Surrogate – a psychological thriller (6 page)

By the time we got home it was late, and I ordered a takeaway. Mole was curled up on the sofa going through the list of surrogates when I handed her a gin and tonic. I felt the pleasingly anaesthetic alcohol working its way through my system and, despite having just driven for hours, I didn't feel so tired anymore. What I didn't want, though, was more talk of babies and children.

"Do we have to do this now?" I said tetchily. Mole pushed her reading glasses up her nose and set some pages down. Despite myself, I picked one up off the coffee table. Surrogate 33 was a long-limbed beauty dressed in ripped jeans over a leotard, pushing her hair back with her hand. Probably one of those American college students Wallace-Jones told us about. She had that caught-off-guard "What me? You think I'm beautiful?" pose of a professional model.

"This one looks good," I said, waving the sheet under her nose. "She says she's an actress who's done various commercials."

"You mean the isn't-my-tummy-flat school of acting," said Mole, turning down the corners of her mouth. "I don't think so. Sorry to disappoint you, but you're not going to sleep with her. Here. I like the look of this one."

Mole handed me another piece of A4 with a young woman staring glumly out of the photograph. Not much of a looker. She had a fattish, rather sallow moon-face and hair parted in the middle. Surrogate 37.

"Ok-ay," I said doubtfully. "What makes you think she's the one?"

Mole tapped the box with her educational qualifications. "Clever. Let's hope some of that clever blood feeds our baby. After all, Mum always told me to marry the brightest boy I met." Mole leaned forward to be kissed. I loved seeing her when she was in a playful mood like this; tonight was going to be a good night.

"Mole, are you really sure you want to do this? I don't want you to be bounced into anything. It doesn't matter about the money, we can always pull out now."

"It's all I've thought about ever since we went to the fertility clinic. You don't know what it would mean to me to hold our baby. I mean, that's what it's all about isn't it, having children?"

She was right, of course. From now on, everything we did would be for our child, all our philosophical questions would be answered ("Why am I doing this? For the children."). The words of a Bob Dylan song came back to me, one about having to serve somebody. Once we had a child of our own, our job was to be of service to him or her. I thought about my old bachelor life with a pang. Our ship was peeling away from the rest of the flotilla, and our new life was about to begin.

We had an Indian takeaway and some wine, went to bed tipsy and made love. For the first time in ages, it didn't feel mechanical or a duty. I was not expected to perform to fit in with her ovulation cycle. For a while we chatted in the dark in that freewheeling way you do after being intimate, and I had that happy, sated feeling. My eyelids were getting heavy, and I felt myself falling backwards into oblivion.

Next morning, Mole got on the phone to the clinic telling them that we had made up our minds and that we wanted to meet our surrogate as soon as possible. To be honest, I didn't feel I had much say in the matter. This was very much Mole's project. It felt as if we had reached a stagnant point in the river and now the water had begun flowing again. We were getting on with our lives after months of becoming increasingly scratchy with each other. It really did feel as if a weight had been lifted from our shoulders. Mole was clear with Wallace-Jones that she wanted to be involved in the pregnancy, making sure our surrogate looked after herself: ate the right food, got enough sleep, that kind of thing.

What Mole called her "nesting instinct" went into overdrive. I suppose I should have been alarmed, but it was lovely seeing how happy she was. She was so excited after the tension of the past weeks. She started converting my bleak spare room into a nursery. Mole turned out to be a talented artist herself: she painted tawny-gold clouds on the walls, with a poem by Walter De La Mare around the cornice. She had just stepped off the ladder and was admiring her work when I brought her a coffee. Her hair was done up in a bandanna and her cropped white tee-shirt revealed a sexy gap of flesh. I put my arms around her.

"I love you," I said, nuzzling her neck. It was one of those moments that you look back on and think, yes, then I was truly happy.

"I love you too," she said, turning to kiss me. Surely love was the most precious commodity in the world, not the endless stuff packed in container ships that we insured.

"What do you think about Conrad if it's a boy and Ruby if we have a girl?" Mole asked.

That brought me up short. "Whoa, Mole, slow down," I said, breaking away. "We haven't even met our surrogate yet. So many things could go wrong. The egg transfer hasn't taken place. Even when it does, it might not take ..."

Mole looked stung, as if she couldn't understand why I would be so negative. "Why do you always have to look on the black side?" she asked.

I held her by the elbows and spoke calmly. "All I'm doing is trying to lower your expectations. A lot of things could go wrong. I don't want you to be disappointed."

We touched foreheads and looked at each other. Mole nodded. "It's just that I want this baby so badly. It's all I ever think about."

Finally the day came when we were going to tell Dad about the surrogate. It was also the first time my wife would meet my father. Until now he had always begged off, claiming he was too ill. This was such an important conversation that we even rehearsed it in the car on the way down.

"Do I look all right?" Mole asked as we drove through Sonning, a chocolate-box village that looked wonderful in the morning sunshine. I assured her that she looked beautiful. Meeting Dad for the first time wasn't the only reason she felt jumpy; we were also having our first meeting with our surrogate that evening at a restaurant near work.

Our surrogate's name was Alice Adams. She was taking the train down from Manchester that afternoon, and I had booked a table in our favourite restaurant. Alice was probably getting on her train right now. I thought it best to go somewhere familiar – we would be nervous enough as it was.

"Is this all your father's?" Mole asked when we arrived at Sundials. I got out of the car and keyed in the entry code to the gates, which swung slowly open. It seemed like only five minutes ago that I was a four-year-old dressed as Spider-Man running around this courtyard. I could even hear my mother's voice calling me.

Sundials was an unusual house: a sixteenth-century barn jammed up against a Georgian mansion. There was an indoor swimming pool, a gymnasium and sauna complex, and even a squash court. I rapped with the knocker. Eliska answered the door dressed in her usual black, looking grave as ever.

"We were expecting you earlier," she said.

"I'm sorry we're late," I said. "The traffic was bad getting out of London. Eliska, this is my wife, Emily." Eliska nodded at Mole as we went in.

"So how's he been?" I said.

"There are good days and bad days. Today's a good day."

"Are the new drugs making any difference?"

"They make him feel bad. He cannot keep any food down."

By now we were crossing the long oak reception room that must have been a barn. Flashback. Another memory. This time Dad in his underpants with a glass of whiskey beside the telephone and a cigarette in his hand. I noticed how his belly hung over his Y-fronts. I had come downstairs dressed in my pyjamas wanting to ask him something. I don't remember what, but I must have been about nine or ten. Dad was speaking on the phone, "Listen, mate, I deal in consequences. And there will be consequences." Pause. "Like what? Like I come round and take your eyes out with a fucking spoon, that's what." I remember being shocked but not quite understanding what he was saying. He noticed me only as he was putting the phone down and tried to make a joke of it. "I love messing with people," he said, coming towards me. I shrank back and realised for the first time that my father was somebody other people were afraid of.

Now we were through to the other side of the house. The walls were lined with framed restaurant menus from when Dad used to drive through France on gastronomic blowouts. Sometimes I would accompany him and whoever his girlfriend was at the time. I remembered how Dad was on those trips, blasting the Stones on the car radio as he took those nasty, twisty corners much too fast. "You'll find your father is much better," Eliska said, going upstairs. The landing carpet was so thick that it absorbed the sound of your footfalls.

I knocked gently. "Fucking come in," said the voice.

Hooked up to the dialysis machine, he looked much worse than when I had last seen him. "Oh, it's you," he said. The leonine mane of hair had thinned and gone grey, and his cheeks were sunken and hollow. Christ, you've got it bad, I thought.

"Eliska said you were coming," he said. The blue digits on the dialysis machine kept changing. Beep beep. Beep beep. Eliska helped Dad struggle up in bed, rearranging his pillows.

"These pills make me feel horrible," he complained.

"You must last the course the doctor prescribed," said Eliska.

"So, I get to meet my daughter-in-law for the first time."

I said, "Dad, this is Emily. Emily, meet my father."

"Come closer, said the spider to the fly," said Dad. He laughed. "Well, come on then, let's have a butcher's."

Mole self-consciously moved towards him and Dad nodded approvingly.

"Not bad. Not bad at all. God knows why you want to be shacked up with him." He jerked his head towards me.

"Oh, he's not so bad," said Mole quietly.

"Parents and children always end up disappointing each other," I said, wanting to cut this conversation off. We chatted for a few minutes before I broached the real subject of our visit.

"Dad, there's something we need to tell you. We've been trying for a baby for the past few months, and it turns out we have fertility problems. We went to see a specialist a few days ago, and he recommended that we go down the surrogacy route, you know, hiring somebody to carry our baby."

"What do you want to do that for?" Dad said. "You only just got married, for fuck's sake. Your mother and I waited for years before we had you."

"My gynaecologist says the longer we leave it, the less chance we'll have," said Mole. "I suffer from an overactive immune system. The thing is, Ronnie, I got pregnant before – my body rejected it ... this is the only chance we have." I wanted to reach out and hold her hand, telling her everything was going to be okay.

"Can't you have treatment or something like that?"

"My doctor says not. Or at least, it wouldn't work. It was he who suggested going down the surrogacy route."

"What happens if this woman wants to keep the baby? What are you going to do then? I can't tell you the number of girls I've lost who said they were coming back to work after maternity leave. Women's feelings change once they've given birth."

This was a turn in the conversation I had already seen off because I had rehearsed it in my head so many times. "There's no chance of that. The clinic makes us sign a legal agreement." This was not entirely true. Wallace-Jones admitted that even though parents and the surrogate sign a document, it is not legally binding. "Everything is set in stone. It's purely a financial transaction."

"You could always adopt," ventured Eliska.

I turned to her. "We've been through that. If we adopt, it still wouldn't be ours, really." I was trying hard to keep exasperation out of my voice. "Hundreds of couples do this each year. I really don’t see what the problem is." Mole subtly motioned for me to calm down.

"How much will this cost?" said Dad. "These things aren't cheap, are they?"

"It doesn't matter how much it costs," I said evasively. "How can you put a value on having a child?"

"Well, if that's how you feel, there's nothing I can do to stop you," said Dad magnanimously. You could tell he was hurt we hadn't consulted him before. "While I've got you 'ere, there's something we need to talk about. Ladies, would you, excuse us for a moment?"

Mole followed Eliska as she glided out of the room. Later, Mole told me that Eliska reminded her of Mrs Danvers, the creepy housekeeper in
Rebecca
.

"Shut the door," said Dad.

"So, how are you feeling?" I asked. "Are the new pills working?"

"Fucking terrible, if you must know. There's something I need to talk to you about. Does the name Bob Grauerholtz mean anything to you?"

"Yes, he's the CEO of Continual Life, isn't he, the American insurance group?"

"To put not too fine a point on it, he wants to buy us. He came to see me a few days ago."

Continual Life was a billion-dollar insurance company, not as big as an Aon or a Willis but still in the top ten. We were a minnow compared to them. "He knows that we're still dealing with the fallout from the Dutch Marquez, right? And that we had to call on investors because we didn't have enough cash in the bank?"

Dad started coughing. "It doesn't matter," he said, shaking his head. "It creates a good news story for the stock market. Shows they're doing something. And the cost of buying us will probably be covered by the uptick in the stock."

I sat down on the edge of the bed, my mind crunching the numbers. Cashing in my stock after the sale, I faced the prospect of becoming a rich man indeed. "Have you spoken to anybody else on the board about this, Brian or Nigel?"

Dad carried on shaking his head, still coughing. "Just get me some fucking water," he said.

"When would we have to tell the market?" I said, handing him the tooth glass.

Dad drained the glass and handed it back. "That's better," he said. "Nigel can take us through the timetable. We keep schtum until they make an offer. And I don't want anybody blabbing to the papers. I've seen too many deals wrecked because somebody got smart and tipped off a journo."

I thought about what Dad had told me all the way back to London. All the massive losses from the Dutch Marquez would be swept under the carpet. There would probably be some golden-handcuffs arrangement for me to stay on, while Dad would retire gracefully. The sale also got us out of what promised to be an eviscerating annual general meeting with the investors, many of whom would be repaid with the Americans' money. Everybody would win.