Perhaps she intended not to come back. She did. A few weeks later she told me she had just been to a gynaecologist and confirmed that she was pregnant. I was moved. I took the unlikely luck of conception — I’d assumed when we made love the night of the party she’d taken the usual precautions, we weren’t drunk even if she was triumphant — as a symbol of what would be a change in our perhaps unsuitable marriage. I am a medical specialist, neurological surgeon.
When the child was born it looked like any other red-faced infant but after several months everyone was remarking how the little girl was the image of Laila, the mother. It was one day, a Saturday afternoon when she was kicking and flinging her arms athletically, we were admiring our baby’s progress, her beauty, and I joked “Lucky she doesn’t look like me” that my wife picked her up, away, and told me “She’s not your child.” She’d met someone in Edinburgh. I interrupted with angry questions. No, she prevaricated, all right, London, the affair began in London. The leading actor who had insisted on her playing the small part introduced her to someone there. A few days later she told: it was not “someone” it was the leading actor. He was the father of our girl child. She told this to other people, our friends, as through the press it became news that the actor Rendall Harris was making a big name for himself in plays by Tom Stoppard and Tennessee Williams.
I couldn’t decide what to believe. I even consulted a colleague in the medical profession about the precise variations in the period of gestation in relation to birth. Apparently it was possible that the conception could have taken place with me, or with the other man a few days before, or after, intercourse with me. There never was any intention expressed by Laila that she would take the child and make her life with the man. She was too proud to let anyone know that the fact probably was that he didn’t want her or the supposed progeny of one of his affairs.
Laila has devoted herself to her acting career and as a result the role of a father has of necessity led to a closer relation than customary with the care of the small girl, now four years old. I am devoted to her and can produce witnesses to the conviction that she would be happiest in my custody.
I hope this is adequate. Let me know if anything more is needed, or if there is too much detail. I’m accustomed to writing reports in medical jargon and thought this should be very different. I don’t suppose I’ve a hope in hell of getting Charlie, Laila will put all her dramatic skills into swearing she isn’t mine.’
THAT Saturday. It landed in the apartment looted by the present filled it with blasting amazement, the presence of the past. That Saturday just as it had come to him. Charlotte/Charlie (what was she) received exactly as he had, what Laila (yes, her mother, giving birth is proof) had told.
How to recognise something not in the vocabulary of your known emotions. Shock is like a ringing in the ears, to stop it you snatch back to the first page, read the letter again. It said what is said. This sinking collapse from within, from flared breathless nostrils down under breasts, stomach, legs and hands, hands that not only feel passively but go out to grasp what can’t be. Dismay that feeble-sounding word has this ghastly meaning. What do you do with something you’ve been Told? Something that now is there in the gut of your existence. Run to him. Thrust his letter at him, at her — but she’s out of it, she’s escaped in smoke from the crematorium. And she’s the one who really knows — knew.
Of course he didn’t get custody. He was awarded the divorce decree but the mother was given the four-year-old child. It is natural, particularly in the case of a small girl, for a child to live with the mother. In spite of this ‘deposition’ of his in which he is denied paternity he paid maintenance for the child. The expensive boarding school, the drama and dance classes, even those holidays in the Seychelles, three times in Spain, once in France, once in Greece, with the mother. Must have paid generously. He was a neurologist more successful in his profession than the child’s mother was on the stage. But this couldn’t be the reason for the generosity.
Charlotte/Charlie couldn’t think about that either. She folded the two sheets, fumbled absently for an envelope they should have been in, weren’t, and with them in her hand left the boxes, the letters, Laila’s apartment, locked, behind the door.
HE can only be asked: why he’s been a father, loving.
The return of his Saturday, it woke her at three, four in the morning when she had kept it at bay through the activities of the day, work, navigating alone in her car the city’s crush, mustn’t be distracted, leisure occupied in the company of friends who haven’t been Told. She and her father had one of their regular early dinners at his favourite restaurant, went on to a foreign movie by a director whose work she admired and the Saturday couldn’t be spoken: was unreal.
In the dark when the late-night traffic was over and the dawn traffic hadn’t begun: silence.
The reason.
He believed in the one chance of conception that single night of the party. Laila’s farewell. Even though his friend expert in biological medicine said, implying if one didn’t know the stage of the woman’s fertility cycle you couldn’t be sure, the conception might have achieved itself in other intercourse a few days before or even after that unique night. I am Charlie, his.
The reason.
Another night-thought; angry mood — who do they think they are deciding who I am to suit themselves, her vanity, she at least can bear the child of an actor with a career ahead in the theatre she isn’t attaining for herself, he in wounded macho pride refusing to accept another male’s potency. His seed has to have been the winner.
And in the morning, before the distractions of the day take over, shame on herself, Charlie, for thinking so spitefully, cheaply about him.
The next reason that offers itself is hardly less unjust, offensive — confusedly hurtful to her, as whatever it is that comes, called up by her. He paid one kind of maintenance, he paid another kind of maintenance, loving her, to keep up the conventions before what he sees as the world. The respectable doctors in their white coats who have wives to accompany them to medical council dinners. If he had married again it would have been a woman like these. Laila was Laila. Never risk another.