And, in a nutshell, I yielded. Partly for those back-lawn reasons, and partly for intimate and sensitive reasons I’ve yet to come to. A temporary phase, I thought. Be flexible. A passing aberration. A year or two…
It’s lasted over twenty.
Now, of course, I’m not sorry. Now, of course, I even shamelessly like to make out that I knew all along, I kept the faith. Our ship (no more, in those days, than a rather leaky boat) would one day come in. Your dad likes to say it was all Uncle Tim’s doing, really. That right-place and right-time theory. And Tim had always told him (he says now) that one day there’d be a bonanza. In science? I think that’s just your dad being modest. It doesn’t sound like Tim Harvey. The “fairy godfather” factor only goes so far. Tim may have had the money and even his wishful thinking, but he had his limitations. And your dad had his hidden talents. I think they were even rather hidden from your dad.
But you’re familiar with the story now, you’re part of it — its real heirs. Things began to come good for us in the end, not so long after you arrived. Tim stepped aside when I was on maternity leave, dealing with the insomniac havoc you wreaked on Davenport Road (forgive me) and wondering if I ever really had worked in art dealing. Meanwhile, your dad’s talents had begun to blossom. Don’t ask me where he got the energy. Then Tim died, in 1981, leaving most of what was left of his private wealth to what he liked to call “LW.” Then it was the Eighties and there was a publishing boom.
You know the rest: Living World Magazine, Living World Publishing, Living World Books. A whole new image. That now familiar logo, the little button-sized, blue and green Yin-and-Yang biosphere. It more or less just got better and better. But, most importantly — and who can say if you didn’t actually bring out that other entrepreneurial man in your father and give him all that drive? — there was the bonanza of you.
I remember how in what I’ll call now the “in-between” years — I mean, before there was you, in the mid-Seventies — when I was starting to do well (and just as well) at Walker’s, I’d sometimes find myself saying, at art-gatherings I had to go to: “My husband? He’s deputy editor of The Living World.” Or, later: “My husband? He’s editor of The Living World.” It sounded good, of course, it sounded important: what could be bigger than the living world? People in the art world aren’t necessarily clued up on science. And it was certainly better than saying, however confidently and breezily, “My husband works on snails.”
All the same, I’d wait for the vacant stare or the bluffing, knowing nod — keeping up a sort of bluff myself. Or I’d prepare for the embarrassed and embarrassing, “I’m not sure that I’ve ever heard…”
But once, at least, it made a big, even a startlingly strong impression. It was with our vet — who would, of course, have been a scientific man. He actually said, “I’m impressed.” It turned out he was a regular subscriber, one of the very few I’d ever knowingly met.
“Your husband’s editor of The Living World? Well, I’m impressed.”
And, naturally, I told your dad. I said, “I had this interesting chat with our new vet.”
But you’ll be thinking: vet? What vet? How does a vet come into the story?
14
I’M JUMPING AHEAD. Come back to Davenport Road in the year that Uncle Eddie died. I need to explain now some difficult and delicate things. I need to explain in my own words what your father will explain in his tomorrow. It’s one thing we’ve agreed on: your father will do the talking. Who else, in the circumstances? But he’s asleep now, amazingly, before the biggest speech of his life. And I want him to sleep. Sleep on, Mikey, as long as you can. And what is your mother supposed to do, while these last vigilant hours slip away? Simply keep silent?
This bedroom, in the dark, with the rain outside, feels like some temporary refuge.
I need to explain that there might never have been you. There was Mike and me, the two of us, but there might never have been you. The world, our lives, this house might never have contained you. Big stuff. But then not so remarkable, you’re already thinking. We all have the flicker of the thought, then brush it aside as superfluous: I might never have been born. Gosh, but here I am.
Some people can wish — I hope you never will, I sincerely hope you never will — that they’d never been born. But it’s not as though any of us could ever have asked, chosen. We always have that little retort to throw back at our parents. Though, speaking for myself — but I think I speak for Mike too — I can’t suppress the quite illogical but painful thought that if you weren’t there, if we hadn’t allowed you into the world, we’d have committed a crime, we’d have done something terrible to you.
Have I ever told you? Have we ever told you? How beautiful you are.
Professor Mike here will point out that nature is colossally wasteful. For every life that makes it, a staggering number of potential lives are lost. There may be millions of us walking around, but we are all extraordinary little exceptions. The same is true of ants or centipedes — think of all those never-to-wriggle legs — or, I’m sure, snails.
But then, if we didn’t ask or choose, but we just arrived against all the odds, how many of us can say that we were really meant? Another thing to throw at our long-suffering parents who’ve done so much to make a home for us. Though even that, of course, isn’t always true. Sometimes there isn’t much of a home to speak of. Sometimes our parents aren’t there or have parted. Sometimes we don’t even know who they are.
It’s another notion we all have, perhaps, then dismiss it, leaving it surprisingly unpursued, considering how totally relevant it is: the notion of tracing ourselves back to our actual moment of conception. It involves a taboo, an intrusion, like entering unasked the parental bedroom. Or it just involves a risk. Who knows in what chancy and sordid circumstances we might have first come about? Perhaps best not to find out. And were our parents, anyway, at the time actually thinking of us?
How wonderful, though, if in following that route back, we were to come to some marvellous chamber, to be guided to it even by our smiling parents themselves — to some glorious bed, a tapestried four-poster, say. There you are, you see, for you we wanted only the very best. Though how many of us might arrive at the back seat of a Ford?
I honestly don’t know where my dad and Fiona…Or if they were particularly intending. I just think, I hope, they were happy at the time. It would have been in the autumn of 1944. And how terribly far off that sounds. Your dad strikes me as exceptional not just in being able to pinpoint the circumstances, but in being pretty confident of the hundred-per-cent intention. Helen and Pete married, then honeymooned — in the Cotswolds — in the limited time that was granted, on special leave. Your dad might even have been conceived precisely on his parents’ wedding night, like a perfect little old-fashioned, recipe-book procedure. The act and the intention were perfectly joined.
But I can honestly say that you were truly and wholly intended. You could not have been more deliberately meant, both at the time and before. You’re doubly exceptional in that respect. You’re double, anyway. You were born, as it happens, in Gemini, but there was nothing fluky about your being born. As for that Gemini thing — which I know rather bugs you — don’t blame us, at least, for that. We used to say to you, when you were smaller, that you’d have been two stars anyway.