He took a taxi from the Strand to Primrose Hill and was twenty-five minutes early on Fitzroy Street when he rang her bell. He did not have a key – that was a line he did not wish to cross. When she came to the door, in the moment before they embraced, he sensed that something was not right, or was different. Or she was different. He thought he saw the vestiges of an expression being modified to greet him. Then, they were in each other’s arms and the idea was gone. She drew with her out onto the cold stone front step a draught of indoor warmth and beeswax from the apartment and, with it, a scent of spices which mingled with her perfume. One of his presents from some bright airport hell. She exclaimed his name, he hers, they kissed, and held apart to take in the other’s face and then embraced again.
As he held her, he felt on his palms the heat of her skin through her red silk blouse. How fogged and monochrome memory was against the living moment. When he was away from her he could only recall in shadow play, or was too busy to attempt to recall, the full vibrancy, the plain and overwhelming fact of her. He forgot the particular touch of her mouth and tongue, her frame, and the way she held herself to dissolve their difference in height when they kissed, the fit of her fingers between his, their degree of springy resistance at the joints, their cool smoothness, length, diameter, the bump of a mole below the knuckle of her left pinkie, and how, when they embraced, his chest was alive to the pressure of her breasts. And this was merely the realm of sensation. How she looked, sounded, tasted – familiar, of course, all of it, but only now that she was here, right in his grasp. Memory, or Beard’s memory, was a second-rate device. When he thought of her from Berlin or Rome, it was all relation and generalised desire, it was her nature he considered, herself in abstract, and his own pleasure, not the warm honey smell of her scalp, the surprising taut strength in her arms, how low her voice was pitched when she said his name.
‘Michael Beard. Get in the house this minute!’
This old joke summoned a certain kind of crusty old-fashioned parent. He never had cause to say it to her – his stew of a flat was not a place to invite a woman like Melissa Browne. She would not feel comfortable there until she had organised it for him, and that was another line he did not want crossed. She took his bag and he followed her in. When the door was closed they stood in the clean expanse of her sitting room, she put her arms around his neck, he drew her firmly to him and they kissed again. For once, it seemed they might dispense with the obligatory fine-tuning small talk, postpone dinner and go directly to her bedroom. But then, at the sound of a hiss followed by a whip-like crack, a vital prompt from the kitchen, she rushed away with a hiss of her own, a staccato ‘shit!’, and he made his way to the sofa. He was no longer an ardent young man. He could wait patiently.
By the time she returned five minutes later, his scotch and soda in her hand, he was sprawled on his back reviewing a proposed submission from his Imperial team to Nature. The customary detritus of shoes, coat, jacket, tie, open briefcase, papers, open suitcase, spilling clothes and a plastic bag extended across the floor. Tipped so suddenly from the charge of their reunion to the intricacies of molecular plant life, and knowing that, however it happened, he and Melissa would make love within an hour or so, with a meal in prospect too, he felt a rare and settled contentment.
She stood over him, free hand on her hip. ‘Make space, Professor.’
He liked her wry, tolerant, lopsided smile. With a grunt, he struggled upright and patted the space beside him and took the glass from her. As she nestled against him, he put the monograph aside and said, ‘Just think, your humblest pavement-crack weed has a secret that the best dozen labs in the world are only just beginning to understand.’
He sipped his scotch while her hand lay between his legs. She was caressing him with an abstracted air.
‘I’ve missed you, Michael. Why weeds?’
‘I must have told you before. A leaf is a kind of solar panel for splitting water and fixing carbon dioxide. We could imitate it and make hydrogen. I’ve missed you too.’
Had he? Now that he was kissing her he realised that he should have, for he was excited and happy. But he had not missed anyone, not since the dark summer of 2000, when he pined like a dog for his last, his final, wife. There were people he vaguely looked forward to seeing, but not since that time had he been afflicted by an absence. These days, as soon as he was alone, he read, he drank, he ate, he was on the phone, on the internet, watching TV, travelling to a meeting – or asleep. He was self-sufficient, self-absorbed, his mind a cluster of appetites and dreamy thoughts. Like many clever men who prize objectivity, he was a solipsist at heart, and in his heart was a nugget of ice, which Melissa sensed and intended to melt.
Of course, it was necessary before they made love to have a conversation about their respective lives these past weeks, their states of mind, their day. His fault for not keeping in touch, hers for not holding him to account. So she told him her news. A musical about a working-class lad wanting to be a ballet dancer was keeping turnover above the seasonal average. But few boys came in. It was all down to girls dreaming of such a boy. She told him of the recent death of a respected choreographer who was never quite famous enough for his own taste. At the memorial service, five dancers performed in the narrow aisle of a Soho church, and even the old man’s enemies wept.
Michael’s arm was around her shoulders, and she was pressed against him, talking into his chest. She looked after her shops, her customers, her staff, her lover, and she wanted someone to take care of her. As he listened, he looked about him – at the brown chaise longue against the wall, the maquette, the eighteenth-century drypoint of dancers in a Utrecht street, a bowl of smooth stones in a copper dish – hoping to identify what it was that appeared to his unobservant eye so subtly altered. Something was out of kilter. He was sure it was not his own possessions. The air itself seemed disordered, the way it does after a smoker has left and his smoke has cleared.
‘I love you,’ she interrupted her account of the funeral to say, and she bit him playfully on his arm.
He felt tenderly towards her, perhaps as much as he ever had, but one day he might have to disentangle himself, and it would be harder for both of them if he had once said he loved her. But how he would begin to give her up, and when, was beyond him, and he drew her closer to him. What he whispered sounded lame, but it would do.
‘You’re beautiful, Melissa.’
She went on with her story and he stroked her head and thought that for the first time since he had thrown up behind the velvet curtain, he could imagine himself hungry, perhaps within the half-hour. He was beginning to wonder about the spices in the air. Was it tamarind he could detect, and garlic, limes, ginger, chicken? Her voice was musical and soft, and even, he thought, a little sad. From time to time she drew his head down for a kiss. She was talking about the shops again, drifting into another story, this time about a hole in a ceiling or a floor and something falling through it, about a bad-tempered dachshund left behind by an ancient prima donna with Alzheimer’s. And now he too was drifting. He thought he was an average type, no crueller, no better or worse than most. If he was sometimes greedy, selfish, calculating, mendacious, when to be otherwise would embarrass him, then so was everyone else. Human imperfection was a large subject. Consider just a few of the defects. S-shaped backs that easily buckled, breathing and swallowing recklessly sharing a passage, the infectious proximity of sex and excretion, childbirth pure agony, testicles unwieldy and vulnerable, weak eyesight a general affliction, an immune system that could devour its owner. And that was just the body. Among all the yearning rationales for the godhead, the argument from design collapsed with Homo sapiens. No god worth his salt could be so careless at the workbench. Beard comfortably shared all of humanity’s faults, and here he was, a monster of insincerity, cradling tenderly on his arm a woman he thought he might leave one day soon, listening to her with sensitive expression in the expectation that soon he would have to do some talking himself, when all he wanted
was to make love to her without preliminaries, eat the meal she had cooked, drink a bottle of wine and then sleep – without blame, without guilt.
She took his empty glass and stood.
‘Food,’ she said. ‘And I’ll get you another.’
But she could not bring herself to leave him, not until she had stood right over him and kissed him again. This kiss was long and deep, and then she clasped him to her, and Beard, still seated, fully aroused, his face part shrouded in the scented gloom of her unbuttoned blouse, his view entirely filled by the division and swell of her breasts, had time to wonder why it oppressed him more than usual, all this talking and listening and cooking before anything properly rewarding could take place. Perhaps he had lost patience with the small print of human contact by spending so much time in loud public places, among worldly professors like himself, each bristling with his personal style of academic grandeur. And when alone, he was mostly among the near-abstraction of cobalt ions, protons, catalysts. And when not alone, in mindless dalliances he preferred not to consider now.
She released him from the embrace and as she straightened she said something, a single phrase he did not hear because at the same time her arms brushed against his ears. Her hands came to rest on his shoulders and he looked up, expecting to exchange a reassuring smile that would neutrally close this particular physical episode and dispatch her to the kitchen, and was surprised to see tears in her eyes, gathering thickly, ready to spill. And oddly, she was smiling, but without humour, as though dismissing or mocking her own feelings. For a superstitious moment he imagined he had upset her with his thoughts, impossibly murmured them aloud, or they had been legibly stamped across his face. But every man was an island, his thoughts were safe. It must be something serious, unconnected with himself. As he stood, he took her hands and they were damp, not only on the palms, but between the fingers, sticky, hot, expressive of a strong emotion it was now his duty – all prospect of pleasure receding – to elicit and understand.
‘Melissa,’ he said. ‘What is it, and what did you just say?’
They kissed again, as tenderly as before. Perhaps it would not be so difficult after all to set the evening on its proper course.
Then she gazed at him in wonder and laughed. ‘You idiot. I love you. I said I’m pregnant.’
‘Ah …’
His mind had softly whited out, the manly equivalent of a neurasthenic faint onto the sofa behind him. Pregnant. He struggled with this ripely swelling word – familiar enough, but for the moment devoid of helpful context, like the face, say, of the local newsagent encountered in an improbable place. Then word, meaning and consequences, biology and fate, clicked into alignment like a steel bolt. His cell door had been open for months, years, and he could have walked free. Too late. While his back was turned one of his own sperm, as brave and cunning as Odysseus, had made the long journey, breached the city wall and buried its identity in her egg. Now he was expected to do the same. In forty years he had talked various women, including two of his wives, into terminations. It was a miracle he had come this far without lapsing into fatherhood. But he would have a tough time persuading Melissa. She was watching him now, lips parted in expectation, waiting for him, for the words, Daddy’s first words, that might indicate the course of this new life.
‘I’ll have that scotch.’
‘Come with me.’
He put an arm around her shoulder, and together they stepped over his mess and crossed the boards to her tightly organised kitchen. One large green pot, source of the pervasive aroma, was on the stove on a low heat. Otherwise, apart from a carton of rice, there was no sign of cooking, for the surfaces had been wiped down, all peelings trashed, every implement washed and stowed. A mystery, how someone as rich-bloodedly sensual as Melissa could be so aseptically neat. A baby, with its diurnal tides of entropy, would put her to the test. But this baby must not be, and all that was in question was how long it would take him to convince her of the fact. How could she not see it already, the folly of his shouldering this obligation, and the pathos of it – almost seventy years old and the child not yet ten! Then, the unsuitability of the father’s character, his own gifts for entropy, his remorseless preoccupation with work, his recent earnings not even in six figures, his awful past, the risks of transcription error in offering his time-degraded seed to posterity, and her eggs surely feeling the chill of thirty-nine winters. And what of his mission? Would it be an exaggeration to say that the planet could suffer if he were deflected from his course? Perhaps not.
He watched her peer into the green pot and seem satisfied, unscrew the bottle and pour his drink, and take an ice cube from a dispenser. If the arguments he was marshalling were overstated, it was because he feared that the decision might already be out of his hands. She wanted this, she had always wanted this. So they weren’t arguments at all, they were pleas. If she loved him she would listen, but she loved him and wanted a child, and was bound to ignore him. The situation was grave, indeed gravid. He took the drink from her and did not knock it back in one, as he would have if he had been alone with this problem, but went at it in rapid sips.
She flashed him a smile and set about her brisk arrangements for the rice, and poured olive oil and lemon juice into a bowl and tipped in rocket leaves from a packet in the fridge. This mound of greenery was surely for herself. Folic acid, phytonutrients, antioxidants, vitamin C. Eating for two. Something had to be done.
She said, ‘Do you know, I think for once I’ll have a glass of white wine.’
He did not want arrangements for an abortion turning into a celebration of a future birth. Nor did he want his foetal child’s neural development compromised by alcohol. He felt so unreasonable, he could not speak. She raised her glass to him, and mutely he raised his. Her measure of wine was no larger than his neat scotch.
‘Do you like this skirt?’
This question, her tone suggested, was not a change of subject. It was fine cashmere, charcoal grey, with many folds that swung in a delayed spiral when she turned.
‘It’s lovely,’ he said. ‘And so are you. You’ve never looked better.’ Not a good idea to encourage her, but he could not help himself. By way of compensation, he said, ‘How pregnant are you?’
‘Seven weeks.’
‘When did you find out?’
‘Day before yesterday.’
‘Melissa, tell me. Was it an accident?’
She came over to him and pressed her hand against his cheek. He felt again her radiant body heat. She was the oven, he thought stupidly, in which there was a bun. Their bun.
She whispered finally, ‘No.’
‘You came off the Pill?’
‘The last three times we made love I was off the Pill.’
‘You should have told me.’
‘You would have resisted me.’
‘Yes, I would. You know my feelings about this.’
‘And you know mine.’
His glass was already empty. He stepped round her to get to the bottle and helped himself. Now they stood almost the length of the kitchen apart and it was easier for him to say, with an edge of hardness, ‘You deceived me then.’
She was coming towards him again. It would be difficult to turn her from this calm, seductive mode. He would have happily settled for a row, with delicacy tossed to the winds. Greater distances traversed. But in this homely stillness, she was coming towards him and he could not help his arousal, and he could see she knew that, which excited him more. From his new angle by her pitiful drinks tray – one amaretto, one near-empty Johnnie Walker, one Baileys – her face was differently lit and he saw that the fine-texturing, high-blooming first-trimester hormones had been working on her skin. Already? He had no idea, but he had never seen her look so pretty or young. When she stopped close in front of him he had to remind himself that he had just, and justly, accused her of deception. He could not allow her to seduce him. She had been dishonest. On the other hand, a measure of sexual release would give him immunity,
let him think more clearly and make his life-denying case with more brio.
She said, ‘I wasted years thinking I shouldn’t have a baby until the right man came along. A lot of idiots and bastards took up my time – my fault as much as theirs. I think you’re the right man, but Michael, if you don’t think you are, it doesn’t matter. I’m going ahead anyway. It’ll be sad without you, but not as sad as having nothing. You don’t have to decide tonight or next month. You can say no and change your mind later. Perhaps you’ll change your mind when you see the baby. That can happen. But one thing I’m sure of – I’m not going to have an argument with you. If you’re dead against it, you’re free to go. And free to come back.’
‘I’ll be almost seventy when this child is only ten. What use is that?’
‘Fine. Don’t get involved. But I think you’d count yourself blessed at seventy to love a ten-year-old and be loved by one.’
Blessed? Where had she got a word like that? He had never heard her use it before.
‘And there’s another thing.’
She said it mellifluously, she was that sure of her ground. She had smoothed out the crags and precipices of this new landscape and he was wandering through it – completely lost, but not in harm’s way, or so she seemed to be suggesting.
‘You didn’t ask to become a father. I’m not asking for financial support. I’ve got savings and I’ve got the shops. If you want to contribute, all the better. If you want to be with us, better still.’