What normally compensates for the loss of a parent? Not, really, a cat. To Mike’s parents, to your Grandpa Pete and Grandma Helen, it must have looked, later that year, as if a perfectly understandable and not uncommon reaction had taken place. If, all the same, we’d left it a bit late.
I said to your dad, “I told him that you edit The Living World. He was bloody impressed, you know.” And your dad looked pretty pleased, if he batted it off. “Well, that’s someone who reads it,” he said.
At that stage I didn’t mention anything else.
“Well, there you are. You should meet him. You should take Otis in yourself one day and have a chat with him. He’d be pleased, I’m sure.”
It was a little later that spring that I said, “Mikey, listen to me. I want us to think about it again. A.I.D. I want us to reconsider.”
It wasn’t an edict or an insistence or, certainly, a foregone conclusion. I wanted to reopen the debate. But I didn’t get the impression, either, that it had struck your father like a bolt from the blue. He didn’t say yes straight away, but it was different now, we both knew it. He looked sympathetic. Things had happened. And I was thirty-two.
And things, after that, actually happened quite fast. 1978 was quite a year. By midsummer, seventeen years ago this month, I was booked in for my first “procedure.” As it turned out, it was the first of only two — which, I can tell you, is very good going. By mid-September I’d become pregnant. Though it’s not that bit, you’ve always been able to work that out, that will be such news to you.
21
SO NOW YOU KNOW what awaits you, what your father will tell you in his own words. I don’t know what precise words he’ll use, if they’re in his head right now, rehearsed and honed over sixteen years — if so, he’s never let me hear them — or if he’ll simply let the moment itself produce them. And, whatever they are, I can’t be sure at all how you’ll react to them.
Tonight you’re like those two new babies again, back at Davenport Road, still deep in that time before you met your memory — or the one we gave you. I don’t want you to be like that, I want you to be Nick and Kate, sixteen years old and as grown-up and as unimpededly advanced into your lives as sixteen can be. But tonight, though you don’t know it and can’t help it, you’re like babies again. So, right now, is your father.
I’m in a house full of sleeping babies. Even this rain, like some second guardian, seems aware of it and is pressing a finger to its lips: Sssshhhh…
Whether he’s learnt his lines or not, Mike must have played the scene so often in his mind that tomorrow will be like waking into a dream. He’s dreaming now, poor man. But I really can’t predict, I don’t think I have the right to, how you’ll react. I picture a bomb going off and this house falling to bits. I picture everything remaining oddly, precariously, ominously the same. An unexploded bomb. It still might go off — next week, the week after, any time.
Your father isn’t your father. He’s going to tell you himself. Who better? But what I hope he’ll tell you too, after giving you all the necessary facts, is that if he could have chosen, if it worked like that and it were just a matter of choosing, then he simply couldn’t have chosen better. And I hope you’ll think, I hope you might always have thought, that it’s the same for you, the other way round. Your dad.
There are plenty of “real” families (I have to use that expression) where it can seem, after all, that all the wrong choices got made. If only they could choose again, start again. And one day, perhaps not so far in the future, it will all be a matter of choice. Mike seems to think so. He has his peculiar, private reasons for thinking so, maybe, but then he’s still technically a biologist and he’s publisher of Living World Magazine, ear close to the scientific ground. Not that we all don’t pick up the vibrations.
Mike thinks it’s coming, even sooner than we might suppose. It’s upon us. Give it thirty years, he says. Soon it will all be a matter of genetic engineering. Old-fashioned human biology will have had its day. Which means, when you think about it, though I don’t want to think about it, least of all tonight, that you may at some point in your future be one of just a few, peculiar, old-style generations to see sprouting up around you the first generation of made-to-measure infants.
Or, as you’ll discover tomorrow, you’re already part of a gathering process. Since even sixteen years ago your dad and I had our choices, our freedoms, which simply wouldn’t have been there not so very long before. And what “strides” haven’t been made since? We could specify, we could stipulate, up to a point — you should know this — before you were born. All down to science. We could even see you before you were born. That’s a commonplace bit of magic now, I know, but your Grandpa Pete and Grannie Helen or Grandpa Dougie and Fiona were never able to see Mike and me.
And how wonderful it was, to see you.
We were born in the historic year of 1945, when a lot of big things happened, but your dad will tell you (he’s told me enough times) that the biggest thing to have happened this century was a quiet little event that occurred in a laboratory: the discovery of the structure of DNA. Though, as your dad will be the first to admit, he didn’t have a clue about it at the time. He was only eight years old, it was 1953. It was before he started spending those summers at Uncle Eddie’s, learning about frogspawn and birds’ eggs or whatever, a biologist in the making. But even when he was doing that, he hardly had a clue about DNA.
I’m not sure that Uncle Eddie, with all his old-fashioned natural-history books and mahogany collecting boxes, would have done either. Perhaps it was “Uncle” Tim, Tim Harvey — then sole editor of The Living World—who brought the momentous news, on one of those weekend visits to his old chum at Coombe Cottage. Have you heard, Eddie, have you heard? The Living World was about to devote a whole special issue to this extraordinary discovery…
I picture him and Uncle Eddie sitting up late into the night, Uncle Eddie puffing hard on his pipe, chewing it all over. And I picture them in subsequent years, when your dad would have been there too, a nipper of nine or ten sleeping upstairs, wondering: should they tell him, should they try to explain to the lad, or just let him get on with his “Nature Study”? A little like people must have said in that year that I was born: Have you heard? They’ve dropped an atom bomb, on Japan. Should we try explain it to the kids?
Your dad and I were born before DNA. Those innocent times. Of course, it had always existed, it was always there, it was just that nobody really understood it yet. And when they did, I can’t say I was any the wiser. I’ve grown up with it all around me, but I can’t say that I could tell you even now, and biologist’s wife though I am, what it is. No doubt you could tell me, it’s part of basic education these days.
In any case, tonight wouldn’t be the right time to say you should ask your father.
For some reason, when I think of DNA I can’t help thinking of my dad, cracking those codes in a sort of wartime laboratory, and blundering one day into the arms — and, oh Lord, the legs — of a pretty secretary called Fiona.