“We had difficulty there. There’s only one fish we could find which begins with J, a John Dory.”
He had to stop himself from laughing aloud. He said: “What on earth was the point of it? You’ve advertised to the whole country that you call yourselves the Five Fishes? I suppose that when Rolf telephones you he says this is Rudd calling Minnow, in the hope that if the SSP are listening they’ll tear their hair and bite the carpet with frustration.”
She said: “All right, you’ve made your point. We didn’t actually use the names, not often anyway. It was just an idea of Rolf’s.”
“I thought it might be.”
“Look, cut out all this supercilious chat, will you? We know you’re clever and sarcasm is your way of showing us just how clever, but I can’t cope with it for the moment. And don’t antagonize Rolf. If you care at all about Julian, calm it, OK?”
For the next few minutes they drove in silence. Glancing at her he saw that she was gazing at the road ahead with an almost passionate intensity as if expecting to find that it was mined. Her hands clutching the bag were taut, the knuckles white, and it seemed to him that there flowed from her a surge of excitement which was almost palpable. She had answered his questions, but as if her mind were elsewhere.
Then she spoke, and when she used his name he felt a small shock at the unexpected intimacy. “Theo, there’s something I have to tell you. Julian said not to tell you until we were on our way. It wasn’t a test of your good faith. She knew you’d come if she sent for you. But if you didn’t, if there was something important to prevent you, if you couldn’t come, then I wasn’t to tell. There’d be no point in it anyway.”
“Tell me what?” He gave her a long glance. She was still staring ahead, lips moving silently as if she were searching for words. “Tell me what, Miriam?”
Still she didn’t look at him. She said: “You won’t believe me. I don’t expect you to believe me. Your disbelief isn’t important, because in little more than thirty minutes you’ll see the truth for yourself. Only don’t argue about it. I don’t want to cope right now with protestations, arguments. I’m not going to try to convince you, Julian will do that.”
“Just tell me. I’ll decide whether to believe you.”
And now she turned her head and looked at him. She said, her voice clear above the noise of the engine: “Julian is pregnant. That’s why she needs you. She’s going to have a child.”
In the silence that followed he was aware firstly of a plunging disappointment followed by irritation and then disgust. It was repugnant to believe that Julian was capable of such self-deceiving nonsense or that Miriam should be fool enough to connive in it. At their first and only meeting at Binsey, brief though it had been, he had liked her, had thought her sensible and intelligent. He didn’t like having his judgement of a person so confounded.
After a moment he said: “I won’t argue, but I don’t believe you. I’m not saying you’re deliberately lying, I believe you think it’s true. But it isn’t.”
It used, after all, to be a common delusion. In the first years after Omega women all over the world believed themselves to be pregnant, displayed the symptoms of pregnancy, walked proud-bellied—he had seen them walking down the High Street in Oxford. They had made plans for the birth, had even gone into spurious labour, groaning and straining and bringing forth nothing but wind and anguish.
After five minutes he said: “How long have you believed this story?”
“I said I didn’t want to talk about it. I said you were to wait.”
“You said I wasn’t to argue. I’m not arguing. I’m only asking one question.”
“Since the baby quickened. Julian didn’t know until then. How could she? Then she spoke to me and I confirmed the pregnancy. I’m a midwife, remember? We’d thought it wise not to be together more than necessary during the last four months. If I’d seen her more often I should have known earlier. Even after twenty-five years, I should have known.”
He said: “If you believe it—the unbelievable—then you’re taking it very calmly.”
“I’ve had time to get used to the glory of it. Now I’m more concerned with the practicalities.”
There was a silence. Then she said, as if reminiscing with all the time in the world: “I was twenty-seven at Omega and working in the maternity department of the John Radcliffe. I was doing a stint in the antenatal clinic at the time. I remember booking a patient for her next appointment and suddenly noticing that the page seven months ahead was blank. Not a single name. Women usually booked in by the time they’d missed their second period, some as soon as they’d missed one. Not a single name. I thought, what’s happening to the men in this city? Then I rang a friend who was working at Queen Charlotte’s. She said the same. She said she’d telephone someone she knew at the Rosie Maternity Hospital in Cambridge. She rang me back twenty minutes later. It was the same there. It was then I knew, I must have been one of the first to know. I was there at the end. Now I shall be there at the beginning.”
They were coming into Swinbrook now and he drove more slowly, dimming the headlights, as if these precautions could somehow make them invisible. But the village was deserted. The waxy moon, half full, swayed against a sky of blue-grey trembling silk, pierced by a few high stars. The night was less dark than he had expected, the air still and sweet, with a grassy smell. In the pale moonlight the mellow stones gave out a faint glow which seemed to suffuse the air and he could clearly make out the shape of the houses, the high sloping roofs and the flower-hung garden walls. There were no lights in any of the windows and the village lay silent and empty as a deserted film-set, outwardly solid and permanent but ephemeral, the painted walls backed only by wooden supports and concealing the rotting debris of the departed crew. He had a momentary delusion that he would only have to lean against one of the walls and it would collapse in a crumble of plaster and snapping batons. And it was familiar. Even in this unreal light he could recognize the landmarks: the small green beside the pond with its huge overhanging tree and surrounding seat, the entrance to the narrow lane leading up to the church.
He had been here before, with Xan, in their first year. It had been a hot day in late June when Oxford had become a place to escape from, her hot pavements blocked with tourists, her air stinking with car fumes and loud with the clatter of alien tongues, her peaceful quads invaded. They had been driving down the Woodstock Road with no clear idea of their destination when Theo had remembered his wish to see St. Oswald’s Chapel at Widford. It was as good a destination as any. Glad that the expedition had a purpose, they had taken the road to Swinbrook. The day, in memory, was an icon which he could conjure up to represent the perfect English summer: an azure almost cloudless sky, the haze of cow parsley, the smell of mown grass, the rushing air tearing at their hair. It could conjure up other things too, more transitory, which, unlike the summer, had been lost forever: youth, confidence, joy, the hope of love. They had been in no hurry. Outside Swinbrook there had been a village cricket match and they had parked the car and sat on the grass bank behind the dry-stone wall to watch, criticize, applaud. They had parked again where he parked now, beside the pond, had taken the same walk which he and Miriam would take, past the old post office, up the narrow cobbled lane bordered by the high, ivy-clad wall, to the village church. There had been a christening. A small procession of villagers was straggling up the path towards the porch, the parents at the head, the mother carrying the baby in its white flounced christening robe, the women in flowered hats, the men, a little self-conscious, perspiring in close- fitting blue and grey suits. He remembered thinking that the scene was timeless and had amused himself for a moment imagining earlier christenings, the clothes different but the country faces, with their mixture of serious purpose and anticipated pleasure, unchanged. He thought then, as he thought now, of time passing, inexorable, unforgiving, unstoppable time. But the thought then had been an intellectual exercise devoid of pain or nostalgia, since time still stretched ahead and for a nineteen-year-old seemed an eternity.
Now, turning to lock the car, he said: “If the meeting place is St.
