The Continuity Girl (17 page)

“Who?”

“Leonard, of course.” Irma seemed suddenly exasperated. “I met him in Montreal at a reading in the early seventies. You were
just a wee thing. He was so charming, just like the young Dustin Hoffman, only with more sexual confidence. He had a son about
your age and the two of you played together. Don’t you remember?”

“No.”

“Anyway, we had such a nice time, I thought it would be lovely for you to grow up Canadian. Icicles, snowball fights, that
sort of thing.”

“You sent me to school in Canada because you flirted with Leonard Cohen?”

“I did a great deal more than flirt with him, my duck.”

Meredith pushed her hands through her hair and tugged on the ends. “Please—don’t. I really don’t want to hear about it. Just,
why Toronto?”

“Fewer French people. You know I detest the French. Completely humourless.”

Meredith picked up the bottle of Limoncello and poured some into her empty water glass.

“That’s an awful lot, darling. Are you sure you need that much?”

Meredith brought the drink to her lips. It was almost unbearably sweet but somehow tart at the same time, like those sour
gobstoppers you bought as a kid that were meant to give you a funny face from sucking them.

Meredith sat down on the footstool again and balanced her drink on her knee.

“Listen, I have something to ask you. Remember when we used to go and feed the rabbits in Holland Park?”

“Of course! You named the black one Peter, and you thought there was only one—of course there were probably thousands, but
I didn’t have the heart to tell you. It was terribly cute.”

“What I was wondering was, did you ever let anyone else take me? To feed the rabbits, I mean? Like maybe a boyfriend of yours,
or another man?”

Irma raised herself up on a throw cushion and turned her head toward Meredith. “Why would you ask such a thing?”

“It’s just that I have this memory of a man. He’s holding my hand, in the park. It’s not a bad memory or anything. That’s
the thing. It’s actually quite a nice memory. The only problem is, I can’t remember who the man is, and I was wondering...”

“No.”

“What do you mean, ‘no’?”

“I mean, I told you—your father is dead. If you choose not to believe me, that’s your problem. But don’t expect me to reinforce
your delusions.”

“Who was he, then?”

“I told you. He was a dashing American film director. We had a drunken shag in his pool house during a party. I left around
three a.m. and the next thing I heard he was found floating facedown in his pool. Bloody idiot.”

“No, Mother, I mean the man I remember from the park.”

Irma shrugged, settled back into the sofa and closed her eyes. “It was such a long time ago, darling, I’ve no idea. There
were so many men around then. To tell you the truth, it could have been anyone.”

Meredith drained her glass and stared at her mother. Bones poked out of her dressing gown like concealed weapons. Meredith
ran her tongue over her teeth and found they were sticky. She vowed to brush them for a full five minutes before bed, instead
of the usual two.

Meredith spent most of the train trip to Gloucester looking out the window at the mist-blurred fields while Mish snored in
the seat beside her, slumping onto her shoulder with each sideways lurch of the car. The train was already forty minutes behind
schedule. It kept stopping, inexplicably, for rests between stations. Meredith tried to imagine the possible reasons for a
train to stop in the middle of the countryside and couldn’t come up with any good ones apart from life-threatening technical
problems. She worried about Barnaby, who was meeting them at the station.

Squirming in her seat, Meredith smoothed her new chocolate corduroys (bought at Selfridges the weekend before, specifically
in anticipation of the weekend) and adjusted the laces on her hiking boots to make sure the bows were evenly tied.

Ever since pulling out of Waterloo she had been considering, for the first time, the real ramifications of bringing up a child
on her own, without a man. It was not the image of destitute single motherhood that troubled Meredith (she earned a decent
wage and had saved up enough over the years to tide her over for a year, if not longer), but the issue of denying her child
a father. It was the same thing her mother had done, after all. And while she had always convinced herself she didn’t particularly
care about not having a father (one crazy, ill-equipped parent was enough, thank you very much), the question of paternity
had lately started to bother her. Not having had a male parent on-site introduced certain problems into the issue of rearing
a child. She had been thinking more and more about genes. For instance, what if her father had a genetic deformity that had
skipped her generation (or was only carried through the male line) and that would now affect her baby? How could she be sure
that the father of her child didn’t come from a family with a history of madness, premature baldness or some other inherited
defect? Above all, though, Meredith had begun to consider the moral ramifications. It had all started this morning when Mish
met her at the train station waving a copy of the
Times.
On the front page was a story about how there was a movement afoot
to make British sperm donors untraceable, so that future sperm-bank recipients could have complete parental rights over their
anonymously fathered children.

“Forget the sex part,” Mish had said, rolling up the paper and thwacking it against her hip. “You could just go for a blind
donation. I hear they’re mostly from hot med students.”

Meredith had read the full article on the train and had been moved by a comment piece written by a fertility specialist. He
argued the case that the fetus has a “right to know.” As a grown-up fetus herself, one who had been denied the facts about
her father (even as a child, she had never believed her mother’s pool-party story), Meredith could understand where the specialist
was coming from. At the same time, she remained unwavering in her determination to have a baby on her own. The trick was to
find out as much as she could about her biological partner before conceiving. Then she would have something to tell her baby
when it grew up. Who knows, maybe she and the father could even keep in touch. At least she could get a photograph of the
donor, which was more than she herself had ever had.

Meredith considered Barnaby. He was tall (check), with a full head of hair (check) and no evidence of skin problems or acne
scarring (that she could see, anyway). He seemed bright enough (though maybe it was just the accent), and, perhaps most important,
he had the right smell. Clean but not
too
clean. There was something about the way he’d put his jacket over her shoulders
and guided her back to her seat that night. For all his initial fumbling, he knew what to do when doing something mattered.
Meredith liked a man who knew how to move. True, his teeth were a bit snaggled, but nothing a bit of North American orthodontics
couldn’t have fixed. Perhaps he drank a little too much, but that could be said about most people here. In short, he was promising.
And Meredith was keen to kiss him again. That was a good sign.

The real question, of course (and the one Meredith had been studiously ignoring ever since she stepped on a transatlantic
flight to seek her biological fortune), was whether Barnaby (or any other man, for that matter) would mind fathering a baby
that was to be, in no uncertain terms,
her
baby. Above all, she wanted no interference—financial, emotional or otherwise—in
her parenting project. She imagined an annual round of Christmas and birthday cards, perhaps with a bookstore gift certificate
stuck inside, and maybe the odd visit (lunch on the day he happened to be passing through town on business), but that was
absolutely it. Anything else verged dangerously on a
relationship.

Barnaby met them at the train wearing a yellow mackintosh and matching boots, and looking, Meredith thought, exactly like
an overgrown Christopher Robin. He kissed both Meredith and Mish lightly on their right cheeks and insisted on carrying their
bags to his car, an ancient Austin Mini so encrusted with rust it was hard to tell the decay from the original ruddy paint
job.

“Your train was only forty-five minutes late,” he said, cramming their things into the nonexistent trunk. “That’s early for
British rail.”

Meredith smiled. Mish rubbed her face, still grumpy from sleep.

“So sorry, but I’m afraid you’ll have to sit on top of each other in the front, as the backseat is full of dead things.”

Meredith laughed and then saw, through the grimy back window, that it was true. On the backseat lay a tarpaulin with a pile
of limp furry bodies, mostly rabbits, squirrels and a couple of small birds.

“Ghastly of me. So sorry. I’m afraid I didn’t even notice they were there until after I’d arrived here at the station. I was
planning to take them over to the publican the day before yesterday—he makes the most fantastic game pie—but I completely
forgot, and now I suppose I’ll have to bury them. But then the dogs will only dig them up, so that won’t work either. Perhaps
when we get back to the house you could help me put them down the garburator.”

Mish made a gagging sound.

“I’m only kidding, of course. I don’t have a garburator.” Barnaby smiled. “I hope you won’t hold it against me.”

“We couldn’t care less,” Meredith lied. “We’re from Canada. We grew up trapping our own food and living in ice huts.”

“How fascinating,” said Barnaby, getting into the driver’s side.

Meredith couldn’t tell if he thought she had been joking or not. His mind seemed to be somewhere else. Without discussion,
Mish took the seat and Meredith perched as gracefully as she could on her friend’s bony lap. Mish poked her angrily the entire
way, and Meredith was feeling irritable and sore by the time they pulled into the gates at Hawkpen Manor.

The village of Stow-on-the-Wold was located in the damp heart of the Cotswolds, just down the road from Shipston-on-Stour
and halfway between Morton-in-Marsh and Bourton-on-the-Water. Hawkpen Manor was a fifteen-minute drive west of Stow, along
a winding series of country roads with towering cedar hedges that rose up impenetrably on either side of the road. The estate
itself was composed of several hundred acres of uncultivated moorland. On the eastern border, about half a mile in from the
road, sprawled the main house.

As they rounded the bend and it came into view, Meredith felt as though the air had been squashed out of her. A stadium heap
of golden Cotswold brick, the house reclined across the lawn like a sleeping lion. A shameless grin beamed out from its bow-windowed
front facade.

“You actually
live
there?”

“Oh, no,” said Barnaby, keeping his eyes on the road in front of him. “My brother and his wife do. I’m down the road in one
of the cottages in behind.”

There was a confused silence.

“Second-son syndrome, you see.”

“So your older brother got the house,” said Meredith.

“And the title, and the land. And I got the aviary—otherwise known as the unpolished jewel in the Shakespeare crown.” Barnaby
winked. “He lets me live in the cottage, but technically speaking, Nigel is my landlord. Law of the land. We’ve been invited
there for dinner tonight, by the way.”

Barnaby Shakespeare lived in Pear Cottage, a shabby outbuilding to the south. He pulled the car onto a grassy knoll beside
a little yellow-brick cottage with a moss-shingled roof. They climbed out of the car, and Mish and Meredith wandered inside
while Barnaby unloaded the trunk.

For a minute or two they were alone in the cottage. Mish looked around the main room, making goofy faces over the dilapidated
furnishings and dirty dishes, while Meredith sniffed the air.

“I think we should go,” Mish said in a flat, robotic tone.

Meredith started. “Why?”

Without taking her eyes off her friend, Mish pointed at the butcher’s block. On the block was a blood-splattered meat cleaver
and four black-and-yellow king cans of Double Diamond—one standing, three squashed.

“So what?” Meredith shrugged.

“So what if he’s a serial killer is what,” Mish hissed. “Think about it. All the signs are here. Lives alone. Socially isolated.
Has a predilection for murdering small animals—”

“He just happens to have outside interests, okay? It’s called a hobby. Which is more than I can say for you.”

“I have outside interests.”

“Such as?”

“Such as...” Mish searched, twirling a piece of hair between her thumb and forefinger. “Shopping.”

“That so doesn’t count.”

“Skiing.”

“One trip to Whistler with an ex-boyfriend six winters ago? Come on.”

Mish looked at the ceiling and bit her lip. “I read.”

“Being able to read is different from actually reading.”

Mish opened her mouth.

“And magazines don’t count.”

She closed it.

“Well, I give him points for the family spread,” said Mish. “I just wish you were dating his brother instead.”

“Mish, could you please not—”

Barnaby walked in carrying their bags and a few paper grocery bags and caught Meredith mid-hiss.

“Am I interrupting?” he asked, setting down their duffel bags and the groceries and removing a can of beer.

“Of course not,” Mish chirped.

Meredith shot her a poison look.

“We were just saying what a lovely place you have here. When exactly was it built?”

“The main cottage was constructed in the mid-seventeen hundreds, and then the kitchen and bathroom were added on about a century
later. I’m afraid it’s rather a mess.” He reached down and tried to push a bit of polyester stuffing back into a slash in
the sofa cushion, but it kept popping out the other side. Finally he gave up and walked over to the stove.

“Would you like a cup of tea?”

Mish and Meredith accepted, and once they had drunk it, Barnaby showed them to their separate rooms.