Even when I became pregnant I still looked. The truth is, I still look now sometimes. I’ve never stopped looking or searching, even though during the last sixteen years there have been long periods of time when I haven’t caught myself doing it. But your mother, I’m afraid, has a fundamental and incurable habit of looking at other men. This year, these last few months, I’ve felt the need to look a lot. And even when I don’t look, I still wonder. The more years that have gone by, in fact, the more reason there is to wonder. Suppose our paths have crossed, suppose we’ve actually looked, without knowing it, at each other. Suppose we’ve sat on the same train. What would be the chances? Beyond all reckoning? Sometimes, now, I have the strangely arresting thought: suppose he’s no longer alive.
But, assuming he is, he’s out there somewhere. Even now.
Do you see why I needed — I know it’s the most exotic of excuses — my fling, if that’s the word, with Alan Fraser? Not that it’s actually stopped those supposings. Not that it’s exorcised the ghost. And, of course, I can’t prevent myself having the reverse notion, on his, the ghostly one’s, behalf, though I know it’s absurd: that he’s interested in me. Or in us, I should say.
As if in this one case (how many other poor mums, after all, might he have serviced?) the iron rule has been broken and he’s had the privilege of knowing who we are. He’s been watching us all this time, unseen himself — from some special gallery. He even knows that tomorrow’s the big day. He’s been spying on us all these years, this happy family. Spying and perhaps waiting. He’s been counting the “last times” too: the “last” Christmas, your dad’s fiftieth — the last birthday of a so far successful impostor. He was outside that restaurant we took your dad to in January, peering in through the window at our table. He’s out there right now, poor man, getting soaked in the rain and waiting for the dawn of this day: his big day, in a way. He’ll be peering in at us tomorrow, perhaps, through the French windows, from behind the viburnum bush. Or — God help us — he might just crash through the French windows and make his sudden, dramatic, sopping-wet entrance.
Your real father, my demon lover.
I suppose Mike’s had all these thoughts too. He must have done, I’m sure of it. And what would the two of them do if they should come face to face? What would you want them to do? Shake hands, hug each other? Take a swing at each other?
And, of course, when I’ve done my looking on the Tube, walking along Piccadilly, wherever, I’ve been consciously looking in a way — given that vetting process — for Mike’s double, or something close to it. Another Mikey, a pseudo-Mikey, a quasi-Mikey, catching my eye for a fraction of a second, but not even recognizing me.
Isn’t it astonishing that your dad’s still asleep?
A third party entered our lives, a little before you did. Then he became, in due course, a sort of fifth party. Tomorrow he’ll be officially recognised as such, like a christening. From tomorrow you’ll know him about as well as we ever did, but it will be up to you, it has to be up to you, to decide how we should deal with him.
A third party entered your parents’ lives. A fourth party, if you count Otis, who I haven’t forgotten. And, just as with Otis, we had to find a name for him, a token, working name, since he came under that plain wrapping of anonymity. We didn’t even have a number. Not that we wanted or needed, in those early days, to refer to him that much.
Except, perhaps, to thank him.
Yes, to thank him. Will you possibly look at it that way too tomorrow? Even consider it at all, that you might like to thank him? The trouble is, that only begs that other enormous but entirely understandable question: that you might like to meet him. That’s impossible, though it may not stop you wishing it. It’s impossible now as it was back then even to get a simple message of thanks through to him. There are no channels. And how do you thank someone, in any case, whose name you don’t even know?
Tomorrow you may feel the need to give him a name of your own. It’s not such a small matter. You’ll have to use it for the rest of your lives. And perhaps we shouldn’t even mention to you the name we’ve used. Or we should humbly and graciously trade it in for yours. We thought of calling him many things: “Mr. D.,” for example, for “Mr. Donor.” Though that was tricky because “D.” might also stand for “Dad.” Your dad (what a mountain there is in such a little word) came up with some inventive and truculent offerings of his own, which may not be so amusing to you. Such as “The Grand Inseminator” and “Spunky Jim.” But in the end we settled on a formula that was neat and wholly to the point: Mr. S., short for Mr. Sperm.
25
AND, OF COURSE, I can see him in you. I don’t have to look for him randomly in the street, on trains. He’s there before my eyes, invisibly, every time I look at you. And from tomorrow, I’m sure, that mirror-gazing of yours will suddenly get rather serious.
You don’t have grey-blue eyes. You have, as has often been innocently observed, your mother’s dark brown, green-shot eyes, her nose, her cheekbones: but your father’s mobile mouth, your father’s expressions. Despite those specifications we made, it would seem that it was my genes, predominantly, that kicked in. Your dad has clear-blue eyes. We ordered them certainly, the same again, please. So you should know that Mr. Sperm, or whatever you choose to call him, has blue eyes too. But it didn’t work out that way, you got my eyes. Which didn’t stop people from saying, as if the other fifty per cent must be glowingly apparent somewhere else: Ah, but that’s their dad’s smile.
This is the strangest thing — how you’ve conspired, yourselves, in the conspiracy. People see what they expect to see, so why should they not have believed they were seeing Mike in you? Then again, from the start, you saw two faces looming over you that you took to be your parents, and why should you not have taken them as your model? And we did a lot of smiling over you, believe me. But perhaps it was Mike’s smile that got imprinted, perhaps it was his you felt the greater obligation to.
If we’ve performed a part for sixteen years, then, without knowing it, so have you — and even more convincingly. There have definitely been times — whole lengths of time — when we ourselves have fallen totally for the illusion, when we’ve completely forgotten. You’ve been unwittingly such consummate actors, such consummate accomplices, that now it’s like an extra cruelty that you’ll have to undo it all.
And yet I’ve noticed already that it’s started to slip, it’s already started to look less plausible. You’re sixteen, you want to be yourselves. The last thing you want to look like is your half-century-old parents. The last thing you want to do — it’s perfectly natural at your age — is catch yourselves mimicking some fossilised gesture of ours. Will this help matters or just confuse them tomorrow?
These days, you don’t even want to look like each other. But wasn’t that, from the start, the little unexpected marvel that helped fool everyone? We couldn’t have bargained for it, and certainly couldn’t have specified it when we put in our request list. But people simply, perhaps, mistook the one thing for the other, or the one thing distracted from the other. Of course there was consistency and resemblance here, of course you must look like us, because you looked so much like each other.