by Tony Parsons
Paulo and Jessica followed the estate agent into the enormous garden.
The suburban night was still and peaceful. In the darkness the lights of the swimming pool made the water sparkle and shine, the perfect blue flecked with shimmering gold.
‘It’s large for a private pool,’ the estate agent said.
‘It’s beautiful,’ Jessica said. ‘The lights under the water. I love it.’
‘Not everybody wants one,’ the estate agent said, with one of those flashes of honesty that she used to temper her sales pitch. ‘There’s a certain amount of maintenance – although, that said, I think there are some excellent pool guys around here. And then there’s the safety issue, of course. You don’t have children yet, do you?’
‘Not yet,’ said Paulo, turning in time to see his wife flinch. He felt a wave of despair. Why can’t the world just leave her alone?
‘Can we see the rest of the house?’ Jessica said.
After the doctor told them that Jessica was over her miscarriage, they had gone ahead with the cycle of IVF. But Jessica would never be over her miscarriage, and the IVF hadn’t worked.
Jessica had dutifully injected herself with fertility drugs every night, her tummy slowly becoming covered with a patchwork of bruises, as her egg production went into overdrive. There were countless scans, becoming more and more frequent as the great egg harvest day approached.
Paulo thought his contribution seemed pathetically trivial – a quick wank into a plastic tube on the day that they took the eggs from Jessica. His wife did all the work.
They removed twelve good eggs and they were all successfully fertilised. Two of them were placed inside Jessica but when she took a pregnancy test two weeks later, it was negative. A scan showed that the two fertilised eggs had simply melted away, like teardrops in the rain. And that was it.
It wasn’t like the miscarriage. There was a crushing disappointment, and the depressing knowledge that all those injections and trips to the doctor and hours with her legs in the air had been in vain.
But it wasn’t like losing a baby. There wasn’t the blood and the unused milk to deal with. The IVF cycle was more like an endurance test followed by a beautiful dream, a dream that she eventually had to wake from.
For an unknown number of days, or maybe only hours, or even minutes, or seconds – who would ever know? – there had been two fertilised eggs inside her. Potential babies? No – babies. Her babies.
Then they were gone, as if they had never existed, and after a low-key commiseration with the obstetrician, suddenly Jessica and Paulo were back on Harley Street, just the pair of them, a childless married couple, watching a woman and a man load a newborn baby into a car seat.
‘Never again,’ Jessica had said.
‘You’ll change your mind.’
‘Watch me. IVF? It doesn’t work, and when it does, they don’t know what it does to the baby.’
‘Come on, Jess. That’s not you talking. That’s some tabloid scare story.’
‘They don’t know what it does to the baby. How can they? They’ve only been doing it for a blink of an eye. I’ve read all this stuff that says IVF is a genetic time bomb.’
‘There are plenty of kids who were conceived naturally that get sick. Nobody can ever guarantee that a baby wouldn’t have problems. Is that honestly what you’re afraid of? Or are you afraid of failing again?’
Jessica turned her head away.
‘Leave me alone. You’re horrible to me.’
‘You did brilliantly. You did everything you could. But we can’t give up after one try. There are other places, better places.’
‘And what are the odds at these better places, Paulo? A twenty-five per cent success rate? A thirty per cent success rate? And that’s at the very best places. What kind of odds are they?’
‘But that’s counting everybody. Older women. Women that have had serious illness. That’s not you, Jess. Your odds are a lot better than that if we have another go.’
‘We?’ She almost laughed. ‘What’s this we business?’
‘I’d go through it with you, if I could. Have some of those injections. Fill myself with some of those drugs. I wish I could.’
She stared at the pavement. ‘I know you do.’
‘One more try?’
She shook her head. ‘No more tries.’
‘Oh, come on, Jess.’
Already he could tell it wasn’t going to happen. He could see it in that face he loved so much. This thing had beaten her, and it broke his heart.
‘Because whatever odds they give you, the chances are that it’s not going to work. Failure is what happens, and what you should expect. And I just can’t take any more failure, Paulo. I’m sorry. But I already feel like the best part of me is missing.’
So now they spent all their spare time looking at houses on the edge of the countryside, the part of the countryside that was full of people who wanted to escape London but couldn’t afford to escape too far. The city in the country, the estate agent called it. Apparently it was the hot new thing.
Jessica said it was because their greenish little bit of London was going downhill. Even there, you now got gangs and drugs, as the city got meaner, and harder to keep at bay. But Paulo knew it had nothing to do with the crime outside their front door.
It was because of the room at the back of the house, the room with the new carpet and the yellow walls and the cot from the fifth floor of John Lewis. They had to escape because before Jessica’s miscarriage they had prepared a room for the baby, and now they could never change that room. They didn’t have a reason to use it, and they didn’t have the heart to redecorate it. They could only run away from it.
Paulo turned away from the heavenly light of the swimming pool and went inside the house. It was a beautiful place – one of those substantial homes built just before the war for affluent city dwellers in search of somewhere cleaner and greener. But what would they do in all this space? Just the two of them?
He followed the voices of Jessica and the estate agent to a room on the first floor. He froze when he entered the room. It was a nursery.
There were baby toys all over the floor. A child-sized frog. Some sort of musical teddy bear. And lots of these half-destroyed my-first-books where you pulled a tab and a grinning cardboard animal appeared. A white cot sat at the end of the room like an altar.
‘Nice high ceilings,’ said the estate agent, crushing a clockwork pig under her heel.
Paulo was at his wife’s side. ‘Jess?’
He realised he didn’t give a damn where they lived. He just wanted to be with his wife. To shut their front door and make everybody go away.
She was staring at the cot.
‘It’s perfect for when you hear the patter of tiny feet,’ said the estate agent. ‘And there are some terrific schools around here.’
Jessica nodded thoughtfully, as if agreeing with some internal voice rather than the estate agent.
‘I am tearing all this out,’ she said. ‘Gutting it.’
Her voice was calm and businesslike. But her husband saw her eyes, and knew her heart, and was in no doubt that his wife was choked with a grief that he could never imagine.
Paulo thought that maybe his brother was right. Maybe women changed after they had a baby. Maybe they changed in ways that you would never believe possible.
Paulo didn’t know about that. All he knew was that his brother should come round to his place sometime.
And see what happens to a woman if she never has a baby.
Twelve
Dr Lawford had never been to her flat before. Megan was embarrassed by the shabby pokiness of the place, and her pants drying on the radiator, and the medical books she had casually left on the floor.
But as his strong, bony fingers lightly examined her face, most of all Megan was embarrassed to need his attention.
Embarrassment, Megan thought. What bloody good is embarrassment to a doctor?
She was scratched down one side of her face,
but apart from a throbbing lump on her forehead, the pain was mainly in her arms, where she had taken most of the blows. She knew that much, at least. So perhaps the lessons with Rory were not completely wasted.
Lawford started to take her blood pressure when someone buzzed up from the street. She saw Jessica and Cat in the grimy little monitor and let them inside. ‘My sisters,’ she told Lawford. They clumped up the stairs. Jessica took one look at Megan and burst into tears.
‘It’s okay, Jess.’
‘Those bastards,’ Cat said. ‘Don’t they respect anything?’
‘Not a lot,’ said Megan. ‘Not on the Sunny View Estate.’
‘What about the baby?’ Jessica said.
‘The baby’s fine,’ Megan said. ‘I’m fine.’
‘The baby’s okay? Poppy’s okay?’
‘She’s good. I had a scan. At the hospital. Everything’s normal.’
‘You can’t work in that place, Megan,’ Cat said. ‘It’s too dangerous.’
‘That’s exactly what I keep telling her,’ said Lawford. The three sisters looked at him. ‘These animals don’t deserve our Megan,’ he went on. ‘She should get out and find herself a nice little private practice on Harley Street.’
Megan didn’t know if he was joking or not.
‘Come on,’ he said. ‘Let me take your blood pressure.’
Megan made the introductions and settled herself on her single bed, rolling up her sleeve. Cat put her arm around Jessica and they all watched in silence as Lawford took the reading.
‘We’re going to have to watch this,’ he said.
‘What is it?’
‘A hundred and eighty over ninety-five.’
‘That’s the same as at the hospital. It should be down by now.’
‘Yes.’
‘Well,’ Megan said, taking it in. ‘Someone tried to beat me up. That’s not going to relax you, is it?’
‘In which case we would expect the reading to be temporary,’ Lawford said. ‘But if it doesn’t come down – well. Let’s wait and see, shall we?’
Megan nodded. ‘Let’s wait and see.’
Jessica wiped her eyes. ‘What’s happening? What’s wrong with your blood pressure?’
‘We’ll keep an eye on it,’ Lawford said. ‘Excuse me, I have to talk to the police. After that young man had finished with you, they delivered him to the nearest casualty ward so he could get his prescription filled. When they were a bit too slow with the methadone, he assaulted a nurse. Nice meeting you, ladies. I’ll see you back at the surgery, Megan.’
He left them alone. Cat went to put the kettle on.
‘Megan?’ Jessica said. ‘What’s wrong? What’s all this with your blood pressure?’
‘Do you know what pre-eclampsia is, Jess?’
Jessica shook her head, and Megan thought, of course not. Jessica had read thousands of words about endometriosis. She was an expert on what it was like to go through a miscarriage and an IVF cycle. She could tell you all about sperm motility and fertility drugs. She knew everything there was to know about trying to have a baby. But Jessica knew nothing about all the things that could go wrong when you were about to have a baby.
And why should she?
‘Pre-eclampsia is prenatal hypertension,’ Megan said. ‘High blood pressure, when you’re pregnant. In many ways it’s indistinguishable from what your average, stressed-out, overweight executive gets – except pre-eclampsia has nothing to do with being fat or the pressures of modern life. It’s the kind of high blood pressure that you only get in pregnancy.’
‘This milk is a week old,’ Cat said, coming back into the room with a battered carton. ‘Do you want me to run down the shops for you?’
‘I don’t really want any more tea,’ Megan said. ‘Are you really interested in any of this, Jess?’
‘Of course I am! You’re my sister! Poppy’s my niece!’
‘Okay. It’s to do with the blood supply to the placenta – essentially how the mother sustains the baby in the uterus.’
‘But – this moron attacked you,’ Jessica said. ‘Your blood pressure – it’s bound to be up, isn’t it?’
‘Sure. But it shouldn’t stay up like this. Nobody really knows what causes pre-eclampsia. If there’s a trigger. If something like this could be a trigger. So now we’re hoping it doesn’t stay up.’
‘And what if it does?’ Cat said.
Megan thought of the premature babies she had seen during her training at the Homerton. Tiny, wrinkled little creatures huddled up in woolly hats because they were too small to keep their own body warmth. And their parents, watching them through the plastic of their incubators. She thought about the ones that lived – that went on to be perfectly normal healthy babies. And she remembered the ones that didn’t.
Megan took a breath. She was suddenly very tired. And tired of explaining it all.
‘If my blood pressure remains high, then it’s pre-eclampsia. And the baby will have to be born early. I’ll have an emergency Caesarean because the baby will be too small for anything else.’
‘But she’ll be all right?’ Jessica said anxiously.
Twenty-nine weeks, Megan thought. Her daughter wasn’t ready for the world. Nowhere near it. The baby’s lungs weren’t strong enough to breathe yet – they wouldn’t be for weeks. If she was born any time over the next two months, she would still be considered premature. If she was born over the next seven days, she would be fighting for her life. Megan and Poppy would have to hold on for as long as they could.
‘I hope so. She could be a little undercooked. We have to prepare ourselves for that.’
‘A bit small, you mean?’
Twenty-nine weeks. And the scan showed that the baby was light for twenty-nine weeks. Megan’s obstetrician had told her at the hospital that the baby was currently just under a kilo. A little human life that weighed less than a bag of sugar. Megan’s daughter.
‘Yes. Poppy might be a bit small.’
Megan tried to sound reassuring. She didn’t tell her sisters about eclampsia. She didn’t tell them that when women and their babies died during childbirth in the good old days, eclampsia was usually what killed them.
Toxaemia of pregnancy, they called it back then – literally, poisoned blood, poisoned pregnancy. Convulsions during childbirth, the placenta tearing, and mother and baby bleeding to death within fifteen minutes. It was rare these days, because doctors did everything in their power to stop the pre-eclampsia ever advancing that far. But it could happen. For all their modern technology, the same cruel rules of life and death still applied.
But Megan didn’t teli her sisters any of that. It was one of the unspoken tenets of her profession. You didn’t have to tell them everything.
‘I called Dad,’ Cat said. ‘He’s really worried.’
‘Oh Cat,’ Megan said, suddenly the kid sister again. ‘I really don’t want him to come back for this. I’m fine. The baby’s fine.’
‘I’ll call him again. Tell him you’re okay. You and the baby.’
Their father was in Los Angeles for a couple of auditions. Jack Jewell hadn’t been on a movie set since 1971, when he had a bit part in Not Without My Trousers (‘Dreadful spinoff from the shockingly unfunny TV series’ – the Daily Sketch). One was a very long shot – the part of an evil British terrorist, the British being the one nation who would never complain to Hollywood about racial stereotyping.
Megan began impressing on Cat that she didn’t want her father to know what had happened, but that was when someone buzzed from the street.
‘It’s probably Mum,’ Jessica said.
Cat groaned with disbelief.
‘Well,’ Jessica said. ‘You called Dad. I called…her.’
She went to the door and let their mother into the flat, bringing with her the smell of Chanel and Marlboro. She was carrying a bottle of red wine, as if she were going to a dinner party.
‘Do you know there’s a horrible man with dreadlocks sleeping in the lobby?’ O
livia said. ‘I do believe he’s some kind of tramp. Can’t we get security to toss him out?’ Olivia approached the bed. Cat and Jessica quickly stood up, and edged back to give her space. Handing Jessica the bottle of wine, Olivia kissed Megan on the cheek that wasn’t scratched.
‘What have they done to you, my baby?’
‘I’ll go and buy that milk,’ said Cat.
She was on her way down the rickety staircase when her mother’s voice called her name. Cat kept going. Moving surprisingly fast for someone of her age on heels, Olivia caught her at the bottom of the stairs, repeating her name but not touching her. Cat turned and stared at her mother.
Olivia looked a lot older than she remembered. The war paint was being laid on with a trowel these days. How long had it been? Five years. Since Jessica’s wedding. And it was easy to avoid someone at a wedding.
‘You’ve got some nerve, my girl,’ Olivia said.
‘And why’s that?’
‘Do you honestly believe I don’t have the right to see my own child?’
‘Do what you want. That’s Megan’s choice. But I don’t have to sit there and watch you play the concerned parent.’
‘You don’t stop caring.’
‘Then go and show Megan how much you care.’
‘One day you’ll thank me. You and your sisters.’
Cat had to smile. ‘And why’s that?’
‘Do you have any idea what other women are like with their daughters?’ Her voice became a mocking, working-class singsong. ‘Why aren’t you pregnant yet? When are you going to become a mum? Where’s the lickle bay-be? I spared you all of that. Gave you room to grow.’
‘Is that what you gave us?’
‘I was never that kind of stultifying, brat-obsessed mother.’
‘Perhaps you shouldn’t talk about brats when Megan is in there fighting for her baby’s life.’
Suddenly her mother changed gear. The painted lips parted to reveal a dazzling smile, the voice was soft as a sigh.
‘Look at it this way. I allowed you – and your sisters – to be yourself. You must be able to see that. Not some dull, dreary mother whose self-esteem is tied up in the kids she dropped.’
Cat could smell her mother’s perfume and cigarettes. It felt like it was suffocating her.