Tomorrow

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 detail: 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, harmful: 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.

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.