Foetal Attraction (9 page)

Harriet turned to her. ‘I’m so glad you took me at my word and didn’t go to too much trouble.’

‘Oh dear,’ said Bryce, dipping his finger into the offending gravy, then sucking it critically, ‘and I thought we were friends …’ He waggled the same forefinger in her face. ‘But you’ve put a stock cube in there, haven’t you?’

‘Doan’ worry about me. If I slop Tabasco all over it, I can eat
any
thin’,’ mumbled the Rock Star magnanimously.

‘Ooh,’ squealed Imogen, poking through her salad with a fork prong. ‘Something seems to be eating my salad before I do!’

Humphrey extracted the bouquet garni sachet from the sauce, dangled it by its string like a used tampon
then
, with maximum theatricality, plonked it in the middle of the table.

‘Perhaps you should have stuck to a more traditional menu,’ he pontificated. ‘Kangaroo, say. Or cockatoo. Simply place roo or two plus one axehead into a billy. Boil them until the axehead is soft, then serve.’

Harriet stopped laughing to make her own microscopic examination of the gravy. ‘The best way to thicken gravy,’ she advised loadedly, ‘is with blood.’

Easily done, Maddy thought to herself. She felt that gallons of her type O had been spilt over the carpet in the last twenty seconds. Cooking for the London Celebritocracy had turned out to be more gruelling than a samurai initiation.

Having finally placed the flock of baked budgies in the middle of the table, she flopped into her chair with a sigh. The birds lay on their backs, little legs kicking in the air helplessly. But her gourmet feat was greeted not with the ‘oohs’ and ‘ahs’ she’d expected, but by a cry of ‘Quick, we’re on!’ from Alex, at which the entire table vanished into the living room to watch their host looming out of a desert on a camel to talk about some civil-war-induced famine, picturesquely illustrated with flyblown skeletal beasts.

Maddy, marooned, sat at the table, watching the Brie melt and hang in pale stalactites from the side of the cheese platter.

When the sibilant tones of Alex’s television voice
ceased
cataloguing calamities, the guests returned to scavenge their cold bird carcasses. Between mouthfuls, Harriet cross-examined Gillian about where she and Maddy had met. ‘A cooking course?’ She raised a listlessly suspicious brow. ‘How fifties.’

Maddy was too intrigued by Sonia’s behaviour to reply immediately. Every few minutes, Sonia would delve into her environmentally friendly handbag, hand-woven from cactus fibres at a Mexican cooperative, to retrieve a recycled paper napkin. She would then hold it to her mouth and cough, before adding it to the discarded pile on the banquette between them. ‘What?’ She refocused on Harriet. ‘Sorry!’

‘The sexual revolution is
passé
,’ Gillian pronounced. ‘Men are still only interested in gourmet and pâté. Ask Alex. It was his suggestion, I believe …’

‘Really, Alexander?’ interrogated Oxford University’s leading Feminist, scathingly.

‘Maddy tells me you’re hoping for a husband,’ Alex retaliated. ‘I suppose it will be a
shotgun
wedding. Gillian’s father’, he elaborated for the benefit of the other guests, ‘was an arms dealer.’

A room full of eyebrows shot into the air like the very hairy legs of the
corps de ballet
. If it hadn’t been for her height, Maddy might seriously, then and there, have climbed out through the dumb-waiter.

Gillian smiled. The smile a refrigerator would give if a refrigerator could smile. ‘Of course, I should have
known
of your interest in family connections. Otherwise, why would you be listed in
Who’s Who
?’

Alex’s smile retreated faster than John Major’s popularity. He visibly quailed. ‘Oh,
that
.’ A hearty laugh could not disguise his agitation. ‘Oh, that had nothing to do with me.’

Maddy shot a ‘what shenanigans are you up to?’ look in Gillian’s direction.

‘You reach a certain level of celebrity, and they just include you,’ he spluttered in a rush of coagulated consonants. ‘I haven’t even seen the bloody thing …’

‘Oh, haven’t you? You’re in luck then. I never travel without it.’ Gillian could not keep the trace of relish from her voice.

‘I mean, one never knows whom one may meet.’ She extracted the massive tome from her large canvas hold-all.

Alex plaited and unplaited his fingers. ‘They write all sorts of rot about you …’

‘Really?’ Gillian quizzed. ‘I understood you write the entry yourself. A … B … Of course the uninitiated are led to believe that there are thousands of highly impressed researchers out there, writing this syncophantic nonsense … C … D … here we are. Drake … Alexander Drake. Born Grimsby—’

‘I don’t think we need to go into the boring details.’ Alex’s smile was constrained. He took the book from Gillian’s clasp a little too forcefully.

‘Let me see.’ Maddy in turn wrested the volume
from
Alex, sending the fingerbowl tumbling all over Imogen. Alex, Humphrey, the Exiled Opposition Leader and the Socially Aware Popstar all lunged at her lap with napkins as the abandoned baby slithered floor-ward, head lolling.

Maddy traced her way through the entry with her fingernail. ‘Parents … Educ —’

‘Educated,’ prompted Gillian. ‘And …’

‘What’s the “M”?’ Maddy looked up in time to see the sly glances exchanged by the other guests. ‘What’s that?’ The silence wasn’t just audible; it was cacophonous. Humphrey launched into an uncharacteristic lecture on how the death of one Maurice Reckitt had removed the last bridge between the croquet of before and after the wars. Sonia showed a sudden desire to discuss amateur badminton. Bryce delivered a lecture on the importance of baby-massage and the environmental ramifications of using disposable nappies – all the time puffing on an ecologically unsound cigar. Like crabs, they approached their topics sideways, eyes averted, pincers poised.

‘Oh, for God’s sake,’ blared Harriet, ‘put the poor child out of her misery.’

Alex’s face was like a crumpled bed. ‘Well, it’s “married”, actually.’

Maddy tried to repeat the word, but it caught in her teeth like a fishbone. She was afraid that it would wedge there, keeping her gaping, in shock for ever. Withdrawing her hands from the table, she steadied
herself
by holding on to the seat she shared with Sonia. Her left hand plunged into something wet and odious. Maddy remotely registered that she was wrist-deep in vomit. ‘Married?’ she spat out finally. ‘Married? You have a
wife
?’

‘Sort of,’ Alex confessed sheepishly. He made a small adjustment to his mouth and smiled engagingly. ‘I told you I had a few loose ends to tie up.’ Their love boat had just diverted into the Gulf after a breakdown in ceasefire negotiations with Iraq.

‘You mean, he didn’t tell you he was married?’ Gillian asked mischievously. She uncapped a lip pencil, snapped open a compact and outlined a mouth now curling with derision.

‘It’s my stomach,’ Sonia confided, gathering up the crumpled pyramid of napkins. ‘It’s stapled. Can’t hold anything bigger than a boiled egg. Which is why I regurgitate—’

The baby started crying. Bryce and Imogen glowered at each other. ‘It’s your turn,’ he said.

‘It’s not my turn, it’s your turn,’ she replied.

‘If it’s not your turn and it’s not my turn, then whose fucking turn is it?’ hissed Father of the Year.

The SAP absent-mindedly jiggled the abandoned baby on his knee.

‘You hate babies,’ Sonia reminded him, fiddling nervously with her eco-friendly jewellery, cleverly reworked from hot water cylinders and plastic milk cartons.

‘Cheese?’ Humphrey thrust a fetid slab of smelly cheese under Maddy’s nose. ‘Parentage unknown … A dairy product after your own heart, no?’

Imogen carved off a slice and devoured it whole, licking her fingers lasciviously. ‘I think Brie tastes like sperm,’ she announced, gazing intently at the Rock Star.

‘Not when it’s been in the fridge. Only when it’s warm,’ Sonia, determined not to be outdone, retaliated.

‘I’m trying to remember …’ Harriet pondered. The men exchanged knowing smiles. ‘The last time I ate Brie, I mean,’ she added, flustered.

‘It’s look-ism, that’s what it is.’ Sonia clenched and unclenched the folds of her white hessian frock, which bore a close resemblance to the major work of a Beginner’s Origami class. ‘The cosmetically challenged shouldn’t be discriminated against.’

‘As a black person …’

‘It wouldn’t hurt to wear a little make-up, my dear,’ Gillian suggested not unkindly.

‘They test cosmetics on poor little puppies and bunnies—’

‘Why is it only the cute animals you care about? What about rats and slugs?’ Gillian gibed. ‘That’s look-ism too, isn’t it?’

‘I happen to have brought along a copy of my latest poem,’ Humphrey announced, immune to the drama exploding around him. ‘What about a reading?’

‘As a black person …’

Maddy looked at them all blankly. What she suddenly realized was that he
had
told her. The trouble was that nobody spoke English in England. They spoke
euphemism
. She needed those little United Nations headphones. Then she could have deciphered what everybody had been saying to her since she’d lobbed into London.

‘Australians,’ Humphrey had said, ‘so re
fresh
ing.’ This, Maddy now realized, decoded as ‘rack off, you loud-mouthed colonial’. ‘So glad you could come,’ Sonia had greeted her, when Alex took her to their Chelsea mansion for dinner, ‘we think it’s so important to widen our circle of chums.’ This Maddy now translated as ‘we had a last-minute cancellation and couldn’t get anyone but
you
to make up the numbers.’

Then there were the hideous Bond Street shop assistants. ‘Oh, the baggy look is really
in
’ unscrambled as, your size is eight, but fourteens are all we have in stock. ‘What an elegant original outfit’ indicated that the price was well over the one-thousand-pound mark. ‘Just a tuck or two here, adjust the hem a teensy, weensy bit’ meant that the alterations would cost more than the garment. And ‘it’s so you!’ – i.e. no one else would be bloody stupid enough to buy it.

And Alex. Whose ‘rather tricky whatnots and few loose ends to tie up’ read as a mortgage, a
four-wheeled
drive ‘breeder mobile’, a ‘do it yourself’ deccie’s kit, a
pied-à-terre
in Maida Vale and a family home in Oxford with a wife called Felicity – the syndicated columnist who wrote, as Harriet put it, a chatty, wacky little strip on wedded bliss.

Alex, momentarily ruffled, was now back in full swing, chortling, telling jokes, opening more wine. ‘Hey, Degas said it first. Without imperfection, there is no life,’ he said, patting Maddy’s hand. He preferred not to call it ‘marriage’. It was more of a ‘spousally analogous situation’.

‘Really, Alexander, you must simply grow out of these …’ Harriet darted a look at Maddy, ‘cheap thrills.’

And sitting there, gulping at her wine, trying not to shatter into tears of embarrassment in the spotlight of the others’ intrigue, Maddy now understood the bullet-dodging assignments, chasing whalers and poachers. The pieces to camera, knee-deep in a school of South American piranhas. The drives, at kidney-killing speed, rattling up roads marked No Exit. Parking illegally next to empty meters. Jumping off trains before they’d stopped. Getting to the airport seconds before take-off. The paraplegic cubicle, the back seat of the car. Having affairs and forgetting to mention his matrimonial status. It was all about seeing how long he could get away with it. She was in love with an adrenalin-junkie.

‘Besides—’ Alex, standing at parade rest, had
reclaimed
his cocky and light-hearted self-regard. This man had a gift for self-forgiveness. ‘How can adultery be a crime? That would make loving a crime and where’s the sense in that?’

Maddy felt that it was a little like saying if you ate meat it was okay to be a cannibal.

So much for ‘drinking from the cup of life’. Madeline Wolfe, who’d left her home and hemisphere to drain it to the dregs, had the feeling she was about to find a drowned, half-decayed cockroach at the bottom of it.

Part Two: Complications

Complications

8 P.M. JESUS
Christ. Call the
Guinness Book of Records
. This has got to be the longest labour known to humankind. Adoption is starting to look like a very civilized alternative.

‘Perhaps, Doctor,’ the midwife is saying, ‘an epidural?’

Epidural?
Euthanasia
is more what I have in mind.

I look up at the man who is prodding between my legs. There is something familiar about the uncommunicative eyes, the ersatz smile. ‘Sister, the epidural will make it harder for Miss …’ he checks my patient file, ‘Wolfe to push. You’re still only four centimetres.’ He is wielding what looks like a crochet hook. ‘I’m going to rupture the membrane.’

Yolanda rouses from her sleep in the armchair. ‘Hey! What are you doing? Her waters already broke!’

‘That was a hindwater leak,’ explains the midwife.

Yo-Yo is on her feet, dancing a furious jig by the side
of
the bed. ‘You can say no, you know. The baby will be born with a caul. It’s good luck. Like David Copperfield. She’ll never drown at sea.’ As she flaps her arms, I can see the tight whorls of her underarm hair, beaded with perspiration. ‘Madeline, it’s
your
body. Doctors, especially
male doctors
, are so interventionist! Let nature take its course.’

Take its curse, I want to say, but can’t.

‘She’s suffering from hypotonic inertia. Rupturing will significantly decrease the length of the labour.’ Silly me. I thought the whimpers and moans echoing through the hospital corridors were those of patients. But it’s
doctors
, distraught by the protracted labours preventing them from getting home in time for golf. ‘Otherwise I’ll use Syntocinon.’

Now they’re talking Sanskrit. ‘What?
WHAT?
’

‘That’s a synthetic form,’ Yolanda deciphers for me, slowly, as though I’m a newly arrived immigrant from Uzbekistan, ‘of oxytocin, the body’s natural hormone.’