‘Oh, she married again. Rather a nice chap. He has a business selling sportsware, so I suppose they had more to build on than we did.’
‘Were there any children?’
‘Two boys and a girl. Though I don’t know what happened to them.’
‘I meant with you.’
He shook his head. ‘No, there weren’t.’ This time his silence seemed very profound. After a moment he completed the thought. ‘I can’t have children,’ he said. Despite the apparent finality of this statement there was something oddly unfinal in the tone of his voice, almost like that strange and unnecessary question mark that the young have imported from Australia, to finish every sentence. He continued, ‘that is to say, I could not have children by the time that I married.’
He stopped, as if to allow me a moment to digest this peculiar sentence. What could he possibly mean? I assumed he had not been castrated shortly before proposing to the fitness centre manageress. Since he had introduced the topic, I didn’t feel guilty in wanting to make a few enquiries, but in the event he answered before I had voiced them. ‘We went to various doctors and they told me my sperm count was zero.’
Even in our disjointed, modern society, this is quite a taxing observation to counter with something meaningful. ‘How disappointing,’ I said.
‘Yes. It was. Very disappointing.’
Obviously I’d chosen badly. ‘Couldn’t they do something about it?’
‘Not really. They suggested reasons as to why it might have happened, but no one thought it could be reversed. So that was that.’
‘You could have tried other ways. They’re so clever now.’ I couldn’t bring myself to be more specific.
He shook his head. ‘I’d never have brought up someone else’s child. Suzanne had a go at persuading me but I couldn’t allow it. I just didn’t see the point. Once the child isn’t yours, aren’t you just playing with dolls? Living dolls, maybe. But dolls.’
‘A lot of people would disagree with you.’
He nodded. ‘I know. Suzanne was one of them. She didn’t see why she had to be barren when it wasn’t her fault, which was reasonable enough. I suppose we knew we’d break up from the moment we left the surgery.’ He stood to fetch himself another drink. He’d earned it.
‘I see,’ I said, to fill the silence, rather dreading what was coming.
Sure enough, when he spoke again his tone was more determined than ever. ‘Two specialists believed it might have been the result of adult mumps.’
‘I thought that was a myth, used to frighten nervous, young men.’
‘It’s very rare. But it can happen. It’s a condition called orchitis, which affects the testicles. Usually it goes away and everything’s fine, but sometimes, very occasionally, it doesn’t. I didn’t have mumps as a boy and I wasn’t aware I’d ever caught it, but when I thought it over, I was struck down with a very sore throat a few days after I got back from Portugal, in July of nineteen seventy. I was in bed for a couple of weeks and my glands certainly swelled up, so maybe they were right.’
I shifted slightly in my chair and took another sip of my drink. My presence here was beginning to make a kind of uncomfortable sense. In a way I had invited Damian to Portugal, to join a group of friends. God knows, in the event it was more complicated than that but the excuse had been the party was short of men and our hostess had got me to ask him. With disastrous results, as it happens. So, was he now trying to blame me for being sterile? Had I been invited here to acknowledge my fault? That as much harm as he had done to me on that holiday, so had I done to him? ‘I don’t remember anyone being ill,’ I said.
He did, apparently. ‘That girlfriend of the guy who had the villa. The neurotic American with the pale hair. What was her name? Alice? Alix? She kept complaining about her throat, the whole time we were there.’
‘You have wonderfully perfect recall.’
‘I’ve had a lot of time to think.’
The image of that sun whitened villa in Estoril, banished from my conscious mind for nearly four decades, suddenly filled my mind. The hot, blond beach below the terrace, drunken dinners resonating with sex and subtext, climbing the hill to the haunted castle at Cintra, swimming in the whispering, blue waters, waiting in the great square before Lisbon Cathedral to walk past the body of Salazar… The whole experience sprang back into vivid, technicoloured life, one of those holidays that bridge the gap between adolescence and maturity, with all the attendant dangers of that journey, where you come home quite different from when you set out. A holiday, in fact, that changed my life. I nodded. ‘Yes. Well, you would have done.’
‘Of course, if that were the reason, then I could have had a child before.’
Despite his seriousness I couldn’t match it. ‘Even you wouldn’t have had much time. We were only twenty-one. These days every girl on a housing estate may be pregnant by the time she’s thirteen, but it was different then.’ I smiled reassuringly, but he wasn’t watching. Instead, he was busy opening a drawer in a handsome bureau plat beneath the Lawrence. He took out an envelope and gave it to me. It wasn’t new. I could just make out the postmark. It looked like ‘Chelsea. 23rd December 1990.’
‘Please read it.’
I unfolded the paper gingerly. The letter was entirely typed, with neither opening greeting nor final signature written by hand. ‘Dear Shit,’ it began. How charming. I looked up with raised eyebrows.
‘Go on.’
Dear Shit, It is almost Christmas. It is also late and I am drunk and so I have found the nerve to say that you have made my life a living lie for nineteen years. I stare at my living lie each day and all because of you. No one will ever know the truth and I will probably burn this rather than send it, but you ought to realise where your deceit and my weakness have led me. I do not quite curse you, I could not do that, but I don’t forgive you, either, for the course my life has taken. I did not deserve it.
At the end, below the body of the text, the author had typed: ‘A fool.’
