Life (21 page)

Or maybe Spence was making a devil’s bargain, which one day three people would rue, one of them an innocent child. Anna loved him, but she was not in love. In those black hours when she lay awake in the night, he could not comfort her. She believed that her career was ruined—doctoral students don’t have babies, househusband makes no diff—and she was heartbroken. What if someone came along who could break that spell? But your girl gets pregnant: you marry her. He was doing the right thing. That conviction would carry him through. It was like being in Morocco again. The hospitality, the smiling, the food you had to eat.

No one could complain of Anna’s work. Being pregnant, like being on the point of death, concentrates the mind. Before the Carstairs weekend she had been thinking about broaching Transferred Y with Nirmal again. She was cured of this plan. She knew that Parentis could not chuck her out: but she didn’t know what the etiquette was with her supervisor. She asked Sonia. The older woman’s reaction was ominous. Clearly torn between the instincts of a northern matron and grim experience, she crooned over the pregnancy but advised Anna to say nothing. Sonia would break the news.

“He’s not going to be a happy bunny. But he’ll have to lump it, won’t he. There’s such a thing as Equal Opportunities, he can’t get past that.”

Anna waited, trembling, to hear what KM Nirmal would say to her. He said not a word. She only knew that the news had been conveyed by the change in his manner. It was not reassuring. In the team meetings, which were frequent because things were at an exciting stage, she was sidelined. In the lab he treated her with wounding courtesy. If he had to deal with her at length he would stare over her shoulder, speaking as if to a third party, for whom Anna was merely the ventriloquist’s dummy.

“He’ll get over it,” Sonia comforted her.

Anna had been constrained to walk down and visit the animals, after one of these distressing encounters, because there were tears in her eyes. She blinked them back. Spence thought her fears were wildly exaggerated or hormone-fueled or both, but Anna knew. She was dead meat. It would have been bad enough if she had been a young man who had insisted on getting married.

Sonia brooded over the first successfully implanted pregnant mother of three sry sdf/sdf2 female embryos, who was receiving a constant stream of admiring visitors. The team just couldn’t get over her cleverness.

“It’s because he thought so highly of you, love. The way he sees it, he’s put a lot of investment into you and now you’re taking the mommy-track. I told him about your Spence, but he doesn’t believe in househusbands. No, I still wouldn’t say anything yourself, not unless he speaks to you first. Let him calm down.”

Anna stared out of the window at the familiar horizon. She hadn’t told anyone at Parentis except Sonia that she was pregnant, but of course Sonia had gossiped. Already Anna bore the pitying looks, the grinding strain of being counted down, counted out. She had to bear it. She had to get her doctorate.

“He’s got a wife at home,” remarked Sonia. “A wife and grown-up kids. You’d never know it, would you? That should tell you something: he doesn’t mix the compartments. Home is home and work is work. She comes from a very conservative Hindu family. I think she barely leaves the house except to visit relatives.”

Anna imagined fastidious Nirmal doing sex with one of those sullen uprooted peasants you saw in the local streets: ugly woolen coat over her sari, feet broadened by a barefoot childhood slopping out of narrow western shoes. It was shocking. “She’s not educated?”

“Oh yes she is. She went to Girton, took a double first in history and politics. Then her parents arranged for her to meet Nirmal. She liked him, she married him, and that was it.” Sonia stomped the ball of her thumb down on the lab counter and twisted it as if she were squashing a bug. “That’s all she wrote. I’m not saying Nirmal’s a bigot, but that’s what he thinks has to happen. A woman puts her family first. He’s not far wrong. It’s still the choice most women make in the end.”

Anna’s stricken face must have alarmed her.

“Don’t worry love. Your Spence is a treasure. If I’d had someone like that… I tell you what though,” she added, patting Anna’s abdomen through her lab coat (Sonia was the first to introduce Anna to this insolent gesture). “Stick at one. It’s numbers two and three and above that
really
separate the mummies from the daddies. They did in my house, any road. You still don’t feel sick? Must be a girl. Girls are always less trouble.”

It was true, the baby was no trouble. It made no hateful comments, no smug assumptions. Aside from the slight thickening of her waist, her distaste for spirits (which she’d never much liked), and the strange absence of tampons in her life, the baby made no demands.

The first sry sdf/sdf2 pregnancy failed, no obvious reason why. It was a sad day. The lab mice were clones, but they had personalities. Fiona had been a favorite even before her rise to fame. These things happen. It was a set back, not a disaster. Poor Fiona was killed, she and the dead babies minutely autopsied, mulched, and spun, and their DNA pelleted for investigation. The process began again. Anna, who’d become the virtual-modeling queen, worked on a computer simulation of sdf2 expression, trying to find out what damage it might have done in other loci, in a female embryo.

They moved into Anna’s house, 131 Albemar Road, a week before the wedding. It was a Victorian cottage in a row of later, chunkier buildings. It would have been charming, except for the dirty city thoroughfare outside the front door. They would get used to the traffic, and there must be something that would grow in the dank, enclosed tank of paving at the back. Ferns? Their furniture consisted of a double futon, a single futon, a microwave oven, a table, two chairs, and three cardboard boxes of Anna’s effects. The single futon was for Spence’s Mom, who arrived two days later. Spence had vainly hoped that there would be
less
of her than he remembered. No chance. She was as large and ebullient as ever, and hiding her grievous loss under a lava-flow of grand-maternal joy. Spence didn’t know if it was good or bad that his beloved was taking only a minimum of time off, because the next day his mother was speedily busy marking the bushes: deciding what would go where in the house, tidying Anna’s things for her, taking Spence out to scour the sadly deficient malls and stores of Leeds for essential little US household items. She was only trying to help. She was here to be Mom to both of them, to make things easier for lovely, clever Anna… When lovely clever Anna walked in and saw the results she closed her eyes briefly, once: and Spence knew it was all over. Anna the inflexible would never forgive this invasion.

How could he blame either of them? He loved them both.

Spence had invited
they all
to the wedding and a reception afterwards at 131, where snack food, catered by Spence’s Mom, would be served with cheap fizzy wine. To his surprise and embarrassment, they turned up in force.

Ramone drove Daz from the church. They’d sneaked out early; no one was at home at Spence and Anna’s house. They sat in the car, Daz leafing through a glossy magazine looking at pictures of herself. Model: Daz Avriti. Why not her full name? You agreed to things like that, let people mark you with their spoor, because it didn’t matter. And then it did.

She and Ramone were barely on speaking terms.

“I’m not coming in,” said Ramone.

“Oh? Why not? There’ll be free drinks.”

“Because she means it.” The rabid one spoke through gritted teeth. “I came up to this fucking wedding because I thought I understood. She’s pregnant, she’s going to have the baby: good. Abortion is a slave’s option. A marriage of convenience: good. I believe in using the fucking system. That’s not what’s going on. I saw the way it was, in that slimy church ceremony. It’s Spence I’m sorry for, trapped by the oldest trick in the book.”

“I really don’t think Anna meant this to happen, Ramone.”

“Women always pretend its an accident; it never is. Deep down, they’re as callous as men about making babies, it’s a sign of prowess, that’s all it is. If you don’t want to get pregnant you
don’t get pregnant.
There are no accidents; it’s a fucking scam.”

Daz sighed. She got out of the car. “I’ll wait on the doorstep. Say hello to Tex for me.”

Spence’s Mom stayed another ten days after the wedding.

The day she left Anna pretended to go to work. It was a Saturday, and there were no procedures at the nursing stage. She took a bus from the city centre, out into the landscape that she’d watched for so long. She had meant to reach the moors; the bus didn’t take her that far; it left her in a village of one steep street crossed by another. The houses were grey stone. She walked up the hill to the church, a mass-produced Victorian box with a blackened spire. On a bench among the gravestones she sat examining her wedding ring. It felt uncomfortable, she’d never worn a ring before. Inside her belly the child snuggled closer.

She had thought she would have a life exempt from births, marriages, and deaths. Vague dreams of having a family (Rob Fowler, two children, a house by a lake in the mountains) would never have materialized, because Nirmal was right. An ambitious lab scientist is supposed to have a woman (or else a staff of servants) to take care of the domestic. Either that or she works in the chinks, between career breaks, and everyone says, but look what she achieved IN SPITE of being a wife and mother! That was not good enough for Anna. So what now? Was she doomed to turn Spence into a woman? She recoiled from the idea: as she recoiled from Sonia Blanchard’s double-edged concern, and from her sister Margaret, beady eyes swift to cop Anna’s left hand on that appalling visit home, looking for the
engagement ring
(and finding none); as she recoiled from her mother’s reticent sympathy. She didn’t want Spence to be a woman. She would find another way, a fair and decent solution. She was Anna Anaconda. She would swallow family life: make it her own.

The baby stirred again. Its movements had been distinct to Anna for a fortnight. She’d been keeping this to herself while Spence’s Mom was around, or there’d have been no end to the belly-fondling. She could tell him now. She slipped her hand inside her coat. Hello little fish. Such odd emotions. She had already convinced herself that the baby was a companion in her adventure, an invisible friend who comforted her when Nirmal was awful or Sonia unbearably smug. She looked for the jagged abyss in her mind, the terror of annihilation that had been eating into her soul since the morning she found she was pregnant. It seemed to be gone.

When she got home Spence had returned from driving his Mom to the airport, in their new secondhand car. This purchase was a hideous extravagance, but you cannot keep an American around the house and not let him have any wheels. He was taking down the ancient, withered hanging baskets that had adorned, so to speak, the humble frontage of 131. They’d been annoying him.