‘My lack of womb is my problem, not yours, Hattie. It is uniquely mine to deal with. More so than my husband’s, even. If he wants to have kids, he can still have kids – and I wouldn’t even blame him. When he married me that was very much on the agenda. But me? I will never have my own children but I believe I am much more than my womb and I don’t really want to be cast out as no use to my neighbours, just because you won’t be able to share a school run with me.’
Sam could feel the angry cry of injustice bubbling up within her again, but she pitied Hattie so tempered it. ‘My infertility makes people feel uncomfortable, I know that. I can see how that is. But can you only be comfortable with people who have and want exactly what you have, do you suppose?’
‘I hope I’m more flexible than that, but it can get a bit lonely in this village and the thought that I might have a neighbour with children came as a huge relief.’ Hattie paused. ‘Life-saving, even.’
Sam assessed her again. The realisation that Hattie wasn’t coping had been creeping up on her but now Hattie revealed a flash of desperation that Sam hadn’t anticipated. Sam felt swamped by guilt.
‘Sit down, Hattie. Let me make you a cup of tea.’ Hattie slumped down at the table. Sam ran a sink full of hot water and began to wipe down the surfaces. The cloth she was using was stained brown. She opened the cupboard beneath the sink, extracted a new cloth and threw the old one in the bin, continuing where she’d left off.
‘Oh God,’ groaned Hattie, collapsing forward on to her folded forearms, shielding her face. ‘You must think I’m disgusting. I’m just so, so tired.’
‘I don’t think you’re disgusting. My husband is a bit compulsive in his need to keep things clean, so he spends his entire time tidying up after me. Quite frankly, it drives me a bit nuts sometimes, but I suppose I’ve picked up some of his habits.’
‘Your husband sounds dreamy,’ said Hattie, her voice muffled by the sleeves of her cardigan that she was now talking into.
Sam paused, the cloth in her hand. ‘Yes. Yes, he is dreamy.’
Hattie turned to face Sam, but continued to rest her head on her arms. ‘Olly’s barely at home during the week, he has so much on at work that he tends to kip on a colleague’s sofa. He only really comes home at the weekends and it just doesn’t seem worth tidying up for the kids. It’s not like they notice, and they just make a mess all over again.’
Sam felt a flash of anger towards Olly.
‘Well, I hope your husband gives you a hand at the weekends. You’ve got a lot on your plate. It can’t be easy.’
‘He’s knackered by the weekend. He needs to catch up on his rest and he likes to get out to the golf club on a Saturday morning. He needs to take his mind off the stress of the week. After working as hard as he does he can’t really be expected to come home and cope with the kids or help around the house.’
Sam swallowed hard and opened cupboards, finding a home for the cereal. The cupboards needed cleaning. She opened the fridge and took out the milk. The fridge needed cleaning. She put on the kettle and wiped the table around Hattie, who didn’t move, but just followed Sam with her eyes.
‘My husband will bring the mower down this weekend. He’d love to tackle your garden for you.’
‘Really?’
‘Yes, really. It will probably only need to be done once. I’m sure that will prompt your husband to help a bit more. Men often tend to work that way, in my experience.’
Hattie smiled sadly. ‘It’s hard to talk to people that aren’t the same as you,’ she ventured.
‘We’re the same, Hattie.’
‘No, we’re not!’ said Hattie, outraged. She sat up. ‘Look at you, you’re perfect. Look at me. I’m a mess.’
Sam laughed kindly. ‘How long will the baby sleep, Hattie?’
Hattie groaned. ‘Maybe another thirty or forty minutes?’
‘Do me a favour, go and lie down in the sitting room. Close your eyes. Have a proper rest while the baby sleeps. I’ll finish up in here.’
Hattie stood and looked Sam up and down. Sam wondered if she had overstepped the mark, but Hattie nodded obediently and traipsed off towards the sitting room. Sam reappraised the kitchen, looked at her watch and rolled up her sleeves.
Chapter 48
Sam took Danny by the hand when he got home from work and led him to the lawn.
‘Look!’ she said. The grass stood tall and proud in the evening light. It was fading now, the colour of corn and it shimmered with gold in the last rays of sunshine. There were splashes of dark green amongst the pale grass, provided by other plants as they began to make their mark.
‘Gosh, it’s not a savannah now. It’s a forest. Well done, sweet pea.’ He bent down to look at it. ‘So much growth. It makes my head spin.’
‘Sometimes it’s easy to grow things. Sometimes it’s not. Not so easy for us. We’re at the end of the line, you and me.’ Sam squeezed Danny’s hand. Her words were untroubled and didn’t tumble over themselves but appeared one by one, in an orderly fashion, unlike the hysterical clamour of Sam’s thoughts when she was writing as Libby. This was not a conversation they had ever had and since Sam’s operation, they’d both been quite content to leave the words unsaid. But now, with all of this new growth around them, and with only Libby’s side of the story to represent her, Sam needed to redress the balance.
‘That’s very true – no kids for two only-children.’ Danny nodded and returned the squeeze.
‘I’m sorry,’ said Sam, realising she’d never apologised to Danny.
‘For what? To whom?’ he asked, confused.
‘We’ve let them down a bit, our ancestors, haven’t we? They’ve been busy procreating successfully, generation after generation, since for ever, and we’ve dropped the ball.’
‘I think the human population will carry on without us, don’t you? And I suspect our ancestors have been more successful elsewhere. We’ve probably each got a million distant cousins we don’t even know about.’
‘I’m sorry for you, Danny. You’ve been so good about this. But it doesn’t have to be the end of the line for you. I know you didn’t sign up for this. And you can probably go right ahead and procreate without me if you’d like to. I wouldn’t blame you.’
‘Oh, Sam.’
They were holding hands, looking intently at the even growth of grass that stretched from boundary to boundary. Sam turned to look at Danny, pulling him closer in to her.
‘I wouldn’t blame you. Don’t look so sad. I worry, yes of course I worry. I lie in bed and imagine you getting cold feet and rushing off to find the first functional womb. And I feel a rage of absolute jealousy, but I would get over that. But I wouldn’t get over you. My God, I would miss you and I really don’t want to live my life without you. But I’d let you go.’
‘Sam.’ Danny’s tone had changed. His eyes were filled with tears, but the sadness was greater than the plea of his eyes. His sadness was greater than the sag of his shoulders or the downward slump of his mouth. His sadness filled the space around them.
‘What?’ said Sam, alarmed now.
‘I’ve not been honest with you.’
Sam felt a rush of nausea. This is what she’d dreaded. She wasn’t enough. She could never be enough.
‘Tell me.’
Danny sat down heavily on the paving stones and brought his knees up towards his chest. He covered his face with his hands. She saw his shoulders heave a couple of times and she realised she’d never seen him cry before.
‘Champ. Tell me. I’m strong enough. You know that.’ She sat down beside him, putting an arm around his shoulders.
Danny spoke through his sobs. ‘You’re so strong. You’re so unflappable. You’re so capable, and I’m not worthy of you.’
Sam felt light-headed. ‘What have you done?’
‘You’re stronger than I am. And I took advantage of that. I let you carry this weight on your own and I should have shared it.’
‘You’re scaring me a bit, Da
nny.’
Danny rubbed his face fiercely with both hands, as if he could fight back the tears with physical force. He turned to Sam. ‘Back when we were first married, I was untrue.’
Sam’s stomach lurched. Back then? All that time ago, when she was still well? When they had a whole perfect life in front of them? He’d been unfaithful back then? She stood up, took a couple of paces away from him and then returned and sat kneeling beside him. She put her hands on his knees.
‘Tell me, Danny.’
‘When we were first trying for a baby.’
‘Yes?’
‘I felt sure it was me. I thought I was the problem. I made myself sick with worry that I’d let you down, that I wasn’t going to be good enough for you.’
‘Well, that was a whole lot of additional anxiety you needn’t have worried about!’ Sam used one hand to tip Danny’s face up and she prised his hands away so that she could see him. ‘What a waste of worry!’ she said, light-heartedly, though the fear still hovered between them.
‘But that’s just it. I went.’ Danny stifled another sob. ‘I went to a specialist, I went to see a doctor and I got myself checked out.’
‘Without telling me? You brave thing.’
‘I wasn’t brave. I was the problem. My sperm was…’ He stopped dramatically, shaking his head in shame. ‘It was sluggish.’
Sam tried to process this information but couldn’t get beyond the vision of sluggish sperm. She’d never really imagined them, en route, but didn’t think that torpidity would be a useful attribute. She stifled a small laugh. ‘Sluggish? I mean, what? They lacked motivation? What on earth are sluggish sperm?’
‘I was told they might not hit their target.’
‘I don’t understand why you’re so upset, Danny. You had lacklustre sperm, but that wasn’t really a problem in comparison to the complete removal of all my reproduction organs, was it?’
‘But don’t you see? I didn’t tell you.’
Sam used her thumbs to wipe a tear away from beneath each of Danny’s eyes. He blinked steadily.
He shook his head. ‘You’re so strong.’
‘I have my moments.’
‘And I didn’t want you to see me as weak. I never found the courage to tell you. I lay awake at night thinking about telling you, but I could never say it out loud. And the longer I left it, the worse it seemed to be. And then you got your diagnosis and suddenly, I didn’t have to tell you.’
‘My news trumped yours, I can see that.’ Sam frowned, unsure how she felt.
‘I’m a coward.’
‘That was, well, yes, that was a little spineless, Danny.’
‘I’m so ashamed.’
‘But more than that, it was stupid. Why did you carry that on your own, you could have shared it with me and it would have been gone in a flash. Events soon overtook your sluggish sperm. Not that it sounds like they were going to put up a fight.’ Sam laughed at her own wit, but Danny was not yet ready for her flippancy.
‘Because I didn’t want to be less of a man for you.’
‘That’s one of the most idiotic things you’ve ever said. And besides, you were prepared to take the risk that I might consider myself less of a woman for you. That doesn’t seem fair.’
He hung his head in shame, the occasional fat tear escaping and forming a rivulet in the crease between his nose and cheek.
‘What do I think about your manhood, Danny? Let me be honest. I do not think less of you for having sluggish sperm, but I do think less of you for not telling me. Telling me would have been courageous.’ She searched his face with her eyes, looking for other revelations she might find now they’d started to talk. ‘Did you tell anyone?’
He shook his head vigorously, tears rinsing his face. She wiped his cheeks with the heels of her hands pushing the wetness towards the outer edges of his cheeks where it clung to the stubble growing there.
‘Who on earth would I tell? You’re the only person I talk to.’
‘I don’t know. Who do guys tell their personal problems to? Other guys, I guess. That colleague of yours, the one with the annual barbecue. Peter? I can imagine you talking to him over a beer.’
‘Can you? Can you really imagine me talking to Peter about my sperm while drinking a beer? In a pub?’ Finally Danny laughed. ‘Oh, sweet pea. I’ve done a better job than I thought of presenting myself as worthy of your love.’ He clasped his hands behind the back of Sam’s head and pulled her gently towards him until their foreheads and noses touched.
Chapter 49
Danny and Sam were laughing again but still clinging to each other for reassurance. They’d both held back so much from each other that the watershed of revelation had allowed themselves to look at each other anew, although their mutual curiosity was still tinged with a trace of suspicion. They were both sitting on the sofa, toe to toe, talking softly and teasing each other gently.
‘Peter didn’t ask us to his barbecue this year,’ Danny said, aware that the snub had never been properly filed away and was fizzing around in a disorderly mesh somewhere just behind his eyes.
Sam was immediately alert to a spurn. ‘Any reason why not? He’s quite a good friend, isn’t he?’
‘Friend.’ Danny scowled as if struggling with the pronunciation of a difficult foreign word. I don’t know how to tell. I thought so. At any rate, we’ve been asked to the barbecue previously and now we’ve not. It’s puzzling me. I can’t seem to formulate a clear response because I don’t know exactly what I’m responding to. I thought I had dealt with it. I assumed he’d re-evaluated his career prospects and somehow decided we were in direct competition so he would need to distance himself from me to focus on his next steps.’
Sam thought for a while, concentrating on the conundrum. She flicked his toes with her own while she thought.
‘I tried to file it away, in a drawer marked “work problems” but you know that thing that happens with a filing cabinet, when you can’t open one drawer if another one is slightly open? It’s like that. I think I’ve got two drawers open at the same time. It might need re-processing.’
Sam nodded seriously. ‘You’re right. It’s not a work problem. And it’s not you. It’s me.’
Danny shook his head, decisively. ‘Don’t be ridiculous, sweet pea. He’s my colleague. This is a reflection on me. I think he sees me as competition. But there might be something else, too.’
‘Well, if it’s not me, it’s us. You make him nervous because you are married to me. I make him nervous because I make his wife nervous. We don’t fit in. My lack of reproductive organs makes us unsuitable candidates for barbecue guests.’
‘People don’t actually think like that. Do they?’
‘Oh they do. Believe me. These days I’m only surprised by people who don’t think like that. Every time anyone learns of my absent womb, they immediately reassess me. More often than that, they reject me.’ Sam shook her head and laughed lightly. ‘It’s times like this you want friends like Libby Masters, she’d probably campaign for the rights of my womb-shaped gap. She’d probably fight for my rights harder than I would.’
‘What on earth do you think happened to Libby Masters?’ Danny said suddenly. ‘Has she never cottoned on to the fact you both stole her identify and turned her into one of the women that women most love to hate?’
‘I think she might have got there all on her own, eventually. She was a young woman destined for a following. She was always going to attract a vast number of acolytes or dissenters. Who knows which she would have ended up with, she had the personality for either or both. But she never came back to class after that first year. I can only imagine she died a tragically valiant death. She just vanished.’
‘What did the tutors say?’
‘They said they didn’t know why she’d left. And in my experience the university body wasn’t exactly open about mental health problems. They didn’t dwell on issues that might be interpreted as personal weakness in case it reflected badly upon the instit
ution. Well, that’s what Libby always said.’
‘But didn’t you adore her? If she had died you would have heard surely and wouldn’t you have wanted to be at her funeral?’
‘Oh, you misunderstand me. I was a little bit in love with her, but she barely noticed me. I was way out of her league, I promise you. Even dead she was wildly superior to me. There is no way I would have had the guts to go to her funeral. She’d have called me bourgeois from her coffin and I’d have had to leave the church in shame.’
‘But you’re absolutely certain she died?’
‘Well, no, I can’t be certain. I can’t quite remember what I knew and what I fabricated to fill in the gaps. But she was incredibly involved at university and all the tutors loved her despite her militancy. Everyone knew she was preordained for great things, so only a huge disaster could have derailed her. She was very bright, very attractive and rather ahead of her time. It was rumoured that she’d turned down a place at Oxford because she was rebelling against her privilege. Honestly, ours was a good university but she must have been frustrated by the dullards around her. There was nobody on her wavelength. I just think it is entirely possible she took her own life, she felt things so very deeply and it can’t have been easy, to carry everyone else’s suffering on her shoulders.’
‘Maybe she just went to a different university… maybe that could explain it. Perhaps you and the other dullards had her running for the steeples.’
Sam thought about this as a possibility and shook her head, solemnly. ‘I just doubt it, she’d been so vociferous in her contempt for the establishment. But it’s a happier thought…’
‘Haven’t you ever looked for her?’ Danny asked. He was now tapping away at his laptop.
‘Libby M.A.S—’ he spelt out carefully as he typed. ‘This might not be easy, there would be a few of those, I imagine.’
‘She wasn’t Masters, she was Sage-Forsyth.’
‘Sage-Forsyth. Goodness. She sounds like she was the establishment. That should narrow it down a little. Where did Masters come from?’
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