She’d gone mad anyway. He didn’t understand. No one did, not even her sisters. She’d only spoken to Miranda about it once, before losing her temper, furious at herself for even thinking she would understand, let alone care. Juliet hadn’t bothered to discuss it with Eliza, already knowing what her reply would be. ‘Millions of women around the world don’t have children, Juliet. I haven’t and do I seem unhappy?’
‘No, but you’re some kind of ice woman,’ Juliet would have replied. ‘You don’t need a man in your life, or children. You’re perfectly happy with your business. Well, I’m not. I wanted more. I still want more.’
Clementine would have been more sympathetic, to a point. But she would probably have explained that human beings were just like any other creature. She saw it all the time in her research projects. Some had chicks, others didn’t. But no one lived happily every after, even in the bird world. Clementine would have cited case after case of chicks being abandoned, killed or mistreated because they were different. Making her point as usual that the bird world and the human world weren’t as far apart as people imagined.
Juliet knew all that. She knew having children wasn’t the golden ticket to a life of happiness. She had always been realistic about it. After all, she’d seen Maggie from her first day. She knew the reality of caring for a small baby – the sleepless nights, the mess, the constant work. She’d been prepared for that, because she had also been there for the good side of it – the first smile, the first step, the sheer fun of having a baby, then a toddler and then a child in the house. For all the mess and chaos Maggie had somehow managed to create, there had also been great enjoyment. Juliet had never forgotten the sight of Maggie holding up her arms in the cot in greeting to the first person to come into her bedroom after a sleep. Or the sound of her laughter when she was being tickled. Or the funny things she would say, in that earnest way she’d had from the beginning. Juliet had seen it all with Maggie, loved it and thought, blithely and innocently, that it would all be ahead for her and Myles when their own children started arriving.
Her experiences with Maggie had prepared her for the realities of adolescent life too. She’d been ready for a gaggle of her own teenagers, for the good times and bad: sleepless nights worrying when they weren’t home yet; sullen days, moody days, drama-filled days. Temper tantrums from a teenage daughter. Monosyllabic answers from a teenage son. She had acted out scenarios in her head, over and over again, for years now. She had a parallel imaginary life, one filled with children, next to her real life’s landscape. She’d done it as recently as this week, when she arrived here in Donegal. Her perfect life. It had kept her going through the darkest of times.
She shut her eyes and pictured a scene from it now. Some details didn’t differ from the reality. She imagined herself as she was now, in her family’s beautiful holiday house, preparing for the arrivals, food simmering on the stove, the fridge full, bottles of wine ready to be opened. It was the cast of characters that she changed. Sometimes she imagined her twin daughters arriving. Emily and Romy. One of them working as a teacher in London, the other a lab assistant in a hospital in Edinburgh. Bright, happy women. They fought a bit, of course, each of them coming to her and saying, ‘Mum, Emily said…’ and ‘Mum, Romy told me…’
Sometimes she thought of her boys arriving. Three of them. Rowdy, boisterous and fit. Adam, Lewis and Henry. All of them with dark hair. Lewis was the quiet one, the more academic, still at university. She worried sometimes that he studied too hard, but he would assure her that he was getting plenty of fresh air and exercise. ‘Stop fussing, Mum.’ Adam was showing promising signs of being a professional cricketer. He’d hit three centuries the previous season. Henry had taken up soccer and was showing promise too. Juliet would stand with the other mothers and laugh. ‘I don’t know where they get it from. I could barely throw a ball and the closest Myles got to a sports field was driving past it on the way to work.’
Even one. A daughter, or a son. She wouldn’t have minded. She would have felt the same, waiting for their arrival, making sure their bedroom was beautiful, that their favourite meals were in the oven, that she was ready to hear all their stories, offer any advice – or no advice. Whatever they wanted.
Myles never featured in any of these imaginings. It would confuse it too much; bring reality crashing in on her. Anger, disappointment. Why had she listened to him rather than her body? She’d wanted a baby since the first year they were married. ‘Let’s establish ourselves first,’ he’d said. When the cafés took off in Australia, they’d been too busy. ‘There’s no rush, Juliet.’
She agreed, at first. Not for a moment had she thought they would have problems. The year she turned thirty-five she decided it was finally time. She’d stopped taking the pill for six months before she told Myles what she was doing. The mental picture of the end result stopped her feeling any guilt. She’d imagined herself setting the table for a romantic dinner, serving his favourite meal, pouring two glasses of wine and then after they had clinked glasses, putting hers down, going to his side of the table and saying, ‘I’ve got some news.’ Getting on the phone to Leo and the others, their congratulations ringing in her ears.
Except it didn’t happen. Month after month came the disappointment. More than disappointment. It was a need, an ache, a space needing to be filled. She longed to feel a child in her arms, to feel a baby nestling against her neck. Not any baby – their baby. Her baby. It wasn’t just physical. There seemed to be a whole area of her brain reserved for her child – for her children – as well. She was ready to worry about a child, be amused, be annoyed, angry and concerned about. To be consumed by. She had seen all that Maggie brought to Clementine; all that Maggie brought to all of them. The way a child in the house filled gaps and spaces with noise, laughter, warmth and love.
She was thirty-six by the time she and Myles started seeing doctors. Unexplained infertility, they told her. She had wanted to scream. How can it be unexplained? She needed them to explain it to her. She needed to know in the tiniest detail why what she wanted most in the world wasn’t going to happen for her. She undertook test after test. So did Myles, even if she’d had to drag him in there. They met with counsellors. They took relaxing holidays. They tried fertility treatment. Courses of drugs. Nothing worked.
Myles gave up first. ‘Perhaps it’s just not meant to be.’
She had gone into a fury with him, the temper fuelled by the latest course of tablets she was on as much as her own feelings. ‘It is meant to be. I feel it. I don’t just want a baby, Myles. I need a baby.’
They had nearly broken up in those early days. Her distress was too much for him, his acceptance of the situation was too much for her. It was the business that kept them going. If they hadn’t been working together, it would have been easy to stop talking to each other, to keep to their own parts of the house, to drift away. In the office together every morning, they had to speak to each other.
Maggie’s visits had helped a little. As a child, then a teenager, and occasionally as an adult, she kept moving between all their houses, sure of their attention and love. In Sydney, and then when she and Myles moved to the UK, in their house in Manchester, Juliet had always kept a room in her house ready for Maggie. There was a shelf in the bookcase full of her books, even some of her clothes in a cupboard. Juliet had treasured her company, all the while knowing that the bond and the love she’d feel for her own child would be even deeper than the feelings she had for Maggie.
When none of the treatments had worked, when they had spent thousands of dollars in Australia and thousands of pounds in England, when she had cried more than she thought was possible, she decided to call a halt to it. Myles had begged her to stop months before. ‘You’re destroying yourself,’ he said. Her own anguish and the hormones had made her fly at him. ‘I’m not destroying myself. This situation is destroying me.’ The words had been on the end of her tongue. She had pictured them, lined up, ready to go. ‘It’s all your fault.’ She w
anted to blame someone. She wanted to blame him. Because it was his fault. If he hadn’t insisted they delay having children, for year after year, for the stupid, shallow reason of building their business, for the ridiculous, pointless goal of opening more cafés, then she may have had children now. The doctors had all said as much. She’d left it too late to start trying, too late to discover there were problems. The odds had been against her from the very beginning. And she had left it until too late because of Myles.
There had been distractions for a few years in their work. She couldn’t deny it; she had found solace and pleasure in making a success of their cafés. She still loved cooking, thinking of recipes, preparing menus, working with all her staff.
What had changed in recent months was her home life. She couldn’t pinpoint it, but one day at breakfast she had looked across at Myles and known it was over. He had been talking about a business trip he was planning to Glasgow. She looked at him and it was as if the volume had been turned down and she just saw his mouth opening and shutting. She wanted to get up from the table and walk away. So she did. He hadn’t noticed. He kept on talking.
Their whole marriage was summed up in that moment, she realised. It had always been about him, not about the two of them, and definitely not about her. He had admitted to her once, in the middle of the IVF treatment that she had researched, that she had booked, that he had never wanted children as badly as she did. He was doing all of this for her. That had made her cry, as the smallest of things at that time had made her cry. ‘I need you to want it as much as I do, Myles. You have to.’
‘But I can’t, Juliet. I can’t lie about it.’
The nurse had come in and not batted an eye at the tears or obvious argument. The IVF clinic was always a mass of emotions, Juliet discovered. Fights, anguish, elation; every couple who came in through the doors would soon be experiencing one or the other.
Juliet hadn’t made the decision to stop the treatment completely on her own. Her doctor had told her bluntly that she was wasting her money, time and hope. Myles did his best at that time, she conceded. He took her away for a two-week holiday in Spain. He spoilt her, brought her breakfast in bed every morning, didn’t say anything when she insisted on staying in their room every day, sleeping or sometimes just lying there while the sun shone outside and the air filled with sounds of swimmers and windsurfers. All she could hear was children playing. She was being tormented by it. Everywhere she went she saw happy families.
It changed after a time. Everywhere she went she started to see unhappy families. People who didn’t deserve children. Mothers in supermarkets slapping their toddlers. Teenagers roaming the streets late at night, uncared for. Every newspaper and TV news bulletin was filled with stories about neglected children, abandoned children.
She became obsessed with adoption and fostering, signing up with two agencies. Both of them told her she wasn’t ready yet. ‘You’re wrong,’ she insisted. ‘I’d be a perfect mother. I’m longing to be a mother.’
They’d gently explained that was the reason they were asking her to wait. They felt she still had some way to go in the grieving process about not having her own children. They were concerned she had an idealistic view of motherhood. ‘We don’t think you are quite ready for the reality of it,’ she was told. She disagreed. They stayed firm. She didn’t go back to them.
That news affected her and Myles in different ways, too. Myles simply got on with his life. Juliet felt like her life was now at a standstill. Her marriage was at a standstill. On the outside it looked the same. The two of them working together, living together, sleeping together, though they hadn’t had sex for months now. But all that time something had been changing. Her love for him. It had withered, as her hope for children of their own had withered and died.
She felt she had no other option than the one she had finally decided upon just the week before. She had to leave him. There was nothing left to keep them together. And soon he would be in their kitchen reading that note and he would realise that too.
She kept expecting to cry, but the truth was she had no tears left any more. She’d shed them all already, years before. All there was left was a kind of emptiness. A resignation. A void that she had long been filling with work.
With a sudden, brisk movement, she stood up, turned on the radio and gathered an armful of bed linen from the hot press under the stairs. Hadn’t it always been Myles’s own advice, whenever he found her in tears, month after month?
‘Just keep busy, Juliet.’
She would. She’d fill these next days with food, company and her family, with the unexpected presence of Maggie and her surprise fiancé. And when they had all gone, and she and Myles had sorted out their separation and it was just her on her own, she’d still keep busy. What other choice did she have?
In Melbourne, Eliza was finishing her packing. She planned to be at Tullamarine Airport by seven, in time to meet Clementine’s flight from Hobart. Their international flight left just an hour later.
‘I’ll miss you,’ Mark said, lying on the bed and watching as Eliza put the final items into her suitcase. He’d called around to her apartment after finishing training work with one of his football team clients.
‘I’ll be back before you know it. I’m only going for a week.’
‘I’ll still miss you.’
‘You’re just a sentimental fool.’ Her smile took the sting out of her words.
‘Why did you change your mind about going?’
‘I realised I did have a few free days in my schedule. And the fact is my father isn’t getting any younger.’ She left it at that. She had never gone into detail about her family with Mark and she didn’t want to start now. That’s what she loved so much about their relationship. It was just about them, the two of them, without other people complicating matters. She didn’t want to take up the time they had complaining about Leo’s latest antics, Juliet’s dramas, Miranda’s selfishness or Clementine’s success. She spoke about Maggie occasionally, but even that she kept as separate as she could. Maggie had never met Mark, in all the years she had stayed with Eliza. Eliza couldn’t risk it. She didn’t want to hear what her family would say if they knew about the situation.
‘Have you finished packing yet?’
‘Nearly. Why?’
‘It seems a waste to be lying on the bed and not doing anything more interesting than watching you fold T-shirts.’
‘That’s a very good point.’
She moved her suitcase onto the floor and joined him on the bed, wrapping her body around his, placing her lips against his. Her desire for him was as strong now as it had always been. She kept waiting for it to fade, but it never did.
‘What will I do if I need this while you’re away?’
‘You’ll wait until I get back.’ She knew that he and his wife had long stopped being lovers. He’d told her and she believed him. Nearly believed him. If they did have sex occasionally, then there was nothing Eliza could do about it, in any case. It didn’t change what they had. ‘You’ll count down the days until I get home and you’ll be here, waiting on my bed, just like this, when I do arrive back.’
‘Will I?’
‘Yes.’
‘How do you know that?’
She smiled. ‘Because I know what you want and what you need, and I’m the only person in the world who can give it to you.’
‘I love it when you talk to me like that.’
‘That’s why I do it,’ she said. Her next kiss silenced him.
Miranda woke up from her afternoon nap, reached up and stretched, luxuriating in the feel of the warm air on her bare skin. Outside her window she heard a splash as one of the other guests jumped, or was pushed, into the pool. She preferred to stay indoors during the hottest part of the day. The bright Greek island light wasn’t very forgiving to older skin, no matter how well-looked after that skin was. Not that she ever gave that as her official reason for staying away from it.
Since she’d arrived
here two days earlier, she’d made a habit of breakfasting early, swimming before ten, retiring to her room for a few hours in the middle of the day before stepping out onto the terrace around three, just in time for drinks and a late casual lunch. The villa had an enviable location, overlooking the Mediterranean Sea in one direction and the whitewashed houses of the nearest village in the other. The view wasn’t the only wonderful thing about it. George was an extravagant host. The food was always sensational, yet simple: grilled fish, inventive salads, fresh fruit and local cheeses, all prepared by a very skilled chef that none of them ever saw. The wine cellar was extensive. The housekeeper was efficient: Miranda’s clothes for the evening were already pressed and hanging in her wardrobe, her bed freshly made with the finest Egyptian cotton sheets and her marble bathroom gleaming clean and fully stocked with expensive toiletries. And all George expected of her in exchange was as much witty – and preferably bitchy – conversation as possible.
‘It’s a fair trade in my opinion, dearest Miranda,’ he’d said. ‘You provide the decoration and the entertainment, and I’ll do all I can to make you happy.’
Such a shame he was gay. Still, George always made sure there were plenty of other possible suitors in these gatherings of his. She’d been hugely flattered the previous evening when the twenty-something son of one of the other guests made a pass at her. A clumsy one, fuelled by too much fine champagne, but a pass nevertheless. She’d let him down gently.
‘Darling, you and that body of yours tempt me, I promise, but I’m old enough to be your big sister.’ She certainly hadn’t said ‘old enough to be your mother’ even if she was sure that was the case.
It was a shame to be leaving so soon. But at least the Donegal visit was looking brighter, now that Maggie and a sudden mystery boyfriend – fiancé, even! – were going to be there. Not to mention Eliza and Clementine as well. A full house, in fact. Thank heavens for that.
Those Faraday Girls Page 38
