Conrad & Eleanor (22 page)

Now in this time of lucid happiness, it was possible to examine that. ‘I used to think you were being sexist when you opened doors and carried stuff for me before.'

‘Used to think?'

‘I like it now. Can I still call myself a feminist?'

He grinned. ‘A pampered feminist.'

‘More to the point, can you still call yourself a feminist?'

‘Naturally. I am lightening a woman's physical burdens in order to facilitate her intellectual pursuits.'

‘You're sure you're not suggesting I'm a weakling who might snap if I had to carry my own bag to the car? And reinforcing the stereotype that you are my big strong protector?'

‘Think of it more as a master–slave role. You're the superior being and I'm the brute.'

‘OK, I'm happy with that.'

‘You can pay me back. This is strictly baby-linked. It will cease the day you stop breastfeeding.' She breastfed Cara for eight months.

She became more aware of his mind. Noticed, almost with surprise, his clarity. It was over this period that she decided to get out of IVF. The intellectual sparring – the articulating and being listened to – the working out of a new position and learning to defend it; the testing of it in argument, was all down to Con. His persistent, rigorous opposition forced her to make her ideas watertight; she tested them against him till she knew they were true.

When El remembers this now it drenches her in sadness. That is what's been lost. How long since they have argued like that? Neither of them has become stupid, senile, uninterested in ideas. So why have they stopped making each other think? Why, for the last however long, has there been nothing to talk about?

She remembers the night she went to hear Gena Corea and Robyn Rowland speak about reproductive technologies. Paul and Megan were both miserable with colds, and Cara was niggling and hadn't fed properly. El had half a mind not to go. Con persuaded her that Cara would settle better if she was out of the house, which was almost certainly true. But although this would be a set of arguments she knew she ought to hear, she had little appetite for a gaggle of lesbian feminists moaning about evil men in white coats, and had told herself she would stay no more than an hour.

The venue was depressing – a dingy church hall with a FINNRET banner drooping across the doorway: Feminist International Network on the New Reproductive Technologies. She resented the fact that they had appropriated the word feminist, as if to oppose them were to be non-feminist. The Feminist International Network had managed to conjure a full eleven women out of the Manchester gloom to listen to this American star, so already El's slipping-away-early plan was foiled. But once Corea began to speak, that didn't matter. El was riveted: this was not some poky little organisation of man-hating separatists and conspiracy theorists. Corea was stunningly well informed, able to paint a convincing picture of the progress and effects of IVF on a wider geographical and political scale than El had ever contemplated. She made no false claims or assertions; her arguments were all about interpretation. What she did, as El realised later, describing the evening to Con, was to drag out into the daylight all the half-formed anxieties and objections that had been lurking in the depths of El's mind for the past eighteen months.

‘She started with success rates. Claims of success rates, and actual live births. You know the Norfolk Clinic has the best success rates in the world – well, it's still only 13 per cent. And that's five and a half years after Louise Brown. The success rates are not improving.'

‘You knew that.'

‘I sort of knew it, but it gets obscured, doesn't it, by successful ovarian stimulation, and successful fertilisation, and successful cleavage and success of embryo transplant – but after all these successes, the whole thing still fails more often than not.'

‘OK.'

‘So then the argument is, women are being offered children. Yet this is a highly experimental, 87 per cent failure risk procedure, involving many direct threats to the women's health and well-being, and they are being asked to pay for it.'

‘No one's forcing them. If you can't stop people spending money on getting pissed out of their heads, you can't stop them spending it on making babies.'

‘Right. It's being offered as a choice to childless women. But in fact it's not a choice. Because eighty-seven out of a hundred of them will come away without the thing they chose.'

‘Well, you could argue that the success rates should be honestly revealed, but after that, it is free choice.'

‘Take a step back. The point of feminism is to give women freedom. Freedom to live their lives as they wish – equally with men.'

‘In so far as men are free.'

‘OK, OK. Within the constraints of being human. But that freedom must be freedom from social pressure to conform to biological stereotyping.'

‘In what sense does an IVF programme constitute social pressure?'

‘By its very existence! It says to childless women, it is your destiny to bear children, so don't consider making a life without them – come and try again to have them.'

‘It can say what it likes – women don't have to listen.'

‘But it's the underlying assumption: if you can't have children you're incomplete, and must be willing to sacrifice any amount of money, time and health in order to try and get them. Instead of saying to the childless woman, OK, there are a million other things you can do, go off and find one that interests you.'

‘El, no one obliges them. Childless women can say that to themselves. But they don't. They queue up for IVF programmes.'

‘But the
existence
of those programmes creates social pressure.'

‘It is scientifically possible to go to the moon; that doesn't mean all men feel obliged to try and go there.'

‘It's not reckoned to be a defining part of your identity as a male that you should go to the moon.'

‘I should adventure and explore —'

‘Bollocks. You know about amniocentesis in India?'

‘Go on.'

‘Used for sex selection. They find out the sex of the foetus and then abort girls. Corea had some figures, I wrote it down. Listen. An estimated 78,000 female foetuses have been aborted in the last five years. Of 8,000 abortions in Bombay last year, 7,997 foetuses were female.'

‘Terrible, clearly. But your argument?'

‘My argument is that the use of amnio in India is not progress. It is the opposite. It is like genocide, it is like the holocaust, only it's men and women —'

‘The people who have the amnios and abortions are women.'

‘And do you think they do that of their own free will? You don't think their husbands and society pressurise them?'

‘OK.'

‘So it would be best not to have that option. It would be best if there was no amnio.'

‘You can't undo medical progress. You have to educate people so they can make the right choices. Presumably they've been smothering female newborns for generations.'

‘But the choice – here in this country, the pill has given more women control over their own fertility, deciding to work, choosing to parent or to be childless – and then along come the scientists with a procedure which basically says, “If you don't have children you're ill and we can treat you.” It says infertility is a
disease
.'

‘This would all be so much more convincing if it came from a childless woman.'

Of course, he was right, and that took them on to biologic­al determinism, and how far it is ever possible or desirable to try to overcome that; on to the male impulse to impregnate as many females as possible; the female desire to bear children by the most powerful, successful male available. ‘Both of which, to some degree, humanity has overcome in the interests of social stability and a better environment for our young – thus proving we are not slaves to our biology, and that our lives are better for not being so. Game, set and match to me!' she crowed.

Revisiting these debates, El is aware of her own past actions in a way that it was easy not to be at the time. Glenn was younger than Con, more ambitious. She thought she'd simply had some fun. In fact she'd mated with the most powerful and successful male available, and got a child out of it.

She finds this analysis repellent, has always seen biological determinism as an insidious, cobwebby set of puppet strings to be swiped through wherever possible. And so has Con, although he's always been willing to offer her a run for her money in an argument. But what if they've both been wrong, all along? What if every choice and decision they think they've made in their lives has been no more than their genes tugging at their puppet strings? What if she has spent her time, ever since turning against IVF, arguing futilely against a force which is as unstoppable as the incoming tide: the overriding desire of females to have children?

Has she pretended people can choose how to behave in order to shield herself from a much uglier reality – a reality Con, maybe, has been learning to embrace?

W
hen he has
finished his pasta marinara Con orders another glass of wine. Silly, it would have been cheaper to get the bottle in the first place. He drinks it slowly, telling himself it is his sleeping draught. He'll sleep tonight and then tomorrow he'll be able to make some sensible decisions. Sitting here drinking alone makes him feel as if he is on holiday, waiting for someone; waiting for El and the kids to join him, turning over in his mind what they might do tomorrow. His real life, that competent slightly weighty machine of responsibilities and routine, of planned-and-saved-for-treats and familial interactions perpetually animating him, continues in another dimension unstoppably, since by definition it can have no end, being what Conrad is, being Conrad's life.

How can his life have ended before he has?

He should be on his way. He pays, hauls on his coat and sets out into the cold again. He seems to have wandered away from the main drag; the street is dark and narrow without shops. He turns right towards what seems to be a road with more streetlights. It is raining now in earnest, thin stinging drips that hit his skin like shards of ice. Maybe that last glass was a bad idea, he feels a little fuzzy. Emerging from a couple of turns at the end of the street, he finds himself at a major road. Three lanes of traffic in each direction. Did he cross this to get here? He has a memory of traffic and a dog, but wasn't it a smaller road? He finds the lights have changed and a green pedestrian sign is urging him to cross. It must be right because on the other side the covered pavement begins again, the vaulted brick roofing which is so distinctive in the city centre. It is good to be out of the rain. He has been going for a while when he realises he's climbing a hill. There's no hill in the centre of town; and it looks darker and darker up ahead. This is wrong.

As he turns to go down he sees a figure fall back into the shadows. Someone was following him. Quickly climbing down from the high pavement into the road, he crosses to the other side. His eyes can make out movement – indistinct movement, down in the street below. People walking up the hill? He rubs at his eyes which are blurred by rain or sweat, but they refuse to focus. Lights are set into the brickwork of the vaulted arches overhead, he is lit up and on display. He moves on up into the dimness midway between lights, and leans against the wall, feeling the vibration of his heartbeat. Still can't make out what's moving down there. Then he sees that it's a monkey. There's a monkey staring at him, standing up on two feet in the middle of the road. Definitely a cynomolgous monkey, its grey fur is haloed by a streetlamp lower down the hill. Its eyes gleam in its black face, it is very still, it's watching him. He wants to turn and run but he knows how fast they are. It would be up his back in seconds, clawing at his head and neck, chattering with rage. If he keeps still maybe it'll get distracted. He blinks and the monkey's gone. His eyes scour the dimly-lit pavements and dark roadway, ears straining for the click of its claws upon the stone. He is trying to quiet his breathing, he is trying to see where the monkey has got to, he is already instinctively pulling up his collar to protect his vulnerable neck, when a male voice further up the hill barks, ‘
Chi e quello
?
'

‘
Scusi
. I am lost.
Inglese
.'

‘English?' The man approaching Con is walking with a stick, slightly stooped. As he moves into better light Con sees his face is fierce and intelligent.

‘Yes, I have taken a wrong turning. I'm looking for my hotel.'

‘Where is it?' His English is fast and good.

‘City centre.'

‘You are on the via di San Luca. You must go back down the hill.'

Maybe the monkey will be scared by this man's voice. By his stick. If Con can walk down the hill with him he'll be protected. ‘Thank you.' He waits for the man to fall into step beside him.

‘What is your hotel?'

‘It's – it's —' The name has gone.

‘Street?' says the man. ‘Street of your hotel?'

Con has no idea. He just knows what it looks like. If he can get himself into the right neighbourhood he will be able to find it. ‘I've forgotten,' he concedes.

‘You are tourist?'

‘No. I'm a scientist. I've been to a conference and I, I had some bad news. I came to Bologna for, for a rest.'

‘Sorry for your bad news. I am Alberto.' The man is gravely courteous. Con offers his name and they shake. There is no sign of the monkey and Con's hot sweat is now freezing on his skin. If he can get back to his room and shut the door he'll be safe, he can take off his wet coat and have a warm bath. Alberto is a saviour.

‘Your English is very good.'

‘Hah!' Not quite a laugh. ‘My wife was English. She is now two years dead.'

‘I'm sorry to hear that.'

‘I go to evening mass for her. You know the church, of the Vergine di San Luca? But you should not to walk this hill at night, we have not so much light here. Sometimes the robbers come.'

Con is not concerned about robbers. He is concerned about the monkey, which is back in the road ahead, keeping to the dark centre of the street, keeping pace with their speed, glancing back at Con over its grey shoulder every few seconds to check that he is following.

‘What is the matter?' asks the man.

‘There —' Conrad points. ‘You see?'

‘What is?'

‘A monkey. We have to be careful, they are vicious.'

Alberto stops and ferrets in his pocket. For a moment Con hopes he might take out a gun and shoot the monkey. But there's bound to be more. ‘This is where I live.' He has a key in his hand. ‘I wish you good night.'

As Alberto unlocks the door Con notices that the monkey has stopped going downhill and has fully turned to look at him. Another burst of scalding sweat erupts through his skin and he puts his hand to the wall to steady himself. Alberto opens his door and steps inside, switching on a light. He turns to look at Con again. ‘You are unwell? You like a glass of water?'

Wordlessly Con nods and follows him into the hall; as the door closes behind him relief unstrings his limbs and he crumples to the floor.

Later he is in a small dark blue bedroom with posters of racing cars on the walls, and a lamp glowing beside his bed. He is aware, through memories which are shifting like sliding glass doors, of a series of things. This is the bedroom of Alberto's grown-up son, his headache has returned tenfold, there are monkeys after him. He is shivering and yet his skin is slick with sweat. Alberto gave him a glass of brandy as he lay on the hall floor, and he doesn't know where his hotel has gone. He is in bed in his clothes, he hasn't even got pyjamas. The lamp is giving off flakes of light, more like bubbles in fact, bubbles of light which seem to float up towards the ceiling. It soothes his itching eyes to watch them. And then to let his lids fall shut.

After a period of blackness he opens them again to find the same scene. He feels secure, almost as if he has reverted to boyhood, to the age of the son who decorated this bedroom with his racing cars. And he has a son of his own, too. His flickering thoughts turn to Paul's room, Paul's posters, of owls, pandas, polar bears and whales. Paul is the one person he would like to tell what he has done. He would like to win Paul's approval, at last, after all these years. It is only Paul who has maintained an unwaveringly critical attitude to the use of animals in research. It seems to Con now that he patronised the boy by rooting it all in that first unhappy monkey house experience. Why insult Paul by implying that his seriously held beliefs are simply the after-effects of childhood trauma? Say rather that that first visit to the monkey house planted a seed of intelligent questioning.

Con remembers Paul's arguments and the arrogance with which he demolished them. He saw arguing with Paul as sparring, as play. He realises now that Paul must have guessed this and felt belittled by it. As he grew older he moved from emotional (in Con's head, soft) arguments, to hard: to questions of cost and political choice. Here it became more difficult to demolish him, and the arguments ran on from one conversation to the next.

Con remembers taking him out to practise for his driving test, soon after Con had started working for Corastra. His new work had been the subject of conversation in the house all weekend, and Paul had made his disapproval clear. They were on country roads, driving towards Halifax, and Paul continually drove just a little too fast for comfort. Con had to check himself, after he'd exasperated Paul by twice asking him to slow down. He kept his eye on the speedometer and vowed to himself not to mention it again unless the needle touched 60. It didn't, Paul's speed was perfectly calculated; Con knew it was being used to wind him up. They came to a lay-by with a mobile shop and he suggested they stop for a coffee. Paul parked and Con got out into the damp air to buy the drinks.

‘I think the research you're doing is unnecessary, politically suspect and immorally cruel.' Con realised that Paul must have been rehearsing the sentence in his head as he waited for Con to return with their coffee, selecting and rearranging the charges for maximum impact.

He tried for lightness. ‘Oh, is that all?'

‘I'm serious.'

‘OK. Unnecessary because you think people with heart problems should be left to die?'

‘Yes.'

‘Politically suspect because the money should be spent on starving children?'

‘Yes.'

‘Immorally cruel?'

‘You chop out pigs' hearts, you stick them in monkeys, the pigs die, the monkeys die.'

Despite himself, Con was needled. ‘I'm not doing it for fun.'

‘Maybe. But you are doing it for money.'

‘For God's sake, Paul! You don't even understand the basics of what I'm doing, yet you set yourself up —'

‘Tell me then. What makes it so different from what I think?'

‘The reason we're using monkeys —'

‘Start with the pigs. Go on, explain it.'

‘Right. We want to make a pig heart that can be transplanted into humans. Pig hearts because pigs breed easily in captivity and have large litters – a lot of hearts can be supplied.' His anger began to subside. ‘D'you really want to hear all this?'

‘Sure.' A rare grin from Paul. ‘Give me the ammo to whop you.'

‘You know the big problem with transplants is rejection.'

‘Yes.'

‘Well, the more divergent the species the more ferocious the rejection. If you put a normal pig heart in a human you get hyperacute rejection, which means the antibodies of the host's blood attack the antigens on the surface of the alien heart and reduce it to a black swollen mass within minutes.'

‘Ugh.'

‘So, the pig is genetically modified, which is to say a very small number of its 50,000 genes are modified to alter the surface antigens of the pig's cells so that they more closely resemble human antigens. So then when the pig heart is transplanted the human immune system is tricked into seeing the pig organ as human and not attacking it, OK?'

‘OK. Does this have to be done to every pig foetus?'

‘No, the transgenic pigs breed naturally and their offspring inherit their genetic make-up.'

‘They're not slowly going to grow more and more like people?'

‘Only in science fiction.'

‘Then what?'

‘Then we transplant the hearts to monkeys.'

‘And what happens?'

‘We treat the monkeys with immunosuppressants, to help prevent rejection, and we monitor their progress with a view to transplanting hearts like these into sick humans in the near future.'

‘How long do the monkeys survive?'

‘Anything from a few hours to sixty days.'

‘So the best you could offer anyone is sixty days?'

‘At the moment. If you consider that HAR takes six minutes, sixty days is not bad going.'

‘So in the hope of one day producing a heart and drugs that will keep a human alive for longer than sixty days, you kill – how many pigs? How many monkeys?'

‘The pigs are irrelevant, since we breed them specifically.'

‘OK. Monkeys are our closest relatives in the animal world. They can remember, love, hate, play, feel pain and rage —'

‘This is the furry friends argument.'

‘You know a mother monkey will grieve for a year or more over the loss of her baby?'

‘The belief that human life is more valuable than animal life is a principle of all research involving animals.'

‘That's speciesism.'

‘No argument.'

‘It's wrong.'

‘We'll have to agree to differ.'

Of course he knows it was cruel. His ability to work depended on him effectively blocking out that knowledge. How easy to be a bleeding-heart sympathiser. He has a physical sense, now, of how tightly he screwed himself up against that sympathy, how he locked up his feelings, and the cost at which he did it. He had to make himself feel nothing. And what he locked up has broken out now, flooding his system with grief and shame.

Something is shaking. Con opens his eyes reluctantly and sees Alberto tugging at his shoulder. ‘You drink now. Drink or you will dehydrate.'

Con pulls himself up in the bed; his body is strangely heavy. He takes the glass of orange from Alberto. ‘Thank you.'

‘Now water.'

Con obeys again. Alberto watches him drink. ‘I'm sorry about this – you are very kind —'

‘No problem. You have the flu I think. Headache?'

‘A bit.'

Alberto points to the bedside table, there is a box of para­cetamol. ‘Take two.'

Again Con obeys; there is an ache around the bridge of his nose which he is afraid will turn into tears of gratitude. How can a stranger be so kind to him? When he looks up again, after painstakingly swilling the tablets down his constricted throat, Alberto has gone. Con lies back on the bed, too exhausted even to shuffle down properly under the blankets. When he's better he'll organise something. Buy Alberto a present. He allows his eyes to close.