HUSBAND AND WIFE AND GENES

A husband an wife are curious about their heritage...

“I feel blessed,” whispered Janice to her husband Ian as they snuggled up to each other early one morning.

“Six years, and counting,” smiled Ian, “and the best thing I did with my life was marry you. Not just cohabit with you but actually be part of you, husband and wife, wife and husband.”

“Especially considering it was just a chance meeting that set us off on our course together,” sighed Janice, “who would have thought that two strangers attending the same lecture on the same day would click like we did.”

“It must have been in our genes,” suggested Ian with a twinkle in his eyes, “I wonder if any of our ancestors knew each other? You know, going back a few generations. Maybe to the Victorian age when things were hard for many. Maybe my great-great-great granny knew your great-great-great-grand-daddy”

“You always did like dreaming,” laughed his wife, “the stories you write! When I read them I get to wondering if we met in a previous life.”

“Do you know if your ancestors always lived round here?” asked Ian, “I know it’s a hard question because you don’t really know who your biological parents are, being adopted as you were, but you might have got some idea from the paperwork.”

“Phooey! Of course I don’t know! But someone said, maybe it was my mum who must have known the owner of the sperm that made me for me, that he was actually mixed race. I think I saw that on the paper that came with me. You know, black and white, and in the army. That’s how they met, she going to a dance when they were posted not so far away. There was a camp outside Swanspottle, I believe, and mum went to a Friday night dance in their hall when she was in her teens. A bus-load went, but the bloke who must have been my dad took her home and it was under the light of a spring moon that he stopped in a lay-by and they got down to it.”

“I hope it was a big enough car, then,” sniffed Ian. “What then?”

“Mum must have gone home and he was sent to some war or other the very next day. I reckon that’s why she agreed to the intimacy when she did, because the chance would be gone, and she must have liked him to do with him what she did. You know, teenage lasses and their hormones! Apparently he had some Caribbean blood in him, mixed with Yorkshire or somewhere northern. I’ve got a paper somewhere.”

“You are a shade darker than me in some lights, so that might explain it,” murmured Ian thoughtfully, “though I’m as unsure of my paternity as you are. My mum always admtedly that she could be a bit on the wild side, you know, and I know I shouldn’t say it of the woman who brought me up so lovingly and with so much care, but she took risks when the mood was on her, and she once said to my dad when he’d upset her over something trivial that I wasn’t anything to do with him, that an old lover of hers had turned up out of the blue and they’d briefly reunited. She retracted it soon after, and never mentioned it again as far as I was concerned. But who can tell?”

She climbed out of bed and pulled her nightie off. “So neither of us can be absolutely sure who we are,” she said thoughtfully. “And it could be important. I mean, what if we’ve got bad genes that are going to cause trouble for us as we get a bit older?”

He stared at her lasciviously as she started to dress, knowing just how pretty she looked in that flimsy cotton frock. “Like cancers of one sort of another?” he asked, “yes, it would be helpful to know in advance so that we can see if anything can be done about it before we get struck down.”

“We could get DNA tests,” suggested Janice.

“We might find out that we’ve got a murderer for a father,” smiled Ian, “how about that? How’d you feel if every time I went anywhere near you would wonder exactly what it was I’d inherited from my father?”

“Now don’t. I seem to remember that sometimes you get that odd wild look in your eyes…” she said with a grin, “anyway, at the city University they advertise a service of DNA analysis, the main idea being to help people who are exactly like us and don’t know who their fathers are.”

“Shall we?” asked Ian, thoughtfully, pulling on a clean pair of boxer shorts. “It might answer a few questions if we did. You know, health-wise.”

“You just have dribble into a test-tube or something like that, and they do the rest, so shall we? Both of us? We might get an answer that helps us as we go into dithery old age.” she smiled, “do you like this dress?”

“You know I do. I tell you every time you wear it.”

“”You say you like everything I put on. If we do the DNA thing we might find you come from a long line of sex-maniacs!”

“Whilst you come from an even longer line of bathing beauties!”

“That’s taken as read!”

“I’ll make appointments, then,” he said, “for both of us. And I’m not minimising how important the results might prove to be. After all, we do want to live foor ever, don’t we?”

It was several weeks before they could take the test, and another several weeks before the results were known, but when they were called in to have the results discussed the effect on them was far greater than they could have predicted. It went well beyond the possibility that they might have inherited disease-provoking genes from an unknown father.

“We have an issue here,” said the professor responsible for DNA enquiries, “and it affects both of you equally.”

“It does?” asked Janice nervously, “how?”

“What do you know about your parents? By parents I mean biological parents?” he asked.

“I was adopted soon after I was born,” Janice explained, “so I don’t really know anything, though someone planted the idea that my father might be of mixed race, maybe on the paper that came with me.”

The professor nodded. “That’s right,” he said, “he was, or to be accurate, he is.”

“And my father is a complete unknown. Just a one night stand on the part of my somewhat ditzy mother,” said Ian.

“What do you know about your mother, ian?” asked the professor seriously, frowning and almost but not quite shaking his head.

“I’ve known her all my life!” he said, “she lives a couple of streets away from us and we pop round for Sunday lunch once a month!”

The Professor nodded. “And you, Janice, what do you know about your mother?”

Janice shook her head. “The same as about my biological father,” she said, “As good as nothing. Apparently she was a teenager when she fell pregnant with me, and had to have me adopted.”

“I thought that’s what you’d told me before,” said the professor, shaking his head again. “Now this might come as a bit of a surprise,” he said, “but you both have the same father. There can be no doubt. And, and don’t get upset before you’ve worked it out, you both also have the same mother!”

Janice looked at Ian and Ian looked at Janice…

“But,” he stammered, “doesn’t that mean…”

“That we’re brother and sister?” Janice finished the sentence for him.

“But we’re husband and wife!” added Ian, “aren’t we?”.

© Peter Rogerson 13.05.23

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