by Cathy Kelly
‘Oh, Em, I love you, you daft thing,’ Pete said. ‘What made you decide now?’
‘Sitting here with Mum did it,’ she explained. ‘Her life is just slipping away, day by day, and here am I wasting mine because I can’t face the truth. If we can’t have a baby, we’ll adopt. Anything is better than doing nothing, which is what I’ve done for years. I’ve been so stupid.’
‘Don’t be so hard on yourself, Em,’ he said.
‘I’m not, but I have wasted time. You need to be on the adoption list for years before you get the go-ahead to adopt a baby from abroad; I’ve wasted too much time already.’
‘Let’s see if we can have our own baby, first. I’ve been reading about that IVF thing. There’s a twenty per cent success rate, mind you, so if it doesn’t work the first time, we’ll try, try and try again.’
‘It’s not cheap,’ Emma said.
‘If I have to sell my body to finance it, I will,’ joked Pete. ‘Seriously, love, we’ll manage. This is the most important thing in the world. We’ll borrow the money if we have to, I don’t care.’
‘You’re wonderful, do you know that?’ Emma said.
‘Ditto. Come home soon and we can practise getting my specimen in the paper cup!’
It was well after seven before Jimmy came home. Emma was exhausted and longed to go home to Pete so they could make plans. She was eager for it to be Monday morning so she could start on her quest to discover what was wrong with her. Whatever it was, she was sure they’d overcome it. She and Pete were going to be parents, that was definite.
Jimmy was in a foul mood. ‘Did you not make any dinner for me?’ he demanded as soon as he realized that there was nothing inviting waiting in the oven for him.
Emma stared at him. He was unbelievable.
‘No,’ she said coolly. ‘I didn’t make any dinner for you because I assumed you’d be home long before this.’
‘That’s marvellous. I reared you and you can’t even make me a bit of dinner. Listen to me, my girl…’
‘No,’ Emma said sharply. ‘You listen to me. I have been here all afternoon on my day off looking after Mum and the first thing you do when you get back is shout at me. It’s just not good enough.’
‘Don’t take that tone with me, young lady!’ Jimmy roared.
For once in her life, Emma didn’t quail. This was a day for firsts. She’d made a momentous decision to do something about a baby, now she needed another momentous event.
‘Don’t talk to me like that,’ she said, ice in every word. ‘Because if you do, I’m walking out that door and I’m not coming back, and then you’re going to find out exactly how much I do for you.’
‘Rubbish,’ he shouted at her.
‘When you have to look after Mum full-time without my back-up, when you have to clean this house for yourself and wash and iron your own clothes, perhaps then you’ll be sorry, Dad.’
‘Kirsten would do it in a flash,’ he snapped.
‘Kirsten wouldn’t be bothered,’ she replied witheringly. ‘She has her own life and she figured out how to say no to you years ago. I’ve only just learned.’
She picked up her handbag. ‘I won’t be back until you’ve apologized,’ she said.
Jimmy’s face lost some of its bluster. ‘What about your mother?’
‘We need to discuss nursing care, whether you like it or not.’
‘I don’t like it,’ growled her father, ‘and it’s my decision.’
‘I’m afraid it’s not your decision alone. It’s mine and Kirsten’s too. It’s getting to the point where we can’t look after Mum on our own. Either you get carers to come to the house, or she needs to go to a nursing home where she’ll get specialized care. And you can stop the bullying, Dad, it doesn’t work any more.’ She ignored her father’s furious mouthing. ‘And never talk to me like that again. I’m looking after Mum because I love her, not because of you.’
She drove home fast, pushing her foot to the floor in an attempt to get rid of the nervous energy she was experiencing.
She waited for the guilt to come, the overwhelming sense that she’d failed everyone who loved her by giving in to an appalling display of temper and ungratefulness. Nice girls didn’t fight with their fathers. But it didn’t happen; she didn’t feel any guilt, only a glorious sense of release.
She’d been seething with anger and resentment for all her life but had kept it to herself. Anger was bad, unfemi-nine, destined to make people hate you. Or so she’d thought.
Today, she’d discovered that wasn’t true at all. Pete, whom she loved, would be delighted with her for standing up to their father. Did it matter if her father was angry with her? He’d been angry with her since the day she was born, for no apparent reason. She’d given him a valid one, that was all. And he needed her more than she needed him. She didn’t need him at all. It was a heady feeling.
She found Pete making dinner and she ran to him, throwing her arms around him.
‘You haven’t changed your mind, have you?’ he asked anxiously.
‘Far from it,’ Emma said. ‘It’s been quite a day.’
The next day, they lazed late in bed.
‘It’s nice to have you to myself,’ Pete said, wrapping his body around hers.
‘I suppose I have been spending a lot of time with Mum,’ Emma sighed. ‘I hope she’s OK. It’s her I feel guilty about.’
‘Your father is the one responsible for all this,’ Pete said. ‘He’s abused you and the only way to teach him a lesson is to be tough. Tough love.’
‘He can’t cope and he can’t admit it,’ Emma said.
‘That’s his problem. You can’t take the troubles of the world on your shoulders, Emma. You’ve been at his beck and call since you were born. It doesn’t mean you’re a bad daughter just because you need your own life away from that bully.’
She snuggled against him, enjoying the feel of his body against hers.
‘It’s sad,’ she explained. ‘I’d have sympathy for anyone in Dad’s situation but I can’t reach him. Our relationship is so bad, I’ll never be able to do that.’
‘You look after your mother,’ Pete pointed out. ‘Making sure that she’s well taken care of is the most important thing. Don’t let him use that to manipulate you.’
‘I won’t.’
In the end, Kirsten got involved.
‘I can’t believe you’re doing this,’ Emma said a week later as they drove to the hotel where they were going to meet their father and the carers they were to interview for the position of looking after Anne-Marie.
‘He’s never off the phone to me,’ Kirsten complained. ‘He can’t use the washing machine, that was the first problem. He broke the Hoover yesterday and, as for the microwave, forget it. I told him I wasn’t his bloody slave and he could learn how to do it himself. And,’ she smirked, ‘I gave him a piece of my mind for being so nasty to you. Told him you’d been a far better daughter to him than I ever had and that he didn’t deserve to see you ever again.’
‘You didn’t!’ Emma was lost in admiration. ‘That was sweet of you.’
‘Well, if he’s got you to lean on, he won’t be on the phone to me all the time, so there was a certain personal motive behind my sweetness,’ she admitted.
Emma laughed. Kirsten never changed.
‘It’s been an awful week,’ Kirsten protested. ‘I had to get him off my back somehow. Still, it worked. He’s finally realized that he can’t look after Mum on his own, mainly because you did so much.’
Jimmy seemed to have diminished when they saw him standing in the hotel lobby. He looked smaller, thinner. Emma felt the old guilt that she shouldn’t have left him on his own to look after Anne-Marie.
Kirsten poked her in the ribs. ‘No getting all maudlin and apologetic,’ she warned. ‘Dad has to apologize to you, not the other way round. Mum’s illness doesn’t allow him to be an even worse bastard than he already is.’
Apologies weren’t Jimmy’s forte.
‘Hello, girls,’ he muttered. ‘I said I’d meet them in the bar. We should go in.’
‘Don’t you have something to say, Dad?’ Kirsten enquired.
He looked Emma in the eye for the first time. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said gruffly. ‘I wasn’t fair on you the other day.’
‘Apology accepted,’ she said formally. That was as good as it was ever going to get. Her father would never acknowledge that he had more than just the other day to apologize for. But it was her own fault for being such a victim. She’d let him walk all over her. Still, if they could get on well enough to look after Anne-Marie together, that was good enough.
‘Shall we go into the bar?’ she said brightly. She wanted to get this over with. Now that she felt she’d made a new start with her father, she was dying to tell Kirsten her news: that she and Pete were on the baby trail and nothing was going to stop them having one. Nothing.
The results were unexpected. There was nothing wrong with either of them. Pete’s sperm count was excellent and Emma had no blockages, scarring or obvious reasons why she’d never conceived.
‘There is absolutely no reason why you can’t have a baby,’ the specialist said. ‘We call it unexplained infertility.’
It sounded so inconclusive, so unconvincing. Emma found it incredible that in a world of modern science where everything was transplantable and where mice could grow human ears on their backs, infertility like hers could be inexplicable. But unexplained infertility left her with that most precious commodity: hope.
‘Some people in your position wait and hope, but as you’ve waited and hoped for quite a while, you could try the IVF option,’ the specialist said encouragingly.
Outside the clinic, Pete had held her hand so tightly that it hurt. She could see him biting his lip and knew he was afraid to even look at her, afraid that she’d go to pieces. Yet for some unaccountable reason, she didn’t feel upset: she felt relieved. As if a millstone had been cut from the rope where it hung around her neck. Her inability to have a baby was inexplicable, not something she’d done, not some flaw within her traitorous body, not a problem that couldn’t be fixed. The cleverest minds had told her so. The fear and dread of the result was out of her hands.
After years of being scared to discover the truth, she now knew it. And it was cathartic, like a balm to her soul. Because unexplained infertility meant hope.
‘Pete…’ She swung around to face him, stroking his tense face, feeling the soft skin where he’d shaved a few hours before. ‘I’m not upset, love, really I’m not.’
He didn’t believe her; she could see that. His normally open, smiling face was racked with grief for both of them. But Pete hadn’t read every book and magazine article on infertility the way Emma had. He assumed that this result was the worst thing, but it wasn’t.
‘Don’t you see, Pete, we can start again,’ she pleaded. ‘We’ve been messing around for so long, wondering what was wrong, afraid to talk about it and afraid to talk about the future. But now,’ she smiled a smile of genuine pleasure, ‘they can’t find anything wrong. That’s what unexplained infertility means. I don’t have anything they can see. That may mean I can never have a baby or it may mean I can. Let’s try IVF. We’ve as good a chance as anyone else has.
They’ve got a twenty per cent success rate, as you told me. I don’t mind gambling if you don’t.’
For a moment, Pete stared at her, then his face cracked into a beaming smile. Picking her up, he whirled her around, kissing her fervently and yelling, ‘I love you,’ at the top of his voice.
Clinging to him, Emma threw back her head and whooped, not caring that passers-by were looking at the happy couple who looked as if they were re-enacting a movie scene about young lovers.
‘Where do we go?’ demanded Pete. ‘Let’s do it now, right this minute, immediately!’
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Claudia threw her dummy at Hannah. With the phone still cradled between her ear and shoulder, Hannah picked the dummy up, dumped it in the sterilizer, removed another one and handed it to Claudia. Seeing the look in her mother’s eyes, Claudia, who was very clever for four months old, decided to hold on to the dummy. She twinkled endearingly at her mother, scrunching up her cherub face and letting the liquid brown eyes so like her father’s take the crossness out of Hannah’s expression. Before Claudia had been born, Hannah thought dummies were the work of the devil and lazy mothers. No child of hers would ever have one. After two months of constant screaming, one kind neighbour she’d met in the park had told her to forget her high-principled ideas and hit the chemist immediately for a six-pack. ‘Peace and principles are two very different things,’ the woman had said. ‘I swore I’d never use them, and look at my lot. They’ll be doing college finals with them in their mouths.’ Hannah took her advice and peace reigned.
Now Claudia sucked happily, big eyes watching her mother intently.
‘We need another waitress,’ Hannah said again to the man who ran A & E Catering. ‘One isn’t enough. We’ve got fifty people coming tonight, as you well know because you’re supplying the food. One waitress is ludicrous.’
He gave her the usual bullshit and Hannah rolled her eyes. Why Felix had insisted on using these people was beyond her. Just because his new best friend had recommended them was no reason to entrust their first big party to them. But he insisted it was a good idea.
‘Hannah, I’ve been at three parties lately where they’ve worked, trust me,’ he said bluntly.
As she hadn’t been to the same three parties because Claudia’s colic meant the au pair couldn’t manage, Hannah had no comeback. The au pair couldn’t manage very much. Neither, it seemed, could A & E Catering. Felix had told her grandly about plans for a seafood buffet with splendid raspberry tarts as dessert, like the last party he’d been at. The catering company had said that the woman who oversaw seafood buffets was on holiday and would she not settle for hams, cheese, the odd quiche and exotic fruit meringue?
Now the problem was the number of staff. Somebody had overbooked and there was only one waitress available for the party. Hannah, who thought it was all too expensive anyway and would have much preferred to cancel the bloody party, had no intention of being the second waitress, which was what would happen unless she could twist the caterers’ arms.
‘Look,’ she said finally, ‘I want two waitresses or consider yourself fired.’
She hung up.
‘Mercedes!’ she yelled.
Mercedes was the au pair, an indolent French charmer who could have been on the front of Vogue and was clearly biding her time au pairing until she was asked. A tall, sylph-like nineteen with endless legs, she had long platinum-blonde hair she could sit on and big blue eyes that must have looked wanton from the day she was born. Now she swayed into the kitchen, pink kitten heels clacking on Hannah’s terracotta tiles, a vision in black jeans and a pink gingham shirt with the ends tied carelessly about her tiny waist.
‘Oui,’ she breathed.
‘Can you take Claudia for a walk?’ Hannah asked. ‘I have a few more phone calls to make and she’s restless.’
‘But I must do my nails,’ Mercedes said plaintively.
Hannah’s own nails were unpainted and likely to stay that way because she still had to do so much before the party Felix wanted, a party they couldn’t afford.
‘Mercedes, please,’ begged Hannah. ‘You can have all of tomorrow off.’
For a brief, dizzying moment, Hannah remembered running an office, hiring and firing at will. Now she was reduced to begging the au pair for help. Mercedes was supposed to work for six hours, five days a week, the days to be organized between employer and employee. But after that first month coaxing Mercedes out of the desolation of homesickness for Marseilles, Hannah had crossed the line from employer to mother-figure and Mercedes now behaved exactly the way Hannah suspected she behaved at home: on the phone at all hours, by turn melancholy and jubilant, depending on which boyfriend had phoned, and uninterested in emp
tying out the dishwasher. She loved Claudia, which was wonderful, but hated nappy-changing and feeding. Getting her to take Claudia out for a walk was like getting NATO chiefs to reach a unanimous decision.
The promise of Saturday off did it. Mercedes liked nothing better than spending Saturdays with her au pair friends, idling away hours drinking coffee in Covent Garden, being eyed up by handsome young men and spending money their parents had sent on flirty little outfits from French Connection and Monsoon.
‘Oui,’ Mercedes said grudgingly, and because she was a kind girl, added, ‘Are you going to the ’airdresser, ’Annah? I’ll keep Claudia for the afternoon.’
Hannah could have kissed her. Once she’d decided to help, Mercedes was generous.
Claudia was the only one who didn’t like this plan. She scrunched up her face and bawled, hurling her bottle at Mercedes this time and making enough noise to frighten the cat.
Hannah picked her up and cuddled her tightly as the wails subsided. As she held Claudia’s heaving body close to hers, she marvelled again at the intensity of her feelings for her daughter. From the very second she’d been born, love for Claudia had overwhelmed Hannah like a volcanic eruption pouring ceaselessly out of a crater. She adored each dark curl on her daughter’s head, was obsessed with every breath she took, even sitting beside the cot when Claudia had been very small, listening to every inhalation, as if watching the tiny chest rise and fall could keep Claudia safe. Under the circumstances, it was a miracle that Claudia had remained so sweet and sunny-natured thus far. But despite her adoration, Hannah was terrified of spoiling Claudia, and the little girl had learned that her beloved mother occasionally had to do things and go places that didn’t include her.
She wasn’t in the mood today. Snuggling closer to Hannah, Claudia sniffed plaintively.
‘I hope she’s not getting something,’ Hannah said anxiously, immediately toying with the idea of cancelling her hairdresser’s appointment.