Things I Want My Daughters to Know_ A Novel - Elizabeth Noble [38]
He winked, kissed her on the cheek, and headed in the direction of the front door. “Okay, then, but you just let me know where and when…. I’m always ready.”
FOR SIX MONTHS, THEY HAD CARRIED ON LIKE THEY HAD BEEN, just without chemical intervention. For six months they didn’t worry. They laughed, and they made love, and often both at the same time.
For the next six months, she paid a little more attention to the right time to conceive. She made little doodles in her diary, counting fourteen days forward from a period. She even turned down the odd invitation from friends when it fell on a likely night, although she never told Stephen she had.
For the six months after that, she used an ovulation prediction kit from the chemist. Stephen called her the Professor.
When nothing had happened for eighteen months, at Stephen’s request, she went to the doctor.
And at every stage, when she knew a normal woman would have been increasingly anxious and worried, she grew more and more ambiguous about the whole thing.
Stephen was, certainly, doing well at work. She didn’t really understand much of what he told her about what he did, but it appeared that he did it well. He had a couple of promotions, got a company car, started going to more and more overnight sales conferences. He got a BlackBerry and was never off it. It came on holidays with them, demanding constant attention, and slept in bed beside them. She often awoke—far too early—to the clicking of his fingers on the miniature keyboard. She told a friend at work they didn’t need a baby; they had a BlackBerry and that was enough. He was preoccupied. He wasn’t listening to her so much.
But worse than that was the subtle, inexorable change in his attitude toward their conceiving a child. At the beginning, it was both of them, and it was fun. Both of them trying, both of them failing. Then she knew it had shifted. Something in him needed to believe that it was more to do with her than with him, some ancient, buried machismo, some unwillingness to admit defeat. When she was unwilling to go to the doctor—claiming that with a young, healthy couple, the system wouldn’t be interested until they’d tried on their own for a long time—he could give vent to the insinuation that had been there, unspoken, for a while.
He was less kind to her. Less patient. They stopped laughing so much. And all the time, she became less and less certain that getting pregnant was what she really wanted.
How had things changed so much in three New Year’s Eves? They’d been so happy—young and in love and at one—in New York. It was like something had happened. Like someone had had an affair, only no one had. It was what hadn’t happened, what apparently couldn’t happen, that had caused this. She sometimes wondered whether she had just fallen out of love with him. Like she had with John. Maybe there was a time limit on her ability to love another person…but there were still moments between them when she knew it wasn’t that. You couldn’t explain it, could you? It was a million tiny things that made it change.
And so they went out, of course, this year, like they did most years. They were all about making it look like everything was fine. They met friends in this noisy Italian restaurant, and ate and drank and danced. You would have to be watching very closely to see what was missing between them. They were not the kind of people who would ever fight in public, or make other people uncomfortable, or show their vulnerability. That was something they still had in common—this ridiculous, dumb pride. But that just made her feel more isolated. If only Mum was alive. She’d give up, she’d talk to her. Maybe she only told herself that because Mum was dead, and it couldn’t happen. No—she would. She was desperate. She’d listen to what she had to say. As the clock chimed midnight, and everyone was falling into each other’s arms, kissing and whooping, she was thinking of her mum, and how she’d missed her chance.
When Stephen found her in the crowd, he put his arms around her and held