Believing the Lie - Elizabeth George [147]
When Simon left her in their room at the inn, she did what she knew had to be done. She phoned his brother David and gave him what she called their decision. “I so much appreciate how you’ve thought of us, David,” she told him, and she meant every word. “But I can’t get my mind round sharing a baby with its birth parents. So we’re saying no.”
She could tell that David was disappointed, and she had little doubt that the rest of Simon’s family would be disappointed as well. But Simon’s family were not being asked to open their lives and their hearts to the virtual unknown. David said, “You know, it’s all a lottery, Deb, any way you go at parenthood,” to which she’d said, “I do know that. But the answer’s the same. The complications involved… I wouldn’t be able to cope.”
So it was over. In a day or two, the pregnant girl in question would move on her way towards another couple eager for a child. Deborah was glad she’d made the decision, but she felt disconsolate all the same. Simon wouldn’t be pleased, but she couldn’t see any answer other than the one she’d given. They simply had to move on.
She could tell her husband was more than ill-at-ease with going down the surrogacy route. She’d actually thought it would appeal to him since he was a scientist. But for him the miracles of modern medicine were turning out to be “dehumanising, Deborah.” Locking himself up in a doctor’s loo and seeing to the appropriate deposit made into the equally appropriate sterile container… And then there was the matter of harvesting her eggs and what that involved and the additional matter of the surrogate and monitoring the surrogate throughout the pregnancy and even finding the surrogate in the first place.
Who is this person? he reasonably asked. And how do you make sure of all the things you need to make sure of?
This person is just a womb we’re hiring, was how Deborah explained it to him.
If that’s what you think the extent of her involvement would be, Simon replied, then you’ve got your head in the clouds. We’re not hiring a vacant room in her house to store furniture, Deborah. This is a life that’s growing inside her body. You seem to think she’ll ignore that.
There’ll be a contract, for heaven’s sake. Look here, in the magazine, there’s a story about—
That magazine, he said, needs to go into the rubbish.
Deborah, however, didn’t toss it away when he left the room. Instead, she phoned David and when she’d done so, she’d sat and looked at the copy of Conception that Barbara Havers had overnighted to her. She gazed at the photos of the six-time surrogate, posing with the happy families she’d helped. She reread the article. Finally, she turned to the back where the advertisements were.
Everything related to reproduction had some sort of listing, she saw, but despite the hopeful article in the magazine itself, nothing referred to surrogacy. Phoning a legal service listed on the page told her why this was the case. Advertising oneself as a surrogate mother was illegal, she learned. The hopeful mother had to find her own surrogate. A relative is best, she was told. Have you a sister, madam? A cousin? Even mothers have carried their own grandchildren for their daughters. How old is your own mother?
God, nothing was easy, Deborah thought. She had no sister, her mother was dead, she was an only child of only children. Simon’s sister was a possibility but she couldn’t imagine the madcap Sidney— currently in the throes of love with a mercenary soldier, for heaven’s sake— allowing her million-pound model’s body to be the launching pad for her brother’s child. There were definite limits to sororial love, and Deborah reckoned she knew what they were.
The law was not her friend in this matter. Advertising