Chapter One
Martha made sure the bathroom door was firmly shut. Which was stupid. The door was either shut, or it wasn’t. Just as there were no degrees of being pregnant. You either were, or you weren’t. And that was something she knew all about. The not being pregnant part, that was. She was all too familiar with that state of affairs.
Opening the package which she had bought on the way home, she followed the instructions to the letter. Not that she needed to read the leaflet contained within the small box; she knew what she had to do.
Afterwards, and while counting the seconds away in her head, she flushed the loo, then washed and dried her hands. When she had reached a hundred and twenty, she added on an extra thirty seconds in the hope they would make all the difference.
They didn’t.
As before, the appearance of the minus sign told her that once again she and Tom had failed in their attempt to create a baby. This time she had really thought it might happen, that she was pregnant. She had convinced herself that this month she felt different, that her body was already nurturing a tiny speck of miraculous life.But it was just a cruel false alarm. Or no more than a case of wishful thinking.
Cross with herself for putting too much store in being eight days late, for allowing her hopes to be raised, she stared at her face in the mirror above the basin. Too soon to panic, she told herself; she was only thirty-five, there was plenty of time yet for her to become a mother.
The important thing was to remain relaxed about it.
Anxiety, she reminded herself, would only make things worse. Besides, she wasn’t the worrying kind.
She was Martha Adams.
Cool-headed and practical Martha.
Efficient Martha.
Reliable Martha.
As Dad used to say of her, if you needed a steady pair of hands, then Martha was your girl.
Pep talk over, the disappointment in her face now replaced with a determined smile, she put the pregnancy kit back inside the chemist’s bag, screwed it up, and put it in the bin under the basin in the marble-topped vanity unit. She then scraped her shoulder-length dark hair back into an obedient ponytail. Mum had described her hair that way when she’d been a child.
‘You’re lucky to have such obedient hair, Martha,’ she would say while brushing it ready for a day at school, ‘it’s so perfectly thick and straight, it will always do what you want it to do.’
In contrast her sister, Willow, had baby-fine blonde hair that had a careless way about it. As a girl, Willow’s plaits had nearly always worn themselves loose by the time the lunchtime bell rang.
Downstairs in the kitchen, Tom was chopping onions with an ostentatious dexterity he had learned while on a cookery course Martha had given him for his fortieth birthday earlier that year. An avid fan ofMasterchef, he never missed an episode, he loved to cook. He read cookery books the way most people read novels, devouring them page by page, word by word.
‘There’s a bottle of wine open in the fridge,’ he said, tipping the onions into a large ceramic frying pan.
When she’d poured out two glasses of Cloudy Bay, Martha asked him how his day had gone.
‘Oh, you know, same old same old for a Monday,’ he said, deftly crushing a garlic clove beneath the blade of a knife by banging it with his fist. ‘How about you?’
She tried to think back to her day in the office, before she came home with the pregnancy test kit and the day was ruined. Before that small seed of hope that had taken root in the last few days was ripped from her. Before she felt … well, never mind all that. ‘A bit like yours,’ she said with a shrug. ‘Same old same old.’
He smiled and added the garlic to the frying pan. ‘Pass me those mushrooms, will you?’
She did as he said, then sipped her wine. Her friends and family said she was lucky to have married a man like Tom, a man who was the perfect embodiment of patience and so handy in the kitchen. They were right; shewaslucky. A previous boyfriend had dumped her with the damning criticism that she was too organised and sensible. She didn’t think she’d ever felt more insulted, but had then rallied with the acknowledgement that she was who she was, and that was that.
Amazingly Tom loved her for just that reason.
‘If I wanted an impractical and empty-headed girlfriend,I wouldn’t now be sitting here with you,’ he’d said when she’d warned him what she was like on their third date. She hadn’t seen any point in things progressing between them if he was hoping to discover that hiding beneath the tough exterior there was actually a hopelessly incapable girl longing to have her life organised by a strong man. There really wasn’t.
As for how she felt about Tom; she loved him with her head as much as her heart. She loved that he regarded the two of them the way she did, as an equal partnership, a strong team that together could face any challenge thrown at them.
Their life goals were probably the same as most people’s – the desire for a fulfilling work life, combined with having children and a nice home. Two of those things they had accomplished with relative ease, it was just the small matter of conception they had yet to achieve.
‘What are you making?’ she asked.
‘Mushroom risotto topped with a sprinkling of toasted walnuts and a drizzle of walnut oil. That okay with you?’
