by Debbie Rix
Whilst it baked, he made coffee on the stove, bringing it to Rachael as she read a story to Angela outside on the veranda. When the bread was ready, Tommaso removed it from the oven and broke it into pieces. He dipped it in oil, offering a little piece to Angela, who ate greedily, shovelling the bread into her small rosebud mouth.
Rachael was delighted by his domesticity. She had never known a man who cooked, nor took part in any way with domestic life. Her father had never made a meal – he could scarcely make a pot of coffee; nor had her husband. But this man, who had rescued her child and protected her, was now feeding her – both physically and emotionally, with kindness and gentleness. It was intoxicating.
When it was time for him to leave, Tommaso kissed Rachael gently on each cheek. As he kicked the scooter engine into life, he called out: ‘A domani, Rachael…’
She watched him roar off up the lane and realised some pivotal moment had taken place between them. As if, in the rescuing of her child, an unbreakable bond had been created.
Would she ever tell her father or Giles what had happened that day?
No… she thought not. It would be their secret – hers and Tommaso’s.
Chapter Twelve
Gloucestershire
December 2016
For the first time in three years, Sophie was back on the pill. Each morning, before she brushed her teeth, she swallowed her medication. And as she did so, she said a prayer: ‘Please, please, let me have a baby’. She had a renewed sense of optimism about her chances of having a child. She was healthy, there was no physical reason why she was unable to conceive and once her cycle was regularised, she would begin treatment in earnest. In mid-January she would start on a course of fertility drugs. A few weeks later her eggs would be harvested – a phrase she hated. By March, she could be pregnant. She could have a baby by next Christmas.
She exhaled deeply as she studied herself in the mirror. She must not let her imagination run away with her. On the other hand, she must remain positive. The treatment would work; she would have a child – of that she had no doubt. But she worried sometimes that her need for a child, her longing to be pregnant, was verging on the obsessional. Then she would rationalise those anxieties; of course she was obsessional – it was the most important thing in her life right now.
She popped the small white pill out of the foil container and swilled it down with a glass of water. How ironic, she mused, that her road to fertility should begin with taking an oral contraceptive.
‘Four weeks on the pill should be enough,’ her consultant had said at their first meeting a few weeks earlier. ‘We just need to get your menstrual cycle working properly, and the pill’s the best way of doing that. Then, you’ll start taking fertility medication. This will stimulate the follicles in your ovaries and mature more eggs than would typically take place in a normal cycle. The goal is to produce at least four eggs.’
In spite of the fact that Hamish worked in the same building as the consultant, he had not come with her to that appointment.
‘Darling…’ he said when she had asked him to check his diary, ‘I’ve got a long list that day. Awkward to get out of it.’
‘Don’t you want to come?’ she asked. She had regretted the question instantly, and felt him withdraw from her.
He crossed the kitchen and turned on the cold water, running it until it was cool. He ducked down and drank from the tap; it was a habit she loathed.
‘You don’t really need me there, do you?’ he said, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. ‘It’s not as if either of us is ignorant of what’s going on here. I know exactly what he’s going to prescribe. It’s all quite routine. It’s not a problem is it?’
‘No… not at all,’ she’d replied, untruthfully.
It was a problem, of course. She would have loved to him to be as enthusiastic as she was about the process. Because although, as a doctor, he was familiar with the medical procedure, in this instance, he wasn’t just a doctor, he was her husband and the father of her future child. But she knew that he struggled with the medicalisation of their situation. Besides, he argued, she didn’t require his presence when she had a cervical smear or an inoculation, so why should he attend her IVF appointments?
After taking her pill and brushing her teeth, she pulled on her thick winter dressing gown. It was the middle of December and snow was forecast. Hamish had left for work quite early and the house felt quiet and calm. Down in the kitchen she noticed that Mick-the-Chick had left a box of eggs on the windowsill. The hens were already outside, clucking around the yard, indifferent to the cold weather. She ran outdoors and retrieved the eggs, rushing back inside and leaning up against the Aga for warmth. As she broke two of the fresh eggs into a pan, and whisked them together, she thought about Hamish and tried to recall if he had always been so separate from her – so reluctant to share her experiences. It was true that when they first got together their relationship had been based not just on mutual physical attraction – the strange ephemeral alchemy that takes place between two individuals – but also, an admiration for the other’s professional life. Hamish respected Sophie’s intelligence, and her academic ability. But he also admired her independence.
‘I’m so glad,’ he had said after their first few dates, ‘that you have a life of your own – a career you believe in. I’m not good at being “needed”. Does that bother you?’
‘Not at all,’ she had replied, honestly. ‘I’m independent and happily so…’
As far as Sophie was concerned, going out with a doctor came naturally. With her own mother as a role model, she understood why work had to come first. If Hamish had to cancel a dinner date or a weekend away at the last minute, she was phlegmatic about it. And Hamish was funny; he could always make Sophie laugh and he was a great storyteller – particularly about life in the operating theatre. It was often said that most jokes originate with anaesthetists. They stand at the ‘head end’ while the surgeon gets on with the business in hand, and their job, apart from keeping the patient sedated and free of pain, is to entertain and amuse the rest of the team. Being gregarious and sociable, Hamish took to this role naturally. And he had a large entourage of mostly medical friends with whom he met once a week to play poker. It was one of his few vices, and she was amused, and rather proud of his poker prowess.
When Hamish decided to specialise in anaesthetics, he was offered a job in Plymouth. Rachael was halfway through an MA at London University, and so they commuted to one another at weekends. For Sophie, that meant a long train journey on a Friday evening. After fighting her way through the commuters at Paddington, she was filled with anticipation as the train chugged through west London. But her sense of exhilaration grew as the train left Exeter station and swept along the perilous stretch of track that bordered the English Channel, the sea spray splashing against the train carriage windows. Hamish would be waiting eagerly at the barrier to meet her. They would rush back to his meagre hospital bachelor flat and make love as if their lives depended on it. Their sex life had always been good. They ‘clicked’ somehow from the beginning. Hamish had other girlfriends before Sophie – some had been more experienced than her, some more experimental. But with Sophie it had seemed a perfect match.
Sitting now at the kitchen table, listening to the clucking of the hens outside, the cat on her lap, she thought back to their engagement. Hamish had just moved back to London – he’d got a registrar’s post at King’s College Hospital. He moved initially into Rachael’s rented flat near Holborn, but commuting to South London was time-consuming. Eventually, they discussed buying a house together nearer the hospital. They knew it was a momentous decision, and a serious commitment. Sophie was quite content with the idea of simply living with Hamish – she didn’t crave marriage; in fact they never even discussed it. But one evening, he slid a tiny jeweller’s box shyly towards her across their kitchen table in the flat in Holborn.
‘This is for you…’
Inside was a beautiful vintag
e solitaire diamond ring.
‘Oh my God…’ said Sophie, taking it out of the box and trying it on, ‘is this what I think it is?’
He smiled. ‘Marry me?’
‘I had no idea you were even thinking about it.’ She looked puzzled.
‘Really? Why not? Why wouldn’t we get married?’ he asked logically. ‘I’ve never loved anyone like you. We’ve survived this long – two years apart when I was in Plymouth… it just feels right. Don’t you think?’
‘Yes… yes it does. I’m just rather touched by how old-fashioned you are.’
‘I didn’t drop to my knees,’ he said, ‘I’m not that romantic.’
‘That has been noted,’ she laughed.
‘But I did ask your dad first…’
‘Did you? How traditional and patriarchal of you… what did he say?’
‘Rather predictably, he said that it was none of his business and that I’d better ask you…’
‘Good old Dad… quite right. Well, as it happens, it is quite all right with me…’
The wedding was a small simple affair in a registry office, followed by a reception in the back garden of her parents’ house in Hampstead. They had no honeymoon, but instead put all their money, together with a loan from their parents, towards a deposit. The house they eventually found was a complete wreck. It had been lived in by an old lady for the previous fifty years and needed total renovation. They spent every spare moment stripping wallpaper, sanding floors, even knocking a wall down between the two ground-floor rooms. It had been a shared project – a joint passion. They worked hard, they played hard, they decorated, they made love. They were happy.
Their sex life remained good. Four or five years into their marriage, they still made love spontaneously. He would come up behind her as she cooked and wrap his arms around her and she would turn and kiss him, and sometimes, they would run upstairs and make love before dinner. They once even made love standing up against the kitchen dresser.
But something changed when they began trying to have a child. At the beginning of the process, Sophie suggested they should only make love when she was ovulating, and she bought a special thermometer that indicated which days of the month would prove most fruitful.
‘Darling,’ she would say last thing at night, ‘we should do it now, it’s the right time…’
Hamish understood what she meant, of course, but it seemed to him that the right time was when they felt lust for one another, and not when the thermometer told them to ‘perform’. The right time, for him, was when something about the curve of her neck, or the way her dark hair fell over one eye, made him long for her. As a relatively normal red-blooded man, the prospect of sex with his wife at any time should have been a turn-on.
‘You lucky bugger,’ his poker friend Jonno said, when he told his friends he and Sophie were trying for a baby. ‘Since we had the third one, my wife doesn’t want it at all.’
‘I remember those days,’ mused Steve, a consultant surgeon Hamish often operated with. ‘“Come home now”, she’d say, “we’ve got to do it.” Happy days…’
Hamish would smile, and laugh along with the others, agreeing that he was lucky, but that was not how he felt. It was as if he was being asked to perform like a circus monkey. For the first time in his life, he developed ‘performance anxiety’. A euphemistic phrase that he clung to, in the hope that it would eventually disappear. But, nevertheless, it made him feel a failure, inadequate even.
Sophie was understanding, of course, but also mildly irritated. The first time it happened, she did not handle it well.
‘Never mind,’ she said, with a false veil of calm which concealed a deeper sense of panic. ‘It will still be OK tomorrow – perhaps we can do it in the morning?’
But the following morning, Hamish got up early and went for a run. He was already showered and dressed by the time Sophie woke up. She reached across to him as he sat on the bed putting on his shoes. He flinched.
‘Sorry, babe…’ he’d said. ‘Got to go… long list today.’
And he was gone.
As she rinsed her plate under the tap, the cat wrapping himself around her ankles, she pondered how she could address the issue of Hamish and his ‘performance anxiety’. What if he simply refused, or couldn’t take part. They still did make love occasionally, but she knew that he found the pressure increasingly difficult to handle.
That evening, as small flecks of snow drifted down from a dark overcast sky, she plucked up the courage to discuss it with Hamish.
‘Darling… are you really on board with this IVF thing? We’ve started the treatment – I’m on the pill. Next month, I’ll start on the ovulation drugs. It’s everything we’ve been waiting for. And I don’t want to…’ she cast around for the right phrase, ‘put undue pressure on you.’
‘It’s fine… it’s grand,’ he said abruptly. ‘Don’t worry about me. You’re the one who’s going to be taking all that medication. How hard can it be?’ He tried to sound matter-of-fact.
‘I mean…’ she continued cautiously, ‘I’m really nervous. I’m terrified in fact. What if it doesn’t work, what if it does work… I’m just a mess of nerves, of conflicting emotions.’
He stood up and came round to her side of the table. He sat beside her and wrapped his arms round her. He kissed the top of her head.
She felt a longing for him. She looked up and he kissed her.
‘I really want you…’ she said quietly.
Afterwards, as they lay in one another’s arms, she said, ‘I wish it could always just be like this; I hate all the thermometers and timing and all that….’
‘Me too,’ he said.
The following morning, Sophie was woken by her phone alarm at six o’clock. Groaning she reached out and switched it off. The air in the bedroom was chilly, and as she reluctantly threw off the duvet, she shivered and hauled on her dressing gown. Peering outside into the garden, she was relieved to see that the previous evening’s snowfall had not settled.
‘You off already?’ Hamish asked, sleepily.
‘Not yet… shortly,’ she said, putting on her slippers. ‘I’m leaving about seven. I’ve got to be in London by nine thirty. I’ll be staying with Mum and Dad tonight – hope that’s all right?’
He nodded.
‘Go back to sleep then?’ she suggested.
‘Come back for a cuddle,’ he said, lovingly.
She smiled at him, slipping the dressing gown off her shoulders. ‘I suppose there is time…’
Later, as she dressed and put a few things in an overnight bag, she asked, ‘Are you sure you’ll be all right – all on your own?’
‘Darling – of course! I’ll get a poker game together, have a takeaway and go to bed. Besides, it’s good that you stay with your folks – gives you a chance to keep up with them. Now bugger off…’
She thought about their lovemaking, as she sat on the train from Kemble to London. Why couldn’t it always be like last night, and again this morning, she wondered. Twice in twelve hours – it had been ages since they’d made love like that. Perhaps she’d already be pregnant if they’d always been so enthusiastic. It seemed ironic that he was so keen to make love to her now she was on the pill, but when the ‘time was right’, he shied away. Perhaps she needed to be subtler with Hamish – to relax more and seduce him. If they could work together, she could have a baby in time for Christmas. She could see it now – a tiny, perfect child, lying in a pram in the hall of their house. A large Christmas tree twinkling with fairy lights in the sitting room. She could imagine her parents giving her presents on Christmas morning – baby clothes and pretty bedlinen and a mobile maybe, to hang over the cot. She could visualise it so powerfully; she could almost smell the warm, clean scent of a tiny baby. And in her fantasies that smell was mixed with the scent of gingerbread men as she took them out of the oven; of a Christmas cake standing on the dresser… just the way Rachael used to make it.
‘Paddington, Paddington station.’
Sophie was jolted out of her reverie by the announcement. ‘Please make sure you take all your belongings with you when leaving the train.’
As she sat on the tube, she focused on the day ahead. She was grateful for the distraction of her work. When she was talking to her supervisor at the university, or visiting the British Museum, researching and writing, she was able to put her yearning for a child out of her mind. She was fortunate that her work was so absorbing. If she had a normal office job, she was sure that she would be even more fixated on her failing fertility.
Sophie had persuaded her supervisor to let her study the connection between byssus silk and first and second century burial practices. She had been intrigued by this rare textile since the dream in which her grandmother Rachael told Sophie about sea silk and the water women. The more she researched it, the more fascinating the subject became. This curious by-product of the giant clam had been used since the time of the ancient Greeks. Many different names had been given to it over the millennia – sea silk, byssus silk, mermaid silk, sea wool. It was called butz in Hebrew, byssos in Greek and byssus in Latin. Academics warned that the word byssus was often confused for Bombyx mori silk. Some said that byssus simply meant linen or cotton. And yet… the ancient texts were filled with references to this mysterious cloth. Religious vestments had been made from ‘bundles of fibres from the pinna mussel of the eastern Mediterranean coast’. The Bible mentioned ‘cloth of gold’. Could that be explained, she mused, by the existence of byssus? As for a link to her own PhD – there were numerous examples of bodies being buried, wrapped in byssus, for thousands of years – as far back as the ancient Egyptians.