In 1960 people hadn’t started to admit freely that they couldn’t have children. The boom in fertility treatments, which changed all that, didn’t happen for another twenty years. If you were married and couldn’t have children, you either said you didn’t want them or you got them from somewhere else and often no one was ever the wiser. It was always a private affair, at times a dirty little secret. It wasn’t that surrogacy was a bad word; it wasn’t even a word yet, though up and down the country private agreements along those lines were being forged, as they had been for generations, among close family or friends.
I was never going to disappoint Vivi up there on the ridge that day, however much her suggestion had surprised me. It wasn’t so much that I’d decided, out of compassion, to give my sister the baby she so desperately wanted. I didn’t even consider turning her down. She’d made me feel so honored: Vivi had chosen me to be the mother of her baby. In the same way that I’d never have stopped her sharing my bed this morning, despite the intrusion and discomfort, I wasn’t going to turn down the chance of securing that everlasting kinship with Vivi by having her child.
Vivi was adamant that the surrogacy must be kept secret from everyone—apart from the three of us—so that there could be no possibility of the child stumbling across the truth of a lifelong lie and hating us for it, or of anyone else finding out for that matter. She said that having a secret from your child for their own good was one thing, but for a child to grow up amid a secret that everyone else knew was wrong and unkind.
Vivi especially didn’t want Maud and Clive to know yet. Of course, they knew she couldn’t have children but, for reasons I have never understood, she felt they’d be opposed to the idea.
“I said they might be against it,” she corrected me, as we huddled together in the cold on the ridge that day. “I don’t think they would necessarily,” she said quickly. “I don’t know what they’d think.”
She wanted us to get pregnant, before we let them in on the secret, in case they tried to stop us. She said at best they’d give us lots of opinions that would confuse us, and it should be for us, and us alone, to decide.
“I can make up my own mind, Vivi, and I’ve told you already that I’ll do it,” I assured her.
“Thank you, sweetie, I love you. You’re my best friend as well as my best sister,” she said in a pure rush of love that made me feel dizzy. “I just want it to be our secret to begin with, Ginny,” she said pleadingly. “We’ll tell them as soon as anything happens.”
“As soon as I get pregnant?”
“Yes, of course,” she said. “When you’re pregnant they can’t put us off.” She laughed.
I decided it came down to the difference in how we viewed our parents: Vivi had always seen them as working against her, while I always thought of them as on my side. If I could tell them once I was pregnant, I couldn’t see how it would make much difference to do as Vivi wanted. So it was agreed.
“Promise, cross your heart and hope to die,” she’d said.
“I promise.” I’d sincerely crossed my heart with my right hand to secure the pact and seal our fate.
We were still up on that frozen ridge when she told me her entire stratagem. Ostensibly Arthur’s visits to Bulburrow would be on business—an idea for a new wholesale bakery to supply the area—although they’d happen to correspond with my monthly estrus. She’d got it all worked out, as always.
So there we were, Arthur and I, alone for the first time in my bedroom, which was farther down the landing and on the opposite side to my parents’ room. It was the afternoon, just before teatime. Maud and Clive were busy in other parts of the house.
The first thing Arthur said to me, almost formally, was, “Ginny, I need to know that you understand what you’re doing, that you know you’re giving the baby away. It will not be your baby. You will not be its mother. Vivien will. Are you sure you want to do that?” He said it so very s-l-o-w-l-y and c-l-e-a-r-l-y, as if I were an idiot.
“Yes,” I said, my single-size iron bed looming between us as an overwhelming symbol of the enforced intimacy of the very near future.
“But you need to think about it,” he said, rather puzzlingly.
I find it a struggle to understand the complexities of people I know best, let alone decipher those I don’t. Surely in giving him the answer I’d already thought about it. I’ve learned that it’s futile to challenge anyone about why they say what they say, or mean what they don’t say. Mostly I try to humor them, saying and doing what will please them most, and hope it all becomes clear later. So, on the other side of that bed, which was glowering up at us in the hope of unification, I tried to act like I was “thinking about it” for a few seconds, as if “thinking about it” was something you did rubbing your chin and gazing skyward, but what I was really thinking was how odd it was that I’d never discussed the surrogacy with Arthur directly, not once. I’d only ever talked about it with Vivi. Occasionally she alluded to Arthur’s opinion on this and that aspect of the arrangement, but mostly she talked about it furtively and covetously, as if it were only our secret, which made me almost forget that Arthur was involved at all. She’d talked about how we would watch the child grow and progress, how she would teach it about the city and I would teach it about the country, so that I’d come to regard it as Vivi’s and my baby, not his. I’d considered him an inert part of the process, a catalyst—necessary for the reaction to happen but remaining unchanged at the end.
So until that moment I’d never actually considered Arthur’s feelings. I wondered if this last-minute deliberation meant he wasn’t as keen as Vivi on the idea. Perhaps he was looking for a way out, but I didn’t know whether it was because of the baby or because it meant having to have sex with me. Then I said, as thoughtfully as I could feign, “It’s not my baby. I will not be its mother. I understand that.”
He considered my response slowly and, for whatever reason, decided it would do. “Good,” he said, and relaxed. “Shall we get undressed?”
I quickly stripped off my skirt, underpants, blouse and bra and stood naked by the bed. When I looked up I found Arthur with his back towards me and a towel fastened round his waist. He was struggling to undress beneath it, as if he were changing on a crowded beach. Modesty about our bodies made no sense to me when we were about to do something as intrusive and intimate as sex.
“Oh,” he said simply, when he turned back to me holding, with one hand behind his back, the towel that covered him. He was looking intently at my face, as if he didn’t want to be caught ogling my body, but I couldn’t help staring at the towel. I would have liked to see the equipment we had to work with before we got started. This was sexual reproduction for reproduction’s sake only, so surely we could be matter-of-fact about it. We stood there uncertainly, hovering in hesitation.