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The Secrets We Keep

Page 11

by Stephanie Butland


  Michael in his turn had watched her and hoped, with all his heart, that she would settle to life here and keep on being as happy as she seemed to be. Back in Australia for their wedding, she had asked him whether he really would have been prepared to move for her. He’d said yes, and he’d meant it, because he would have done anything for her and for the sake of being with her. But he doesn’t think he would have liked it the way Elizabeth seems to like it here.

  They had decided to run the Marsham March Marathon together, and so even on the darkest days they were out training, putting in the miles as Michael says, clocking up the miles according to Elizabeth. A training run is the setting for their first serious argument: Michael trips, and his wife laughs and tells him not to make such a fuss, then keeps running. Somehow—and neither of them can ever work out how—that night Mike insists on sleeping on the sofa after Elizabeth has told him that if he wants to be mollycoddled then he’s picked the wrong woman, and he’s said that yes, maybe he did, he had no idea she could be so selfish. Sometime around 4:00 a.m., he’d climbed into bed beside her, and she’d said, “I have no idea how that all happened,” and he’d said, “No, me neither,” and that was the end of it, although their training runs seemed to lose their rhythm for a while. But they both ran a personal best in the marathon.

  “We’re so good for each other,” Mike had said as they crossed the line.

  That spring, Elizabeth found a job in the new hotel on the outskirts of Throckton. So, on their first wedding anniversary, spent in a country house hotel just the other side of Marsham, because Michael could only get one night off, Mr. and Mrs. Gray seemed to be settling down well enough.

  • • •

  “Are you really happy here?” he’d asked her.

  “Yes, Mike, I’m as happy as can be. I really am.” Elizabeth had noticed how much reassurance he needed. Even now they were married, settled, and she was the one on the wrong side of the world if it all went badly, he still needed her to tell him that everything was all right. Which it was. So that was fine. She kissed him, hoping to distract him.

  “I’m so glad. When I look at you I still can’t quite believe my luck.”

  It was the next anniversary when the baby question became the baby answer. Elizabeth and Michael were in Edinburgh, walking down the Royal Mile, dodging strollers and laughing about the increasingly unsubtle hints coming their way from Patricia, when Elizabeth had said, in the casual way that only comes out when things mean a very great deal, “Well, I’m game if you are, Mike.”

  “Really?”

  “Really.” She’d only glanced toward him, not so much as broken her stride as they walked together down the hill, but he’d still known that this was no spur-of-the-moment offer. His beloved wife wanted their first baby now. His beloved wife would have one. Michael must, somehow, prepare for a better life than he had now, a job he loved, a place to live that had always looked after him, this woman beside him. It seemed impossible to him.

  But not to Elizabeth, who had been ambushed by her desire for a baby. Motherless since the age of nine, she thought of mothers as something that happened to other people. When she watched friends with their children, she more often than not found herself overpowered by anxiety on behalf of the baby, imagining itself safe in the unchanging world of its mother’s arms when in fact anything could go wrong, at any time. She had to stop herself from interrogating her friends about what provision they had made for their children should disaster strike. When she and Michael had talked about their own plans for a family, she’d known, in the abstract, that that was what she wanted, but had no idea of how the hot, visceral need would hit her.

  One ordinary day, a couple had checked into the hotel, bleary from a long drive, bickery from tiredness as they gave their details. By the woman’s feet was a baby car seat and the child in it, dressed all in pink and still peachy with newness, stretched in her sleep, and it was as though that wave of a tiny arm flicked a switch in Elizabeth. In that instant, she loved the child, she longed for her own child, and when the woman sensed her baby waking and picked her up, all tension draining out of her as the little one found its place against her shoulder, Elizabeth felt such jealousy attack her that she wondered if she was ill.

  • • •

  The next anniversary, they were still in good spirits. Marriage had failed to settle down into something mundane, every day, uninteresting. Michael and Elizabeth were still walking hand in hand, seeking each other out, planning time together, mainly delighting in the life they were making.

  But there was the nonappearance of a baby, or any sign of a baby. To Michael, Elizabeth looked more beautiful than he’d ever seen her: six months into Operation Puppy, as they’d called it—a joke that was becoming less funny with every despondent month that passed—she’d started drinking less, running more (but not too much more), taking multivitamins, and as a result she was fitter, healthier, lovelier. “You look…” He’d struggled to find a way to express it, every word that came to him—glowing, radiant—too pregnant a word. “You’re just lovely. Lovely.”

  “Well, you’d better make the most of it, because I intend to let myself go completely to hell when the baby comes.” She’d laughed, but her eyes had dulled a little bit at the apparently limitless size of that “when.”

  Michael couldn’t see that there was anything to worry about. A book about fertility had appeared at Elizabeth’s side of the bed, but when he’d read the first chapter while waiting for his wife to come to bed from her bath he’d discovered that, until they had been trying for two years, there wasn’t any reason to suppose there was a problem.

  “I know,” Elizabeth had said when he’d ventured this view, gently, later. “But I thought it would just happen.”

  “I know,” Michael had said, and he had admitted that he had expected the same.

  “It’s just going to have to be three times a week for the foreseeable future then,” she’d said, and rolled herself in close to him, and he’d laughed and agreed. But checking a date in her diary the next week, he’d realized that she was keeping a record: P for period, O for ovulation, S for sex. He felt as though he’d been handed a school report with “must try harder” written across the bottom of it.

  Folded into the back of the diary was the list of baby names they’d made one evening, early on, when there was nothing in the world to worry about. Elizabeth’s girl suggestions were Amelie, Kayleigh, Seraphina, against Michael’s of Rose, Daisy, Lily. Elizabeth’s boys were Arthur, Archie, Tom, playing Michael’s John, Jack, Sam. “We’re going to need nine months to thrash this out,” she’d said. He’d said, “Why don’t you name the first and I’ll do the second.”

  The book about fertility became a pile. “They’re new,” Michael had said.

  “I went into Marsham to get them,” Elizabeth had replied, sidestepping the real discussion. “Living in Throckton really gets on my nerves sometimes.”

  “Do you want to move then?” he’d asked mildly, sensing the onset of premenstrual syndrome and knowing (finally) not to ask whether that was the problem.

  “No. I don’t want to move. I want to be able to walk into the bookshop here and buy a bunch of books about babies.”

  • • •

  Eighteen months after they started trying to conceive, Elizabeth began taking her temperature every morning, and the bathroom cabinet always contained an ovulation predictor kit. They tried having more sex. They tried having less sex, at the times when it was more likely to work. Elizabeth trawled the Internet for clues about what might add the magic ingredient that they were missing. She drew up lists of things that could be wrong with either of them. Mealtimes became combinations of foods high in one thing and low in another, in the hope that they would add the missing something. Wine was for weekends. Sex was not for fun. Once, Michael had come in from work on a night shift to his wife saying, “We need to do it now, but we need to b
e quick, because I have to be at work in fifteen minutes, and if I drive instead of walk I can be there in five.”

  Michael was the one who suggested going to see a doctor. He wasn’t sure they needed to, couldn’t believe that their good health and their bodies and their love wouldn’t do the job sooner or later, but he was afraid for Elizabeth, for the way she seemed to need a baby more than she needed him. One night, she had said, “Maybe that’s the one that’s done it,” as she turned over to go to sleep, and her husband was fairly certain that she hadn’t known she’d said it out loud. Their world, once everything they needed, was becoming a place where they could only see what was missing. Elizabeth longed for her baby, Michael for his wife. A baby seemed the best way of getting his wife back.

  So they went to see their GP about it, properly, at the office, although the topic had come up between Andy and Michael not long before. They’d been at the pub quiz and Andy and Lucy had announced that they were expecting. Elizabeth had said the right things and gone quiet; the men had gone to the bar. “You’ve had better luck than us,” Michael had said. “We’ve been trying for a year and a half.” “Give it a bit longer,” Andy had replied. “A year and a half doesn’t mean anything. Honestly. Medical opinion. But come and see someone about it, if it will put your mind at rest.”

  Back at the table, Lucy had caught something of Elizabeth’s mood and said, “It will be you next.”

  In the waiting room, Elizabeth whispered, “I haven’t felt like this since I went to get the pill when I was seventeen.” Michael smiled and squeezed her knee. Elizabeth added contraceptive pill too early/too long? to her list of possible reasons for her empty arms.

  Their doctor told them that there was probably nothing amiss, but referred them on to a specialist. The appointment was another six-week wait. “Makes a change from a four-week wait,” Elizabeth had said, and she’d suggested that they go for a run. It helped her to clear her mind, and tire her body. It was the first time she’d proposed that they do anything except have sex in a long time. Which, Michael reflected as he pulled on his sneakers, sounded a lot more fun in theory than in practice.

  The fertility unit was bright and full of couples holding hands. As they waited Elizabeth read leaflets and Michael looked at the notice board thick with thank-you cards and pictures of babies and hoped. Only Mel and Andy knew they were here; only Mel and Andy knew that they were trying for a baby.

  If Michael and Elizabeth had thought they were trying before, then that first appointment at the clinic showed them that there could be a whole new level of endeavor. They had tests for everything. They had medical histories taken, as far back in their families as either could remember. They had hormone tests, blood tests, swabs to be taken and sent on. Elizabeth’s menstrual cycle was recorded. The doctors needed to check that Elizabeth was ovulating, that Michael both made and delivered good, healthy sperm. Because of the cystic fibrosis that ran in Michael’s family, because Elizabeth knew nothing about her father and knew of no one living on her mother’s side, there would be genetic testing too.

  “It’s like forensic evidence,” Michael had said, on the way home in the car.

  “Isn’t forensic evidence exactly what it is?” Elizabeth had asked with something that was shaped like a smile but wasn’t really. “And I can’t believe that you didn’t tell me about the cystic fibrosis, seeing as it usually means infertility in men.” She was driving, glaring at the road. He was afraid to touch her. It seemed like a long time since the one of them who wasn’t driving would rest a hand in the other’s lap.

  “I didn’t tell you,” he had said, “because I never really think about it, to be honest.” He’d tried for the positive angle. “I know I don’t have it.”

  “That’s not the point,” she’d said.

  “No,” he’d replied, “I don’t suppose it is.”

  • • •

  “So,” the specialist had said to them, when they sat in front of her, holding hands, another sad month later. “There’s nothing really wrong with either of you. Michael’s sperm count is a little below average, but the sperm are healthy, so that shouldn’t present a problem. Michael, you do carry the cystic fibrosis gene, although you don’t have cystic fibrosis”—Elizabeth’s fingers had stiffened in her husband’s hand—“but, Elizabeth, you don’t, so we would have no worries about any child that you had on that score.” The stiffness became a squeeze. Michael was forgiven.

  “But it’s been two and a half years. If there’s nothing wrong with either of us…” Elizabeth had said. Her voice had slid to a halt. She had looked at Michael. His face had said, I don’t know. He had realized that they were both hoping for a problem, something that could be fixed with pills or an injection. Michael had felt Elizabeth’s body soften; not relaxation but defeat.

  “What else could we do?” he had asked.

  “First of all, don’t despair. We can’t find anything wrong with thirty percent of couples who don’t conceive naturally. That doesn’t mean we can’t help them. In your case, I suggest we try IVF using your own eggs and sperm.”

  Mike,

  It’s only now I’ve started dreaming about you. Andy said that dreaming about you is a good thing. He says it’s part of the process. I said, “Don’t call this a process. Making a cake is a process. Taking out an appendix is a process.” He said, “OK, dreaming about Michael is a good thing, and we’ll leave it at that.”

  Except in the dreams, I can’t see you. I know you’re there, but I can’t reach you. Sometimes you’re just around the corner, and I’m waiting because I know you’re coming, but you don’t. Sometimes I can hear you, taking off your boots without undoing the laces, pushing one off with the toe of the other, the bounce on the kitchen tiles and Pepper welcoming you home. Sometimes you’re lying in bed with me, curled into my back, but I’m trapped in the sheets and I can’t turn over to you.

  Andy says it’s still a sort of healing. Mel says, “Like leeches, you mean, Andy,” and he said, “I know, but it’s hard.” I agreed, with the hard part.

  I haven’t told them the other part. The other dreams. There’s you—you’re still not there, you’re always just out of shot, parking the car or putting the kettle on, something ordinary—and there’s me, and there’s our baby too. And it’s just normal. You’re going to work, or we’re watching TV, or the baby is playing with something, a ball, a train, on the floor. His age changes in the dreams, sometimes I think we’re just back from the hospital with him and sometimes it seems that he’s ready to go out on his little bike, but he’s always a boy. Always a boy, a little you. I don’t think I’d have been good with a girl, but in these dreams I am very good with our boy, and he is plump and smiling and towheaded, like you were when you were small. If I’d told Andy about these other dreams I know what he’d have said. He’d have said, “You’re mourning for what you didn’t have, as well as what you did.” He’d have told me that although we always said we’d come to terms with not having a baby, there was probably still a part of me that hoped, and that your death means no more hope. And he would be right. All those books I read about infertility when we were trying, and the ones about coming to terms with childlessness when we stopped, made me good at this stuff.

  But I didn’t tell him, partly because I don’t need to hear people saying things like “no more hope” to me, and I don’t like how Andy looks when we have those kinds of conversation, so full of grief and worry.

  But the main reason I keep quiet is that I quite like those dreams, and I quite like the way I feel the next day: after the kick in the guts of understanding that you’re not here, and that the baby never was here, I feel as though I have a secret, a hidden little bit of something special, a shiny pebble in my pocket that I can touch and rub my thumb across and hold on to when the day darkens.

  Dreams are better than nothing. Dreams are better than flowers in the garden that aren’t from you. Dreams are mi
ne, and I’ll keep them close for as long as I want to.

  Oh, my love.

  E xxx

  Now

  Ever since the morning when she took the pregnancy test six weeks ago, Kate has walked around unable to understand why no one can see what is going on inside her. It seems to her that she has the words “mother-to-be” picked out in flashing neon above her head. Every time she walks into a room with her parents in it, she waits for one of them to see what’s happening in front of them, but they never do, although they look at her with love and concern and, she thinks, more than a suspicion that they don’t know the whole story. She hears her name spoken softly at night, sometimes, as she goes downstairs for bananas and milk.

  Although Kate has been sad, so very sad, since the night at Butler’s Pond, still she feels a deep, uncomplicated joy at the thought of this baby nestling itself into life inside her. She cannot tear her thoughts away from it. She’d thought, for three months, that the sickness and the tiredness she felt were the understandable aftermath of the horrible night when she nearly drowned; everyone around her seemed to think the same thing. But then she’d added coming off the Pill at the beginning of December into the equation—it had seemed like a good time for a break—and a baby became a much more likely explanation.

  The first time she felt it move, her whole self lurched with love in response. She reads, secretly, voraciously, about this miracle her body is making, fascinated by how it grows: grape, plum, lemon, avocado, grapefruit. She wishes she wasn’t doing this alone.

  She knows what her parents will say; she knows she doesn’t care. She knows the worst they can do to her is make her leave, and that they won’t do that, because then there would be just the two of them, and they all know how well that would work.

 

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