‘I’m not from Paris,’ she continued, speaking as if he had asked a ridiculous question. ‘My accent’s disgusting – I know you can tell.’
‘I was thinking perhaps Australian.’
‘My mother was Swedish. Then she was American. Is American. I must remember not to kill her off. But she ran off and left me so I was brought up by my father, so I have to be what he is. No choice in the matter.’ She shrugged, sharp collarbones showing under her sleeveless black polo. ‘So where is it that you live?’
‘Out of town. Just beyond St Germain-en-Laye. Quiet, clean air. A very nice area.’
She nodded. She knew it. Way out of town, big houses, big gardens, big trees. In places like that nothing moving outside commuting hours except gardeners in the morning and children in the afternoon. ‘It must be nice, if you live there. Wow, that is a long way out. What time do you get home?’
‘Oh, not too late.’
‘What about your wife, doesn’t she complain?’ There was an empty bar stool and she took it, twining her long legs around each other, keeping her eyes on his face. Confess. Tell me how guilty you are, before I punish you. Her knee was almost in his crotch. Her brown leather rucksack lay collapsed on the floor, taking up an inconvenient amount of space in the crowded bar. She made no effort to move it so he bent down and folded it more neatly, anxious because this was the flashpoint, it was here that women could turn cold and leave. Still, no sense in evading the question; silence answered it just as well.
‘I suppose I must look married.’
‘Yes, you do.’ She was smiling again, and eating olives one after the other, very fast.
‘My wife has nothing to complain about. I’m a good husband, she has everything she wants. Right now she’s in Normandy with the children, relaxing by the seaside while I’m back here in Paris in August, sweating my guts out.’ He checked himself, aware that he was almost babbling with nerves. ‘You’ve eaten all the olives.’
‘I’m hungry. I’d really like a big steak, and ice cream.’ She was still with him and still smiling. His heart beat hard with relief. There was a good moon up tonight.
Such a sweet girl, not beautiful, you could not say that, but striking, yes; too tall and too thin, these students never ate properly. It would be a pleasure just to walk into the brasserie with her. He asked her name.
‘Imogen.’
He had a classic, Burberry-style mackintosh. They all did, it was like a uniform. She took his arm as they left the bar, gloomily anticipating the steak. It would be necessary to eat at least some of it. One of them got so mad when she wouldn’t eat that he had stood up and walked out, throwing money for the bill on the table. She had wasted a whole night. It was important to learn to compromise if you wanted to achieve what you desired, to learn to give in order to get.
Her father always lectured her about compromise. She would not go to his extremes, though. There was a difference between compromising and being compromised, the way he was. To get what he wanted he gave away so much of himself that in the end there was nothing left, not even the remains of a personality, only that ravenous will which had made the first compromise necessary. Greed in a suit, that was all that remained of Daddy.
The victim was holding open the restaurant door. They were so easy, these family men. This one was the easiest yet. Perhaps they got panicky towards the end of the holidays, worrying that the pussy season was ending and they hadn’t got their share. He looked so clean and pompous in his fine white shirt and his suit. He commanded waiters like a dictator, his chest swelling. Such a display of power. She thought of how he would be in a couple of hours, so eager to shuck off the carapace and humiliate himself.
‘Grace. It’s good to see you.’ The kiss on both cheeks from the friend, then the friend transformed herself into a gynaecologist. ‘Sit down, please. How are you today?’ The worst thing about being sterile was having to be treated by someone you’d had to dinner.
‘Lousy, thank you.’ No response. How could it be that a woman gynaecologist was actually colder, less comprehending than a man? Every time Marie-Laure’s name appeared in her diary she was bad-tempered for a week; it was almost as good as PMT, which she had never had. Grace had once been on good terms with her body, proud of her health and delighted with physical pleasures. Now she thought of her body as an enemy.
She sat on her hands because she had an impulse to get hold of Marie-Laure by the shoulders and say, listen, you little cow, you have a womb too, that at least we have in common. Your biology is my biology, your hormones are my hormones, and in addition you’ve eaten at my table, so quit pretending you’re not reading up my file and give me some goddamn empathy here. It’s been three years, I could use a kind word. She tried again.
‘I’m tired all the time, I can’t concentrate, I feel like I’ve got a hangover.’
‘Have you been drinking more than usual?’
‘You know I don’t drink, Marie-Laure. Not even wine with lunch. You need a clear head in our business.’
‘Yes but perhaps … in your business …’ There it was, the you-media-people brush all ready to paint out her identity, wielded with the I’m-not-being-judgemental professional hand. Just because once, just once, I cancelled an appointment when I had to cover the Rwanda crisis. Grace asked herself if she was being paranoid. It was difficult to maintain friendships outside the business. Everybody mistrusted journalists. Everybody thought their own stress load was special but yours was just an excuse.
‘So, how is your work going?’
‘Like it goes in August. Silly season. Air traffic strike called off, farmers complain of drought, oldest duck in France killed in road accident, foreign news editor dies of boredom.’
‘So stress management is not a problem for you right now?’ In Marie-Laure, this passed for humour.
‘Not that kind of stress. Maybe it’s this situation that’s getting me down.’ Every time her period started she felt less of a woman, more of a failure.
‘It’s never an easy process, investigating problems of conception. How are you and Nick?’
‘Nick and I are fine. We are following instructions and keeping our good feelings for each other in our minds and hearts.’ That had to be in some textbook somewhere; every doctor they had seen signed off with exactly the same words, try to keep your good feelings for each other in your minds and hearts. Nick was also a doctor, so most of them were his friends, and sometimes she caught them monitoring their marriage, looking for the good feelings, curious to see a living specimen of a relationship strained by unexplained infertility. Even so, they had absolutely no idea what hell it was to feel a normal desire grow into a monstrous obsession, to live out the brutal paradox which demanded that to make a baby they must sacrifice all the pleasures of love. And for Grace and Nick, those pleasures were considerable.
And then, the personal stuff. Marie-Laure was one of those perky, gamine women who get lost in crowds and have a hard time looking authoritative. Grace was a goddess with cheekbones who was always noticed and had a hard time looking vulnerable. She made Marie-Laure uneasy and if she tried to be nice to her it came out patronizing. On the other hand, in the past three years Marie-Laure, with her miniature pelvis and triple-A-cup breasts, had popped out two ten-pound babies. The doctor–patient relationship had acquired a certain caustic informality.
It was all right for Nick, he’d been a doctor all his life, he didn’t need all the reassuring bullshit, the white coat and the impersonal manner, but Grace did. They’d argued about it, the three of them, and Marie-Laure voted with Nick for wearing ordinary clothes in non-clinical situations. So here she was in a Hawaiian shirt and safari shorts, sitting on a sofa. Grace would have been quite happy with Dr Kildare.
Marie-Laure was saying, ‘You performed very well in the interaction tests for your husband’s sperm and your cervical mucus.’
‘Maybe we should take it up professionally.’
‘And your husband’s semen analysis is excellent
.’
‘That’s reassuring.’
‘Yes it is.’ Not a smile, not even a flicker of amusement. Please. ‘So now, in this second phase of investigating your continuing sub-fertility, we are entering the area of looking for one of the very subtle but important biological anomalies which could account, in a healthy couple such as you obviously are, for the absence of conception in your case. Then, when we have identified the condition, the challenge for us will be to discover how it can be treated, and for you, for a little longer, the challenge will be to be patient.’
God, the jargon. Three years they’d been going through this. They never said ‘treatment’; they said ‘management’. This was the management of sub-fertility. ‘I wish you’d stop managing me, Marie-Laure. Why don’t you just lay it on the line? Just level with me. What’s the next thing? What are our chances?’
‘In any couple, the chances for future childbearing are always imprecise. Fifteen per cent of couples in the Western world are clinically sub-fertile. There is no line to lay it on right now, Grace. We are still finding out about you two.’
They had had some fun, having this problem managed for three years. Lying still for an hour after intercourse with a pillow under her bottom had been a good laugh, especially when she’d only just trained Nick for the post-coital cuddle. Then that riotous farce in the consulting room when Nick had to produce a sperm sample and decided he needed her help, thereby scandalizing the nurse but inspiring the man with the same problem in the cubicle next door.
You had to laugh because you’d cry otherwise. The temperature-taking, the red-ringing of Big O (for ovulation) day, the tiptoeing around each other on eggshells trying not to have a row, slip a disc, overeat, overwork or get drunk for two days either side of the Big O, a real gas. And, at the same time, praying for no news story to break anywhere in Europe – just hilarious. She had actually lit a candle. She had called up her mother for help to figure out the appropriate saint.
Using condoms for three months in case she was allergic to Nick’s sperm had been a thrill; his own clinic dispensed them and he said the experience gave him many useful insights. And Marie-Laure giving them the results of the intercourse evaluation test – an act not to miss. Fascinating to find that you got a pain in your shoulder if someone blew carbon dioxide through your cervix; the marvels of the sympathetic nervous system. More fun than the fibre-optic safari up her fallopian tubes with a D and C for luck. And that was just phase one.
‘But it’s down to me now, isn’t it?’
‘It is important in these cases not to look around for implications of fault or guilt in either partner. Sub-fertility is a problem of the couple as a unit, not of the man or woman exclusively …’
‘But you’re out of tests for Nick, aren’t you? You know all you need to know about him, he’s got sperm, mega-millions of them, they’re normal, they’re speedy and they’re making it through to the right place. You’ve checked him out, he’s all OK. This is my problem, isn’t it?’
‘We now need to investigate your ovulation process a little more closely.’
‘So it’s down to me. Come on, Marie-Laure, hit me.’
‘Ideally, you should have an ovarian ultrasound scan every day so we can review your follicle normality, with a daily blood test to see what’s happening with your pituitary function and your luteinizing hormone.’
‘Ultrasound every day? Not this month, sorry.’
Marie-Laure sighed, and Grace interpreted it as another you-media-people sigh that meant you were an overstressed, overpaid social parasite bringing all this on yourself with your terrible lifestyle, a sigh asking what kind of mother would you be anyway if you were still putting your career before having a family at this stage. ‘I know it’s very demanding working for newspapers …’
‘Which is why I’m going on holiday tonight.’
‘Ah.’ That had thrown her. ‘It’s Thursday.’
‘Yes, it’s Thursday. I’m taking an extra day off. I want to miss the weekend traffic.’
‘You’re going to your place down – where is it?’ Marie-Laure knew it was somewhere remote, bizarre, unfashionable, somewhere only you-media-people would choose for a second home.
‘Gascony. You must come some time.’
Grace knew she was quite safe. Gascony was just about as far away from Paris as you could go before you hit the Spanish border. Marie-Laure always took her family to Switzerland; she said she could relax better in a country where the people were better off than they were back home; peasants gave her a bad conscience.
‘In that case, we can arrange the ultrasound when you return, and in the meantime perhaps we could try something else to start filling in the picture of your hormone function.’ She got up and went to search the drawers of her desk. ‘It’s a daily saliva test you can do yourself, with technology dipsticks which change colour and the chart ready printed to fill in.’
‘Goody-goody. I love charts.’
‘More pleasant than blood tests, anyway.’ The personal stuff again. Grace was a veteran blood donor, star of the A-positive vault, no problem with needles, but Marie-Laure had eventually confessed that she hated taking blood. ‘Then we can begin the ultrasound in September. I would like to do three months.’
‘And suppose after that everything is still normal?’
‘Why don’t we wait and see before …?’
‘Come on, I am an adult.’
Marie-Laure was annoyed, but she swallowed it. ‘If your ovulation cycle is normal after these tests then, in my opinion, it would be biologically sensible to attempt IVF.’
‘What does biologically sensible mean?’
‘It means …’ She shrugged, struggled but could not come up with a translation. ‘… biologically sensible. But you know, Grace, that is a possibility only, and a long way ahead. We need more data first.’
She explained the use of the testing kit in detail, put the components back in their shiny white plastic box, handed it over in one of the clinic’s tactful white plastic bags, and turned back into a friend.
‘Enjoy your holiday – and give my love to Nick.’ Kiss, kiss.
‘I’ll tell him his sperm are still performing well.’
‘Where is he today? Normally I see you together.’
‘On holiday already. He left last week – there was some course in Basque cookery he wanted to take.’
‘Oh yes, he likes to cook, I forgot. I’d find that very difficult, I’m so territorial about my kitchen.’
‘Well, I’m not. It’s nice to come home from work and have dinner on the table.’ We-media-people, we know what hard work is. With an unworthy smile, Grace said goodbye to Marie-Laure.
She needed a coffee. Nuts to optimum nutrition, her metabolism was screaming for a large espresso. And not on the same street as the clinic, because there was this adorable little baby shop right across the road, flaunting its pink and blue broderie anglaise-trimmed crib sheets and Babar the Elephant night-lights.
Poor Marie-Laure; only being herself and doing her job, she didn’t deserve all that sarcasm and ill-will. For a moment, Grace considered going back to apologize, but then again the poor earnest creature might feel even more threatened by an emotion out of place.
The street was crowded. Men hurried past and she felt their glances linger momentarily, approving, aroused. What did they know? She had always caught men’s eyes, whatever beauty she had was bold and arresting. Her body suggested vitality, health, good appetites. Who was to know that when the chips were down it was useless?
Today, she felt tense, but that was probably the idea of Marie-Laure inducing an emotional crisis. Perhaps she would have been able to accept this problem better if she had been more accustomed to ill-health. Pulse, blood pressure, cholesterol, iron count – everything, was always A1. She had perfect teeth, straight toes, a complexion like oyster satin, the eyesight of a twenty-year-old at the age of thirty-eight and periods you could set a clock by. Her physiology ate toxins for br
eakfast with a double order of stress on the side – no colds, no allergies, no indigestion, not so much as a hangover in her life. She ate well, slept well and had orgasms. No drugs, except the coffee. The only flaw in her body was the scar on her forehead, more or less self-inflicted in a car crash, and even then the doctors had said they’d never seen a fractured skull heal so fast. Her flesh had always done everything nature intended.
Call it superstition, but Grace knew this was not a physical thing. She didn’t just want a baby. She yearned specifically for the state of pregnancy. She needed to give birth, in order that she herself could be reborn. She would surrender her body to an inevitable process of transformation; the old broken Grace would conceive a new whole Grace. But what was stopping her was an abnormality of her heart, a dysfunction of love. So she was up against God’s own Catch-22.
It was a long drive to Gascony, ten hours flat out in her old English MGB, taking hideous risks overtaking the long-haul container trucks and stopping only once to top up the caffeine. The last two hours were on the departement road, running south through pine woods. Their resin scented the hot night air and she stopped again to fold down the roof. Gradually the land began to rise, hills swelling up towards the distant Pyrenees, and she turned into the snaking lane leading to their village. This was an old pilgrim route to Santiago de Compostela; the squat church tower could be seen for miles, even by starlight.
She arrived at the magic hour just before the dawn, when the bats came swooping back to the village like fighter planes returning from a raid, flickering through their palm tree and over the old tiled roof, disappearing into the ancient walls. Their house had been the village cinema; Nick had named it the Alhambra. Inside the cavernous auditorium the local carpenter had built them an oak staircase and a gallery leading to the bedrooms. The old foyer was the kitchen. Nick would arrive tomorrow but someone was already waiting for her, the white wild cat with half a tail who came and went as she pleased through holes in the massive walls.
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