Dear Thing

by Julie Cohen

  ‘I feel that way too.’

  ‘Then you’ll respect my decision.’

  ‘We were so close.’

  ‘And that makes it worse.’ She knelt and found the caster sugar in the cabinet. She could feel him standing behind her: his surprise, his dismay.

  He didn’t say anything for several moments. ‘Claire,’ he said at last. His voice was full of anguish. ‘Please.’

  Still on her knees, she closed her eyes. She couldn’t look at him, or go to him. Not now. It would make her weaker, make her complicit in her own failure.

  ‘I know I’m letting you down,’ she said. ‘But it’s better to decide now than to keep on disappointing you. And it’s my body, Ben. I’m sorry.’ She took out the sugar.

  ‘Why won’t you look at me?’ he said. ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘I’m making a coffee-walnut cake with espresso ganache.’

  He left the room, and Claire stood. She began to measure out the sugar, gram by gram.

  3

  The Answer

  THE ROSE AND Thistle was busy tonight for the quiz to benefit the Berkshire Air Ambulance; Romily waved at some of the regulars and dumped her corduroy jacket at their usual table by the low-beamed fireplace before she went up to the bar.

  ‘He’s usually here before you,’ said Liz, the landlady. Romily suspected she had a bit of a crush. This was Ben’s local – low-ceilinged and thatched, and decorated with horse-brasses and dried hops. If Romily wanted to have a drink and not drive, it was a bus ride and half a mile’s walk.

  ‘I’ll get his pint, anyway,’ Liz went on. She began pulling two pints of Tanglefoot.

  ‘You can be on our team,’ said one of the regulars, Glenn, joining Romily at the bar. He wore a Barbour jacket and corduroys, a weekend country squire.

  ‘Thanks, but if he doesn’t turn up I’ll try it solo.’

  ‘You’ll never get the current events round.’

  ‘How do you know I haven’t been watching the news? Like, constantly?’

  Glenn smiled and shook his head. ‘I’ve watched you do these quizzes. I know your weaknesses.’

  ‘You’re scaring me now.’

  ‘Who’s Prime Minister?’

  ‘That’s easy. Barack Obama.’

  ‘You’re going down, love.’

  ‘Want to lay some money on it?’

  Glenn hesitated.

  ‘Didn’t think so,’ said Romily.

  Liz slid over the two pints and Romily took them to the usual table. She watched the door. Ben hadn’t replied to her texts for over a week. He’d missed football last Saturday. He and Claire might have gone away, but you’d think he’d have mentioned something, especially since they’d agreed to do the quiz ages ago. It was a total waste to get a babysitter just so she could hang around the Rose and Thistle by herself. If she’d known, she could have traded tonight for another night during the week, and gone out and done something else. Something like …

  Well, she couldn’t think of anything at the moment. But she could have done something. Gone to a movie; she hadn’t been to a movie in ages. Popped up to London for a lecture.

  Though of course she could do those things in the evening any time she wanted to, really, because Ben and Claire would always babysit if she asked. It wasn’t the wasted babysitter that she minded. It was Ben not getting in touch. She understood. He had a real life. He had a marriage and a wife, now pregnant.

  She noticed, to her surprise, that she’d drunk more than half of her pint. She glowered at the door and worked on the rest of it. At the end of the bar, Muz, the long tall hippy who ran the quiz, was getting his papers ready. He turned on the microphone and it let out a long screech of feedback, just as it always did. She squinted and endured it. Competition in these village pub quizzes was fierce; according to Ben, people talked strategy for months beforehand. Every other team was made up of six people, which was the maximum allowed. She and Ben were usually the only twosome, though that hadn’t stopped them winning the last three years in a row. The other teams were already conferring in low voices, as if the Rose and Thistle were some sort of hop-strewn battle zone.

  ‘On your own?’ Muz asked as he distributed the answer sheets.

  ‘Looks like it.’

  ‘I saw him driving out of town with his missus last night.’

  She bit her lip and looked over the picture round. Damn. Glenn was right. She knew none of these people. ‘When are you going to do a picture round about insects?’

  ‘You’d have an unfair advantage.’

  ‘I always have an unfair advantage,’ she muttered, ‘but tonight he’s with his wife.’

  ‘Then his twin just walked in,’ said Muz, and Romily looked up, smiling.

  Ben’s face was like thunder. He glanced at Romily and the single full pint in front of her, and went straight to the bar.

  ‘There may be trouble ahead,’ Muz commented. ‘What have you done?’

  ‘It wasn’t me,’ she said. ‘Probably work.’

  Liz gave him a big greeting. Romily couldn’t hear what either of them said, and Ben had his back to her so she couldn’t see his face either, but from the way Liz’s grin melted away, he hadn’t reciprocated her good cheer. Romily busied herself with the picture round again.

  Another pint appeared on the table and Ben plopped down across from her in his usual chair. ‘Give that here,’ he said, and Romily passed the sheet of paper over. She watched as he picked up the pencil Muz had left on the table and rapidly filled in answers, raising his drink to his mouth with his left hand. By now, the two of them would normally be trading banter with the other teams, but Ben was radiating ‘don’t talk to me’ vibes. The regulars kept well clear.

  Ben was hardly ever in a bad mood. She had the good sense not to ask him what was wrong. She steadily made her way through her second pint, the one that had been meant for Ben. When he had filled in half the picture round she said lazily, ‘Team name?’

  ‘Don’t care. You do it.’

  She scrawled Lumbricus terrestris on the top of the sheets – upside down on the one Ben was working on.

  ‘What’s that?’ he asked.

  ‘Earthworm. Keeping our heads down.’

  He grunted and finished his bitter. ‘It’s your round since you didn’t get one for me.’

  ‘I—’ She shut her mouth. No point. She got the beers from a much less ebullient Liz and brought them back to the table.

  They got through another pint, the general knowledge round and part of the current events round without exchanging any unnecessary words, and Romily began to feel, along with the bitter sloshing around in her stomach, a taint of dread. The last time she’d seen Ben he was so happy. There was one possible explanation for such a huge shift in mood … but that wouldn’t make him angry, would it?

  Maybe he wasn’t angry.

  She looked more closely at him. It was in the corners of his eyes. She could hardly believe she’d missed it.

  ‘Is Claire all right?’ she asked quietly. Kicking herself for not seeing it before.

  He finished writing down John Ratzenberger and gripped the pencil in a fist. ‘We lost the baby.’

  Muz asked another question. Romily didn’t hear it. ‘Oh Ben, I’m so sorry,’ she said.

  She wanted to get up, go to his side of the table, and take him in her arms. But they didn’t do that sort of thing, she and Ben. She moved her fingertips towards his hand, the one that gripped the pencil, and let her own hand rest there, a fraction of an inch from his white knuckles.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said again. ‘When – when was it?’

  ‘Last Thursday afternoon. I was on site. I wasn’t even there when it started.’

  ‘I thought she was doing so well.’

  ‘We all did.’

  She bit her lip for a while, watching him. The tension had left his face and his skin was slack. He looked into his beer, seemingly examining the froth on the side of the glass.

  ‘It will work b
etter the next time,’ she said.

  He swallowed. ‘That’s the thing,’ he said. ‘She says she won’t try any more.’

  ‘What? Really?’

  ‘Yes. She wants to give up.’

  ‘Well … she’s discouraged. It makes sense. She needs some time to recover.’

  ‘That’s what I thought.’

  ‘There you are.’ She drank her beer, hoping the conversation was over.

  ‘But she says she won’t change her mind.’

  ‘It’s early days.’

  ‘I’ve never seen her like this. I can’t seem to reach her. She won’t listen to me.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘I know it’s been horrible for her. Worse than for me. I know that. But how can she give up? That makes it all for nothing.’

  ‘Um.’ Romily took her hands back and curled one around her pint, looking around the room. Everyone was absorbed in the quiz.

  ‘It was always the plan. We’d finish university, we’d get married. She’d get her PGCE and teach while I worked my way up in a firm. We’d move to the countryside and we’d start a family and she’d stop work and I’d set up on my own.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And okay, it was taking longer than we’d expected, but these things happen. We were working through it, step by step. Now she’s given up.’

  Someone cleared their throat nearby. Romily looked up to see Muz hovering, holding out his hand. ‘Er … current events sheet?’

  Ben handed it over. Muz raised his eyebrows at the half-empty paper, but put down the film round sheet in its place and went to the next table.

  ‘She won’t talk to me,’ Ben said. ‘She says I’ll try to convince her. I just want to discuss it.’ He put his head in his hands.

  Romily heard the quiz questions going by. She didn’t know what to say.

  ‘You … have you talked about adoption?’ she ventured.

  ‘We wanted our own child. Claire looked into it, of course. Do you know how long it takes? Or how unlikely it is to get a baby?’ He drained his pint. ‘I don’t know. Maybe we have to talk about that now. But I’m not ready to give up the dream, Romily. I can’t believe she is.’

  She stood. ‘Want another?’

  ‘Yes.’

  She went up to the bar. She was a pint ahead of him, but she didn’t feel drunk. She was trembling.

  She’d never seen Ben like this. Her sunny, optimistic, energetic Ben. Ben who was a force of nature and who always knew all the answers.

  ‘Is he all right?’ Liz asked.

  ‘He’s fine,’ Romily said. ‘Just having an off night.’ She glanced over at their table, though, and she knew it was more than an off night. He looked lost. As if his entire world had been ripped out from underneath him.

  ‘I’ll have a couple of tequilas as well,’ Romily said.

  She brought all the drinks back to the table. ‘Here. Drink this.’

  Ben screwed up his eyes, but he drank the tequila. ‘It’s bad for your sperm count,’ he said. ‘Not that it matters any more, I suppose.’

  She downed her shot. It seemed to take effect immediately.

  ‘It’s not fair,’ she said. ‘There are millions of women who don’t even want children and get pregnant anyway. All the women who drink and smoke and do drugs and stuff.’ She drank her beer to take away the taste of the tequila. ‘I think it would be so much easier sometimes if we did what ants or honeybees do. Collective parenting. Everyone related. It’s an elegant solution.’

  ‘If we’re going to talk bugs, I’m going to need another tequila,’ said Ben. He went to the bar and came back within a few minutes.

  ‘Posie wants you two to be her parents anyway,’ Romily said after they’d drunk their second shots.

  ‘No, she doesn’t.’

  ‘She really does. And I can’t blame her. You know, the thing is, if I didn’t—’ She stopped. Tequila was dangerous; there was a reason she never drank it around Ben. She started again. ‘If you weren’t my friend, I would hate you. You’re brilliant, you’re talented, you’re successful. You married the love of your life. Everybody who meets you falls in love with you.’

  ‘Don’t be silly.’

  ‘I’m serious. Look at Liz up there.’

  They both looked. The landlady was watching them, her brow furrowed. When she realized she’d been spotted, she smiled slightly and waved before pretending to wipe down the bar.

  ‘She’s just being nice,’ said Ben.

  ‘And look at me,’ Romily continued, and then corrected herself again. Damn tequila. ‘I mean, look at my life compared to yours. I live in a poky flat in a rubbish town, I’ve never got any money, I love my job, yeah, but it’s not exactly the sort of thing you can talk about at cocktail parties, even if I got invited to cocktail parties, which I never am. I haven’t been on a date in … well, a long time.’

  ‘You’ve got one thing that I haven’t,’ Ben said quietly. ‘You’ve got Posie.’

  ‘Yeah. But that’s not fair either. Here you are, you’ve been planning for years to have children, and me, I use a dodgy condom one night and bam!’

  ‘Posie’s wonderful.’

  ‘She is, and I love her, but she wasn’t exactly intentional. As you remember.’

  ‘I remember. But it was the right decision, true?’

  ‘Of course. I mean … yes. I think she’s amazing, I wouldn’t trade her for the world. She surprises me all the time. But you wouldn’t say I’m a natural motherly type. You get the soft-focus part of parenthood on the telly. All those toilet-paper adverts with the cute kids and the dogs. There are so many things that you don’t really sign up for. Colic, or carsickness, or nappy rash. There’s a lot of laundry. And all the board games, over and over and over again round and round that little circle till you want to scream. And when they’re hurt, it’s like a chunk of you has been ripped out, you just completely revert to primitive mode. As for the mothers in the playground …’

  If she’d meant to comfort Ben, it wasn’t working. He looked as if she’d kicked him in the stomach.

  ‘Right.’ She cleared her throat. ‘Anyway. Enough of that. What we need to do is think up an action plan.’

  ‘I don’t know, Romily. Maybe Claire is right. Maybe it’s not meant to be.’

  ‘Nonsense. Have you ever let me give up? Even when I wanted to?’

  Ben considered his pint. ‘No.’

  ‘Well then.’ She took the abandoned film round sheet, turned it over, and picked up the pencil. GET BEN AND CLAIRE A BABY, she wrote at the top. Then she decided that looked too much as if they were going to pick one up at the local supermarket, so she erased it and wrote HOW BEN AND CLAIRE CAN HAVE A BABY.

  ‘One,’ she said, writing it down. ‘Adopt.’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Two. Um …’ She scratched her forehead with the pencil and drank some more of her beer. ‘Get pregnant naturally by mistake.’

  ‘That’s not going to happen, short of a miracle.’

  ‘Well, miracles happen. Biology is not an exact science. Anyway, this is brainstorming absolutely every possibility. We’ll see if anything sticks. Three. Try fertility treatment again.’

  ‘But that’s exactly what Claire swears up and down she won’t do. I wish I could do it instead of her. I wish I could go through it.’

  The expression on his face made her feel sick, but she put some cheerfulness in her voice. She’d always been able to make him laugh, at least. ‘Let’s try another tack. Four. An incredible scientific breakthrough that hasn’t happened yet e.g. men giving birth.’

  ‘Romily, this is ridiculous. You should never be given tequila.’

  ‘Five. Aliens.’

  He was smiling now, at least a little, and that was worth something. She pressed on. ‘Six. Borrow someone else’s ovaries.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Yeah. It’s Claire’s eggs that are the problem, right? Use donated eggs and your own sperm. Then the child will be yours.’
<
br />   ‘It won’t be Claire’s.’

  ‘Will that be a problem for her?’

  ‘I … don’t know.’ He thought about it for a little while.

  ‘It’s still more treatment, anyway,’ Romily said. ‘More embryo transfers. So maybe not a good idea.’

  ‘The doctor said she might have trouble keeping a pregnancy, even if we do get an embryo. We have to do more tests.’ Ben rubbed his forehead. ‘She says that the hope is the worst.’

  Romily sighed and studied the list. Her writing was quite wobbly, due to the tequila no doubt. Still, there was something in it that was niggling at her. An idea, maybe, that was trying to make its way to the surface.

  ‘Hey,’ said a voice next to their table. They looked up to see Glenn holding two more glasses of tequila. ‘I just brought these over to thank you for failing to do the quiz. We won for the first time.’

  ‘Should’ve taken the bet,’ Romily told him, and accepted the tequila.

  ‘If you could arrange to do the same next time, we’d appreciate it.’

  ‘Don’t count on it.’

  Glenn saluted them and went back to his team, who exchanged high-fives with him.

  Ben leaned his elbows on the table and propped his chin on his hands. ‘I know you’re trying to help, Romily, but this is – I feel terrible. I feel sick. I’ve never argued with Claire. We’ve had little disagreements, but nothing like this. She won’t touch me or even really look at me. And I can see that she’s hurting, but I can’t do anything to comfort her because it always leads to the same thing. I still want a baby. And she’s given up.’ He knocked back his shot, and so did Romily.

  And then it came to Romily, in a big blinding revelation that felt like a firecracker popping in her head.

  ‘Ben!’ she cried. ‘I’ve got it! I can get pregnant for you!’

  ‘Shut up, Romily.’

  ‘No! I mean it. I can carry the baby, and give birth and everything, and then you and Claire would have a baby.’

  ‘Shut up, Romily.’

  ‘We can use your sperm and my eggs – not, I mean – not that we would have to have sex, of course. We could use,’ her hands seemed suddenly quite sweaty, ‘a turkey-baster or something and then I’d be the pregnant one, and Claire wouldn’t have to go through any more treatments at all, but it would be your baby. And I’ve already had a baby, so I know that I can do pregnancy and birth. The physical part was quite easy for me. And I have no desire whatsoever to have any more children, so it wouldn’t be a problem to hand over the baby when it was born.’