AFTER THE PEACE
Fay Weldon
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About this Book
About the Author
Table of Contents
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About After the Peace
How many parents does it take to make a baby? In the case of Rosalind Melrose Smithson it took four: one birth mother; one legal father; one interfering neighbour and one turkey baster filled with the defrosted essence of an anonymous donor.
Or not so anonymous as it turned out. For donor no. 116349, ‘6ft 1in, blue eyes, blond hair, BA (Oxon), action man…’ is the 9th Earl of Dilberne, who gave his seed back in 1979 as a stripling of twenty-two, and has now conceived a daughter – unknowingly – at the riper age of forty-two.
As they say, the truth will out. And what will our Rozzie do when she finds out about her patrimony? All we know is that as a true Millennial, she will not take it lying down…
Content
Welcome Page
About After the Peace
Epigraph
Part 1
Rozzie Is Conceived
The Day Of The Plunger
The Moment Of Choice
Oh Yes, Gwinny Always Obliged
The Other Man
A Tricky Inheritance
The Moving Finger
A Matter Of Inheritance
Not In Our Stars But In Ourselves
Between The Notion And The Act Came The Wedding
Childhood Memories
A Failure Of Nerve
A Question Of Bonding
The Fabulous Wedding
Degrees Of Separation
Lost Souls
After The Ball Is Over, After The Dancers Have Gone
The Dreaded Sounds Of Silence
Needless Swelling Of The Population
Part 2
A Case History
Me, Me, Me #MeToo
But No Place Like Home
Gwinny And The Brothers
A Lesson Well Learned
Back To Where I Began
A Morning On Primrose Hil
A New Dawn
The Neighbours Move In
A Confessional
The Return Of The Warrior Queen
Intervention By The Gods
The Wheels Of Fate
A Certain Loss
The Love Of Beauty
Trying To Forgive And Forget
Not Fit
A Matter Of DNA
Death Of A Good Plain Man
Understanding And Forgiving
A New World And A New Start
You Can Forgive But Can You Forget?
Getting On With The Neighbours
Part 3
Three’s Company, Four’s A Crowd
Waiting, Waiting, Waiting
The Childless Years
I Had Sinned
Last-Minute Panic
Having It All
Suspicion Dawns
Doubting The Goddess
A Reason For Everything
The Art Of Forgetfulness
Facing The Facts
Nature Or Zature
Some External Intervention Is Needed
Many A Slip
A Pact With The Knowledgeable
Trio Con Brio
More Waiting
A Scene Better Forgotten
An Explanation
Possibilities Occur
A Wake-Up Call
Marriage Can Be Difficult
Time For Reflection
Xandra At Work
Going Private
Taking The Plunge
Part 4
Rozzie As A Child
A Much-Filmed Child
Naming The Child
The Good Neighbour
Getting By With A Baby
The Big Break
Out Of The Dark Age And Into The Light
A World Of Cameras
Screen After Screen
A Very Clever Little Girl
Ignorance Is Bliss
The Wrong Time
A Dreadful Row
Chess Foster Mother
I Ching: Hexagram 61. ‘Inner Truth.’ Pigs And Fishes
Part 5
Time For Reflection
Rozzie The Dutiful Daughter
From Out Of The Bardo Thodol
Who Is Sent Where?
Oh The Spurning And The Spurting!
Truth Will Out
The Fight Against Homelessness
A Scandal
Part 6
Exodus
Postscript
About Fay Weldon
Also by Fay Weldon
About The Love & Inheritance Trilogy
An Invitation from the Publisher
Copyright
In the year 1979, the young Viscount Hedleigh, heir of the 8th Earl of Dilberne, drunk, in love and penniless, visited a sperm bank and earned £25 by selling his seed.
Part 1
Rozzie Is Conceived
A whole lot of people were involved in Rozzie’s conception. That was in 1999, some twenty years ago, when smartphones hardly existed. There were the initial four of us. One birth mother, pretty, hippie Xandra, aged thirty-nine. One very handsome – legal – father, Clive, aged thirty-six. There was one family friend to witness – that was me, Gwinny Rhyss, aged fifty-nine. And then, trapped inside the turkey baster, was the fourth: the sperm, the very essence of the young Viscount Sebastian Hedleigh.
There seems to be no firm use-by date for frozen sperm. Sebastian had been a stripling of twenty-two when he spent his seed, but was forty-two and by then the Earl of Dilberne when I finally injected Xandra’s womb with the stuff. Clive had been the one who was going to do the plunging, but he lost his nerve at the last minute.
But we four were only the first of those responsible for Rozzie’s existence – there were a whole lot more if you include the white-coated medical staff of the new Your Beautiful Baby Clinic in 1979 – in the unsupervised days when sperm donation was anonymous and a convenient commercial transaction, available to any casual passer-by who looked vaguely okay. No medical tests were required.
All the high flyers pictured in the YBBC brochure were involved in the birth one way or another, ten men and two women, in white coats and of various ages, lined up and brightly smiling, though a shifty-looking lot they seem to me in spite of their apparently excellent qualifications in genetic technology. But perhaps it’s just the flares and the hair down to the shoulders.
You can find a copy of the original seventies prospectus of the YBBC online – I did. The place has long since closed. In 2005 anonymity of donors became illegal, and the supply of impoverished passers-by dried up, so the sperm banks did too. Flick through the pages and view the blank, outlined heads of available donors, rows and rows of them all the same: no names, no pack drill, no legal complications, just a brief caption beneath each silhouette citing occupation, eye colour, temperament and profession. Thus, donor No. 116349: ‘6ft 1in, blue eyes, blond hair: BA (Oxon), action man, aristocrat.’ It was above these few words that my pencil circled and struck in January 1999.
We were all a long time getting there. It is my avowed intent to tell you how Rozzie came about. I have done my course in creative writing. I will do my best to be a reliable narrator. It was a long and arduous journey. Me, Gwinny Rhyss, of 23 Standard Road, NW5. My home.
Men Have Art, Women Have Babies
That early staffing gender ratio is an interesting matter. The fertility business, and it’s a very lucrative one, still seems to attract mostly men – envious, I daresay, of the female power to create. ‘Men have art, but women have babie
s’ was a common observation in my young days, and presented as an equivalence, a sop to any women envious of the male artist. As if by controlling and witnessing birth, men could own that too. And then, as domestic technology advanced, women had time and energy to go out to work and earn their independence, stopped worshipping the phallus and claimed art to be as much theirs as anyone else’s.
Women no longer just had babies or looked pretty on a stage: now they had time to write and paint, compose, all sorts of things as well and be taken just as seriously as any man. And, to get things balanced again, men have been driven to get more and more involved with the technology of birth. One should not complain or bitch about that.
But by plunging the turkey baster on March 18th 1999, I had at least taken some part of the process back into female hands. I keep that brochure in mind as a memento of my courage and the wisdom of my choice.
Sebastian’s theoretically anonymous sperm had been kept in various freezers since 1979. Xandra and Clive did not get married until 1986, after several years of living in sin – much to the distress of Xandra’s mother. Perhaps the spirit of the sixties was carried in Sebastian’s sperm, together with the subsequent disillusion that went with it. For him, the All You Need is Love theory of existence was fast being replaced by Sid Vicious’s My Way. If Rozzie emerged into the world carrying all the baggage of four decades, and found the need to shuffle off the burden of the past it was hardly unreasonable.
‘Living in sin’ – Good Lord, to think we once thought like that!
The Day Of The Plunger
‘Between the idea And the reality Between the notion And the act Falls the Shadow,’ Clive misquoted Eliot, as he sought to impregnate his wife with another man’s sperm, turkey baster held high.
Clive had a ready fund of quotable lines, seeing himself as a great if misunderstood literary figure, when actually he was a spectacularly good-looking actor of the action man variety, who’d once enjoyed a successful career as a tenor in the world of West End musicals. But I could see his hand trembling. It was an elegant, sensitive hand, well creamed and beautifully manicured. It seemed the wrong moment to start an argument, even though the word is usually ‘motion’ not ‘notion’, thus making nonsense of the quote, but never mind – me, I blame printer error – as his wife lay there with her legs open. I let it go. ‘And that shadow is doubt, Xandra,’ Clive stage-whispered loudly, urgently. ‘A great overwhelming doubt!’ His brilliant blue eyes glittered, his curved lips quivered. ‘I’m sorry, but I can’t do this. You do it, Gwinny. You’re the lucky one.’ He lowered the plunger and handed it to me. ‘Gwinny, will you please do the honours?’ I took it into my rather red, slightly swollen, un-manicured hands.
‘Oh please do hurry, Gwinny,’ begged Xandra. ‘Just do it, before I change my mind as well. Don’t let the stuff get cold again!’
So it was that I, Lady Gwyneth Petrie of No. 23 Standard Road, NW5, otherwise known as Gwinny Rhyss of the same address, neighbour and witness to the life of Clive and Xandra Smithson next door at No. 24 – and having no children of her own – was the one who brought a new soul to life in the shape of Rozzie Smithson, destined to become the Lady Rosalind Montewan, born on New Year’s Day, 2000. A Millennial, if ever there was one.
The Moment Of Choice
Possible choices of suitable father, each captioned with a brief description of looks and temperament, appeared in blank silhouette on the ‘Now choose your donor’ pages of the Woolland Brilliant Baby Clinic’s brochure. Would I have done better to have decided on ‘5ft 11in, brown eyes, black hair: writer, thinker, healer’, rather than the ‘6ft 1in, blue eyes, blond hair: BA (Oxon), action man, aristocrat’? The blond aristocrat won.
I was born the daughter of a Welsh coal miner turned builder, so any innate grovelling to the upper classes, as the unkind few have suggested, was out of the question. Besides, I had learned the habits and failings of the aristocracy all too well in my earlier life to afford them undue respect.
No, being rather short myself, at 5ft 3in – back in the eighties an unfortunate Daily Mail headline about me read ‘Pocket Cougar Venus Strikes Again’ – I went for the extra two inches, and so ended up inadvertently choosing DNA which has been causing trouble for generations. Dilberne genes. The Dilberne family – peers since the reign of Henry VIII – has accumulated a lot of unfortunate DNA along the way, insisting, as they so often did, on marrying for love and not for property or land. Once unstable genes are introduced into a blood line, there’s no getting rid of them: they keep resurfacing. Ask anyone who studies racing form or dog breeding.
But I may delude myself as to my own nature. Looking back, I fear my choice that day was motivated by a lack of self-worth, a poor self-image, rather than anything else – an absurd admiration for height. It was the extra inches that swung me. Stupid, stupid. If karma came back to bite me in the years that followed in the form of Rozzie herself, I could hardly be surprised.
Xandra and Clive declined to take on the responsibility of choice. Xandra claimed her eyes went blurry when she looked at the lists: Clive said, ‘In that case leave it to Gwinny. She’s the lucky one.’ So out of guilt, I, Gwinny, obliged.
My finger dropped on ‘action man, aristocrat’. And that was that. A sloppy description in the first place, by some tired white-coated moron on duty at the 24/7 clinic the night of the deposit, hastily writing down the brief description the law required of sperm depositors at the time: height, race (defined by the colour of the eyes), education and profession. Sebastian probably said he had been a Captain of Cricket at Eton – the kind of thing young men were still proud of in 1979, the year Margaret Thatcher became Britain’s first female Prime Minister, punk rocker Sid Vicious was found dead in New York and Mother Teresa won the Nobel Prize for Peace. Times have changed.
Oh Yes, Gwinny Always Obliged
Just as when in 1999, Clive kept saying ‘You do it, Gwinny! You’re lucky,’ leaving me to take up the syringe and glug the thawed and living Dilberne DNA into Xandra’s vagina. At least we hoped it was living. It was sold to us at half price, being old stock: twenty years old, but it lived, and it produced our miraculous Rozzie.
Just as when in 2000, I named the baby Rosalind it had been ‘You decide, Gwinny!’ – Xandra being too exhausted and not sure she loved the baby (a difficult birth can create a delay in the bonding process) and Clive complaining there was too much choice, it gave him a headache. He’d hoped for a boy. Xandra had wanted a girl. So had I, very much so. I was not too fond of baby boys.
I liked Rosalind as a name, having been a great E. Nesbit reader when I was a child. I had adored The Story of the Amulet and Five Children and It. Rosalind sounded so hopeful, sweet and good and so it was that this name ended up on the birth certificate. Rosalind Melrose Smithson (the Melrose after Clive’s deceased mother). As it turned out the name did not suit her in the least. Far too Victorian for a Millennial. She was soon enough called ‘Rozzie’ anyway, which – ambitious, determined and ruthless – did not sound sweet and gentle at all.
So really I suppose all four of us, Xandra, Clive and me, not forgetting Lord Sebastian Dilberne, Rozzie’s progenitor, deserved what we got. His Lordship, penniless and drunk as he was, should have walked home instead of selling his soul and his inheritance for a taxi fare home. Mind you, in those days twenty-five quid would have taken him almost all the way to Dilberne Court, the family seat in Sussex, not just the town house in Belgrave Square, such has been the devaluation of our currency.
I did not ask for this power over the Smithsons’ lives. I suppose it was because I was a generation older than they were. I was a child of the 1940s, they of the 1960s: they respected me. I had money in the bank. They seemed to need me, and thought I was lucky, if a bit nuts. That everything always turned out right for me. Well, sometimes it did, sometimes it didn’t.
The numbers in Standard Road run consecutively, not odd on one side, even on the other. I have no idea why. The Smithsons seemed a very pleasa
nt young latter-day hippie couple, if on the hapless side, when they turned up with the estate agent. I’d not wanted No. 24 next door to lie empty, and to this end I had guaranteed their mortgage. In the same way people just drift apart we happened to just drift together. If we were in each other’s pockets all the time it was because we found those pockets cosy, companionable and comfortable.
Or so I find it convenient to tell myself. It’s true that when the Smithsons first moved in there were absurd rumours up and down Standard Road of troilism ‘goings on’ between No. 23 and No. 24: all total nonsense. Nothing sexual whatsoever ever went on between us.
We certainly were in and out of each other’s houses a good deal throughout the nineties. Xandra needed feeding when she came home from her nursing shift. Clive had to be dragged away from writing his verse-novel, play or musical – sometimes A Broken Chord, sometimes The Roar of Lament, though occasionally it was a kind of multimedia opera, Let’s Get Out of Here! He was good at titles, it was only the content and word-count that eluded him. And he was a rotten cook anyway. I’m what they call a good plain cook, that is to say better at feeding than concocting, better at fish fingers and chips than at a cheese soufflé, but no-one ever went hungry. I grew up with four ravenous wolves as younger brothers so I do know how to feed people. The neighbours went on puzzling and gossiping about what our relationship could possibly be… ‘the nutty old lady with her yellow cycling leggings – once a whore always a whore – and that handsome young pair next door – well, him anyway, though she wasn’t lasting so well, beginning to thicken up a bit in the middle in a double-chinnish sort of way – night shifts could do that to a girl (all those biscuits) which left him and the old bat together, and who paid whom for what? Troilists!’
A poison pen letter came through the letterbox to that effect but Clive Smithson laughed it off. ‘Sticks and stones may hurt our bones, but words will never hurt me. Some nutter. Gwinny, do stop being so paranoiac!’