Magpie

  ‘I’m not pregnant.’

  ‘No.’

  He held her hand over the duvet.

  ‘Is that what’s been bothering you?’ Jake asked.

  She nodded again.

  He sighed.

  ‘I’m sorry, my love. I’m sorry you feel sad. But …’ She could see him choosing his words with extra care. ‘It’s only been a year. You need to be kinder to yourself. It’ll happen. In its own time.’

  Kate propped herself up on the pillows and took a sip of tea. It was sweet.

  ‘Did you add sugar to this?’

  ‘Yes. Thought you needed something sweet. For energy.’

  ‘Is it because you don’t think I’m sweet enough already?’

  Jake noticed the diversionary tactic and refused to give into it by laughing.

  ‘I think you’re perfect.’

  She pressed her knuckles to her eyes.

  ‘Do you really think it’ll happen?’ Kate asked.

  He placed his hands on her cheeks and told her to look at him.

  ‘I do. I have complete faith. It doesn’t matter if it takes six months more or even a year or however long it takes because we have our whole lives together.’

  ‘I mean, I’d quite like to have a baby before I’m eighty-five.’

  He let his hands drop. The light outside was fading and she could see his profile, studded against the gloom, the dip and bulge of his Adam’s apple as he swallowed.

  ‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘I don’t mean to be flippant. I’m not flippant about this.’

  ‘I know you’re not.’ He was still gazing at the floor, staring at the faded red and gold patterned rug. ‘You’re talking as if you’re at death’s door. You’re thirty-one, it’s not as if there isn’t time.’

  ‘No, I know. You’re right.’

  It was better having spoken about it. She was relieved and felt closer to Jake than she had done in months. She tossed back the duvet cover and clambered onto his lap, putting her arms around his neck and resting her head on his shoulder. He stroked her back.

  ‘It’s going to be OK.’

  She believed him. She always had.

  Christmas was not as bad as Kate had feared. Annabelle’s cooking was as atrocious as ever, but her conversation seemed less aggressive, as though she had run out of fight. She asked Kate a handful of questions about herself this time, including what her favourite book was and when Kate said Middlemarch, Annabelle dissolved into ecstasies of agreement.

  ‘That bit when they’re on their honeymoon,’ Annabelle said, cheeks glowing from her after-dinner brandy, ‘and Dorothea says she thought love was going to be like an ocean, but it turns out to be nothing more than a basin … oh, it’s perfect.’

  Chris, who was sitting in his usual corner of the drawing room letting most things wash over him was suddenly roused.

  ‘Steady on,’ he said.

  They all laughed and Kate was surprised, not just by Annabelle’s literary taste but at the warmth she felt in that moment.

  Of course, Annabelle played all her usual tricks too, insisting on placing Jake next to her at every meal, recalling long-ago family anecdotes that excluded Kate in their re-telling and at one point getting out an old photograph album filled with pictures of Jake and his ex-girlfriend.

  ‘Oh, how funny, I’d forgotten we had so many photos of you and Charlotte,’ Annabelle said. ‘I only wanted to show you the funniest picture of Toad … now where is it …’ She placed the album on the dinner table, angled so that Kate could see it clearly and she continued to flick through the pages, stopping occasionally to say, ‘Charlotte was such a sweet girl, wasn’t she?’ and ‘Jakey, you look so young and handsome and happy there!’ and ‘What happened to Charlotte? Are you still in touch with her?’

  Jake shook his head. ‘No idea, Mum.’

  ‘Shame. I’d love to see her again.’

  Underneath the table, Jake squeezed Kate’s hand.

  But Kate found it funny more than hurtful. Annabelle’s jabs were so unsubtle that it would have felt almost churlish to get upset.

  When the two of them returned to London, laden down once again with tin-foil packages of leftover turkey and an old cream tub repurposed to contain a dozen devils on horseback, Kate was astonished to find that she had quite enjoyed herself. More than that, she was relaxed.

  ‘That wasn’t too bad,’ she said to Jake on the drive back.

  ‘Told you. Mum thinks you’re great.’ Then he grinned. ‘She just can’t admit it to herself yet.’

  16

  Months passed and still she wasn’t pregnant. In April, her period was a few days late and she bought a test from their local pharmacy and sat on the toilet seat trying not to let herself get excited, trying not to allow herself to believe that this, surely, was their time. She placed the cap back on the test and waited for the lines to appear. The minutes passed, and she stared at the small oval aperture. One line made itself visible, a pale mark like a charcoal stroke on blotting paper. Her breath caught in the top of her throat as she waited for a second one to join it, but it never came and instead the single marking grew darker and darker until its presence seemed to taunt her with the indisputable absence alongside it, like a tree on a sunlit street that doesn’t cast a shadow. It looked so wrong, Kate thought. She kept checking the packet the test came in, which had a visual key denoting that one line meant not pregnant, two lines meant pregnant, and she wondered if, in her haste to unwrap it, she had misread the instructions. She hadn’t. The truth was staring her in the face.

  She started to cry and was consumed by her own perceived stupidity for believing it would be different. What was the point of hope when it existed only to be extinguished, month after painful month? She threw the test in the bin and didn’t tell Jake. The next morning, her period came. She got drunk that night, on tequila mixed with pre-made margarita mix, the alcohol hitting the back of her throat like a well-landed punch.

  Jake found the pregnancy test in the bathroom bin and asked her about it, and when she told him, he held her in his arms and stroked her hair, but she felt numb.

  Slowly but perceptibly, Kate cloaked her emotions in cynicism. It was a form of self-protection. When another friend announced their pregnancy, uploading blurry twelve-week scans to Facebook, she groaned and cracked a bitter joke with Jake. She crossed the street to avoid women walking with toddlers, their dimpled fists held in bigger, adult hands. She started to complain about babies crying in restaurants and to avoid social gatherings where she knew there would be newborns that Kate would be expected to coo over and interact with. It was all too painful.

  It was Jake who suggested they start looking for houses, as a way of taking their mind off it.

  ‘We shouldn’t put our lives on hold while we wait to get pregnant,’ he said. ‘It’s causing way more stress than it needs to.’

  ‘It’s pretty desperate if you genuinely think buying a house is going to be less stressful than this,’ she said, blankly.

  But she agreed, and they spent a few weeks going on viewings, assessing the relative size of bathrooms and gardens and asking each other whether they really needed a separate office space and whether they should investigate the catchment area for local schools, and finally they found somewhere that they loved and the sale went through with barely any hitches or delays and then they moved in and unpacked and chose a colour scheme and bought a purple velvet sofa and the whole process took just over four months and then they had nothing else to distract them.

  Kate would walk up and down the stairs of the new house, unaccustomed to all the space, and she would go into the room they intended to use for the nursery and sit on the floor, imagining the mobile they would hang from the ceiling and the framed animal alphabet they would put on the wall and she would imagine, too, being greeted by the smile on their baby’s face when she came in
at night to feed him or her.

  Still nothing happened. And then another year had passed, and they made an appointment to see their GP who took blood from Kate’s arm that, a few days later, revealed nothing of note but because it had been two years of trying to conceive (or TTC as the internet forums called it) they were referred to their local hospital to discuss their options with a consultant called Mr Cartwright.

  When she first met Mr Cartwright, Kate liked him. He spoke well and had wavy grey hair and was handsome in a weathered way that made him look like a TV detective. He told them about the further tests they would do, the sperm samples and the internal scan and a procedure that would involve putting dye into her womb ‘to show us what’s going on in there’, and Kate imagined a riotous party taking place in her uterus, full of drunken guests passed out on the steps like in Hogarth’s painting of Gin Lane.

  The tests came back and nothing was wrong. Mr Cartwright said their infertility (it had a name now, her failure to get pregnant. It was diagnosed as an issue) was ‘unexplained’. He talked through their options and they decided to try IVF, which Kate did not realise involved self-administering daily hormone injections to fool her body into thinking it was going through the menopause.

  ‘That’s the suppression phase,’ Mr Cartwright said, matter-of-factly. To Kate, it felt as though her natural reflexes needed taming, as if they had misbehaved for too long.

  Then there were more injections to stimulate the ovaries, tickling their underbellies like trout until they produced the requisite number of eggs. Except when Kate went in every other day for her internal scans, she was told by the quietly spoken Portuguese nurse that there weren’t as many as they’d like to see. Kate left the hospital each time deflated and sad, stopping for a camomile tea (caffeine was discouraged) in the cafe on her way out. She would sit on the bench by the window, surrounded by pale-skinned men in dressing gowns, trailing intravenous drips on wheels, and entire families crowded round a child in a wheelchair eating a chocolate muffin, and she would look out onto the street and marvel at the busyness of the world, at how it continued to function so easily when she could not perform the most natural biological function of womanhood.

  And still she was not crying. The hormones made her fuzzy rather than emotional, as if she were experiencing the world at one remove through smeary lenses and ears plugged with cotton wool. So when she was told by the nurse that there was just one follicle that looked mature enough to contain an egg, and was she sure she wanted to go through with egg collection when she could switch instead to a less invasive procedure, there were no tears. Kate simply stated that they wanted to see it through to its logical conclusion. After all, it only took one egg, didn’t it?

  But for whatever reason, it wasn’t the right egg. It did not fertilise with Jake’s sperm in a petri dish. It was a non-starter. It did not proceed to the much-fabled blastocyst phase when success rates for implantation were so much higher. It did not contain the right stuff. It had promised so much, but it had failed to deliver.

  That night, they sank two bottles of wine between them.

  ‘We’ll try again,’ Jake said. ‘This is why they say it takes three cycles on average. It’s nothing to worry about.’

  Sitting at the table in their new kitchen, the dusky evening light slinking in through the glass garden doors, she couldn’t bear to look at him. Kate knew that he was trying to make her feel better but she could also tell from the tone of his voice that he was starting to panic. She reached over and put her hand over his. She was too knackered to say anything else.

  17

  They did a second cycle with Mr Cartwright. This time, he retrieved seven eggs (this was the word he used, as if he were a hunting dog nuzzling the undergrowth for dead pheasants). Three of them fertilised, but only two embryos kept dividing themselves into the requisite number of cells and only one was graded highly enough by the embryologist to be transferred. The other eggs, having not reached the right standards, were expelled as if they had failed an exam and Kate, who had always been a conscientious, solid student at school, took it personally. She had always thought that if she did the right thing, worked hard, got good results and a stable job, and tried generally to be a decent person, that life would progress in the way she anticipated. Motherhood and children were part of that. It was just what happened, wasn’t it?

  She imagined her eggs discarded in a medical waste bin and wondered what they did with them.

  The single embryo was transferred into her womb, and for a glorious twelve days after that, during which the nurses encouraged her to take things easy and put her feet up and not do any strenuous exercise or take hot baths, Kate felt indisputably pregnant.

  ‘Because you are,’ Jake said, his face flushed with pleasure. ‘There’s no doubting it.’ He kissed the tip of her nose. ‘I’m so proud of you, you clever thing.’

  Kate was happier and more at peace than she had been in ages. For those twelve days, she stopped crossing the street to avoid prams or buggies, choosing instead to smile broadly at the parents, as though they already shared a secret kinship. She imagined that the women could tell, that there was a special pheromone only mothers could scent on each other. She took long walks along the river, listening to audiobooks as she went, taking photographs on her phone of the herons she saw stalking in the shallows. She ate healthily: big bowls of green, leafy vegetables and diced sweet potato, and she started each morning with a celery juice whizzed up in their NutriBullet. She felt in sync with her body, encircled by the oneness of it: her and her embryo, its cells neatly dividing and multiplying as it implanted itself into her thickened uterine wall, just as it should.

  On the thirteenth day, she started bleeding. Not a lot. A rusted spotting in her pants that she chose to ignore. It got slightly heavier in the following hours, so Kate turned to the internet, obsessively scanning fertility forums for the stories she wanted to find, and discarding all the ones that warned her of bad news. It could be an implantation bleed, she read, and a sign that everything was progressing positively. She clung on to this notion through the sleepless night that followed, but in the morning there was a red stain on the sheets.

  Jake, sleeping beside her, would be oblivious until the alarm woke him an hour later. When he opened his eyes, he was facing her. He knew instantly – she could tell he knew – and the fact that he didn’t have more faith in her made her angry.

  ‘It hasn’t worked,’ she said, and then she turned away from him, lying on her side facing the wall. She thought he would move towards her and take her in his arms as he usually did, but Jake made no movement. Minutes passed. A muffled sound from the other side of the bed. She turned back and realised, with a lurching heart, that Jake was crying. He was pinching the top of his nose with his thumb and forefinger, trying not to make a sound, but when she took him in her arms and said, ‘I’m so sorry. I’m so, so sorry,’ he started sobbing – big, wrenching sobs that sounded like he was gasping for air.

  He allowed her to comfort him, and then he reached for a tissue from his bedside table and blew his nose.

  ‘This is shit, isn’t it?’ he said when he spoke. She nodded. It was the first time his optimism had flagged, and she realised he had been putting on a brave face for her all this time.

  She felt so bad for not having been able to hold on to their baby. She felt, again, that it was her fault.

  Across the mattress, he grabbed her hand.

  ‘I love you, Kate. We’ll have a baby, even if it takes us longer than we expected. And when we do have our baby, we’ll love it so much because of everything we’ve been through to get there.’

  His hand grew hot over her own. Outside, there was the sound of a puttering exhaust as a motorbike started up. The sun slid through the gaps in the blinds and she wished it would go away again, that it would rain and that the weather would be in tune with her thoughts.

  She kissed his wet chee
k, and then she kissed his lips. He returned the kiss with forceful passion, gripping the back of her neck and pressing her head into his. It was as if he were trying to prove something. But what, and why, she didn’t allow herself to question.

  Mr Cartwright told them they should take a few months off before trying again.

  ‘Allow yourselves to recover. Go on holiday.’

  The walls of his office were covered with pictures of babies, held in the arms of shiny-eyed women and tired-but-happy-looking men. Mr Cartwright was featured in several of the photographs, smiling broadly as if delighted with himself. In one, he carried twins, his checked shirtsleeves rolled up and an identical baby nestled into the crook of each arm.

  ‘Is it worth it?’ Kate blurted out.

  In the plastic chair next to her, Jake looked surprised.

  Mr Cartwright met her gaze.

  ‘That’s a decision for both of you,’ he said. ‘I can speak from my experience of hundreds of patients and tell you that they definitely think it was worth it.’

  His voice was calm. The consultant’s demeanour seemed designed to make Kate feel like an increasingly hysterical woman. His manner had changed from their first appointment, when he had cracked jokes and been breezily optimistic. Now, Mr Cartwright was frustrated that she wasn’t holding up her part of the bargain. He had done his bit, after all. More than once, he had told her that she was ‘failing to respond to the drugs’ as if the drugs themselves could not possibly be blamed, let alone his efficacy in prescribing them.

  ‘Thank you, Mr Cartwright,’ Jake said. ‘We’ll take some time to think about our next steps.’

  They went for a coffee in the ground-floor cafe. They didn’t go on holiday, but spent the next couple of months trying to occupy themselves with other projects. They had friends round for dinner. They went to the cinema and art galleries and restaurants they had heard other people recommend. Annabelle came up and stayed for the weekend in the room that would eventually be the nursery, but which they had filled for now with a double bed. She was polite about the house and brought Kate a huge bunch of peonies to say thank you for having her. Only once did she revert to form, when she asked why they’d moved into such a big place.