She let out a long sigh. ‘I didn’t want to say anything, not like this, not with all the other things going on.’
‘The cat’s out of the bag now, so you might as well tell me.’
‘I may be going through early menopause. In fact, I may have a thing called premature ovarian insufficiency. They’re sort of the same in the end – it means my chances of having a baby are going to be getting pretty slim pretty soon. It might already be too late – who knows? I certainly don’t.’
‘But there must be something that can be done?’
Zoe shook her head. ‘If it was that easy, no woman would volunteer to go through menopause. It’s a fact of life, and unfortunately it’s come a lot earlier for me than for most others.’
‘Then we’ll start trying. If it’s what you want, we’ll start trying right away, before it’s too late.’
‘I don’t want to try for a baby before we’re ready, just because we’re panicked into it. I’ve not long moved in.’
‘We don’t have time to wait.’
Zoe gave him a sad smile. It was as she’d feared – he hoped for a baby with her. He hadn’t told her it didn’t matter, he hadn’t offered to support her in whatever way she needed, he’d only been concerned with beating the clock, with getting pregnant before it was too late. And if that didn’t happen, he’d be forever disappointed, resentful of the fact they hadn’t been able to start their own family. ‘What if it’s too late already?’
‘Have you seen someone?’
‘Only Simon. I’m on the waiting list for a specialist.’
‘We’ll pay – get you an emergency appointment.’
‘Alex, you can’t even afford to pay Virginia for her advice. How are you going to find the money to pay for private fertility care? It costs a fortune, and there are no guarantees even when you’ve paid all that money. I’d rather wait.’
‘How long will it take if you wait for an NHS appointment?’
She shrugged. ‘I’m not sure. The referral has only just gone off, so I haven’t had anything back yet. But they might say they can’t help – and we have to be prepared for that. I’ve got HRT. I haven’t started to take it yet, but now that we’ve talked about it, I suppose there’s no reason not to.’
‘What does that do? Will it help?’
‘It’ll help manage my symptoms,’ she said, guessing at his thoughts. ‘It won’t help me to conceive. That’s not how it works.’
‘But it makes you how you were before…doesn’t it? I don’t know, but I thought that was what it did.’
‘If only.’
There was a thud from upstairs to remind them that they weren’t the only people in the house who needed reassurance.
Zoe angled her head at the ceiling. ‘You’d better go and see Billie.’
‘Another person I’ve got to grovel to.’
‘You should have let us know what was going on. What were we meant to think?’
He got up and started for the door. ‘We’ll talk more later.’
Later never came. Alex came back to the kitchen and sat down to resume his talk with Zoe, then his phone rang with a call from a prospective booking with a query. He was on the phone so long that Billie came to get food, and then there was a knock at the door and his current guests had questions for him, and then Zoe got a call from one of her expectant mums who was worried she might have gone into premature labour, and Zoe was forced to dash out. She didn’t get home until gone eleven, and by that time, the house was in darkness, with only a note on the table to tell her everyone had gone to bed.
Sorry. We waited up, but tomorrow is a busy one and we didn’t know how long you would be. Don’t be angry. I know we need to talk, and we will. I love you. A. x
Zoe sat down with a heavy sigh. They did need to talk, but it seemed life had other plans.
25
Over the next few days, Alex made such an effort to be the supportive boyfriend he thought Zoe wanted that it was almost worse than when he hadn’t been aware of her problems. They touched upon her diagnosis whenever they had a spare moment alone, and each time Zoe felt he was pushing, too hopefully, towards a prognosis that she didn’t have as much confidence in as he did. He seemed to think it would be easy for her to get pregnant with the right drugs, no matter how many times she explained to him that it simply wouldn’t be that way. And no matter how many times she told him that it would be a mistake to rush into trying for a baby just because they might run out of time, he still mooted the idea too often.
She’d wanted a baby too, but she was scared that if they put too much faith in her conceiving, it wouldn’t end well. Not to mention that they had so much else to juggle, with Billie and Louisa, her job and the campsite, and a relationship that was relatively new. In fact, Zoe had been forced to remind him that they hadn’t yet been together for a year, even though it might have felt that way. She’d seen pregnancies that had been meant to save marriages, and pregnancies where one partnerhad wanted it far more than the other, and pregnancies that were last-gasp attempts to deny the inevitable changes of middle age…she’d seen all sorts of pregnancies that had sprung from circumstances that were far from ideal, and she’d hate her own, should it happen, to be one of those.
