THE MAKINGS OF EMILY JENSEN
The inciting incident
When Francesca Jensen’s waters broke during an arts programme interview on her local television station – an interview she was unfortunately in the process of conducting rather than simply watching from the discomfort of her own home – she reassured herself that life, which she had hitherto planned to the very last letter, could never again become more mortifying.
She really had no idea.
There was little need for Francesca to swiftly phone her best friend and birthing- partner, the screenwriter Megan Peabody, when the incident happened. Megan had fortuitously been the programme’s guest interviewee that same early Wednesday evening.
This was probably the only stroke of luck on so memorable a day. The originally- invited subject, a well-known film director, had come down with a nasty and very public case of Me Too, so Megan, who by good fortune lived quite near Francesca on the Kent coast and hadn’t harassed anyone recently, was hauled briskly in.
As Megan hadn’t had a screenplay produced in the past few years and had frankly admitted to Francesca that she didn’t currently have a thought in her head, having recently fallen in love with and married, for the first and blissfully unexpected time, an older and very influential man, Francesca decided to devote the entire segment to writer’s block.
She had thought this quite ingenious and it was going rather swimmingly until, as her friend later referred the incident to all and sundry, ‘le deluge, after moi’. (In fact, it had also ironically provided this resting screenwriter with her first cinematic idea in some time, in which intriguingly each character, major or minor, has their own story to tell, in his or her own individual way. Which was, of course, quite exciting but rather defeated the object of this particular exercise.)
Yet naturally, for so creative an endeavour, this screenwriter demanded far more details than Francesca, despite being Megan Peabody’s absolutely best and most loyal friend since Cambridge, had rather selfishly been highly reluctant to impart. Details such as, first and foremost, who the hell was the father?
If her BFF didn’t enlighten her by the time the baby, a little girl called Emily Jane Jensen (Francesca has never cared for surprises) chose to enter the world, then she could forget about any future babysitting.
And Francesca, despite being a resolutely single mum-to-be and a devout control-freak, would still need all the help she could get.
*****
“Alright Megan, I’ll bloody tell you!“ shrieked Francesca Jensen from her prone position, “but can we get out of the sodding ambulance first?”
“Don’t mind us, love,” encouraged the kindly paramedic, “it’s stories like these that make the job.”
“I had the birth heavily-pencilled for next week!” muttered the expectant passenger, which the men took to be just the usual ramblings of a mother-to-be in extremis but Megan knew to be utterly symptomatic of her friend’s freakish obsession with planning, (family and otherwise)
As it happens Francesca had plenty of time in the maternity wing of her local hospital, if not exactly an unbounded inclination, to tell Megan Peabody everything the happily un-pregnant woman dearly yearned to know. And, of course, her friend had all the time of the world. Megan had no children of her own to whom to attend but had recently and happily acquired two delightful stepchildren (‘polysyllabic conversation and no stretchmarks.’)
It took a while for Francesca to get fully into her stride. Setting aside the pain, which she had been assured, by spasmodically attending professionals, would be of some duration, increased frequency and could only become worse, the disgruntled patient had been unnerved to discover one of her second year Film Studies students in the reception area, for reasons that weren’t immediately apparent.
Of course all her students, at the nearby university where she taught, knew that she was pregnant – Film Studies is a visual subject - but none were aware that there wasn’t a resident father involved. Now Francesca suspected that the intrigued young person would logically assume the rather glamorous Megan to be partner in all senses of the word and was giddily speculating on the exact provenance and manufacturing process of the child in question. Well, so be it. It was probably a more intriguing story than the truth, which stories often are. Although Megan Peabody might soon choose to disagree.
Francesca suddenly wondered, with a markedly different spasm of discomfort, whether news of this evening’s eventful and possibly unique television interview had already spread around the campus of The University of the Cinque Ports (formerly Dymchurch Tech) and heaven forbid way beyond.
After all, as she would be the first to admit, Francesca Jensen was rather well-known and not simply in academic circles. As ‘The Popcorn Pundit’ her film reviews of blockbuster movies reached that wide audience of the cinema-going public who didn’t regard the notion of mainstream entertainment as something to be avoided like Ebola. The fact that she was an extremely attractive, flame-haired academic in her late thirties didn’t exactly hinder her desirability as the go-to person, whenever TV companies needed intelligent and intelligible commentary on some movie-related news.
She also wondered briefly whether her long affair with a married professor in the History Department had been quite as secret as she might have supposed.
“Well, it can’t be Henry Montague, can it?” said Megan, just to get the conversational ball rolling, when the two of them were finally on their own and temporarily unbothered by nurses and midwives. “Everyone knows he’s had the snip.”
Francesca didn’t bother to question her friend on exactly how the world would be so well-informed about a medieval history professor’s reproductive potential or lack of it, as she now recalled telling Megan that this was one of her reasons for concluding the relationship. In fact the foremost one. At the age of thirty-nine, with her clock ticking like Big Ben on crack, Francesca Jensen had quite unexpectedly, yet utterly desperately, wanted a child. Not just intellectually, where her desires usually found their most fertile ground, but with every cell of her yearning body.
“No, of course it wasn’t Henry. That was over some time ago. But good while it
lasted. Well …” she paused, before employing her own favoured reviewing system, “three tubs of popcorn… out of five.”
Megan decided to keep her own counsel. She realised that her dear friend, despite the mounting unpleasantness, could well be on a roll. And now was certainly not the time to stem the (confessional) flow. Not if she wanted to hear every last juicy detail.
“I didn’t want or need another relationship,” continued the woman squirming on the bed. “It was all too raw after Henry and there was absolutely no one on the horizon, married or otherwise. As you well know. And, of course, time was running out. Or at least I felt it was. So I decided to immerse myself in a new and all-consuming project. With my usual meticulous attention to detail. No prizes for guessing.”
Megan merely nodded her rigorously-coiffeured head in the direction of the massive bump. She wouldn’t have been surprised if there weren’t a whole troupe of Jensens lodging in there, although she had been reassured several times that it was a single occupancy.
The writer had of course known, or at least suspected, that her dear friend had been searching for some time for an ‘A-list’, cordon bleu, Nobel-worthy sperm donor. A top seed in the high-stakes game of reproduction.
Someone entirely of her own choosing, not selected from some vaguely untrustworthy computerised depository, with only a top-shelf magazine for encouragement. This had to be an intensely eligible male, with all the appropriate genes and qualifications and, of course, total obliviousness to the mental spread-sheet that had been constructed with Francesca’s customary attention to detail. Someone preferably from well outside this green and pleasant land, whom Francesca would hopefully never meet again, but of whom she would be forever reminded in a fulfilling and biologically nourishing way.
“So,” asked Megan, disapproval not entirely absent from her voice but hopefully masked by an overwhelming curiosity, “who was the ’lucky man’? Did all your meticulous planning work out as planned? Knowing you, I can only assume that it did.”
She looked into her friend’s contorted face but couldn’t quite decide whether it was contractions or recollection causing the oddly disturbing rictus. “Tell me quickly,” she encouraged, “before you’re in too much agony to do anything aside from scream.”
Wondering once again whether Megan Peabody might not have been the most prudent choice of partner on this momentous journey, Francesca began her tale.
The Mother’s Story
O-kay. So, you may recall that some months ago, well nine months ago obviously, there was the first ever Cambridge Spy Film Festival. I’m surprised they’d never done it before, considering this is where all the best spies came from. Not ours unfortunately but of course that just adds to the intrigue.
It was a no-brainer that I’d attend. In fact I’d been asked to introduce the Harry Palmer retrospective, commencing naturally with The Ipcress File. Actually I’d been hoping they’d offer me John le Carre Day, but they got a real spy to do that gig, one of ours this time, so I couldn’t really complain.
Naturally everyone who was anyone in Film Studies and Critical Theory was there. And I had heard through the grapevine that they’d even invited Seymour Brodsky himself, from The California Institute of the Arts, to give his seminal lecture Matt Helm vs Our Man Flint. I’d met Seymour on Zoom a couple of times and approved of everything about him. Extremely tall, rather good-looking, Harvard educated, funny, ferociously bright and single. What’s not to like? So, I took one deep breath and decided to resume contact before the main event.
We seemed genuinely to click across the cyberverse – hate that word! - and I did believe he was being politely flirty. Nothing crude or lascivious but a definite spark in those intelligently cool, blue, patrician East Coast eyes. So when I heard that he was definitely flying over to Cambridge, I suggested that I take him for dinner, as this was my sphere of operations, so to speak. England in general I mean, not specifically fine-dining Cantab.
As hoped, my esteemed invitee very graciously jumped at the chance. Which I found promising. So, that was the first box ticked.
I took him on arrival to our old college, because as you know Emmanuel makes a big thing that John Harvard himself had studied there, and of course they had even preserved his old room, although God knows how they could have divined at that stage who he was going to be. Anyway, Seymour thought it rather charming.
The meal itself, at The University Arms Hotel, where we both fortuitously happened to be staying, was suitably delicious. As, even though I say it myself, was yours truly. And so indeed, after all this fervid anticipation, was the aforesaid Mr Brodsky. A paean to natural selection. I could almost feel my ovaries humming over the beautifully presented sea bass. Oh don’t make that face, Megan!
So that’s when I plucked up all my courage – I wasn’t quite as brazen as I might sound right now (despite these bloody contractions) – and a bottle of fine red claret certainly helped. As the meal was drawing to its caffeinated conclusion, by which time I had almost exhausted my repertoire of meaningful looks, I finally offered up my carefully prepared and oft-rehearsed line.
“This may surprise you, Seymour,” I began somewhat coyly, glancing slowly up at him across the candlelit table, “but I haven’t been with a man – you know, like this – for some time.”
He gave me the most appealing smile. “Oh, I have,” he said.
Shit! I thought, feeling the ‘optimum-fertility’ window slamming shut like an Old Bailey cell. How did I get the bloody signs so wrong? As you know, I’m feted in academic circles for my research.
So, anyway, I swiftly decided sod this for a game of soldiers - if I scurry I might just catch the late night champagne screening of ‘Modesty Blaise – the director’s cut’ at Trinity College. And that’s exactly what I did, with very pricey sea bass and red wine and Irish coffee sloshing inside me all the way down Kings Parade.
Which is how, serendipitously, I met little Emily’s rather gorgeous, albeit home-grown, alpha-male, PhD dad.
Megan, does this baby seem to be taking a hell of a long time? … No, I do know you’re not a bloody midwife. .. I am getting to the good bit. Please don’t rush me.
Okay. Cut to Trinity College…
He was perched on a bar-stool when I came out of the viewing-room, halfway through the film. I was sneezing fit to bust, so I barely noticed him at first. It was only when he spoke to me that I fully turned to face him over my hankie.
As I said, he was rather good-looking, in a far more rugged, earthy sort of way than the poor guy I had just left back at the hotel. He was clad in a smart dinner-jacket, you know, the way guys at Oxbridge seem to do on every conceivable occasion. Clearly he’d been to a far posher do than a Modesty Blaise retrospective.
“Don’t be upset,” he said, nodding his very slightly greying but reassuringly bushy head towards my streaming eyes. “It’s only a film.”
“Eh? .. It’s not the film, for pity’s sake,” I told him. “It’s your bloody weather!” That’s when I segued into more sneezing, which isn’t my most attractive function, but you know me and my allergies. “Every time I come here! I swear there’s a fen or something with my name on it.”
He picked up an open bottle of rather good red wine from the table beside him and found a couple of glasses behind the unmanned bar.
“On behalf of the whole of irritating East Anglia,” he smiled, pouring the wine, “I apologise.” I couldn’t make out his accent. It was English, but not posh English. So he had clearly arrived here on merit, which was promising. As you know, I’m not a snob. … I’m not, Megan! He offered me a rather full glass. “Here, have something to warm you up,” he said, quite charmingly.
He clinked the glasses and our eyes fully met for the first time. And for maybe a fraction of a second too long. He had soft brown eyes you could get quite lost in. And a wide, crinkly smile that animated his whole face. He really was quite attractive.
“So why aren’t you in there?” I asked, nodding towards the little makeshift cinema.
“Because the booze is out here.” He nodded towards the pretty decent Cabernet. “‘Wet work’. That’s a CIA - .”
“I know what it is!” I looked back towards the cinema. “I suppose I should go back in.”
“What the hell for?”
“It’s my job.”
“Watching crap old movies? Any vacancies?”
“I’m a senior lecturer in Film and Communications Studies,” I explained. “I’ve been referencing this film for three years – it was directed in 1966 by the great Joseph Losey. Pinter co-wrote the screenplay. And I’ve never actually managed to see it through to the end. It’s quite seminal - .”
He just laughed at this. Rather a lot. I could have taken offence but I actually found myself laughing with him. That’s when he sat down quite close to me.
“Not a course we do here in Cambridge, is it?” he said. “Y’know, Film - .
“Well, that’s where you don’t quite cut it, isn’t it?” I said, a bit sharply. “I’m at the University of the Cinque Ports.”
“Oh yeah. Dymchurch Tech. I had a friend who moved down that way.”
“Uh huh,” I opined. “And I suppose you’re a rocket scientist.”
“Me?“ he smiled again, with that smile he probably keeps for such occasions. Then he put on a pair of thick-rimmed glasses, as if he wanted to look more – I dunno – donnish. “No. Micro-bacteriological research. In layman’s terms - the common cold.” He grabbed my hankie – I still had it crumpled in my hand. “Can I have that when you've finished with it?”
“I never exchange bodily fluids on the first date.”
He had the courtesy to laugh, as it was rather a bon mot, and poured us some more wine. And it was then that he said something so intuitive that I wondered for just a moment if he had sussed out my true motivation for this trip to the flatlands of the East.
“Happy in your work, are you? In your life. Fulfilled?”
“Yes I am. Of course I am,” I said, perhaps rather too speedily.
“Good. Well...that’s good. I mean just think of all those grateful students who, if it weren’t for you, wouldn’t know how to...er...go to the pictures.”
“Listen, you condescending academic elitist, what I do at UCP is not some Mickey Mouse course .. although we do have an animation option in Year Three.”
“I bet you’re a great teacher.”
Where did that come from, I wondered. It was rather a nice compliment. And quite perceptive. So I thought it was only fair to return the gesture. “And I bet you’re an excellent - .”
“Don,” he finished for me.
“Yes, don. I think I’d better be on my - .”
“Hey, hang on!” he said, gently touching my sleeve. “They’ll all be out soon. You can finally find out how this one ends.”
“Oh, I can guess how it ends. ‘The apparently-tough female stereotype falls suddenly and helplessly into the arms of the strong and handsome male archetype.’
“The sixties! Thank God we’ve moved on since then. And talking of moving on...”
“Thanks,” I said, “but I really do have to go.”
My Cambridge don threw me that look again. “What have you got to go to?”
“Er...fair point.” I certainly didn’t wish to bump into sweet but unreliable Mr Brodsky. “I just don’t want to see any more students or academics.”
“Well,” he said, getting up from his seat, “I happen to know a bar that’s so scuzzy, even students won’t go there...”
“No such place exits,” I said. “I was a student here.”
But there was. And we went. And then he very graciously saw me back to my hotel room and quietly slipped away very early the following morning. Without a word, a note or a backward glance. I didn’t even catch his name! Which I suppose, in retrospect, was all to the good, although I must admit to being just a tad miffed at the time.
And – well - here I am now, carrying a potential microbacterologist. Daughter of a seriously good-looking and very personable Cambridge don. Although of course he will never know it.
That’s all there is, Megan. Mission accomplished. Not something I would include with excessive pride in my autobiography – or indeed tell Emily, when she’s old enough. Well, not in every exact and far from wholly unpleasant detail – but, hey ho, what’s done is done. And rather well done.
Now, despite that signature look of disapproval, I know you’re already thinking of this as a film script. Well, just don’t – okay? Now could you please hold my hand, Meg. Tight please. Really tight. I think it’s going to be a rather long night.
