In the Light of What We Know: A Novel Read online

  I was sitting in the garden when Emily appeared, her jacket unbuttoned and open, wafting her way through an overgrown path. She sat down beside me. She pinched her lips together and through those pinched lips she forced herself to speak.

  * * *

  I have always wanted children, said Zafar to me, going back even to my early twenties. I used to think there was something wrong with me. Young men, men in their twenties, they’re not supposed to want children, they’re not supposed to daydream about raising children, are they? If anything, the male role in childbearing—well, there is no role. It’s not his body that houses and feeds the baby, it’s not his belly that blows up and weighs him down, and it’s not from his body that the child is torn at birth. We might protect and provide for our mate, but that’s all. We’re supposed to want to play the field and sow our oats and have a good time and all the rest of it. But wanting children? That comes later, right? Yet that’s exactly what I wanted. Thirty years old and what I wanted most in the world was children. Maybe I wanted a child in order to repair my own childhood; maybe the desire was to fix something in me. But I don’t think so. This is what I think. Some things are random to our eyes because they are buried in our makeup, like the quantum mechanical randomness of the moment of a particle’s emission from the nucleus of an atom. The randomness might be real or only the projection of our inability to grasp what’s going on. I have the impression that women of our generation, the ones who have given so much to their professional lives, they think they can have children as late as forty. But it’s random.

  What is?

  Some women can have children later and some women cease to be fertile much earlier, at thirty-two even. So a lot of women get caught out because they leave it too late.

  Emily was which?

  She could have children then, at thirty, but my point is that some men develop the desire to have children at forty-five and some earlier. Maybe it was just that: my instincts, my drives, wired up to trigger a wish for children from the moment of my maturity. That’s not a purely random thing, but nor is it an explanation based on neurosis, on a desire to fix the past. After all, the same cause—a troubled childhood—could equally have left me not at all wanting children of my own.

  Emily said she was pregnant?

  I’d been in hospital five weeks and we’d last made love two weeks before I went in, two weeks in which I was unraveling and she was so very busy at work, so that when she told me about her pregnancy and I carefully pieced all this together—a herculean effort back then—I was able to work out that she was between six weeks and five days and seven weeks pregnant.

  I can’t tell you how happy I was, how deep the pleasure I felt as I sat on the bench and listened. Even as she looked afraid, I was smiling. If there was any sign of doubt in her face, I didn’t see it but saw instead only the fear that I took to be the lot of women. Can the word tearing ever be as vivid? But I was smiling at myself, smiling at my own reaction, which came over me completely. I was smiling because this is what I had always wanted, because I was completely ready for it, because I had always wanted kids and I thought I wanted them with Emily, and all this was in me there on the bench in the garden and so I was smiling.

  When I asked her if we could tell others, she replied that she wanted to wait a little, as people did, and do the telling herself, when she was ready, and I said I understood that. I was so understanding, you see, so bloody understanding.

  And one day I started talking about names. There are places in the world where infants aren’t named for weeks after they’re born, even months, where infant mortality is so high that parents don’t name children because they don’t want to get too attached. I think the naming thing was a big mistake, but she didn’t just go along with it, she was right there by me. I might have turned the key in the ignition, but she put her foot on the pedal; she talked about it again and again.

  Jasper, she said. She looked at me closely. Was I going to suggest something a little more in keeping with the child’s father’s heritage? Something Bangladeshi? Something Muslim?

  Or Charlotte, if it’s a girl, I said.

  I like Charlotte. Phoebe’s also nice, she added, still looking closely. Wouldn’t I make even a nod eastward, even sound out one of those transcontinental names like Jasmine or Sara? Or go exotic with Scheherazade or Salomé? But wait. Was she thinking about the last name, the surname, the family name? Was she assuming the child would get my last name, so that the first name could come from the West, the first name hers to choose? I hadn’t thought about marriage, not since she’d laughed when I proposed, but was this now on the cards?

  There aren’t many Hampton-Wyverns left, she said, just my brother and me.

  And your parents and your stepmother.

  She’s my father’s wife, not my stepmother, she snapped back.

  The point Emily was not going to make, because it involved a disagreeable idea, is that her father’s wife couldn’t have children and therefore couldn’t have children who would also carry the Hampton-Wyvern name—the disagreeable idea being that her father might have wanted children with his new wife, the younger Mrs. Hampton-Wyvern. Emily had told me that the woman was infertile—another instance of postcoital intimacy—but that only raises the question, how did Emily know this? I didn’t ask then because, when she was forthcoming, rarely enough, I didn’t dare interrupt, for I was ever curious to know what it was that she, of her own unprompted volition, wanted to say. But the question remains: In what kind of conversation does this arise? Daddy, are you going to have more children? And the father reassures his daughter, bending his new wife’s personal tragedy into the service of placating his children and easing his relations with them, Darling, we’re not having any other children. We can’t.

  I wonder, she said, if we might not give it my last name?

  That’s fine. I don’t care either way, I said.

  Which was a lie. How could that be the truth? The truth was that all those years ago, I had been charmed by her name. I had seen it first in a message for you on the notice board at college. I had seen it again on a flyer for a concert in the University Church, at the rehearsal for which I saw her for the first time, where she didn’t see me, and which encounter I never mentioned to her. What would I say? I was spying on you?

  The truth was that names meant something to me and her name meant everything. People surrender judgment for much less. Did you know that there are two ways to change your name in England? The first is by deed poll, an official document by which you announce your new name to the world. The second is when you’re baptized, when you announce your new name to God, and the law of the land bows to divine law. Giving my child her family name was an act of cleansing to me. However distasteful that now sounds, that is what it meant. It was a means of overcoming the bonds with bastardy, with my parents, overcoming bondage.

  In the first few weeks after leaving hospital, which were spent in Penelope Hampton-Wyvern’s house, I passed the days reading, sitting in the garden, or tinkling on the piano. Penelope was out most days.

  For seven weeks after Emily told me, we talked about the baby. We talked about names, I marveled at the technology of strollers, descendants of lunar modules, and we stopped in front of Baby Gap, where I pointed at the clothes and said how ridiculous it was to spend that kind of money on clothes for a baby but had to admit that the clothes were just too cute and the baby would look adorable in them and why not? We talked about cribs and I said I’d like to make one, and she gave me a curious look. We talked about how we would tell others when the time came. She would tell her mother first, she said, in reply to my direct question, then her father, and then we could set about telling others. But we never talked about marriage, apart from that one time, when her laughter had hurt, and even though, by the time of the pregnancy, I’d found an accommodation for it, so that the sting had all but passed, some vestige of pride or self-preservation had walled off the subject. Perhaps marriage didn’t matter to her, I
thought. After all, were we not an unlikely couple? Weren’t we forged in the furnace of modernity, two people sprung from their respective traditions? We were something else. Marriage was feudal, and she and I were the new republic.

  That was the story I told myself, but she asked me once if I’d thought about schools.

  I’ve been once. You think I should go again?

  For the child.

  I thought we might skip all that and raise the kid as a feral animal. Could be a neat experiment on language acquisition. What do you say?

  Do you have any objections to private schools?

  The penny dropped. The formula alone, private schools, said it all. Of course she knew I needed no translation—we’d had enough conversations in which public schools had figured, so why say private schools now? But wait. In those conversations where she’d mentioned someone’s schooling, she’d never needed to use that formula public school. After all, you don’t refer to Eton, the public school, do you? Everyone knows Eton, everyone knows Winchester, knows Harrow. She never needed to identify Harrow, the public school. Had schooling become a potentially divisive issue, now that a choice was to be made? Did she think that the phrase public schools drew attention to the inherent irony, that there was nothing public about them? Did she feel she couldn’t speak of public schools to me, who was educated, for want of a better word, at state schools, who must have come out thinking public schools were the devil’s own, the class divider, the fork in the road? Did she really think I would object? Did she not grasp how much I wanted to be rid of my history, not how little it mattered to me, but how much it mattered not to see my child walk any part of the road I’d traveled? It was no concession but a relief. The new republic would not be struck on the anvil of revolution, not if it meant such sacrifice.

  None at all, I replied. Nothing in the world matters to me more than to give the kid the best start in life that I can.

  She said nothing but somehow looked uneasy. There was a silence. I waited for a response.

  Have I misunderstood? Do you have objections to private schooling? I asked her.

  No, I don’t, she said, and she smiled, a smile to herself it was.

  I don’t know where that conversation was going. Her mother was at the front door, so it ended. And because something about it had made me uncomfortable, I didn’t raise the matter again.

  At fifteen weeks, it is fifteen centimeters long. Its sex is predictable with almost 100 percent accuracy. The it has become a he or she in progress. He or she can make his or her own independent movements. He or she is, in short, so easy to imagine that only with conscious effort can you not do so, and even then you will only be telling yourself not to think about something. Information paints a vivid picture, and that is why those who would limit a woman’s choice work first to have a woman informed, denying the right of a human being to choose how to be informed or to choose not to be informed. But what of the couple that decides to have a child? Who would deny them their daydreaming, his daydreaming and hers, the visions of a future human being?

  There were signs, but I didn’t notice them. She had, as I mentioned, sold her apartment while I was in hospital and was looking for another, staying with me at her mother’s place. I was barely involved in the process, visiting only one property with her, an apartment much the same, I thought, as the one she’d left, differentiated only perhaps by its better address, something I would never have understood but for my fast education on entering her world. In those seven weeks we never talked about where we—we three—might live.

  * * *

  I did not perceive the signs because I was in love in an altogether new way. How does one talk about such love? I loved the baby before it was born, before God made the heavens and the earth, you know, before the idea of nations, before any plant had found the memory of its flower. I would pester Emily in bed to let me listen, and I would announce at the slightest tremor, certainly imagined, that the child was a kicker. This one’s a kicker. I thought of how I would play with the baby and the toddler and the boy. I imagined making wooden toys, a doll’s house, a tree house, a rocking horse. I drew sketches. I considered kinds of wood. No plywood; the edges might splinter. I fantasized about answering the child’s questions. I liked doing that the most, Jasper asking questions, why after why, and I would give an answer and wait for the next why or say that I didn’t know but that we could find out, and we go to the library and look things up or sit at the computer, Jasper on my lap, and call up pictures of butterflies and dragons, and I tell him never to mistake the names of things for the things themselves, still less for an understanding of what they are, and I say this knowing it will pain me to watch him learn, for I know the cruel fact awaiting him, that understanding is not what this life has given us. And I lie in bed with him between us, Emily sleeping, her body that had so often coiled into a question mark now echoing the fetal position; she is asleep but not I, too afraid we might roll onto him, onto Jasper, and I whisper into the curl of his ear, Your father loves you all the way to infinity, adding under my breath, whose force terrifies me, and don’t you ever underestimate infinity. And I learn that when you hold seven or eight pounds of new human being in your arms, those seven or eight pounds teach you for the first time, against all the laws of science, how a thing can weigh so little and weigh so much. At another age I teach him chess and we start with a simple version of the game, each side with only a king, a queen, and a pawn, a new and familiar game, and I promise to play with one hand only, and he giggles and he moves the pieces helter-skelter and I move all three of my pieces onto one square and he giggles again because—it pleases me to believe—something in him understands something in me.

  There were other signs. There was a moment when I thought it would all come out. Emily, Penelope, and I were standing in the kitchen, Penelope making tea. She took a carton of milk from the fridge, and as the door moved on its hinges she paused, as if time had come to a halt, as if perhaps she had noticed the luster of her daughter’s skin or the softness of its edges.

  You look really rather well, darling, she said to her daughter.

  But I do not think Penelope considered any clearer notion than that. If the thought had traversed her mind, it had appeared so low on the horizon as to be barely visible. She might have shaken her head; I cannot say. Her daughter remained silent, and if I now remember Emily glancing my way, it seems equally likely that she studiously avoided my eyes.

  One day, seven weeks after I came out of hospital and only a few days after that incident in Penelope’s kitchen, Emily called me from work. I was sitting at an oak bureau in the office.

  I’m sorry, my love, she said. I’m sorry but I’m not ready. I want to have the child, but we’re not ready. Right now, you have to come first. We’ve got to get you better.

  I said nothing. If you know me at all, then you won’t ask why I acceded but why I said nothing. When I began to think about why, my answer first came in stages of error, approximating something hard to find, something obscured by layers of emotion. It seems the answer is, finally, rather prosaic. I believed that she needed me, that this bright and beautiful woman, who might possibly have no reason to love me, needed me now.

  I can’t do this on my own, sweetheart, she said. I don’t have the strength. Come with me. Will you hold my hand?

  When I try to remember the day itself, all I can assemble before my eyes are mere fragments, as if the sun that day fell in patches. We know or we believe that as well as taking the form of a wave, light has a quantum form of discrete packets. And, defying intuition, these two forms exist together, at the same time, if they exist at all. It is the simultaneity of opposites in one that pleases me, the coterminous existence of contradicting states. I never studied quantum mechanics or relativity; I was too much a pure mathematician in my youth. But now I’m glad I have only sketchy notions of such things, those notions that make their way into the popular consciousness, for the fuzziness around the fringes allows me to piece them tog
ether in such form as to make something consoling. I am reminded of what Einstein said on the death of his friend: He has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me. That means nothing. For us believing physicists, the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubborn illusion.

  * * *

  Late in the afternoon, even as dusk was coming in, we went south of the river, to a place where these things happen discreetly, privately, and conveniently, during hours that require no absence from work and no excuses. In the waiting room, I sat with her, holding her hand. I avoided eye contact with others, some couples and a few women who were there alone. I pitied the women on their own, and I sensed the couples clenching each other’s hands. Perhaps, I thought, this is a kind of death, numbness brought on by the vulgar reality of shame. I did not like that room.

  In the weeks and months to come, this particular day would return to me, not some uncertain date of an unfinished birth but this particular day with its uncompromising certainty. In the hour I waited, I grasped the nature of my own need. I needed to believe that what she had carried had mattered to her, maybe not as much as it had to me, but that it had mattered to her in some way. It would not be enough to hear it; I had to feel it in the muscle of my heart.

  Inside the cab I reached for her hand. What exactly had happened? I did not know. Does this mean, I asked myself, that back in the surgery, somewhere in that surgery, in some plastic bag or some disposal bin, imprinted with words like organic matter, is that where something is, something that isn’t a child but was the focus of a vision of the future, my vision, that had already acquired my love, not earned it, not deserved it, a love that went back through me, through generations upon generations of evolution? Can I ask what they did to you? I said to her.

  I had an ultrasound, she replied, and then they gave me a pill and I have to take another one in two days.

  Another ultrasound?

  Another pill.