The Would-Begetter (29 page)

‘This isn’t just about money though.’

‘No, no, not entirely, of course not, but it does come into the equation, Jess. It’s bound to.’

‘Are you sure it isn’t actually about ownership?’

‘I’m not with you.’

‘Well, put it this way – isn’t affection more important?’

‘I don’t see that it’s a choice? Florian’s my son.’

‘QED’ Jess murmured.

‘What?’

‘Nothing. I’m sorry, Hector, I really ought to be going.’

‘Me too I suppose,’ Hector said gloomily, ‘back to the in-house harridan.’

‘Is Wendy being difficult?’ Jess asked, getting to her feet.

‘Does the sun rise in the east? Of course she is. D’you know, she’s still going on about the thirty pounds I slipped Florian months ago. She says I never give her that much! She’s a real pain to live with these days.’ He sighed. ‘Never mind,’ he said in her ear as they got to the door. ‘At least I’ve got my Jessy-bootle, even if she won’t sleep with me.’ He smiled
winningly. ‘I’d be such a mess without you, you know. You’re my oasis in a sea of troubles.’

‘Mmm,’ Jess said, biting back guilt and irritation, ‘that’s not much of a compliment actually. Think about it. You make me sound about as useful as a sandcastle in the desert!’

In bed that night she thought, I really don’t have any choice now. I’ve got to move to London to Caroline’s basement, and escape all this hassle from Hector. I won’t sell my flat, though; I don’t want to close down all my options. I’ll hang on to it and maybe rent it out to summer visitors, or even use it myself from time to time. I can’t go on like this. It really is now or never.

When she finally nerved herself to tell Hector of her decision, he was affectingly distraught. ‘But what will I do without you? You can’t leave me, Jess,’ he implored. ‘I
need
you.’ Then, when she remained determined, he abruptly changed tactics. ‘I’ve decided to buy that brand-new car I was telling you about,’ he said. ‘I don’t feel the same about the Jag any more, and all those modern gadgets do seem rather useful. Apart from things like electric windows and central locking, they tell me my new one will be alarmed and immobilised. Come to think of it, that’s exactly how I feel at this moment! Tell me you’re not
serious
about leaving, Jess.’

‘I’m so sorry, Hector, but I am. I’ll miss you too.’

‘But how can I prove to you how much I care? I had a really good offer the other day, you know, and I turned it down for love of you.’

‘Who from?’

‘Zillah Brakespear.’

Jess almost laughed. ‘It’s no good, Hector. Emotional blackmail won’t work either. I’m sorry but I really do have to go. Surely you can see that? There just isn’t any future for me here with you, much as I hate to leave.’

‘You’ll regret it you know,’ Hector said, thwarted and suddenly spiteful. ‘No one else is going to fall for you at your age, especially in those clothes!’

Jess gasped. ‘Thank you so much for that,’ she found the presence of mind to say. ‘That really clinches things. Now I couldn’t stay, even if I wanted to.’

In the middle of the night Jess awoke with doubts. Perhaps Hector was right. Perhaps she would never find anyone else who would love her. Tears seeped out from under her closed eyelids and ran down her cheeks on to the pillow. Should she go? It wasn’t just Hector; there were other excellent reasons for staying. At this moment she had a steady job with a regular salary. Would she be mad, wilfully to throw it all away in order to launch herself into the irregularly paid, seriously dodgy world of the freelance photographer?

Perhaps it would turn out to be the worst mistake of her whole life? Perhaps she would regret it for ever?

Eventually she sat up and put the light on. Then she found a tissue, wiped her eyes, blew her nose and tried to think positively. It might well turn out to be a bad idea, but she was determined to do it anyway. If it all went horribly wrong, she would just have to hope that she could be as blithely insouciant in the face of disaster as the boat owner who once wrote in his ship’s Log:

‘Bright and beautiful morning. Sank.’

At intervals during the next seven years, Jess forgot her relief at having escaped from the burden of Hector’s unreasonable expectations, and began to regret never having slept with him. She sometimes saw it as a lost opportunity; perhaps her only chance of love? Gradually however, as her freelance job developed, she became more and more engrossed in it and less and less wistful. Business was good. She’d won a major competition in photojournalism early on, and much subsequent work had flowed from that. I’ve been lucky, she thought. It was the right decision after all.

She stayed in touch with Hector. He rang her every few months, ostensibly to ask how she was getting on, but actually to unload some of his troubles on to her shoulders. Jess put up with it. She vaguely felt it was the least she could do, but she made a firm decision not to see him in person. It had been upsetting enough to make the break in the first place, and she wasn’t about to jeopardise her new found equanimity.

‘I’ve resigned from the
Chronicle,’
Hector said, six months after she had left.

‘Why?’ she asked, surprised.

‘Oh, lots of reasons – I wasn’t getting anywhere – the job’s changed out of all recognition – the new building is quite ghastly – and anyway I was beginning to feel like a prisoner. I just never got out; spent all day on the bloody phone, and that’s no life for anyone.’

‘But you were never particularly ambitious, were you? I thought you just enjoyed the ambience of the Newsroom. You clearly weren’t in it for the money!’

‘A dilettante, eh?’ Hector said. ‘Probably true, but after you left it wasn’t the same. Did you know Barry’s the Senior
Reporter now? Seems no time ago that he was the podgy office boy. He’s even given up crisps.’ He sighed.

‘So, what now?’

‘Oh, I’ve joined the family firm as a Director. Mudgeley Goggles is doing rather well at the moment, in fact. We’ve gone into wraparound sunglasses to protect our customers from all the nasty UV radiation that’s currently streaming through the hole in the ozone layer, and it seems to have been a smart move. Funny, really. I always swore I would never get involved…’

Poor Hector, Jess thought as she put the receiver down. He sounds so unlike himself, so depressed. This mood seemed to set the tone for the intervening years. Hector was invariably miserable whenever she spoke to him, but worst of all was the day when he telephoned to tell her that Morgan had been ‘Statemented’ as definitely having Specific Learning Difficulties.

‘In other words,’ Hector said, ‘he’s handicapped! I can hardly believe it, Jess, he looks so normal. He was such a beautiful baby too.’

He sounded near to tears. Jess, who had recently done an assignment in a school for dyslexic children, was taken aback at the depth of his defeatism.

‘But Hector,’ she said. ‘It’s surely not that bad? Literacy is only a part of life after all, and these days it’s less and less necessary. People are already talking to their computers.’

‘You don’t understand!’ Hector said vehemently. ‘To me, literacy is
everything.
It’s been my living for most of my life. Books are the greatest recreation there is, after all. I have nothing in common with someone who doesn’t read, don’t you see? It means
I can’t relate to my own son!
Put it this way,’ he said, ‘as far as I’m concerned, if you aren’t a fast and fluent reader, then you must be educationally sub-normal. In other words you’re mentally deficient!’

‘But Hector, that’s just nonsense!’ Jess protested. ‘It’s simply wrong. Dyslexics may have difficulty in dealing with symbolic stuff like the written word, but they’re really strong on logic and reasoning, and great on things like spatial awareness. They just have weak short-term memories and are slow at reading
and writing, but they often have high IQs, and they’re certainly not stupid!’

‘So, how come you’re suddenly such an expert?’

‘I’ve just been working at this school. I wish you could have been there, Hector, their art work was really something.’

‘Oh, Morgan’s always messing about drawing things, mostly buildings, these days.’

‘Well there you are then.’

‘It’s not enough, Jess. I know it sounds harsh, and I wouldn’t say it to anyone else but you, but when a ten-year-old boy can’t even recite the months of the year in the correct order, I just feel despair. I feel like washing my hands of the whole fatherhood thing.’

After many such conversations over a long period of time, Jess pondered on the pressures parents bring to bear upon their children, and wondered why some were driven to do it. In her experience, they mostly said they didn’t want to pursue their own goals vicariously, but then they tried to do just that. Her own parents hinted heavily, constantly, about the joys of marriage and motherhood.

‘You’re thirty-nine,’ her father had said only the week before. ‘You’re not getting any younger, you know?’

‘You do seem to have an extraordinary facility for stating the painfully bloody obvious,’ Jess snapped at last.

‘No need for that tone of voice, my girl. We care about you, Jess. It’s only natural.’

Jess speculated on whether Hector’s reaction towards Morgan could be counted as ‘only natural’ too. Perhaps if he hadn’t built up this cosy fantasy about the father-son relationship, then he mightn’t be so disappointed now? But then again, why should parents assume they had the right to be
disappointed
in their children in the first place?

Jess wondered whether there had been any other reasons why Hector had wanted a child. Some men collected status symbols – a smart car, a pretty wife, an elegant house, a pedigree pet or two – and then had to have at least one trophy child to prove their masculinity and complete the set. Perhaps that was it? Of course, she hadn’t forgotten the main reason why Hector had been so determined to have a son, but she had always found that one hard to empathise with. No one
cares about hereditary titles these days, she thought. They’re irrelevant, obsolete, and all the best people play down such things anyway – look at Jonathon Porritt! So, who did Hector imagine he was going to impress? Certainly no one like me, and probably not Wendy either. Caroline? I suppose that might have been a factor when they first met. Jess made a face and smiled to herself.

Caroline could barely believe that she had been made redundant. After all those years of service, all that enthusiasm and inspiration and sheer bloody hard slog that she had put into the company, and now they had been taken over and were downsizing. She was above the 26-35 ‘employable’ age range and therefore not to be kept on. She was shattered. She searched feverishly through the jobs sections of the broadsheet newspapers, avoiding all posts which specified a ‘sense of humour’ on the grounds that they were the employers most likely to exploit their workers. She knew she had good communication, interpersonal, management and organisational skills. She enjoyed a challenge, had experience, commitment and energy. She was courteous, unflappable, sensitive and flexible – all the buzz-words. She was also highly motivated and had a good track-record, but at forty-four, she was too old. It seemed hopeless.

Jess was a great source of support and help, in spite of being frantically busy and enviably successful. Caroline acknowledged their changing fortunes with a wry smile. She had once suggested in a joke that Jess might buy her house and then rent out the basement to her, to make their role reversal complete. Then she was upset when Jess, for a moment, appeared to consider the idea seriously.

Hannah, at fourteen, predictably saw everything in relation to her own concerns. ‘Oh no,’ she said. ‘You won’t be hanging around here all the time now, will you, like a real mother?’

‘Thanks, Hannah. Give the knife a good twist while you’re about it, why don’t you.’

‘When I have kids,’ Hannah said virtuously, ‘I’m going to stay home full-time and look after them properly.’

‘Fine,’ Caroline said. ‘So why don’t you get in a little practice now, with the hoover.’

‘You’re barking!’ Hannah said contemptuously. ‘I’ll get a woman in to do
that.
You do!’ Yes, her mother thought. But for how much longer? It’s not cheap.

The golden handshake, which had seemed so generous to begin with, now appeared alarmingly finite. They were accustomed to a high standard of living, and Hannah would need a lot of support when she went to university in four years time. Caroline knew that she had to get another job at all costs. She took to going down to the basement of an evening, to discuss her financial worries at length with Jess.

‘Well… what about Hector?’ Jess suggested tentatively. ‘He’s not short of a few bob.’

‘I’d have to be pretty desperate!’ Caroline laughed shortly. ‘But yes, I suppose as a last resort… Funnily enough, Hannah and I were talking about him only last night.’

‘Really?’

‘Yes. She wanted to know who her father was, so I felt I had to tell her his name, but not much else. I don’t
know
much more! Maybe you could talk to her about him one of these days?’

‘Well… yes. Does she want to meet him?’

‘I’ve said no. Absolutely not. Not until she’s eighteen. Then she’ll be officially adult and I can’t stop her. So… how is handsome Hector these days. Does he still phone?’

‘Yes, pretty regularly. I think he’s lonely.’

‘You don’t ever wish you’d let him leave Wendy for you?’

‘Well… very occasionally I do, if I’m honest. I haven’t met anyone since him who was such fun to be with… and we might have had children together too, I suppose.’

‘Well yes, but they can be a constant worry,’ Caroline said, sighing. ‘Look at me and Hannah. She’s my darling only child, and yet now I feel I barely know her. I’ve missed so much of her childhood, through working all the time, and in five years or so she’ll be grown up and gone and that will be it. And now I’m out of a job and wondering whether it was all worth it. D’you remember when I said I wasn’t going to let my baby change my life? How could I have been so incredibly naїve! Maybe I should have stayed at home and been a proper mum.’