The Gene Genie

By Lynette Lowthian

DO YOU EVER ESCAPE EMOTIONAL SCARS HANDED DOWN BY YOUR PARENTS?

CAN YOU CHANGE THE PATH OF DESTINY?

 

It’s 1978. The winter of discontent brings Britain to its knees, the world’s first test tube baby is born...and the Sex Pistols play their last gig together. In a downbeat London suburb, teenager Emily Enderbie gives birth to twins, Annie and Bea. Separated at birth in shocking circumstances, the girls face very different futures. Raising vital questions about family, identity, pain and loss, the book explores the way the past stalks the present and the enduring heartache passed from one generation to the next.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Austin Macauley Publishers
• Release date: Jan 6, 2023
• ISBN: 9781398469686

Lynette Lowthian

Lynette Lowthian has worked as a journalist and editor all her professional life, and she also teaches creative writing and journalism. She’s met and interviewed an incredibly diverse range of people in her career—from politicians, authors, actors and TV personalities to families in crisis and campaigners for disability rights. ‘I’m obsessed with people, what haunts them, what drives them and why they do the things they do. And I love to write about them,’ she says. The Gene Genie is her first novel, and she’s now at work on her second.

Book preview

About the Author

Lynette Lowthian has worked as a journalist and editor all her professional life, and she also teaches creative writing and journalism. She’s met and interviewed an incredibly diverse range of people in her career—from politicians, authors, actors and TV personalities to families in crisis and campaigners for disability rights. ‘I’m obsessed with people, what haunts them, what drives them and why they do the things they do. And I love to write about them,’ she says. The Gene Genie is her first novel, and she’s now at work on her second.

Dedication

To Rob – thanks for everything you do, but especially for giving so generously of your time in editing and proofing my first novel and for encouraging and believing in me throughout.

Copyright Information ©

Lynette Lowthian 2023

The right of Lynette Lowthian to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by the author in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.

Any person who commits any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

ISBN 9781398469679 (Paperback)

ISBN 9781398469686 (ePub e-book)

www.austinmacauley.com

First Published 2023

Austin Macauley Publishers Ltd®

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Part 1

The Past Imperfect

Chapter 1

Toby Summerfield, 2013

It’s one of those midsummer evenings special to London, when hot sun filters through dirty city air to form a gauze of golden motes. For Toby Summerfield, it is an evening redolent of the past.

Toby sits in his north London garden scanning The Ham and High. Not a newspaper he habitually reads, but he has an affection for it, for giving him a job when he was just another graduate who thought he could write. God knows, as editor-in-chief of the foremost liberal left-leaning daily in the country, he should read all the newspapers he can, if only to keep an eye on the competition. His wife Clara does a great job in keeping him abreast, especially of the human-interest stuff. After a week of print, he’d sooner get out his headphones and listen to music.

He’s not much interested in what The Ham and High has to say about national politics: he can pretty much pre-guess it. He shuffles through to a page of local stories. His go-to pub is getting a makeover and will be closed for the summer. A girl at his son Theo’s school has won a national handwriting competition. Local residents are up in arms over their rubbish collection being cut. All of mild interest, but Toby’s keen editor’s eye is drawn to a name in the lead story, a report of a domestic incident not far away in West Hampstead.

The name in the story is Enderbie and it turns Toby’s mouth dry. There’s no mistaking the name and its unusual spelling, with the unexpected ‘ie’ at the end. Toby senses a rising anxiety in his chest and his vision waves and blurs as he reads on.

From The Hampstead & Highgate Express, October 22, 2013

Mystery surrounds the identity of an assailant, following an incident in a house in West Hampstead this week.

After an alert, paramedics arrived at the scene to find two women, believed to be identical twins. One had received a serious blow to the head and was unconscious. She was taken by ambulance to hospital in a critical condition. The other woman, described as ‘uninjured’, is unable or unwilling to verify her identity. Police were called to the hospital to interview both women, but no further information has been released as yet.

Jasmine Poole, who lives next door to the house where the suspected attack took place, told The Ham and High: ‘I moved in three months ago. Anna Enderbie and her partner and child live next door. They seem a pleasant enough couple, though I only pass the time of day with them. Just a normal happy family. One thing I do remember as odd. I was in the front garden not long ago and Anna came out of her front door. Her beautiful black hair had been dyed bright honey-blonde. It gave me a shock, but to be polite I called out like the new hairdo. She stared back at me as if she’d never seen me before in her life. It’s not like Annie to ignore people. I’m wondering now if that was the other twin. I wasn’t aware Anna had a twin, let alone an identical one.’

Police are unable to comment until investigations are complete.

Toby believes himself to be a mild-mannered man. In editorial meetings, he doesn’t bang his fist on the table and insist: he listens. When his son steps out of line, he doesn’t shout and order: he reasons. Not a man to make a fuss. So, in his usual manner, he quietly folds the newspaper, removes his Panama and reading glasses and places everything neatly on his deckchair. He doesn’t cry out for his wife, or falter, as he crosses his lawn in long strides, to reach the dim recesses of the house.

In the little cracked mirror in the cloakroom, he peers at his face. It has squared out: gone are the planes and hollows of boyhood, replaced by the surplus skin and air of complacency of a moderately long life, lived well. Staring intently at his fallen face in the mirror, Toby lets out a silent howl of anguish. For what he loved and lost. For the deceptions and lies. And for the babies, stolen from him, that he would never hold.

Chapter 2

Emily Enderbie’s Memory Book, 1978

Dear reader

My babies have taken over my life. I’m only just 18, it’s not fair. One is tough enough, but twins are crazy bad luck.

I’m going to write everything down because I haven’t got anyone to talk to. My mother has barely spoken to me since I fell pregnant. She and my father think I’ve brought shame on the family.

So this will be my Memory Book. Or it could be a diary. It can actually be whatever I want it to be. I’m not sure anyone will ever read it. If by chance you’re reading it now, you’ll already know that it’s a ring binder with a sticker saying ‘Emily Enderbie’s Memory Book’ on the front and a stars and planets design. I was thinking of ‘reaching for the stars’ or something corny like that. I might put it in a box and make it a time capsule when I’m done with it. Or there again, I might hide it under the bed or behind the wardrobe and someone will find it in about the year 2000! Whatever, I’m sure if I write down all the stuff that’s going around in my head, I’ll feel better.

I guess my bad luck began when I was born. I’ve read books about girls raised on farms, with ponies, a big garden and lots of brothers and sisters. No such luck for me. I’ve lived in 101 Elm Avenue, Tooting Bec all my life. It’s a narrow terrace and though there are only three of us—well, five now, if you count the twins—everywhere you go, you’re squashed in.

Let me tell you a bit about the inhabitants of number 101.

My dad is Clive—I call him creepy Clive, though not to his face. I prefer to call both my parents by their real names, not mum and dad. It makes the gulf between us feel bigger, which is fine by me. Truth is, they’re nothing like my idea of a mum and dad. Clive is a skinny little man with a gnome-shaped head and wire specs. Small he may be, but he’s got a loud mouth, a big temper and a high opinion of himself. He’s a mechanic so, as he loves to point out, he’s more than a cut above someone like me who has never worked in a proper job at all.

One thing I’ve always wanted, along with a pony, a brother or sister and a big garden, is the sort of mum you can have a heart-to-heart, or even just a laugh, with. I’ve tried so hard to get Norma to do girly things with me. But it’s as if someone switched off her inner light bulb. Some people might call her strong and silent, but to me she’s more silent and deadly. She’s tall and Clive’s tiny, so the two of them look ridiculous as a pair. God knows how they ever got it together to create me.

If I said Norma and Clive never wanted me, you’d probably think I was making it up. But I truly believe they didn’t. Norma doesn’t shout, she glares. But Clive gets so mad that he turns purple and all the veins in his neck stick out. I can see why they didn’t bother with a brother or sister for me. Which is pretty much how I feel about the twins, if I’m honest, although I’m trying hard to be an okay mum, even if I’m not a good one. I’m 18 and supposed to be having fun, not spending my days flipping out boobs and bottles so the babies can get fat on me.

I’m struggling to think of much to say about the twins because they’re just babies who cry, eat and sleep in that order and then need a nappy change. It would be easier if they looked different, but they’re identical from the tops of their fuzzy heads to the tips of their fat, pink toes. Annie and Bea. Two peas in a pod.

But wait, there is a difference. Annie is my firstborn. In the cot, she waves her hands in the air and studies them thoughtfully. When I pick her up to feed, she gurgles happily even if I’m frowning. Her eyes seek out mine as she sucks away at my breast. Bea is my difficult one. She hates the cot and cries bitterly to be lifted out. She avoids my face and I have never yet seen her smile. Annie smiles all the time. Or what passes for a smile in a three-month-old. A sort of gummy grimace.

If someone is out there reading this, you’re probably wondering how I got myself in this fix, stuck in a skinny tube of a house with two babies who are sucking me dry and parents who would rather I was somewhere else—or nowhere at all. To get where I’m coming from, you need to know a bit more about me. So here’s me in a snapshot. You may get more than you wished for.

I’m an only child and it’s hard work. I deal with my parents’ dreams and disappointments all on my own—if they ever had dreams. They had a shotgun wedding and then Norma had a bad birth from which she’s never fully recovered. Or so she says. She’s told me often enough that it ‘might’ have been better if I’d never come along. She might not have stuck with Clive and they might have had better lives. I am the big disappointment. I get that.

So what do they do with their lives, so badly diminished by me? Norma likes housework and what she calls ‘make do and mend’. Anything from crocheted cushion covers to horrid homemade ‘frocks’ made from tissue patterns. Clive likes mechanical stuff, paper airplanes and shouting—which takes up a lot of his energy.

I did have dreams, but they are long dead. One was to be a writer. You see, I always loved reading and writing and my teachers even talked of university. When I was still in school, I read Jane Eyre. Jane felt a bit like me. She had no love, no certainty, nothing to tie her to a person or place: and then something changed and everything fell into place for her. Dear reader, I married him.

Maybe that’ll happen for me someday. I thought if I could just have someone to love and be loved by…and that’s when Toby Summerfield, with his soft lips and floppy hair, stepped in.

Be careful what you wish for.

Chapter 3

Norma Enderbie, 1978

Having a baby again in the house at 101 Elm Avenue was never going to be easy. But really, Norma had completely underestimated the havoc it—or they—would bring. What on earth is her feckless daughter doing upstairs in the attic bedroom with not one but two babies, both born out of wedlock?

Norma doesn’t consider herself unkind. She hasn’t kicked the girl out. She is providing Emily with shelter and food. What more can be expected? But this constant crying is too much. She cradles her mug of morning tea and watches the ice gently melting on the inside of the bedroom window. At least the twins haven’t disturbed Clive yet. He’s snoring away happily in the single bed next to hers. How does he sleep through it?

Two nights ago, the twins woke Clive in the small hours and he couldn’t get back to sleep. By 6 a.m., he’d had enough. He’d burst in to Emily’s room, picked up one of the twins (Norma guesses it was Bea because she cries hardest and longest) and started shaking her. Norma wasn’t sure what she feared most: Clive having a heart attack or a dead baby on her hands. He was puce in the face and all his veins were sticking out, but the baby did stop crying.

In any case, Norma has seen a lot worse than Clive in her time. She takes a deep breath and tries, unsuccessfully, to steer her thoughts in a better direction. Memories have a habit of jumping out of the cabinet, even when you think you have them securely filed away. It’s always at this time of the morning that they get to you. Even a morning cuppa is haunted by the past. By childhood.

She pictures the bleak pebble-dashed West Country cottage, five streets back from the beach. Growing up without a mum, without even the memory of a mum. The father who detested her because he blamed her for losing his wife in childbirth. Then, when she got to 13, the loathing turned to lust.

Norma sits up sharp and pulls up the eiderdown. Quickly rearranges the images in her head. Now, she’s picturing herself on the windswept pebble beach, 13 years old, looking out to sea for German warships. Praying for them to come and rescue her, invade this small isle and set her free.

Norma gathers her eiderdown around her once more and concentrates hard on a single lump of ice on its meandering journey down the windowpane. But nothing can stop the images that define her childhood, returning to her sometimes by day and often by night to taunt her equilibrium. The first time.

She sees herself, hair whipped by the sea breeze, in her flower-print dress with the grubby peter pan collar. The fabric barely covers her lean brown thighs: she’s already growing into the statuesque woman she will become. She is standing on the cliff path, watching for Germans in the cobalt sea, but something—a sense of impending threat or perhaps just the wind in the gorse—makes her turn round. Behind her, a broad meadow dotted with daisies and buttercups slopes gently upwards towards the blue, blue sky. Seagulls swoop and somewhere, she thinks she hears a skylark.

She spots him at the top of the meadow, where the land meets the sky. With his ragged farm clothes flapping in the wind, he looks from a distance like an overfed scarecrow in silhouette. He stands motionless, scanning the meadow before marching towards her. She has nowhere to go but towards the cliff edge.

By the time he catches up with her, Norma’s father is breathless and red in the face. ‘What do you think you doing? You should be setting supper,’ he says.

‘I didn’t know what time it was. I haven’t got a watch.’

‘Well it’s time to get back girl.’ He pushes her in the small of the back.

Norma flinches. Why does he always call her ‘girl’, never ‘Norma’, although he was the one who gave her the name. Now he’s gazing at her legs.

‘That dress is too short.’

‘Well, get me another,’ she retorts. He scares her most of the time, but she’s made a pact with herself not to show it. As they trudge side by side up the hill, she keeps a careful distance. Her father slides odd glances at her.

‘Should you be wearing a you-know?’

‘A what?’ she snaps back.

‘You know, a corset.’

She nearly sniggers. ‘You mean a brassiere, father.’ Her words are layered with barely-concealed contempt.

‘Yes, that.’

He’s gazing fixedly at her emergent breasts and she instinctively covers them with her elbows.

‘Well you need to buy me one then.’

‘I can’t do that girl. You’ll need to get Nance to do it.’

Norma’s great aunt Nance is always sent for to help with what her Father calls ‘women things’. Recently Nance, who is 84, unmarried and wears callipers, was called on to assist with rags. She is dubious that Nance will even know what a brassiere is.

‘Yes father.’ Norma spins a dandelion clock in her fingers as they return in silence to the cottage. She prepares supper as she’s done every evening since she turned 10. After their plates of spam, hard-boiled eggs and some leaves of home-grown lettuce soaked in vinegar, sugar and salt, she escapes to her bedroom. She doesn’t like light evenings, which leave hours with nothing to do except sleep. It’s better in winter when she can gaze out at the stars. She reaches under her pillow and pulls out a book. It’s The Girl from the Limberlost and she stole it from school. She loves stories, but she’s never told anyone as she’s afraid it might be a sin. Norma adores the resourceful Elnora Comstock and plans to make a getaway one day, just like Elnora did.

Shadows are falling and Norma is nearly asleep, the book discarded on her bedspread, when footsteps come tap-tapping up the stairs. Suddenly wideawake, she hears them approach her door. ‘What is it?’ she calls out. ‘What do you need?’

Her father opens the door a crack and lets himself in. Approaching the end of the bed, so he is towering over her, he removes his shirt. ‘What are you doing, you’re in the wrong room,’ she says.

He doesn’t speak, but his eyes don’t leave Norma’s face as he begins to pull down his trousers and then his underwear. Now he is naked, his body luminous in the moonlight. He sits on the edge of the bed. ‘Go away, father.’ Norma spits the word in his face. But she has nowhere to run and nowhere to hide, just the dark garden, the empty fields and the village beyond, where the villagers will turn their heads in scorn.

‘Take off your night-dress, girl.’ She freezes. Though she only dimly understands what’s about to happen, she recognises that, for her, the earth will never again tilt in quite the same way. She loathes and fears her father in equal measure. Wordlessly, she obeys.

This is the first night that Norma’s father visits her room. The first of many, stretching into the remainder of her childhood like a row of tin soldiers. As time wears on, she starts to understand that confiding—in a kindly teacher or a trusted friend—would be as much a betrayal of herself as an indictment of her father. She learns words like Used Goods and Whore. She is not, she will not be, that person.

Well, in the end, it wasn’t the Germans who rescued her, it was Clive. The thought almost makes her laugh out loud. If her father killed her capacity for love, then Clive hardly re-ignited it. But he’s put a roof over her head, kept her in tea and biscuits—and even brassieres.

Norma learnt young to be a survivor and the only time she feels she might get knocked off her perch is when she’s around babies. Something about them—their innocence, their vulnerability, their trust. All the things she lost. She sighs as another piercing scream rips through the ceiling.

Something must be done.

Chapter 4

Emily’s Memory Book, 1978

Toby Summerfield. The skinny feel of him in my arms. His fingers in my hair. The taste of him on my tongue. I promised you, dear reader, that I’d get to Toby. So here goes.

He’s way out of my league, Toby Summerfield. That’s the first thing to say about him. He lives on the far side of the dog-ended, pooh-infested area of grass they call a common. We both live next to it, almost overlooking it, but that’s not the point. Our side of the common is made up of row on row of narrow terraced houses, some split into two. Most of the roads are at right angles to one another—there are hardly any curves or corners—I guess you can get more houses crammed in that way. And there are no trees. You have to cross the common to find one of them.

Toby’s side is way different. The Victorian houses are big and slightly crumbly, but in a good way. Some have walled gardens with apple trees tippling over the walls. You can’t see inside, but you can imagine a secret family life going on in there. Mums sunbathing, Dads reading the Sunday papers or mowing the lawn and kids having fun hanging out. I’ve got no way of proving it, but I know in my gut it’s a different way of life from ours, over here in Elm Avenue.

So we have (or had, in my case) this weird situation at my comprehensive school: a mix of kids from both sides of the common. Perhaps it’s some sort of experiment they’re doing with their kids over there on the other side. A lot of them put even Labour Party stickers up in their windows. Why do that when rich people vote Conservative? And why send their kids to our grubby old comp when they could be going to a smart private school?

I asked Toby about it, one hazy, lazy Sunday afternoon, as we lay entangled together in my single bed in the attic room, with Norma and Clive safely out of range at Clive’s mum’s. ‘Why don’t they send you to a private school?’

‘Because they don’t want me to be an elitist,’ murmured Toby, nuzzling my ear. I was about to say: ‘What’s an elitist?’ but I didn’t want to look stupid and Toby sensed it. He always knew what I was thinking, often before I did.

‘It’s someone who thinks they’re better than other people because they’re wealthier, cleverer, or have a higher social status. So they want me to meet lots of people from different backgrounds, ethnic backgrounds, social backgrounds, you name it…’ he tailed off.

Toby is going to be an architect. Or a film director. He hasn’t quite decided, but his parents definitely want him to be an architect. His dad Rupe (it’s actually Rupert but no one ever calls him that) is a human rights lawyer and his mum Maddy is something high up in the probation service. I’m slightly in love and in awe of them both. Toby must have been around all the time I was at the comp, but I didn’t notice him until fifth form. I struck lucky: they’d just put the school-leaving age up so it was harder for Norma and Clive to get me to leave—although they would much rather me bringing in some bacon. We were in the middle of exams and I was expected to do well, especially in English, which Clive says is a time-waster.

At school, I felt like a misfit. I didn’t really fit into either camp, you see. Too clever by half for my own lot and not enough airs and graces for the others. Skinny, scrawny loner with jet black hair, a beaky nose and a glum look on my face. Maybe I had a bit of attitude back then. Maybe that’s what Toby liked in me. You’d have to ask him.

We’d been discussing To Kill A Mockingbird in class and all the rights and wrongs of it were going around in my head. I noticed Toby, by himself in a corner of the cafeteria, head slumped over his book.

‘Hey Emily. Good book, isn’t it? ’he said in his posh voice which always made me feel like laughing. I nodded. It probably looked more like a curtsey bob than a head nod, I was so stiff with nerves and I don’t know what. ’Sit down,’ he said. ‘I’ll get you a coke.’

‘Flash.’ I thought, but I sat down. And that was it. The start and the end of everything.

Chapter 5

Norma, 1947

At 16, Norma Jackson was almost a beauty, with her wasp waist, lean limbs and curtain of raven hair. But she was damaged goods. As a child she had been shy and introspective, now she was aloof and bitter. She’d been clever, now she was calculating. The village girls were scared of her and the boys ignored her. She liked it that way.

After she left school at 15, she found employment in Allens, the village butcher’s shop. It was the sort of job that most girls of her age would find distasteful. But Norma really didn’t mind how many slabs of raw meat she boned and chopped, or how many rabbits she strung up. She wasn’t squeamish about blood and gore. After three years of her father’s nightly attentions, there was little left to love, hate or be squeamish about.

The villagers thought Norma and her father an odd pair. He was small and stout, while she was tall, slender and almost queenly in her way. You rarely saw them together, but if you did, they never spoke. Even the nosiest neighbour had long ago given up speculating about the nature of their relationship. If only the mother hadn’t died in childbirth. But they’d stopped feeling sympathy for Norma when the shy but eager little girl was replaced by a woman who seemed to have too many airs and graces for her own good.

One sleety winter morning, Norma was wiping down the counter when Clive Enderbie stepped into the shop. She wiped her hands and gave him her vacant stare. He looked like a war casualty, though the war was over two years ago. Everyone knew how to spot a war casualty: they looked pale, wan and slightly brain-dead. But Norma suspected Clive was not much older than she was.

‘What can I do for you?’ Her questions tended to sound like challenges.

‘For now, I’d like a meat pie, but I’m also looking for a job and somewhere to board, if you’re asking.’

It turned out that Clive had been a ‘lucky’ one. He’d signed up for the army at 17 and survived the bloodbath in France. Back home in London, his luck ran out when he couldn’t find a job. He wanted to get out of the city, so he’d packed his bags and set off in search of work. Quite why he had hit on this desolate coastal spot was a mystery, even to him.

Norma eyed him up and down speculatively. He was puny, with wire-rimmed spectacles and a head that reminded her of a turnip. Could he be her ticket to freedom? She couldn’t imagine him in a stand-off with her father, but at least he was a man. ‘There could be some farm work at our place,’ she said. ‘I would need to talk to my father. And we might have a spare room. It’s a sort of outhouse downstairs next to the kitchen.’

Two red spots appeared on Clive’s pallid cheeks. He’s keen, thought Norma. Now all I need to do is to talk father around which shouldn’t be too hard. Since she’d begun work in the shop, her father badly needed extra help, even if it was only casual labour. What mattered was getting Clive in as a boarder.

When she got home, Norma unwrapped two lamb cutlets she’d brought as a treat from the butchers’ and put them on to sizzle. ‘Supper’s ready,’ she called to her father when she’d assembled the cutlets and mash on plates. Once he was settled down chewing on his lamb, she plucked up courage. ‘I met someone looking for work today.’

‘Oh yeah,’ said her father,