Cuckoo (2 page)

‘Nice bacon,' he grunted. ‘It's the Cullen's isn't it?'

She found the sample, later, on the bathroom sill, concealed behind the Harpic: a few oozy gobbets of greyish phlegm, already congealing in its jar. Could that be life material, half-way to a baby? What a messy, complicated business reproduction was! No wonder Charles was hostile. He liked things to be orderly, and if they weren't, he made them so, forged or forced them into shape. He'd have preferred to have a baby computer-fashion, feeding in the relevant information and masterminding a safe, no-nonsense, fully automated, remote-control delivery, without all the mess and fuss of haphazard sperm and elusive ova.

Frances gazed around the crowded carriage of the underground. All those seething people were almost proof of nature's random method. Their parents hadn't had test-tubes or computers. World population stood at some four and a half thousand million at the present. That meant four and a half thousand million spermatozoa had successfully found an egg and fused with it. Not to mention all the countless million others, in preceding centuries. Why should Charles' sperm be so recalcitrant? She opened the Fortnum's bag a crack and stared at the curdled junket at the bottom of the jar. Was something wrong with it? Did it have its own, conservative ideas about procreation or world population control? Or was it simply proud and stubborn, like its owner, too fastidious to scramble up slimy cervix walls into the hurly burly of the womb?

She steadied the jar on her lap, fanned herself with her still unopened copy of
The Times
. The train was stiflingly hot and had unaccountably stopped between Oxford Circus and Regent's Park. If there were a breakdown on the line, the sperm would die and the infertility investigations come to a screeching halt. None of the passengers spoke, few even bothered to look up from their newspapers. She fumed at their impassivity.
They
might have time to wrestle with the crossword half the morning, or goggle at Page Three, but she most certainly did not. Mr Rathbone had stressed how important it was that she didn't hang about. Sperms were like goldfish – they perished when out of their natural element. She closed her eyes and willed the train to move. It didn't. She wondered if she could sue London Transport for the murder of four hundred million spermatozoa. Veritable genocide. Rathbone had told her that was the number in just one ejaculate. No wonder women always felt inferior. They simply didn't operate on that overwhelming scale. The carriage shuddered, sighed, jolted forward twenty yards, then stopped.

‘Murderer!' she muttered.

The train let out a screech of protest and revved into motion, rattling and pounding into Regent's Park Station. Frances leapt out with her jar.

‘Splendid, splendid, Mrs Parry!' chuntered Mr Rathbone, as she almost collided with him in the Harley Street laboratory. He always called her plain Mrs Parry, without the Jones. She wasn't sure if he were merely absent-minded, or whether he did it in the interests of brevity, or vaguely democratic bonhomie. He looked far too respectable and avuncular to be a gynaecologist, trespassing among women's private parts and messing about with Fallopian tubes and foetuses. He had short, no-nonsense grey hair, combed strictly to one side, and half-moon spectacles. He shook her hand, whisked the jar away, and closeted himself with two technicians and a microscope.

Frances sat and waited, leafing despondently through
Country Life
. Whatever Rathbone's pronouncement, there was going to be a problem. If Charles' sperm were deficient, he would never forgive himself, nor her for proving it. She wasn't sure if she'd forgive him, either. But even if it were entirely satisfactory, they were still no nearer having a baby.

Rathbone returned, looking flushed and jubilant, as if he had just given birth himself.

‘Well?' said Frances.

‘Very much alive and kicking! No problems there. Want to look?'

Frances moved into the inner room. It seemed impertinent to be prying into Charles' emissions, when he was captive on an aeroplane. She looked. Hundreds of tiny punctuation marks were writhing under the microscope, leaping and lunging in an ecstatic John Travolta dance.

‘Are you
sure
that's Charles' sample? I mean, you haven't muddled it up with someone else's, have you?' Charles was such a controlled and sober person, it seemed most unlikely that he should harbour such giddy, madcap sperm.

Mr Rathbone smiled his eighteen-carat smile. ‘No doubt at all, my dear. Your husband's semen is eminently satisfactory. There's clearly nothing wrong on
his
side.'

Frances sat down suddenly. She was glad, yes of course she was. It was unthinkable that Charles should be defective, even in a sperm count. Charles never failed. He'd won the form prize every year at Radley and then gone on to get a highly satisfactory 2/1 at Cambridge. He'd come third out of twelve hundred candidates in his accountancy examinations and he could play Liszt's
Harmonies Poétiques
without even looking at the music. A man of that calibre simply wouldn't produce sub-standard spermatozoa. So why did she feel disappointed, resentful even? Did she
want
him to fail? She hated failures just as much as he did. She had married him precisely because he outshone her in everything, and that wasn't always easy. She had a degree herself, a good one, but it wasn't Oxbridge. They'd met at a golf competition – the Pearson Mixed Foursomes – but her handicap was double his. They both spoke French, but Charles' accent was almost imperceptible. They both liked art, but Charles could tell a Canaletto from a Guardi at a glance, even from the back of the gallery. And he wasn't even smug. He was too serious for that.

‘Well, I suppose it's my fault.' Frances swung her handbag angrily against the chair.

‘We don't talk about faults, my dear. And, as you know, all your own tests were completely satisfactory.'

‘Well, what
is
it then? We've been trying long enough. I've been following your instructions like the Bible.'

Rathbone clasped his hands together, as if he were praying. ‘Call it Factor X, if you like. Something mysterious we can't put our finger on. In ten per cent of all cases we investigate, we find absolutely nothing wrong. It might be the colour of your eyes, the weather, the type of book you read …'

‘Mr Rathbone, I'd appreciate it if you could take this subject seriously.' They paid him enough, for heaven's sake, and all he could do was produce idiotic jokes.

‘But I
am
serious, my dear. I'm often amazed myself at the oddities of medical science.' Rathbone shifted his gaze to the leather-bound blotter on his desk. ‘Some women are actually allergic to their own husband's semen. They make immune bodies to it, as if it were an invading germ. We don't know a lot about it, but it's one of the subjects being kicked about by the boffins at the moment.'

‘You mean a woman who's perfectly fertile might simply not conceive because she and her husband were – well – sort of biologically incompatible?'

‘That's it exactly. And if the same woman had intercourse with a different man, one whose semen she accepted, she might very well get pregnant.'

Frances shrugged. ‘That's all very well if you believe in polygamy, but I haven't got a different man.'

Rathbone grinned conspiratorially at the tradescantia trailing across his desk. ‘You could always try the milkman, my dear. I'm joking of course.' Frances stared. He sounded deadly serious. ‘But – well – it has been known, Mrs Parry. And if you both want a baby so badly …'

I'm not sure Charles
does
want one. She didn't say it. It sounded ungrateful after all Mr Rathbone's efforts, but to have a baby with a tradesman – Charles would expire. He believed in people sticking to their proper stations. Mr Rathbone really was eccentric. He looked like an elderly bishop with his black coat and his pinched, ascetic face, yet here he was more or less encouraging her to couple with the milkman.

‘But, Mr Rathbone – think of all the problems. And, anyway, couldn't people tell? What about paternity tests and blood groups and all that sort of thing?'

‘Why should any husband bother? He'd just accept the babe as his own. They do, you know. And even if he were one of the rare suspicious ones, paternity tests are still notoriously unreliable – one of those grey areas of great complexity, which can always be obligingly confused.'

Frances frowned. ‘But surely you're not seriously suggesting …'

‘Of course not, my dear. Just a tip other women have found fruitful – ha ha – forgive my little joke. No, the best thing for you, Mrs Parry, is to forget all about this baby business and find yourself a little job.'

Frances stood up. She found it infuriating when men referred to women's jobs as ‘little'. No red-blooded man ever did a ‘little job'. But however responsible and arduous the job, if a woman took it on, it automatically shrunk in status.

She'd worked for years, for God's sake. And in a big job, a man's job; had only given it up to have their non-existent baby. Maybe that was the trouble. She'd worked too long through all her fertile years, never doubting for a moment that she and Charles would produce their perfect 2.5 progeny the minute she stopped the Pill. Everything else had always gone right for them. Charles and Frances Parry Jones, the perfect couple. She wondered if their friends hated them, those well-bred, well-fed friends, who only said what was allowed in the rules. Who had written all those rules? Was it Charles, or his mother, or God, or the Royal Mid-Surrey Golf Club, or the Richmond Residents' Association?

Oh yes, they had it all. The elegant house on Richmond Green where they'd moved after their impeccable country wedding. The charming Norman church and the chic Vogue dress. Yet, she'd cried all night before the wedding, and hadn't even known why. Gone through the ceremony like a puppet, smiling and mouthing until her face ached. It had seemed strange taking on his name. Frances Parry Jones was such a mouthful after plain Franny Brent. (Charles refused to call her Franny.) The name had always weighed her down. Like the house. The expensive, tasteful, dark, funereal house – Charles' house, not theirs, too big, too perfect, for a pair of newly-weds. All the furniture came from his mother (who looked like a bow-fronted chiffonier herself) – Georgian desks and Chippendale chairs, priceless and uncomfortable antiques you couldn't loll or sprawl in, and so much labour. Brass to polish and parquet to shine. Not that she had to do it. Charles' mother found them Mrs Eady, another glum, sombre, unaccommodating thing. They never seemed alone. Mrs Eady in the mornings, grumbling about the rain ruining her washing, or the sun spoiling the furniture; Charles' gilt-edged friends in the evenings, and the golf crowd at weekends. There wasn't much of Franny left. Even her career was always overshadowed by Charles'. A Public Relations executive with a flair for fashion couldn't hold a candle to an international finance consultant. Sometimes she wondered if she wanted a baby only to complete her, to give her a role and status denied to her by Charles. Something which wasn't dark and overshadowed and antique.

‘Mr Rathbone,
please
. There must be something else you can do. I'm not a person who gives up easily, you know that. I don't mind what I go through …'

‘My dear Mrs Parry, conceiving a baby is not meant to be an endurance test. If you could only relax, it would probably happen anyway. There's nothing wrong with you, you know. Your temperature charts are perfect, you're ovulating nicely, you've had a D and C, your tubes are open …'

‘Yes, I know all that, but nothing ever happens …' She shrugged towards the door. It was stupid wasting time with this second-rate charlatan. She should have chosen a doctor with verve and dynamism, a man more like Charles. That was the trouble with having a husband like Charles – all other men seemed feeble in comparison.

‘Sit down, Mrs Parry, I can see you're very overwrought. Look, there is one last thing I could suggest, although I hesitate …'

What was he up to this time? A test-tube baby in a milk bottle, care of United Dairies?

‘Well?' She strummed her fingers along the padded leather chair-arm. Rathbone was such an old muddler. Even now, he wasn't looking at her, but punching his pen nib through the larger leaves of the tradescantia.

‘I could perhaps put you on one of the fertility drugs – just for a short trial period.'

God Almighty! Sextuplets crawling over the front page of the
Sun
, television cameras peering down her womb, their house overrun with nappies …

‘I … er … don't think Charles would be too keen on a multiple pregnancy.'

Rathbone laughed. ‘No cause for alarm, my dear. I was merely thinking of Clomid. One of the less dramatic drugs. You may get twins on Clomid – 6.9 per cent I think the incidence is, but nothing worse than that.'

Twins? Charlie and Franny? Two in one? Rather convenient, really. Save time, save money. Charles would approve of that. She opened her bag and took out her leather-covered memo-pad. (A present from her husband. Where other wives received boxes of Milk Tray, she was given memo-pads.) ‘Right, what is it? Where do I get it? When do I start? What are its side effects?'

Rathbone needed pushing. He was far too ready to sit back and talk about relaxing. He could have put her on the Clomid months ago and the twins would be almost toddling round the golf course by now.

‘It's very rarely given where women are ovulating as regularly as you are. That's why I hesitate.… On the other hand, it may just work. It does seem to make a better ovulation. Now what you do is …'

Frances uncapped her pen and recorded Rathbone's instructions to the letter. She mustn't get it wrong. Somehow, she felt this was going to be the answer – a wonder drug and twins.