And so it goes, back and forth, back and forth, thrown and returned, thrown and returned, day after day, and you hope that at last the waves will erode the stone. You hope, one day, there will be no stone. Though there always is.
‘But Stuart, this is the point. When you take pain like that, every day, and squeeze it tight, squeeze it into a stone, and throw that stone away, eventually you realise: you can do that with anything. Any part of yourself. And that’s why this has been easy for me. Do you see? I’ve been doing this for years. Stuart. Feel my belly.’
‘That’s enough,’ I said.
Stella leaned forward, over the table, the phone firmly in her grasp. ‘Watch.’
Betty had turned the camera upon her body. Waving steel grasses tipped across her supine form, hiding her gravid belly. Out of focus, writhing and spiralling, they stirred her flesh as though it were a soup.
I sat there, helpless.
‘Touch my belly. Feel how hard it is. Like a stone. Are you going to catch it, Stu? Are you going to catch this stone? Are you going to look after me?’
The picture went out.
I got to my feet. ‘You had no business showing me that.’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘That’s between Mum and Dad. You had no business recording it.’
‘Stuart.’
I buttoned my coat.
‘Did you not hear? She was talking to you. That was all meant for you.’
I shook my head. ‘She was talking to Dad. She’s confused.’
‘Please, Stuart.’
I threw a twenty pound note on the table, a calculated slight since Stella always paid – pointless, too, since the hotel no longer accepted paper money – and I left.
Bob’s own interpretation of Betty’s state of mind had been refreshingly straightforward. ‘She wasn’t interested in anything I had to say. Mind you, she never was.’
Following his aborted trip to Ladywell, Stella saw him back to our flat. He spent the evening with me and Fel, saying very little, and the next day he returned to Hebden by the noon train. His visit, which I had expected to be both awkward and intrusive, proved in the end too short for us. Fel felt she must have done or said something wrong. ‘I don’t think he liked me very much,’ she said as we pulled sheets and bed covers from the couch where he had slept, and I said nothing, because in all honesty she was probably right. It must surely have occurred to Bob that the Bund, which had won dominion over so much already, had now won dominion over his wife. And if that was the case, then who was Fel but the agent through which the Bund would win dominion over his son?
I lived in two worlds, and until that point I had always imagined I would be able to hold them apart: my unaccommodated life, and that part of my life that nudged up against the Bund. I had managed until now. I had remembered not to rub my father’s nose in my higher education. I had always toned things down when he was around.
I wanted him to be proud of me, but I knew not to make too much noise about all of the important things I had learned, nor opine too vigorously about political matters of which Bob, living where he did, and doing what he did, could not possibly know anything.
But the stretch between life in the West Riding and life in London was as nothing to the chasm the Chernoy Process was opening up between the unaccommodated and the Bund, and for the first time, I felt myself tear. I loved Fel, and I loved my father, but as time went on and the world continued to change, playing out with a cold logic the speciations triggered by Gurwitsch’s ray, I could see that I might be forced to choose between them.
7
We none of us visited Betty very often during her pregnancy. And this was no tragedy, since day by day there was less of her to visit. By the autumn, when we were carrying umbrellas to Ladywell and splashing along gravel paths from tent to tent, it was impossible, when we got to her gazebo, for us to glimpse the oh-so-precious core one likes to imagine lies at the root of a human self. Betty’s body alone remained. That and a wrapper of words and associations unbound by anything you could call consciousness.
Betty’s tent was sagging by then, its crimson canvas faded in streaks to a fleshy pink. Mildew grew in the corners and its seams bled in the rain. There was mud trodden into the rugs around the couch, and things living under the weave, and the tin lamps scattered round about, which had lit Betty’s confinement from beneath like a Victorian nativity scene, had tarnished and dented, and many had ceased to function. By then, Betty was spared the sight of this dilapidation. The stand of blade-like grasses had receded back into the earth, but now her head was smothered by hordes of silver bees. It was a sight familiar enough by then to make my last visit, at the end of November, easier than perhaps it ought to have been. Not very charged with emotion at all, in fact – it was as though I had already lost her. When I squeezed her hand for the last time, her fingers found mine and yet I knew, deep in my heart, that this was merely an autonomic response, and that she was consumed. I stared at her swollen belly. Its late fecundity was still disturbing to me: a youngish belly parasitising on an old woman. An unnecessarily bitter way of looking at the Chernoy Process, but given Betty’s medical history, how could I think of it differently?
Oblivious to my grim metaphor-making, Betty hurtled towards her triumphant rebirth. At Stella’s request, the clinic sent us regular video reports. Through them we sensed her belly swelling day by day, and heard the bees swarming in and out of her mouth and nose in pursuit of strange honey, reading her mind even as they burned away her brain.
The clinic controlled every nuance of this process, including the moment of death. For Betty’s demise, they picked Christmas Day: the very day the family were meant to cheer Jim off to Woomera.
Stella’s house in Islington stood on the corner of Inglebert Street and Myddelton Square. It had an impressive front door, but the easiest way in was by the garden. I pressed the bell and after a long shivery moment the side door – set in a high, lilac-topped brick wall – unlatched itself without buzzing. I let Fel through first. Though much of the planting had died back, the garden still felt overgrown. I gathered Fel to me and kissed her in the shadow of the long-neglected apple tree. Laughing softly, she pushed me away and I nearly toppled over a planter moulded in the shape of a classically proportioned human head. I took her hand and led her, more by feel than by sight, along a narrow brick path to the top of a spiral of slippery iron stairs.
Light from the basement dining room lit our way. The kitchen door was ajar. From it spilled a current of warm air, heavy with asafoetida and cumin. Stella, who had never cooked for Fel before and who claimed never to have done more than spiralise a few vegetables for Georgy (‘We always eat out’) was attempting a feast compatible with the Bund’s strictures on diet. There was no trace of Christmas in her cooking, no decorations in the windows, no sign of cake anywhere. I put a brave face on things but it had somehow slipped my mind that Christmas was not universal. I was as disappointed as a child, though grimly determined not to let it show.
‘Come in, come in,’ Stella harried. ‘Don’t let the warmth out. No, don’t shut the door, leave a gap, we won’t be able to breathe.’