Mum called Scarlett and me after wonderful characters’ names in books that she was reading.
I like to tease Maura by saying she could have been called Amber afterForever Amber. And then she straightens up a bit, and you can see the steel coming to her spine.
Forever Amberwas the sort of book that we stole out of Mum’s bookshelves when we were teenagers in the hope that there would be lots of rocking goods in it. It wasn’t really that sexy in our day; although it was probably considered the height of sexiness when it was written. By the time we were growing up, it was positively tame. Maura had a friend whose mother was addicted to Harold Robbins, and we read plenty of those.
We all agreed that once you’d read Harold Robbins, you didn’t need thenon-existent Catholic schoolgirl sex education classes.
Scarlett is so used to her name that she doesn’t think about it, but it does make people look up. She looks like a blonde Scarlett: her hair is the same striking blonde as all of ours, for which we thank many deities all the time, because really it requires no time in the hairdressers, and she is prone to smoky eyes and the odd bright red lips that drive men wild. But the only man she’s wanted to drive crazy, ever, is Jack.
Jack is an amazing man, although not as amazing as my darling Dan.
Con, my brother, says Jack’s amazing for putting up with Scarlett at all, but the women in the family – myself, Maura and Mum – all make faces at Con when he says this and say ‘shut up, Con.’
Jack is all the things that Maura half wishes her husband Pip would be. Jack is romantic, given to public displays of affection and buys the right presents.
‘He knows how to cherish,’ says Maura, mournfully.
Jack gets hold ofimpossible-to-find foreign perfumes for Scarlett for Christmas or buys her sea glass necklaces encased in filigree silver. Pip trots down to the shop of Maura’s choosing and follows instructions: ‘enter the shop, turn right, take two paces to Clarins stuff. Talk to nice woman there who is already prepped on what I need: that new serum to stop my face meeting my chin.’ Said gift is then wrapped for him and he pays. Done.
Since Jack and Scarlett met ten years ago, they have been like twin souls who navigate the universe together: voyagers on a difficult journey across the oceans. For them, the difficult journey has been trying to have a child.
Dan says he’s lost count of how often they have gone in for infertility treatment, but I know. Five times. Five times that has put them into debt.
Not only do I love Scarlett, but I admire her so much because I don’t think I’d have been able to cope with what she has gone through. First all those years of trying to get pregnant, then the endless tests, then having been told there was a great chance in one clinic and two full cycles and one frozen cycle, and nothing.
‘I can’t understand it,’ Scarlett said to me thesecond-last time, sitting at the kitchen table in our old house and resting forward with her face in her hands, so that her hair covered her face. ‘I don’t think I can stand it anymore, the pain, the emptiness.’ Her hands slid down to her empty belly, almost in disgust. ‘Why is it that it’s women who have to bear babies? Why did bloody evolution put this one on us?’
‘I don’t know.’ I sat beside her, so I could pet her head the way I used to when she was little.
When people say that sometimes there is nothing that you can say, it’s true.
Sometimes there is literally nothing youcansay, nothing that will take away the pain.
Somehow, Jack and Scarlett managed to pull themselves together, go to a different clinic and do it twice again, which brought them to their fifth and latest failure.
Don’t let anyone tell you that infertility and infertility treatments only affect the woman. Jack was devastated each time. He didn’t cry to me or Dan or anyone in our family, but to his brothers, all of whom had big glorious families: the types made up of three or four children, a scattering of dogs and cats, a ferret and two parrots even – their houses veritable menageries of creatures while Scarlett and Jack had nothing.
I nearly hit Dan the day he said, ‘Do you think that’s the problem? That they keep trying. They need to accept it’s not going to happen, not now, not at Scarlett’s age – what is she? Forty soon? It’s not happening.’
I rounded on him with rage. I never got angry with Dan, not properly angry.
‘How dare you say that,’ I’d hissed. ‘How can they give up. Would we have given up?’
I’d rarely felt such anger towards him, not even when he was dealing inadequately in the early days with stupid Elisa, when Lexi was just a little girl, used to a neglectful form of mothering and my rage against Elisa had burst its banks and washed over him.
But he held his ground this time.
‘I’m just saying,’ Dan said calmly, ‘that I don’t know if I’d be able to keep going.’
‘You don’t know because we have three beautiful babas. Our lives are so full, but Scarlett and Jack – it’s a totally different situation. Plenty of people choose not to have children and more power to them but Jack and Scarlett are not among them. They want a baby. More than anything.’
‘I suppose,’ said Dan.
Scarlett and Jack’s house is a slender house in a terrace: pretty and with a murderous mortgage. It’s not far from Summer Street but while Mum and Dad’s house is a bit rambling with higgledy piggledy extensions added on over the years, Scarlett and Jack’s home is a small two up, two down.
Inside, it’s ironically the sort of house you’d imagine could never welcome children: all white wooden floors,off-white couches with pale throws draped across them. Yet Scarlett loves having children there, adores it when my three are visiting, and she just laughs and says ‘It’s a washable cover,’ when Teddy gets the inevitable bit of chocolate/ice cream/raspberry juice on the couch.
We all have keys to each others’ homes and she’s upstairs lying on the bed in her and Jack’s bedroom, which is equally white and yet still cosy with its nubbly curtains and a soft grey throw made ofmega-chunky wool on the bed, an item Maura insists she could have made.
