24
LET ME MAKE ONE thing absolutely clear, in case any doubt has entered your minds: Alan Fraser (MRCVS) is not your father. Neither of you has grey-blue eyes. We — that is, he — took all due precautions, in a hotel once owned by rubber barons. I’d rather lost touch, you could say, with such things.
In any case, that wasn’t the point of the exercise. The point of the exercise was — hypothetical. Alan Fraser isn’t your father, any more than Otis was. It’s just that without either of them, you might not be there at all.
But, of course, there must have been a practical exercise. It may not be wise to enquire too deeply into how we were brought about, but since the whole thing will be so calculatedly sprung on you tomorrow, since you’re about to discover that you yourselves were the work of painstaking calculation, you’ll at least want to know how the actual thing was done. Even if you don’t ask, you’re bound to wonder: you won’t be able to avoid a certain — image of your mother.
But, for all I know, perhaps you will ask. Perhaps you’ll both be uninhibitedly hungry for every graphic technical detail. Kids these days, they certainly don’t hold back. I’ve tried so hard to anticipate every possible form your reaction might take, from outrage to laughter, that perhaps nothing will surprise me. Perhaps you’ll even be thrilled to know that you were concocted in such a special way. You’ll want a badge for it (I hope not: what would go on it?). And you won’t feel at all like treading carefully. So, come on, Mum, spill it. We came out of a test tube?
No, not exactly. You came out of me — as I once explained, remember? When all’s said, there’s that wonderful fact and joy of my life, you came out of me. Have I ever told you how much I love you? Has your father?
It’s hardly a secret, anyway, how it was done, how it has to be done. A little mechanical thinking will get you there. It’s no more secret, mysterious or romantic, I’m afraid to say, than a visit to the dentist. To begin with, there was even a certain amount of dull bureaucracy, of form-filling and question-and-answer. First of all, we went along, the two of us, like responsible parents-to-be, to a place that dealt in such things and talked it over, in the strictest confidence of course.
We learnt the fundamental rule, which was the rule of anonymity. It’s the same rule for you, my darlings, as for us, we’ll need to make that clear tomorrow. There’s no way of knowing, even for you. You were conceived anonymously — or semi-anonymously, let’s more accurately say. Though, within the bounds of anonymity, it was possible to be selective, if not exactly fussy: skin, eye colour, hair colour. It was possible to attempt a kind of sketchy match. It was possible, I don’t mean to be flippant, to place an order.
This was when your dad, with all his resolve and resignation, got a little uncomfortable. This was when “He” began to loom, to seem suddenly close and actual, like someone who might already have been told about us and put on standby.
But my own nerves were steady. I’d been to the Gifford Park with our vet.
Then we signed the forms. Then I had some standard tests and was given an appointment, relative to my menstrual cycle. A little while before it, when it happened to be our anniversary, we went to Venice. Then one fine and sunny morning at the very end of June, I went back to the clinic and to a special room. Your father came with me. He didn’t have to — and I don’t mean that he came as well into that special room — but he drove me to the clinic, as if I were some fragile out-patient about to undergo something potentially upsetting. We both joked about this misplaced analogy, but somehow couldn’t shake it off.
I don’t know what Mike did, while I was — busy. He read the paper? He drank coffee in a Styrofoam cup from a vending machine? He walked round the block? Or he just waited, not in the building, but in the car park, in the car. That’s what he said: he’d be in the car, not in the building, where there were seats for waiting and magazines. Fair enough. When I came out through the glass doors he stepped from the car and walked towards me as if I might have needed help. Poor Mikey, what could he say: how did it go?
It doesn’t take very long. The real thing, after all, needn’t take very long. It all comes back to me now on this night: the ridiculous, bright-lit matter-of-factness. Like having an injection, a jab before you go on holiday. It had none of the momentousness of — tomorrow. I knew it might not even work. I didn’t even know whether to treat it, in my mind, as special or as merely functional. Both options seemed somehow treacherous. I tried, in fact, not to think at all. That’s the normal state of affairs, after all, with the real thing. It’s called conception, but who’s actually being conceptual?
It’s like a simple vaginal examination. So far as I know, Kate, you’ve not had one of those: a treat in store. A sort of speculum. Except something else, of course, is introduced. A nurse did the honours, a straw-blonde nurse of roughly my age (that pleased me) who introduced herself as Becky. I still, strangely, see her face, in close, physiognomic detaiclass="underline" a slightly too sharp nose, a slightly too thin mouth. Was she a mother herself or single? And how exactly was I to think of her? A nurse? A midwife? Hardly. A mid-husband, perhaps, a helping hand…And should you joke or be serious? It seemed somehow understood that too much humour would be inappropriate. Smiles and friendly efficiency, yes, but this was not quite a laughing matter. If the real thing sometimes can be.
Clinical neutrality — definitely no sexy dim lighting or soft music in the background. And, beneath it all, banishing the jokes anyway, the vague feeling that you’re doing something wrong, illicit or even, perhaps, harmfuclass="underline" you’re really having an abortion. I’m sorry, I’m only being honest.
Afterwards they ask you just to lie down and “rest” for a bit. I don’t know if it’s to encourage the natural processes or because they actually think you might be tired. No cup of tea and a biscuit — though I didn’t ask — and, of course, no post-coital cigarette. I did smoke a bit then too, as a matter of fact. I stopped, you’ll be glad to know, when I became pregnant. I might have stirred my tea, taken a drag and made small talk with Becky. “I’m here because of a cat, you know. Called Otis.”
So, not exactly a test tube. Though there would have been, I suppose, at some stage, a sort of test tube and someone, so to speak, would have been in it. A stranger slipped that day into our lives — an unfortunate phrase, since that’s just what he didn’t do, or not exactly, yes and no. When your dad saw me walk off to that special room I wasn’t in anyone else’s company, but when I walked out again through those glass doors you could say, in a manner of speaking, I was.
A stranger entered our lives — that’s not quite a happy phrase either. And not a complete and absolute stranger anyway, because of that preliminary vetting. I don’t seem to be able to get away from awkward puns.
In the “debating” stage, during those days and weeks after Otis’s return, and again when we’d made up our minds and contacted the clinic, I used to ride the train up to work, the Tube from Victoria to Green Park, and look constantly, furtively, at men around me. Perhaps not as furtively as I thought, and perhaps if they caught my eye they might have got the wrong idea. This sort of thing, after all, goes on all the time. But they could hardly have guessed the nature of my interest. They could hardly have guessed that I wasn’t just looking, but searching.