infectious proximity of sex and excretion, childbirth pure agony, testicles unwieldy and vulnerable, weak eyesight a general affliction, an immune system that could devour its owner. And that was just the body. Among all the yearning rationales for the godhead, the argument from design collapsed with Homo sapiens. No god worth his salt could be so careless at the workbench. Beard comfortably shared all of humanity's faults, and here he was, a monster of insincerity, cradling tenderly on his arm a woman he thought he might leave one day soon, listening to her with sensitive expression in the expectation that soon he would have to do some talking himself, when all he wanted was to make love to her without preliminaries, eat the meal she had cooked, drink a bottle of wine and then sleep – without blame, without guilt.
She took his empty glass and stood.
'Food,' she said. 'And I'll get you another.'
But she could not bring herself to leave him, not until she had stood right over him and kissed him again. This kiss was long and deep, and then she clasped him to her, and Beard, still seated, fully aroused, his face part shrouded in the scented gloom of her unbuttoned blouse, his view entirely filled by the division and swell of her breasts, had time to wonder why it oppressed him more than usual, all this talking and listening and cooking before anything properly rewarding could take place. Perhaps he had lost patience with the small print of human contact by spending so much time in loud public places, among worldly professors like himself, each bristling with his personal style of academic grandeur. And when alone, he was mostly among the near-abstraction of cobalt ions, protons, catalysts. And when not alone, in mindless dalliances he preferred not to consider now.
She released him from the embrace and as she straightened she said something, a single phrase he did not hear because at the same time her arms brushed against his ears. Her hands came to rest on his shoulders and he looked up, expecting to exchange a reassuring smile that would neutrally close this particular physical episode and dispatch her to the kitchen, and was surprised to see tears in her eyes, gathering thickly, ready to spill. And oddly, she was smiling, but without humour, as though dismissing or mocking her own feelings. For a superstitious moment he imagined he had upset her with his thoughts, impossibly murmured them aloud, or they had been legibly stamped across his face. But every man was an island, his thoughts were safe. It must be something serious, unconnected with himself. As he stood, he took her hands and they were damp, not only on the palms, but between the fingers, sticky, hot, expressive of a strong emotion it was now his duty – all prospect of pleasure receding – to elicit and understand.
'Melissa,' he said. 'What is it, and what did you just say?'
They kissed again, as tenderly as before. Perhaps it would not be so difficult after all to set the evening on its proper course.
Then she gazed at him in wonder and laughed. 'You idiot. I love you. I said I'm pregnant.'
'Ah €¦'
His mind had softly whited out, the manly equivalent of a neurasthenic faint onto the sofa behind him. Pregnant. He struggled with this ripely swelling word – familiar enough, but for the moment devoid of helpful context, like the face, say, of the local newsagent encountered in an improbable place. Then word, meaning and consequences, biology and fate, clicked into alignment like a steel bolt. His cell door had been open for months, years, and he could have walked free. Too late. While his back was turned one of his own sperm, as brave and cunning as Odysseus, had made the long journey, breached the city wall and buried its identity in her egg. Now he was expected to do the same. In forty years he had talked various women, including two of his wives, into terminations. It was a miracle he had come this far without lapsing into fatherhood. But he would have a tough time persuading Melissa. She was watching him now, lips parted in expectation, waiting for him, for the words, Daddy's first words, that might indicate the course of this new life.
'I'll have that scotch.'
'Come with me.'
He put an arm around her shoulder, and together they stepped over his mess and crossed the boards to her tightly organised kitchen. One large green pot, source of the pervasive aroma, was on the stove on a low heat. Otherwise, apart from a carton of rice, there was no sign of cooking, for the surfaces had been wiped down, all peelings trashed, every implement washed and stowed. A mystery, how someone as rich- bloodedly sensual as Melissa could be so aseptically neat. A baby, with its diurnal tides of entropy, would put her to the test. But this baby must not be, and all that was in question was how long it would take him to convince her of the fact. How could she not see it already, the folly of his shouldering this obligation, and the pathos of it – almost seventy years old and the child not yet ten! Then, the unsuitability of the father's character, his own gifts for entropy, his remorseless preoccupation with work, his recent earnings not even in six figures, his awful past, the risks of transcription error in offering his time-degraded seed to posterity, and her eggs surely feeling the chill of thirty-nine winters. And what of his mission? Would it be an exaggeration to say that the planet could suffer if he were deflected from his course? Perhaps not.
He watched her peer into the green pot and seem satisfied, unscrew the bottle and pour his drink, and take an ice cube from a dispenser. If the arguments he was marshalling were overstated, it was because he feared that the decision might already be out of his hands. She wanted this, she had always wanted this. So they weren't arguments at all, they were pleas. If she loved him she would listen, but she loved him and wanted a child, and was bound to ignore him. The situation was grave, indeed gravid. He took the drink from her and did not knock it back in one, as he would have if he had been alone with this problem, but went at it in rapid sips.
She flashed him a smile and set about her brisk arrangements for the rice, and poured olive oil and lemon juice into a bowl and tipped in rocket leaves from a packet in the fridge. This mound of greenery was surely for herself. Folic acid, phytonutrients, antioxidants, vitamin C. Eating for two. Something had to be done.
She said, 'Do you know, I think for once I'll have a glass of white wine.'
He did not want arrangements for an abortion turning into a celebration of a future birth. Nor did he want his foetal child's neural development compromised by alcohol. He felt so unreasonable, he could not speak. She raised her glass to him, and mutely he raised his. Her measure of wine was no larger than his neat scotch.
'Do you like this skirt?'
This question, her tone suggested, was not a change of subject. It was fine cashmere, charcoal grey, with many folds that swung in a delayed spiral when she turned.
'It's lovely,' he said. 'And so are you. You've never looked better.' Not a good idea to encourage her, but he could not help himself. By way of compensation, he said, 'How pregnant are you?'
'Seven weeks.'
'When did you find out?'
'Day before yesterday.'
'Melissa, tell me. Was it an accident?'
She came over to him and pressed her hand against his cheek. He felt again her radiant body heat. She was the oven, he thought stupidly, in which there was a bun. Their bun.
She whispered finally, 'No.'
'You came off the Pill?'
'The last three times we made love I was off the Pill.'
'You should have told me.'
'You would have resisted me.'
'Yes, I would. You know my feelings about this.'
'And you know mine.'
His glass was already empty. He stepped round her to get to the bottle and helped himself. Now they stood almost the length of the kitchen apart and it was easier for him to say, with an edge of hardness, 'You deceived me then.'
She was coming towards him again. It would be difficult to turn her from this calm, seductive mode. He would have happily settled for a row, with delicacy tossed to the winds. Greater distances traversed. But in this homely stillness, she was coming towards him and he could not help his arousal, and he could see she knew that, which excited him more. From his new angle by her pitiful drinks tray – one amaretto, one near-empty
