by Tim Adler
It must have been about a month or so after Mole discovered she was pregnant that my phone went in Leadenhall Market. Lloyd's of London had closed, and I had gone out for a quick sharpener with a colleague before heading home. Harry, the barman at Cheese, was telling me a joke as my phone rang. I could see it was Mole, and I mimed apologising while I ducked outside to take the call. "Could you come home?" she said. "I'm bleeding. I don't know what to do."
The train seemed to take forever getting back to Woolwich.
As I dumped my keys on the hall table, I noticed that our bedroom door was closed. I pushed it open and saw the room was dark. "Darling, are you all right?" I asked, pressing the light switch. The white bedroom exploded into light, the halogen lamps leaving purplish spots fading before my eyes. Mole was lying in bed with her back to me and the duvet pulled over. I sat down beside her and touched her hair. It was only then that I noticed the dried blood smeared on her cheek and that she was trembling. Slowly, I peeled back the duvet to reveal the sheet sodden in blood. It was absolutely soaking in the stuff. Then the smell of it hit me. "I'm so sorry," she whispered, her face still turned to the wall.
Our dream of having a little family of our own died that evening.
Seeing her curled up like that, I felt so much compassion. I slipped off my shoes without saying anything and got into bed next to her, hugging her tightly. I could feel her shaking and vowed that no matter what, we would get through this.
I got her into the shower and cleaned up while I stripped the bed. Brown dried blood had even soaked into the mattress. The thing that we wanted the most had been denied us and, if anything, the miscarriage made me even more determined that we would have the family that other people had. All this money, all this stuff, was going to be put to good use. Money can't buy you love, the song said, but it sure as hell could buy you a child.
The next day I came home early to give my wife the biggest bunch of flowers you have ever seen in your life. I wanted to do anything to make her feel better. I found Mole in the kitchen chopping vegetables, pretending nothing bad had happened, which was typical of her. It pained me to see her like this. I just felt, well, so impotent, and I took her hand to stop what she was doing.
Mole laid the flowers on the counter carefully. "They're beautiful," she said. "I know what you're doing. You don't have to do this."
"What did the doctor say?"
"She says there's nothing wrong she can pinpoint. My periods have been regular, and I haven't felt ill. She wants me to go and see a specialist. Apparently he's the god of fertility. She says that if there's anybody who can get to the bottom of what's wrong with me, he can."
"How are you feeling now?"
"Sore."
"Has she given you anything for the pain?"
"Some ibuprofen. I hope you don't mind, but I've made an appointment for us both to go see him."
"Why do we both need to go?"
"Darling, it might not just be me." That's what you think, I reflected bitterly.
"What's his name?"
"Jean-Luc For-zhay. You know, spelled like forget."
I stroked my wife's beautiful hair and kissed her forehead. She smelled so wonderful. "Everything is going to be all right, just you see," I reassured her.
We tripped up the steps to Doctor Forget's clinic in Harley Street a few days later. A discreet brass plaque had the practice name on it. A pretty receptionist answered the door, admitting us into what looked like a busy country house. Telephones rang. We were shown into a waiting room with thick sofas and a selection of newspapers and magazines on a rosewood table. Financial Times and Daily Telegraph for the grown-ups and old Beanos for the children. The room was full of women. "I had no idea there were so many others," Mole whispered. The idea that we were not alone in this was somehow comforting, and the waiting room, with its baby snapshots on the walls from grateful patients, felt warm and inviting.
I had just settled down to read Companies and Markets in the FT when Doctor Forget stuck his head round the door. "Mr and Mrs Cox?" he said.
The first thing that struck you about Jean-Marc Forget was his energy and how handsome he was. He was a dead ringer for George Clooney. I had Googled Mole's gynaecologist during an idle moment at work and come across a profile of him in one of those posh women's magazines. "Meltingly handsome" was how he was described, and he was much in demand with models and actresses, which did make me wonder how much this was all going to cost. We both rose from the sofa.
Doctor Forget's surgery was more like a cosy bookish study than an antiseptic clinical surgery. A gas fire bubbled away. Immediately you felt comforted, and you had the sense that whatever he told you, nothing truly bad could happen here. There were silver-framed photographs on the bookshelves, and I noticed one black-and-white photo of his family posing with a Labrador; his attractive blonde wife and their predictably gap-toothed, floppy-haired son. Forget began leafing through some printed-off emails and made a few notes with his Mont Blanc fountain pen.
"Forget's an unusual name," I said. "Where does it come from?"
"My father is French but my mother is English," he said, not looking up.
I smiled at Mole encouragingly because I could tell how nervous she was.
"Now," said Forget finally. "Why have you come to see me?"
"I had a miscarriage last week," Mole began. "I'd only discovered I was pregnant three weeks before. My doctor suggested I come and see you. Before that we'd been trying for, what, about six months?"
I nodded gravely.
Forget pressed his fingers together and sat back in his chair. "Six months isn't very long. It can take years."
"Now this has happened, I need to know what's wrong with me. I need to know whether I can have children." She went over the circumstances of her miscarriage in detail.
Forget had an annoying drawl, his sentences dropping and rising like a plane looping-the-loop. "The first thing I want to do is get you to fill out these forms. Your medical history. Then I want to get a closer look at you, Mrs Cox. It's called a hysteroscopy. Basically, I'm going to X-ray your fallopian tubes. Don't worry, there's nothing to be afraid of. It's not going to hurt."
"What, you mean now?" I asked dumbly.
"There's no time like the present. I'll just go and see whether the nurse is free."
Forget left us alone while we completed the forms. Occasionally we looked up at each other. There were questions about how much I drank and what kind of exercise I took, whether I had ever caught any sexually transmitted diseases or if I was HIV positive. My darling wife gave me a brave little smile when the nurse arrived to take her away.
The next time I saw her she was lying on a trolley in what looked like a dental surgery, with her abdomen covered and her legs raised. Forget and the nurse were both wearing face masks, and he was holding what looked like a wand with a balloon on the end of it, which I realised he was about to insert.
"Now, I'm going to try and be as gentle as I can," his muffled voice said through his mask. I put my face close to Mole's and told her that, whatever happened, to just keep looking at me. She winced and reached for my hand the moment the catheter entered her. Forget made muffled noises of encouragement. Suddenly Mole grimaced and gripped my hand, grunting with pain. She later told me that the moment the catheter came in contact with her uterus, she thought she was going to pass out. It was as if something white hot had touched her brain, and a tear ran down her cheek. Right at that moment, I would have done anything to change places with her, anything to save her from this ordeal.
Minutes later, Doctor Forget was snapping the X-rays onto a lit-up wall. "Well, there's nothing physically wrong with you, that's for sure," he said, pointing to a ghostly black-and-white blur. I didn't understand what we were looking at. "If anything, you're too healthy."
"What do you mean, too healthy?" Mole asked.
"Mrs Cox, the truth is that nearly every woman who comes to see me has the same problem."
"And what's tha
t?"
"Let me ask you a question. When was the last time you got ill?"
Mole looked at the gynaecologist blankly. "I really can't remember–"
"What, not even a cold or feeling run-down?"
"No, come to think of it, I've never had a day off work."
Forget looked at me as if to say, I rest my case.
"Your immune system is too strong. Your body is rejecting the pregnancy because it sees it as an invasion."
"So wait, you're saying that my wife is too healthy to get pregnant?" I said.
"That's pretty much the sum of it. Of course, it will take weeks to ascertain what is exactly wrong with Mrs Cox’s immune system, but I would bet my bottom dollar that's what the problem is."
"What happens if I get pregnant again?" Mole asked.
"Your body would reject the pregnancy and abort it," Forget said matter-of-factly. "I could give you a lot of old flannel and string you along for months with IVF. Believe me, your chances of getting pregnant and carrying the baby to term are almost non-existent. You'd end up spending thousands of pounds to end up just where we are today. I'm sorry, but that's the sum of it."
I could have throttled him for the brusque way he spoke to my wife, for his lack of bedside manner. It was almost as if he enjoyed it. Then his voice softened. "Look, may I give you some advice? Go down the surrogacy route. That way you can be assured of having a baby. It would be your eggs and sperm, just with another carrier."
"Surrogacy?" I repeated. "You mean, getting somebody else to have our baby?"
Forget gave me a withering look. I felt as if I was playing catch-up with the two of them. "It's more sophisticated than that these days. The fertilised egg is placed in the womb of the carrier mother. There's no human contact. Of course, you could ask a girlfriend to be a surrogate, but I wouldn't recommend it ... gets messy. Go through a clinic. There are some good ones. There's one in Wiltshire ..."
"I don't want this," Mole said quietly. "It's not what we planned."
"Look, you've asked for my advice, and I'm giving it. Thousands of couples use surrogate parents each year. This clinic in Wiltshire is highly recommended. Some of my biggest clients, the ones you see in Hello!, have used it. There was that actress ..." He clicked his fingers, trying to remember her name.
My mind cycled through what he had just told us. I mean, there were so many things to think about. "With surrogacy, how does it work? What if the surrogate decides to keep the baby?"
"There's no danger of that. The whole process is tightly controlled. That's why you should go through a clinic. There's more danger of the surrogate keeping the baby if you use a friend. With a clinic, everything is legal. There's lots of paperwork. You needn't even meet the carrier if you don't want to."
Mole and I looked at each other doubtfully. There was a lot to take in, and I wasn't sure how I felt about it. This was not something we had discussed. Did we really want a child badly enough to rent another woman's womb, which was effectively what we were doing?
"I don't know," I said. "We need to talk this through. It's not something we've even considered."
"Of course, of course," Forget said, placing his hand on my shoulder.
Have you ever thought how your life can change on the tiniest decision? Not getting on a packed bus? Turning left instead of right? That's what happened when our gynaecologist suggested going down the surrogacy route. I should have just grabbed Mole's hand and got the hell out of there.
Chapter Five
Rain smoked around the back tyres of cars on the motorway all the way down to Wiltshire. We had a four o'clock appointment at the Arlington Clinic, the surrogacy centre Doctor Forget had recommended. Mole was quiet in the car, preoccupied. I guess she was thinking about this enormous step we were about to take. Instead of talking, we listened to music from when we were children: Blur, Oasis and the Stone Roses. I took my hand off the steering wheel and gave hers a squeeze.
Forget was not kidding when he said this clinic was discreet. It took several wrong turns down country lanes before we found the house we were looking for, and even then I overshot the entrance and had to reverse back up the road. A canopy of overhanging trees choked the long driveway up to the house. At one time the clinic must have been a handsome red-brick Victorian home, but today it had a sagging, neglected feel to it. I swung the Porsche 4x4 across the drive and came to a stop facing the house. Rain trails hung in the distance even though the rain had stopped.
We crunched across the drive to the entrance and pressed the buzzer. Pushing the door open, we found ourselves in a waiting room where saccharine photographs of happy children gazed at us from the walls. The children were even more winsome than those in the fertility clinic, all reinforcing the message that children equated to happiness, and happiness was just another thing you could buy. They say that money can't buy you everything, like love; well, I'm sorry John Lennon, but in my experience you just have to dig a little deeper in your pocket. Because even if we found a surrogate, this whole exercise was going to cost me anything up to sixty thousand pounds. The receptionist had given me fair warning to bring a chequebook along. The clinic wanted a twenty-thousand-pound deposit if we went ahead.
There was a half-finished feeling to the Arlington Clinic, as if it was either setting up or going out of business, and the corridor had an institutional smell of fried food and hot, dusty radiators.
I wondered what our surrogate was going to be like, what she was doing right at this very moment. Our lives were going to change forever in nine months' time, yet was I really ready to be a father? I knew how important becoming a mother was to the woman I loved, yet could I say goodbye to my old life? And what exactly did that old life consist of, doing blow in nightclubs? Wasn't it time to grow up and move on with the next stage in my life? I pictured myself teaching our son to ride a bicycle, my hand pressed against the small of his back, letting go and watching him turn back as he pedalled on his own. But then again, wasn’t childhood one long waving goodbye to each other?
As if reading my thoughts, Mole said: "Are you sure you want to go through with this? We can always go back to London."
"We've talked and talked about this. You want a child. I'm ready for a child. We could go on debating for the rest of our lives. We're committed, so let's do it."
Mole liked to examine every decision from every angle, which drove me mad sometimes. It took her a long time to make up her mind, whereas I, rightly or wrongly, would rather jump in and to hell with the consequences.
"All we're doing is exploring options," she said, as if to reassure herself. "We don't have to agree to anything. Oh, I meant to ask you, have you told your father yet?"
"I thought it better to tell him once we've decided. You know what he's like. He'll only stick his oar in."
A brisk-looking blonde put her head round the door and told us Mr Wallace-Jones would see us now.
Trevor Wallace-Jones had a large round face, a salt-and-pepper beard and round John Lennon glasses. He had a weak, floury handshake, and there was an off-putting softness about him. We sat down opposite his desk in his blankly modern office.
"Please excuse the mess outside," he said. "We only moved in a couple of months ago and never seem to get round to unpacking." We murmured that this was quite all right. Wallace-Jones continued. "Doctor Forget says in his notes that you've been trying for a baby for six months, is that correct? And that you got pregnant only to miscarry a few weeks into the pregnancy, yes? And that you, Mrs Cox, have been diagnosed with a hyper-vigilant immune system?"
When you see a new medical person, you always have to recap everything. We both nodded.
"Perhaps we should start by you telling me why you've decided to explore surrogacy," he said. "Then I can tell you about our work here and how we operate." In another life, Mr Wallace-Jones might have been an Anglican cleric and I looked towards Mole, who was already knotting her hands.
"When Doctor Forget told us it was useless trying IVF, something
inside me died. I could feel it," she began. "You don't know what it's like for a woman to be told she can't conceive. Everything we have, everything we own ... I just feel, I just feel ... like a failure."
Mole was becoming tearful. "I can't give my husband the one thing he wants," she continued, before correcting herself. "I mean, the one thing we both want."
Wallace-Jones nodded sympathetically and pushed a box of tissues towards her.
"I completely understand," he said. "Perhaps I should begin by explaining what we do here. Basically there are two types of surrogacy: traditional and gestational. With traditional surrogacy, the sperm is injected into the surrogate between twelve and thirteen days after menstruation ..."
"The turkey baster, you mean," I said, trying to be funny. Wallace-Jones ignored me.
"... using a syringe, and then the baby is monitored and born in the traditional way. Then there is gestational surrogacy, where there are three parties involved: the father, an egg donor and the surrogate."
Mole said, "I don't understand. Are you saying that the egg donor and the surrogate are two different people?
Wallace-Jones smiled, showing an ugly row of yellow teeth. "They can be. We work with a lot of gay couples, so there's no question of them providing an egg sample. The fertilised egg is placed in the womb of the surrogate, who then carries the baby to term. So the egg donor could be a college student in California, while the surrogate could be a woman living in India."
I found the idea of an Indian woman wandering around her flat in Mumbai carrying our baby a little unsettling.
"These women who donate their eggs, where do they come from?" I asked.
"Oh, various backgrounds. A lot of them are newly married and need to make extra money. We've had models and actresses. A lot of them are in college and need the cash for course fees. Of course, that wouldn't apply in your case. You're producing eggs, it's just that your body sees any foreign object as a threat. All we would be doing is taking your fertilised egg, Mrs Cox, and implanting it in a surrogate of your choice. Your body would reject the fertilised egg, which is why you miscarried."