‘What’s that arrangement called where you don’t need a male?’
‘Parthenogenesis, I think.’
‘Jolly good idea. It’s pretty bloody unfair really, isn’t it?’ said Alice bitterly.
He could only nod.
She grinned, suddenly. ‘No need to look quite so hangdog. You didn’t personally devise the system. Don’t worry – I’ll suss something out. Or maybe the mood will pass with a bit of fresh air and exercise. Have I buggered us up, now, suggesting it?’
There was no question of that, he assured her. Absolutely no question. Everything was exactly as it had been. He was glad she … He tried to say that he would have been offended if she hadn’t asked him, and could not manage to do so. Of course she hadn’t buggered anything up. Of course not.
‘Hmn …’ said Alice. ‘I shan’t cheat on you, if that’s what you’re thinking.’
He was creeping with guilt now, for some reason that could not or would not be identified. He felt shabby. Casuistical. Biologically parsimonious. In California, he remembered having heard, there were generous-spirited men who put their sperm on deposit, for any who might be in need. And here was he turning away a nice woman he had known for years, had nothing whatsoever against, indeed was positively fond of. All for some scruple which, when he stared at it in the wastes of future nights, probably would not stand up to investigation. And, for ever more, each time he entered Alice Cook he would experience misgivings. Had she taken her pill? Was she stealing his seed?
‘Oh, shit,’ said Alice. ‘Wouldn’t life be nice and simple without all these bloody urges?’
Of which the reproductive urge must surely be the most complex, as experienced by late twentieth-century man or woman. Well, some late twentieth-century men and women. The view from Dacca or from Ethiopia was no doubt subtly different. But from the standpoint of urban Western prosperity it was tortuous, or so it seemed to Matthew. Thinking about himself; thinking about Alice Cook. About Susan. About Jane. There was the genetic drive, boiling away unsuspected while you got on with the rest of life, or at least you thought that that was what you were doing. The genes lurked there in the body, determining everything – whether you were six feet tall or prone to sunburn or liable to develop a particular disease – and quite possibly directing your actions as well. Sending you off in pursuit of one kind of mate rather than another. Stirring up an interest in housing and mortgages.
So far, so straightforward. Genetic drive. The compulsion to leave something of yourself behind: your nose, your freckles, your intelligence or stupidity or athletic ability or artistic talent. Except that there of course you ran into dangerous waters – the old nature/nurture controversy. Be that as it may, you were still gene-propelled, driven to ensure your own survival. No, their survival. The gene, of course, does not care about the whole man or woman – it cares only about itself. It is worried solely about the immortality of red hair, or a long nose. Each of us is host to a mindless soup of egotistic tendencies, all in blind and manic pursuit of their own propagation and compelling us in one direction: towards parenthood.
Just the same as any other animal. Except that there the resemblance ends. Animals have it relatively easy. One chick, lamb, cub, kitten is much like another; give birth, wear yourself out raising them, and then start all over again. A taxing process, to be sure, but shorn of the vital element of permanent commitment.
Here, it would seem, genes cop out. People love adoptive children just as much as natural ones. Genes throw in the towel and shuffle offstage, having set the scene. Laughing immoderately, no doubt. What do they care about patricide and matricide, about oedipal complexes and incest? About everyday anxiety and ambition and disappointment and betrayal and rejection? About joy, fulfilment and sacrifice? They’ve done their stuff. They’ve ensured continuity, and anything else that ensues is a by-product. If it turns out to determine much of human conduct – well, they can’t help that, can they?
When Jane was six she broke her wrist. She also gashed her forehead but that, as it turned out, though messy and initially alarming, was insignificant. She had fallen off the brand new two-wheeler bike and lay, inert, on the tarmac path of the local park. Matthew was not there. He was at the office and there came this phone message. Could he meet his wife at the casualty department of Bart’s to which she had taken their daughter with a head injury? And his stomach ran cold. He got up from his desk, went down the stairs, found a taxi and sat in it with his heart thudding. It was the period in which he and Susan had reached their lowest point, living together in silent misery and unrest.
At the hospital, he was directed along a corridor. There were curtained cubicles and, at the far end, a row of chairs and Susan, sitting there all alone. She was very white and when she looked at him there was a vulnerability in her eyes that he had not seen for a long, long time. She said, ‘I think it’s going to be all right. She wasn’t unconscious for long. They’ve taken her to be X-rayed.’
He sat down beside her. She told him what happened. She was not looking at him any more now. He asked one or two questions, and then they fell silent. Nurses hastened to and fro.
Matthew said ‘I’m sorry I wasn’t there. It must have been horrid for you.’
She nodded. And, suddenly, shuddered. An awful convulsive shudder.
He reached out and put his arm round her. She was wearing a thin cotton shirt; as his hand touched her shoulder he felt her flinch and go rigid. And at that moment he knew that there was no hope, that they were done, that it would have to end.
Jane was brought back on a trolley, and put in a curtained cubicle. Her forehead was swathed in bandages; she was alternately tearful and important, awed by the gravity of her plight. She complained that she felt sick, and that her hand hurt. She wanted to know what had become of her bicycle. Matthew and Susan stood on each side of her. Susan stroked her hair. Matthew said that he would go to the park and find the bicycle. If it was damaged he would mend it.
And then the doctor came with the X-rays. The head injury was superficial. He did not think there was concussion, but Matthew and Susan must watch her, and bring her back if at all concerned. The wrist, though, was fractured, and would have to be set. She would be taken along to the plaster room shortly.
The doctor held the X-rays up to the light. And Matthew saw his child’s skull, a small and fragile thing of light and shade – the curve of the cranium, the eye and nose sockets, the jaws, the teeth. That most potent of all images. And her hand – a tiny, delicate fan of bone. He stared, in his numbed state of relief and of grief, amazed and chilled that these structures should be thus revealed, beneath the warm and silken skin that he knew so well.
Matthew’s present flat was the top floor of a large mid-Victorian terrace house in north London. When he first moved in he had cared so little about his surroundings that he had simply set down his furniture and lived there as he might have done in a hotel. More recently, partly in view of Jane’s weekend visits and partly, he recognized, in consequence of his own slow progress to a more normal state of mind, he had redecorated a couple of rooms, hung pictures and shifted the furniture to more congenial positions. He had put his desk in front of the largest window at the back and began to work there sometimes, at evenings and at weekends.
The view from this window was of the roof-line of the houses in the neighbouring street, and their back elevations. At night, it was surprisingly beautiful. The roof-line made a complicated black silhouette of chimney pots and angles against the ochre-orange city sky, while the buildings themselves were a dark mass brilliantly packed with the squares and rectangles of lit windows. From time to time a plane would creep above them, a firefly winking white and ruby red. And then by day the houses presented a complex of individualities by way of extensions, fire escapes, dormer windows. Someone had a minuscule conservatory in which was a white cane armchair frequented by a ginger cat. Someone else grew tomatoes on a parapet balcony. One penthouse flat with through windows afforded frequen
t glimpses of its occupant – a shadowy figure who went to and fro and, once, was joined by another with whom he or she stood in an embrace. Matthew had instinctively looked away and when he turned back both were gone.
It was a view, above all, of brick. An extension built onto the house some ten years or so ago jutted out at right angles to Matthew’s window, giving him the perfect opportunity, in idle moments, to study in detail the city’s system of rebirth. The bricks – laid Flemish bond, headers and stretchers alternating – were all old London stock bricks but of many kinds and colours: rust red, beige, grey, brown, nearly black. Here and there were yellow ones – malm bricks made with an admixture of clay and chalk. The cumulative effect was pleasing – the variety gave texture, interest and warmth to the surface of the wall. The eye approved the range of colour, the uneven look, the way in which each brick differed from its neighbour and yet was in subtle harmony. But, more than that, to look at it was to see the way in which this wall arose from the ashes of many buildings. Studying it, Matthew saw in the mind’s eye warehouses and churches, factories and shops, terrace houses like this one, blasted to the ground perhaps on some furnace night of 1940. He thought of how the city lifts again and again from its own decay, thrusting up from its own detritus, from the sediment of brick dust, rubble, wood splinters, rusted iron, potsherds, coins and bones. He thought of himself, living briefly on the top of this pile, inheriting its physical variety and, above all, the clamour of its references. The thought sustained him, in some curious way, as he sat at his desk in the flat which was not yet a home, or as he moved through days and through the city, from Finsbury to Docklands to Covent Garden to Lincoln’s Inn.
‘One prawn mayonnaise and one pastrami, please.’
The glance of recognition. ‘One prawn, one pastrami. And how’s life been treating you?’
‘Moderately well, thanks,’ said Matthew.
‘Glad to hear it. Had your holidays yet?’
‘Not yet.’
‘Ah. Anyway, they’ve got good weather for Wimbledon, for once.’
‘Yes. So they have.’
It was nearly two. The sandwich bar was empty. Let’s hope most of this chap’s customers are better at small talk than I am, thought Matthew.
‘There we are. One-ninety, sir.’
‘I’m afraid I only seem to have five pounds.’
‘Not to worry. One-ninety … Two, three, four, five. There you go.’
There I go indeed, thought Matthew. ‘Thanks. ‘Bye, then.’
‘Cheerio. Oh, hang on … I was quite forgetting. Your friend came in. Last week it was. I gave her your note.’
‘Ah,’ said Matthew. ‘Thank you very much.’
‘She’s not been in touch?’
‘No,’ said Matthew. ‘She hasn’t.’
‘Ah well. Maybe it wasn’t the one you thought, after all.’
‘Very likely.’
‘Tell her you were in, shall I? If she’s back.’
‘No need,’ said Matthew. ‘Don’t bother. Thanks all the same. ‘Bye.’
Lincoln’s Inn Fields is duskier today. The sun is not shining, so the shirts are on and the pram canopies are folded. The sky is high and white (it will not rain on Wimbledon); the girls have flung a jacket or a sweater on top of their cotton dresses; the pachyderm feet of Platanus X hispanica Muenchh stand foursquare in the grass but up above their leaves are in continuous motion.
Matthew finds a bench, and tackles the prawn sandwich; the chap has been over-prodigal with the mayonnaise. He opens his paper and reads a couple of articles and an obituary, through errant gobs of mayonnaise.
There is nothing more foolish, of course, than to assess people according to physical appearance. ‘I thought she looked a nice woman,’ says his mother – usually recounting some saga of betrayal or disillusion. Well, of course. Physiognomy is a wonderfully unreliable guide to character. Murderers, in newspaper mug-shots, look quite unremarkable folk. The most villainous face in Matthew’s newspaper is that of a leading cleric. Women are if anything more impenetrable than men. And then there is the extra complication of sexual allure – absence thereof, or abundance. A woman who is attractive arouses expectations of being agreeable as well. But women who are demonstrably pleasant do not necessarily provoke sexual desire.
The girl in the sandwich bar was not arrestingly beautiful. She would not turn heads. Nice-looking, and for some reason the face stays in the mind: shape of nose, brown wings of hair against the cheeks. And that, of course, is the flaw – nice-looking. Whatever leads one to suppose such a thing? She is undoubtedly a nastly little bitch prone to ungovernable rages, unremittingly self-absorbed, whose sole interests are windsurfing and war gaming in Berkshire woods. One is well out of it. Let this be a lesson.
Physiognomy may not be an indication of character, but it undoubtedly affects a person’s fate. An excess of good looks or sexual appeal will lead to one kind of life rather than another. Beautiful women provoke certain expectations. Handsome men also. Matthew was joined now on his bench by a couple of girls who presumably judged his appearance adequately unthreatening, and who took no further notice of him. He reflected, with detachment, upon his own looks. Shorter than the average male by perhaps an inch, a matter of distress to him in youth, which now seems odd, and a touch disturbing: there lurks still, then, some primitive human belief that size is a measure of potential. Sturdily built, but the build not of an athlete but of a road-mender. Chunky, a mite round-shouldered. As a student, Matthew had taken vacation jobs on construction sites and had had occasion to note that, stripped to the waist, he looked much like everyone else but, mortifyingly, was not nearly so robust.
Dark hair, almost black. Wide face with rather blunt nose; brown eyes set far apart, thick eyebrows. An expression that is apparently cheerful without intention; a woman in a lift last week said to him indignantly ‘What are you grinning at me for?’ when he had barely been aware of her presence.
So far as sexual allure goes, he would probably register about average. Women had not exactly come running, but neither had they turned aside in droves. His appearance, then, it would seem, was neither off-putting nor particularly magnetic. Women, quite properly, resent being viewed as sexual objects. The difficulty is, of course, that we all in some degree view one another as sexual objects – to the extent of the thought occurring, however subliminally, that one would like to or one would prefer not to. Most people you come across are the wrong age or gender anyway; those who are not are bound to provoke vague responses of inclination or rejection.
And the girl in the sandwich bar? This is purely an academic exercise, since the situation has now been rationally assessed and she is recognized for what she is: illtempered, selfish, superficial if not downright perverted. Well, undoubtedly one had registered inclination rather than rejection. In an abstract sort of way. Far more than that, there had been this yearning, this sense of deprivation. The green hill. Not a sexual object, oh no, but an object of desire. A promised land. A naïve and irrational impulse.
His companions on the bench had finished their lunch and left. It was twenty past two – high time to get back to the office. Another five minutes. He got up, disposed of the newspaper – now marbled with mayonnaise stains– and began a slow circuit of the gardens, idly studying other walkers. Their faces, their gait, their dress. There were two small girls of Jane’s age, whom he watched with benign professionalism; he recognized the skipping game they played, he knew – or thought he knew – what was in their minds. He saw in the distance a young woman whose fair cropped head brought Susan vividly to mind– not Susan now but Susan then.
The first time he ever met her he had barely noticed her. She was brought by another man to a Sunday lunch gathering at a riverside pub. Matthew’s sights were elsewhere, in any case; he was mildly besotted with a gloomy and overwrought German girl and had spent the time trying to negotiate the next unsatisfactory meeting, while on the other side of the table Susan chatted with a merrier gro
up. And then he had run into her again at a New Year’s Eve party, and talked to her, and noticed. And then he had engineered a group jaunt to Brighton which she had joined, and then he had asked her out to dinner. And then, and then. A conventional enough courtship; banal even.
And the structure, in any case, is now largely forgotten. What remains are those silvered imperishable scenes. He stands by the ticket office at Waterloo, searching the crowds for her, and sees her far off, knows her at once by the way she walks, the way she turns her head, and is swept by joy, by her strangeness, and her infinite familiarity. He looks furtively at her across a room, catches her looking, also, for him, and feels an uprush of excitement. They are walking on the Embankment, in a drizzle of winter rain; they stop under a tree, and he takes her in his arms. They kiss, and over her shoulder he sees the bare branches of the tree black against the sky, with the round balls of the seed pods slinging from them like decorations. The London plane, of course.
But all this was long ago, and in another country. Waterloo is still there, and the Embankment – he passed that precise spot, indeed, just the other day – but the place in which those things happened is the country of the mind. He is elsewhere now, and must make what he can of it.
Two twenty-five, and Matthew heads for Kingsway and the tube station. He looks, as usual, at buildings – and sees, as always, some detail not previously observed. But he looks above all at people. During the last hour the faces of a hundred strangers have passed before him. He thinks of this torrent of flesh and bone, forever replenished, forever renewed. He listens to the sound of that torrent, that flow of death and birth.
It is an incendiary night; they must be dropping them in thousands. You hear them rattle and clatter on the roof tops, and the clunks as they hit the ground, and then a whole street will be sizzling with blue-white fireworks as though they had sprouted rather than fallen. He has dealt with half a dozen already, and has his eye out all the time for that gout of flame from a roof that means one has gone through the tiles and into the rafters. And incendiaries mean the big stuff is to follow, that is the sequence. Get the city lit up with fires, and then come in with the thousand-pounders and the land-mines.