Instead, everyone looked as if the Holy Grail was buried somewhere in the building and they were anxiously waiting to be cal ed into its presence. The air was twenty-five per cent nitrogen, twenty-five per cent oxygen and fifty per cent hope.
Everyone looked up eagerly each time a white-coated person appeared and cal ed out names, and everyone sank back onto their hard banquettes when it wasn’t their name.
Alex was not good at waiting, and Daisy could see that he was very nervous. He lounged back in his seat with one leg casual y crossed over the other, the very picture of nonchalance,
but he was rotating one ankle as if model ing for an airline video on how to avoid deep vein thrombosis. His eyes were cast down too, as if he was terrified of meeting anyone he knew. Daisy glanced at him. ‘You al right?’ she asked, for what had to be the tenth time since breakfast.
‘Fine,’ he said brusquely, as he had each time.
Nerves, it was just nerves. Daisy reached over and took his hand. His fingers gripped hers tightly, comfortingly, and she closed her eyes and tried to think happy, calm thoughts. In two days, she was due to fly to Diisseldorf for a clothes fair, and normal y she would have been at home putting the finishing touches to her packing so that her fashion fair wardrobe was perfect. Today, she didn’t care what she wore to Diisseldorf. This was more important than anything else.
She got up from her seat yet again to riffle through the papers on the low coffee table. There were lots of old women’s magazines, a couple about yachting and a single National Geographic with a picture of Peru on the cover.
She picked it up. ‘Look, Alex,’ she said brightly. ‘Peru. We always said we’d go.’ Offering it to him like an Inca priest offering up a heart, she smiled hopeful y.
Alex had just taken the magazine from her when a tal dark woman in a white coat opened the waiting-room door and said, ‘Daisy Farrel and Alex Kenny, please.’
Daisy sprang to her feet like a jack-in-the-box. ‘That’s us,’
she said breathlessly.
It was like a normal visit to a normal doctor, Daisy thought, except that the tal woman, Dr Makim, was fil ing in a history of their fertility, asking about brothers and sisters, previous children if any, previous pregnancies, if any, operations, il nesses. It took quite a while, and Daisy had relaxed into feeling that this was al perfectly ordinary after al and she hadn’t needed to have been so nervous, when Dr Makim put down her pen and began to talk about what the clinic did. She gave them sheaves of paper as she spoke.
‘You’re thirty-five, which is when we do notice a decline in the fertility of women,’ she told Daisy, who felt the usual pang of guilt that this was al her fault. ‘But fertility is a complex issue and can affect either partner.’
If the problem was the quality of the sperm, there were various methods of helping, from washing the sperm to advanced IVF techniques, right up to using donor sperm.
Daisy hardly dared to look at Alex at this point. He was staring stonily at the doctor. Men could find their infertility an emasculating experience, according to Daisy’s bible, The Smart Woman’s Fertility Guide. Daisy honestly didn’t mind if the problem was hers, just to save him the pain of thinking it was his fault. She’d go through it al without a word for the sake of their baby. Who cared who was to blame once she could get pregnant? She laid a comforting hand on his knee but he was too engrossed in what the doctor was saying to respond.
Next, Dr Makim wanted them to understand what they were letting themselves in for. Lengthy hormonal treatments that were, in rare cases, fatal, enormous emotional strain and, often, failure.
‘The success rates vary from clinic to clinic but the general success rate, what we cal the take-home baby rate in the Avalon,’ she said, her face sympathetic as Daisy winced at the bluntness of this description, ‘is around twenty per cent.’
‘And people think you have for ever to have babies, thanks to science,’ Daisy said jokily, to hide her nerves, while praying to be one of those twenty per cent.
‘Science is science, not God.’ Dr Makim shrugged wryly with the air of one who’d seen evidence of this at first hand.
‘There are no guarantees. Understanding that is the biggest step. Despite what you read, this is not an easy route to take.’
Daisy and Alex were silent as they digested this information. ‘First, we test you both,’ went on the doctor.
‘Sperm tests for the man, blood tests for you both, a post-coital test, then final y a laparoscopy for the woman. That’s a procedure where we
insert a micro camera through an incision in your navel to see if you have endometriosis or any other problems with your ovaries, uterus or tubes. It’s an overnight stay with a general anaesthetic. You haven’t had a reaction to an anaesthetic, have you?’ She was writing as she asked.
‘No,’ said Daisy. With or without an anaesthetic, she was up for it.
‘An operation?’ interrupted Alex. ‘With an anaesthetic? I didn’t know the tests would involve surgery.’
It was Daisy’s turn to feel a flicker of irritation. She’d given him The Smart Woman’s Fertility Guide to read the week before and the options were al there. Hadn’t he read it?
‘Infertility clinics are often accused of handing out treatment to people who don’t real y need it,’ Dr Makim said, steel in her voice. ‘That is not the case at the Avalon Clinic. We wil not treat any couple unless we have done al we can to determine the reason, if we can find one, for their infertility.
Without the ful battery of tests, we wil do nothing.’
If they decided to enter the programme, they would have to attend a lecture on infertility treatments given by the clinic’s director, and they’d have to come to two counsel ing sessions with one of the Avalon’s team of psychologists.
‘We’re not tel ing you that you don’t know your own mind and haven’t decided properly that you want to enter our programme,’ Dr Makim added, ‘but we want you to know al the facts and have thought it al over before you do.’ Daisy nodded agreement, inwardly wishing they could bypass al that stuff and start now. She and Alex wanted a baby - why wait?
They left with a sheaf of literature about the clinic, consent forms and an IVF diary of a couple’s trip through the process that the doctor said people often found helpful.
Daisy sat in the passenger seat of Alex’s car, hugging the literature to her chest. She felt almost too excited to breathe. It was happening, final y.
It could just be fluke and she was madly fertile and al it would take would be some drugs before she’d be pregnant.
Wasn’t she always hearing those sort of stories? ‘It’s nearly twelve thirty,’ she said, glancing at her watch. ‘Why don’t we get a sandwich for lunch, then you can drop me at my car and head back to the office?’
As the clinic was in Dublin, they’d both driven into the city that morning, so Daisy could head back to Carrickwel afterwards. ‘Yeah, sure,’ said Alex distractedly.
He drove to a restaurant, and left Daisy sitting at the table while he went to the bathroom. ‘Order me soup, a chicken sandwich, and a latte,’ he said.
Daisy placed their orders and then al owed herself the thril of opening the IVF diary. A real person’s description of the whole process would make more sense to Daisy than any dry medical text.
The diary was by a woman named only as F. There was no mention in the introduction if she and her partner, T, had actual y had a baby.
Can’t believe this is real. We’ve been saving for a long time for this and T is almost as excited as me. We’d stopped talking about kids for the past four years and now we are letting ourselves mention them again. In our home, we had what we cal ed the nursery right up until I was diagnosed with polycystic ovary syndrome. We cal ed it the spare bedroom from then on.
Last night, T said we should redecorate the nursery. Those were his words. I loved him so much when he said that. He believes we can do it.
I Daisy flicked further on, eager to read more, to see what I happened next.
The injections are horrible. It’s like a pen you stick into your stomach. The one diabetics use. T has to do it for me because I’m terrible with needles, even when they’re disguised as pens. My stomach feels bloated and I’ve read that some people can real y feel al the extra eggs you emit because of the hormones. They cal them fol icles. That sounds sil y - fol icles are on the end of your hair. T says I’m daft. I prefer to feel ful of eggs to make our baby instead of fol icles!
She flicked a few pages again.
Waiting is the worst part. The doctor said that but I didn’t believe him. And he’s right. It’s hel on earth. Do normal people wait to see if they’re pregnant like this?
Daisy felt a bond of sympathy with the unknown F. Please let it have worked for her. Alex came back at the same time as the waitress with their food. Daisy’s appetite, absent at breakfast, returned with a vengeance and she tucked into her sandwich and juice with gusto. Alex didn’t touch his sandwich, just stirred his latte, staring into it as if the secret to the universe lay therein. ‘We can do it!’ Daisy whispered across the table at him, eyes shining with happiness.
‘We’re going to have a baby!’ ‘Daisy, I think we should take a break,’ he said quickly. ‘This is al too intense, this clinic stuff.’
Daisy blinked. The piece of cucumber in her salad sandwich suddenly tasted like rubber. ‘What … what do you mean? A break from what? We’ve only just got started.’ ‘I don’t mean the clinic. I mean us, a break from us. A trial separation.’ Now that he’d started, the words rushed out.
‘I’m not comfortable with this treatment…’ He said it with distaste, as if the word itself was distasteful. ‘It’s stressing me out and you too. Look at how obsessed you are. You never talk about anything else.’
‘Wel , it’s so important,’ Daisy said anxiously, ‘but I can cope with it, I promise. We can cope with it, Alex. This morning was tough but it’s better to know al the facts straight up, isn’t it? We can deal with it.’
He shook his head. ‘We can’t; I can’t. It’s taking over,’ he said. ‘There’s got to be more to life than this babymania.
Babies, babies, babies, that’s al I hear.’
‘That’s not fair.’ Daisy knew she didn’t talk about babies al the time. Hel , if she’d talked about it as often as she felt like, then they would have no other conversation at al . But she didn’t. She held herself in check, constantly censoring her conversation.
‘I’m sorry, Daisy, I can’t deal with this. I’m sorry, real y sorry.’
He kept staring anxiously, dark eyes fixed on hers, the handsome face she knew so wel looking more strained than she could remember.
‘You can’t mean that,’ she said, and as she said the words, she realised that he did. He actual y wanted a break from their relationship. It was too enormous for her to take in.
Alex and Daisy not together. The world was turning upside down. ‘I do,’ he said helplessly. ‘We need some time apart.’
‘You can’t mean that,’ she said, more urgently this time. ‘I love you, we’ve been together for ever, we should be getting married and having a baby … not this.’
‘We just need some time apart.’ He repeated the words like a mantra. ‘It’s for the best, Daisy. Please, do this for me. It makes sense.’
‘How can it make sense?’
‘It does, trust me.’
An old joke sprang inappropriately into her mind. What does a liar say when he wants to say, ‘Screw you’? He says, ‘Trust me.’
‘I don’t want to hurt you, Daisy.’ He was staring into his latte again and that was very unsettling. ‘We’ve been through so much together ‘
‘We can get through it,’ interrupted Daisy fiercely. ‘Don’t do this, Alex, please. I love you. You can’t leave me, you can’t
…’ ‘I have to,’ he snapped, and shoved his cup away with such force that coffee spil ed in a milky puddle.
‘Oh shit.’ She began to cry and shake at the same time, great globs of tears running down her face. She couldn’t stop the shaking and when she looked down at her hands in disbelief, she could see the tremor. They looked like somebody else’s hands on top of the table.
‘Please don’t go.’ She didn’t care if it sounded pathetic -
every fibre of her being wanted him to stay. Longing for something so much could make it happen, couldn’t it?
‘Please stay.’ It was a whisper now. ‘I can’t go on without you, Alex. Whatever’s wrong, we can sort it out.’
‘Stop saying that.’ He wasn’t begging. He was sharp, annoyed with her for being so weak, so craven. ‘Come on, Daisy, it’l be fine. Lots of couples split up for a bit, to work things out.’ Yes, lots of couples did. She leaped at this evidence that this was a relationship hiccup, some awful rite of passage and they’d be back together again soon.
‘It’l be al right again?’ She didn’t care that she sounded like a smal child stammering for her mummy.
His reply was a friendly pat on the arm. ‘I’l go stay with David tonight. It’s better that way. I’l pick up a few things while you’re at work and we can talk when you get back from Germany, OK?’ ‘OK,’ repeated Daisy. Then something occurred to her. ‘Alex, is there another woman?’
For a mil isecond, she thought he was going to say yes. ‘Of course not,’ he said easily. ‘I’l order a taxi for you back to your car.’ He got to his feet. ‘I have to fly back to the office.
I’ve been gone too long already this morning.’
He was al business, signal ing to the waitress for the bil , asking her to cal a taxi. Daisy sat in her seat weakly and he pressed a fifty-euro note into her hand. ‘For the taxi,’ he said, and kissed her kindly on the forehead.
Some stil -functioning part of Daisy’s brain told her that fifty was far too much money for a taxi. Her car was only a mile away. He could have dropped her to it as easily. ‘We’l talk when you get back from Germany. Have a good trip and take care of yourself. Don’t shop too much!’ It was what he always said. Daisy’s credit card burned in her purse when she was let loose and it burned with even more intensity when she was abroad. Today, his warning sounded shal ow.
‘You’l be fine, Daisy. You love the shows and Diisseldorf’s the best, isn’t it? We’l talk, right?’