Bertie worked in an advertising agency and for reasons now already forgotten to her was in Belgravia, where Angus was facilitating a “Hackathon.” (Yes, really.)
Angus’s father was a QC and his mother a hospital consultant, and the family—a brother and two sisters—had been brought up in Primrose Hill, where Angus had a “pretty normal childhood.” Bertie had immediately mistrusted him. Nobody had a normal childhood.
He was in marketing, “an innovator,” which didn’t seem like a proper job to Bertie. “I’m in library services,” she said, because that was always a conversation killer.
“On the website,” he puzzled, “it says you’re in ‘community education.’ ”
“Same thing,” she said. “More or less.” She could never remember what her cover story was, she would have made a dreadful spy. “Community library,” she amended and his eyes duly glazed over at this information and he turned his attention to the twice-cooked baby chicken on his plate. Surely once was enough for the poor thing?
“… bluejacking… roadblocking…”
Angus was currently wearing a black T-shirt with a picture of Nipper, the HMV dog, on it. Beneath Nipper—and she really wished she didn’t know this—Angus’s chest was waxed. Nipper himself was beneath the Lloyd’s insurance building in Kingston-upon-Thames. Bertie hoped that she didn’t end up buried beneath a building. Or worse, excavated and put on show, like all those poor Egyptian mummies or the people from Pompeii, immortalized in their helpless death throes. Grandpa Ted wanted a woodland burial. (“An oak, if possible.”) “He’ll get what we give him,” Viola said. “It’s not as if he’s going to know, is it?” (But what if he did?) The fight over his corpse had already begun and he wasn’t even dead yet. Bertie loved her grandfather. Her grandfather loved Bertie. It was the simplest arrangement.
“… standout talkability…”
What on earth was she doing with her life? Could she just get up and leave?
“… hot linking…”
Viola was the last person she would ever tell about the men she dated. Bertie was thirty-seven—“and counting,” as Viola always reminded her in that giddy girls’-school manner she had sometimes. “Just jump right in! You don’t want to miss out on motherhood.” Bertie’s friends who were married with children—all her friends, in fact; Bertie had spent what seemed like nearly every weekend for the last five years at either weddings or christenings—all seemed in thrall to their children, each one a version of the Second Coming. None of these children seemed particularly attractive to Bertie and she worried that if she had a baby she wouldn’t like it. Viola came to mind. She hadn’t loved them, or it certainly hadn’t felt like it, and she definitely didn’t like them (although she seemed to like no one). “Liking doesn’t really come into it,” Grandpa Ted had told her when he was still capable of giving advice. “You’ll be besotted with your own.” Bertie wasn’t sure that she wanted to be besotted by anyone, particularly someone small and helpless.
“Your grandmother was besotted with Viola,” her grandfather said. So, it just went to show, anything was possible.
A long time ago now, before he left on his hegira, Sunny had got a girl pregnant. Viola had been aghast and then when the girl had a termination she was equally aghast. “No pleasing some people,” Sunny said.
Viola had started sending Bertie links to donor websites—sperm supermarkets where you could simply pick a gene packet off the shelf—Scandinavian, 71 kilos, 6' 1", blond hair, blue/green eyes, teacher—and pop it in “Your Basket.” “Danish is best, apparently,” Viola advised.
Of course, Viola was terrified that if she didn’t have grandchildren her genes would die and nothing of her would be left. She would cease to exist. Pouf! Viola was sixty now, always waiting for people to say, “Never!” Which they didn’t. “You may not think so now,” Viola said to her, “but when you get to fifty and turn around and find it’s too late for motherhood, you’ll be devastated.” Why did her mother always have to be so unnecessarily melodramatic? Because no one would listen if she wasn’t?
Of course, no one was more surprised than Bertie when two years later she had twins (and, yes, besotted), after marrying a perfectly straightforward man, a doctor (yes, that man on Westminster Bridge), and becoming, well… happy. But that wasn’t now. Now was Angus pumping the air with evangelical fervour as if he were at a prayer meeting and exhorting them to consider “sellsumers.” Bertie tried to divert herself by thinking of rhymes for Nonsense Man (Japan, frying-pan, catamaran, watering-can), but in the end she had to pull out scraps from the ragbag of loveliness that she was forced to carry around these days to protect herself from the evil materialist universe. (Was advertising the right profession for her?)