The Secrets of Married Women (20 page)

Still his gaze doesn’t budge. ‘I can’t live my life worrying about when I get old Jill.’

‘I know. Neither can I. I mean, I’m not. It’s just, well, in some ways I think it’d be good for us. For you. To be a dad. You’d make a lovely dad.’ I take a risk here. ‘I was even thinking I could get an appointment and find out about sperm donors.’

He glares at me. ‘Sperm donors? You want some strange man’s semen in you? Someone who you’ve never even seen? You’ve just picked him off some list?’

Ergh. ‘Well, when you put it like that...’ My heart’s thumping now. I clutch the cold castle wall. ‘But who said you pick them off a list?’ Has he been researching this?

‘What if you got HIV?’

‘Oh Rob, it’s pretty regulated. I’m sure -’

‘You won’t know the first thing about him! His family history! What you were passing on!’

‘I think they have to declare stuff like that.’

‘Oh yeah. Some bloke who sells his sperm for money. He’s probably really honest.’

I want to tell him Lawrence did it. But then he’ll know Leigh and I have talked about this and then he’ll be even more angry with me. ‘Rob, let’s not make a big thing. It was just a thought.’

‘Well from all this thinking you’ve obviously been doing Jill I’d say you’ve made your mind up.’

‘I’ve what? How do you draw such conclusions? That’s not true! I punched in ‘sperm donors’ on the Internet, read about three pages on the subject, now you’re making it sound like I’m giving you some ultimatum.’ I want to throttle him and say I just want to talk about it! Like normal people. But I try to keep it cheerful. ‘Look, really, the way I feel right now I’m probably about 50-50 wanting a kid. But then other days—most days actually—I’m like, twenty-eighty, as in hardly wanting it at all. It’s true. I’m not just saying this to make you feel better. In fact, it’s the strangest thing that I can be so ambivalent to something as primal as a woman’s desire to give life.’ I think I am saying this slight exaggeration mainly to make him feel better.

He stuffs his hands in his pockets, leans against the wall with his back to the beach, looks at his shoes that are impacted with sand. The wind blows his hair around his face. ‘I told you this before Jill, if you want a kid that badly I understand. It’s not right of me to deny you that.’ He looks up, scours my face, looking more handsome and more pained than I’ve ever seen him. ‘If I could give you a baby Jill—if there was a pill I could take or an operation I could have—I’d do it gladly. It would make me the proudest person in the world.’ He moves his hand toward my face but takes it back quickly. ‘But I can’t. And there’s not a damned thing I can do about that. He moves hair off his eye, puts his hands in his pants pockets, looks back to his feet again. ‘But you can do something about it. You could go find somebody else and be a mother. But I hope to God you’ll do it before it’s too late.’ He turns and looks across the water and the mist seems to blow in a close cold circle around his head. ‘What would hurt me the most is if I thought you stuck around another ten years and then realised that staying with me was the biggest mistake you made, and then you’d live the rest of your life bitter because of it. I don’t want a bitter wife. I don’t want to have to carry around your regrets as well as my guilt for the rest of my days.’

God it sounds like he wants rid of me. I press the corners of my eyes. I mustn’t cry. Tears will only affirm in his stubborn mind that pain about this topic is eating away at me. So instead I link him, force my words out through a big smile. ‘You’re being mad. I don’t have regrets and I’m not bitter, and I never will be. I just thought that if we decided we still wanted a family, adoption would be one way for us to have it.’

He stares heavily ahead. ‘I don’t know, Jill. If I can’t have one of my own… How do I know I could love somebody else’s?’

‘Oh please! Look how much you love Kiefer and he’s a dog!’ He gives me a penetrating, querying, washed-out look. ‘I know you Rob. If somebody put a little baby in your arms and said it’s yours, you would love it instantly and madly with your entire being. Because you’d know it was a little baby that somebody gave away, that somehow found its way to you.’

‘Well…’ he says, still not blinking. ‘Maybe you’re right.’ Which means,
I’ve had it with this topic now.
He turns and starts walking. The seagulls squeal again, and he looks up at them, and his feet make a lonely leaving sound that reverberates through the castle walls.

We go and sit in another tea room, but our mood hangs damper on us than the rain. And then we drive back to the hotel, calling off at the same pub for a plate of mince and dumplings and a beer, which we consume in critical silence again.

I don’t know how much more of this I can take.

We go to bed early because there’s nothing else to do. Rob lies with his back to me. With hurt and anger etching around my tone I ask him, ‘Rob? Are you going to talk to me, or even say goodnight?’

He extends an arm over his shoulder, pats me consolingly.

‘For the fifty-fifth time Rob—and this is the last time I will ever say it—I swear I’m not bothered if we never have a kid. I really, truly, am not. I thought you were. I thought that’s why you’ve gone into this shell. So adoption was my solution.’

‘I’m not in a shell,’ he says, in about as sorry a tone of voice as you’d ever hear from somebody who’s supposedly not in a shell.

It pains my soul that our day has ended this way. I had such high hopes for it. ‘Hold me. Please,’ I say to him. If I don’t manage to connect with him on some level now, it will feel like we are broken beyond repair. There’s a resistant pause, then he turns onto his back, lifts an arm for me to settle under. He just holds me, and lies there thinking. I can feel his blinking eye against my temple.

Sunday is more of the same. Weather wise, everything wise. We decide to head back early.

Rob drives, and I sit there quietly staring out the window, my champagne, lovely dress, and tart’s outfit burning a hole in the suitcase. I think Rob needs to see a doctor. It’s not enough for me to plant magazine articles on infertility around the house. This is bigger than that. Bigger than me. But if I mention him seeing a doctor, he’ll believe that I think he’s sick. Besides, Rob is a macho northern male. He won’t lie down on any quack couch and pour out his heart. Suggesting it will only make him think I don’t even know the man I’ve been married to for ten years. Maybe I don’t. Maybe it’s me who should see a doctor.

The dark green Northumberland landscape slides by. Am I to give up on Rob ever being anything other than a rather withdrawn but abiding partner to me? I’m too young to settle for that. And none of this is my fault. And then my thoughts drift to a certain Russian. And unlike other times when I’ve stopped them, I just let them fly. They carry me home, playing like some soothing background track on the personal stereo of my mind.

When we pull up at our front door, my eyes latch onto something on our ‘Welcome’ mat. ‘What’s this?’ I ask, opening the car door before Rob has even put us in park. Lying in plastic wrapping on our doorstep—a very rained on plastic wrapping I might add—is a massive bunch of red long-stem roses.

A pain builds up on the bridge of my nose. ‘Where did these come from?’ I scoop them up in my arms, their dewy fragrance punching me.

I turn and look at my husband of ten years leaning on the open car door, head cocked, watching me. His sad face bears a quietly pleased-with-himself look. ‘I had a man deliver them yesterday. I didn’t know we wouldn’t be here, did I? They were supposed to be a surprise. One that doesn’t bark and crap on the carpet.’

‘I’m dying to give you the updates on the shag of the century, but first, how was your anniversary?’ It’s Leigh. I’m in Boots filling a basket.

I can tell she has little interest in my anniversary so I give a basic answer. ‘It was nice Leigh. Very nice.’ I find myself, coincidentally, in front of the condom shelf, my eyes going over colours, textures, sizes. I walk further up the aisle to get away from them and find myself staring at men’s deodorant. Old Spice. A sea of it.

‘Was he impressed with the nurse’s outfit and the bubbly?’ She’s giddy, giggly and annoying.

I wish I’d never told her. ‘Very.’

‘Did nursey-nurse and her medicine chest mend things in the old penis department?’

‘There’s nothing wrong with his penis Leigh. His penis has never been the problem.’ I say it a bit too loudly. A fellow shopper looks at me with startled fascination.

‘So I can assume you did it then?’

Oh, I can’t have my sex life reduced to this level. I walk off down another aisle to get away from people. ‘We did.’

‘Thank God,’ she says. ‘For a moment you had me really worried for you two.’

I tell her I’m at the till so I have to go. I hang up, abandon my basket in the aisle, and flee. I keep running until I’m half way down an unpopulated side street, bending over in a painful pant, allowing the crowds of shoppers to dissolve into a blur behind me.

I can’t go home. So I walk around the town, full of the ailing state of my marriage, wondering if I’m blowing us out of perspective, if there’s a bright, light side I’m not seeing because I’ve convinced myself I can’t. It’s a sunny evening. Stores are closing, metal shutters clanging to the ground. Somebody is picking expensive watches out of a jeweller’s window, and the barrow boys are loading their things-unsold into vans. Suddenly, the sky goes very dark. In about three seconds my white T-shirt looks like it’s been lifted out of a pail of water. I pelt past Grey’s Monument, as people who’ve been sat there soaking up the sunshine, run into Eldon Square for cover. Under the awning of a pie shop, I stand and watch it coming down in one long spectacular sheet, bouncing noisily off the ground like grey lightning. Behind me, people disappear down the slippery steps of the Metro. Everybody going home. To their families. Why don’t I want to go home to mine?

My phone rings. I want it to be Rob, telling me that he’s suffering like I am, but it’s Wendy. Her voice anchors me again though. ‘Actually, Wend, I’ve been ringing you all day but your mobile’s been switched off,’ I tell her.

‘Oh I’ve just bought a one like Neil’s,—a fancy one with all the bells and whistles—only like everything we seem to buy, there was a problem so it’s being fixed. How was your anniversary?’

‘Not great. We had a fight.’

There’s a pause. ‘I thought you sounded flat. Is it anything you want to tell me about?’

Yeah, my husband has withdrawn from me. But then again, you could have cancer, so I can see how my problem might pale
… ‘Not really. How did your appointment go?’

‘Alright. Although you know me, I find that whole business of people looking down there so unpleasant. You’d never think I’ve had three kids.’ There’s a pause with the obvious reference to baby Nina. ‘But they were very nice at the clinic.’

‘When will you find out?’

‘Not for a few weeks. They also did a biopsy.’

‘A biopsy?’ She’s still so vague and it worries the hell out of me. ‘Have you told Neil yet?’

‘Not yet. And I won’t until I need to.’ The rain turns from noisy to quiet. ‘By the way, the naked scramble for a bag of free clothing at the Metro Centre is back on again. Leigh has convinced Clifford it’ll make him a national name like Antony Gormley. Because Gormley did it in
Domain Field
—had
people of all shapes and sizes strip naked before wrapping them in cling film and covering them in plaster. That was art. T
his is exercise pants. But Clifford doesn’t see a difference. Leigh’s busy writing the press release.’ There’s a pause. ‘Oh Jill, it’s a silly little place to work.’ We ring off, the rain eases off, and I go home.

~ * * * ~

‘Don’t go,’ I say unconvincingly to Rob on Saturday, when he announces he’s off to York to do a job for a few days. ‘Send somebody else.’

‘You know I can’t do that Jill.’

‘Can’t or don’t want to?’

He’s honest enough to shrug.

As our front door shuts I think,
That’s it. You desert me and whatever I do from now on is your fault
. I even go as far as to tack,
You bastard
, onto the end, but it doesn’t fit. In my car I have every intention of going to see my mam and dad. Only at the Board Inn, instead of turning right, I keep going straight.

I sit on the wall, hugging my knees, a little bit mortified to be here. A part of me still seeing those roses on my doormat. With these dark sunglasses on, I can pretend I’m just looking around. But my eyes keep sliding past him up there on his lookout post. He has seen me. He keeps glancing back over his shoulder at me. He hasn’t made any effort to come over. It’s rapidly feeling like the end of my world.