Whatever it takes, p.8
Whatever It Takes, page 8
‘Busy?’
‘Pleasantly so.’ She smiled through the lie. She didn’t want him to guess that she hadn’t so much as opened a file this morning. Somehow, she had to give the impression that she was working to 100 per cent capacity but she was not stretched. Industrious but not overwhelmed. Interested but not concerned. It was never easy managing a boss but Sara had a particularly complex relationship with Jeremy that demanded an extra bit of care. Jeremy and Sara had first met a hundred years ago when she’d been training and he was newly qualified. They’d been paired up together for a number of projects. His official role was Sara’s mentor but, somewhat inevitably, considering their combined attractions (humour – his, long legs – hers, loose morals and intelligence – both of theirs), they’d became lovers. Neither of them was looking for anything serious or profound so there weren’t any issues when, after a few brief months of especially acrobatic sex, they went their separate ways. Not long afterwards Jeremy had left Sara’s company and gone to work for a competitor. He’d rejoined her firm last year, as her boss. It was fine. They’d both moved on. He was happily married now with two little boys and she was happily married with a fourth round of IVF treatment, so the situation hadn’t been especially awkward. Just different.
‘And how are you?’ she asked dutifully.
‘Excellent. Planning to take the afternoon off. My eldest is playing for his school.’
‘Football?’
‘Rugby.’
‘Lovely.’
It did sound extremely lovely. Sara envied Jeremy. She envied him because not only did he have an athletic and proud-making son but he also got to sing and dance about it in the office. Sara sneaked a sideways glance at her colleague, Gillian. She was a mother of two as well but she didn’t keep a silver-framed photo of her kids on her desk and she never took time off to take them to the doctor’s, let alone to cheer their athletic prowess. When working in finance, drawing attention to your femininity was career suicide. Still, Sara envied Gillian just as much as she envied Jeremy. What she wouldn’t do to have a baby that she had to downplay in the office, a baby to commit career suicide over!
Jeremy leant up against Sara’s desk; he was almost sitting on it. Supremely confident men often invaded body space in that way. Sara imagined it was because no one ever asked them not to. He started to embellish on his sons’ many skills.
Apparently Joshua was the sporty one (Olympic hopeful for 2020) and Freddie was the musical one (tutored by someone from the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra in four different instruments). Sara wondered if there was a talentless child left in London. It was weird but, despite her efforts to concentrate on his conversation, all she seemed to be aware of was the scent of his aftershave. It was woody and moist. She normally preferred something citrus; she’d got Charlie to start wearing Jo Malone’s lime, basil and mandarin cologne after she’d smelt it, and loved it, on Mark. Sara suddenly had an unfathomable craving to sniff Jeremy’s neck. What the hell was that about?
Hormones?
Pregnancy hormones?
It was too much to even hope for. Yet, it was all she hoped for. She reminded herself of the good stuff over and over again. The drugs had worked, the eggs had been successfully extracted, fertilised and, twelve days ago, they had been replaced and were now nestling inside her. Cling on! Hang on! She prayed to the itsy-bitsy cells. I already love you! She’d taken a progesterone dose to thicken the uterus walls and increase the chances of the embryos taking. She was hopeful and yet she was sick with fear. During the last fortnight, time had defied science; days had seemed like years, hours had seemed like months, minutes like weeks. She had to wait another three days before she could have the blood test and ultrasound that would reveal the success of the treatment and any possible pregnancy. Three days before she heard whether she might, just might, become a mum.
A nano-second after she’d allowed herself to be hopeful, an icy cold blade of fear sliced her wide open, a gash from her throat to her womb, as she reminded herself that she’d been here before. Charlie and Sara had had two IVF treatments that hadn’t got this far and one that had, only for her to miscarry at six weeks. That couldn’t happen again, could it? She was not that unlucky. Was she? This time she was incorporating alternative therapies, because some people believed acupuncture and head massage could work side by side with IVF treatments. She’d also done lots of positive visualisation, her diet would make Gwyneth Paltrow proud, and she’d prayed.
The success rate of IVF was approximately 20 per cent. Some thought that was horribly low, considering what a couple put themselves through both emotionally and physically; Sara’s view was that those were significantly better odds than the lottery and millions of people did that every week. There were a number of factors that had to be taken into consideration when analysing the possible success or the failure of any IVF treatment. The age of the would-be mother was extremely important. It was no surprise to discover that, in general, women above forty found it a little more difficult to conceive using IVF as the ovulation rate and the quality of eggs decreased with age. This caused Sara a cold sense of dread. Of course, it was the same with compliments and wolf whistles, but it was not going to stop her trying. Anyway, she was only a smidge over forty. The cruel fact was that women who had had a normal delivery before the dreaded four-o, or even a previous successful IVF birth, had a greater chance of getting pregnant with intervention the second time. Sara found that difficult to deal with. It was a bit like a married woman taking a lover. Enough already. Just greedy.
The quality of the sperm and egg obviously affected the chances of success but the doctors had tried to reassure Charlie and Sara that they didn’t have any problems with either, although this hadn’t stopped Sara insisting Charlie take cold showers and eat mountains of toasted wheat germ to increase his zinc levels. The IVF centre where the treatment was done also played a part. Factors like size of the clinic, technical expertise of the team, type of equipment used, protocols for ovary stimulation, and transferring of embryos were all vital to the overall success rate. Sara and Charlie were paying for the best.
They’d done everything they could. All they could do now was hope.
‘Sara, aren’t you supposed to be at the audit methodology meeting with Sanders Steel?’ asked Jeremy, suddenly less concerned with his son’s chance of winning another rugby trophy and more concerned about his department’s billable hours.
‘Oh, yes. I’m on it,’ said Sara, as she gathered up her bag. She suspected that both of them were aware she was rarely what could be described as ‘on it’ nowadays.
Having difficulties conceiving wasn’t an unusual problem. Everyone had at least two close friends and a relative who were going through ‘exactly the same thing’, or so Sara was frequently told. People were always trying to reassure her that her situation was commonplace. She doubted them. Everywhere she looked there were women flushed with pregnancy, trailing toddlers, running their juniors to sports fixtures or shopping with teenagers. She didn’t believe anyone was going through the same thing as she was, because, if they were, she wouldn’t feel so lonely. And she did feel lonely.
Sara thought of Charlie as a good husband; gentle, devoted and charming. Charm was often associated with mellow old men at best or ineffectual estate agents at worst. But those associations undermined the power of the charmer. Charm was a priceless attribute to have and to spread. To charm someone meant to mesmerise, to bring someone under your spell. Charlie charmed in a real and absorbing way. His skill was particularly valuable because, as much as she hated to admit it, Sara was concerned that she was moving towards a state that was so charmless that, on occasion, she was downright rude. Her nearest and dearest understood that she was under considerable strain but this much couldn’t be explained to everyone. Mr Dhar, who served in her local 7–Eleven, for example, did not know why Sara might call him a ‘hopeless, just bloody hopeless little man’ simply because he’d run out of HP Sauce. Charlie had realised that the ensuing exchange of sharp words meant that neither he nor Sara would be able to comfortably visit the store again, which was a pity because the next convenience store was significantly less convenient, being a further fifteen-minute walk away. Charlie had taken the initiative to visit Mr Dhar and buy their entire week’s groceries from the overpriced retailer, to charm his way back into his good books. An extravagant gesture, maybe, but on the inevitable Sunday morning when they reached into the fridge and discovered that they were all out of milk and a trip to the nearest store was necessary, it was a gesture that would pay dividends. Charlie wanted to help.
So why wasn’t he able to stop her feeling lonely any more?
Maybe she felt lonely because Eloise had left her, deserted her, run for the hills (literally). But Eloise had said a million times that she was just at the end of a telephone line and, even in Sara’s most hysterical moments, she knew that was the case; they’d spoken at least once a day since Eloise had moved. Besides her husband and her friend, Sara had a stimulating career and two cats. She should not be lonely.
But she was. Having a baby inside her body would stop her feeling lonely. She was sure of it. Only that would stop her feeling lonely.
Sara hadn’t believed it at first. She couldn’t believe that she might be someone who didn’t get what they wanted. She’d always been so in control of every aspect of her life. She had been privately educated and that did tend to place a person in the centre of a very pleasant bubble. She’d benefited from living in a beautiful home, being given a healthy allowance, foreign holidays and all the mod cons that come with a middle-class childhood; piano lessons, elocution lessons and no free time. She was a good athlete, her academic strength was maths, which always gave a girl certain kudos, and if ever she had struggled at school, her mother had done her homework for her or shipped in the most prestigious tutor to reinforce what was being taught in the classrooms. Sara had freely allowed other girls to crib her maths homework and so she had been a popular girl at school; she’d freely allowed boys access to flashes of her long legs and so she’d been a popular girl out of school too. She knew instinctively what people needed and she soon realised that giving them what they needed allowed her to retain control.
Sara had gone on the pill pretty much the day she turned sixteen. Her mother had taken her to the doctor’s and when the doctor had asked if Sara was in a serious relationship her mother had sighed dramatically and pointed out that they weren’t living in the Dark Ages and a young woman had every right to look after her own fertility without having to face an onslaught of intimate questions. Sara hadn’t been in a serious relationship but her mother had been concerned that her luck with condoms wouldn’t hold. The risk of Sara getting pregnant on the pill was less than that of her getting pregnant using condoms. End of. So Sara hadn’t ever experienced a terrifying ‘scare’ like so many other girls; controlling her fertility to prevent herself having babies hadn’t been an issue so it had never crossed her mind that she might not be able to control having them.
Sara had remained on the pill for the year that she’d gone out with Charlie but she’d thrown the pills away the moment they’d become Mr and Mrs. She didn’t expect to fall pregnant immediately, she’d assumed it would take a few months for her body to adjust to her natural cycle but, after six months, she’d begun to wonder and after a year she’d begun to worry. They’d had all the tests. A barrage of them. They’d peed into unfeasibly small pots (harder for Sara than Charlie), they’d given blood and other bodily fluids. They’d attended stress management courses, acupuncture and homeopathic courses, they’d even tried reflexology and then cranial osteopathy.
After two and a half years they’d started IVF. Some people asked what had taken them so long to get medical help. Sara wasn’t sure, so little was cut and dried when it came to an issue like this; an issue of life or no life. Part of her hadn’t wanted to admit that the situation was serious enough, real enough, to demand medical intervention. While she’d been playing around with Vitex agnus castus and chaste-berry she’d told herself that the state of affairs wasn’t dire; when you were flat on your back on a hospital trolley with your legs in stirrups, there was no denying that the situation was authentic and valid.
Sara gathered up her BlackBerry and a bunch of files that she knew she’d need for the meeting and dashed towards the lifts. Like many women, she often found herself literally running in heels.
It was not until she was in the lift that she noticed. There was a slimy feeling between her legs. It pulsed as though it was life. But she knew instantly that it was not. It was death. She didn’t kid herself. She didn’t imagine it was anything other. She felt it with an arctic, brutal certainty.
She felt the death in her gut and her arse as shock and panic turned everything to liquid. Her throat scratched with a lump of sorrow that was the size of a fist. The lump of sorrow was so huge and unpalatable that not only was she choking on it but she also felt sure it would suffocate her. She repeatedly jabbed the button to get the lift to stop at the next floor, tearing her nail low down on her finger. Eventually, the lift lumbered to a stop and she darted towards the loos. She dropped her bag and her files in the lobby, aware that people were startled and staring, probably imagining bomb scares and fire alarms, but she didn’t care what they were thinking. There were tears streaming down her face and she didn’t know how to stop them, didn’t know if they’d ever stop, because there was blood dripping down her thighs. It was flowing so fast now that she could see it on the inside of her knees. Her baby was sitting inside her nylons and it was dead.
8
Eloise pulled the door behind her and simultaneously took in a deep breath of salty, chilly air and the view. It still startled her. This is where I live, she reminded herself. This quaint, lovely but unfamiliar town was her home. Every morning she was jolted by a slight feeling of surprise that this was the case, like the shock caused by static when pulling a jumper over her head, not unpleasant, but certainly disconcerting.
Dartmouth was unquestionably picturesque. Eloise was greeted by rows of two- and three-storey, white or pastel buildings which stood proudly side by side. Their multiple windows were eyes, staring out across the estuary; some winked as the sunlight landed, glinted and bounced away again. Many of the town’s buildings were gathered, topsy-turvy, teetering around small cobbled alleys, like campers huddled around a fire. There were still one or two lopsided Tudor buildings, precariously standing their ground; their oak beams had compacted to a black fossil. Behind the houses there were rolling, mellow fields that were mowed by sheep and framed by hawthorn bushes.
When she turned round, there was the estuary, Dartmouth’s focus, where hundreds of boats bobbed about their business. Whilst Eloise had not become any fonder of water since the move, she was fascinated by the boats. They seemed to take on individual and compelling personalities. The yachts were gleaming and stately and put her in mind of European royalty – lean, rich and impressive. She thought of the collection of small motor boats, dinghies and day anglers as irascible teenagers looking for and offering up the promise of a quick thrill. The larger pleasure cruisers and ferries had a resigned and faithful air about them, rather like middle-aged women with charitable interests or portly old men with a work ethic; they glided back and forth, back and forth in the name of duty. Dartmouth was beautiful, Eloise knew that, but she longed for the day when she took the town’s beauty for granted. Because then she’d know she belonged.
The girls bounced around her, keen to get off to school. Their enthusiasm almost countered the guilt that Eloise felt about not having taken Erin’s cello with them. Capcombe Primary School didn’t have a devoted music teacher, in fact, none of the local schools did. Of course, lugging the delicate instrument across dale and vale wouldn’t have been feasible but Eloise constantly had to bat back the nagging concern that her daughter’s musical talents were being neglected. Specialist, devoted (expensive!) music teachers were abundant in Muswell Hill. Everyone had one; they were secured about five minutes after the umbilical cord was cut.
Apparently, a Miss Cape from Kingswear taught everyone every instrument here. Or rather, she taught everyone she regarded as talented and keen enough. She visited people’s homes. She’d been teaching forever, although she’d never taught Mark because she hadn’t regarded him as keen enough (Margaret wouldn’t speak to her for years for that). In the moment Eloise heard this she went from questioning Miss Cape’s ability to specialise in all the necessary instruments, to wanting nothing more on earth than having Miss Cape teach Erin, but she had failed to muster the courage to call the teacher in case she was refused. Eloise couldn’t help but think that it was so much easier when all she’d had to do was bung a load of cash at the school at the end of the term and let them sort out the lessons and exams and things. Eloise knew she had to organise something soon, it was irresponsible not to; she added it to the list of jobs she had to do.
She still hadn’t informed the DVLA that she’d changed her address, she needed to register at a doctor’s and find a not-too-terrifying dentist. She needed to get a whirly bird for the garden because now she was out here – slap bang in the middle of actual green – she’d begun to feel horribly guilty every time she put on the dryer. When she’d mentioned this to Mark, he’d suggested she stayed focused and laughingly commented that her ‘to do’ list currently ran into hundreds of points.
‘Is it really necessary to buy individual garden kits for all three girls?’ he’d challenged.
‘Yes. I want them to grow things from scratch. To understand and appreciate the process. Didn’t we say that would be one of the benefits of being here in the countryside?’
‘Did we?’ Whilst trying to persuade his wife to move location Mark had thrown out endless carrots. He couldn’t definitely recall every last one, maybe he had said as much. ‘But chickens?’ Mark pointed to the twenty-eighth ‘to do’. It read, buy chickens, etc. It was the ‘etc.’ that had made him smile.
