Letters to My Husband

by Stephanie Butland

  But there was the non-appearance of a baby, or any sign of a baby. To Michael, Elizabeth looked more beautiful than he’d ever seen her: six months into Operation Puppy, as they’d called it – a joke that was becoming less funny with every despondent month that passed – she’d started drinking less, running more (but not too much more), taking multivitamins, and as a result she was fitter, healthier, lovelier. ‘You look’ – he’d struggled to find a way to express it, every word that came to him, glowing, radiant, too pregnant a word – ‘you’re just lovely. Lovely.’

  ‘Well, you’d better make the most of it, because I intend to let myself go completely to hell when the baby comes,’ she’d laughed, but her eyes had dulled a little bit at the apparently limitless size of that ‘when’.

  Michael couldn’t see that there was anything to worry about. A book about fertility had appeared at Elizabeth’s side of the bed, but when he’d read the first chapter while waiting for his wife to come to bed from her bath he’d discovered that, until they had been trying for two years, there wasn’t any reason to suppose there was a problem.

  ‘I know,’ Elizabeth had said when he’d ventured this view, gently, later, ‘but I thought it would just happen.’

  ‘I know,’ Michael had said, and he had admitted that he had expected the same.

  ‘It’s just going to have to be three times a week for the foreseeable future, then,’ she’d said, and rolled herself in close to him, and he’d laughed and agreed. But checking a date in her diary the next week, he’d realized that she was keeping a record: P for period, O for ovulation, S for sex. He felt as though he’d been handed a school report with ‘must try harder’ written across the bottom of it.

  Folded into the back of the diary was the list of baby names they’d made one evening, early on, when there was nothing in the world to worry about. Elizabeth’s girl suggestions were Amelie, Kayleigh, Seraphina, against Michael’s of Rose, Daisy, Lily. Elizabeth’s boys were Arthur, Archie, Tom, playing Michael’s John, Jack, Sam. We’re going to need nine months to thrash this out, she’d said. He’d said, why don’t you name the first and I’ll do the second.

  The book about fertility became a pile. ‘They’re new,’ Michael had said.

  ‘I went into Marsham to get them,’ Elizabeth had replied, side-stepping the real discussion. ‘Living in Throckton really gets on my nerves sometimes.’

  ‘Do you want to move, then?’ he’d asked, mildly, sensing the onset of premenstrual tension and knowing (finally) not to ask whether that was the problem.

  ‘No. I don’t want to move. I want to be able to walk into the bookshop here and buy a bunch of books about baby names.’

  Eighteen months after they started trying to conceive, Elizabeth began taking her temperature every morning, and the bathroom cabinet always contained an ovulation predictor kit. They tried having more sex. They tried having less sex, at the times when it was more likely to work. Elizabeth trawled the internet for clues about what might add the magic ingredient that they were missing: she drew up lists of things that could be wrong with either of them. Mealtimes became combinations of foods high in one thing and low in another, in the hope that they would add the missing something. Wine was for weekends. Sex was not for fun. Once, Michael had come in from work on a night shift to his wife saying, ‘We need to do it now, but we need to be quick, because I have to be at work in fifteen minutes, and if I drive instead of walk I can be there in five.’

  Michael was the one who suggested going to see a doctor. He wasn’t sure they needed to, couldn’t believe that their good health and their bodies and their love wouldn’t do the job sooner or later: but he was afraid for Elizabeth, for the way she seemed to need a baby more than she needed him. One night, she had said, ‘Maybe that’s the one that’s done it,’ as she turned over to go to sleep, and her husband was fairly certain that she hadn’t known she’d said it out loud. Their world, once everything they needed, was becoming a place where they could only see what was missing. Elizabeth longed for her baby, Michael for his wife. A baby seemed the best way of getting his wife back.

  So they went to see their GP about it, properly, at the surgery, although the topic had come up between Andy and Michael not long before. They’d been at the pub quiz and Andy and Lucy had announced that they were expecting: Elizabeth had said the right things and gone quiet, the men had gone to the bar. ‘You’ve had better luck than us,’ Michael had said, ‘we’ve been trying for a year and a half.’ ‘Give it a bit longer,’ Andy had replied, ‘a year and a half doesn’t mean anything. Honestly. Medical opinion. But come and see someone about it, if it will put your mind at rest.’

  Back at the table, Lucy had caught something of Elizabeth’s mood and said, ‘It will be you next.’

  In the waiting room, Elizabeth whispered, ‘I haven’t felt like this since I went to get the Pill when I was seventeen.’ Michael smiled and squeezed her knee: Elizabeth added ‘contraceptive pill too early/too long?’ to her list of possible reasons for her empty arms.

  Their doctor told them that there was probably nothing amiss, but referred them to a specialist. The appointment was another six-week wait. ‘Makes a change from a four-week wait,’ Elizabeth had said, and she’d suggested that they go for a run. It helped her to clear her mind, and tire her body. It was the first time she’d proposed that they do anything except have sex in a long time. Which, Michael reflected as he pulled on his trainers, sounded a lot more fun in theory than in practice.

  The fertility unit was bright and full of couples holding hands. As they waited Elizabeth read leaflets, Michael looked at the noticeboard thick with thank-you cards and pictures of babies and hoped. Only Mel and Andy knew they were here: only Mel and Andy knew that they were trying for a baby.

  If Michael and Elizabeth had thought they were trying before, then that first appointment at the clinic showed them that there could be a whole new level of endeavour. They had tests for everything. They had medical histories taken, as far back in their families as either could remember. They had hormone tests, blood tests, swabs to be taken and sent on. Elizabeth’s menstrual cycle was recorded. The doctors needed to check that Elizabeth was ovulating, that Michael both made and delivered good, healthy sperm. Because of the cystic fibrosis that ran in Michael’s family, because Elizabeth knew nothing about her father and knew of no one living on her mother’s side, there would be genetic testing too.

  ‘It’s like forensic evidence,’ Michael had said, on the way home in the car.

  ‘Isn’t forensic evidence exactly what it is?’ Elizabeth had asked with something that was shaped like a smile but wasn’t really. ‘And I can’t believe that you didn’t tell me about the cystic fibrosis, seeing as it usually means infertility in men.’ She was driving, glaring at the road. He was afraid to touch her. It seemed like a long time since the one of them who wasn’t driving would rest a hand in the other’s lap.

  ‘I didn’t tell you,’ he had said, ‘because I never really think about it, to be honest.’ He’d tried for the positive angle. ‘I know I don’t have it.’

  ‘That’s not the point,’ she’d said.

  ‘No,’ he’d replied, ‘I don’t suppose it is.’

  ‘So,’ the specialist had said to them, when they sat in front of her, holding hands, another sad month later, ‘there’s nothing really wrong with either of you. Michael’s sperm count is a little below average, but the sperm are healthy, so that shouldn’t present a problem. Michael, you do carry the cystic fibrosis gene although you don’t have cystic fibrosis’ – Elizabeth’s fingers had stiffened in her husband’s hand – ‘but Elizabeth, you don’t, so we would have no worries about any child that you had on that score.’ The stiffness became a squeeze. Michael was forgiven.

  ‘But it’s been two and a half years. If there’s nothing wrong with either of us …’ Elizabeth had said. Her voice had slid to a halt. She had looked at Michael. His face had said, I don’t know. He had realized that they were both
hoping for a problem, something that could be fixed with tablets or an injection. Michael had felt Elizabeth’s body soften: not relaxation but defeat.

  ‘What else could we do?’ he had asked.

  ‘First of all, don’t despair. We can’t find anything wrong with thirty per cent of couples who don’t conceive naturally. That doesn’t mean we can’t help them. In your case, I suggest we try IVF using your own eggs and sperm.’

  Mike,

  It’s only now I’ve started dreaming about you. Andy said that dreaming about you is a good thing. He says it’s part of the process. I said, don’t call this a process. Making a cake is a process. Taking out an appendix is a process. He said, OK, dreaming about Michael is a good thing, and we’ll leave it at that.

  Except in the dreams, I can’t see you. I know you’re there, but I can’t reach you. Sometimes you’re just around the corner, and I’m waiting because I know you’re coming, but you don’t. Sometimes I can hear you, taking off your boots without undoing the laces, pushing one off with the toe of the other, the bounce on the kitchen tiles and Pepper welcoming you home. Sometimes you’re lying in bed with me, curled into my back, but I’m trapped in the sheets and I can’t turn over to you.

  Andy says it’s still a sort of healing. Mel says, like leeches, you mean, Andy, and he said, I know, but it’s hard. I agreed, with the hard part.

  I haven’t told them the other part. The other dreams. There’s you – you’re still not there, you’re always just out of shot, parking the car or putting the kettle on, something ordinary – and there’s me, and there’s our baby, too. And it’s just normal. You’re going to work, or we’re watching TV, or the baby is playing with something, a ball, a train, on the floor. His age changes in the dreams, sometimes I think we’re just back from the hospital with him and sometimes it seems that he’s ready to go out on his little bike, but he’s always a boy. Always a boy, a little you. I don’t think I’d have been good with a girl, but in these dreams I am very good with our boy, and he is plump and smiling and tow-headed, like you were when you were small.

  If I’d told Andy about these other dreams I know what he’d have said. He’d have said, you’re mourning for what you didn’t have, as well as what you did. He’d have told me that although we always said we’d come to terms with not having a baby, there was probably still a part of me that hoped, and that your death means no more hope. And he would be right. All those books I read about infertility when we were trying, and the ones about coming to terms with childlessness when we stopped, made me good at this stuff.

  But I didn’t tell him, partly because I don’t need to hear people saying things like ‘no more hope’ to me, and I don’t like how Andy looks when we have those kinds of conversation, so full of grief and worry.

  But the main reason I keep quiet is that I quite like those dreams, and I quite like the way I feel the next day: after the kick in the guts of understanding that you’re not here, and that the baby never was here, I feel as though I have a secret, a hidden little bit of something special, a shiny pebble in my pocket that I can touch and rub my thumb across and hold on to when the day darkens.

  Dreams are better than nothing. Dreams are better than flowers in the garden that aren’t from you. Dreams are mine, and I’ll keep them close for as long as I want to.

  Oh, my love.

  E xxx

  Now

  EVER SINCE THE morning when she took the pregnancy test six weeks ago, Kate has walked around unable to understand why no one can see what is going on inside her. It seems to her that she has the words ‘mother-to-be’ picked out in flashing neon above her head. Every time she walks into a room with her parents in it, she waits for one of them to see what’s happening in front of them, but they never do, although they look at her with love and concern and, she thinks, more than a suspicion that they don’t know the whole story. She hears her name spoken softly at night, sometimes, as she goes downstairs for bananas and milk.

  Although Kate has been sad, so very sad, since the night at Butler’s Pond, still she feels a deep, uncomplicated joy at the thought of this baby nestling itself into life inside her. She cannot tear her thoughts away from it. She’d thought, for three months, that the sickness and the tiredness she felt were the understandable aftermath of the horrible night when she nearly drowned; everyone around her seemed to think the same thing. But then she’d added coming off the Pill at the beginning of December into the equation – it had seemed like a good time for a break – and a baby became a much more likely explanation.

  The first time she felt it move, her whole self lurched with love in response. She reads, secretly, voraciously, about this miracle that her body is making, fascinated by how it grows: grape, plum, lemon, avocado, grapefruit. She wishes she wasn’t doing this alone.

  She knows what her parents will say: she knows that she doesn’t care. She knows that the worst they can do to her is make her leave, and that they won’t do that, because then there would be just the two of them, and they all know how well that would work.

  She knows, she tells Beatle, who keeps on wagging his tail in spite of the weight of all the secrets he is carrying, that there will be a bit of temporary unpleasantness. There will be a conversation in which the words ‘disappointed’ and ‘education’ and ‘future’ will feature, heavily. Her mother will look tragic and her father will sulk and tut and sigh. They will all three of them – all four of them, if you count the baby, all five of them, if you count Beatle – be upset for a couple of days. But then, they will all find a way to get on with it. She’s sure they will. It will be all right, she promises the pup, and promises herself.

  Kate has known since that morning when the word ‘pregnant’ materialized, like magic, in front of her, that the longer she can keep her secret from beaming, blurting itself out, the better. The further on the baby is, the more of a fait accompli she will be able to offer the world. So she’s done her best to sleep unobtrusively, vomit discreetly, crave privately. She hears her parents talk about her, about shock and trauma, and she slides her hand to her belly, rounding now. The plan is to wait, until six months if she can, and then tell them. She thinks it’s a good plan.

  But then, one morning, there’s blood.

  Richenda looks up from her laptop as Kate flies down the stairs, Beatle at her heels. There’s an urgency in their approach that alerts her. Since ‘that night at Butler’s Pond’, as the family have come to refer to it, Richenda has grown used to Kate being lethargic at best. She is anything but, now. Her eyes are wide and her hands are reaching for her mother. ‘I’m bleeding,’ she says, ‘Mum, I’m bleeding.’

  ‘Where?’ Richenda is thrown. There’s been no crash, no clatter. There’s no sign of injury, no blood on her hands.

  ‘No,’ Kate says, and she takes her mother’s hands, and a deep breath, and forces herself to look straight into her mother’s face, although this is not how she planned this, not at all. ‘Mum. I’m five months pregnant. And I’m bleeding.’

  In the car on the way to the hospital, there’s one of the most uncomfortable question-and-answer sessions that either has ever taken part in. It reminds Kate of the conversation that she’d had with her English teacher after failing her mock A level because she’d misunderstood the instructions on the paper; Richenda recalls talking to Rufus about one of his ‘work weekends away’.

  ‘Do you have any pain?’

  ‘No, no pain.’

  ‘What colour is the blood?’

  ‘Mum—’

  ‘It’s important. Bright red, brownish-red?’

  ‘Bright red.’

  ‘How much?’

  ‘Mum—’

  ‘If you’re pregnant, Kate, you need to be able to answer questions like this like a woman, not a girl. How much?’

  ‘Not much. Spots.’

  ‘OK.’

  Kate hugs her baby to her, as though her arms could hold it in its right place, as though the force of her love will make this all ri
ght. She hopes her mother has stopped with the questions. She hasn’t.

  ‘How long have you known?’

  ‘About six weeks.’

  ‘Why didn’t you tell us? Me?’ Richenda’s voice is breaking. Concentrate, she tells herself, drive carefully. Don’t cry. Don’t look at her, look at the road. This family doesn’t need another near miss.

  ‘I thought you’d try to make me get rid of it.’

  The baldness of this makes Richenda pause. She stops thinking about a place at Oxford thrown away and a life narrowed and limited in ways that Kate cannot imagine. Instead, she remembers how she might have been a mother of three instead of having one perfect, beautiful baby girl and two wretched, painful miscarriages: how easy it is to be objective about someone else’s pregnancy, how your own is your own cosmos.

  She decides that she will leave the education/potential/future-abandoned-for-the-sake-of-one-mistake stuff to Rufus.

  ‘Who’s the father?’

  ‘No.’

  Richenda, negotiating a series of mini-roundabouts, thinks she’s misheard. ‘You don’t know? Oh, Kate—’

  ‘That’s not what I said, Mum,’ Kate says. ‘I said no. I’m not telling you who the father is. There’s just me and the baby. If the baby is all right.’ Her voice starts to fray with tears. They pull into the hospital car park. Richenda stares ahead for a moment, then takes her daughter’s hand.

  ‘The baby’s survived a pretty rough time already,’ she says. ‘Let’s hope for the best, shall we?’

  They are through Accident and Emergency and into the Early Pregnancy Unit before there’s been time to say much more. Kate has been pale and still, but she’s answered questions in a clear, unapologetic voice, and while she hasn’t invited her mother to come into the consulting room with her, she hasn’t stopped her either. Richenda, calm on the outside but a scramble of worry and disbelief inside, is within arm’s reach, should Kate choose to reach. So far, she hasn’t, but her mother is sure that the time will come.