Ark Baby (44 page)

Miracles. We had never imagined that we could produce offspring of our own, after what Dr Scrapie had said about the nature of the hybrid, but in this, as in many things, he was wrong. I am delighted to report that a happy event is on the horizon. Violet is now in what is termed a delicate condition.

‘I feel that it will be a girl,’ she said smilingly, as she told me the news. ‘We will have a daughter, Tobias.’ And I thought of little Tillie and felt glad.

So in our attic bedroom, Violet and I lie together on the big wrought-iron bed, and await the evolution of events.

On the mantelpiece sit the eight generations of gourd, and my whelk shell, and my fossil, and my fish-knife, and the jar that still contains my amputated tail. Above us, on the wall, hangs the picture of Noah’s Ark: God above, in a silver Heaven, with His great beard dissolving into the clouds of the flood-waters. Noah and his family on the deck. The beasts below, from mighty elephant down to humble ant.

And I think: We will call our daughter Tillie, and I will tell her the story of the
Ark.
But it will be a different story from the one Parson Phelps told me when I looked at this picture as a boy.

The story I will tell my daughter begins with the ocean. Huge. Ink-dark beneath a black sky. And a vessel, bobbing on the waters. A toy of wood and string.

But in this story, the
Ark
has no cages and no captain.

And there is land on the horizon. Look. A vast, bare continent, beneath a rainbow.

‘That continent is the future, Tillie,’ I will tell her. ‘It is waiting for us. We are its creatures.’

And a boundless hope floods my heart.

While writing this novel, I drew great inspiration from Edmund Gosse’s
Father and Son
, and Keith Thomas’s
Man and the Natural World.
I am also grateful to Nick Baker, Viv Black, Polly Coles, Valerie Jensen, Martin Lloyd-Elliott and Nick Royle for reading and commenting on the manuscript at different stages.

Liz Jensen is the author of
Egg Dancing
(long-listed for the Orange Prize),
The Paper Eater, War Crimes for the Home
(long-listed for the Orange Prize),
The Ninth Life of Louis Drax
, currently in development as a major motion picture by Anthony Minghella, and
My Dirty Little Book of Stolen Time.
She divides her time between Copenhagen and London.

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