But she agreed, and they spent a few weeks going on viewings, assessing the relative size of bathrooms and gardens and asking each other whether they really needed a separate office space and whether they should investigate the catchment area for local schools, and finally they found somewhere that they loved and the sale went through with barely any hitches or delays and then they moved in and unpacked and chose a colour scheme and bought a purple velvet sofa and the whole process took just over four months and then they had nothing else to distract them.
Kate would walk up and down the stairs of the new house, unaccustomed to all the space, and she would go into the room they intended to use for the nursery and sit on the floor, imagining the mobile they would hang from the ceiling and the framed animal alphabet they would put on the wall and she would imagine, too, being greeted by the smile on their baby’s face when she came in at night to feed him or her.
Still nothing happened. And then another year had passed, and they made an appointment to see their GP who took blood from Kate’s arm that, a few days later, revealed nothing of note but because it had been two years of trying to conceive (or TTC as the internet forums calledit) they were referred to their local hospital to discuss their options with a consultant called Mr Cartwright.
When she first met Mr Cartwright, Kate liked him. He spoke well and had wavy grey hair and was handsome in a weathered way that made him look like a TV detective. He told them about the further tests they would do, the sperm samples and the internal scan and a procedure that would involve putting dye into her womb ‘to show us what’s going on in there’, and Kate imagined a riotous party taking place in her uterus, full of drunken guests passed out on the steps like in Hogarth’s painting of Gin Lane.
The tests came back and nothing was wrong. Mr Cartwright said their infertility (it had a name now, her failure to get pregnant. It was diagnosed as an issue) was ‘unexplained’. He talked through their options and they decided to try IVF, which Kate did not realise involved self-administering daily hormone injections to fool her body into thinking it was going through the menopause.
‘That’s the suppression phase,’ Mr Cartwright said, matter-of-factly. To Kate, it felt as though her natural reflexes needed taming, as if they had misbehaved for too long.
Then there were more injections to stimulate the ovaries, tickling their underbellies like trout until they produced the requisite number of eggs. Except when Kate went in every other day for her internal scans, she was told by the quietly spoken Portuguese nurse that there weren’t as many as they’d like to see. Kate left the hospital each time deflated and sad, stopping for a camomile tea (caffeine was discouraged) in the cafe on her way out. She would sit on the bench by the window, surrounded by pale-skinned men in dressing gowns, trailing intravenous drips on wheels, and entire families crowded round a child in a wheelchair eating a chocolate muffin, and she would look out onto the street and marvel at the busyness of the world, at how it continued to function so easily when she could not perform the most natural biological function of womanhood.
And still she was not crying. The hormones made her fuzzy rather than emotional, as if she were experiencing the world at one remove through smeary lenses and ears plugged with cotton wool. So when shewas told by the nurse that there was just one follicle that looked mature enough to contain an egg, and was she sure she wanted to go through with egg collection when she could switch instead to a less invasive procedure, there were no tears. Kate simply stated that they wanted to see it through to its logical conclusion. After all, it only took one egg, didn’t it?
But for whatever reason, it wasn’t the right egg. It did not fertilise with Jake’s sperm in a petri dish. It was a non-starter. It did not proceed to the much-fabled blastocyst phase when success rates for implantation were so much higher. It did not contain the right stuff. It had promised so much, but it had failed to deliver.
That night, they sank two bottles of wine between them.
‘We’ll try again,’ Jake said. ‘This is why they say it takes three cycles on average. It’s nothing to worry about.’
Sitting at the table in their new kitchen, the dusky evening light slinking in through the glass garden doors, she couldn’t bear to look at him. Kate knew that he was trying to make her feel better but she could also tell from the tone of his voice that he was starting to panic. She reached over and put her hand over his. She was too knackered to say anything else.
17
They did a second cycle with Mr Cartwright. This time, he retrieved seven eggs (this was the word he used, as if he were a hunting dog nuzzling the undergrowth for dead pheasants). Three of them fertilised, but only two embryos kept dividing themselves into the requisite number of cells and only one was graded highly enough by the embryologist to be transferred. The other eggs, having not reached the right standards, were expelled as if they had failed an exam and Kate, who had always been a conscientious, solid student at school, took it personally. She had always thought that if she did the right thing, worked hard, got good results and a stable job, and tried generally to be a decent person, that life would progress in the way she anticipated. Motherhood and children were part of that. It was just what happened, wasn’t it?
She imagined her eggs discarded in a medical waste bin and wondered what they did with them.
The single embryo was transferred into her womb, and for a glorious twelve days after that, during which the nurses encouraged her to take things easy and put her feet up and not do any strenuous exercise or take hot baths, Kate felt indisputably pregnant.
‘Because you are,’ Jake said, his face flushed with pleasure. ‘There’s no doubting it.’ He kissed the tip of her nose. ‘I’m so proud of you, you clever thing.’
Kate was happier and more at peace than she had been in ages. For those twelve days, she stopped crossing the street to avoid prams or buggies, choosing instead to smile broadly at the parents, as though they already shared a secret kinship. She imagined that the women could tell, that there was a special pheromone only mothers couldscent on each other. She took long walks along the river, listening to audiobooks as she went, taking photographs on her phone of the herons she saw stalking in the shallows. She ate healthily: big bowls of green, leafy vegetables and diced sweet potato, and she started each morning with a celery juice whizzed up in their NutriBullet. She felt in sync with her body, encircled by the oneness of it: her and her embryo, its cells neatly dividing and multiplying as it implanted itself into her thickened uterine wall, just as it should.
On the thirteenth day, she started bleeding. Not a lot. A rusted spotting in her pants that she chose to ignore. It got slightly heavier in the following hours, so Kate turned to the internet, obsessively scanning fertility forums for the stories she wanted to find, and discarding all the ones that warned her of bad news. It could be an implantation bleed, she read, and a sign that everything was progressing positively. She clung on to this notion through the sleepless night that followed, but in the morning there was a red stain on the sheets.
Jake, sleeping beside her, would be oblivious until the alarm woke him an hour later. When he opened his eyes, he was facing her. He knew instantly – she could tell he knew – and the fact that he didn’t have more faith in her made her angry.
‘It hasn’t worked,’ she said, and then she turned away from him, lying on her side facing the wall. She thought he would move towards her and take her in his arms as he usually did, but Jake made no movement. Minutes passed. A muffled sound from the other side of the bed. She turned back and realised, with a lurching heart, that Jake was crying. He was pinching the top of his nose with his thumb and forefinger, trying not to make a sound, but when she took him in her arms and said, ‘I’m so sorry. I’m so, so sorry,’ he started sobbing – big, wrenching sobs that sounded like he was gasping for air.
He allowed her to comfort him, and then he reached for a tissue from his bedside table and blew his nose.
‘This is shit, isn’t it?’ he said when he spoke. She nodded. It was the first time his optimism had flagged, and she realised he had been putting on a brave face for her all this time.
She felt so bad for not having been able to hold on to their baby. She felt, again, that it was her fault.
Across the mattress, he grabbed her hand.
‘I love you, Kate. We’ll have a baby, even if it takes us longer than we expected. And when we do have our baby, we’ll love it so much because of everything we’ve been through to get there.’
His hand grew hot over her own. Outside, there was the sound of a puttering exhaust as a motorbike started up. The sun slid through the gaps in the blinds and she wished it would go away again, that it would rain and that the weather would be in tune with her thoughts.
She kissed his wet cheek, and then she kissed his lips. He returned the kiss with forceful passion, gripping the back of her neck and pressing her head into his. It was as if he were trying to prove something. But what, and why, she didn’t allow herself to question.
Mr Cartwright told them they should take a few months off before trying again.
‘Allow yourselves to recover. Go on holiday.’
