One Life Read online

  Further praise for One Life

  ‘A love letter to an unborn child that cuts to the core of what it means to be a man or a woman in the modern world’

  TONY PARSONS

  ‘An accomplished and startling debut novel’

  Daily Ireland

  ‘The author’s own experience of IVF lends authenticity to this charged tale of a career couple whose increasingly desperate attempt to conceive threatens to destroy their relationship’

  Grazia

  ‘Instantly engaging, this is a poignant account of a modern couple – their lives free and career-orientated – and how things change with the question of commitment and children . The subsequent quest to conceive in the face of infertility is frankly and movingly written’

  Big Issue

  ‘For fans of Maggie O’Farrell and Tony Parsons . this book is a must-read’

  Birmingham Post

  First published in Great Britain by Simon & Schuster UK Ltd, 2006

  First published by Pocket Books, 2007

  An imprint of Simon & Schuster UK Ltd

  A CBS COMPANY

  Copyright © Rebecca Frayn, 2006

  This book is copyright under the Berne Convention.

  No reproduction without permission.

  ® and © 1997 Simon & Schuster Inc. All rights reserved.

  Pocket Books & Design is a registered trademark of Simon & Schuster Inc.

  ‘The sea’s the home’ on page 3 © The Estate of Robert Lax

  The right of Rebecca Frayn to be identified as author of

  this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78

  of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

  Simon & Schuster UK Ltd

  1st Floor

  222 Gray’s Inn Road

  London WC1X 8HB

  www.simonandschuster.co.uk

  Simon & Schuster Australia

  Sydney

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is

  available from the British Library

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents

  are either a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Any resemblance to actual people living or dead, events or

  locales is entirely coincidental.

  ISBN-13: 978-1-4165-0270-8

  ISBN-10: 1-4165-0270-X

  eBook ISBN: 978-0-85720-375-5

  Typeset by Rowland Phototypesetting Ltd,

  Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk

  Printed and bound in Great Britain by

  Cox & Wyman Ltd, Reading Berks

  For Finn, Jack and Emmy

  The picture was scratched, and the soundtrack intermittently distorting on the bass notes, but all technical shortcomings were overridden by the sheer horror of the image that flickered there. Before us a woman writhed and howled, while between her splayed legs spilled liquid – more liquid than I’d ever imagined the human body could possibly contain. Convulsing and bellowing, she appeared to have no face, her features engulfed by the howling yawn of mouth. Then something crumpled and purple was at last expelled from her, slippery with blood and mucus, its goblin face also contorted by a high-pitched wail, its repellent appearance quite as alarming as the excruciating torments that had produced it.

  As the fluorescent lights fizzed and guttered into life again, Mrs Tanner stood with her hand at the switch, surveying the faces of the class, apparently amused at the dazed hush that had fallen across the room.

  ‘Any questions, 3R?’ she called cheerily, her voice coming from far away on the winds of whistling faintness. Her mumsy smile seemed sinister now, her very womanliness to embody treachery.

  Around me my classmates – thirty teenage girls contemplating their biological destiny. After all those years of shy allusions and giggling playground whispers, this then was what awaited us.

  PART ONE

  the sea’s

  the home

  from which

  i rose

  &

  homeward

  now

  the river

  goes

  Robert Lax

  1

  We might be children again as we sit here side by side, filled with anxious humility before this stranger, this infertility specialist, as he rests his pious gaze upon us. And now that we’re here, if we have to be here – I’m rather hoping he can write us out a prescription which could have it all sorted out without further ado. But it’s increasingly apparent from his melancholy patter, that our quest for a child will be an expensive and, quite possibly, a prolonged one. That the treatment will be invasive and the long-term health consequences unknown. That above all, there are no guarantees that we will have anything to show for all our trouble and expense at the end. Somehow the thing I had spent so much of my adult life fearing, has become the very thing I now sought in vain.

  In adversity, we quite naturally try to construct a narrative. To trace the underlying cause and effect that brought us to this sad and sorry place. And often I puzzle over how it was that the problems of infertile couples outlined so frequently and touchingly in news and human-interest stories somehow became our problem.

  My work as a photographer has always involved a total immersion in other people’s lives. Perhaps the time had come to give some consideration to my own.

  If this story began in that classroom, and reached crisis point in the doctor’s consulting room, what of the intervening twenty years? I see now that a perfectly pleasant, if uneventful, childhood was quickly overturned by a fierce adolescent hunger for life to begin. When I reached the age of eighteen, my parents gave me a Nikon camera. And after leaving college, I set off for India with the camera around my neck. Quite randomly and, as it was to turn out, fortuitously, I passed through Bhopal, where I spent some time documenting a family still struggling for survival after the Union Carbide disaster. The pictures I brought home had won a young photographers’ prize and, intoxicated by the notion of photo-journalism, I set forth on this new career without a backward glance. I wanted to be the next Cartier-Bresson. To take my place beside Salgado.

  But, though it pains me to confess it, the passing years have brought little but disappointment. Despite this promising beginning, I have languished almost entirely at the margins and learned to my cost how very hard it is, in a world awash with images, to make your mark.

  Yet I remain forever hopeful of a change of fortunes, ambition still burning undimmed. Absorbed in a commission, it’s as if everything else recedes. Ambient noise falls away. Peripheral vision closes down. On long assignments, I tumble exhausted into sleep, only to find I am struggling to frame my dreams. Sometimes, it is as if a tropical fever is running in my veins. Possessed, on fire, I am helpless in the face of its tyranny. And it’s tough on relationships. Tough in particular on Johnny.

  Johnny. The second great love of my life. It had been mutual friends, Tamsin and Pete, who introduced us, and my first impression was of someone long-limbed and stylishly dishevelled in a manner that for some reason struck me as rather French. But it was the whimsy of his smile that caught the heart, seeming to reveal an irreverence of spirit that continued, even all these years on, to disarm. I quickly learned that he was a man as easygoing as I was earnest. Certainly his job in advertising indicated someone entirely untroubled by the kind of high-minded ambition that so bedevilled me.

  Initially our differences in temperament had amused us. Then, when we began living together, they had become a source of conflict for a while. But over time, a mutual if sometimes grudging admiration had grown again between us. I always knew that it was the security of our relationship that freed me to pursue my career with such commitment, and was grateful for the safe port he offered once the fever
receded.

  Until one day, quite without warning, everything changed.

  * * *

  Along and particularly absorbing job had just come to an end. An inner London council had commissioned me to document their new pilot project, ‘Working for a Better Environment and Healthier Lifestyle’. And somewhat to my surprise, though I’d taken the liberty of broadening it into a rather more controversial and cutting-edge essay on inner-city alienation, they’d remained surprisingly accommodating. After much discussion we’d agreed a final portfolio. There’d even been talk of an exhibition that could tour local libraries and community centres. Privately I’d harboured a secret hope that the project might lead to a book of some kind. That at long last my career might actually be amounting to something of substance.

  So there I was, waking as if from a dream, stretching and blinking in the light of day. Focusing at last on my own surroundings. The house was a tip. Piles of paperwork that needed sorting. Bills that must be paid without delay. Unanswered messages from friends. I noticed for the first time there was a chill in the air, that the trees were bare. That winter had crept upon us.

  And there, I discovered anew, was Johnny. Beloved Johnny. Boyish of face and long of limb. I was present now in our conversations, ready to take up my share of domestic duties again, eager to resume all social engagements. I remember expressing surprise at how long his hair had grown, to which he had laughed in an unpleasant and puzzlingly sardonic manner. He had seemed quite uncharacteristically out of sorts that morning. But it was only later, when the terrible realisation came to me that I had forgotten it was his birthday, that the panic had set in. Of course I rang immediately in an attempt to make amends, and that evening was sincerely contrite. I was midway through cooking a conciliatory supper when he came in, and an assortment of hastily selected presents were wrapped and waiting on the side. But his manner was abrupt, and nothing I could say appeared to soothe him. He dismissed my abject apologies impatiently. It wasn’t that that he particularly cared about. It wasn’t any one thing, he said. The birthday incident was just indicative of a much bigger issue.

  ‘I mean, tell me something, Rose,’ he said suddenly. ‘Have you any idea what it is I’m working on at the moment?’

  He observed me intently, waiting.

  ‘Working on?’

  And though I’d rifled quickly through the flotsam and jetsam of recent information relating to his working life, it was undeniably true that shamefully little had come to mind. There’d been that soft drinks campaign. Though that had surely been and gone some time ago.

  ‘There. You see!’ The ease of his victory merely serving to further inflame him. ‘I was trying to tell you. Just the other day. Only it was perfectly obvious you weren’t taking a word of it in.’

  I remember being galled to have put up such a feeble performance. I remember suggesting sarcastically that perhaps he should find someone with a nice nine-to-five job. A dentist maybe. Or an accountant. And he had stared at me in silence for some moments. Certainly I remember a feeling of relief at having clawed back a little ground.

  ‘I suppose . ’ He had run a trembling hand through his hair, before rising in confusion to his feet, an inner agitation appearing to quite overwhelm him. ‘I suppose . ’ he had said again, the extent of his disarray quite perplexing me. Then he had turned quickly, distress giving him the face of a stranger. ‘I suppose what I’m trying to say is that I’ve had enough.’

  The shock had snapped my head back, as if I’d been dealt a physical blow.

  ‘I see.’

  ‘And I think we should go away somewhere and try and sort it out. Just spend some time together. Either that . ’ he had said with a ferocity I’d never heard in him before, ‘. either that, or call it a day.’

  ‘I see,’ I said again, giving him my full and undivided attention now. Listening not just to the words, but to the intonation and even the pauses in between. Outside, the winter winds shrieked a loud lament.

  ‘I’m thirty-six now. You’ve just turned thirty. We’re not kids any more. I mean, where’s this relationship actually heading?’

  And to my astonishment, I saw that I’d been waiting for this question to be posed for some time now. Here it was at last then. My wake-up call.

  2

  Ladakh, Cuba, Uruguay. The world at our feet. We pooled our money. I cleared my diary. Johnny’s agency gave him a month’s unpaid leave. Feeling suddenly free as birds, we agreed, finally, on Vietnam.

  In my rucksack somewhere was a postcard Tamsin had given us at a dinner party they gave shortly before we left. She had run after us, urgently waving it to and fro, while behind her a group of old friends had gathered tipsily at the open door, raising glasses and calling last farewells.

  ‘I completely forgot. This came the other day for Pete and me . ’

  Dear friends, it read in a scrawling hand. Have found Paradise on Earth and may be some time. It bore a Vietnamese stamp, a name, Xin Chao, and was signed simply ‘Bill’.

  ‘You remember him, don’t you?’

  Johnny had laughed, nodding. ‘Guess he had to cut and run. Too many women baying for his blood in this town.’

  Though I said nothing, the truth was I also remembered him only too well. I’d first encountered him at one of Tamsin and Pete’s famous Christmas parties. Pushing through the crush of guests in a low-backed dress, I’d felt the caress of a stranger’s fingers trace my spine, and turned quickly to find a man of striking beauty smiling boldly upon me. Up until then I’d known him by reputation only. He was an actor whose prolific and complex entanglements had become a favourite source of dinner party anecdote amongst our group. And despite the heart leap that he had startled in me – or perhaps because of it – I’d made a point of entirely ignoring him when our paths subsequently crossed, hoping to make it quite clear I was amongst a minority entirely indifferent to his charms.

  ‘Well keep an eye out for him will you?’ Tamsin had said. ‘He’s been gone a while now.’ We were huddled close, squinting against the fine drizzle blowing down the street. ‘And if you ever get as far as Xin Chao, send him home. We miss him . ’

  I held the card out to her, but she shook her head, already retreating through the rain.

  ‘No, no, take it. You never know when you may need an inside tip.’

  Beyond the hotel windows, the traffic noise of Hanoi hummed like tinnitus on the humid, diesel-choked air. Punch-drunk from the long flight, and felled now by heat, I could do no more than loll languidly. For some time I had watched the pallid geckos flick across the ceiling in staccato bursts, half-hypnotised by the blurred wheel of the ceiling fan, and its cool slipstream of displaced air. But Johnny sat at the rickety table, flicking determinedly through guidebooks and unfolding crisp new maps. The elation of arranging the trip had unaccountably waned. Our exchanges were irritably brittle, the unresolved resentments that had brought us here beginning to fester again. He rejected my suggestions, then I in turn rejected his. And the more brisk and purposeful he became, the more inertia paralysed me. With my eyes closed, I listened to the singsong fragments of conversation from the street and the frenzied din of traffic, the weeks before us stretching like a life sentence. We should never have come, I thought, humming tunelessly.

  ‘What about Tamsin and Pete’s friend?’ I opened my eyes again. ‘That “paradise on earth” place.’

  He sighed. ‘Don’t be ridiculous.’ He hadn’t even bothered looking up. ‘We don’t know anything about it.’

  ‘Exactly.’ It took all my reserves of energy to roll over and address him directly, an earthy scent of mildew rising up from the mattress. ‘We’re on an adventure, Johnny. Isn’t that what you do when you’re on an adventure?’

  He made no reply, absorbed in his pedantic search through the guidebooks. He began to read a passage on the sights of Hanoi, but he’d scarcely begun before I was shaking my head. It sounded everything I wanted to escape. And looking exasperated, he had hunted out the postcard, sm
oothing it flat, turning to cross-reference it with the guidebook.

  ‘“Designated a National Park in 1993, Xin Chao is an island of quite spectacular natural beauty, boasting unspoilt sandy beaches and dramatic forested inlands. The island has no mains electricity and limited water supplies, which combined with its sheer remoteness and protected status means that tourist facilities remain, for the time being at least, scanty.” ’ He picked up the postcard again, taking this in.

  ‘Are you really serious? It seems so random.’

  ‘Why not?’ I shrugged.

  There was a pause while he considered this, then to my surprise he had laughed, the idea seeming to catch him.

  ‘I suppose that’s right.’ He glanced at me appreciatively, the old recognition at last sparking. ‘Why not?’

  We took a night train to the south, waking to waterlogged paddy fields, then a cab to the coast, where we found ourselves standing, feeling a little foolish, at the water’s edge. Confused by our fumbling attempts at Vietnamese, the motorbike taxi had apparently abandoned us in the middle of nowhere. In the shade of beached fishing boats, three fishermen sat cross-legged, mending their nets.

  ‘Xin Chao?’ I said tentatively, addressing the eldest member of the group. But he had only shaken his head, looking puzzled.

  ‘Xin Chao?’ Johnny repeated. And this time the faces of all three men had instantly lit up, ‘Ah, Xin Chao!’ they chorused, nodding and smiling, responding with an animated explanation in Vietnamese. When we shook our heads uncomprehendingly, the old man mimed the motion of a boat, and appeared to be urging us to make haste. Then the three men had risen as one, pointing urgently away down the coastline, making encouraging gestures, as if to small children.

  So we set off briskly, swinging our rucksacks across our backs, each pressing the other to hurry, though neither of us were sure quite what it was we were hurrying for. Very soon we rounded the headland and came upon a small fishing port. And there, amongst the clustered fishing boats, a ferry – laden with animals and people and preparing to set sail.