by Ali Mercer
It had been a long time, since Sean. And actually, in all the years when Ava had been little, sex with Sean had never really been that satisfactory. I don’t mean to say it had been terrible. But I’d always secretly felt a bit like Sean felt he was doing me a favour, overlooking my post-baby flaws and fancying me anyway.
With Mark, everything was different. He wanted all the things Sean had never really wanted. Things I could give him. Myself included.
I put on my dress and a light coat, and hurried out of the flat.
We wouldn’t have long. I’d have to leave the hotel at five to get home in time to put the supper on. Ava could have done it, but I didn’t particularly want to give her the opportunity. I didn’t want the day to be spoiled by her looking at me accusingly to let me know she’d guessed what I’d been up to.
This was my time – mine and Mark’s, at last. It definitely wasn’t the time to be worrying about whether we’d run out of frozen peas or not.
* * *
I was due to meet Mark at three, and when I got to the hotel bar at five to he was already waiting for me.
He was well dressed as usual in a suit and tie – he was always dressed in formal work clothes when we met. Because he was fairly senior and spent so much time away from his office, he had almost as much freedom to manage his schedule and sneak off during the day as I did.
Usually when I arrived he was all smiles, but that day he seemed preoccupied and distracted. My heart sank. This might be just a bad day at work. Or it might be something more.
Then I remembered the news I had to give him, news that would turn his day around for sure, and I kept the spring in my step and my head held high as I crossed the bar to join him.
When I reached his table he stood up and pecked me on the cheek, and then sat down again as I settled opposite him. There was an empty bottle of beer and a glass with about an inch left in it on the table in front of him. He never usually drank before our daytime trysts. There wasn’t time. I’d never seen him have beer before, either.
‘We need to talk,’ he said. ‘Do you want a drink?’
‘I’ll have an apple juice,’ I said. I wasn’t much of a drinker at the best of times; Sean had cured me of that.
Mark gestured to the waiter – he was always confident with waiting staff – and asked for my juice. Then he sipped his beer and gazed into space as if trying to work out where to start.
Part of me wanted to tell him my news straight away. Then this frozen nothingness would be impossible and everything would be out in the open and this scene would be over. But I forced myself to wait.
Hold on. Don’t show your hand just yet. Let him go first.
He sipped his drink. I loved the way he drank – how he could have just the one, and then stop. I loved it, but it was also slightly scary – that ability not to get sucked in, to say no, to keep a clear head and retain his dignity.
With Sean, nothing was ever cut and dried. He was the one who’d called time on our marriage, but even after we’d started the divorce proceedings he’d still talked about us getting back together, and me giving him a second chance.
But someone like Mark could just decide that it was time to cut you loose, and that would be it: over and out.
The waiter delivered my apple juice. When he’d gone Mark drew a deep breath. ‘We need to tell them, Jenny.’
My mouth was dry: I drank some juice. I said, ‘Are you sure?’
‘I am,’ he said. ‘We should do it soon. I was thinking that I could take the three of you away somewhere. Maybe to France. They’ve never been abroad, have they? Make a treat of it. A special occasion.’
‘But Ava’s got exams.’
‘A break would do her good though, wouldn’t it? And her half-term holiday’s coming up. We could do it then. South of France, long weekend. What do you say?’
He’d looked up Ava’s half-term holiday dates. He knew she had such a thing as a half-term holiday. Sean had never got his head round that concept. It seemed to baffle him, and it wouldn’t have occurred to him to look it up. He probably wouldn’t even have been able to remember the name of the school she was at.
Under other circumstances, I might have tried to persuade Mark that we should wait. Let Ava get her exams out of the way. She’d worked so hard, been so conscientious. Last thing she needed was a bombshell family revelation right in the middle of it all.
But then, there were also some very good reasons why it shouldn’t wait any longer than it already had. And also… it wasn’t just about Ava.
‘Ellie has some tests coming up, too. But those will be out of the way by then,’ I said. ‘Anyway, we’ll have to ask them.’
He raised an eyebrow. ‘Ava will want to come, Jenny,’ he said. ‘You know she will. She’s so desperate to live a different kind of life.’
And even though I was slightly wounded by this, I had to admit that he was right.
‘And she’s doing French, isn’t she? For her GCSEs? And she’s never been to France? Well, better late than never.’
I said, ‘There would be passports and things to sort out.’
‘Oh, don’t worry about all that. You can actually do it pretty quickly if you need to.’
‘I suppose.’
‘I’d like to tell Ava first. I think I’ll know when it’s the right moment. And then you could explain it all to Ellie.’
‘Don’t you think we should sit down with both of them, all four of us together?’
He pulled a face. ‘Really? I can’t say that’s how I’ve imagined it.’
‘But we don’t want either of them to feel left out of anything,’ I pointed out. ‘And they both need to know. We have to face this as a family, together. We have to start as we mean to go on.’
‘You’ll be inviting Sean along next,’ he said, with a cold look that was almost a rebuke. Then he held up his hands. ‘OK, I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have said that. I’m just nervous about it. That’s all.’
‘I know. So am I. More than nervous. Terrified. But we have to tell them, and we have to do it right.’
‘OK. If that’s how you want to do it, that’s how we’ll do it. We’ll sit them down and tell them together.’ He interlocked his fingers and pushed his hands away from him, stretched out his arms and shoulders and exhaled. ‘We’ll go away in May, and when we come back, it’ll be sorted. And there’ll be nothing that Sean or anyone else can do about it.’
‘Mark,’ I said. ‘Does she know?’
He finished his beer and put the empty glass back down. ‘You mean Paula? You really don’t need to worry about her. She doesn’t want to have anything to do with me, remember? She was very clear about that. Anyway, how would she find out? Unless someone tells her, she’s got no way of knowing. And I’m not about to fill her in. Apart from anything else, it’s really nothing to do with her.’
‘I suppose so. I guess… I just wondered how she would feel about it.’
‘About what? About us being together?’
I sipped a little bit more apple juice.
Really, why hadn’t he guessed? He was the one with the degree, the top-drawer education, the fancy job. How could anyone so intelligent and successful be so blind?
But then, he thought the biggest possible deal was what Ava and Ellie would think once they knew the truth. He’d forgotten that there might be something else to think about. Something that would change things for all of us just as fundamentally as the news we had just agreed to share with the girls. Maybe even more so.
I put my glass down carefully on the coaster on the glass-topped table. Whatever he said later, his first reaction wouldn’t be a lie. I’d know straight away whether this was really what he wanted.
‘I’m pregnant,’ I told him.
His jaw dropped. He gazed at me in pure astonishment, and then in awe, and then he shot up out of his chair and rushed towards me, and I stood too and we embraced so tightly it was as if nothing and nobody would ever be able to come between us.
> Right then, I felt myself turning into someone else: not the vamp in black silk underwear, but the carrier of children. The mother. The worker of Mark’s little miracle: the woman he’d never, ever want to let go.
Eight
Paula
Months, seasons, then a whole year went by. Still nothing.
I didn’t tell anybody we were trying. When I met my remaining childfree friends, we talked warily, each eyeing up what the other was drinking or not drinking. You couldn’t make assumptions about anybody. We’d talk about jobs, holiday plans, moving house, other people we knew. If the friend was still single we talked about who she was dating. If the friend was in a settled relationship we talked about other things, apart from minor gripes about our other halves that could be used for comedy value. That was the real difference between being married (or equivalent) or not: the married did not discuss their private lives.
But it was a strain.
I didn’t talk about it with Mark. I was waiting for the right time. I knew I had to choose carefully. Otherwise he’d just go into full-on defensive mode. He might even say he didn’t want to carry on trying. I knew how afraid he was of having something wrong with him. It wasn’t entirely surprising that he should feel that way. If there was one lesson his family history might have taught him, it was how vulnerable you were in the hands of doctors.
Understanding didn’t make it easy. But like I said, I’m a slow-burn kind of person. Patient. Made for distances, not for sprinting. I’m the tortoise who gets there in the end, long after the hares have even forgotten there’s a race going on.
It’s petty of me, I know, but there’s some satisfaction in that. Vindication. Showing the lot of them. My goodness, it’s her! She’s still going! Such terrific surprise. What did they expect? Didn’t they realise that absolutely nothing was going to stop me from getting what I wanted? The right moment always presents itself eventually, whatever it is you’re waiting for.
* * *
Mark always organised our holidays, and usually he booked places that were sleek and modern and sexy, but for our eleventh wedding anniversary he took me to a country house hotel near Oxford that was about as traditional and romantic as you could get.
We had an enormous four-poster bed in an oak-beamed room with mullioned windows and a view over an Elizabethan knot garden. I was very taken with it, and struck by the concession he’d made to my taste, which he usually disparaged. And that got me thinking: Maybe here… maybe tonight could be my chance.
The atmosphere of the place was dense and solemn with history – all creaky stairs and heavy drapes and shadowy corners – but it didn’t have a dampening effect. We reacted to it by turning as skittish as a pair of teenagers. It was one of those nights when there’s a kind of wildness in the air and you don’t feel at all like yourself, the sensible, professional you who knows the last three debits that went out from your bank account and remembers your colleagues’ birthdays and cleans out all your cupboards once a year.
After dinner we didn’t even make it to the four-poster bed; we ended up making love on the floor in front of the fire.
That was the thing about Mark. The only time he ever really loosened up was when we were having sex. All that pent-up energy, that frustration, that uptightness: he let it all go. And I was the beneficiary. It was the one way we could always connect. It was like magic: it seemed to bring us back into focus, and made the minor irritations and fault-finding, the slow grind of compromises that made up day-to-day life, not matter.
If you want a satisfying lover, look no further than someone who has something to lose. Or who is afraid of what he might lose, which comes out as the same thing in the end. That’s who Mark was: he went through life as if it would all go to pieces if he stopped concentrating for a minute, but every once in a while he let himself off the leash. And that was when you realised how much he was holding back.
He was the only lover I’d ever had. I’d never wanted anybody else. I couldn’t imagine that anybody else could begin to match up. He’d had a few other girls, before we got together: ‘Practice runs before I met you’ was how he’d always described them. No one who mattered. We were both quite clear that there was nobody out there, nobody at all, who could hold a candle for the other.
But as we lay side by side on the hearth rug in our oh-so-romantic room in that country house hotel, I wasn’t really thinking about him at all.
I was thinking about the baby I wanted. More than wanted: had to have. If I couldn’t… If I didn’t… That was an unbearable prospect. Truly unbearable. I knew it would drive me out of my mind.
He was naked, and I still had my dress on, unbuttoned to the waist and rolled up to my hips; there was a candle burning above the blocked-up fireplace and I knew I’d look good in the light. I propped myself up on one elbow and said, ‘You know, once we’ve been trying for two years we could think about IVF.’
It was as if I’d broken a spell. He sat up straight away and gave me that look of his, the one I always dreaded: that cold, glassy, uncompromising look that was almost as if he wasn’t really seeing me, as if I’d become someone it was necessary to keep his distance from. It was the kind of look you might see on the face of a judge about to pass sentence. It wasn’t the way you want your husband to look at you ever, let alone just after sex when you’re desperate to have his baby.
‘I didn’t realise you were keeping track of time like that. Or that you thought of making love as trying,’ he said.
I sat up too. Suddenly I felt ridiculous. Not a sex goddess. Not a beloved wife. Barely even a woman.
I was a failure. We were a failure. And he couldn’t even bring himself to talk about it.
‘I just wonder whether it might be time to look into things,’ I said. ‘To rule out any potential problems. And it’s easier to start with you than me.’
‘I’m not getting into all of that. It either works or it doesn’t. And you either want me or you don’t. If you think you’ll have better luck with someone else then go ahead and find him. But I won’t be waiting for you, and I think you’ll regret it.’
He stood up and went off to the bathroom, and I got up and lay down on the bed and cried.
I knew I’d have to pull myself together quickly. When he was like this, tears didn’t move him: they just made him cold. After a while I forced myself to stop, and sat up and blew my nose and buttoned my dress. The shower was still running. I checked my reflection in the mirror on the old-fashioned dresser by the bed, wiped off my smudged eye make-up and brushed my hair, and lay down on the bed again.
When he came back he was wearing one of the hotel dressing-gowns and smelled of lemon-scented shower gel. He sat down next to me and put an awkward, consoling hand on my shoulder.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I just can’t. I can’t do it. I love you, Paula, and I don’t want to lose you. But if it’s going to be all that… test tubes and injections and God knows what… I don’t think I can bear it.’
I could have tried to reason with him, to point out that it might be something that could be easily fixed, that it was foolish not to at least try and find out. But I didn’t. Instead I straightened up and gave him my brightest smile.
‘Let’s just enjoy this weekend, shall we? Because right here, right now, I’m really happy to be with you.’
He put his arms round me and embraced me, and I felt him sighing in relief.
‘It’s going to be all right,’ I told him, remembering the little girl I’d once imagined so vividly, who had seemed so real.
In a way, it didn’t matter what I felt… If I wanted her, I had to keep Mark happy, had to keep him on board. I had to push all the bitterness down and stay sweet. I needed him to want me, because how else was I going to make it happen?
I suppose you could say that in a way I was deceiving him too. But I did it for love. For the future. For the child I wanted. And everything he did, right from the start, was for himself.
* * *
The next day we went to the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford and I touched an old black clay bottle, shaped like a little vase, that women two centuries before had sought out for good luck when they wanted to have children. Mark didn’t see me; he was looking at something else.
I thought of the man I’d been in love with once, the colleague from my first job in publishing. The affair we’d never had. Not because I hadn’t wanted to. At the time, I’d wanted him more than I’d ever wanted anything.
That man was now happily married with twins, and last time I’d seen him – in the street, by chance – I’d felt nothing for him. Next to nothing. A flicker. It had been the twins that caught my eye, side by side in the double buggy.
And then I thought of that little girl – my little girl – with such longing that it seemed impossible my wish wouldn’t be granted.
Nine
Ellie
Mum never took us on holiday. She said that if all she could afford was a weekend in a soggy tent, what was the point? Might as well stay at home where at least it was dry. And so we were forever stuck in Kingston, which wasn’t even proper London, just a suburban town with a shopping centre and too much traffic.
One time I’d started talking about how Bella Montie was going to Spain with her family and it wasn’t fair that we never went anywhere, and Ava had given me such a look I’d shut up straight away. Later that night, in our room, she’d taken me to task: ‘Don’t you realise if Mum stops working she doesn’t get paid? If she takes us somewhere to keep you happy, she’d spend the whole time worrying about how she couldn’t really afford it. Is that what you want?’ I had never mentioned the subject again.
