Zia Rahman - In the Light of What We Know

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.