Love Nest

by Julia Llewellyn

  ‘You were the one who wanted to live in St Albans.’

  Phil gave her one of his rare icy looks. ‘I hate the commuting,’ he repeated. ‘I’m bored with sitting at a desk number-crunching. I want open spaces. A new challenge.’

  ‘Darling, we’ll talk about it in the morning. I’m bushed. Goodnight.’

  She hoped by the morning he’d have forgotten all about it but to her annoyance, he brought it up again. And then again and again in the months that followed. She found him browsing property websites.

  ‘Darling, the girls are so happy at their schools. You’re not seriously suggesting we uproot them?’

  It was annoying, but Karen never really took it seriously. Generally Phil tried to please her – it had always been that way. She’d made a compromise in marrying him and another in moving to St Albans; he couldn’t ask any more from her.

  And then everything changed.

  Phil kept getting colds that he couldn’t shake off. Was constantly exhausted. Had bad headaches. Was losing weight. Eventually the doctor did some blood tests.

  The diagnosis came back – leukaemia.

  Karen would never forget the night after he’d received his diagnosis, her trying to keep it together. Phil, who’d always been so calm, so logical, losing it. Shouting about how his body had betrayed him. ‘Now it knows how to grow a cancer,’ he’d yelled, until drowsy Bea had come downstairs, wanting to know what the noise was, and they’d told her Mummy and Daddy had been chopping onions and it had made them both cry and a bit cross.

  In the days leading up to his first consultation he would lash out viciously and irrationally. Then he’d lock himself in his den, watching old golf DVDs and snarling at Karen even if she dared ask him something like what he wanted for supper. ‘Who cares?’ he’d yell, his face crushed with fear. ‘None of this means anything.’

  Karen reminded herself that illness affected men differently from women. As a mother she had already experienced huge changes in the body, was more familiar with hospitals and embarrassing procedures. Knew how it felt to give up your body to strangers. But of course her pregnancies had had joyful outcomes. She couldn’t know how it must feel to think you were dying. Inasmuch as she’d ever envisaged it, she’d always imagined herself brave, long-suffering, cheery, but Phil had been reduced to a snivelling, self-pitying, aggressive wreck. It wasn’t pretty to watch and it was virtually impossible to live with.

  But then who could blame him? Over the next eleven months he went through two rounds of chemo, two of radiotherapy. Rapid weight loss. His hair falling out in handfuls. Puking in an orange plastic washing-up bowl at the side of the bed. But there was a happy ending. Karen would never forget the consultant breaking the news that Phil’s latest tests had come out clear. Cue weeping and rejoicing, though inside Karen simply felt numb. And of course it wasn’t so simple – was anything in life? – because he was only in remission, which meant another four years or so of blood tests before he would officially be cancer free.

  During those eleven months, Phil had had plenty of time to think. He’d decided that his life needed a complete makeover, that he was going to offload the last of his businesses and use the cash to start afresh. He would have made much more if he’d sold three or four years earlier, but they still ended up with a ridiculous lump sum in the bank.

  ‘Neither of us need ever work again,’ Phil boasted.

  Now, looking at the seven-figure price of Chadlicote Manor, Karen doubted this. Even if they negotiated a big discount, it would still eat hugely into their capital. And the restoration would cost millions more.

  Phil hated it when Karen raised such objections. ‘Money is for spending,’ he’d say airily. ‘Haven’t you realized, even now, how short life is?’ He had a point. But then he’d never grown up wanting anything. Karen, still remembering how they’d had no central heating eleven months of the year because Dad was too skint to turn it on, found such comments terrifying. Money wasn’t for spending. Not all of it, anyway. It was for putting aside for a rainy day.

  Sophie peered over her shoulder. ‘Ooh. Is this house on the radar now? You’re not going to move there, are you? What would you do for your daily sushi fix? Catch a trout in the lake and skin it?’

  ‘Not if I can help it,’ Karen shrugged.

  ‘The grass is always greener, isn’t it? I’d kill for a garden and here’s you turning your nose up at a million acres of land.’ Sophie’s tone was philosophical rather than bitter; she was a contented soul.

  Karen’s phone rang again. ‘Hello?’ she said, guiltily aware that she really should be calling Issie, their cookery writer, to beg her to next week please try to do recipes that didn’t feature Jerusalem artichokes, as readers kept writing in complaining of the terrible wind they gave them.

  ‘It’s me. Great news. They can do a viewing tomorrow. The estate agent’s going to a wedding but the owner’s happy to show us round herself. So we can have a day out – drive down early, see the house, then maybe go and have lunch somewhere. What do you think?’

  ‘I think that’s lovely. But we’ll still have to cancel Bea’s party. Do you want to ring Isobel’s mum? Her name’ll be on the form list pinned to the fridge.’

  ‘Oh. Can’t you?’

  Karen gritted her teeth. Now Phil wasn’t working he was far more involved with the girls’ day-to-day lives, but he was still reluctant to participate in the nitty-gritty of organizing playdates, making headdresses for the school play, liaising with teachers.

  ‘I’m quite busy here, darling.’

  ‘But, but… she’s a mum. You know her. I’d be embarrassed.’

  Karen glanced at Sophie, now hammering at her keyboard. The innocent. She had no idea motherhood was going to be like this. Karen remembered how, occasionally, before Phil got ill, she had occasional meltdowns at all the stuff she had to do. ‘When I’m a goner you realize you’ll be the one who’ll have to make lunchboxes and buy all their friends’ birthday presents,’ she’d shout.

  She could never say anything like that now.

  ‘All right, I’ll do it tonight,’ Karen said firmly, knowing she’d regret it. ‘But you can break the news to Bea.’

  ‘OK. Karen. I’m so excited about tomorrow.’

  ‘Me too,’ she lied.

  ‘Love you.’

  ‘’Bye, darling,’ Karen said.

  4

  Arriving home, Gemma looked around the flat for signs of a viewing. As usual, everything was exactly as she’d left it. Not that there was exactly anything to hide: her knicker drawer was always orderly, the bathroom cabinet full of Lancôme and Jo Malone, with any embarrassing bits and pieces locked away.

  Still, she was paranoid, knowing a stranger had been in her home judging her taste, asking what possessed anyone to buy a flat with a bed on a platform and the bathrooms a schlep down a ladder away.

  She was tempted to leave a note. It wasn’t me. It was my husband. He was a boy about town when he bought it and he wasn’t bothered about en-suite bathrooms. Can’t you see what a cool party flat it is? A bit ironic since my husband doesn’t really do parties any more. He may only be thirty-one but he’s too tired after a day in court and prefers to see people over dinner in a quiet restaurant. But hey ho, it fitted with the image he had of himself when he’d just been accepted by his chambers.

  And do you know what? We’ve been really happy here. Watching films up on the mezzanine. Holding big dinner parties downstairs. Lying all day in the funny platform bed, reading the papers and eating croissants and making love, then stepping out of the door and being right in the middle of London. I’ve always thought of it as our love nest. It’s time for us to move on now but I’m sure you could be just as happy here too.

  Obviously she wouldn’t do it. Yet maybe she should stick around and waylay viewers. But Alex would pooh-pooh such an idea. Alex, who wouldn’t be home before eight at the earliest. Who would probably eat dinner and then head straight for his desk. Such was life as a criminal b
arrister; he’d be stepping out of chambers when his clerk would chuck him a brief for the following morning, involving defending an alleged rapist in Bromley, and the evening would be gone.

  Gemma had got used to seeing films alone, turning up at dinner parties unaccompanied. To cancelling holidays and weekend plans at the last minute. She was an expert at making nutritious meals that could be reheated the moment she heard her husband’s key in the lock. To going to bed without him, to be wakened around three for sleepy sex.

  She never complained; it was what she had signed up for. And right now she was glad of his absence, giving her time to indulge in her secret obsession. She went into ‘her’ bathroom – since the flat had two, side by side, she’d bagged the one with the bath while Alex got the shower – and unzipped her handbag. At the bottom, concealed beneath her purse and a copy of London Lite, just in case her husband should decide to stop and search her, was a pregnancy tester.

  She knew, she knew. She’d rationed herself to just one test a week. Because at one stage she was doing at least one a day and it was bankrupting them, not to mention keeping them on a constant rollercoaster of raised and dashed expectations. After a showdown with Alex, Gemma really had tried her hardest to cut down, to limit peeing on the stick to Friday morning just after breakfast. But every so often, when she was feeling nervy, she cracked and today was one of those days. She knew what the answer was going to be, she had the eggs of a nine-year-old for heaven’s sake. But she still couldn’t resist.

  Her hand shook as she unwrapped the foil. Expertly she crunched it and the box inside an old loo-roll tube in the bin and covered them with the newspaper, which she should recycle really. She’d fish it out later.

  Gemma was obsessed with having a baby. But she was also obsessed with not letting her obsession affect her marriage. She’d read so many articles about women desperate to conceive, who’d ended up childless and manless, because of their nuttiness. Consequently, she initiated sex at least every other day regardless of how tired or not-in-the-mood she was, so as never to commit the terrible crime of baby-making fornication. Initiated sex, even though she had no desire for it whatsoever, now that the body she’d honed so carefully all these years had betrayed her. But Alex would never know as she wriggled under him, faking earth-shattering orgasms.

  Every time the tests showed negative or a rare sparse period came, she didn’t cry – she knew Alex would feel guilty and resentful. She just shrugged and brightly said: ‘Oh well.’

  But while Gemma stayed perky on the surface, inside she knew that infertility had warped her. She used to consider herself a generous person, but now every time she saw a pregnant woman she felt twisted like the roots of an ancient apple tree. When friends called to break the news, she tried to sound delighted. But inwardly she was notching up scores on a mental chart, a chart where points were allocated to people she knew had had other hardships in their lives or suffered several miscarriages. Those who said things like ‘To be honest, it was a bit of a happy accident’ plummeted straight to the bottom and from then on Gemma did her utmost to avoid them.

  She’d been dreading the news from Dr Malpadhi, but in a funny way actually knowing it was never going to happen naturally came as a warped relief. At least now she had something to work on. Before that she had been taking her temperature every morning, spending a small fortune on ovulation kits and travelling round the country to be with her husband at the ‘right’ time, while pretending she just wanted to keep him company in bleak hotel rooms. But now she knew that – barring a miracle – there would never be enough of her eggs to commune meaningfully with Alex’s sperm, she’d had to move on and investigate the alternatives. Starting with adoption, which Alex opposed violently.

  ‘I’m just not sure I could love a child that’s not my own.’

  ‘Everybody says you do. That it’s just the same. Even more intense sometimes.’

  Alex shook his head. ‘It’d have to be a last resort. Let’s exhaust the other options.’

  And the only real option was egg donation. The problem was finding an egg. Hardly any were available in the UK, so they’d have to go abroad. Gemma was fine with this, Alex wasn’t.

  ‘You don’t know what you might be getting. The kind of woman who’s desperate enough to want to sell her ovaries… well, I don’t want her genes in my babies.’

  ‘No, it’s not like that. I’ve been on some of the American websites. You can choose a donor who looks like you, who has a college degree…’

  ‘It’s still too weird. That half the child would have nothing to do with us. The better half,’ he added, tousling his wife’s hair.

  ‘But it would be bathed in my hormones, in the womb.’

  ‘Doesn’t convince me,’ he said, as if she were one of his clients trying to explain why the man in the CCTV throwing a brick through the wall might look exactly like him but actually it was his long-lost twin visiting from Patagonia.

  The idea had come to her in the middle of one of her reflexology sessions. Of course! Bridget! After all, they shared exactly the same DNA. And although the pair of them were so different – both in character and in looks – Gemma was convinced that the combination of Alex’s sperm, not to mention the latent genes of a family who, bar Bridget, made the Waltons look like a bunch of swinging crackheads, would ensure a more… reliable… child than her sister had been.

  And now she’d agreed, it was all systems go. She just had to get Alex to say yes, but that was a mere formality. Before she told him, however, she’d just do one final test, to be totally sure that a rogue mature egg hadn’t been fertilized.

  She unwrapped the plastic and peed on the stick, thinking it would be sod’s law that – having secured Bridget’s services – she’d be up the duff. But even as she was hoping this, a red line was filling the bottom porthole. The top hole stayed empty.

  Shit.

  Downstairs, the door slammed. Gemma jumped as if she’d heard a gunshot.

  ‘Hi, Poochie!’ Alex called, using their old nickname, one that went back so long she’d forgotten its origins.

  Why was he back so early? Whatever. No time for secret tears, for mourning yet another non-existent baby.

  ‘I’m in the loo!’

  ‘I don’t want to know!’ One of Gemma and Alex’s longest-standing jokes involved never seeing each other on the throne. She had friends who happily took a dump while their husbands were in the bath. Personally Gemma couldn’t bear even to acknowledge she had bowels, which was a bit of a problem in a flat where the bathroom was situated directly off the living area. She’d become an expert on running the taps at full volume – though what that was doing to the environment and Chudney’s future world she hated to think. She didn’t know how she’d manage giving birth, when sometimes you pooed – but she’d be so grateful for the chance to push a baby out, she’d deal with it.

  She shoved the stick under the paper in the bin, flushed the loo and ran out to the mezzanine. Alex was standing in the dining area below, looking up at her, hair tousled, tie slightly askew.

  ‘Hey, Pooch. How are you? How was your day?’

  ‘Busy. But that doesn’t matter. What about you? What’s this news?’

  There was a look of anticipation on his face that Gemma recognized. Oh God. She’d given him the wrong idea. Now she was going to have to disappoint him.

  ‘Oh, Poochie. I’m not pregnant.’

  ‘Oh.’ Alex rubbed his nose vigorously, as he always did at times of great emotion. Alex really wanted children – originally he’d said four but he knew better than to go on about that. ‘Right.’

  She hurried down the spiral staircase and kissed him full on the lips. ‘It doesn’t matter! I saw Bridget today.’

  ‘Oh yeah?’ Alex looked puzzled. What possible good news could relate to Bridget unless it was that she was emigrating to the moon?

  ‘She wants to be our donor.’

  There was a pause and then Alex said, ‘Bridget?’

  ‘
Yes. She’s going to give us one of her eggs. Isn’t that fantastic?’

  ‘Does that mean I have to sleep with her?’

  Gemma laughed at his appalled expression. ‘Of course not, darling. They harvest the eggs from her like they would from any anonymous donor and then they mix one in a test tube with your sperm and put the embryo inside me. It means the baby will have a genetic link to me.’

  ‘But we’re talking dotty Bridget here. With a druggie past, who freeloads off everyone and can’t stick to anything for even five minutes.’

  ‘Just because Bridget used to be a bit of a loose cannon does not at all mean her… mean our baby would be the same way. It’s just as likely to be like me. After all, she and I are exactly the same gene pool, just differently shaken up.’

  ‘But still…’ Alex ran his hands through his hair. ‘I just don’t know, Poochie.’

  For the second time that day Gemma felt tears pricking. ‘Darling. What other option do we have? I can’t give you a baby, you won’t adopt. You don’t want an anonymous donor egg from Spain.’

  ‘A tortilla? No thanks.’

  ‘Don’t call it that.’ Gemma took a deep breath. ‘It’s got to be Bridget. It’s an incredible offer. Why can’t we be grateful for it?’

  ‘I’m not being difficult. I just think we can’t rush into any of this. You need to look before you leap.’

  ‘What’s to look at? We want a baby, we’re being offered a great chance of having one. The only chance we have.’

  The tears started to fall now. Damn. She’d been really hoping she could keep a lid on things. Awkwardly, Alex put his arms round her. She pulled him close.

  ‘Poochster,’ he said into her hair. ‘It’s OK. I’m not saying no. I’m just saying Bridget is not a reliable person and should we embark on such a life-changing journey with her at the steering-wheel?’

  She tried to stop the sobbing, but the tears kept coming. She felt his warm breath against her hair. His body sagged.

  ‘OK, OK. We’ll accept it. It’s incredibly kind of her. Though, I mean… We’re still not guaranteed a baby, are we?’