Us. Already this pinhead-sized entity had moved in, it had a social presence. Beard felt both wronged and outmanoeuvred. He was too heavy-footed to articulate whatever general principle Melissa was defying with such efficiency. Did he have no rights? He could not command this child’s early annihilation. So what did he want? He attempted a return to basics.
‘Whether I stay or go, pay or don’t pay, I’ll have become the father of your child. Against my will. You didn’t ask me because you knew what I would say.’
‘If you never see the child and contribute nothing, I don’t see how much will have changed for you.’
‘That’s not for you to say, and besides, you’re wrong, dead wrong. Do you really think there’s no difference between having a child you never see and having no child? You’re forcing choices on me that I never wanted to make.’
He pronounced this with some heat and he believed what he was saying, but it seemed too abstract. His real objections, still without verbal form, lay in a fog.
She must have anticipated his reaction. She seemed untroubled as she turned away from him and began to set the table. When she spoke, she put her hand impersonally on his arm and her voice was conciliatory, even though she was not actually looking at him.
‘Try to see it from my side, Michael. In love with you, wanting a baby, not wanting anyone else, seeing you only occasionally and never knowing when, knowing you were seeing other women, and you not making any move to come closer or to leave, and four years drifting by like this. If I did nothing, I’d be at the menopause. And that would be the quiet choice you would have forced on me.’
It sounded a rotten deal. But she had been free to kick him out. He placed his hand over hers where it rested on his arm. A kind of apology.
She lifted the casserole from the stove onto a trivet on the table and gave him a bottle of wine to open. It was a Corbières, a decent one, and he would be drinking it alone. Her two inches of white were barely touched. As he sat down he remembered her present, bath oil and bitter chocolate mints from Berlin Tegel. Exactly the wrong moment to hand them over. A silence settled as she served up the stew. She had neutralised his protest with a list of indictments. He had always assumed she knew about his affairs, but it shocked him, no, it stirred him, to hear her say it so calmly. As he lifted his fork he saw vividly, as though back-projected, brain to retina, a tableau of Melissa and a girl he had known briefly in Milan, kneeling up together, companionably naked on a four-poster against a moraine of sheets and pillows, tenderly expectant, in the low-lit style of a pornographic spread. He even saw the centrefold staples. He blinked this arrangement away and began to eat. But his daydream had tensed the walls of his throat and the first mouthful was difficult to swallow. She had made her reasonable case, and he was struggling, he was in the wrong when he knew he was right, he was in knots even while he suspected that the matter was simple: she had changed the subject.
He let a minute or so pass and then, determined to sound grave rather than querulous, he said, ‘The point is, Melissa, there wouldn’t really be a choice for me if you went ahead with this. How am I supposed to ignore the existence of my own child? Not possible for me. I guess you were counting on that, and this is what I object to. It’s a form of blackmail …’
The word hung over them, and he thought that at last they would have the liberating row. But she remained calm, the serene mother-to-be, reflecting while she chewed. She was eating more than usual.
‘I wasn’t counting on you being unable to ignore our baby. If it’s true, I’m happy. I knew you’d be angry, and I don’t blame you. I thought of saying it was an accident, but I couldn’t live with that.’
Not after she had lived with the contraceptive deceit. But he did not feel like saying that, and nor could he bring himself to say that he saw the future well enough. After a happy interlude, and assuming he did not succumb to marriage, he would become, by degrees, a worthless, unreliable pseudo-husband, and this was what would make a worthless, unreliable father of him. It was what she was choosing, it was her right to choose. This was what women had marched for, birth as well as abortion. Perhaps there was nothing he could do. She was absolving him of responsibility, but this was not how it would unfold, this was not how she would feel when their lives had been transformed, when they repeated the tired, angry scenes, with shouting, the baby wailing, a slamming door, his car starting up with a roar. That was when she would know it was all his fault, whatever she said now, while her unsuspecting brain was soused in optimistic hormones, one of evolution’s tricks for getting this child past the first post.
As he refilled his glass he felt the fight, his accusatory sting, give way to light-headed fatalism. He wanted to set the problem aside and direct the evening towards its proper course – by way of amiable conversation with this beautiful, nearly young woman, her generous cooking and the dark wine, towards lovemaking, sleepy embraces, sleep. Was he lazy and sybaritic, or was he affirming a decent appetite for life? He knew the answer. He reached across and put his hand on hers.
‘I’m glad you were straight with me. Thank you.’
Keeping his hand in place, he told her that he was sorry for his sharp words, that she was certainly no blackmailer, that he was profoundly happy to be with her again, and that she was right, they must not quarrel. She gazed into his face while he talked as she might a hypnotist’s. Her eyes glistened again. She got up and came and kneeled by him and they kissed deeply. By the time she went back to her chair, all seemed well, and they continued with the meal. He put away three portions of chicken and chilli stew while he talked about his work and travels, the conference in Potsdam, the latest from New Mexico, how a team at MIT was working on an artificial photosynthesis process similar to his own, but was eighteen months behind. He talked of design simplicity, of the beauty of no moving parts, of an Oxford team’s calculations for the optimal shape of a solar reflector, which was not the parabola he had expected.
He was boring her surely, talking to put distance between himself and the baby, to replace it in her thoughts with his own ideas, his own baby. Sometimes she prompted him with a question, but mostly she was silent, gazing at him with deeply irrational forbearance. She was in love with a bald fat man who seemed to her the essence of seriousness and high purpose, who was the father of her child as well as the father she longed to care for, the father who had not yet fallen in love with his fate, but who, she calmly knew, was bound to yield.
In what he considered layman’s terms, he explained the recent excitement – not one electron for every photon, but two, and one day perhaps, even three! As she listened, she adopted the expression he always liked, a wry smile puckered into a pout that barely contained the pressure of a delighted laugh. But nothing he was saying was faintly amusing. She deserved better. So he began to tell her about his adventure on the train, and because he was still feeling bloated and overheated, suggested they move back to the sofa.
When he had told the story at the Savoy, he had drawn directly on his memory of the experience. Now there were three elements – the events as he recalled them, the fresher memory of his first account, and the desire to tell an after-dinner anecdote and make her laugh and like him more and dispel for the moment their one real subject. Everything he now emphasised or modified or added was plausible enough, some of it was true. He plagiarised himself, borrowing turns of phrase, pauses and pacing he had deployed at the lectern. He made his fellow passenger larger and more threatening, he made himself the complete bumbling fool, impulsive, greedy, quick to blame. Towards the end, at the moment when his luggage was lifted down, he exaggerated the young man’s patient, saintly quality. With a feel for narrative art, Beard suppressed any detail that might have anticipated and diminished the moment of revelation, when he put a hand in his pocket and found the unopened bag of crisps.
Withholding information worked. At the right moment Melissa shrieked in amazement. She took his head between her hands and shook it and said, ‘You idiot, you nincom
poop! Oh, I wish I’d been there!’ Still laughing, she fetched her wine, that same two inches, and then they kissed, and laughed together, and embraced. She pulled away and said, ‘You thug!’ and then, wonderingly, ‘That poor fellow!’
Recovering at last, she moved closer beside him and said, ‘But do you know, something just like that happened to Ivan – you remember Ivan in the shop?’
He did not care to hear about Ivan. He stood with some difficulty and, making a mock chivalrous gesture with open hand and faint bow, guided her towards the bedroom and there, in silence, undressed her. She liked to begin this way, naked while he was fully clothed. He knew nothing of such things but he was certain that in some other century she would have been considered the ideal of feminine beauty, of perfection in a welcoming softness of form. Narrow at the shoulder, swelling to the hip, heavy breasts, two dimples at the base of her spine above generous buttocks. He kissed these dimples now. He was sitting on the edge of the bed, and she turned and lowered herself to sit astride his thighs, arms looped around his neck. She nuzzled and kissed his forehead, he kissed her breasts. But such beauty was not weightless. A fiery pain in his dodgy knee was intensifying, and he thought he had less than a minute before the next move, before a ligament tore from its anchoring in the bone. But she was telling him she loved him, she was whispering how she loved him, and he had to wait.
Finally, with a moan that passed for passion, he took her in his arms and lowered her on her back on the bed, and drew back the duvet for her. The bedroom was cooler than he would have liked. He was out of his own clothes with long-practised speed and lying beside her, caressing her in a manner some women found too clinically expert. At these reunions, Melissa was usually impatient to get started, but although she held his cock, ringing it with looped forefinger and thumb, pleasing him immensely with gentle movements, now she seemed to want to talk. Intent on stroking and kissing her and on the enveloping thrill of her touch, he paid little attention at first. Her disconnected words loomed then drifted past him, vivid and random, the way coral-reef fish might appear to a diver. Then he came to and realised that she was talking about being pregnant. Why bring that up now? But of course – what else? For her it was no change of subject at all. Sex, babies, breasts, love, down through the generations an unbroken golden thread. Not a rope to bind his arms and feet, or with which he could hang himself from the nearest beam, just when he thought his life, in its final active stages, was filling with meaning and grand purpose. But he suppressed his impatience, opened his eyes, directed his gaze towards the ceiling, and listened.
‘. . . like loving someone you’ve never met, but that’s not it either. We have met, we’ve always known each other, right from the beginning. Michael, I didn’t know it would be like this, that it would start so soon. It’s already begun, I’m already in love with her, with him, this tiny person coming towards us from nowhere, curled up inside me in the dark, growing larger every hour, coming to meet us. Sometimes I love it so hard I get an ache in my chest. I’m so lovesick I keep sighing out loud. This is stupid, but isn’t it strange and wonderful, how one person can come out of another, like a Russian doll? So strange and ordinary at the same time. I’m so happy. I’m not making sense. I love you, I love this baby inside me and I hope you’ll love it too, I think you will, Michael, you will, say you will, say you love this baby . . .’
She had drawn him towards her, and they were making love. Plaintively, she repeated, ‘Say you will, please say you will …’ until it was indecent not to comply, and he said, ‘I will,’ and he kissed her and thought that perhaps he was not lying because he did not know the future and it was not entirely inconceivable that, in his own way, he might love this child, if it ever existed, and whatever he said now, time and events would scramble, and lovemaking was an enclosed, enchanted world with its own language and rules, its own truth.
She took her pleasures easily, she was a loud, big-hearted lover of the back-clawing school, which was to his taste, but not tonight. As they bucked and turned, and her silky skin turned slick and her cries grew louder in his left ear, he found he could no longer abandon himself completely, and he was troubled, distracted. He wished she had not reminded him of her pregnancy. After many uncountable minutes, the moment was approaching when sexual etiquette required that he time himself, get in step with the shrieking downhill dash to her final orgasm, and he knew he was not ready and might not make it. And so, in those closing seconds, he entered a familiar empty theatre, sat in the stalls and auditioned some women he knew, bringing them onstage in merging sequence at the impossible speed of thought. They appeared in experimental attitudes, in different tableaux that magically involved himself. He summoned and dismissed the girl from Milan, then an Iranian biophysicist, and then Patrice, an old stand-by. But at last he settled on the right choice, the immigration officer with the withered arm. He let her step out coolly from behind her station, and there they stood, fucking against her desk in front of five hundred bored passengers ready with their passports. To Beard, sex in public among indifferent lookers-on was a fantasy of unaccountable appeal, and it worked. He made it just in time.
When he returned from this affair to Melissa’s bed, she was kissing his face and saying, ‘You’re my darling. Thank you. I love you. Michael, I love you. You dear, dear man.’
He thought it was a police helicopter that disturbed him as it hovered a couple of streets away, but by the time he was fully awake it was receding northwards across the rooftops and it was a neighbour’s deep-throated dog making all the noise. His hand was tangled in Melissa’s hair, her right leg was crossed over his. He extricated himself, then lay waiting while she murmured in her sleep on a querulous note. When she was settled he slipped out from under the covers. There was never much darkness in a city bedroom and he crossed quickly to the door and went naked along the hallway to the bathroom.
The black slate floor was heated all night and felt good beneath his cold white feet. Let the planet go to hell. Remembering that there were several mirrors – one of them covered an entire wall – he turned the dimmer switch down before he went to the hand basin to drink from the tap. Then he urinated, and afterwards lowered the wooden seat and lid over the bowl. Before he sat, he put on a scarlet dressing gown she had bought him three Christmases ago, and tied it at the waist.
Orgasm sometimes brought on a bout of insomnia. He might have been more comfortable in the sitting room, but to go in there would be a concession to wakefulness, to the next day, the next subchapter of his existence. His mood was sour. He wanted oblivion, and the bathroom was a provisional place, an anteroom to sleep. He did not understand why he felt so rough. He made a tally of the previous day’s drinking – just about average – and began to form the familiar resolution, then dismissed it, for he knew he was no match for that late-morning version of himself, for example, en route from Berlin, reclining in the sunlit cabin, a gin and tonic to hand. And what had he been reading on the plane? What other concerns could a rational man have? Three reports in succession. First, an early draft from oil-industry insiders calculating peak oil production in five to eight years. So little time to turn this matter around. Second, also a draft, to be published in the autumn: a quarter of the planet’s mammals under threat, a Great Extinction already under way. Third, an academic paper sifting data on Arctic summer ice, proposing 2045 as the disappearance date.
Was he unhappy, reading of this man-made mess? Not at all. He had been content, a frowning serious man at work, not even thinking at that point of the lunch to come, marking significant passages or his professional dissent with pencil underlinings, arrows, balloons, while an oval window framed the azure stratosphere to his left, and ten kilometres below, the treeless north-German plain, flattened and smoothed by centuries of bloody battle, which yielded eventually to treeless Holland and its Mondrian fields. Also to his left, the southern sun, too high for clouds, sent its photon torrent to illuminate and elevate his labours. How could he ever give up gin?
> But he was unhappy now at 4 a.m. on his oak and porcelain pedestal, hunched like Blake’s Newton over his toes, too tired to sleep. This was alcohol’s contribution to insomnia – he was parched, exhausted, alert. The usual bundle of congealed anxieties appeared before him in the gloom of the overheated bathroom. They were not all abstract concerns. Some were distinctly embodied: his weight, his heart, which he thought beat too irregularly these days, giddiness when he stood up, pains in his knees, his kidneys, his chest, the smothering tiredness that was always on or near him, a red blotch on the back of his hand that some months ago had turned purplish, the tinnitus that he could hear now, an airy, rushing sound which never left him, the pins-and-needles sensation in his left hand, also constant. He felt his symptoms as crimes. He should see a doctor and make a full confession. But he did not want to hear himself condemned.
Then, the squalid basement flat in Dorset Square, accusing him like an abandoned friend: when are you coming back? One oppressive detail was the piles or mounds of unopened mail. There were letters from Tom Aldous’s father, who wanted to meet and reminisce about his son. What was Beard supposed to do? This was not the time to take on the burden of an elderly man’s distress, of a father still grieving after five years. Then, the precariousness of the project. Would the venture capitalists of Silicon Valley finally open their hearts and bank accounts? Would John P. Hedley the Third, the rancher in New Mexico, change his mind before his proxy and Beard signed the papers in the US Embassy tomorrow? Could he make gases from water even more cheaply, and could he stop them recombining? Must the catalyst be an oxide? If he let his thoughts go towards this problem, he would never sleep. It was easier to think of Melissa’s news. Could he have guessed she would be so devious? On this matter, the pregnancy, his three hours’ sleep had conferred some certainty. He knew it in his gut, it could not happen, this child could not be, he would not permit it, this homunculus must retreat to the realm of pure thought. That he would talk her round he did not doubt. She cared what he thought of her. That she loved him more than he loved her was the unarguable source of his power.