Tomorrow

22

I’VE GOT TO THE NUB, but there are harder things still to come, things your dad won’t even touch on tomorrow. I think it’s important that since you came into the world as you did you should know every twist and turn of the journey. I’m your mother, and now the truth is going to be uncovered, there should be no little residues of secrecy. A clean breast, as the saying goes, though it was my breast that fed you long ago and fed you from the beginning with the lie about your dad.

It was a factor from the very start, I mean even in those weeks before we went to Venice, it was a key part of the “debate”: the question of lying. You can’t get away from it. The biological necessities are plain, but the issue of dissimulation gets trickier and trickier, the more you think about it. When do you tell, how long do you leave it? Well, now you know our answer to that. But who else, if anyone, do you tell meanwhile? It was principally your Grandma Helen and your Grandpa Pete. Your Grandma Fiona was a more academic proposition.

To tell or not to tell. Suppose, having set out, for the best and most carefully considered reasons, on a course of pretence, your deception is suddenly rumbled? And how good, anyway, will you be at pretending? It’s no easy ride. It’s a little like being a secret agent and never being able to relax your cover story. What starts out as the simple task — which isn’t simple at all — of acquiring offspring becomes a task of reconstructing the world.

And, as of tomorrow, I’m afraid it will become your task too. You’ll have to take on your share of the lying — that is, of course, if you want to. Since it will very quickly become clear from what your father will tell you that we’ve told no one else, that we’ve lied, if you like, all round. Which sounds rather shocking. Though perhaps not as shocking as discovering that for sixteen years everyone else knew and you were the last to find out.

It’s just within these walls, just the four of us. And Edward.

But then that’s clearly a lie too. I confess it. It goes without saying that, apart from your dad and me, there would have been certain people in the know for strictly clinical reasons, though they don’t count, since they were bound by professional codes. But haven’t I just said that I blurted it all out one day to our vet? Hardly a clinical disclosure. Or, more accurately, it was our vet, Alan Fraser, who was the first outsider to rumble our situation, still in its merely conceptual stage, and I had no choice but to own up. As I’m owning up to you.

Our vet knew, for one. And I think Otis knew, for another. I know that sounds preposterous. He could hardly have been listening, you’re thinking, on that examination table, to what I said to our vet. Has your mum gone daft? But I think he knew anyway, even before that. Cats can tell things, perhaps.

Why do people have pets? And why do they sometimes vanish? The simple, primal instinct of escape: Archie flying to the antipodes? Otis recovered, thanks to Alan Fraser, but it was a false recovery. Later that year he relapsed. I think he knew. He knew that the time was coming when his role in our lives would be over. He didn’t need Alan Fraser to spell it out for him. He knew, perhaps, even from that time we’d left him in Carshalton and I’d cried my eyes out, but really for my father. He knew even better than I did.

But that’s not all he’d have known if he’d truly been able to listen in to my conversations with our vet.

Biology’s just a ruthless tyrant? It was all just to do with that famous biological clock ticking away inside me, at thirty-two a good deal more loudly than at twenty-six, so that even Otis could hear it and recognise it? If only it were as simple as that. I need to tell you that it wasn’t nearly so simple, and I’m not going to pretend to you, anyway, that in her early thirties your mother had become a mere pawn of biology.

I still had my qualms — as I told our vet — about that little procedure so cheerfully called “artificial.” It’s artificial, and it’s not artificial. A simple business, a few moments in a clinic, it doesn’t even hurt, but it wasn’t just Mike who flinched, believe me. It’s clinical and detached and impersonal, but it’s not, exactly. It’s all done with a test tube, so to speak, but it’s still done with someone else, and rather intimately. And you may start to worry rather seriously about these things tomorrow — from the other end, as it were. Sperm isn’t just a general ingredient. It’s not like self-raising flour.

It might seem that it’s this man here beside me who’s most in jeopardy. Poor Mike. Marching orders! You’re no dad of ours. God forbid, my angels, God forbid. But is it so one-sided? You’ll have to tell me. Why am I lying awake like this, stirring my conscience? Mike’s the impostor — or just the hapless, innocent bystander? Of what was he the perpetrator?

You may look at it this way, though I don’t want to put the formulation into your heads: I’m your real mother, of that there’s no dispute or doubt, but I’m also the woman who, if by prior agreement and for the best of all possible reasons (I’m not sure you can quite escape being implicated yourselves), went and forsook your father and did it with another man.

Forgive me.

I’m getting to the really tough part now. It’s just as well I’ve established the rules of this story. It’s a bedtime story: exactly. I’m telling it, you’re fast asleep. It’s just as well Mike is too. The simple and hard truth is that, on my side of it, it wasn’t just a matter of having qualms to work through, of reopening a debate. It was a matter, since I would be the actively engaged party, of — how can I put this? — prior experimentation.

Give me a while to explain.

It’s possible that from tomorrow you will start to look at the whole world differently, not just this house in Rutherford Road. I’ve thought this through. You may start to look at complete strangers in a way you’ve never done before, but in a way, I assure you, I once started shiftily to do many years ago. And still do. It’s even a fair bet that you may start to look at your own faces in the mirror in a way you never have before.

I know a lot of that goes on anyway — the mirror-gazing, I mean. You’re teenagers, after all, the mirror’s your daily obsession. Kate, you’re already an experienced hand with the make-up, while oddly protesting (rightly as it happens) that you don’t really need it. Nick, you’re always looking for some real cause to use that razor. But you just look, anyway, at your faces. I’ve seen you. And though you both do it you like to catch each other at it, as if it’s something vaguely shaming and damning — as if, I’ve sometimes thought, when either of you looks in the mirror, you’re really gazing at each other.

Fundamentally (I know, I really do), you’re each of you looking to see who you really are. You’re looking to see that slow-about-it and fully separate creature actually, finally emerge. But now, from tomorrow, there’s going to be a whole new dimension to your peering.

The fact is, isn’t it: he’s out there somewhere?

What I thought, as I deliberated, and still wavered, all those years ago (sometimes looking at my own face in the mirror, as if that would help) was this. Suppose it were real. It’s tantamount to being real in the first place. Just because I’d never see his face — or, if it comes to it, any other part of him. Another man, who I’d never know. Another man, who wasn’t Mike. It’s why I’d balked that first time around, in the days when your dad talked to Doctor Chivers.

Maybe other women in my situation don’t get caught on this hurdle. They’re more desperate, perhaps, or more sensible. It’s just something that happens in a clinic. But it’s the union (can it be disputed in this age of DNA?) of two people. And the only way I could surmount this obstacle and know my own mind on the matter was to exorcise this ghost-in-advance, to do the real thing, in the flesh yet hypothetically, and see how it felt.

There, I’ve said it.

And after I’ve said a bit more, you may think it’s all the most blatant twaddle. I didn’t know my own mind then? I don’t know it now. And wasn’t I just talking about lying?

I was simply attracted, you may think, to our not unattractive vet, Alan Fraser. To his capable forearms, sleeves rolled up, as he handled Otis. To the way he made poor Otis purr, even in his poorliness. To his boldness and directness, even when — even because — it overstepped the mark. To the way he’d got so quickly under the skin of my “condition,” all the time looking at me with sympathetic, forty-year-old, but (let me say it) ever so slightly boyish, ever so slightly unwise grey-blue eyes.

Not to mention the fact, I won’t be coy about it, that he was attracted to me. One doesn’t miss these things. Those dark-suited clients at Walker’s, with their peeping red flames of breast-pocket handkerchiefs, not just looking at the pictures. Simon’s own little low-burning flame. Thirty-two: but I knew I’d gained something — lost something, the first flush, but gained something. (You’ll find out, Kate, how it works.)

Not to mention that safe, confessional, veterinary space in which all this occurred, under the chaperoneship of Otis. Now I’m confessing to you.

I even vicariously reversed the roles. That is, I pictured your poor dad — as a vet. Not such an unlikely job for a former biologist, nor such a bad one, and hardly a comedown, vets can make a decent living. Out of loyalty to your father (if I can say that), I didn’t disabuse Alan Fraser of his evident respect for the editor of The Living World. I didn’t say, it may be called The Living World, but it’s run from a roof in Bloomsbury. But then I’d already given him, a complete stranger, the full low-down on my husband’s spermatozoa.

Out of loyalty — and honesty too — to your father, I told Mike about these veterinary conversations, even about their non-veterinary element. I even told him he should make the acquaintance of Alan Fraser, and he did. They liked each other. And if the subject of families, of having them or not having them, came up between them, then, apparently, it didn’t cause ructions. Your dad didn’t feel obliged to hit Alan Fraser on the chin. Two scientists, two grown-up men.

Your dad would even say he was sorry, a few months later, when Fraser rather suddenly moved to a new practice, less than a year after he’d arrived.

I’m getting to the hard part. Now I’ve got there, there’s no point in wrapping it up. Here we go. Alan Fraser and I went away together one weekend. That’s even overstating it. It was a single night, a Friday night, you couldn’t call it a weekend.

That trip to Venice wasn’t the only business trip, or ostensible business trip, of mine in the first half of that year. I’d been to Paris, on my own, in January, and there’d been a second trip to Paris in May. Except it wasn’t. May is a very nice time in Paris and this might have been another shameless opportunity for engineering a break for two, sponsored by W. and F. Especially as I was to be in Paris, apparently, on a Friday.

But this wasn’t so very long after Otis’s return and, though he was much on the mend, he was still in need of monitoring, still technically — under the vet. We could hardly cart him off to his cattery quite yet. And it was a time when we had things on our minds, our resurrected debate, that might only cloud the delights of a weekend in Paris. Your dad even said, “Another time. But stay over on the Saturday too, if you like.” He saw me, perhaps, wandering broodily round Paris, clarifying my maternal position.

No, I said, I’d come straight back on the Saturday morning. I didn’t want him to expect me to ring. Or vice versa. I wanted my own clean exit. But I gave your dad — it was a risk — the name and number of the hotel where I’d stayed before in January. He didn’t ask to see my plane tickets. Why should he have done? I’d have said, anyway, they were for collection.

I wasn’t in Paris at all. It wasn’t a business trip. Alan (shall I call him just Alan?) wasn’t offering Paris. I wasn’t exactly in a position to specify, but, to be fair, nor did he want to be cheap or to make me feel that I was. Definitely not his flat in Stockwell.

For me it all involved considerable subterfuge and deception. That’s not an excuse, but it makes me realise how much I needed to do it. He was unattached, a divorced man: a pretty poor witness, you might say, for having a family, the very opposite of what, at this point, should have enticed me. Though enticement, I’m trying to explain, wasn’t my only or chief motive.

He was on the lookout, of course, let’s not pretend about that. He was experimenting too, and might even have used that convenient word himself. Where would a divorced vet first start to look? I don’t know how many experiments he might already have conducted. But what I do know is that he was my only experiment, my only ever trial run.

And he didn’t take me to Paris, though he was eager to impress. I took a morning train to Gatwick, as if to persuade myself I still might really be flying to Paris. He picked me up there in his car and we drove around for a bit, round Sussex, killing time, and had lunch in a pub.

Then he took me to the Gifford Park Hotel, five stars even in those days. Do you see my dilemma?