“Yes, of course,” she said. “When you’re pregnant they can’t put us off.” She laughed.
I decided it came down to the difference in how we viewed our parents: Vivi had always seen them as working against her, while I always thought of them as on my side. If I could tell them once I was pregnant, I couldn’t see how it would make much difference to do as Vivi wanted. So it was agreed.
“Promise, cross your heart and hope to die,” she’d said.
“I promise.” I’d sincerely crossed my heart with my right hand to secure the pact and seal our fate.
We were still up on that frozen ridge when she told me her entire stratagem. Ostensibly Arthur’s visits to Bulburrow would be on business—an idea for a new wholesale bakery to supply the area—although they’d happen to correspond with my monthly estrus. She’d got it all worked out, as always.
So there we were, Arthur and I, alone for the first time in my bedroom, which was farther down the landing and on the opposite side to my parents’ room. It was the afternoon, just before teatime. Maud and Clive were busy in other parts of the house.
The first thing Arthur said to me, almost formally, was, “Ginny, I need to know that you understand what you’re doing, that you know you’re giving the baby away. It will not be your baby. You will not be its mother. Vivien will. Are you sure you want to do that?” He said it so very s-l-o-w-l-y and c-l-e-a-r-l-y, as if I were an idiot.
“Yes,” I said, my single-size iron bed looming between us as an overwhelming symbol of the enforced intimacy of the very near future.
“But you need to think about it,” he said, rather puzzlingly.
I find it a struggle to understand the complexities of people I know best, let alone decipher those I don’t. Surely in giving him the answer I’d already thought about it. I’ve learned that it’s futile to challenge anyone about why they say what they say, or mean what they don’t say. Mostly I try to humor them, saying and doing what will please them most, and hope it all becomes clear later. So, on the other side of that bed, which was glowering up at us in the hope of unification, I tried to act like I was “thinking about it” for a few seconds, as if “thinking about it” was something you did rubbing your chin and gazing skyward, but what I was really thinking was how odd it was that I’d never discussed the surrogacy with Arthur directly, not once. I’d only ever talked about it with Vivi. Occasionally she alluded to Arthur’s opinion on this and that aspect of the arrangement, but mostly she talked about it furtively and covetously, as if it were only our secret, which made me almost forget that Arthur was involved at all. She’d talked about how we would watch the child grow and progress, how she would teach it about the city and I would teach it about the country, so that I’d come to regard it as Vivi’s and my baby, not his. I’d considered him an inert part of the process, a catalyst—necessary for the reaction to happen but remaining unchanged at the end.
So until that moment I’d never actually considered Arthur’s feelings. I wondered if this last-minute deliberation meant he wasn’t as keen as Vivi on the idea. Perhaps he was looking for a way out, but I didn’t know whether it was because of the baby or because it meant having to have sex with me. Then I said, as thoughtfully as I could feign, “It’s not my baby. I will not be its mother. I understand that.”
He considered my response slowly and, for whatever reason, decided it would do. “Good,” he said, and relaxed. “Shall we get undressed?”
I quickly stripped off my skirt, underpants, blouse and bra and stood naked by the bed. When I looked up I found Arthur with his back towards me and a towel fastened round his waist. He was struggling to undress beneath it, as if he were changing on a crowded beach. Modesty about our bodies made no sense to me when we were about to do something as intrusive and intimate as sex.
“Oh,” he said simply, when he turned back to me holding, with one hand behind his back, the towel that covered him. He was looking intently at my face, as if he didn’t want to be caught ogling my body, but I couldn’t help staring at the towel. I would have liked to see the equipment we had to work with before we got started. This was sexual reproduction for reproduction’s sake only, so surely we could be matter-of-fact about it. We stood there uncertainly, hovering in hesitation.
“Are you nervous?” he asked.
“A bit,” I lied, my eyes shifting from the carefully placed towel down to the floor. I should have been nervous, I know, but I was far too preoccupied with the practicalities of the situation, and once I get an idea in my head I find it difficult to think of anything else until I’ve resolved it. How, exactly, from this position, the bed between us, him covered up, were we going to end up with his penis depositing sperm into my uterus? I was more confused than nervous.
“Well, don’t be,” he said kindly.
My room was a bright daffodil yellow, richly augmented by the late afternoon sun stretching gloriously through the window. I’d selected it—the daffodil—when I was too young to know better and insisted that the ceiling as well as the walls should be done in the chosen color. Maud had painted it herself, directly over the Victorian wood-chip paper, which had raised swirls all over the ceiling.
When I was little I liked it because when I stared up at it from my bed and half crossed my eyes, enough to make them lazy, it was easy to lose my focus in the swirling ceiling. It would take a minute or two to get my eyes into it, to lose perspective and start to see the shapes and patterns in other dimensions. Once I’d got my eye in, it was quite impossible—without looking away first—to see the ceiling as flat again. Sometimes the swirls would be shooting away from me, and at other times they were spiraling out of the paper towards me so that if I reached up I could put my hand straight through them. I’d lie there in the light evenings or the early mornings of my childhood, moving them about and watching them dart in and out of the room.
Sex didn’t hurt, as Vivi had said it might, and it didn’t give me any pleasure, as I’d wondered it might. Instead, as I lay as still as I could under him, I watched the yellow spirals on the ceiling above me, dancing in and out like lively springs, and was astounded that this frenetic, mediocre act was what we were made for. This, apparently, was what men and women craved, not just when they wanted a child but for the act itself. After all, it’s all we’re required to do in life—by the laws of nature—to ensure the continuation of our species.
I can’t think why but at that moment I thought of a stag beetle with his shiny black armor and huge, fierce- looking antlers, as long again as his body. With such an outfit you’d assume he was a great warrior, yet his fearsome appearance is a mystery to naturalists. He doesn’t fight once in his monthlong life. He doesn’t even eat. His sole purpose is to lug his cumbersome body around in search of a mate and, once he’s mated he dies, his formidable weaponry an unnecessary encumbrance.
Arthur’s head was buried in the pillow beside me, his mouth close to my ear. I smelt his musk and listened to his strained irregular breathing and I thought of all the forces driving him to do this. His arms were on either side of me, solid in rock-hard tension, his elbows locked at right angles to give him a little height, and I could see his sinewy upper body immaculately taut, powerful. Every slender muscle had a job to do and I marveled at the force in the thrust of his bottom, even for a thin man.
At last I felt Arthur’s whole body go rigid in involuntary spasm and wondered if there was any other moment, apart from ejaculation, that so many of a man’s muscles contract at the same time. I imagined the little packages of ATP and lactic acid being busily shunted and exchanged deep within the filaments of his muscles, a powerhouse working at full capacity.
When he’d finished and withdrawn, I flipped my legs to the head of the bed and stuck my feet and bottom up on the wall above me.
“What are you doing?” he asked then, rolling off the bed.
“I’m just helping them.”
“Does it?” he said. “Help them?”
“Vivien thinks it might. It’s on her list,” I said, referring to a list of helpful hints and instructions she’d sent me, but Arthur was looking at me strangely, at my legs. “It’s not one of the things I
“Ouch, what happened to you?” he interrupted. “Did you have an accident?”
“Those?” I tried to sound casual. “I always have bruises,” and I tugged at the sheet to cover up the marks of Maud’s outbursts.
“Sorry.” He looked embarrassed, as if he’d just pointed out a deformity he shouldn’t have mentioned, and went into the bathroom.
I felt his sperm trickling inside me and along the inside of my thigh. I checked that he was out of the room before I felt between my legs with my fingers. I had an urge to rush to the lab upstairs, smear the glistening liquid
