wombat was a pet name, a cosy and affectionate one. Whatever was a wombat? She’d heard the word before, in connection with a zoo. She looked it up in Magda’s encyclopaedia, the pages so immaculate she doubted if the girl had ever opened it.
‘An Australian marsupial mammal of the family Phascolomyidae.’ No wonder Magda didn’t like encyclopaedias – they made everything sound fossilized. ‘Thick, clumsy body, coarse hair, rough to the touch, small mean eyes, naked ugly muzzle.’ But that was nothing like Magda; Magda was beautiful. How could she stay with a woman who insulted her by calling her a wombat? She read on. ‘A solitary nocturnal animal, reserved and retiring.’ That was more like it. ‘The wombat wreaks so much damage on cultivated pastures, it has been widely destroyed and persecuted.’ A brute beleaguered pest, tamed and loved by Viv, kept as a pet in one home, when it had been snared and wounded in another. Not an insult, but a declaration of love.
She tried not to read the rest of the letter. It was too intimate, too painful. ‘Little one,’ Viv called her. ‘You know I care about you.’ How dare she care! And Magda wasn’t little – she was a great hulking colt of a creature. ‘Remember what I told you …’ What had Viv told her, and why were they having secrets from her? How did Viv communicate, when she had failed? Love for Viv was something everyday and plentiful, dollops of it larded over everything like cheap strawberry jam. Love in the Parry Jones establishment was rarer; rationed; measured out like caviare, in tiny, precious portions.
Frances dropped the letter miserably back on to the desk. She’d tried, for God’s sake, even read books on parenting and puberty. She’d coached Magda in history and offered to cook her favourite food. But Magda didn’t have a favourite; didn’t want her fancy dishes, or anything to do with her. The studio was empty now. The cornflowers had disappeared with the lipstick, under a wash of bland new paint. Magda had turned herself into Viv’s daughter and gone off to be a wombat.
She always seemed more like a cuckoo, a rapacious, gatecrasher bird, taking over someone else’s nest. Almost absent-mindedly, she replaced the W volume of the encyclopaedia and took out the C to D, leafing through the prim, print-crowded pages from Crusades to Cubism. She stopped at Cuculus.
‘A shy, brown, undistinguished, often furtive bird.’ Yes, that was all more or less correct. ‘A summer visitor to these islands’ – right again – ‘it departs for warmer climes in early September.’ (Would to God it did!) ‘Famed for its habit of brood parasitism, the mother cuckoo selects its victim, then destroys or devours one of the host bird’s eggs, to make room for its own.’
Frances stared at the drawing of the cruel, predatory female stalking towards an unprotected nest. Wasn’t it symbolic, somehow? The very word ‘victim’ was strangely apt. She had always felt duped and oppressed by Piroska. By infiltrating an alien chick into the nest, she had somehow destroyed her own capacity to be a mother in her turn.
No, that was quite unfair. She was taking her Clomid, wasn’t she, preparing herself to conceive this very month, only days from ovulation. It was absurd to draw analogies between a cuculid parasite following its instinct, and a human child deprived of her natural rights. She tried not to see the drawing of a doting and devoted robin perched on the baby cuckoo’s back, feeding it a grub. ‘The fledgeling cuckoo soon grows larger than its foster mother.’ Well, that was true, at least. Magda towered above her, made her look puny and insignificant. ‘It rarely receives attention from its real parents.’ How could it, when one of them was whoring in Hungary, and the other truant in Nassau? All the more reason for it to have the full devotion of its foster mother. But Frances was no tireless robin or self-sacrificing pipit. And there was no precedent in bird life for a fledgeling to fly away to another nest.
‘I’ve failed, Ned,’ Frances muttered, when they were climbing Box Hill with ice cream cornets and a home-made kite. ‘Magda doesn’t even want to live with us. I can’t get close to her at all. Do you realize, I’ve never so much as kissed her goodnight. And yet she lets Viv give her bear hugs. How does Viv do it, Ned, when I can’t even touch her?’
Ned swapped cornets. His was three-quarters finished and hers was melting. ‘Viv’s not married to Charles,’ he said. ‘Viv’s not beautiful and talented. Viv’s got Bunty.’
He didn’t add ‘Viv doesn’t live in a showcase, or polish up her own swingeing version of the ten commandments. She’s a mother and you’re a monster.’ He didn’t even insinuate that she hadn’t kissed him goodnight, either. He could have hinted that she was the one who was scared of touching. She loved him because he didn’t. In all the five days they’d been out and about together, he never nagged or criticized, or made everything complicated and accusing. Even when she shied away from him – his mouth, his dangerous body – he only grinned and teased her, and called her a gazelle or a unicorn. She let him hold her hand because he did it so matter-of-factly, and she allowed their bodies to touch and overlap a little, when they lay down to capture a view or digest their sandwiches. It seemed churlish to make a fuss about simple, easy things. She had to repay him with something, when he gave her so much time and understanding, listened unendingly to her fears about Magda. She knew he wanted more, impossibly more, but she tried to close her mind to it.
Brighton had been a dangerous precedent. She had been knocked off guard by sun and sleep, and then her own body had betrayed her. She almost marvelled at it. It seemed like someone else’s flesh and blood, doing things spontaneous and sensual, without a nagging chaperon. But once was enough. Her body belonged to Charles and was trying to have his baby. It had no right to jaunt off on its own and help itself to barren pleasures.
Sometimes she longed to tell Ned everything. But how could she trot out Mr Rathbone, when Ned was playing hopscotch at the zoo, or launch into the topic of infertility when they were sitting in a teashop with butter dripping down their chins? They had constructed a Peter-Pan-and-Wendy world where grown-up subjects didn’t stand a chance. It suited her, in fact; a never-never land, where the nevers weren’t real and chilling as they were with Charles.
‘We’ll never have a baby,’ she felt like shouting at him on the phone, when he rang so punctiliously from Nassau. It was already day eleven, so they should have been making love by now. It was so damned difficult explaining, long-distance, that her egg was bursting to be fertilized, primed and prepared by Clomid, waiting to turn them into pedigree parents, if only he weren’t five thousand miles away. There were just three more days to go, three crucial, desperate days, before the whole thing was too late, the egg dead and dissipated. He must be back, he must be.
‘I will be, darling, trust me.’ Charles sounded solemn, like a bishop. ‘I know how critical it is. I can’t wait to get out of here, in any case. The air-conditioning’s broken down and the court room’s like an oven. Look, I should know more tomorrow. With any luck, the whole thing will be over when I ring you then. Miss you, darling.’
Oh yes, she missed him, too. She missed the circles round the dots, the rutting hallmarks on her blank, barren charts; she missed him as her partner and accomplice with the Clomid. And yet in some ways, she didn’t want him back. Things were simpler and sunnier without him. Ned had turned a damp July into a sparkling August. It was bad enough, coming home each evening to a dark frowning house, after the bright patchwork days with a man who used the world as his playground, rather than his bank vault. She never asked him in. The house was Charles’ territory. There were barricades around it, which even Frannys weren’t allowed to enter.
It was Frances who sat there every evening, alone and dutiful, washing off Ned’s hands, gargling away the picnics, filling in her charts. If it weren’t for the charts, she might almost have welcomed a court case which left her free to walk barefoot in pine-woods or learn to beach a dinghy in a force seven easterly.
On day thirteen, she refused to see Ned – made up some excuse about a headache. She was so tense, she did ache – not only her head, but all of her. Charles had been due home the evening before. He was already two days late. There were only twenty-four more hours to fertilize that precious egg, which had become frighteningly important. The days with Ned had been only squandered time, a parenthesis between the real, serious business of life and parenthood. Ned was a bachelor, a layabout, a law unto himself. She was married, joined, a womb, a receptacle, a woman who must prove her womanhood, however high the cost. She belonged to Charles, she bore his name, his hallmark, and she must also bear his baby, before it was too late.
‘N-no, Charles,’ she had stammered. Her voice was ship-wrecked. ‘I simply can’t believe it. Y-you must come home.’
There were cracklings on the line, strange whistlings and buzzings. She wanted to scream. It was so grotesquely difficult to communicate.
‘Charles, you don’t understand. This drug has side effects. It may even be dangerous. What’s the point in my taking it, when you’re never here at ovulation time? We’ll never have a baby.’ Never-never land. The real one, the grey hopeless empty one, where the nevers stretched five thousand miles. Charles sounded a lifetime away, his whipped-cream voice curdled by all the interference on the line.
‘I’m distraught about it, darling. Of course I realize what it means to you. I’d simply no idea the case would drag on as long as this. But now they’ve traced the missing funds to a Cayman Trust, so I’ve got to check all the transactions in between.’
‘But why can’t someone else do it? What about Bill Turner? He’s got all the facts.’
‘Darling, you’re talking nonsense. Turner’s just a lackey. I’m a key witness. I’ve been subpoena’d now. They simply won’t release me. If it were anything else, I’d leave immediately, you know I would. But I can’t defy a judge.’
She cried. It was a waste of money, crying long-distance. The phone turned her tears into a jarring dissonance. Charles hated tears, in any case. She tried to choke them back.
‘Look, Charles, how about tomorrow? If you could make it by tomorrow, we might still be OK – just about.’ It was so confusing with the time being different in their two parts of the world. She had to keep subtracting five hours. Charles’ tomorrow might not even be her own.
‘Impossible! Oppenheimer’s flying in and I must be there when he arrives. He’s king, Frances, and the courtiers don’t run off when royalty arrives.’
King! She almost spat. Heinrich Oppenheimer was just a self-made millionaire with a first-class tailor. All right, she knew he was the power behind her camel coats and Citroëns, but she’d gladly renounce all that, to have a baby. With a child in your womb, who cared if you had only cheap rags on your back, or a Ford Fiesta in the garage?
‘Listen, Charles, I’ve got a plan. It could still work out. You meet Heinrich first thing in the morning, have your briefing with him – explain the whole situation at home, if it helps – then catch the next plane back. We could just about make it then, by the skin of our teeth. I’ll meet you at the airport, if you like. We could even book a room at the Heathrow Hotel, so we don’t waste precious time driving back to Richmond.’
‘Frances, my darling, you sound absolutely obsessed. It’s simply out of the question. Oppenheimer’s plane doesn’t get in till lunchtime, and that’s already evening, your end. In any case, he’s relying on me to see this whole thing through to its conclusion. I’m not a free agent. The court’s sitting and I must be there – at least three more days.’
Three more days! The egg would be long since shrivelled, her half of the baby flushed away like a tampon. Anger thrust between the crackling wires. ‘What if I were dead, Charles? I suppose they’d leave me stinking and unburied, before they let you out.’
‘You’re not dead, darling. Do be reasonable. We’ve still got next month. Look, I promise you faithfully I won’t go away next month. If it’s anywhere remotely near ovulation time, I shan’t even risk an overnight stay. That’s a solemn undertaking. Now, come on, Frances, try and understand. I miss you. I love you.’
She didn’t say ‘love you too’, she didn’t even feel it. Only a bleak, gnawing pain, and horrible confusion. She couldn’t really blame Charles – his job had always been like that. And for fifteen years, she’d enjoyed the fruits of it. Emeralds round her throat and Paris in her wardrobe, steak in the freezer, claret in the cellar, charge accounts at Fortnum’s and Harrods, Lillywhites and Simpson’s, her string of credit cards, her new McGregor golf clubs – all were Charles’ bounty.
But there were other sorts of bounty – kites and cuttle-fish, peanut-butter sandwiches, puddles and paddle-boats. You could always opt for spam and shandy instead of salmon and champagne, and who needed diamond chokers to dam a river or reel in a trout? But that was only a week’s new thinking, play-acting. Five short days of pretending to be a gypsy, dressing as a tramp. It was easy to lunch on bangers and mash in a transport caff, when she could top up in the evening with caneton á l’ orange.
Or grub in the fields for fungi, when she had Fortnum and Mason truffles swanking in her larder. Hypocritical to swan around with Peter Pan and spend Tinkerbell days grabbing at rainbows, when she’d been made, saved, and subsidized by Charles and Oppenheimer.
She stayed in all day and tried to turn herself wholly into Frances. But Frances was empty, barren. She locked the door and took the phone off the hook. She didn’t want Laura snooping round, crowing, ‘So when did your hairdresser expire, darling?‘ or ‘No wonder Charles stays away, sweet, if you will wear jeans from the Oxfam shop.’ Or Viv to ring and explain that all Magda needed was love. Or Ned rocketing down the phone with a witch’s potion for her headache and two free tickets for a pop festival. ‘I’ll bring the peace and the pot, and you bring the Snoopy blanket.’
She didn’t want anything except a baby, a circle round her dot. She wasn’t barren, there was a baby there – she knew it – waiting, only lacking a Charles to kick it into life. The week with Ned had primed and softened her; all that sun and sea, fresh air, wild flowers, new feelings, had worked like some lush fertility rite, blown out the gloom and tension from her womb, and made it fruitful.
Slowly, she walked upstairs to the top of the house, where she kept her filing system. Drawersful of past PR campaigns, promoting furs and fashion houses, bridal gowns and beachwear; details of all their Richmond furnishings – colour swatches and fabric samples; photographs – Charles as a young man, looking just the same but less assured about it, herself at seventeen, dumpier, and grinning in a way she hardly recognized. The bottom drawer was her baby file, full of articles and cuttings she’d been collecting since she gave up her career: the best form of childbirth, the advantages of breast-feeding, lists of equipment, nanny agencies. She took out the folder and sorted through it. The pictures of babies hardly moved her – they all looked much the same, chubby and torpid. It was the mess and mystery of childbirth itself that appalled and fascinated her. Something so natural and yet so strange and undignified, like sex. It both sanctified and sullied every woman who went through with it. Her mind felt prepared now, and her body ready – breasts fuller than usual on account of the Clomid, and a sick, expectant feeling in her stomach.
She went downstairs again, prowled through all the rooms. She couldn’t eat. Books and music were impossible. Crazy schemes darted through her head. She’d rush to the airport and take the next plane to Nassau. But even then, it would be too late. The flight took at least eight hours, and by the time she’d waited for a plane and hung around for Charles at his hotel … She could hardly drag him screaming from the court room. ‘Beg leave, m’Lud, for your honourable witness to fertilize an egg.’
Strange, how remote he felt. Not just on the other side of the Atlantic, but wafer-thin and dwindling on another planet. It was Ned who filled the room, sneaking up between the floorboards or grinning from the frames of the self-important pictures of Charles’ ancestors. Ned felt real and solid – the only thing that was. She should never have put him off. Perhaps she ought to phone him and just say something casual and conversational – her headache was better, the rain had stopped.
She picked up the phone and began to dial … put it down again. It wasn’t Ned she needed, it was Charles. And anyway, she’d always refused to see Ned in the evenings. She was Frances in the evenings, not Franny, and Frances was composed and self-sufficient. If she couldn’t control herself enough to read or work, then at least she’d settle down and do a little cooking. They had an important dinner party later in the month and she could prepare a rum and orange soufflé in advance, and put it in the freezer. She stood at the kitchen table and set herself to grate the peel from seven oranges, a long and fiddly task. A man was talking on the radio in a plump, brandied voice about Balanchine’s collaboration with Stravinsky. She tried to concentrate. She squeezed the orange juice and mixed it with a generous sloosh of rum. The long-case clock struck ten, echoed by the high bray of the chiming Delander, and, at the same instant, the spring door of the Victorian cuckoo-clock burst open and his absurdly smug cuckoo-ooo coughed across the hall. Ten cuckoos, ten chimes, ten peals, ten booms, ten …
All the clocks were so bloody obedient; none of them late or slow or out-of-time. How could they be, when they were Charles’ property? She flung the pile of carefully grated orange peel into the sink, gulped down the tumblerful of rum and orange juice, and rummaged for the car keys. Sod the soufflé! Damn the rules! She needed air and space and action.
It was a soft summer night. The scent of stocks lassooed her as she walked across the garden to the garage. The grass looked grey and smoky. Tendrils of clematis reached out to touch her face as she edged along the wall. She was gulping air like rum.
The car knew where to go. It turned out of Richmond and along the Kew Road, over the bridge, past the old Brentford market. She hardly noticed the route. She was only out for a drive, a change of scene. She had no plans. If the car wanted to take itself to Acton, well, why not? It was as good a place as any. She cruised along the Vale, turned right, then right again.
The house looked taller and shabbier than she’d remembered it. There were no stocks in the front garden, only dandelions. A grey cat whisked round the side of the house and disappeared. She leaned against the cold stone steps. She’d drive off again in a moment. She was only getting a breath of air. Ned would be out, in any case. Or entertaining a girl, a young kid from Southmead Polytechnic with hair like Magda’s. Why shouldn’t he? He was young and unattached and bound to have a yes-girl. Frannys spent the whole time saying no.
It wouldn’t hurt to knock. If they’d gone to bed, they simply needn’t answer. And, if they hadn’t, she could always say she was just passing and could she borrow a …
‘I was … er … just passing …’
His legs were bare under the dirty towelling dressing-gown, his hair rumpled and on end. She’d obviously disturbed him with a girl. He’d be furious, embarrassed. She tried to back away.
‘I’m sorry, Ned, I should have phoned. I …’
‘Franny.’ His voice was soft like fudge, an off-guard, sleepy voice without its usual banter.
Suddenly, her chin was grazing against his dressing-gown and she was drowning in rough brown towelling.
‘I wondered … if I could borrow a …’
‘Borrow anything, my darling.’
He pushed her down again. Her head was underwater. She clung to him. He was a buoy, a lifeboat. He was rescuing her, dragging her from the waves and setting her down in the cool green shores of his bedroom.
She was quite safe. It was only a continuation of the week. She’d lain beside him almost every day, on picnics and in parks, and nothing had happened. She hadn’t let it happen. So it made no difference, really, that they were lying on his bed now, and his dressing-gown had slipped apart, and he was taking off her clothes. She was chilled – that was all – and she needed his hot nakedness to stop her catching cold.
She tried to keep talking, then she needn’t think. It was just an ordinary evening, and they were relaxing together, putting their feet up.
‘I was out for a drive, and …’
‘Mmmmmm …’ He was kissing the inside of her elbow and down along her forearm.
‘So I thought I’d just drop by and say hello …’
His mouth was wet and open and had moved against hers. She dodged it.
‘You taste of rum, darling. Delicious.’
She tried to fix her attention on the ceiling. ‘I … hope I didn’t wake you up.’
‘Hush, my love, don’t talk.’
It was so much worse in silence. All the guilts rushed in to fill the empty spaces where the words had been. Yet, it couldn’t be entirely wrong. Rathbone had suggested it himself – well almost. Worse still to do it with the milkman and produce a bald, gingery infant, in a strawberry yoghurt carton. At least Ned was literate.
She mustn’t enjoy it, that was the key. So long as she regarded it merely as a duty in the larger cause of procreation, a cold, sterile procedure like dilatation or laparotomy, then it couldn’t be wicked. She must dispense with the kissing and the cuddling, cut out everything which smacked of pleasure. Ned was still nuzzling her neck. She rolled over on top of him, shut her eyes, put out her hand and groped down.
It felt different from Charles’, smaller and more pliable. She tried to slot it in, still not daring to look down. It keeled over and slipped out. She tried again, closing her legs and squeezing. She wanted it to fill and overwhelm her, like Charles’ did, to grind her into pieces, so that she couldn’t think of Charles, or anything, to whiplash her out of her head, into harbour. But the small soft thing was oozing out again, shrinking away from her. She mustn’t let it go. Whatever happened, they must continue with this medical procedure. It was crucial day fourteen.
Ned crawled out from underneath her and stroked a hand along her breasts. ‘I’m sorry, love, don’t rush me. Let me kiss you first.’
She hadn’t time for kissing. There was an egg more or less bursting to be fertilized, and every demon in hell ready to pounce if she wavered for a moment. Why were men so damned perverse, Charles dallying in Nassau, and Ned dawdling in Acton, still slowing down the pace.
‘Hey, Franny …’
‘What?’ She wished he wouldn’t talk, or use her name. She didn’t want to remember who she was. Even Frannys wouldn’t go this far. Safer to be just a body on Mr Rathbone’s couch. She closed her eyes again, tried to steer and coax him in.
‘Look, darling, just relax. You seem so tense, on edge, and it’s affecting me, as well. There’s no rush. Let’s just cuddle.’
No rush! How could she relax when she was terrified he’d go completely limp, and her one chance of conceiving would peter out in cosy (barren) cuddles. They were already losing contact. She tensed her muscles and moved her body against him, the way Charles had taught her, circling her thighs and gripping. She could feel Ned stiffen a little, but he was still only a mollusc, compared with the mast that Charles was, and hardly moving at all. They were stranded, becalmed, but they must go on – it would be crazy to stop now. She needed Ned, his kiss of life, life not for her, but for her baby. She rocked backwards and forwards against him, slower, then quicker, using Charles’ own tuition to betray him. Ned suddenly gasped and shouted underneath her. There was a shudder, a tin-pot explosion, and, as he slithered out, she felt sperm trickling down between her thighs.
She rolled over, bent her knees up right against her chest. She had to harvest every drop of sperm. Ned was kissing her and kissing her. She turned her face away.
‘I’m sorry, love. I was lousy, but you took me by surprise. I like a bit of preparation first. Anyway, you’ve been saying no so long, I’ve begun to see you as a sort of Virgin Mary, and screwing Blessed Virgins puts me off. Give me half an hour and I’ll recover.’
She felt rigid with embarrassment. Now she had his sperm safe inside her, the whole thing seemed shameful. How ever could she have got into his bed, a squalid hole with crumpled sheets that had never seen an iron, threadbare blankets, half a cheese roll mouldering on the bedside table, an outboard engine in pieces on the floor, the smell of naked, sweaty male? He was lying half on top of her, his nose jammed against hers. He didn’t even seem mortified, just sleepy. She longed to creep away, but Mr Rathbone’s instructions precluded it. She had to lie there a full thirty minutes on her back, and by that time, he’d be stiff again. Or fast asleep. He already had his eyes closed and was murmuring silly, sleepy things into her hair. His body felt damp and sticky against her own cool, dry one. She fought a strong temptation to push him off, alarmed by her own anger. She should be grateful, not vindictive. He had saved her, hadn’t he, kindled the Clomid, serviced her egg. But she wanted Charles’ baby, not a yellow-eyed pygmy who’d be born with an instant grin and a dandelion between its teeth. And, if it had to be Ned’s, why couldn’t it have been a beautiful encounter, an immaculate conception? Hot-house flowers blooming in a five-star bedroom, romantic music sobbing through a languorous night, not that sordid, five-minute shipwreck which had beached them on a wasteland.
Yet it was she who had made it sordid, by insisting on sperm instead of sensations. She had outlawed all ecstasy by setting up some pleasure-guilt ratio – if the one diminished, so would the other. But it hadn’t proved the case. There was a different, harsher ratio – the more torpid it was, the more reprehensible. She couldn’t even excuse herself on the grounds that she had been swept away by passion, or overruled by Ned’s tempestuous feelings.
She was still surprised at Ned. After Brighton, she had expected something wilder, more akin to the last occasion she’d made love – well, hardly love, that time, the way Charles had forced her head against the floor and then rammed Magda into it. She had loathed his brutishness, yet there was something about it which now attracted her. Ned’s passive, flaccid, rudderless performance had made her realize that Charles’ thrust and vigour were not simply to be taken for granted as the norm.
Ned was leaning over her, his hair dripping in her eyes. ‘I want you, Franny. I’ve wanted you ever since I found you in my front garden. Hold me, love. I want to have you properly.’
She couldn’t say no. It was his bed, his sperm. She’d woken him up and she could hardly tell him to go back to sleep and forget it ever happened. Yet she didn’t want him near her, especially not that part of him coiling damp and soft against her thigh. She’d never thought much about size before. She’d taken Charles as her gauge and her yardstick, and assumed most men more or less matched up. But now she found they didn’t, it disturbed her.
Ned grew an inch or two as she used her hands to fondle him. She had to repay him for the sperm. She only hoped he’d come on top of her – Rathbone had made it clear she mustn’t move. The egg had the best chance of being fertilized if she lay on her back with her legs drawn up. She drew them up still further, pretending she was excited by his mouth. The mouth moved lower down, rough chin scratching between her breasts, across her belly, and still on down. Suddenly, it had reached her thighs, his reckless tongue dipping and squeezing between them. She closed herself against him. That was not allowed. But, by drawing up her legs, she’d more or less encouraged him. He’d taken it as an open invitation, not just a practical procedure for retaining his sperm. Well, at least she needn’t move, just stay on her back and pretend it wasn’t happening.
His face had almost disappeared between her legs, his fair hair shading off into her darker, coarser thatch, his nose squashed sideways against her thighs. She mustn’t look, or he’d think she was enjoying it. She was enjoying it. He was doing exquisite things with his teeth. His tongue felt barbed and dangerous. He was turning her inside out, adding pain to ecstasy, as he teased and nipped with his teeth and grazed his unshaven chin back and forth across her thighs. Part of her held back still, worrying and analysing in the prison of her head – she shouldn’t be enjoying it; he’d expect her to do it back; supposing he licked away all his own semen and lessened the chance of conception. No, the sperm were already in her, rushing for the egg like lemmings, all four hundred million of them. She could almost feel them plunging and shoving deeper into her womb, an exhilarating feeling, somehow connected with what Ned was doing deep between her legs. His chameleon tongue changed shape and speed and texture from minute to minute. He was licking secret, shameful places which had nothing to do with sex, cul-de-sacs which had been closed and private all her life. She spread her legs wider. Everything was opening for him, the sensations taking her over. She could feel her own mouth imitating his, her tongue searching for him, restless.
‘Ned,’ she shouted. ‘Ned!’ Her voice came from somewhere deeper than her mouth.
He let his head move slowly up her belly. His face looked damp and crumpled, and his lips tasted strange when they fumbled against her own. No good recoiling – that was her own taste and smell – one she tried to drown with soap and douches. His tireless mouth was repeating what it had done further down. He had slipped his little finger between her lips, as well as his deft tongue, and there were incredible, tangled sensations she could only submit to. She had moved out of her head and into her mouth. She was no longer Frances, not even Franny, but just an object and an orifice. It was a shattering relief. All her life, sex had been monitored through her consciousness and conscience, obeying rules, observing boundaries, but now it had rebelled. She was suddenly a body – mouth, bowels, belly, arse – messy, sweaty, open.
He had still not entered her. She thrust her thighs up and out towards him, almost forced him in. He still felt small, as if he had been swallowed up inside her. She tried to move in time to him, but he was too slow, too feeble. She longed for him to slam into her, on and on, until her mind shrivelled with disuse. He was moving now, though only very tentatively. She slowed herself down to suit him, and suddenly, he yelled ‘Christ!’ and then lay still.
She was so wet already, she hardly knew he’d come. Her own body was still revving and thrusting underneath him, but there was nothing to fill or answer it. She tried to force him back, scooping up the small slippery thing between her hands and struggling to revive it.
He was spent, exhausted, his whole weight flat against her. ‘You’re wonderful, Franny, glorious! Put your arms around me, hold me.’
She didn’t want to hold him. She wanted to screw him. That wasn’t a Frances word. It had crept out of her new uncaged body and was crying out for a finale. She felt overwhelmed with contradictory feelings – white heat of frustration mixed with fury, amazement at the new, greedy whore she had become, but also a shame, a reticence, a slow return to the clogged, accusing strictures of her head.
There were black crosses everywhere, a hundred for adultery, a thousand for enjoying it, two thousand for wanting more. She felt guilt and terror towards Charles, anger and gratitude to Ned, delight and horror at herself. A civil war was raging in this small, poky bedroom, and one of the chief combatants was sleeping through the gunfire, slumped across her chest. She tried to shift from underneath him, but he clung on like a baby.
Baby! She’d forgotten all about babies for at least twenty minutes. God almighty! She was pregnant – she must be. Everything was primed. It was exactly day fourteen, the Clomid had made her super-fertile, all her tests were perfect anyway, Ned was young and virile, and above all, he was a different man with different sperm. If she was allergic to Charles’ semen, as Rathbone had hinted, then this new, gutsy brand would mean instant conception. Now she had caught up with Piroska, and was Charles’ equal in betrayal. A Ned for a Magda. She shivered. She didn’t want to be his equal. One of Charles’ attractions was that you could never catch up, not even in betrayal.
Charles would know the child wasn’t his. It would be born with fair curly hair creeping down its navel, loll in its cot and never learn its alphabet. She could almost feel the foetus growing inside her, a soft-shelled, feckless thing, flinging its toys about, untidying her perfect houseproud womb. Cells adding to cells in the relentless drive towards creation; Ned’s slipshod chromosomes forcing hers apart, and fusing with them. It was an alien growth, a cancer, slow-growing and inexorable, totally indifferent as to whether she welcomed it, or cursed it.
Even the act of conceiving it had totally confused her. Ned’s thrusting had been almost perfunctory. Charles could do it at full throttle for at least twelve minutes. He probably even timed it on his quartz digital alarm. And yet, all that time, she had never felt the wild, inside-out sensations which Ned’s mouth had exploded into her. Charles never moved his mouth any lower than her breasts. She tried now to imagine him, fusing Ned’s tongue on to Charles’ body and opening her legs, ashamed of her excitement. Not only had Ned impregnated her, he had turned her into some greedy, voracious slut, kindled strange new parts of her anatomy with wild new desires. And then he’d gone to sleep on top of them, leaving them still shouting out for more. He was crushing her limbs and lying on her hair, his mouth half open, one arm pinioning her chest.
She stared up at the ceiling. The bedside light was still switched on and she could see the paint stained and flaking on the dirty walls, and the overhead bulb bare, without a shade. She longed to be in her own bedroom, with its old-rose ceiling and the fragile elegance of the Bohemian tear-drop chandelier. The bed was too small for both of them. The mattress dipped and bulged, and there was only one small pillow. She’d never get to sleep. Another man’s body was crushed on top of hers, another man’s baby sprouting in her womb.
At least it was warm. There was something very comforting about lying against another naked body. She rarely did it. Charles always got up and took a shower after sex, and then returned to the chilly order of his own bed. There were a lot of things she rarely did. Her legs were still open. She trailed her hand down between them and left it there. She dared not move too much in case she woke Ned, but she turned her fingers into Ned’s mouth and Charles’ mast combined. The bed trembled in shock.
Rilke slunk through the open door and sprang on top of her. His soft fur brushed against her thighs and added to the tangle of sensations between them. She lay with Ned’s weight against her breasts, and Rilke’s warmth purring through her, further down. She was exhausted, even sore, so many guilts and pleasures breeding in her body, she doubted if she’d ever sleep again. But she might as well relax. The situation was so bizarre, all she could do was lie back and accept it for the moment. It would be light by five o’clock. She’d wake Ned then, and make her getaway. Meantime, she’d try to lull her frantic mind – work out logarithms, recite the whole of Paradise Lost, anything to dull the screaming ache of what she’d done. Charles had given her Milton, all twelve volumes, vellum-bound, for her twentieth birthday.
‘Of man’s first disobedience and the fall …’
It was noon when she woke. The sun was stampeding through the open curtains and the day smelled of toast. There were five hefty slices of it, glistening with butter, with Ned attached to them, trying to balance the marmalade on the teapot and kiss her, all at once.
‘Your petit déjeuner, madame. Devilled kidneys on a silver salver, smoked Orkneys haddock in a chafing dish … and Tesco’s tuppence-off teabags. Sleep well?’
‘Mmmm …’ She couldn’t have slept. She had eleven and three-quarter more books of Paradise Lost to work through, and at least eight hours of guilt.
‘Hungry?’
‘Yes.’ She couldn’t be hungry. She was a wicked, unfaithful, pregnant, feckless bitch. An insomniac who’d lost her appetite.
He fed her with three-quarters of the toast and three mugs of tea, and tickled crumbs across her naked tummy. Rilke sat on her left foot and Werther licked butter from the empty plate. Ned spread the Daily Mail across the bed and thumbed through it for the horoscopes.
‘Right, here we are – Virgo. ‘‘Stay in bed all day today and don’t venture out. Intimate encounters with a fair, mysterious stranger can only prove fruitful.’’’
Frances tried to laugh. Fruitful – that terrifying, marvellous word. ‘You’re making it up, Ned. It probably says ‘‘Business interests prosper’’, or something boring like that.’
‘No, it doesn’t. It says ‘‘Stay in bed with lovely Ned.’’ Which is halfway to a poem. Come on, love, move over. I don’t see why Rilke can lie on top of you, if I can’t.’
‘Look, Ned, I ought to get back …’
‘Whatever for?’
‘Well, Charles …’
‘He’s away.’
‘Yes, but …’
‘How long will he be gone?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Roughly.’
‘Three or four days, maybe.’
‘OK, I’ll settle for that. Three or four days in bed with Ned, and if the Daily Mail allows it, we’ll get up on Friday. No, don’t start objecting. I want to kiss you and it tickles if you talk. Shove up a bit, love, I’m falling out of bed.’
‘Ned, I …’
‘Hush, love. You taste of lemon marmalade, and I want some more of it. Look, we’ll do it six times today, seven tomorrow, ten on Thursday, and go to Confession on Friday. Right? Right!’