But now you know. Now you know what the score was for us, over twenty years ago. It was under two million, but call it zero. Which doesn’t explain one very obvious fact, does it? Your dad will explain tomorrow, your dad will talk you through it. But there’s still a lot more of the story left which he won’t or can’t go into. And he can’t explain anything without explaining that for six years — it’s a strange way of putting it perhaps, but it’s how you yourselves might look at it, and it’s only fair you should know — we decided against you.
It was the option that won out, of the limited options that were available. Try not to blame us. Other options were discussed, and there was one that very nearly succeeded — and remained, as it happened, on the shelf. But the option that prevailed was to do nothing. No further action required. To be and to stay just as we were, a couple, a childless couple. It’s only a sad expression if you choose to see it that way. And anyone else, such as your grandparents-in-waiting, might have thought, impatient as they may have been getting: well, they’re just biding their time, they’re not “ready” yet. And then had the second, non-interfering thought: or perhaps — they’re just happy without.
Happy without. Isn’t that possible? Weren’t we happy with each other? That was surely, with us, a given. And isn’t one sorry reason for having children to make up for a deficiency of happiness, for something that doesn’t seem to be there any more? If happiness is a completeness, then what does it matter how many components go to make the whole? If two can complete the circle. Let it be just us.
We never thought of you, you’ll be pleased to know, as little remedies.
But first you must know that for a little while after Doctor Chivers’s pronouncement — Mike’s not going to tell you this and perhaps your mother shouldn’t — we simply couldn’t do it. Complete the circle. Make love, I mean. The very thing that should have been our comfort and mainstay, the very thing we’d always done a lot of and, recently, with a good deal of application. That had never been our problem.
They say this is a common reaction, and Doctor Chivers may even have touched, gently, with your father on such possible repercussions. But I don’t mean just your father, for whom, I could see, there was a question of “manhood.” I had my own disinclination. There was a question of “womanhood” too. There’s a time for such big words. For quite a few nights we slept together, to use that ever ambiguous phrase, as if seized by sudden chastity. There was a gap between us, just a little gap of inches in our bed, but it might have widened like a crevasse — and what would you have ever known? I think Mike feared it would. I think he feared me. Judgement day. Marching orders. Cruel biology speaking.
But, look, he’s still here. Fast asleep.
Just us? But enough of that “just.” We came out of this period of quarantine. Let’s not be so feeble — or so ungrateful. Not the end of the world: this world that had been so kind to us and that can be a lot more terrible. We started to make love again, and with a new — I don’t think it’s the wrong word — potency. And that’s just what it was now, making love, since it wouldn’t be making anything else. Love without any dues to pay to reproduction. And I think we became better at it and more ardent. Just love. But enough of that “just.”
This was the time when we started to appreciate, since it was to be just the two of us, going away for weekends. The era of hotel rooms. A time when we were not exactly rolling in it, but we could afford, not having other commitments, these occasional gifts to ourselves, which sometimes came, anyway, courtesy of Walker and Fitch: art-dealing assignments to which we’d attach our private pleasure trips. Venice, Rome, Paris…We made just love in some fine places.
Art and sex, there’s never been a clash for me or (though I’ll never ultimately know how it works with Simon Fitch) any question of an either-or. Paint’s sexy stuff, and isn’t so much of painting to do with the rendering of flesh? Doesn’t paint sometimes ache to be flesh? Art’s not so artificial.
And these were weekends, in case you’re now feeling a little left out, that, with or without the help of art, weren’t just consumingly sexual. I think we both felt it: as if in our brave undertaking to be just us we’d left a small corner for magic. This was our last thin unscientific but fervent hope. How silly, but how sustaining. If we just made love keenly, resourcefully enough. If we just made it enough. As if Doctor Chivers had offered it as his final unofficial nose-tapping advice. Try going away for the weekend — if you know what I mean. A change of scene, a special room, a special bed…
And as if we’d only followed his recommendation. Let’s see if that room in Florence, with the shutters closed, bright-slitted, against the hot afternoon, won’t swing it. Or if that place in the crisp, autumnal English countryside, with the oak panels and the log fires — October swelling the rose hips outside — won’t just do the trick.
You see, you were never entirely out of our secret thoughts.
Reactions and repercussions. Doctor Chivers might have warned, but it was hardly his province, that this little thing, this mere trifle of a million here, a million there, can have its extraordinary behavioural consequences, its delayed and long-term side effects — and not really side effects at all.
Tim Harvey would never know just how perfect his timing was. If your dad hadn’t been so — indisposed. Or do I really mean disposed? If Tim, with Uncle Eddie newly in his grave, hadn’t made his approach rather like some dispossessed parent himself. Your dad took the job at The Living World, in any case. And I let him, God help me. A dead-end job as it seemed at the time, with more than a touch about it of the self-destructive. Not to mention the destruction of those snails. He said “twenty-seven,” didn’t he? He didn’t hesitate in giving that answer. He’d just stuck, inside, at twenty-seven. There’s part of me that’s still twenty-seven too.
A dead-end job, that might have turned, in the fullness of time, into merely our embarrassing consolation. Merely! Look, we have no kids, but we have the Living World. And yet — isn’t the story almost too good? — we’ve shared the treasure with you. The gift and the consolation too. There was a time when you were small, you’ll perhaps remember, when we told you we have “two houses now.” Meaning this one here and your dad’s “other one” in town. Since that attic in Bloomsbury had expanded downwards, Living World Publishing suddenly being on the up and up. The firm of architects who occupied the lower floors moved out — expanding, themselves — and your dad opportunely moved in. 12 Ormond Square. A very fine house too, a lovely fan-light over the front door, though we weren’t suggesting, I hope, that your dad actually owned it and we certainly didn’t want to give the impression that he might be going to live there.
But I’m jumping ahead again, years ahead, to when we were already taking those holidays in Cornwall. Gull Cottage, a third temporary little house. Come back — if you can do it — to life without you.
It was possible. It went on for several years. Don’t be offended. Looking back now, it can even seem to me like some sweet and not unsunny and perfectly legitimate plateau. Just your dad and me. Don’t hold it against us. Mike in his attic in Bloomsbury: at least it was a Georgian attic in a beautiful Georgian square, and not so far from me in St. James’s. Lunches in Soho. I’d invariably pay. But we weren’t so hard up, thanks to Walker’s, even if these were the parsimonious Seventies. Your dad would sometimes say, as if in self-defence, that there simply wasn’t the money around these days, even at Imperial, for pure research. I didn’t argue.