Secrets of a Happy Marriage

by Cathy Kelly

  Jojo controlled the urge to slap said pregnant people, and discovered an urgent call she had to make, asking Elaine to take over.

  Infertility played hell with your social life too – either people gave her knowing looks when she said she wasn’t going to have a celebratory glass of wine: ‘Are you expecting?’ they might whisper, with all the quiet of a pantomime dame.

  Or they’d be happily married with a carload of children and ask, when were she and Hugh going to stop partying and settle down to have kids?

  ‘You don’t know what you’re missing!’ they’d roar, so that the people in the cheap seats could hear too.

  Just once, Jojo longed to be able to say: ‘We don’t want kids. I hate them. I’m keeping all the money we’d be spending on them to buy a yacht in the Caribbean. It’s combining luxury with population control …’ Just to see the look on their faces.

  ‘Doesn’t anyone ever think before they open their mouths?’ she’d rage to Hugh on the way home in the car.

  ‘No, love,’ said Hugh sadly, and then she’d feel guilty because Hugh wanted children too. He didn’t have endometriosis. Every part of him was in perfect working order. Plus, he had two older brothers, they both had children and Hugh made the best uncle ever.

  Jojo’s sisters-in-law were nice women but, seriously, neither of them had the slightest clue when it came to discussing all things baby in her presence. Surely they must have put two and two together and figured out that a couple together as long as she and Hugh were childless because something wasn’t working? Or perhaps not.

  Family parties were the worst.

  ‘Oh, Hugh, hold little Tallulah … she’s so cute. Look, she’s smiling at you! She only smiles for us! You have a gift with children!’

  Teeth gritted, Jojo would slip out of the room and text Cari: ‘Send bail money – am going to kill someone.’

  At least Jojo didn’t have to compete with Cari when it came to kids.

  Barney’s stunt at the altar had put paid to all Cari’s thoughts in that direction. Cari’s sister, Maggie, six years younger, thought kids were cute from a distance – like from Outer Mongolia, maybe – but didn’t really want one of her own.

  ‘It’s like guys,’ said Maggie thoughtfully. ‘If they annoy you, you can send them off to their own place and look for a better one. You can’t do that with kids, can you?’

  ‘Not without social services getting involved,’ Jojo agreed.

  These days, Hugh and Jojo’s house was health central. There was no booze in the house, Jojo had sworn off the fake tan and she’d even bought organic make-up remover, just in case.

  Hugh had arrived home one evening the month before with a giant red juicer machine.

  ‘Is this a theme,’ Jojo teased her husband. ‘Red coffee maker, red food mixer, red toaster. Red sports car next?’

  ‘I wish.’ He grinned at her. ‘Think of how healthy we’ll be – it could help,’ he’d added, large frame and huge hands hugging her much smaller body in a hello kiss. They fit together beautifully: a dance of ten years’ practice.

  A week of drinking green sludge had merely made Jojo intimately acquainted with the loo in the shop. Not a good option at the times when she was there on her own and had to actually lock up before she made a dash into the back.

  ‘You’ll have to be a superhero drinking green juice on your own, honey,’ she told him at the end of the week. ‘Either I’ve picked up a tropical disease that cleans your intestines out – or else I’m allergic to vegetables.’

  ‘Coward.’

  ‘No, it’s just that a juice cleanse is cleansing me a bit too much. I like my food to stop briefly inside me before it reaches the escape hatch. Yes, Too Much Information! Sorry!’

  ‘I’ll make you fruit ones instead,’ said Hugh kindly.

  At weekends, she watched as Hugh carefully cut up a cucumber into precise, even shapes, although the machine was supposed to make mincemeat of even the hardest of veggies. He prepped for stir fries the same way.

  ‘Exacting,’ was the word, Jojo thought. She loved that about her husband: his precision and organisation.

  They were total opposites. She was messy, couldn’t help trailing books and make-up around their room, and abandoned half-read magazines with corners turned down on the couch at night.

  Her home desk – where she did the shop’s accounts, kept records of orders and inputted stock-taking details – was cluttered. The inevitable ‘a clean desk is the sign of a sick mind’ sign was stuck at a corner of her computer. But despite the mess, she was her father’s child – the accounts were flawless, even if the desk itself was chaotic.

  Hugh’s home desk – sleek and grey – was always empty unless he was working on it, when his work laptop and an OCD-level desk organiser were set at right angles to the desk side. And even his pens – he liked pale blue ones – were set at the correct angle.

  She could see him as a father: sitting at a table doing homework with their child.

  She wasn’t greedy – one was enough.

  It was a lovely picture: his large frame bent over their small child, fair hair flopping forward, his hands impatiently hauling it back as he drew graphs and maps, with coloured pens for capital cities, highlighters on important facts …

  The pain grabbed her: visceral, somewhere – ironically – in her belly. A clenching fist that told her it would never happen. That what happened to other people who went the IVF route would not happen to her. That she would never hold her own baby in her arms. Her early hopefulness had been dashed by that first negative pregnancy test. Then, the second negative test.

  ‘I am asking for help,’ she muttered softly, then loudly. ‘I am asking for help.’

  ‘The universe helps,’ her cousin, Maggie – fan of crystals, psychics and angel cards – insisted when she wanted something.

  But then Maggie had been asking the universe for a BMW and a hunky rich boyfriend for years now and no joy, so who knew?

  Toast finished, Jojo shoved her dishes in the dishwasher, noticing Hugh’s glass with remnants of green sludge already there. He made his juice the night before: ‘Cold press juicer,’ he’d said, having investigated the whole thing beforehand. ‘You can leave it overnight because it hasn’t been heated by centrifugal force.’ He drank it as breakfast at half six just before he left for work. Corporate law waited for no man.

  The shop could wait for one of its owners to come in because today was one of Elaine’s early days. Fridays were always busy in the shop with women deciding they had nothing to wear for weekend nights out.

  ‘You should have called it Nothing To Wear,’ pointed out her other cousin, Trina, the first time she’d helped out by working behind the till, her being broke coinciding neatly with Elaine being off sick with gastric flu one weekend. ‘That’s what everyone seems to say when they arrive. Honestly, all they do is buy clothes – how come they have nothing to wear?’

  Trina, being permanently broke, lived in Primark and bought the cheapest things she could online. Jojo helped her and Maggie out by giving them things at cost or for free and giving them shifts in the shop when they had maxed out their credit cards, which was just about every month.

  ‘Pot meet kettle,’ laughed Jojo. ‘You’re always in the shops.’

  ‘Yeah, but I buy tops for a tenner,’ said Trina.

  ‘That’s down to disposable income,’ Jojo said. ‘If you earned more you’d spend it. Women love clothes – society tells us we need loads of them. Plus, if they didn’t come in here, I’d have no business and since Maggie has done quite a few shifts for me, and I’ve given her clothes for you too, you and Maggie would half the wardrobes you already have.’

  ‘Yeah, fair enough,’ Trina said equably.

  ‘You guys have to learn how to budget,’ Jojo added. ‘I saw your credit card bill last time I was over. Have you bought a foreign country and not told us?’

  ‘You shouldn’t have looked,’ said Trina, not even slightly upset.

&
nbsp; ‘It was on the couch and I was sitting on it,’ Jojo said with a grin. ‘Your filing system is worse than mine. But you guys have got to get your finances sorted. The partying gets boring, you know. You need to think about the future and getting settled—’

  ‘Yeah, that’s what Cari says too,’ agreed Trina cheerfully, her face saying ‘Yeah, whatevs’, and raced off to help a customer who’d already said she didn’t need any help.

  Breakfast finished, Jojo went upstairs to shower and do her hair and make-up. In the bathroom mirror, she didn’t see her face or body any more. She saw instead the slight curve of her belly despite the thinness of the rest of her. Menopausal belly and menopausal breasts? she wondered. It had been the same the first two times too – her breasts had felt strange during what the doctors called the down regulation part of the process.

  The second part of the process, where she had to inject herself daily to grow what they called ‘follicles’ and what she and Hugh, after seeing them on-screen during one of the many vaginal scans, called eggs, meant she had the weirdest feeling inside her. As if she was a creature working hard to grow these precious eggs.

  ‘It’s like being a simple life form, a mammal, growing my babies,’ she said to Hugh as they sat curled up on the couch each evening, stroking her belly, willing the eggs to grow.

  ‘Those scans are amazing,’ Hugh said, his long strong fingers gentle. ‘It’s like you’ve another world inside you, a world of strange ghostly shapes and then these little buds of happiness.’

  Seven of the buds of happiness had been harvested and the two best embryos, after life in their petri dish with Hugh’s sperm, had been transferred. After the embryo transfer, when Jojo had felt as if jewels had been put inside her as the two precious embryos were carefully placed in her uterus, she had touched her breasts constantly and looked at them, willing the signs of pregnancy.

  ‘Do you think I look pregnant?’ she’d ask Hugh constantly, turning this way and that, examining her slenderness to see if there was any sign. ‘My breasts feel different, I’m sure of it.’

  They’d had to wait sixteen days after the transfer to do a pregnancy test. Each day had felt like years to Jojo.

  She’d been torn two ways – that she was pregnant, that it had worked because they wanted it so much. The ache that Jojo felt inside her to hold her own baby couldn’t be called what sociologists described as Baby Hunger– it was a wild, animal need to have her own child. A fierceness that she hadn’t known existed until they’d begun this painful journey.

  The second feeling was that she wasn’t pregnant – that it would never happen. Her mother had died, how could anything good now happen? If only they’d really started earlier, hadn’t kept putting off going to a specialist when they were first married because they were young and healthy, because they’d been sure she’d get pregnant naturally, right? And then putting off going to a specialist because Lottie was sick and Jojo had buried her need deep inside herself in order to help her mother through a terminal cancer diagnosis.

  On the sixteenth day that first time, her hands had been shaking as she’d done the test. Whatever the result, she needed to go into the fertility clinic later for a blood test.

  When she’d peed on the stick, she and Hugh had sat on the bathroom floor, the stick back in the packet, him holding her close, almost too tightly as if afraid she would fall apart if the result was negative.

  ‘We have to be prepared for whatever happens,’ he said.

  His face was taut, an expression on it that Jojo hadn’t known until they’d started the treatment. He was a serious-looking man but he so rarely looked serious when he was looking at Jojo: he had what Cari called ‘his Jojo face’ that Cari insisted was charming and romantic and said that this clever man with two degrees – law and economics – could scarcely believe his luck in having found someone as wonderful as Jojo.

  ‘Hugh, I am prepared, you know that,’ said Jojo.

  She was lying through her teeth. She wasn’t prepared: had never felt so untethered in her life. Her hands shook as she held on to Hugh. She loved him so much, they’d been together so long, since she was twenty-four and yet she felt utterly alone.

  This procedure, this whole infertility system, did more than just transform her body into a supposedly fertile ground for embryos – it ripped a couple in two. The clinic psychologist had warned them but she hadn’t believed it at the time. Now she knew it to be the truth. Infertility might turn some couples into even stronger units – it had turned Jojo and Hugh into islands drifting on the same sea.

  If there was no baby, Jojo wanted to be alone. She couldn’t bear to see her husband because this pain would feel like hers and only hers. He would not understand. Nobody would.

  How had she ever been optimistic about it all?

  Hugh’s phone alarm finally sounded the three minutes.

  They looked at the little white stick. A piece of plastic standing in for the Oracle at Delphi.

  There was only one line in the tiny window.

  Even as she looked at it, Jojo curled in on herself, bending over so that the half-retching, half-crying noises were made as she curled herself into a human ball.

  ‘No! no!’ she sobbed.

  Nothing had ever felt like this.

  ‘Please, Hugh, go away,’ she’d begged. And he had.

  Six

  ‘And yet it moves …’

  As whispered by Galileo after the Inquisition made him recant his statement that the Sun did not move, the Earth moved around it.

  Hugh Hennessy rolled over in the big bed and reached out to Jojo’s side. The sheets were cold, the duvet pulled back. He angled himself up enough to see the fat cube clock he’d had since before phones had alarms, a thing that could wake the dead if you didn’t hit the ‘off’ button within five seconds. He didn’t need it any more: somehow, he woke at five to six every morning, even at weekends. Years at college and then work had trained him. But today was Saturday, there had been no need to leave the cosy nest at six this morning, no need to move now – except.

  It was just after seven. Four minutes after, to be precise. A lie-in, he thought gratefully.

  But his wife was up. Up and undoubtedly worrying.

  Sighing, Hugh buried his head in his pillow and tried to doze again but it was no good: the sleep cycle was broken and his mind was a racing minefield of worries about Jojo, the infertility treatment, her father, her stepmother … this damn seventieth birthday.

  If it was possible, Hugh would like to airlift Jojo and himself to a remote land for six months so she could get away from family, work, parties, grief and the ache he saw on his wife’s face every day.

  They had talked about what infertility treatment meant, they had seen a counsellor connected with the clinic and they thought they were ready for what the counsellor described as a ‘rollercoaster of emotions’.

  Rollercoaster? It was more like being strapped onto the outside of a rocket heading for Mars: rollercoaster could not do justice to the highs and lows of each part of the procedure, and Hugh wasn’t even the one who was being pumped with drugs that played havoc with your hormones.

  He was naturally optimistic, he believed it would work. So had Jojo.

  Therefore they’d been excited and full of anticipation at the early trips in and out of the clinic.

  Science could do anything!

  Then had come the talk about ovarian hyper-stimulation and how women had died from this. They must be on the alert for the symptoms: lungs could fill with fluid, serious anti-stroke meds needed to be injected instantly.

  They’d both stared at each other in horror.

  ‘Are we mad to be doing this?’ Hugh had asked in the car on the way home.

  ‘No,’ cried Jojo fiercely. ‘I want a baby, Hugh: it’s the only way. It’s my body that’s letting us down. This is a risk but we’re ready for it, aren’t we?’

  What turned out to be the riskiest of all was the gradual disintegration of their relations
hip.

  When the first treatment had failed, Jojo had been devastated but slowly and eventually determined. ‘We’ll try again,’ she’d said.

  With the second negative test, she’d turned in on herself.

  She was still there physically, still able to smile, but it was a smile that never reached her eyes.

  Hugh felt as if he’d lost her.

  ‘We’ve got to talk, Jojo,’ he’d tried to say. ‘Please, talk to me.’

  But she wouldn’t.

  And then she’d wanted, been determined, to go through with another round of treatment when the three months after the last one was up, which was when they were allowed by the clinic to go through another cycle.

  ‘We’re not ready for it,’ he’d said flatly to her. ‘I’m going to tell the psychologist you’re not over the last one. Not every couple are right for this – it’s huge pressure. We can try adoption—’

  Jojo, but not a Jojo he recognised, had turned on him, almost snarling as she interrupted, ‘We are doing it, you are not saying anything like that, you are not! Do it for me, Hugh, for me.’

  Shaken, he’d tried again, making her sit beside him at the kitchen table, holding her arm, an arm that had grown so thin.

  ‘Please, lovie—’

  ‘I need this, Hugh!’

  He felt like such a coward for not fighting her.

  Instead, he’d gone with her to see the psychologist without whose agreement they wouldn’t be accepted for another cycle.

  ‘We’re fine,’ he’d lied, Jojo’s hand gripping his so tightly under the table that it hurt.

  And here they were again: just another week till Jojo had another transfer, a frozen one this time, where the five remaining embryos, which had been frozen last time, would be defrosted to see if they could survive to the next stage, ready for two to be implanted.