Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 100, Nos. 4 & 5. Whole Nos. 603 & 604, October 1992

My Son, My Son by Robert Barnard

Congratulations are due to Robert Barnard for his nomination for the 1991 Agatha Award for best short story. Mr. Barnard’s story, “The Habit of Widowhood” (November, 1991), is one of three EQMM contenders for the award, which is intended to recognize merit in the field of the traditional, or “cozy,” mystery story. (“The Crime of Miss Oyster Brown” by Peter Lovesey and “Long Live the Queen” by Ruth Rendell were also named.) Here he is with another entertaining offering about a fantasy with very real consequences...

Leonard Parkin planned the birth of his son for the seventeenth of October. He was going down to London for a management conference on the sixteenth, and there was a social event of the usual dreary kind in the evening, which he decided to leave early so as to enjoy all the exciting terror of the beginning of labour. The main conference was in the morning, but the afternoon was free and he was not planning to take the train home to Peterborough until after the evening rush hour. John Julian would be born in the afternoon.

At the evening reception, held in an anonymous hotel on the fringes of Bloomsbury, Len was rather abstracted, but in the general atmosphere of wine fumes and grabs for the canapes nobody noticed. They didn’t notice either when he first slipped away to the Gentlemen’s, then left the hotel altogether. Len was liked, but he wasn’t much noticed.

Back in the Great Northern, his usual hotel, Len put the chain on his door and lay happily on his bed. Bliss! He wondered whether to crack the little bottle of champagne in the room fridge, but he decided that champagne wasn’t right, not for the labour. He would have a bottle of white wine later. What he wanted now was just to lie back on his bed and imagine it.

Marian, after all those months, feeling the first pains. The look she gave him, the certainty in her eyes and in his. “I think it’s starting” — those time-honoured words which would grant Marian kinship with the millions of other women who had used them. What would he do? He would go over and kiss her tenderly on the forehead, then he would run to the telephone and ring the well-rehearsed number. The waiting, the waiting! Another terrible pain, just as he saw the flashing light of the ambulance drawing up outside.

He went with her, of course, the two of them silent in the back, he letting her grip his hand tighter and tighter as the agony came, receded, then came again. Then the arrival at the hospital, the stretchered rush to the maternity ward, he always by her side.

He lay there for two hours, picturing the scene, filling in small details, living through Marian’s pain and her thrilled anticipation, being there with him beside her. Then he got up and poured himself some wine. It was good, but somehow as he drank the scene became less vivid. Natural, of course, but disappointing. He wouldn’t have a drink tomorrow. He needed to be at his most alert tomorrow.

After the morning’s business, all the representatives at the conference for people in the confectionary business were free to do what they pleased, and they all dispersed to boozy gatherings in pubs, on shopping sprees to Harrod’s and Oxford Street, or on unspecified business in Soho. Leonard went to Hyde Park and lay under a tree in the sun. There his mind winged him back effortlessly to the maternity ward, and to himself sitting there by Marian, helping her through her labour. In real life, he suspected, he would have refused to be there with his wife, or been there only reluctantly, being fainthearted about that sort of thing. But in his imagination he could make the labour terrible but short, and he could cut to the magical moment when the baby was born, to his touching it, blotchy and screaming, to his seeing it for the first time in Marian’s arms — no, not it, but him, John Julian Parkin, his son and heir.

The day was sunny and he lay there, rapturous, ecstatic, more intensely alive than he had ever been. For hours he lay savouring the sensations: the sound, the smell, the touch of his newborn son. Then he walked all the way to the station, got his case out of Left Luggage and caught the train home. On the hour’s journey he invented little embellishments, made more vivid the picture of his son’s face. It had been a perfect day.

It was late when he finally got home, and Marian was preparing the supper.

“Have a good conference?” she asked.

“Very good indeed,” he said, kissing her, feeling a sudden spurt of love for his practical, commonsensical, infertile wife. The strongest feeling in her down-to-earth heart was her passionate love for him, made poignant by her inability to have children. He could never share the birth of their son with her. Her incomprehension would have killed him stone dead.

John Julian grew apace in the months that followed, but no quicker than a natural child would have. Leonard was strict about that. As he grew his picture became sharper in his father’s mind: how much hair he had at birth, and what colour it was; how quickly he acquired more; the precise shape of his snub nose; how he looked when he smiled. Naturally there were setbacks and worries: Len would sometimes enliven a long car journey on business by imagining bouts of colic or the worries of teething. The great landmark joys he usually kept for some business trip which would involve a night away from home. Then, as on that first occasion, he would slip away as early as he decently could from whatever function or meeting he was obliged to attend, shut himself in his hotel room and recreate his mental world around the son that had been born to him. The pictures were so vivid — of Marian breast-feeding their boy, of his first words and first tentative steps — that they became part of his existence, the most cherished part.

Sometimes it was quite difficult to make the transition from the imaginary to the real world. He would come through his front door with memories still crowding around him and expect to see Marian cradling John Julian in her arms, or playing with him on the floor by the fire. Then he would have to drag himself down to earth and enquire about her day rather than John Julian’s, tell her what he’d been doing, not what he’d been imagining. For Marian remained the common-sense, slightly drab woman who reserved her greatest intensity for their love-making, while the Marian of his imagination had blossomed with motherhood, had become altogether more sophisticated and curious about the world. She had given up her job in the chain store to be with their boy, but Len never resented sharing him with her because certain times and certain duties were by common agreement his and his alone.

He was a healthy boy, that was a blessing. He played well with the other children in the street, and on the one morning in the week when he went to play-group, the leader commented on his nice disposition. Len started to imagine futures for him, though all the time with the proviso in his mind that of course John Julian would do exactly what he wanted to do when the time came for him to choose. He was an active, open-air child, but Len didn’t want him to be a professional athlete. It was too short and too limiting a life. But he’d be a very good amateur. Len always said when the Olympic Games were on that it was a pity the facilities weren’t used afterwards for a Games for real amateurs. Perhaps by the time John Julian was a young man they would be, and he would compete — maybe as a middle-distance runner, or perhaps a pole-vaulter.

His real work would surely be something where he could use his brain. There was no disputing that he had one, he was so forward. Len didn’t fancy his becoming a doctor, as so many parents hoped for their children, and certainly he didn’t want a surgeon son. Still, he would like something that involved a degree of prestige. He finally settled on Oxford and a science degree, with a fellowship to follow, and a succession of brilliant research projects.

But that was what he hoped for. The boy’s future was for him to decide, though he knew John Julian would want to talk it through with both his parents before he made his decision.

Meanwhile there was a real highlight in his life coming up: his first day at school. Marian had agreed — the Marian in his mind had agreed — that he should take him on his first day. She would be taking him day in, day out after that, she said: that would be her pleasure. It was only right that Len should have the joy of the first day. One of the firm’s confectionary factories was near Scarborough, and Len usually visited it once a year. He arranged to go in early September — Tuesday the fourth, the day that school started for five-year-olds in his area. He booked a good hotel in the upper part of the town, near where Anne Bronte had died, and he went off with a head brimming with happy anticipation.

He got through the inspection and consultations well enough. He had had to train himself over the past five years not to be abstracted, not to give only half his attention to matters of that kind: after all, it would never do for John Julian’s father to be out of a job. When he was asked by one of the local managers to dinner with him and his wife that evening, Len said with every appearance of genuine regret that unfortunately he was engaged to visit “a relative of the wife’s.” In fact, when the day’s work was done, he went back to the hotel, then took the funicular railway down to the sands. In a rapturous walk along the great stretch of beach he imagined what his day would have been.

John Julian was excited, of course. Immensely excited. He had dressed himself and was down to breakfast by half past seven, and when his mother and father smiled at his enthusiasm he said that he had to pack his schoolbag, though in fact he had done it the night before, and packed and unpacked it for days before that. When they set out from the front door Leonard was immensely touched when John Julian reached up and took his hand, conscious that he needed guidance and protection at this great moment of his life. At the gate he turned to wave to Mummy at the door, then took Len’s hand again for the ten minutes’ walk to school, sometimes shouting to friends of his own age who were also with their parents on their first day of school. At the school gate John Julian looked up at his father to say as clearly as if he’d used words: “You will come in as you promised, won’t you?” So Len went in, as most of the parents did, knowing the new children’s classroom from the introductory tour the week before. Soon the children were mingling, playing, and discovering their new world, and the parents, with conspiratorial glances at each other, could slip away. The wind buffeted Len’s face as he walked back to the funicular and thought what a wrench it was to leave him, and what a happiness to walk home with some of the other parents, talking parents’ talk, swapping tales of achievements and setbacks, hopes and prospects.

Back in the hotel room, Len imagined his day, going over things with Marian, wondering what John Julian was doing, speculating whether he was getting on well with his teacher (“She seemed such a nice woman”). As with most parents, such speculation was endless and self-feeding, and Len decided to save the fetching of his son from school as a delicious treat for next day.

His work at the factory, his talk in the canteen, was despatched with his usual efficiency. By late afternoon he was on the train to York, and then on the Inter-City Peterborough, gazing sightlessly at the rolling English countryside. His son had run into his arms at the school gates, almost incoherent in his anxiety to tell his father everything about his day. Len had sat him on the wall of the playground to give him a few minutes to get his breath and tell him all the most vital points. Then they had walked home hand in hand, John Julian still chattering nineteen to the dozen as he retrieved from his memory more facts and encounters of vital interest in his young life. Marian was waiting at the door and the whole thing was to do again — all the day’s events recounted, all the jumble of impressions and opinions rolled out again for her.

Marian in fact was not at home when he got in. She was still at her night-school class in nineteenth-century history. Len made himself a sandwich, poured a glass of milk, and sat by the kitchen table gazing out at the twilit garden, smiling to himself as he went through the excitements and joys of his day. He did not hear his wife let herself in through the front door. He did not realize she stood for some moments watching him as he sat there smiling contentedly. He was conscious only of a movement behind him as she snatched the breadknife from the table, and very conscious of pain as the knife went into his back.

Later, in the police station, her face raddled with tears of grief and guilt, Marian could only sob out over and over: “I knew he’d found another woman. I’d known it for months. He was so happy!”