April came and went. Then May. In June, she felt angry when blood stained her underwear and she had to retrieve the tampons from the bathroom cupboard. When she got her period again in July, she cried. She hadn’t realised how much she had wanted to be pregnant until she started trying. But they’d talked about it for so long, and had made all their plans, and now she was frustrated that her body was holding everything up. She didn’t talk to Jake about it, and he didn’t ask.
Instead, she bought ovulation sticks from Boots, and dutifully pissed on them every morning to check her HCG levels in order tomonitor when she might be releasing an egg. HCG stood for human chorionic gonadotropin, she learned on the internet. The internet also revealed that rubbing the trouser bulge of a Parisian statue, piercing the left side of her nose and having sex on the Cerne Abbas Giant would all potentially help her to get pregnant. She laughed at the suggestions, but remembered them in spite of herself.
In August, they went on holiday to Mykonos and she gave herself a month off. ‘Just relax’ was all anyone ever said when she confided that they were trying for a baby. ‘You’ll go on holiday, get drunk one night, have sex and you’ll be pregnant before you know it. You just need to stop stressing.’
But in the effort to stop stressing, Kate ended up being more preoccupied. She was tense all holiday, and when Jake asked what was wrong, she didn’t want to tell him. She felt ashamed of herself and believed it to be her fault.
Back home, they fell out of the habit of having sex regularly and September and October passed in a flurry of opportunities missed. She worked late, but without any passion for what she was doing. In November, Kate was determined that she would initiate sex at all the most fertile moments in her cycle, but it was difficult to do this in a way that seemed natural or sensual because she was in her head so much of the time they were actually making love. Would this be the time they conceived, she would ask herself as Jake fucked her, and would she know, would she feel any differently, would there be some cosmic sign that this was it? And should she stay lying down for half an hour afterwards as she had read you were meant to, so that the sperm had time to make their way up her cervix? And should she put her legs up to help them along? Except that would look ridiculous and still she didn’t want to let on to Jake that she cared so much. She didn’t want him to be as obsessed as she was, and yet at the same time she worried that he was fixated on a baby and she was letting him down. All of this whirred through her mind when they had sex and when Jake was on the verge of coming, she sometimes pretended she was too so that it would be over, so that he would have ejaculated inside her without this prolonged attempt to turn her on, whichseemed unnecessary now. What did her own pleasure count when she was failing so conspicuously to do the thing other women did without thinking?
Then it was December again and a whole year had passed, and they had agreed to go to Annabelle and Chris’s for Christmas and Kate was dreading it, but they packed up the car and made the trip to the farmhouse-that-wasn’t-a-farmhouse and when they arrived, Kate was so shattered she made her excuses and went straight to bed. She knew Annabelle would prefer to have her out of the way, and she cried into the lace-trimmed pillow at how alone she felt.
She fell into a deep sleep, waking half an hour later when there was a knock at the door. Jake walked in, with a cup of tea in his hand. He placed the saucer down on the bedside table and came to sit next to her. He stroked the hair out of her eyes and his hand felt cool against her hot forehead.
‘You OK?’
She nodded, not trusting herself to speak without crying.
‘You don’t seem OK, Kate. You seem sad. You’ve seemed sad for months.’
She didn’t say anything. From her pillow, she could smell the earthy steam of the tea.
‘Do you want to talk about it?’
Kate was going to say no, but she stopped herself when she realised she did want to talk about it. She wanted to talk about it very much.
‘I’m not pregnant.’
‘No.’
He held her hand over the duvet.
‘Is that what’s been bothering you?’ Jake asked.
She nodded again.
He sighed.
‘I’m sorry, my love. I’m sorry you feel sad. But …’ She could see him choosing his words with extra care. ‘It’s only been a year. You need to be kinder to yourself. It’ll happen. In its own time.’
Kate propped herself up on the pillows and took a sip of tea. It was sweet.
‘Did you add sugar to this?’
‘Yes. Thought you needed something sweet. For energy.’
‘Is it because you don’t think I’m sweet enough already?’
Jake noticed the diversionary tactic and refused to give into it by laughing.
‘I think you’re perfect.’
She pressed her knuckles to her eyes.
‘Do you really think it’ll happen?’ Kate asked.
He placed his hands on her cheeks and told her to look at him.
‘I do. I have complete faith. It doesn’t matter if it takes six months more or even a year or however long it takes because we have our whole lives together.’
