Haley Hill - Love Is...

I’d been hoping for distraction not ego annihilation. ‘What did?’ I asked.

‘Well,’ he said, in a manner that implied he was drumming his fingers on the table. ‘Let’s consider Eleanor Rigby’s life journey so far, shall we? What were you doing before this all-consuming quest for conception?’

‘I don’t know, working?’

He sighed. ‘Ellie, you spent five years planning your wedding.’

I went to speak but Matthew continued. ‘Prior to that you spent four years aggressively soliciting a proposal from Nick. Before that you engineered a career that enabled you to personally interview thousands of eligible men.’

‘And women,’ I said, ‘as a matchmaker. I was trying to help people.’

He chuckled. ‘This behaviour, although disturbing enough in isolation, was preceded by many other alarming antics: a shambolic engagement, two disastrous cohabitations, fours years cyberstalking Hugh Jackman, a stretch hyper-parenting a pet rat and six years fanatically coddling two Cabbage Patch dolls.’ He paused and took a deep breath. ‘Ellie, you’ve been looking for love since the day you were born.’

‘No, I haven’t,’ I said, pulling myself up from the bed. ‘And FYI, Bungle was a guinea pig. Not a rat.’

Matthew must’ve handed the phone over to his toddler, because all I could hear was the choking sound, then wailing, then manic laughter, then some salivary noises, then more wailing then Matthew coming back on the line.

‘There you go,’ he said. ‘That’s what your life will sound like if you get what you wish for.’

I rolled my eyes. ‘It can’t be all bad.’

‘It’s not all bad,’ he replied, ‘but it won’t make you happy. Just like marriage won’t make you happy. And kids certainly won’t make your marriage happy.’ He paused for a moment, seemingly to wipe a child’s orifice, then continued. ‘If you kept abreast of the latest research, as you should, you would know that a recent study showed a couple’s happiness decreases proportionately with the birth of each child.’

I rolled my eyes. ‘Who conducted that study?’ I said. ‘Was it you, interviewing yourself?’

He laughed. ‘We’re conditioned to think we need to have children in order to be content, when in fact, if we bother to look at the evidence, the opposite is true.’ He let out a deep sigh. ‘Why else do you think Lucy went back to work and left me looking after the little buggers?’

I giggled. ‘You love it really.’

‘No,’ he said, ‘I really don’t. I love them, of course, but I don’t especially enjoy sacrificing my every human right in the name of positive parenting.’ He moved away from the phone to confiscate some crayons then continued. ‘Freud said that our need to procreate is driven by a fear of death.’ He went on to adopt a lady therapist voice. ‘Do you fear death, Eleanor Rigby?’

I rolled my eyes. ‘The only one who should fear death is you, if you don’t shut up.’

He was still laughing when I hung up.

I checked the timer on my phone. Twenty seconds to go.

I flopped down on the bed again, feeling the weight of my body sink into the mattress. Nick said he would love me no matter what.

Would he really though? I wondered. Even if I could never give him the sandy-haired children he’d always wanted? The son he could hoist up onto his shoulders and teach what it means to be a man, or the little girl with pigtails reaching for his hand, eyes wide with adoration. What if it was just us? For the rest of our lives. Our union having no greater purpose than to provide comfort to each other in old age. We’d play bridge, grow vegetables and potter around the house. And then we’d die.

Ten seconds to go.

I burst back into the bathroom. Before I reached for the test, I stopped and looked up at the ceiling, retracting my earlier complaint to the Almighty and substituting it with a pledge to reinstate my monthly charitable donations.

I snatched the test from the pot and stared at the screen on the side. The words registered straight away.

Not pregnant.

I looked again, just in case I was hallucinating the ‘Not’. I shook it and then held it up to the light. I knew there was nothing I could do to change it. I threw it in the bin along with the backup test and then went to get ready for work.

Chapter 2

I nudged the front door closed with my shoulder to force the lock into place. A flake of black paint fell onto the front path.

I turned to see Victoria, who was bouncing on the spot, clad head-to-toe in Lycra, ponytail swinging like a metronome.

‘Morning, Ellie,’ she said.

‘Morning,’ I mumbled, pulling my handbag onto my shoulder. I’d hoped I would be able to sneak out before she’d emerged from her five-thousand-square-foot double-fronted mansion for her morning showy-offy jog.

She continued to bounce but at the same time cocked her head. ‘You didn’t reply to my text.’

I sighed. Victoria had been charting my IVF process with the precision of a government agent. This, I suspected, was precisely the reason she’d been lurking by her front door since 7 a.m., jog-ready, to jump out and catch me on my way to work.

I glared at her. A glare that I hoped would say: Do you think my face would look like this if I’d just discovered I was incubating a much-longed-for half-me-half-Nick bundle of cells? No, Victoria. Instead of expressing elation, relief and the warm glow of raised hCG, this face is more befitting an exhausted and dejected woman who has endured two years of invasive medical interventions comprising, yet not exclusive to, double-dose vaginal suppositories, self-administered stomach injections, daily internal scans performed with a dildo ultrasound device, leg-stirrup procedures with disturbing terms such as ‘egg harvesting’ and ‘implantation’, then topped off with a giant needle stuck between my eyes to release my chakra. And all that to be told once again that I have failed to do the very thing that women were made to do.

Victoria screwed up her face. She’d been at the Botox again. ‘Aw, Ellie, no luck?’

I shook my head and made a point of theatrically rubbing my barren uterus.

‘Third time lucky maybe?’

‘Victoria, this was the third time.’

‘Oh yes, fourth then.’ Her bouncing quickened. For a moment, there was a glimpse of empathy in her stretched smile.

I scowled at her. She knew there’d be no fourth attempt.

She sniffed, and started bouncing higher.

‘You could always adopt,’ she said, adjusting her heart rate monitor. And with that she sped off.

I stood on the street for a moment, not realising I was still holding my stomach, and looked up at Nick’s and my house. Against the rows of magnificent Victorian villas, it looked like the neglected stepchild, stuck on the end like an ill-considered afterthought. While its siblings had been sent to Farrow and Ball finishing school, ours had been pebble-dashed and left to fend for itself against the elements. They say a pet chooses the owner and I wondered if that might be true for a house too. As much as I’d tried to fit in on this street, I was starting to doubt I ever would.

Up the road, mothers were bundling impeccably presented offspring into shiny cars. For them, life seemed so easy. Most had met their dashing eloquent husbands at top-tier universities, or later, working in some kind of glamorous grown-up profession. They’d gone on to marry in a grand French chateau or palatial Tuscan villa, then breed effortlessly, popping out rosy-cheeked cherubs every year or so, sometimes two or three at a time, while also advancing their careers, renovating and interior-designing their houses and serving quail eggs as appetisers. They even found time to accessorise with chiffon scarves.