Graham Swift - England and Other Stories

‘We’re thinking,’ the other one says. ‘Don’t talk, we’re thinking.’

Then the first one says, ‘No, you’ll have to tell us. We give up, you’ll have to say. I’m Matt, this is Jamie.’

‘I’m Holly and this is Polly. Yes, we know. But look now, we’re doing what Polly and me do all day, we’re making introductions. We’re clinical embryologists. Have you heard of those people? We spend all day looking at sperms. We’re experts on the little fellers. We pick out the good ones, the best from the rest, and then we introduce them to eggs. We say to them, “There now, say hello, youse two, and on you get with it.”’

And then the lights go off, or they go brighter. A turn-off or a turn-on. They might want to get mucky. And Holly can do mucky.

And they haven’t even seen the full picture.

You can’t make it happen. You can bring the parties together. But tell me, please, how does that happen? How does it happen that there was Holly Nolan, raised in a convent (though you might not think it) somewhere in Ireland and there was me, Polly Miller, meek and mild, but raised in a comprehensive in Bolton, both of us fired by the same thing (‘Sure, isn’t it the only subject now, the science of life?’), both of us getting, in different places, our B.Sc.’s and our certificates, so that she should cross the sea (it not being a field that Ireland’s big in) and we should meet in a brand-new clinic, in a clean white room with clean white counters and white expensive instruments, like two specimens ourselves in some sort of clinical trial, both of us in the pea-green scrubs we were provided with.

So that we would be introduced to each other.

‘I’m Holly.’

‘I’m Polly.’

‘Would you believe it? Hello, Polly. We’re to work together.’

‘Yes.’

‘In these things! Have I come all the way from County Kildare just to wear green?’

Both of us only twenty-three ( junior clinical embryologists), but both of us qualified and trained for a job that some people say is the job of playing God.

‘Well I like that now! Are we not a pair of goddesses?’

So that we would come together, so that it would happen. So that my life would at last begin.

When I’m out with Holly in a bar, teasing men, I sometimes see the touch of red in her black hair — what she calls her ‘burn’. I see her tarty brashness, what they think is her being up for it. I hear her unstoppable voice. I think: Not my type, not my type at all.

How wrong can you be?

‘Well now, Polly dear, there’s such a thing as the attraction of opposites.’

When she first arrived here she used to say things about her Catholic upbringing that could make me blush. Or blush inside. That could make me think: Hold on, that’s wrong, that’s blasphemous. She said that she and her convent-school friends used to sing a plainsong rendering of the sexual act, in Latin. And she sang it for me — intoned it for me — in her purest priestly voice:

Penem in vaginam intro-duxit.

To which the response was, as from a choir of monks:

Et semen e-mi-sit.

With a long sustaining of the ‘mi’ .

It was hardly filth, and it was Latin. And it had me in stitches. The stitches maybe hid the blushes. But it was the very idea of it, I suppose, the idea of singing such a thing as if it were a prayer. It was the feeling of a wickedness unavailable to such as me. Me with my godless (but chaste) upbringing. My only shred of religion was that I’d worshipped once my biology teacher, Sandra Rhys.

Which is only to say I felt jealous. Why should that be? Jealous of Holly and of her convent schooling and of her chorus of profaning schoolfriends.

‘I haven’t shocked you now, have I, Polly? In our line of business.’

And how many jobs are there — tell me one other — in which just along a corridor men go into little rooms and, well, as Holly would say, they engage in private devotion and offer themselves up into little jars, and the jars are passed discreetly our way for us to examine closely.

For a while we couldn’t mark the arrival of such a tribute without actually singing, softly, in unison, or wanting to sing:

Et semen e-mi-sit. .

I was even jealous of her familiarity with Latin. If you’re a biologist you need to know a little, but for her it had really once been a sort of second secret language.

‘ Introduxit ’—from introducere , to lead into or towards. The introduction business.

And it’s a serious one. We’re not God. We’re not playing either. Though sometimes you have to laugh. We’re the girls in the lab, the girls in the back room. It’s Dr Mortimer and his nurses who do the meeting and greeting and perform the intimate procedures, but we sometimes get to see the clients, to say hello to — Mr and Mrs Desperate. And Dr Mortimer, as he makes the introductions, will inevitably call us his behind-the-scenes angels, the ones who perform the real miracles. The smoothie. Or the buck passer, as Holly would say.

You have to laugh.

And we’ll sometimes see in the faces of Mr and Mrs Desperate the surprise, or sheer alarm, at knowing that their chances depend on such a pair of youngsters. Two girls in green. Or else see them thinking: Well it’s all right for them, it must be a lark for them, hardly out of school and with all their bits inside just as they should be, but not even thinking about it yet, not even caring about it. Though getting in plenty of practice, no doubt, on the preliminary activity.

If only they knew, if only they knew the real cause of our clinical detachment.

We don’t often think about it, but sometimes we do. We know that one day in a living room somewhere, because of something we’ve done in our clean white lab, and because the moment has come, Mr and Mrs Desperate will squeeze each other’s hand, and she will go to the bathroom where there’s the testing kit our clinic has provided. And he will wait, perhaps saying a small prayer. And a little while later they’ll squeeze hands again while they cry tears of joy. Or just cry.

What is it that makes things happen?

I thought, with all her mouth — a cherry-lipsticked gash of a mouth — and all the language spilling from it, she can’t be a virgin. But why should I have had that thought at all? She was twenty-three, and had crossed the sea. They grow up, don’t they, Catholics, with the Holy Virgin, they worship their Holy Virgin? Though hardly this one. But there wasn’t the mention or even the hint about her of any man. Despite all the mouth. Despite the way she could twist Dr Mortimer round her little finger. And that despite the fact that Dr Mortimer, good and caring gyno though he is, likes everyone to know that he does the charming round here.

Is she a virgin? Why should I even have thought it? In our line of business.

For the simplest plainest reason.

She said, ‘Are you doing anything tonight?’ Not of itself a remarkable question. But she said it in a certain way, with a certain tilt. She said it even, I like to think now, with a little toss of her hair. Except she couldn’t have done that in her scrub cap. And of course she was a virgin. For the same reason and in the same sense that I was. It takes one to know another perhaps, but there’s still the attraction of opposites.

The plain truth of it was that we ourselves were two Miss Desperates. There had never been, in all our years, for me or her, a ‘ penem in vaginam ’ situation. Oh the handiness of Latin. Though there had been some false introductions.

It takes some less time, it takes some perhaps, poor souls, much longer, but it had taken each of us all our lives to discover and acknowledge, then to nurse and hide, in our different ways, our secret. Both wondering all along, like good little girls intent on being pure even till their wedding nights, if there might be someone, the right one, one day, with whom we could share it.