If it is not too far-fetched a comparison, the sexual and cultural revolution we have experiencedthese past two decades is not a million miles away from the horticultural revolution that has takenplace in our herbaceous borders and sunken beds. Where once we were satisfied with our biennials,poorly coloured flowers thrusting weakly out of the earth and blooming a few times a year (if wewere lucky), now we are demanding both variety and continuity in our flowers, the passionatecolours of exotic blooms 365 days a year. Where once gardeners swore by the reliability of theself-pollinating plant in which pollen is transferred from the stamen to the stigma of the sameflower (autogamy), now we are more adventurous, positively singing the praises of crosspollination where pollen is transferred from one flower to another on the same plant (geitonogamy),or to a flower of another plant of the same species (xenogamy). The birds and the bees, the thickhaze of pollen these are all to be encouraged! Yes, self-pollination is the simpler and more certainof the two fertilization processes, especially for many species that colonize by copiously repeatingthe same parental strain. But a species cloning such uniform offspring runs the risk of having itsentire population wiped out by a single evolutionary event. In the garden, as in the social andpolitical arena, change should be the only constant. Our parents and our parents' petunias havelearnt this lesson the hard way. The March of History is unsentimental, tramping over a generationand its annuals with ruthless determination.
The fact is, cross-pollination produces more varied offspring that are better able to cope with achanged environment. It is said cross pollinating plants also tend to produce more and better-qualityseeds. If my one-year-old son is anything to go by (a cross-pollination between a lapsed-Catholichorticulturalist feminist, and an intellectual Jew!), then I can certainly vouch for the truth of this.
Sisters, the bottom line is this: if we are to continue wearing flowers in our hair into the next decade,they must be hardy and ever at hand, somethingonly the truly mothering gardener can ensure. If we wish to provide happy playgrounds for ourchildren, and corners of contemplation for our husbands, we need to create gardens of diversity andinterest. Mother Earth is great and plentiful, but even she requires the occasional helping hand!
Joyce Chalfen, from The New Flower Power, pub. 1976, Caterpillar PressJoyce Chalfen wrote The New Flower Power in a poky attic room overlooking her ownrambling garden during the blistering summer of '76. It was an ingenuous beginning for a strangelittle book more about relationships than flowers that went on to sell well and steadily through thelate seventies (not a coffee table essential by any means, but a close look at any baby-boomer'sbookshelves will reveal it lying dusty and neglected near those other familiars, Dr. Spock, ShirleyConran, a battered Women's Press copy of The Third Life of Grange Copeland by Alice Walker).
The popularity of The New Flower Power surprised no one more than Joyce. It had practicallywritten itself, taking only three months, most of which she spent dressed in a tiny t-shirt and a pairof briefs in an attempt to beat the heat, breast-feeding joshua intermittently, almost absent-mindedly,and thinking to herself, between easy-flowing paragraphs, that this was exactly the life she hadhoped for. This was the future she dared to envisage when she first saw Marcus's intelligent littleeyes giving her big white legs the once-over as she crossed the quad of his Oxbridge college,miniskirted, seven years earlier. She was one of those people who knew immediately, at first sight,even as her future spouse opened his mouth to say an initial, nervous hello.
A very happy marriage. That summer of '76, what with the heat and the flies and the endless melodies of ice-cream vans,things happened in a haze sometimes Joyce had to pinch herself to make sure this was real.
Marcus's office was down the hall on the right; twice a day she'd pace down the corridor, Joshua onone substantial hip, nudging open the door with the other, just to check he was still there, that hereally existed, and, leaning lustily over the desk, she'd grab a kiss from her favourite genius, hard atwork on his peculiar helixes, his letters and numbers. She liked to pull him away from all that andshow him the latest remarkable thing that Joshua had done or learnt; sounds, letter recognition,coordinated movement, imitation: just like you, she'd say to Marcus, good genes, he'd say to her,patting her behind and luxurious thighs, weighing each breast in his hand, patting her small belly,generally admiring his English Pear, his earth goddess . and then she'd be satisfied, padding back toher office like a big cat with a cub in its jaws, covered in a light layer of happy sweat. In an aimlesshappy way, she could hear herself murmuring, an oral version of the toilet-door doodles ofadolescents: Joyce and Marcus, Marcus and Joyce.
Marcus was also writing a book that summer of '76. Not so much a book (in Joyce's sense) as astudy. It was called Chimeric Mice: An Evaluation and Practical Exploration of the Work ofBrinster(1974) Concerning the Embryonic Fusion of Mouse Strains at the Eight-cell Stage of Development.
Joyce had read biology in college, but she didn't attempt to touch the many-paged manuscript thatwas growing like a molehill at her husband's feet. Joyce knew her limitations. She had no greatdesire to read Marcus's books. It was enough just to know they were being written, somehow. Itwas enough to know the man she had married was writing them. Her husband didn't just makemoney, he didn't just make things, or sell things that other people had made, he created beings. Hewent to the edges of his God's imagination and made mice Yahweh could not conceive of: micewith rabbit genes, mice with webbed feet (or so Joyce imagined, she didn't ask), mice who yearafter year expressed more and more eloquently Marcus's designs: from the hit-or-miss process of selective breeding, to the chimeric fusion of embryos, and then the rapid developments that lay beyond Joyce's ken and in Marcus's future DNA micro injection retrovirus-mediated trans genesis (for which he came within an inch of the Nobel, 1987), embryonic stem cell-mediated gene transfer all processes by which Marcusmanipulated ova, regulated the over or under expression of a gene, planting instructions andimperatives in the germ line to be realized in physical characteristics. Creating mice whose verybodies did exactly what Marcus told them. And always with humanity in mind a cure for cancer,cerebral palsy, Parkinson's always with the firm belief in the perfectibility of all life, in the possibility of making it moreefficient, more logical (for illness was, to Marcus, nothing more than bad logic on the part of thegenome, just as capitalism was nothing more than bad logic on the part of the social animal), moreeffective, more Chalfenist in the way it proceeded. He expressed contempt equally towards theanimal-rights maniacs horrible people Joyce had to shoo from the door with a curtain pole when afew extremists caught wind of Marcus's dealings in mice or theA hippies or the tree people oranyone who failed to grasp the simple fact that social and scientific progress were brothers-in-arms.
It was the Chalfen way, handed down the family for generations; they had a congenital inability tosuffer fools gladly or otherwise. If you were arguing with a Chalfen, trying to put a case for thesestrange French men who think truth is a function of language, or that history is interpretive and science metaphorical, the Chalfen in question would hear you out quietly, then wave his hand, dismissive, feeling no need to dignify such bunkum with a retort. Truth was truth to a Chalfen. And Genius was genius. Marcus created beings. And Joyce was his wife, industrious in creating smallerversions of Marcus.
Fifteen years later and Joyce would still challenge anyone to show her a happier marriage thanhers. Three more children had followed Joshua: Benjamin (fourteen), Jack (twelve) and Oscar (six),bouncy, curly-haired boys, all articulate and amusing. The Inner Life of Houseplants (1984) and acollege chair for Marcus had seen them through the eighties boom and bust, financing an extrabathroom, a conservatory and life's pleasures: old cheese, good wine, winters in Florence. Nowthere were two new works in-progress: The Secret Passions of the Climbing Rose and TransgenicMice: A Study of the Inherent Limitations of DNA Microinjection (Gordon and Ruddle, 1981) inComparison with Embryonic Stem (ES) Cell-mediated Gene Transfer (Gassier et al, 1986). Marcuswas also working on a 'pop science' book, against his better judgement, a collaboration with anovelist that he hoped would finance at least the first two children well into their university years.
Joshua was a star maths pupil, Benjamin wanted to be a geneticist just like his father, Jack's passionwas psychiatry, and Oscar could checkmate his father's king in fifteen moves. And all this despitethe fact that the Chalfens had sent their kids to Glenard Oak, daring to take the ideological gambletheir peers guiltily avoided, those nervous liberals who shrugged their shoulders and coughed upthe cash for a private education. And not only were they bright children, they were happy, nothot-housed in any way. Their only after-school activity (they despised sport) was the individualtherapy five times a week at the hands of an old fashioned Freudian called Marjorie who did Joyceand Marcus (separately) on weekends. It might appear extreme to non Chalfens, but Marcus hadbeen brought up with a strong respect for therapy (in his family therapy had long supplantedJudaism) and there was no arguing with the result. Every Chalfen proclaimed themselves mentallyhealthy and emotionally stable. The children had their oedipal complexes early and in the rightorder, they were all fiercely heterosexual, they adored their mother and admired their father, and,unusually, this feeling only increased as they reached adolescence. Rows were rare, playful and only ever over political or intellectualtopics (the importance of anarchy, the need for higher taxes, the problem of South Africa, the soulbody dichotomy), upon which they all agreed anyway.
The Chalfens had no friends. They interacted mainly with the Chalfen extended family (thegood genes which were so often referred to: two scientists, one mathematician, three psychiatristsand a young cousin working for the Labour Party). Under sufferance and on public holidays, theyvisited Joyce's long-rejected lineage, the Connor clan, Daily Mail letter-writers who even nowcould not disguise their distaste for Joyce's Israelite love-match. Bottom line: the Chalfens didn'tneed other people. They referred to themselves as nouns, verbs and occasionally adjectives: It's theChalfen way, And then he came out with a real Chalfenism, He's Chalfening again, We need to be abit more Chalfenist about this. Joyce challenged anyone to show her a happier family, a moreChalfenist family than theirs.
And yet, and yet.. . Joyce pined for the golden age when she was the linchpin of the Chalfenfamily. When people couldn't eat without her. When people couldn't dress without her assistance.
Now even Oscar could make himself a snack. Sometimes there seemed nothing to improve, nothingto cultivate; recently she found herself pruning the dead sections from her rambling rose, wishing she could find some fault of Joshua's worthy of attention, some secret trauma of Jack's orBenjamin's, a perversion in Oscar. But they were all perfect. Sometimes, when the Chalfens satround their Sunday dinner, tearing apart a chicken until there was nothing left but a tattered ribcage,gobbling silently, speaking only to retrieve the salt or the pepper the boredom was palpable. Thecentury was drawing to a close and the Chalfens were bored. Like clones of each other, their dinnertable was an exercise in mirrored perfection, Chalfenism and all its principles reflecting itselfinfinitely, bouncing from Oscar to Joyce, Joyce to Joshua, Joshua to Marcus, Marcus to Benjamin,Benjamin to Jack ad nauseam across the meat and vcg. They were still the same remarkable family they always hadbeen. But having cut all ties with their Oxbridge peers judges, TV execs, advertisers, lawyers,actors and other frivolous professions Chalfenism sneered at there was no one left to admireChalfenism itself. Its gorgeous logic, its compassion, its intellect. They were like wild-eyedpassengers of The Mayflower with no rock in sight. Pilgrims and prophets with no strange land.
They were bored, and none more than Joyce.
To fill long days left alone in the house (Marcus commuted to his college), Joyce's boredomoften drove her to flick through the Chalfens' enormous supply of delivered magazines (NewMarxism, Living Marxism, New Scientist, Oxfam Report, Third World Action, Anarchist's Journal)and feel a yearning for the bald Romanians or beautiful pot-bellied Ethiopians yes, she knew it wasawful, but there it was children crying out from glossy paper, needing her. She needed to be needed.
She'd be the first to admit it. She hated it, for example, when one after the other her children,pop-eyed addicts of breast milk, finally kicked the habit. She usually stretched it to two or threeyears, and, in the case of Joshua, four, but though the supply never ended, the demand did. Shelived in dread of the inevitable moment when they moved from soft drugs to hard, the switch fromcalcium to the sugared delights of Ribena. It was when she finished breastfeeding Oscar that shethrew herself back into gardening, back into the warm mulch where tiny things relied on her.
Then one fine day Millat Iqbal and Me Jones walked reluctantly into her life. She was in theback garden at the time, tearfully examining her Garter Knight delphiniums (heliotrope and cobaltblue with a jet-black centre, like a bullet hole in the sky) for signs of thrip a nasty pest that hadalready butchered her bocconia. The doorbell rang. Tilting her head back, Joyce waited till shecould hear the slippered feet of Marcus running down the stairs from his study and then, satisfied that he would answer it, delved back into the thick. With raised eyebrow she inspected the mouthy double blooms which stood to attention along thedelphinium's eight-foot spine. Thrip, she said to herself out loud, acknowledging the dog-earedmutation on every other flower; thrip, she repeated, not without pleasure, for it would need seeingto now, and might even give rise to a book or at least a chapter; thrip. Joyce knew a thing or twoabout thrip:
Thrips, common name for minute insects that feed on a wide range of plants, enjoying inparticular the warm atmosphere required for an indoor or exotic plant. Most species are no morethan 1.5 mm (0.06 inch) long as adults; some are wingless, but others have two pairs of short wingsfringed with hairs. Both adults and nymphs have sucking, piercing mouth parts. Although thripspollinate some plants and also eat some insect pests, they are both boon and bane for the moderngardener and are generally considered pests to be controlled with insecticides, such as Lindex.
Scientific classification: thrips make up the order Thysanoptera. -Joyce Chalfen, The Inner Life of Houseplants from the index on pests and parasites Yes. Thrips have good instincts: essentially they are charitable, productive organisms whichhelp the plant in its development. Thrips mean well, but thrips go too far, thrips go beyondpollinating and eating pests; thrips begin to eat the plant itself, to eat it from within. Thrip willinfect generation after generation of j delphiniums if you let it. What can one do about thrip if, as inthis case, the Lindex hadn't worked? What can you do but prune hard, prune ruthlessly and beginfrom the beginning? Joyce took a deep breath. She was doing this for the delphinium. She wasdoing this because without her the delphinium had no chance. Joyce slipped the huge gardenscissors out of her apron pocket, grabbed the screaming orange handles firmly and placed the exposed throat of a blue delphinium bloom between two slices of silver. Tough love.
"Joyce! Ja-oyce! Joshua and his marijuana-smoking friends are here!"Pulchritude. From the Latin, pulcher, beautiful. That was the word that first struck Joyce whenMillat Iqbal stepped forward on to the steps of her conservatory, sneering at Marcus's bad jokes,shading his violet eyes from a fading winter sun. Pulchritude: not just the concept but the wholephysical word appeared before her as if someone had typed it on to her retina Pulchritude beautywhere you would least suspect it, hidden in a word that looked like it should signify a belch or askin infection. Beauty in a tall brown young man who should have been indistinguishable to Joycefrom those she regularly bought milk and bread from, gave her accounts to for inspection, or passedher chequebook to from behind the thick glass of a bank till.
"Mill-yat Ick-Ball," said Marcus, making a performance of the foreign syllables. "And IrieJones, apparently. Friends of Josh's. I was just saying to Josh, these are the best-looking friends ofhis we've ever seen! They're usually small and weedy, so long sighted they're short-sighted, andwith club-feet. And they're never female. Well!" continued Marcus jovially, dismissing Joshua'slook of horror. "It's a damn good thing you turned up. We've been looking for a woman to marryold Joshua .. ."Marcus was standing on the garden steps, quite openly admiring Irie's breasts (though, to be fair,Irie was a good head and shoulders taller than him). "He's a good sort, smart, a bit weak on fractalsbut we love him anyway. Well.. ."Marcus paused for Joyce to come out of the garden, take off her gloves, shake hands with Millatand follow them all into the kitchen. "You are a big girl.""Er .. . thanks.""We like that around here a healthy eater. All Chalfens are healthy eaters. I don't put on a pound,but Joyce does. In all the right places, naturally. You're staying for dinner?"Irie stood dumb in the middle of the kitchen, too nervous to speak. These were not any speciesof parent she recognized.
"Oh, don't worry about Marcus," said Joshua with a jolly wink. "He's a bit of an old letch. It's aChalfen joke. They like to bombard you the minute you get in the door. Find out how sharp you are.
Chalfens don't think there's any point in pleasantries. Joyce, this is Irie and Millat. They're the twofrom behind the science block."Joyce, partially recovered from the vision of Millat Iqbal, gathered herself together sufficientlyto play her designated role as Mother Chalfen.
"So you're the two who've been corrupting my eldest son. I'm Joyce. Do you want some tea? Soyou're Josh's bad crowd. I was just pruning the delphiniums. This is Benjamin, Jack and that'sOscar in the hallway. Strawberry and mango or normal?" "Normal for me, thanks, Joyce," said Joshua.
"Same, thanks," said Irie.
"Yeah," said Millat.
"Three normal and one mango, please, Marcus, darling, please."Marcus, who was just heading out the door with a newly packed tobacco pipe, backtracked witha weary smile. "I'm a slave to this woman," he said, grabbing her around the waist, like a gamblercollecting his chips in circled arms. "But if I wasn't, she might run off with any pretty young manwho rolled into the house. I don't fancy falling victim to Darwinism this week."This hug, explicit as a hug can be, was directed front-ways-on, seemingly for the appreciationof Millat. Joyce's big milky-blue eyes were on him all the time.
"That's what you want, Me," said Joyce in a familial stage whisper, as if they'd known eachother for five years rather than five minutes, 'a man like Marcus for the long term. Thesefly-by-nights are all right for fun, but what kind of fathers do they make?"Joshua coloured. "Joyce, she just stepped into the house! Let her have some tea!"Joyce feigned surprise. "I haven't embarrassed you, have I? You have to forgive Mother Chalfen,my foot and mouth are on intimate terms."But Me wasn't embarrassed; she was fascinated, enamoured after five minutes. No one in theJones household made jokes about Darwin, or said 'my foot and mouth are on intimate terms', oroffered choices of tea, or let speech flow freely from adult to child, child to adult, as if the channelof communication between these two tribes was untrammelled, unblocked by history, free.
"Well," said Joyce, released by Marcus and planting herself down at the circular table, invitingthem to do the same, 'you look very exotic. Where are you from, if you don't mind me asking?""Willesden," said Irie and Millat simultaneously.
"Yes, yes, of course, but where originally'?""Oh," said Millat, putting on what he called a bud-budding-ding accent. "You are meaningwhere from am I originally."Joyce looked confused. "Yes, originally.""Whitechapel," said Millat, pulling out a fag. "Via the Royal London Hospital and the 207 bus."All the Chalfens milling through the kitchen, Marcus, Josh, Benjamin, Jack, exploded intolaughter. Joyce obediently followed suit.
"Chill out, man," said Millat, suspicious. "It wasn't that fucking funny."But the Chalfens carried on. Chalfens rarely made jokes unless they were exceptionally lame ornumerical in nature or both: What did the zero say to the eight? Nice belt.
"Are you going to smoke that?" asked Joyce suddenly when the laughter died down, a note ofpanic in her voice. "In here? Only,we hate the smell. We only like the smell of German tobacco. And if we smoke it we smoke itin Marcus's room, because it upsets Oscar otherwise, doesn't it, Oscar?""No," said Oscar, the youngest and most cherubic of the boys, busy building a Lego empire, "Idon't care.""It upsets Oscar," repeated Joyce, in that stage-whisper again. "He hates it."Till.. . take ... it... to ... the .. . garden," said Millat slowly, in the kind of voice you use on theinsane or foreign. "Back ... in ... a ... minute."As soon as Millat was out of earshot, and as Marcus brought over the teas, the years seemed to fall like dead skin from Joyce and she bent across the table like a schoolgirl. "God, he's gorgeous,isn't he? Like Omar Sharif thirty years ago. Funny Roman nose. Are you and he .. . ?""Leave the girl alone, Joyce," admonished Marcus. "She's hardly going to tell you about it, isshe?""No," said Irie, feeling she'd like to tell these people everything. "We're not.""Just as well. His parents probably have something arranged for him, no? The headmaster toldme he was a Muslim boy. I suppose he should be thankful he's not a girl, though, hmm?
Unbelievable what they do to the girls. Remember that Time article, Marcus?"Marcus was foraging in the fridge for a cold plate of yesterday's potatoes. "Mmm.
Unbelievable.""But you know, just from the little I've seen, he doesn't seem at all like most Muslim children. Imean, I'm talking from personal experience, I go into a lot of schools with my gardening, workingwith kids of all ages. They're usually so silent, you know, terribly meek but he's so full of... spunk!
But boys like that want the tall blondes, don't they? I mean, that's the bottom line, when . they'rethat handsome. I know how you feel... I used to like the troublemakers when I was your age, butyou learn later, you really do. Danger isn't really sexy, take my word for it. You'd do a lot better with someone like Joshua.""Mum!""He's been talking about you non-stop all week.""Mum!"Joyce faced her reprimand with a little smile. "Well, maybe I'm being too frank for you youngpeople. I don't know ... in my day, you just were a lot more direct, you had to be if you wanted tocatch the right man. Two hundred girls in the university and two thousand men! They were fightingfor a girl but if you were smart, you were choosy.""My, you were choosy," said Marcus, shuffling up behind her and kissing her ear. "And withsuch good taste."Joyce took the kisses like a girl indulging her best friend's younger brother.
"But your mother wasn't sure, was she? She thought I was too intellectual, that I wouldn't wantchildren.""But you convinced her. Those hips would convince anyone!""Yes, in the end .. . but she underestimated me, didn't she? She didn't think I was Chalfenmaterial.""She just didn't know you then.""Well, we surprised her, didn't we!""A lot of hard copulation went into pleasing that woman!""Four grandchildren later!"During this exchange, Me tried to concentrate on Oscar, now creating an ouroboros from a bigpink elephant by stuffing the trunk into its own rear end. She'd never been so close to this strangeand beautiful thing, the middle class, and experienced the kind of embarrassment that is actuallyintrigue, fascination. It was both strange and wondrous. She felt like the prude who walks through anudist beach, examining the sand. She felt like Columbus meeting the exposed arawaks, notknowing where to look.
"Excuse my parents," said Joshua. They can't keep their hands off each other."But even this was said with pride, because the Chalfen children knew their parents were rarecreatures, a happily married couple, numbering no more than a dozen in the whole of Glenard Oak.
Me thought of her own parents, whose touches were now virtual, existing only in the absenceswhere both sets of fingers had previously been: the remote control, the biscuit tin lid, the lightswitches.
She said, "It must be great to feel that way after twenty years or whatever."Joyce swivelled round as if someone had released a catch. "It's marvelous! It's incredible! Youjust wake up one morning and realize monogamy isn't a bind it sets you free! And children need togrow up around that. I don't know if you've ever experienced it you read a lot about howAfro-Caribbeans seem to find it hard to establish long-term relationships. That's terribly sad, isn't it?
I wrote about one Dominican woman in The Inner Life of Houseplants who had moved her pottedazalea through six different men's houses; once by the windowsill, then in a dark corner, then in thesouth-facing bedroom, etc. You just can't do that to a plant."This was a classic Joyce tangent, and Marcus and Joshua rolled their eyes, affectionately.
Millat, fag finished, sloped back in.
"Are we going to get some studying done, yeah? This is all very nice but I want to go out thisevening. At some point."While Me had been lost in her reveries assessing the Chalfens like a romantic anthropologist,Millat had been out in the garden, looking through the windows, casing the joint. Where Me sawculture, refinement, class, intellect, Millat saw money, lazy money, money that was just hangingaround this family not doing anything in particular, money in need of a good cause that might aswell be him.
"So," said Joyce, clapping her hands, trying to keep them all in the room a little longer, trying tohold off, for as long as possible, the reassertion of Chalfen silence, 'y u're all going to be studyingtogether! Well, you and Me are really welcome. I was saying to your headmaster, wasn't I, Marcus,that this really shouldn't feel like punishment. It's not exactly a heinous crime. Between us, I usedto be a pretty good marijuana gardener myself at one time .. .""Way out," said Millat.
Nurture, thought Joyce. Be patient, water regularly and don't lose your temper when pruning.
'.. . and your headmaster explained to us how your own home environments aren't exactly .. .
well .. . I'm sure you'll find it easier to work here. Such an important year, the GCSEs. And it's soobvious that you're both bright anyone can tell that just by looking at your eyes. Can't they,Marcus?"Josh, your mother's asking me whether IQ expresses itself in the secondary physicalcharacteristics of eye colour, eye shape, etc. Is there a sensible answer to this inquiry?"Joyce pressed on. Mice and men, genes and germs, that was Marcus's corner. Seedlings, lightsources, growth, nurture, the buried heart of things that was hers. As on any missionary vessel,tasks were delegated. Marcus on the prow, looking for the storm. Joyce beneath deck, checking thelinen for bedbugs.
"Your headmaster knows how much I hate to see potential wasted that's why he sent you to us.""And because he knows most of the Chalfens are four hundred times smarter than him!" said Jack, doing a star jump. He was still young and hadn't yet learnt to demonstrate his pride in hisfamily in a more socially acceptable manner. "Even Oscar is.""No, I'm not," said Oscar, kicking in a Lego garage he had recently made. "I'm the stupidest inthe world.""Oscar's got an IQ of 178," whispered Joyce. "It's a bit daunting, even when you're his mum.""Wow," said Me, turning, with the rest of the room, to appreciate Oscar trying to ingest the headof a plastic giraffe. "That's remarkable.""Yes, but he's had everything, and so much of it is nurture, isn't it? I really believe that. We'vejust been lucky enough to give him so much and with a daddy like Marcus it's like having a strongsunbeam shining on him twenty-four hours a day, isn't it, darling? He's so fortunate to have that.
Well, they all are. Now, you may think this sounds strange, but it was always my aim to marry aman cleverer than me." Joyce put her hands on her hips and waited for Me to think that soundedstrange. "No, I really did. And I'm a staunch feminist, Marcus will tell you.""She's a staunch feminist," said Marcus from the inner sanctum of the fridge.
"I don't suppose you can understand that your generation have different ideas but I knew itwould be liberating. And I knew what kind of father I wanted for my children. Now, that's surprisedyou, hasn't it? I'm sorry, but we really don't do small talk around here. If you're going to be hereevery week, I thought it best you got a proper dose of the Chalfensrnow."All the Chalfens who were in earshot for this last comment smiled and nodded.
Joyce paused and looked at Me and Millat the way she had looked at her Garter Knightdelphinium. She was a quick and experienced detector of illness, and there was damage here. Therewas a quiet pain in the first one (Irieanthits negressium marcus ilia a lack of a father figure perhaps,an intellect untapped, a low self-esteem; and in the second (Millaturea. brandolidia joyculatus)there was a deeper sadness, a terrible loss, a gaping wound. A hole that needed more than educationor money. That needed love. Joyce longed to touch the site with the tip of her Chalfen green fingerclose the gap, knit the skin.
"Can I ask? Your father? What does he?"(Joyce wondered what the parents did, what they had done.
When she found a mutated first bloom, she wanted to know where the cutting had come from.
Wrong question. It wasn't the parents, it wasn't just one generation, it was the whole century. Notthe bud but the bush.)"Curry-shifter," said Millat. "Bus-boy. Waiter.""Paper," began Irie. "Kind of folding it ... and working on things like perforations .. . kind ofdirect mail advertising but not really advertising, at least not the ideas end .. . kind of folding ' Shegave up. "It's hard to explain.""Oh yes. Yes, yes, yes. When there's a lack of a male role model you see .. . that's when thingsreally go awry, in my experience. I wrote an article for Women's Earth recently. I described a schoolI worked in where I gave all the children a potted Busy Lizzie and told them to look after it for aweek like a daddy or mummy looks after a baby. Each child chose which parent they were going toemulate. This lovely little Jamaican boy, Winston, chose his daddy. The next week his motherphoned and asked why I'd asked Winston to feed his plant Pepsi and put it in front of the television.
I mean, it's just terrible, isn't it. But I think a lot of these parents just don't appreciate their children sufficiently. Partly, it's the culture, you know? It just makes me so angry. The only thing I allowOs............