Harmony, who is a shade or two darker than me, so I’m guessing, like me but unlike her brothers, has a white father, rolled her eyes at her mother. ‘Oh, please, Mum. If I had no homework, I would be making a fortune out of babysitting. I’ll be fine.’
‘We’re not babies!’ Oscar called from the living room.
‘No, we’re not!’ Ore added. ‘We’re nearly ten.’
‘In two years!’ Harmony called back.
Frankie was silent. He had been ever since he’d clapped eyes on Harmony. He kept blushing every time she looked at him and stuttered when he spoke to her. Us leaving him with her was a dream come true. There was a time, in Reception, when he had decided that he was going to marry Priya. Yvonne had been offended because he hadn’t wanted Madison. ‘He told me that Camille’s going to marry her,’ I’d said to Yvonne to make her feel better. Which it hadn’t. ‘There’s no pleasing you, is there?’ I’d told her.
Cece and I walk over to the pub in silence. She orders drinks and we sit at the back. It is quite busy, the place full of people watching a Wednesday-night qualifier for something. I watch Cece take three sips of wine – the first to cleanse the palate, the second to get the tartness out of the way, the third to start to enjoy it. That’s what Bronwyn used to say to me.
‘Do you want to know about Frankie or Yvonne first?’ I ask. Cece is one of those wait-it-out people. I think that’s why I told her. Because I knew she’d take her time, she’d think, she wouldn’t rush to judge, she wouldn’t ask millions of questions.
Another sip. She stares at the table, at the circular beer mats. Ed used to pile them up sometimes twenty high on the edge of the table and then flip them and catch them in one go. His party trick.
‘Frankie,’ she says.
I’m glad she’s asked about that. That will maybe make her understand a bit better about Yvonne.
‘I ended up living and working with this high-flying couple. She was like this superstar journalist, writer, television-programme maker, and she was with Ed, who I’m married to now. He’d been with Bronwyn for years before he met me. That’s her name. Bronwyn Sloane. I’m not sure if you’ve heard of her?’
November, 2006
‘You’re like the daughter I never had,’ Bronwyn said to me. We sat on the big, comfy sofa together, as we often did with soft music playing and the lights on low.
‘I’m not sure I like that,’ I told her.
The cottage was divine. Every single cliché a cottage in the middle of the Cumbrian countryside should be, with its stone floors and uneven walls, the mismatched furniture and draughts we could never quite seal out. The bedrooms were cold but surprisingly cosy and it often felt like we were living on another planet because it could be days before we saw another person.
I lifted my head from her shoulder and sat back and away from her. ‘I know I’m not as old as you, but I thought we were equals or at least friends on an equal footing. If I’m like the daughter you never had, then you think on some level you’re above me.’
‘Not at all,’ she said. She took my chin between her forefinger and thumb, to turn my head to look at her. ‘Not at all,’ she repeated gently. ‘I just meant that … I have this longing, this yearning to be a mother. It’s so boring and primeval that I’m regularly annoyed with my body for making me feel this way, but it’s there nonetheless. I have a need to produce a smaller version of myself, someone I have this unwavering love for. Every other type of love I’ve experienced so far – and believe me, I’ve experienced them all – they’ve all been conditional. I know, without a shadow of a doubt, that there’s something every single person in my life could do that would make me stop loving them. Except you. That’s what I mean, sugar,’ she said. ‘I can’t think of a single thing you could do that would make me dump you. That’s what I imagine being a mother is like.’
What she had said to me was huge. As time had worn on, and her fame as an intellectual, journalist, lecturer and TV series creator had grown, I’d got to know the real her. She could be difficult, ruthless, unyielding. She fell out with people, regularly. Someone she was practically in love with one day was someone she hated the next. She could be volatile, her temper brittle and fragile like freshly formed ice on a fast-moving lake – anything, even the slightest ripple, could cause it to snap. She’d never gone for me, but I knew she could.
‘Ed comes a close second. There’s not much he could do that would cause me to cut him out, but there is something. Not with you, though, sweetness. There’s nothing you can do.’
She leant forwards and pressed her lips against mine. The first time she’d done that, it had felt like my heart had stopped beating, like my blood had forgotten how to flow. I’d been frozen, transfixed by the way she’d broken this physical boundary, had done something intimate, sexual. I’d been so confused, bewildered, but she hadn’t gone any further. Instead, she’d sat back and carried on with what she was doing as though she’d done nothing out of the ordinary. She did it all the time: a quick peck on the lips to finish what she was saying; a longer kiss after she told me she loved me – constant punctuations of her feelings. All of those kisses, those boundary redefiners, had been platonic, had gone no further. Now, she was saying she felt maternal towards me, but she’d kissed me in a way that was anything but. This kiss was different from the others. This one … My heart stopped again, my blood forgot to flow. This one …
‘Are you going to have children?’ I asked her, ignoring the feelings that were bubbling inside me. She was thirty-something (she always fudged that) and she liked sex, had a lot of money now from the success of her journalism and books and the TV series she’d written that had recently been recommissioned – having a baby seemed to be one of those things that someone like her could do any time they wanted.
‘I’d love to have kids,’ she said dreamily. ‘I can’t even describe how much I want to be a mother.’ Her dreamy smile, her wistful look, disappeared suddenly, replaced by defeat, despair and deep, deep sorrow. ‘It’s probably not going to happen, though.’
‘Why?’ I asked. ‘Is it Ed?’
She shook her head. She’d pulled her hair up on top of her head, twisted it around to sit in a messy bun. She’d moved her green plastic-framed glasses to the top of her head and they looked like a tiara. ‘Ah, no, Ed and I are on the same page – we both want children. We’d fill our house with them if we could. It’s me. My body won’t cooperate. I’ve had so many miscarriages. I don’t write about those in my books because it’s all far too painful. Everything else is fair game, but this … I know I shouldn’t keep things back when I can talk about everything in my books, but I can’t. We’ve tried IVF, the works. We’ve got some embryos in storage, but I don’t know if either of us are strong enough to go through it again. I know, I know, I’m a complete hypocrite. I should be able to take this in my stride and talk about it, but I can’t. I just can’t.’ She briefly closed her eyes, sighed. ‘I know I should just get over myself, I should just accept that this is how it is. But I can’t. I simply spend my life hoping for a miracle.’
‘What about adoption?’ I asked, then could have slapped myself. I shouldn’t offer any suggestions. I should let her speak and listen. What did I know? I was twenty-eight. I hadn’t even thought about settling down. I was still free-forming it, living a bohemian life working out in the middle of the Cumbrian countryside with a couple I was slowly but surely falling in love with. What did I know about anything? The only thing I could offer in such moments was a caring, listening ear.
‘I’m getting there, sweetie,’ she replied. ‘I’m getting there.’
I nodded, bit my lip to stop myself offering any more ‘helpful’ suggestions.
‘I need to make sure I know that I’ve exhausted all avenues of having a biologically connected child first. At one point, Ed and I talked about finding a surrogate.’
‘Right,’ I said cautiously. I remembered the looks. Those looks from the nursery, from the night she’d asked me t
o come to Cumbria, from many, many times we’d been here. I recalled those looks and my body grew still.
‘Obviously nothing came from that conversation,’ she said. ‘Can you imagine? Asking someone to carry our child and then hand said child over after nine months? I don’t know a single person who would do that. Like I’d ever do that if I could. Like I could ever be that selfless.’ She laughed suddenly. It smashed up the atmosphere that had been settling like quick-drying cement over us. We were free again, released to be ourselves.
But my mind had been set thinking: Is this why she asked me to come here? To somewhere remote, where no one would ever know if I were pregnant and then gave the baby to her? No, surely not. She wouldn’t do that. It’d be a bust, anyway. She and Ed are white, I’m mixed race, she couldn’t pretend any child I had was theirs. Unless they simply want me to carry an embryo? That way, no one would know. I would simply be the incubator for their child.
But then I was being silly. I was going through my mind and making the pieces of the time since I’d met them fit with this conversation. Because she’d have to know, much as I loved her, much as I loved Ed, there was no way on Earth I’d do it. No way on Earth.
8:40 p.m. I can tell by the way Cece is shifting the beer mat around the table that she’s raced ahead in her mind and knows what is coming next. At the time, gullible as I was, I didn’t know. I honestly didn’t.
September, 2007
‘It’s just you and me today, Max,’ Ed said.
I had been the first down to gather wood, start a fire and get everything ready for breakfast – I’d mixed up the eggs to scramble them when the others appeared, chopped up fruit, cut up bread. I always got the good china out, even though there wasn’t a full set (it was a mishmash of lots of different sets), I’d set out the linen napkins and the hand-woven placemats. I always made the biggest effort for breakfast because it was the meal we ate together most often. Ed was meant to be heading to London today for a few nights and Bronwyn was going to go over the notes I’d made for her lecture series.
‘How do you mean?’ I asked.
‘Bronwyn’s taking a personal day,’ he said. ‘She’s … She didn’t want to tell you until we had good news, but a couple of months ago we had an embryo implantation. It was successful but she started bleeding last night. She …’ He shook his head.
‘Do you want me to call a doctor?’ I asked.
He shook his head again. ‘No, it’s nothing new. When it happens, she doesn’t want to be around people for a while. I’ll cancel my trip to London but we’re best off giving her some space.’
‘Shall I take her a cup of tea and a slice of toast? She needs to keep her strength up.’
‘Yeah, that’d be nice, actually.’ He pulled a tired smile across his face. ‘Thanks, Maxie, it’s really good that you’re here.’
March, 2008
No one ever asked, I don’t remember even offering, but we were doing this thing. We went to the clinic, I had the assessments, the screenings, counselling, we talked and talked about it. We talked and talked until it was happening and I was being implanted with one of their embryos. I don’t remember how I got there, but there I was. On this road. Doing this thing. Helping out two people I loved.
August 2008
In the light from the full moon flooding the kitchen, I sat and stared at the table. The kitchen seemed full of smooth curved lines in the moonlight. I couldn’t sleep, not since it’d failed for the second time. I’d felt so hollow since it’d happened and I wanted that hollowness to stop.
‘Max,’ he whispered. His voice floated over to me on the moonbeams, the sound soft and lulling. I didn’t tense or even jump when his hands slid over my shoulders, resting lightly there. ‘Maxie.’ His hand slid lower, inside the top of my knee-length nightshirt, moving lower until his fingers brushed over my nipple and stopped, resting there. ‘We don’t have to wait for the next transfer.’ Slowly his fingers moved over my nipple, working to make it stand up. When he had what he wanted, when my nipple stood hard and firm against his fingertips, he gently pulled me to my feet.
My breathing was short, hard, fast, and I tried not to react. I kept my gaze cast aside as he slowly opened the buttons of my nightshirt. Then he slowly lowered his head and covered my nipple, painful and erect as it was, with his mouth, gently sucking on it, until it was unbearable and I gasped out loud. He carefully pushed aside the other side of my top, exposed that breast before he covered that nipple with his mouth, teasing it until I couldn’t help but cry out again.
‘The next appointment could fail as well, there’d be more waiting,’ he whispered. He was being careful, gauging how I would react. He knew I practically worshipped Bronwyn – that was why I had agreed to do it in the first place. She was like no one I had ever met before. Doing this with him would be a complete betrayal. He kept his voice low, skimming on the edges of the moonbeams: ‘She wouldn’t mind. You know she wouldn’t mind. As long as she gets to be a mother.’
She had suggested it originally, but I’d been horrified. She hadn’t. It would be a means to an end, she’d said. They would pay me more, but I hadn’t wanted to be genetically connected to the baby, I hadn’t wanted the money but they’d insisted. In all of this, I had wanted to be able to tell myself that I was simply growing their child. But this was taking so long. And after we had thought we had reached success, it’d been snatched away again. Each time, I’d grown closer to … him. I’d felt my loyalty, my devotion, moving slowly towards him. I was fickle. I needed to only spend time with someone who fascinated me, who wowed me with their intellect, and I could feel my eyes opening up, my heart uncurling, my body reaching towards them like a plant towards the sun. Bronwyn had once been my sun, but she’d been replaced by him.
While I thought about what he was saying, what he was suggesting, he reached for my knickers, slowly moved them aside and slid his fingers into me.
This was so far away from my world. The last three years had been so different, so surreal. I had grown up with the simplicity of people saying what they meant and meaning what they said. I had liked the predictability of living in a small community where people went to school, went away to college, but came back, got a job, got married, had babies. I had loved all that; I had expected all that. And then I’d had my head turned, I’d encountered the brilliance and ideas and reasonings of a woman who had done remarkable things. I had been seduced by the idea of intellectuality; I had begun to follow her, wanting to learn and then needing to learn and then needing to be with her. And then I was working for her, basking in her brilliance, growing in the rays of her sun-like presence. She’d taught me so much, helped me to think, to grow, to dream beyond the bounds of who I thought I could be, would be. And now I was here. With her man, her partner, the man she wanted to be the father of the children she couldn’t carry. I was on the edge of doing something the old me would never have done.
You don’t go with your friend’s man. It was a code me and my friends had always lived by. We’d had severe, Siberia-like punishments for the girls who forgot that.
Ed took his fingers away, and lifted me to sit me on the edge of the table, pushed open my legs to stand between them. ‘She wouldn’t mind,’ he said.
She would mind. No matter how intellectual, and open-minded, she would care. She would be hurt. But she would have her baby; she would be a mother.
Ed rolled down my knickers, took them off then dropped them beside me on the table. I still couldn’t look at him, couldn’t face him and what I was about to do. Because of course I was going to do it. Of course I was going to betray her. Ever since she’d announced she was going away for a couple of weeks to visit old friends and get her head straight I had known it was going to happen. The surprise had been how long it’d taken – four nights before he approached me.
I saw him unbuckling himself, unzipping, undoing, releasing. It’s what she would want, I said to myself. I said it again, in my head, louder, then louder still, hoping that a
t some point, I would believe it. IT’S WHAT SHE WOULD WANT.
Slowly, I began to lie back, to ready myself, to do this terrible thing to someone I loved with someone I loved. Because I did love him. More than her. I closed my eyes. It would be quick; it would be a functional act, so we would hopefully get the result we wanted. The baby. A baby. Her baby. Their baby. He would enter me, he would move, he would ejaculate. Over in minutes.
‘Tell me,’ he whispered. ‘Tell me you want this.’
I inhaled, steadied myself. ‘I want this,’ I said. ‘I want this.’
I felt him smile, knew he’d get it over with … and then I gasped again as his mouth grazed between my legs, his tongue beginning to tease me. Not over in minutes, then, not a functional thing for a sole purpose. I gritted my teeth, my fingernails trying to dig into the table. Then my fingers were caught up in the soft, brown curls of his hair, pulling him closer, urging him on, making this a far bigger act of betrayal than I thought it could ever be.
I want this, I want this, I want this.
9:30 p.m. Cece is watching me now. Her face is a mask – I can’t read her, I can’t tell what she is thinking, but she stares directly at me. So directly I have to look away, ashamed, thoroughly ashamed.
June, 2009
‘Are you certain you want to sign this?’ I was sure someone would ask me that.
Or at least I hoped someone would ask me that. No one did, though. We sat in the solicitor’s office and I had the papers and forms in front of me to give it all up. To fulfil the purpose I’d had all those months ago. It was nearly four years since I had first gone to live in a farmhouse in Cumbria, with the space to read and talk to a woman I found fascinating. It was six weeks to the day since I last saw the pale, squawking bundle that I’d handed over in the hospital to his parents. We had never spoken of it. She had been full of gushes, full of kisses and full of hugs – while never quite meeting my eye. And he had stared at her like he adored her, like she had carried the child for nine months, like she had been in labour all this time, like she had given birth and was now handing him his son and heir. It had been surreal. Like that night in the farmhouse when I’d first slept with him, it was all surreal.
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