Elle
‘I’m sorry,’ said the doctor. He was kind in the way private doctors were, knowing that each soothing word was earning them extra. ‘There’s no reason I can find for your infertility.’
She stared down hard at her hands, twisted in her lap. Her mother had always told her never to cry in public. Hold it in, save it for the locked bathroom, the edge of the towel bunched in your mouth to hide the noise from your husband. He should never see you cry, except prettily, with joy. When he proposed, when your children were born. ‘There’s really nothing?’ She’d hoped for an easy answer, a simple fix to explain why month after month her body emptied itself, regular as clockwork.
Of course it’s your fault. Why would any child want you as a mother?
‘In about a third of cases, there’s no reason for it. But there’s always options. Adoption can bring a lot of joy—’
‘No,’ she said. ‘My husband, he wouldn’t want that. He’ll want his own child.’ They had discussed it, of course, when they met years ago, in the crush bar of the Royal Albert Hall, her aglow with a successful concert, him young and handsome, hardly able to tear his eyes from her. But back then, the idea of infertility or babies had seemed so far away. She’d voiced her concerns – her family history, the ethics of continuing her bloodline. He’d kissed her, her face cupped between his hands. I only want you, my darling girl.
She knew him better now. Having a child was not essential to him – he would never be the kind of father to change nappies or take time off for sports days – but he was also the kind of man who’d follow any woman who presented him with his own flesh and blood. The idea of being left for someone younger, someone untainted, was so crippling that Elle knew she had to get in first. If she was pregnant, if they had a child, he would never leave her. They’d be a family. And now here was the doctor telling her it maybe wasn’t possible. They knew it wasn’t him with the problem – he’d told her he got a girlfriend pregnant years ago, at university. She hadn’t kept it, and sometimes, when Elle woke at night, she found herself wondering about that child. What it would have looked like. If it was a boy or a girl. A child that wasn’t hers, but was his – that would be enough for her, maybe.
‘There’s IVF,’ said the doctor soothingly, in those expensive tones. ‘Perhaps your husband would be willing to try?’ She thought of it, the indignity of cups and tests and the plastic sterility of it all. The planning. That wasn’t him. He liked things to be passionate, spontaneous. Increasingly, he did not touch her at all in that way, simply stroking her hair and saying, you must be very tired, darling. But she wasn’t. She wasn’t tired.
‘I’ll talk to him,’ she said, gathering up her Marc Jacobs tote. ‘Thank you, doctor.’ And as she walked out the door, she believed that she would. She’d cook him a wonderful dinner, light candles, open wine, and later on she would broach the idea of getting a little helping hand to start their family.
Suzi
Sometimes, lately, I felt like I was losing control of myself. It was just little things, like I found myself sweating, so I got up to turn down the thermostat, only to find it set way low, seventeen degrees, or I’d be shivering when the dial was up at twenty-two. As if the climate came from inside me.
There was more. The phone rang, and sometimes no one was on the other end, a dropped connection along the line. I went to bed early, exhausted, but woke up in the night, jittery with nerves. I’d hear a noise outside and run to the window, but nothing was ever there. Animals, most likely, something I wasn’t used to after the city. I kept forgetting things too. I would set items down – my phone or a hairbrush or the glasses I was too vain to wear out of the house – and go back to where I was sure I’d left them, but they’d be somewhere else entirely. In my study, though I didn’t remember being in there that day, or inside the fridge even. I’d told Nick about it, troubled, and he put it down to ‘baby brain’.
‘Nothing to worry about. Just shows the little mite is active!’ He put his hand on my stomach, right up under my jumper and on my bare skin, and I pulled away. Maybe he was right. Certainly my brain had been a turbulent place since I lost you.
However, the Monday after our tense dinner party, I woke up to find Nick standing over me. Cold grey light poured in from the window, and I blinked. ‘What time is it?’
‘Seven.’
‘Oh.’ A deep exhaustion pulled me back into the warm duvet. ‘I should rest, I think. It’s so cold out.’
‘Not today.’ He stroked my head in a clinical, tender way. Like a nurse with a child. ‘We’ve got an appointment.’
‘What? Where?’ But he was already leaving the room, turning the shower on for me. He wouldn’t tell me where we were going as I ate bland porridge (no sugar allowed), or as I was marched to the car, my feet crunching on the frosty grass. I was grouchy. ‘Nick, what the hell is this? Tell me where we’re going.’ Was there an antenatal appointment I’d forgotten?
He sighed, staring at the road ahead. ‘I didn’t think you’d go if I told you. It’s nothing to worry about. They’re just going to talk to you.’
A spike of alarm. ‘Who?’
‘The doctor.’
‘What?’ I gaped at the side of his head. ‘You made me a doctor’s appointment? Can you even do that for me?’
He shrugged. ‘It’s all online now. Seriously, don’t you think you should see them? All this talk of music playing, the temperature, and the way you were on Saturday – sweetheart, I think you might need to talk to someone.’
I had nothing to say to that. It was weird, my mental state. Stress, maybe. Loss could also do odd things, I remembered that from my father dying. You’d see the person in a crowd, even start to call their name, before your brain caught up and reminded you it couldn’t be them. But since I couldn’t tell the doctor the truth, could they really help? ‘What can they do for me? You can’t take medication if you’re pregnant, I’m sure.’
He kept driving. ‘Nowadays it’s safe to take some of them.’ I found myself wondering – how did he know this? Had he been researching psychosis? Was that what was wrong with me?
I didn’t feel I was losing my mind. But I wondered how it would sound if I said it all out loud to a professional, and I felt a flicker of alarm.
It was unreal when it happened, the pregnancy. Nick and I had been trying for so long, noting every moment of heartburn or bloating and each twinge in my side. Even when the blood came on my thighs I’d convince myself it was a false period. Hope lets you see what you want. Hope blinds you. Then, when I met you, I realised I didn’t want it after all, and I started fudging the dates to Nick – I made sure to only do the OPK tests when he was out, and I fed my ovulation apps with false data, skewing the fertile window. It was dangerous, sleeping with someone else and pretending you wanted a baby with your husband. I couldn’t even say it wasn’t the right time. We’d got the country cottage, I’d given up work. It was the right time and way past it.
One day, a month or two after we met, I decided to take a pregnancy test to quell my strange doubts, the odd cramp and feeling of constant hunger, the morning I looked at milk and wanted to retch, the chafe of swollen breasts against my bra. It couldn’t be. I didn’t get pregnant. Other women did, within a month or two of trying. I’d been trying for three years. Except trying wasn’t the word any more. Enduring might be close, passive and miserable.
And there it was. I just sat looking at the test for ages, disbelieving. It can’t be. Oh my God. What what what. I tried to count. There’d been Nick, of course, the obligatory monthly ordeal I was fairly sure was too late in the cycle. Then you. And we’d been careful – but not that careful. Nothing about this was really careful. Then it came to me, sitting on the toilet with my jeans round my ankles – I would tell you. I would see what you said. This could be our saving, both of us. A child. My heart swelled with fear and possibility. This was the way out of my life. I had been sure of it. But look at me now; I was even more trapped than before.
He caught my arm. ‘How late?’
‘Um . . . not sure. A few weeks.’ He would have figured it out soon, so I had to tell him, even before I’d found the courage to tell you. He watched me like a hawk. He’d notice if I didn’t put tampons on the shopping list. You, I would not tell for another three months, as I hedged my bets and tried desperately to work out what to do.
Sometimes, when you think about the facts of your own life, or you speak them aloud to a friend, you catch yourself for a moment – Is that really true? There was me, feisty feminist Suzi, and I couldn’t even buy tampons unnoticed because we had a joint account and I didn’t earn and he did all the shopping because it was too far to walk to a shop and we only had one car, and even if we did online delivery he’d insist on checking the receipts for things they might have forgotten.
That morning, he drove to the shops to get the pregnancy test – he was late for work but he didn’t even care. Flexitime, he said. First I’d heard of it. He stood over me while I peed on it and we waited. I already knew what it would say, but I was still praying hard, please please please, although I didn’t know what I was praying for. A pink line. A fork in the road. A guillotine fall. These are the things that change your life.
The doctor – a brisk middle-aged woman with unflattering plum lipstick and dog hairs on her skirt – was kind enough. ‘I understand you’re having some issues, Suzanne?’
Nick had come in with me. I wondered if I was allowed to ask that he leave the room. How would that look though? ‘I’m fine,’ I said, wearily. ‘Just tired is all.’
‘She sleeps all the time,’ Nick said. ‘I don’t know why she’d be tired.’ A tinge of concern hiding the fact this was another dig.
‘Could be anaemia. Quite common in pregnancy. Schedule a blood test with the nurse on your way out.’ I could see she wanted me off her hands, filed away, and that was fine with me. But not Nick.
‘Then there’s the confusion,’ he said, taking my hand and threading his fingers through mine. ‘She keeps forgetting the alarm code. She’s hot, then cold, then hot again. Is that a pregnancy thing?’
‘Can be hormones, yes.’ The doctor was frowning now. I wondered if she had to tick some box about prenatal depression or whatever. Was that even a thing?
‘Plus she’s been . . . a bit ratty. Irrational, upset.’
‘I am here, you know,’ I muttered. The doctor gave me a sharp look and made a note about something.
‘Again, hormones can lead to mood swings. It’s quite common.’
Nick leaned forward earnestly. ‘I’d love to know what I can do to help. She just seems so unhappy. She goes wandering off in the countryside for hours.’
I gaped at him. ‘You told me to walk every day!’
‘Just a gentle stroll, sweetheart. You’re gone hours, sometimes.’
‘But . . .’ I subsided. Was this gaslighting? How could I explain that if I didn’t go for long enough, he pulled me up on it?
‘Don’t overdo the exercise, especially in this trimester. If you’re low on iron, you’ll get tired very quickly.’ She tapped at the computer. ‘Let’s do some blood work, test your thyroid and so on. Pregnancy can be a tough time. Maybe opening up to a friend would help.’
Sure, I’d just tell everyone that I’d slept with someone else and this might be his baby and now he’d buggered off. No problem. Nick was frowning. ‘You don’t think it’s serious? She doesn’t need, I don’t know, antidepressants or anything?’
The look she gave him was enjoyable for me. A man, telling her how to treat her patient. ‘It’s too soon for that. Blood tests first, don’t be afraid to rest, and like I said, talk to someone if you need it.’ That was it, we were dismissed.
In the car, I sensed Nick brooding. ‘Not much use, are they? What do we pay our taxes for?’
‘You’d honestly rather pump me full of drugs before we know anything? The baby eats everything I eat, you know.’ I parroted his words back to him and he scowled. ‘Maybe I just need someone to talk to. Nora—’
‘That’s another thing. Who is this random woman? You’ve only just met, and already you’re having heart to hearts with her?’
‘I’m not—’
‘I think there’s something weird about her. I’d prefer you focused on the house, actually cooking a decent dinner, that kind of thing.’
I held my tongue until I could feel words piling up in me, like water in a stepped-on hose. My only friend here, barely a friend yet, and I wasn’t allowed even that. Slowly, tears seeped out from my eyes and down my cheeks, and I wiped them on my cardigan sleeve. I never had tissues, of course.
Nick glanced over, sighed. ‘You have to sort yourself out, Suzi. It’s embarrassing, admitting I gave my wife everything she wanted and all she does is cry and complain.’
I said nothing. I didn’t realise he knew how much I’d been crying. We drove the rest of the way home in silence. He pulled up outside the cottage. Willow Cottage, what a stupid twee name. I missed living at Flat 2C, Greenham Street, EC2. ‘I have to get to work. Can I trust you to not set the alarm off?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said, shuffling out. ‘I don’t know if you trust me at all.’ My voice was thick with tears.
‘Trust is earned,’ he muttered, pulling off.
Instead of going into our house, I turned and went to Nora’s. Of course she was there. She was always there. ‘Oh, hello,’ she said, coming round the side of Ivy Cottage. She was in dirty gardening clothes and looked flushed with effort. ‘I wondered where you’d gone.’
‘I wanted to take you up on your offer, if you don’t mind,’ I said. ‘Come for a walk with me?’
Nora
I was making a start on the very neglected garden when Suzi came over, pleased to feel soil under my boots again and smell the rough dirt on my hands. Gardening was something they’d taught us at Uplands, a useful skill to come out of that hellhole. It was honest, and it helped calm the spiralling thoughts inside me. The plants couldn’t hide what they were. Not like people. I could have told Suzi hers were already past help; she should have protected them at the first sign of frost.
I said yes to the walk, of course, slipping my key under a plant pot – since I was alone now, I had a fear of being locked out, with nowhere to go – and she went to get the dog, emerging in a tangle of lead and scarf and coat. I watched her set the alarm, bemused. ‘You do that every time?’
‘Oh! Yes, well, Nick insists.’
I said nothing. Country people would likely leave the door unlocked. I only didn’t myself because I had things to hide. Perhaps Nick did too.
We trudged along the country lane then turned over a field, frozen grass crunching under my sensible boots and her impractical wellies. It was so quiet, no sound but our footsteps and the cry of faraway birds. Anything could happen out here, and no one would know.
I broke the silence. ‘Thank you for having me over on Saturday. I hope you got my note.’ I had posted one the next day, as I’d been taught, through the letter box. It had been an interesting dinner in the end. The husband had been nice – almost aggressively so. I could tell he thought of himself as a decent man, the kind who would never cheat or hit a woman, who recycled and swept his path of snow in the winter and gave to charities. I doubted he realised how much he put Suzi down, sneering at her painting and cooking attempts, the housewife role he’d thrown on her. Not for the first time, I tried to feel grateful I’d had another type of man. One who was never jealous, or passive-aggressive, or possessive. Even if he had his flaws in other ways. I would continue to watch Suzi and Nick, and see what I picked up. I had still not decided what to do.
Suzi looked embarrassed. ‘Oh, really, there was no need, but thank you. Nora, I’m so sorry it was . . . That Nick and I had a bit of a b
arney.’ She laughed without humour, the strain creaking in her voice. ‘I don’t know if you noticed. Silly, really – the stress of entertaining! We’re hardly Nigella and Jamie.’
A barney was one way to describe the vicious sniping I’d seen, the coldness in his eyes when he dropped his hints. About what, I wasn’t entirely sure. Suzi had been unfaithful before they left London, perhaps. Now was my chance. I said, ‘You can talk to me, Suzi. I know we don’t know each other that well. But it’s just us out here. We have to support each other.’
She was wavering. My heart began to race. Go on, Suzi. Tell me your secrets. Although what would I say if she did?
‘Oh, I’m fine, really. It’s just the adjustment from work. I was in advertising – graphic design. I always said I hated it – the meetings, the office politics, the lipstick campaigns. But I guess I did like some parts of it. Seeing people, getting dressed up.’ She gestured ironically at her clothes, old fraying jeans and the same man’s jumper on top. It was dirty. She must rarely take it off. ‘It’s just hard, making the change to full-time wife. I’m very lucky, really.’ If there was one thing I knew by now, it was the sound of a lie. I heard it in her throat, the words she was trying to convince herself were true. She hated it here. She hadn’t wanted to move at all. ‘Did you work?’ she asked, turning the subject away from herself.
I was quiet, wondering how to phrase it. ‘My husband had an important job. It seemed to make sense for me to stay at home. But then we didn’t have children, and I started to feel . . . invisible.’
‘Like a ghost,’ she said, and forced a laugh, but neither of us found it funny.
‘Yes. A ghost. That’s a good way to put it.’
‘You seem so young to be a widow. I’m sorry.’
‘Forty-two.’
‘That’s no age nowadays.’ I could see she was shocked I wasn’t older, that grief had aged me almost overnight.
The Other Wife Page 5