by Carmen Reid
Somewhere way at the back of her mind she knew this. But she pulled back, concentrated her thoughts on the day ahead of her.
‘I’m thinking of you. OK. I really, really hope it works for you,’ Alex told her, ‘And it might, Pam, it’s . . .’
‘I know, it’s different this time,’ she interrupted. She didn’t want to hear the words out loud right now.
She had wondered if it was a mistake to confide such a thing even to Alex, but the stress had been so much. There had to be someone she could confide in, someone to share it with.
After five years of trying to make a Pamela and Dave child, they had finally abandoned that hope. Tomorrow was the first attempt at Plan B: making a child that was part Pamela and part anonymous donor sperm.
Chapter Two
ALEX. WHERE WOULD Pamela be without Alex? Her latest and almost immediately closest friend because she’d needed someone different, someone who didn’t know her as Dave’s wife, Sheila’s henchwoman or an IVF patient. Alex let her be, made her laugh raucously, allowed her to forget all the other things, at least for a while.
They had met over a year ago in a secondhand shop in east London. Not a junk shop, the kind of shop where design classic stacking chairs fight for space with Swedish light fittings and 1970s ‘groovy baby, groovy’ sideboards.
A tall, red-brown-haired, strikingly dressed woman seemed to be lingering over all the same things that Pamela admired: the big black glossy vases, the ebony leather armchair, the enormous charcoal fur rug.‘I’m going through a very black phase right now. Gothic meets Japanese,’ the woman had volunteered as they took turns to stroke the rug and sigh over the price.
‘Me too,’ Pamela had told her.‘Mine’s a Fred Astaire does Breakfast at Tiffany’s kind of thing.’
The woman had replied: ‘Cream walls, black sofas, cigarette-holders? Oh yes, I know where you’re coming from.’
So conversation had broken out quite naturally, and the ‘what do you do?’s and ‘where do you do them?’s had revealed that Alex was a professional ‘sourcer’.
‘A dealer, really.’ Alex had smiled and her accent which Pamela had taken a moment to place as mildly Scottish, had broken into pure Del Boy: ‘What can I do ya for? Some lovely 1960s plastic tablecloths . . . genuine kitsch for the kitchen.’
Her lifetime’s work was hunting great stuff down, from all over the place and selling it on to collectors, designers, stylists, whoever was interested.
So, of course, her eyes had taken on a slightly professional gleam when Pamela told her she was an interior designer, who did offices and corporate lobbies but also a lot of high-class nurseries.
‘Oh, I’m always coming across great kids’ stuff,’ Alex had enthused.‘Little French day beds, coloured lanterns, old school desks and I’ve hardly got anyone to flog them off to. We must swap details.’
She had undone the gold clasp of an antique crocodile handbag and brought out an engraved silver cardholder, while Pamela scrabbled in her bag for paper to write on.
‘Because you still haven’t found
What you’re looking for.’
Alex Finisterre
The card also gave a mobile number and email address.‘I’m quite pleased with it,’ Alex had commented.‘But it does make me think of U2, which is unfortunate.’
‘Finisterre? What a beautiful name,’ was Pamela’s response.
‘The ends of the earth. It’s quite appropriate, really.’ Alex left it at that. So Pamela wasn’t sure if she meant she’d made the name up or not.
‘Well, I’d love to hook up some time. Do lunch, see your portfolio, find things for you,’ Alex had said, putting the paper with Pamela’s details into her bag, ‘Great to meet you.’
She’d squeezed Pamela’s hand and exited the shop, with a swoosh of outrageously bright turquoise afghan coat and waft of woody-rose perfume.
A few weeks later there had been a call with the offer of a lunchtime sandwich and the chance to take a look at some ‘amazing children’s quilts’.
‘I’m not being a heavy saleswoman, honest,’ Alex had assured her.‘Just come for the chat, it would be nice to see you.’
It would be nice to see you. Pamela had realized how long it was since she’d made a new friend; well, apart from the IVF support group. But it would be good to know someone away from all that.
Alex turned out to live in a block of red-brick flats, just streets away from east London’s epicentre of cool, Hoxton.
Cool, but still inner-city grubby. Pamela rang the bell and waited, watching the wind gust plastic bags and crisp packets down the street while three boys half-heartedly kicked a football round a small, tarred car park opposite.
‘Hello, you found it OK then?’ Alex had pulled open the heavy metal and glass front door and ushered her in.
They climbed four flights of stairs to a front door painted turquoise blue and baby pink.
‘Never be boring,’ was Alex’s explanation.
Then they were inside a small but perfectly formed sitting room/kitchenette filled, as Pamela had expected, with all sorts of wonderful things: dainty crystal chandeliers, engraved glass vases, a pile of books with leather covers in sugared almond colours, antique crockery, a battered studded cream leather sofa swathed in small, shorn lambskins. Impossible not to wander round and look and touch, just like in a shop. In fact Pamela wondered how Alex lived around all these things. They took up all the space. The few chairs were piled with stuff; so were the table and sideboard. She stood in the centre of the room, unsure where else to put herself.
‘Such gorgeous things,’ she’d said.
‘Everything is for sale,’ Alex had told her from the draining board where she was shaking the water from a rose trellised teapot.‘If you love something, let me know.’
‘Tea?’ she’d asked.‘Don’t take your coat off, we’ll go out and sit on the terrace. There’s more room out there. Oh, but look at the quilts first and I’ll knock us up some food. Is there anything you don’t eat?’ She’d poked her head round the corner of the half-wall which divided her kitchen from the living space.
Technically, there was a great list of things Pamela didn’t, at that time, eat or drink but suddenly she couldn’t be bothered with it all.‘What are we having?’ she’d asked instead.
‘Bacon butties, brown sauce, a proper salad and red wine, stuff the tea.’
Should she worry if the bread and bacon were organic? Whether or not the salad was unsprayed? Brown sauce was toxic stuff that was definitely off her menu . . . let alone wine. She hadn’t touched a drop for four months. But she was ravenously hungry and brown-sauced bacon butties sounded unimaginably fantastic.
‘Perfect,’ she heard herself reply.
‘The quilts are in the cardboard box on the sofa. Dig them out. They’re from a car boot sale in Essex. I get fantastic stuff in Essex, it must be Britain’s clear out your clutter capital or something.’
Pamela opened the flaps of the box and brought out an armful of fabric. She had expected something antique, faded and delicate. But this was a single-bed-sized quilt home-made from jumbled, brightly coloured off-cuts. She could see nylon turquoise and brown patches, polyester purple, yellow chintz, bits of taffeta, all mixed into a crazy hotchpotch then sewn onto a heavy cream bedspread.
Her immediate reaction was ‘yuk’, but she threw it over Alex’s sofa and brought out the other two.
They were just as bad.
‘Aren’t they fantastic?’ Alex popped her head round the wall again.
‘Hmmmm.’
‘No, I agree. You’ll need a moment to adjust. But I’m thinking a mainly white room, splashes of primary colour here and there and three wee beds with these quilts.’
She was right, it would probably be stunning.
‘Just imagine the Essex gran who cut up all her old polyester summer dresses and stitched them together into these for her grandchildren,’ Alex added, mouth full of something.‘They probably loved them, but I bet th
eir mum had a fit!’
Pamela laughed at this.
‘Well, they were £30 the lot, so if you fancy them, that’s the price. I never profit from a first deal, but don’t worry, I’ll rook you the next time. Right, the terrace.’
Alex slung on her afghan and opened the big window-door at the end of the sitting room.
The terrace was only slightly less jumbled than the sitting room. Alex appeared to have just taken delivery of an assortment of large terracotta pots.
‘These are great,’ Pamela commented.
‘Twenty quid a shot,’ was her hostess’s reply, followed by a wry: ‘Don’t worry, you’ll get used to me.’
They were sizing each other up as they sat down to the big platefuls of food and even bigger tumblers of wine on the terrace. It was light grey and chilly out there, with a view of rooftops, TV aerials, and washing lines strung out over balconies, but they pulled their coats around them and Pamela soon found the wine was heating her stomach like a fire. How had she managed four months – four whole months – without this?
She thought Alex was intriguing: messy, a little studenty, chaotic, but obviously so enthused by what she did and, as the trace lines on her pale skin revealed, much older than her clothes, crop-fringed reddish hair and silver trainers might have suggested.
Alex saw a dark-haired, reserved, maybe slightly shy, maybe slightly careful woman, dressed almost entirely in black but whose very funky green buckled bag and matching green boots hinted at something more interesting.
‘Do you always wear black?’ Alex had dared.
‘Oh . . .’ Pamela said, a little knocked off guard, ‘I’ve put on weight and I suppose I do that black cover-up thing. I hadn’t realized how bad I’d got.’ She was in another big black coat, tied tightly with a belt.
‘Are you married?’ Alex had asked, although she had noticed the little gold and diamond combo.
‘Ah ha,’ Pamela had managed from the depths of a bacon sandwich almost religious in its perfection.
‘Kids?’
So casual, nothing but polite interest meant by it, but this question kicked Pamela in the stomach, brought a slight gasp to her throat every time. So hard to get the answer right.
A casual ‘no’ wouldn’t do, because it implied she didn’t have them and it was no big deal.
A ‘sadly, no’ invoked too much sympathy from strangers. So she had now refined her answer to: ‘Not yet, we’re still trying.’ Followed by a question to swiftly change the subject.
She tried this out on Alex. The follow-up being: ‘You live on your own, do you?’
‘Yes. That’s obvious, isn’t it? No-one else would put up with this amount of mess. But I don’t have cats,’ she said with emphasis, ‘I want you to know that. I am not one of those lone forty-somethings with a cat-child! Have more wine,’ she had commanded, dangling the bottle dangerously over the tumblers on the wrecked metal table.
‘No, no, I can’t. My head’s already reeling.’ Pamela had put her fingers over the glass and wouldn’t be persuaded.
So that was how the friendship started and since then it had been cemented with many more glasses of wine out there on the terrace, and regular weekend junk shop and car boot sale scavenging trips.
Finally, a few months in, Pamela had wanted to explain to her new friend her regular hospital trips, her yo-yo-ing weight, her unpredictable moods and the great big knot of unhappiness inside her which she didn’t think was ever going to be untied.
They were driving home with a car full of treasures from a day trip to Hastings when Alex, who’d long suspected what was going on, asked how long Pamela had been ‘trying’.
‘Four years. We’ve done five IVF cycles. Not the slightest sniff of pregnancy.’ Her voice had remained neutral.‘Dave has a very low sperm count and apparently I’m sub-fertile . . . pre-menopausal.’
‘I’m so sorry,’ had been Alex’s response.
‘I’m absolutely desperate for a baby,’ Pamela had added, straight arms on the wheel, eyes fixed, unblinkingly to the road.‘I’m beginning to think I’ll do anything, I almost don’t want to see my brother’s kids any more because I’m going to snatch them . . . eat them up. I’m starving for a baby. I can’t explain it any other way.’ There was a big, wrenching sound after this, somewhere between a sob and a choked cough. Car still gunning down the dual carriageway at 70 m.p.h.
‘I’m so sorry. I’m sorry I’ve brought it up now. Do you want to stop for a moment?’ Alex was slightly concerned about the safety of this conversation.
‘No, no. I’ll be fine. I don’t cry about it. Can’t cry.’ Pamela’s eyes still fixed firmly ahead.
‘Why the hell not?’
‘Because I’ve cried enough. And I worry that if I start, I’m never going to stop. I’m going to be upset about this till the day I die.’
A long moment of silence passed between them. Alex looked out of the side windows at the hedges and fields whizzing past.
‘Anyway, there’s another go coming up in three months’ time. The odds are better now. Twenty per cent of cycles work. We’ve already done five, so maybe this will be the one.’
‘What about you?’ Pamela asked now.‘Don’t you think you would like children?’ – the unspoken ‘And haven’t you left it a bit bloody late?’ acknowledged by both of them.
‘Well . . .’ and Alex knew how unfortunate this was going to sound now, ‘I’m from a family of five children. Have I told you that before? And . . . I know I’ve lived away from home for twenty years or so, but I’m still grateful for the peace and quiet. I’m sorry. That must sound odd to you. I don’t know . . . I like babies. I love little children. But having this person to be responsible for . . . for the rest of my life . . . It’s a bit selfish probably, but I’m just not up for it.’ She shrugged her shoulders lightly.‘So there you go. We’re a very odd couple then. Reminds me of that grace: “Some could eat, but have no meat. Some have meat but cannae eat.”’
Pamela managed a smile.
Chapter Three
PAMELA WOKE MUCH earlier than she needed to, still tired from yet another restless night. Enviously, she turned to watch her husband fast asleep beside her. David Carr, a good person, nice guy, who wheezed slightly as he slept, was no longer quite as good-looking to her as she’d once found him. His once wild, curly blond hair had been tamed into a short, thinning crop and he was so stressed out with work right now, he was even skinnier than usual.
His clothes actually hung off him, which seemed faintly ridiculous for someone in their late thirties. But she didn’t feel angry with him about it, she felt sorry. Like her, he was busy, busy with work and had the added stress of a long commute and a job with the NHS.
He was part of a trust management team. A career that had once looked so promising, altruistic even, but now was bound up in cut-throat politics, in-fighting, futility. He loathed it, was drained by it. All he had energy for when he got home was watering his plants, then slumping onto the sofa with beer and Pringles. He was an addict of the reality escape programmes: ‘Birmingham family move to rural Greece’, ‘Mancunians build French fishing lake’, that kind of thing. His dissatisfaction with life was one of the things that kept her awake at night. Once in a while he talked about ‘getting away from it all’, but then, didn’t everyone? And as Sadie had warned . . . who did? And was it any better out there?
They’d been married for seven years now and been together for five years before that, since she was 22. Was this how marriage went? Or was it their fault? Had they let everything get a bit stale? Because she couldn’t deny how wildly they’d once been in love.
Whole-weekends-in-bed-together love, love-letter love, meeting-him-at-the-door-naked love, driving cross-country through the night to be with each other love, soulmate love. Where did it go? How had it so slowly, step by tiny step, changed from that to this?
From wanting to die for someone . . . to wanting to kill them for leaving a towel, yet again, in a damp heap on the bedroo
m floor.
But then when they’d met, they’d been artists, art school romantics. Love and all the great romantic gestures had come so much more easily back then, when love was new and they felt like the first people who’d ever fallen into it.
Her third-year class had shared a life drawing lesson with the fourth-years. Throughout the afternoon, she’d found her eyes wandering up over the top of her paper to the wiry blond guy beside the window, utterly absorbed, sunlight setting his frizz of curls alight. She hadn’t been able to tear her gaze from the pale face, the oh so intense eyes. To her sensitive, art school soul, he had looked like a warrior angel Gabriel.
OK, so it was maybe just the tiniest of disappointments to find out that the angel Gabriel’s name was actually Dave and he was from the Midlands. But Dave from the Midlands turned out to have as truly poetic a soul as she’d wanted back then. He’d sent her sketches he’d made of her secretly, pinned illustrated poems to her bedsit door, and when he’d won her over, he’d dared to talk of undying love.
They were inseparable, fascinated, dressed in each other’s clothes, had even the tiniest things in common. They went on a penniless hitch-hiking holiday to sketch their way round France and Spain, somehow surviving on bread, cheese, chocolate and wine.
Both sets of parents had looked on with a mixture of awe and anxiety: Dave’s parents liked her; Pamela’s loved him. All worried it would end horribly, but secretly hoped that it wouldn’t, that maybe this fledgling couple might realize what a perfect match they had made so young.
Dave had graduated first and spent a year in Liverpool waiting for Pamela to finish her degree. He painted all day long – paintings that no-one wanted to exhibit, no-one wanted to buy – and worked in a supermarket, stacking shelves at night. By the time she’d graduated, it had got to him. He’d enrolled on a hospital management course, desperate for a ‘proper’ job, something he could do to make a difference. And she’d decided to retrain in interior design.
Another year of grinding, grown-up student poverty followed and the romance of being poor wore off in their tiny flat full of damp, beans on toast, vegetable stew, a one pint limit at the pub.