Magpie

  ‘It’s palatial,’ she said, even though it wasn’t and certainly not when compared to Annabelle’s own sprawling residence in the countryside. ‘You two don’t need this much room, surely?’

  They were sitting on the L-shaped sofa in the kitchen extension. Kate and Annabelle were sharing a bottle of Chablis, while Jake was drinking a Peroni beer straight from the bottle, despite his mother’s protestations that he really should get a glass.

  ‘Don’t you like the house then?’ Jake asked.

  ‘Oh no, no I didn’t say that. It’s lovely. And how you’ve done it up is very … well, it’s very sweet. I just wondered if you ever felt like you rattled around a bit, that’s all.’

  Annabelle tilted her face towards him. She was wearing another one of her floaty thin-knit cardigans, her wrist weighed down with a chunky gold charm bracelet that shook every time she took a drink.

  Kate refilled her glass, staying silent.

  ‘We don’t rattle around,’ Jake said. ‘And it won’t always just be us anyway, will it?’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘Well, when we have children …’

  Annabelle laughed.

  ‘Children?’ she said, enunciating the word as if Jake had outlined a preposterous conspiracy theory. ‘But surely you can’t be thinking … you’re … well … I hadn’t … you’re not even married, darling!’

  Kate snorted. Jake’s neck was mottled red.

  ‘It’s not the nineteenth century, Mother.’

  ‘No, I know, but …’

  ‘Actually, we’ve been trying to get pregnant and it hasn’t been easy, and I – we – would appreciate a bit more sensitivity on that front.’

  When he was furious, Jake’s syntax became formal and middle-aged.

  Annabelle looked as though she had been slapped. Beneath the peachy circles of blush, her face was pale.

  ‘I’m sorry to hear that,’ she said, placing her glass on the coffee table. She stood up from the sofa and swept out of the room, leaving a trail of Christian Dior perfume in her wake.

  Kate emptied her glass.

  ‘That went well,’ she said drily.

  Jake walked over to the kitchen counter, slamming his empty beer bottle into the recycling bin with such force she was surprised she didn’t hear it shatter. Kate knew she should go over to him and try and broker some kind of peace with Annabelle but she was too tired. She told him she was going to bed, and left the wine glasses on the coffee table for him to clear away.

  The next morning, at breakfast, Annabelle sat with an uneaten slice of toast in front of her, very still and upright. She hadn’t applied her usual make-up, Kate noticed. She looked old and pale and clearly wanted to demonstrate her hurt.

  ‘Some coffee, Annabelle?’ Kate asked.

  Jake was sitting opposite his mother, ostentatiously reading a copy of The Economist so that he didn’t have to interact.

  Annabelle shook her head, resting a hand on her clavicle as she did so.

  ‘I’m sorry if I spoke out of turn,’ she said finally, her voice clear. ‘I didn’t realise … it was such a difficult subject for you both.’

  Jake didn’t say anything, but he raised his head from the magazine and met his mother’s eyes. Well, Kate thought, I suppose it falls to me to explain.

  ‘The thing is, Annabelle, we’ve been having IVF.’

  Annabelle looked blank.

  ‘Fertility treatment,’ Kate said. ‘I can’t seem to conceive naturally.’

  ‘We can’t,’ Jake corrected her softly.

  ‘Oh, I see. And, what do the doctors say the chances are?’ Annabelle enquired politely.

  ‘Around 30 per cent,’ Kate said.

  ‘We’ve had two cycles,’ Jake added. ‘Unsuccessfully. They advise three.’

  Annabelle reached for the marmalade and started spreading it on her cold toast. She replaced her knife carefully on the plate and took a small bite, chewing thoughtfully. They waited for her to swallow and for the next, inevitable comment to slice into the room.

  ‘I’m just worried about you both, that’s all.’

  ‘We’ll be fine,’ Jake said.

  ‘I wouldn’t want you to get your hopes up only for them to be dashed,’ she continued, frowning with concern. She reached across the table and rested her hand on Kate’s arm.

  ‘You know my dear friend Trisha? Her daughter had IVF five times and no luck. They don’t know why. I suppose it’s just one of those things. And it must be awful for you to go through, darling Kate. I worry that doctors suggest all sorts of medical procedures when maybe there’s nothing to be done, and the procedure itself can be so draining, can’t it? From what I understand, I mean. Of course I’ve never been through anything like that myself.’

  Kate tried, as much as possible, to let Annabelle’s words wash over her. A year ago, she would have been righteously indignant at the invasive nature of Annabelle’s opinion but now she no longer seemed to have the mental or physical capacity to make her case. And really, she told herself, it was none of Annabelle’s business. She wished Jake hadn’t told her.

  ‘It is draining, yes,’ Jake said. ‘Kate’s been heroic.’

  Annabelle blinked slowly, those clear blue eyes seeming to become even clearer as she spoke.

  ‘Poor Kate,’ she patted Kate’s arm. ‘It must be so tough. I read somewhere that giving IVF to women who aren’t able to conceive is a bit like giving chemotherapy to a terminal cancer patient.’

  For a second or two, Kate wasn’t sure if she’d heard her correctly. She shifted her arm and Annabelle’s hand dropped onto the table. She stood, pushing her chair back so quickly that it slammed onto the floor. Jake reached out for her but she wouldn’t go to him. Not now. She was furious with them both. With Annabelle for saying the things she did and with Jake for being related to her.

  ‘That’s not helpful, Annabelle,’ Kate said quietly. Then she left the kitchen and walked out of the house, forgetting her coat, so that when she returned two hours later, she was cold and damp. Jake greeted her with a hug in the hallway.

  ‘She’s gone,’ he said. ‘We had a massive row. I’m sorry. She won’t be speaking to you like that again.’

  Kate allowed herself to be hugged but didn’t say anything. She marvelled at how, even in this close physical proximity to the man she loved, she could possibly feel so alone. But she did.

  The third cycle produced nine eggs (‘You’re going up every time!’ Mr Cartwright said with a cheeriness that made Kate want to punch him). Four of them fertilised and two were placed back in her womb, so that now she was technically pregnant with twins, except this time she didn’t feel pregnant at all. She accepted that the cycle would fail with a fatalism that seemed safer than the alternative hope, so when she started bleeding again, this time on the final day of the two-week wait, she wasn’t surprised or even particularly upset. She had, over the preceding eighteen months, become immune to fluctuating emotions. She was like one of those robots she had once seen in Seoul airport when travelling back from a film festival. The robots had scooted along the terminal floors, with a friendly expression on their faces, and a touchscreen you could press to find the right answers. This is what she became: at work, at home, with Jake. She answered questions and took part in conversations but she had no real feeling beneath the surface. If she allowed herself to feel the smallest things, Kate knew it would lead ineluctably onto the bigger things and then that would be the start of a fatal unravelling, like a single dropped knitting stitch that ruins the whole pattern.

  They went to a private clinic. It was situated in a building on Great Portland Street next to an expensive deli that sold slices of lemon polenta cake and rosehip tea. No more chocolate muffins or men on drips, Kate thought the first time they went there.

  The clinic gave them a plastic card, as if they were joining
the library, and they were instructed to go upstairs for their consultations and they sat in waiting rooms crowded with white upholstered mock-leather furniture and coffee tables on chrome legs filled with back copies of Tatler and leaflets featuring soft-focus pictures of babies’ feet held in adult hands. They thought that going private would be the equivalent of flying business class after economy, but the appointments still ran late and the consultants’ offices were still cramped and papered with more baby photographs and thank-you cards Blu-Tacked to the walls, and Kate still felt like a malfunctioning female being told that her ovarian reserve was too low, that her womb was ‘inhospitable’ as if she were being rated like a terrible bed and breakfast on TripAdvisor.

  Their consultant – another man, this time an Israeli doctor called Mr Abadi – was matter-of-fact about their dwindling chances but said that they were in the right place to get ‘your preferred outcome’. At their first appointment, he performed an internal scan on Kate and stood there, eyes averted, as she took off her jeans and pants and struggled to cover herself with a scratchy paper towel before he turned around.

  For cycles four and five, she still did not respond to the drugs and Mr Abadi upped the dosage so that she felt constantly on the brink of weepy meltdown. These cycles didn’t work and so there were more tests for things called natural killer cells and DNA fragmentation and uterine scarring and they were both put on long courses of antibiotics during which they couldn’t drink and became crotchety with each other.

  And then – rejoice! – the sixth round of IVF produced a pregnancy. Kate emerged from the two-week wait without having bled, and when she took a test on the fifteenth morning, she did not cry but sat there, on the toilet, in a state of shock for several minutes. When she went back into the bedroom to tell Jake, they both burst into tears.

  ‘You clever thing,’ he whispered into her ear. ‘You clever, clever thing.’

  But although Kate wanted to feel uncomplicated joy, she couldn’t. She was too aware of what could go wrong, and had been robbed by all her previous experiences of the ignorant bliss that is afforded other prospective parents. She wished she could be that naive, that she could unlearn all the unwanted and unasked-for knowledge that had been foisted on her by circumstance. But every time she went to the loo, she checked for blood, and every time she felt a cramp or a twinge, she feared the worst and had to confront, yet again, the essential truth that the world could fall apart with no warning.

  Mr Abadi put Kate on steroids and blood thinners, which she injected into her stomach each morning just as she had done throughout IVF. The needles left pockmarked bruises either side of her navel like an astral map of some undiscovered galaxy. Everyone was telling her she was pregnant, but Kate didn’t feel pregnant. She felt no different. She squeezed her breasts, checking for tenderness. She longed to be nauseous at the smell of coffee. She wondered why she wasn’t as exhausted as the internet forums had led her to believe she would be.

  In search of reassurance, she joined one of them with an anonymised username and asked whether you could be pregnant but not feel pregnant. The replies flooded in.

  ‘Wouldn’t worry hun. I didn’t have any symptoms until week 8 and my dd [darling daughter] is asleep upstairs. She’s five now’ wrote @ivfwarrior

  ‘Anxiety is 100 per cent a symptom!’ added @ttctlc

  ‘If you’re worried have a chat with your consultant,’ said @cyclingunicorn. ‘But it’s very early days, so try not to stress!! Get your OH [other half] to give you a nice relaxing massage! Put your feet up! You’re carrying precious cargo!! xoxoxoxo.’

  The messages each came with a lengthy addendum underneath, in the style of an email signature. There, the women (and it was always women) would outline their own fertility histories in baffling detail, listing MCs (miscarriages) and BFNs (Big Fat Negatives) and numbering each failed IVF cycle, some with DEs (donor eggs). Within each footnote was a story of exhaustion and grief, reduced to a few minimal sentences, and after a while, Kate’s vision grew blurry and she shut down her laptop and went to bed.

  She made it to week seven. Mr Abadi asked her to come in for an early scan, and she was scared but hopeful. Jake was outwardly confident, and told her everything was going to be fine, but she couldn’t believe him. When Mr Abadi placed the probe inside her vagina, she noticed the tell-tale seconds of silence before he spoke and she already knew it wasn’t good news.

  ‘There is a gestational sac,’ he pointed at the screen with his latex gloves. ‘But I’m afraid there is no embryo, Kate.’ He spoke with a gentle accent, his Ts sounding like stones skimmed over water. ‘We would expect to see an embryo at this stage, and what this means is the pregnancy has not developed as it should.’

  ‘Could it just be developing more slowly?’ Jake asked.

  ‘In the event of a natural pregnancy, yes, we could see that being a possibility. There is always some leeway around dates of conception. But in your case, we know exactly when we introduced the embryos, so …’ He shook his head. ‘I’m very sorry.’

  ‘It’s OK,’ Kate said, and then she didn’t know why she’d said it. Because it wasn’t OK. It wasn’t OK at all.

  He talked her through the next steps. Either she could wait to miscarry naturally, although there was no way of knowing when that might happen, or he could give her drugs to induce a medical miscarriage. She opted for the latter, wanting now to be rid of her false hope as quickly as possible. The idea of carrying a dead thing around in her for an unspecified number of days and weeks seemed inhuman. Mr Abadi warned her the pain would be intense, that it would build to a climax in the first twenty-four hours, but then the worst would be over.

  They went home and drank wine and the next morning, Kate prepared herself with a towel over the sheets and a Netflix box set. She turned her phone onto airplane mode and she placed the first pills up her vagina, as instructed. Then she waited. She took paracetamol. And waited some more. About two hours after inserting the pills, the cramping started. It was as if dirt were being excavated by an industrial digger from inside her womb. The pain was so severe she thought she might pass out. It came in waves, cresting and receding, and at one point she threw up into a basin. Jake, who had taken the day off work to tend to her, would come into the bedroom pale and worried, asking if there was anything he could do, but there wasn’t because Kate knew that to get through this, she had to go to a place where no one else would be able to follow her.

  The pain surged in peaks for the next hour and a half and then it went away, becoming milder with astonishing rapidity. The bleeding got heavier and she did not allow herself to look as she passed clots and scraps of what might have been into the toilet bowl. She did not allow herself to think of what it represented. Of the names they might have chosen. Of the child they might have loved.

  It took a week for the bleeding and the pain to subside completely. The experience had been barbaric. She was appalled that women went through this and angry that no one had told her and she knew, without doubt, that she could not endure this again.

  Mr Abadi gently suggested that they start thinking of alternative options.

  ‘It’s been four years now, hasn’t it, since you’ve been trying?’

  ‘Yes,’ Kate said, thinking of how much had happened in that time and how little had been achieved. It seemed to have lasted forever but it had also gone by in a flash.

  ‘Donor eggs might be something you would like to explore, although, as discussed, you have some scarring in the womb that suggests you will not be able to carry a baby, Kate.’

  Carry a baby. It was such an odd expression. You carried shopping. You carried burdens. You carried viruses.

  ‘So, depending on what feels right for your particular circumstances, you might want to consider surrogacy. Or adoption.’

  When he spoke these words, Kate was appalled that her first feeling was relief. Relief that she wouldn’t have to do it
again, that she wasn’t expected to keep trying and trying and then processing the terrible pain and sadness she felt when it didn’t work. She glanced at Jake, who was massaging the back of his neck, his face expressionless.

  They thanked Mr Abadi, although Kate didn’t know what for. They walked out of the clinic, leaving the baby photos and the potted plants behind. Adoption had always been their final option, the thing they would turn to last, and it felt strange to have heard it voiced out loud as part of the next stage. They sat in the overpriced cafe and drank cappuccinos and ate the free amaretti biscuit that came with each cup.

  ‘How are you feeling?’ Jake asked. She was leaning on the table and she noticed he did not take her hands in his as he might once have done. The procedures had drained him too. His face had lost its ruddy complexion and there were horizontal lines across his forehead she hadn’t noticed before. The strain sat oddly with the rest of his body, which was lean and muscular. He had worked out more as a way of dealing with the emotional stress, pumping iron in the gym and going for long runs and boxing with a personal trainer every Thursday morning. He had invested in ever more sophisticated gym clothes: athletic brands that had to be ordered from America, with discreet yet noticeable logos, and mesh trainers with light soles intended to recreate the experience of barefoot running through the Masai Mara. He drank protein shakes and ate chicken breasts, leaving the skin on the side of his plate so that when Kate swept it into the bin, she felt silently judged by its goosepimpled presence. He looked great, objectively, but she missed the comfort of his softer chest. Now it was hard when she lay her head across his heart, and when he held her in his arms, his grip felt too tight.

  Her own body had become alien to her. She had always been toned, with neat muscles in her arms from yoga and the faintest tracing of abdominals on the skin across her ribs. But now her belly felt flabby and filled with fluid. She was convinced her hips had spread more widely. She hadn’t exercised regularly for months. She was sure that she was fatter and that the effort of becoming pregnant and the shadow effort of losing each pregnancy had left a physical mark. She didn’t realise until later that none of this was true.