by Zee Monodee
“Which was?”
On a sigh, she told him everything. The fertility clinic, Nammy’s trust, how he wanted her to be the first patient and then the face of this endeavour.
“You’re not ready for that, are you?” he asked once she’d finished.
She rolled her eyes to the ceiling. “I’m not ready for any of this crap, but do I have a choice?”
He clenched her hand tighter. Her dad knew she wouldn’t tolerate a hug right then. The gesture might come from a good intention on his part, but if he, or anyone else, started to coddle her, she’d lose it. For good.
“But have you thought about it at all?” he continued.
“I don’t know, Dad. From what I’ve understood, because I have no hormonal link in the tumour, I should be back to ‘normal’ within a few years of my treatments. It’s usually a year after chemo, but since I am younger, they want to blast me with the most intensive cocktail they can just so we have all the bases covered.”
“And there’s no accounting what that could do to your fertility.”
Another sigh. “Exactly.”
“What would this procedure be like?”
“As far as I know, just the same as when a woman goes for IVF, minus the re-implanting embryo part. It’s a course of hormone injection over ten days to get more eggs to mature in one swoop, then they go in through a small surgical procedure to extract them and then freeze them.”
“And where would that hurt?” he asked.
Where would it hurt, indeed? True, she already felt like a psycho bitch on PMS days; hormones for follicle stimulation would keep her high on oestrogen and the like for days. Hello, Hell!
But the result … She’d never considered having kids, not having thought she was mature enough or at ‘that’ stage in life where she could contemplate motherhood without running away screaming. Then the cancer had come, and everything changed. She might not even be able to have kids should she want them later on.
And that’s where it hinged, innit? The possibility to have a family later on. She definitely planned to live, to put that ignominious disease behind her once and for all after she’d cleared her treatments. And life had already shown her that its beauty lay in the small things. In the flowers, the pretty streaks of colour in the sky at dawn or twilight. In making her father smile. In indulging whatever culinary fancy Ben had wrapped himself in. In a cup of coffee with loads of cream and sugar, the heavy mug warming your cold hands the very first thing in the morning.
It would also shine at her through the gurgle of a baby. The smell of baby powder and that unique scent the downy heads of babies had. A child looking up at her with wonder, in those years when every kid thought their parent a superhero.
She’d never had a mother. Hers had chosen to leave in the thick of the night with only a note stating “I can’t do this anymore” left behind. Pretty Anita Rabb who’d had pale skin and green eyes had been the queen of her Indian village. In Europe once she’d married Jari Saran, a man who looked more like a Hollywood movie star than an Indian, her name had hidden any connotation of her being from such a lowly place and instead, they’d both passed for white. Until Anita had given birth to her first child … who’d had the misfortune of being born with dusky desi skin.
For the start of Megha’s life, Anita had hardly cared for her, this twist of Fate bringing down a terrible post-partum depression on her. When Megha had been six months old, she’d left, petitioning for her divorce through the elders of her birth village. Neither Megha nor Jari had seen her ever again, though Megha had heard Anita Rabb had married a white Englishman named Winslow, and that she had later borne him three children.
Could Megha be a good mother if she ever had a child? With that kind of family history, should she even be allowed to become a parent? Not to mention the faulty gene she must carry that had caused her cancer—could she ethically bring into this world a child, maybe a daughter, who would carry this same gene and thus a Damocles’ sword on her head?
But then again, she had half of Jari in her DNA, and all of him in her upbringing, in the woman she had become today. Such a wonderful man, who’d never faltered from having to care for a tiny baby after being abandoned by the wife he’d obviously adored, deserved every brightness she could bring into his world. And that implied grandchildren. She had to do everything to make this possible … and under the current circumstances, it meant having her eggs frozen.
“Megha? Earth to Megha.”
She blinked and stared at him. “It’s not covered by the NHS, and it’s not cheap.”
He didn’t even bat an eye. “How much?”
“About three thousand pounds, at least, just for the procedure for one cycle. Could be up to another thousand and more for the fertility drugs themselves. Then there’s yearly storage fees.”
She didn’t add that that she didn’t want to use Magnus’ money for this. She didn’t want to owe him anything. Heck, if she went ahead with this, she wouldn’t even tell him.
“Money’s not an issue, beti. Whatever it takes.”
And that was true. They weren’t rich, but they were also quite comfortable. The restaurant did very well, and if things got dicey, she could always sell one of the antiques she’d so painstakingly searched for and restored up in her flat.
So, the decision was made …
***
Three weeks later, she’d finished the injections. It had been hormonal hell—she never wished to go through that again!—but thank goodness, her team of doctors had been right on board, and given how her menstrual cycle was just about to start again, they hadn’t had to wait nor had they had to accelerate the procedure in order to accommodate her treatment schedule.
In the waiting room of the fertility clinic, Megha had sat herself tall despite everything inside her wanting to make itself as small as possible to escape the stares.
There was pity—oh, look, poor single gal without a man and also with no hope of snagging one, for why else would she be coming here to have her eggs extracted and then surely fertilized with the sperm of an anonymous donor so she can prove she can have a family?
Then smugness—again, not being with a man, while most of the other women were here with their partners to undergo IVF.
Contempt, too—many must’ve thought her one of those career girls who wouldn’t contemplate what she’d been put on Earth for, aka motherhood, and needing to climb the ladder in a man’s world, often by all means necessary; she hadn’t bothered to enlighten the one cow who’d had the viper’s tongue to actually tell her that to her face.
A small dose of something like understanding had come from the lesbian couple in the room—though their struggle wasn’t at all her own. She was here to have her eggs frozen, almost like having kids but before she could proclaim she was having said kids, they were herded away to be stored in liquid nitrogen. Quite anticlimactic, to be honest, and after the roller coaster emotional ride of the high hormones, it all fell flat, bringing with it recognition that this had all been something momentous …
Once outside the clinic after they’d cleared her post-procedure, she knew she had to face it. That kind of place did the job, yes, but it wasn’t meant for cancer patients, for the kind of intrinsic support a woman facing such devastating prospects required. She’d seen it with her own two eyes, had felt it in every part of her heart and the deepest reaches of her soul, where the hurt had infiltrated, insidious enough to leave no area free of its venomous clutches.
The time had come to swallow her pride, because empathy would always win—she couldn’t, in clear conscience, let any young cancer patient go through something like what she’d been through. She’d had the backbone to weather it, but others might not. So, for her fellow cancer sisters, she had to do this.
Megha grabbed her phone and input the number. It rang twice on the other end before the recipient picked up, slightly breathless. What had he been up to at such an hour of the day to be out of breath? Had she maybe interrupted somet
hing …? A blush heated her cheeks.
Get this over with!
She took a deep breath.
“Your fertility clinic idea,” she stated. “It makes sense.”
“So it’s a go from your end?”
Another deep breath.
“It’s a go.”
And now, prayers she wouldn’t regret this …
Chapter Three
Magnus left his Ferrari at the back of the property. The old mews and stables had long ago been converted into a multiple car garage, because no one used horses and carriages anymore in London. This might be Upper Brooke Street, where aristocrats had held pied-à-terre residences for the season in prestigious Mayfair, but they’d all moved with modern times. You’d also not see one aristocrat in the area—Russian oligarchs, Arab and other oil magnates, yes, but a titled Lord or Lady? Forget about it.
Though his family didn’t come from bad stock, they’d never been titled. His great-great-great-something-grandmother had been a lady-in-waiting to Queen Elizabeth I, and the bloke she’d married had been an equerry of said court. Nobody really knew which of the two had borne the deeper pockets, but their son had had an eye for magnificent jewels dripping in precious stones and with almost no visible metalwork to hold them together, and had started Trammell’s back in the day. His brand had become the signature style of the shop which had originated from Daimsbury, where the first store still held pride of place.
And also where he’d met Megha.
He took a deep breath as he entered the house from the back door and stopped in the mudroom to remove his shoes. No one in their right mind would ever dare wear shoes in his Swedish mother’s house, so their households always had mudrooms attached to every entry and exit point. Teak wood parquet would run along the floors, all the walking areas covered in Persian carpet runners to help keep the chill away from exposed soles. And in places where the floor consisted of marble, his family had spared no expense—heating cables ran under said marble to heat the surfaces.
He breathed in deep while inside. A whiff of his mother’s perfume—he’d never found out what she used; most probably a mix designed only for her in Paris—tinged the air everywhere inside this place. Light, heady, like flowers but with a hint of musk or honey. She’d always smelled like that as far as he could remember. This scent, more than anything else, spelled out this place for him. It had been home for his first eighteen years, then he’d moved out to the Kensington flat after both Stellan and Lars had bought theirs in the same building. With the two young men his family had always seen as more mature than him around, they hadn’t had any reason to balk at letting him have the flat there.
Still, something always brought him back to Mayfair. And today, he would say it was Ona’s quail in cream sauce—his mother had called him earlier, passing on the open secret that their cook was making this rare family favourite that evening. He’d miss that for nothing if he happened to be in London whenever she made it.
Across the maze of stairs in the structure of the five-floor residence, he made his way to the main salon just off the front entry hallway. He smiled when he thought of all the times he’d played with his younger sisters in those spiral spaces; some led to dead end rooms, others to outside terraces, and not one spanned the whole house from top to bottom. They’d come across many a lost employee during their days. They’d also hidden from their parents more than once, too, in those darkened depths.
Why were the memories assailing him so much today? He could usually brush them off with a single wave of the hand.
But he had to reckon things had changed. Something—make that someone—had slipped under his skin, between the real him and the persona of the happy-go-lucky fool he loved to pretend being. And because of that, because of her, he could no longer hide. Could no longer play at make-believe.
Her call had come the day before, and just his luck, Stellan was in Göteborg at the seat of his family’s shipping empire at the moment. So Magnus wouldn’t have the backup of his friend to present his plan to his father. Still, he’d thought he’d come tonight—no point letting good quail go to waste—and test the waters with his father, and maybe, hopefully, see if he could broach this topic with him without the tactical support of his best friend.
He had to admit he also missed his sisters. Speaking of them, he spotted his favourite in the room and went up to her on tiptoes, making no sound with his bare feet, all so he could pull her long braid and surprise her.
“Magnus!”
She didn’t even turn, knowing full well it had to be him. He grinned and wrapped his arms around her from behind. “Hey, Pixie!”
She grumbled. “Stop calling me that!”
He chuckled. He’d never do that. His baby sister, Elin, looked like a Norse fairy, for sure, but the girl loved flowers and dreamed of opening her own shop in Daimsbury one day. What better name than pixie, then. That conveyed the idea of a flower-loving, spirited beauty more than the Good or Evil Nordic elves many people believed to also be fairies.
She laughed and turned around to hug him. Fourteen years separated them, but they were the closest. Elin had been the surprise baby who came along eight years after Elsa Trammell thought she’d borne her last child, Tindra. All the family had coddled and cooed over Elin as the baby, then the little girl and sweet teenager she had been.
Magnus had made do with almost the same kind of attitude from his family all his life, with a little dose of indulgence, maybe. The truth remained that he’d been born at twenty-nine weeks. Nobody had expected him to live, let alone to end up being a kid with fully functioning motor skills and cognitive abilities. He’d never understood why his parents were always so hard on his sisters when they brought home better grades than he had, but those hadn’t been good enough. He’d ascribed it to being something inherently different about what was expected of boys and girls. Until the day he’d ‘got’ it—he wasn’t even supposed to be making much sense of what he was learning, so whatever he did accomplish was lauded as a feat.
It hadn’t mattered that he’d passed secondary school with decent grades and had then gone on to achieve an MBA at university. Anything from him was more than had been expected, so there’d been no feeling of pride because he was never met with respect, just a gentle pat on the head before moving to something else.
The day he’d figured this out, he’d stopped caring. A-levels and uni had been more to stay together with Stellan and Lars than to really make something of his abilities. At eighteen, he’d started to party, hard, and it only got harder as the years went by, because, again, everything he did was met with indulgence. To this day, he couldn’t clearly state how and why he hadn’t fallen into the trap of booze and drugs from the lifestyle he’d favoured. Maybe women had been vice enough.
“Hey, Log Head. Where you gone to?” Elin asked him as she broke away from his embrace.
She was the only one allowed to chide him with a derogatory name. He snapped out of his spell and pulled her braid again. “Nowhere. I’m starving.”
“You are always starving,” Elsa Trammell said as she glided into the big salon that looked more like a room from the Ritz or a castle in France than a family house in London. “Where did you get your metabolism? Certainly not from me,” she continued.
He laughed and reached his mother to drop a kiss on her still-smooth cheek. “My life demands a lot of energy.”
As always, around them, he played the fool.
“Yes. All that partying sure uses up calories …” His mother let the words dangle.
She probably referred to all his female conquests. Contrary to public belief, he didn’t sleep with a new girl every week. Partied with them, yes. But sex? It had lost its appeal a while ago, the cheap thrill of being with someone new just because he could. Still, he kept the image up, not wanting anyone to know he could have even the tiniest bit of depth inside him. What would be the point, really?
The doorbell rang, and a few moments later, in stepped a tiny old lady w
earing a pastel cashmere twin set over silk trousers, a long row of pearls separated by a glinting small ring of diamonds—the metal holding the stones invisible, of course, it being a Trammell’s masterpiece—dangling from her neck.
“Nammy!” Elin exclaimed, before enveloping their grandmother in her arms.
“I shall put this in the kitchen, ma’m,” Carson, their butler, said.
Magnus had always thought the very proper and stiff Carson must’ve been the inspiration for the Carson on Downton Abbey.
He eyed the butler as the stiff man made his way to the kitchen and then turned to Nammy. “Tell me that’s cake.”
The older lady smiled and winked at him. “Carrot cake with mascarpone topping.”
This was a secret Amelia Trammel shared only with her close family: her knack for baking that almost made her the body and cooking double of the renowned Mary Berry.
“My favourite,” Magnus muttered before he bent to kiss his diminutive Granma.
Trammell men had always been tall, and with his mother’s Nordic genes, even the girls flirted with six feet. But tiny Amelia didn’t top five-foot-one, and since she also always ditched her heeled shoes in his mother’s house, everyone towered over her. Still, that didn’t imply the older woman couldn’t stand her ground, and maybe even whip them into shape should she feel the need to.
He let go and then tumbled along another staircase hot on the trail of Elin. Both settled down at the massive wood table in the dining room adjacent to the kitchen where the staff took all their meals, and neither bothered to cut the cake before plunging their forks right in.
His mother and Nammy followed in soon after, Elsa berating them for their lack of manners in not getting individual plates. Nammy smiled on.
“Out of the way! Priority to the pregnant woman here!” Agneta, the oldest of his three sisters, chimed in as she bumped Elin from her seat on the bench and started in on the cake, too.
“Not fair! No one waited for me!” Tindra, their other sister, exclaimed as she came to the table, tumbled down onto Magnus’ lap, and directed his cake-laden fork to her mouth.