Least Said

by Pamela Fudge

  ‘Are you all right?’

  The shock of hearing a strange male voice right behind me forced me to somehow grasp the shreds of my dignity and pull them together, suddenly becoming aware of what I must look and sound like. I peered over my shoulder at the tall figure blocking the doorway and my heart almost stopped beating as all my recent fears came rushing back with a speed that was frightening. I couldn’t see his face, because the sun was behind him casting his features into shadow, but there was no doubt in my mind that my past really had caught up with me this time, and was standing on my doorstep behind me.

  ‘What do you want?’ I meant to utter the demand harshly, but it came out as more of a whimper. ‘Why are you here?’

  He held his hand out and when I saw he was holding some kind of paperwork I almost threw up. This was it then, the moment I had been dreading ever since I’d set eyes on the Adonis of that long ago wedding reception and allowed my unfounded anger towards my husband and my longing for a child to get the better of me.

  In my heart – despite all of Tina’s assurances to the contrary - I had somehow known that the one night of lust I had spent so much time regretting and determinedly forgetting was going to come back to haunt me. Now it had, because I had no doubt in my mind at all that this – this person was here to demand the truth, a DNA test, and proof that he was William’s biological father.

  Slowly, so slowly, I struggled to my feet, shrugging off the hand I felt at my elbow. Was he actually trying to offer assistance, trying to be kind before he ripped my world to apart?

  I couldn’t bring myself to face him, I just said again, ‘What do you want?’ quite certain that I already knew the answer.

  ‘You’re obviously very upset, is there anything I can do?’

  He sounded concerned, kind even, but it was all an act, of course.

  ‘You can get out, leave me alone,’ I hissed.

  ‘Well, if that’s how you feel,’ he sounded taken aback, maybe even a little shocked, ‘I was only trying to be helpful, but if you’ll just take these I’ll leave you in peace.’

  I turned round then, and found myself looking up into the face of my regular postman, an extremely tall man in his fifties, and then down at the letters he held in his hand.

  ‘Oh, my God,’ I said, ‘I am so sorry. I’ve just had some very bad news and I thought you were someone else.’ I reached out for the post and repeated again, ‘I’m so, so sorry.’

  He turned to go, and then hesitated and turned back. ‘Are you sure you’re going to be all right? You’re obviously distraught. Is there anything at all that I can do?’

  ‘No,’ I said, feeling the tears beginning to build again. ‘Thank you so much for your concern, but there’s nothing you can do – there’s nothing anyone can do,’ and ushering him out I closed the door behind him.

  It was a struggle to drag myself upstairs to shower, casting the offending trousers into the laundry bin – knowing even as I did so that they would be finding their way into the rubbish, because if I never set my eyes on them again it would be too soon. There was no relief to be found in showering, washing away the faint traces of the baby that never was.

  I stood for a long while, letting the water cascade over me, crying quietly now. I had been foolish, I recognised and accepted that, to allow my hopes to build to such an extent that I truly believed a child was on the way, without a shred of real evidence to support such an assumption. As for the business with the postman, I shuddered and felt my face burn with embarrassment. What was I turning into – some sort of paranoid woman who was expecting the past to jump out at her at every turn?

  With a supreme effort I finally pulled myself together and did what I always did in times of stress, turning to work in an effort to keep my hands busy and my mind occupied.

  ‘There you are,’ Jon said, coming into my work kitchen to find me when he arrived home. ‘I wasn’t expecting your car to be in the drive after your text earlier letting me know that you and Will were off out somewhere.’

  ‘Mmm,’ I murmured, without looking up as I finished off a particularly fiddly bit of piping on a very intricately decorated wedding cake. ‘There was a sudden change of plan.’

  Jon waited for me to complete the task and then he took the icing bag from my hand, and looked down at me. ‘What happened?’ he said, obviously taking in the gloomy tone and red-rimmed eyes.

  ‘We didn’t make a baby this month,’ I said sadly, and burst into tears. I flapped my hands, trying to forestall what I knew he was going to stay. ‘I know, I know, I’m being silly.’

  ‘Sweetheart,’ he pulled me into his arms, ‘you’re not being silly, but it is very early days of us seriously trying to conceive.’

  ‘I know, I know,’ I murmured, relishing his closeness and his love, ‘but I’d so hoped...’

  ‘We’ll just have to try harder.’ I heard a chuckle in his voice. ‘I think I can live with that or if you’re worrying about my low sperm count – even though we eventually conceived Will without any help - we could get it checked out again and take some advice.’

  ‘Really?’

  I could feel my tears drying and my face becoming one big beam.

  ‘We’ll do whatever it takes,’ he promised, ‘go for more tests, accept fertility treatment if necessary. We’re both a bit older now and we both know that can affect fertility, too.’

  I was thrilled with this huge turn-around in Jon’s attitude. Given his reluctance in the early years of us trying to conceive, I’d seriously expected him to flatly refuse any advice or treatment on the grounds that he had fathered Will without any help.

  It was only later, when William had finally been persuaded up to bed after sharing every little detail of the lovely time he’d spent with Lucy and her children, that my thoughts turned to the difficulties and dangers that might arise once we came into contact with the medical profession again.

  We hadn’t hung around after the low sperm count result bombshell had been dropped on us all those years ago. In fact, Jon had stormed out of the doctor’s office immediately after we were given the news, flatly refusing to discuss the matter at all - not with me, his own wife, and definitely not with any member of the medical profession. So, what if – and I shuddered at the thought – the result had shown that his sperm count was so low that the chance of us conceiving without intervention was virtually impossible? Such information was bound to open up all kinds of questions concerning Will’s conception? I knew I just couldn’t risk it.

  Now that Jon had made up his mind to deal with any problems we might currently have with the level of his fertility head on, he seemed keen to get started, as soon became apparent as he spread butter on his toast with a lavish hand the following morning.

  ‘I’ve been thinking,’ he said, and I could tell he was making every effort to inject a note of eagerness into his tone, despite this being a subject he had always found difficult to deal with. ‘We should make an appointment at the surgery sooner rather than later – get this baby-making show on the road.’

  ‘Are we going to a baby-making show?’ Will piped up round a mouthful of Cocoa-pops, looking very interested. ‘Will it be at the Pavilion, like the pantomime at Christmas?’

  I threw Jon a look and shook my head. ‘Daddy was just joking,’ I said quickly, ‘but we might go to see The Lion King at the proper theatre in London before you go back to school – if you’re a very good boy.’

  He was immediately distracted, and I indicated to Jon by rubbing my fingers together, that his thoughtless remark was going to cost him. He just grinned sheepishly and shrugged his shoulders.

  ‘I’ve been thinking, too,’ I said, ‘that there are probably a lot of things we can do for ourselves before we resort to medical intervention. You’re right that it is early days and I was probably expecting far too much for it to happen right away. I’ll do some searches on the internet, look for natural ways of aiding fertility, and try to be patient.’

  Despite Jon’s appa
rent eagerness to take medical advice, I thought he looked relieved.

  ‘We should think back to when Will was conceived,’ he said as he kissed me goodbye on the doorstep, ‘because something obviously worked back then and it could do again.’

  I waved him off, trying not to think about the ‘something’ that might have worked back then because I had no intention at all of going down that route again. If I couldn’t conceive a baby that was definitely Jon’s – despite his low sperm count – then there would be no baby, it was as simple as that.

  The first thing I learned when I logged onto the internet was that sperm production takes almost three months, which was disappointing, but not the end of the world. I reminded myself how many people became pregnant just when they were least expecting it and determined to get in plenty of practice while looking at ways to increase our chances and putting them into practice.

  Poor diet seemed to be top of the list when it came to the cause of male infertility. Too few vitamins and the toxins in processed foods wreak havoc on a man’s sperm cells apparently. I was careful about the food I cooked but, I realised, we did give into William far too often when it came to fast food, so that was one thing that would have to change.

  I printed off a sheaf of pages from the most helpful site I discovered and called William in from the garden. ‘We’re going shopping,’ I said.

  ‘Not for clothes,’ he screwed his face up in anticipated disgust.

  ‘School shoes, maybe, but we can also get new trainers while we’re out. Maybe even that pair you were so desperate for the other day.’

  His face brightened. ‘Really? And McDonalds afterwards?’ The suggestion was added hopefully and I didn’t have a problem with that occasionally – it was Jon I would be steering well clear of fast food restaurants in future.

  ‘Ok,’ I conceded, ‘but we are also going food shopping,’ I held up my hand as the protests started, ‘and we’re going to buy the ingredients to make our own chicken nuggets and beef-burgers and you,’ I emphasised, ‘are going to help me make them.’

  ‘Wow.’

  I couldn’t have said anything that would have pleased him more, because William did love to cook. His enthusiasm made me realise it would work better all-round if he was included in the changes we were about to make to our lifestyle, even if he wasn’t aware of the reason for them.

  We might have spent more time in the supermarket than was usual, but it was time well spent as I discussed the various ingredients we were buying with Will, and also the reasons we were choosing this one as opposed to that apparently similar one over there.

  ‘Well, what’s all this then?’ Jon exclaimed when he walked in on a scene resembling Celebrity Masterchef at the end of his working day.

  ‘We’re making proper beef burgers,’ Will told him importantly from his position standing on a chair, wrapped in one of my large white aprons, and up to his elbows in a minced beef mixture.

  ‘He has washed his hands thoroughly,’ I mouthed at Jon, and added a little louder, ‘we’re on a healthy eating kick, aren’t we, Will?’

  ‘Yes,’ he agreed, adding sagely, ‘eating food that’s full of vikamins and nucraments.’

  ‘Vitamins and nutrients?’ Jon hazarded a guess, looking to me for confirmation, and then offering, ‘why don’t I fire up the barbeque to give those burgers a really authentic taste?’

  ‘Yes, yes, yes,’ Will jumped up and down so much that he was in real danger of toppling from the chair.

  ‘Careful,’ I made a lunge and grasped his arms to hold him steady. ‘If you carry on like that it will be a visit to the hospital instead of a barbeque. Now, do you want to go outside with Daddy or finish making the burgers?’

  I could tell he was torn, but in the end he stayed put and, with my help, he fashioned the mince mixture into fairly creditable beef burgers, though they varied quite considerably in both size and shape.

  ‘Those are amazing.’ I could tell that Jon was viewing them from a proud father’s perspective when he was handed the tray of what could easily be described by less than doting parents as seemingly unappetizing lumps of raw meaty mixture.

  Well,’ he said later, when William had cleared his plate and was whooping round the garden trying to catch next door’s cat, ‘if the object of the exercise was to get him to eat more – I would say it was a resounding success.’

  ‘This,’ I replied handing him a sheaf of printed pages, ‘is the real object of the exercise but, if it has the side effect of encouraging Will to eat more healthily, I’d call that a huge bonus.’ I could see Jon eyeing the Sperm Production heading and I pointed to another bold statement further down the page which advised Improve Your Diet. ‘I thought it wouldn’t hurt for us all to be involved.’

  ‘This is what you were talking about this morning?’

  I nodded. ‘As you can see, I didn’t waste much time.’

  ‘It says here sperm production takes the best part of three months,’ Jon looked and sounded as if he’d been given some really bad news.

  ‘Well, yes, I don’t suppose it will improve overnight but,’ I gave him what I hoped was a saucy grin, ‘there’s no reason at all why we can’t get some practice in the meantime. To put it very bluntly, I’m presuming the old sperm has to be used up to make way for the new.’

  ‘I like your thinking.’ He lunged at me, but I was ready and sprinted off across the garden with Jon close behind and William, obviously deciding that this was better than cat chasing, close behind that.

  Including William in the improve your diet section of our efforts to improve the quality of Jon’s sperm count – though for him we focussed completely on how eating healthily can improve your fitness and strength – turned out to be exactly the right thing to do. He began to take a huge interest in cookery programmes and showed a willingness to try many of the foods that he had turned his nose up at just a short time ago.

  When we bumped into Jade, Lucy and the children at the local library a few days later, they were amazed to find Will pouring over children’s cookery books, while Tristan and Molly headed straight for the fiction section.

  ‘Now how on earth have you managed that?’ Jade demanded. ‘Even Molly’s idea of a roast dinner is chicken nuggets and roast potatoes all covered in ketchup, and everything, except the ketchup, has to come ready-to-cook from bags in the freezer.’

  Will overheard her and, looking very superior, he stated, ‘I can make chicken nuggets.’

  Lucy was fascinated, and sitting down beside him, asked, ‘From minced chicken and ready-made breadcrumbs, right William?’

  ‘Oh, no,’ he said loftily, ‘from fresh chicken breast and our own grated breadcrumbs – and beaten egg,’ he added as an afterthought.

  ‘But doesn’t it take forever?’ Lucy directed the question at me. ‘Tristan would get bored in five minutes.’

  ‘Not if you all ate the result of his labours,’ I assured her. ‘Will can’t wait to get hands-on in the kitchen these days. I barely get a look in. In fact why don’t we invite everyone round to try your beef-burgers this weekend, Will? Do you think you can manage to make enough for all of us?’

  ‘No problem,’ he said confidently, sounding and looking just like a miniature Jon.

  Unfortunately, the pleasure I took in that was quite spoiled when, on the way home, Lucy asked William if he was planning to be a chef when he grew up, he answered firmly, ‘Oh, no, I’m going to be a rugby player.’

  Chapter 9

  ‘A rugby player? Really?’ Jade looked puzzled. ‘That’s a funny choice – I would have thought most boys these days would choose to be a footballer. Is Jon a fan of rugby, Wendy?’

  I tried hard not to be defensive and I thought I’d succeeded when I managed a carelessly light and dismissive tone. ‘Oh, Jon will watch any sport, given half a chance, and William often watches with him. No doubt it’s another fad.’ I even laughed as I added, ‘He was even going to be a wizard for a while after he watched Harry Potter.’
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  ‘Oh, I know,’ Lucy joined in. ‘Talk about fickle. Tristan was definitely going to be a soldier after we paid a visit to the Tank Museum at Bovington, but only until we flew to America on holiday and then he decided he’d rather be a pilot for Virgin Airlines.’

  The conversation followed in that vein for a while and then by the time we’d reached the local park and the children were playing on the swings the original subject was forgotten and changed for another one – also close to home for me – when Jade suddenly confessed that she and her husband, Ian, were trying for another baby.

  ‘I thought it would happen right away, just as it did when we were trying for Molly, but it’s been almost six months now and nothing seems to be happening at all. I haven’t even been late with a period. I think we should make an appointment with the GP and look at our options, but Ian won’t even consider it. I think he’s scared it will turn out to be his fault we’re having trouble conceiving, though he won’t admit it. What would you do if it was you?’

  The question was directed at both Lucy and me, but I was glad when Lucy answered, giving me time to think before I spoke.

  ‘Well, I think you should make the appointment and insist that he accompany you,’ she said firmly and briskly. ‘After all, neither of you are getting any younger, are you? If there’s a problem it needs to be sorted sooner rather than later, and if you need medical intervention, then so be it. This is no time for Ian to be burying his head in the sand in case it turns out to be his fault, that’s just selfish.’ She got up then, and lifting Trixie from her buggy she went to sit her in the baby swing and set it in motion.

  Jade stared after her for a moment, and then she turned to me. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘that’s her opinion – what’s yours?’

  ‘I think I’d start by taking a look on the internet,’ I told her carefully, ‘no need to go looking for a medical problem when it’s probably absolutely nothing of the sort. After all, not everyone gets pregnant immediately. In fact, I bet very few couples do. There are probably loads of hints and tips that will help increase a couple’s chances of conceiving.’