Nearest Thing to Crazy (30 page)

The memory of the day I was told I could never have children of my own was still so vivid that I could reach out and touch it, smell it, climb right inside it and relive every excruciating moment. It was a hot day, a hot July day. Big, dust-filmed sash windows let in too much of the sun’s heat, making the dreary mahogany-lined room stiflingly hot. There was a faint whiff of sour sweat coming, I guessed, from the consultant’s shiny pin-striped suit. His steel-coloured hair was scraped back from a balding pate. He had some of those funny white pustules around his eyes, and half-moon glasses which rested on a bony escarpment halfway down his nose. He leaned over a leather-edged blotting pad, twirling a stiletto-shaped letter opener between his fingers. From the moment he started clearing his throat I knew I was in trouble. As I held my breath, waiting for him to speak, I remember the sound of the traffic providing a constant hum in the background, a hum overlaid with the thrumming syncopation of a taxi’s diesel engine; the screech of a bus’s brakes; the shrill roar of a jet overhead – sounds all mingling together to form the symphony of Harley Street. And inside the room, like a solo instrumentalist, a fly slapping against the window, while the consultant beat time, tapping the stiletto letter opener on the leather-edged blotting pad.

Being told I couldn’t have children hit me at such a deep, fundamental level, I suppose, because it’s what we’re here for, our entire purpose in life. It’s why we want to find a mate, why we have a sex drive, why we have a survival instinct, because it’s all about the preservation and regeneration of ourselves. So it felt like a large slice of me had died. That there’d be nothing left of me. That I wasn’t really
for
anything.

Dan said it was silly to feel that way. He said he loved me no matter what and that he could live without children; he said he’d married me for me, not because of someone he’d never met. Looking back, it’s extraordinary how loving Dan was, and how understanding. When my periods started to dry up, about a year after our marriage, I put it down to things like stress. There’d been so many changes in my life. Maybe my diet wasn’t as good as it should have been, not that I was ever too thin, or anything like that, the obvious things that you could assume were a rational cause. But when, after nine months, I’d been period free, I decided I’d go and see the doc, just to find out what was going on. At first he’d been reassuring and then, as he questioned me more and more, asking for my symptoms, suggesting that perhaps I might have others, I began to suspect what he was getting at. I had been feeling a bit weird – hot flushes, night sweats, odd aches and pains. He said he wanted to do some tests, take some blood, and refer me to a gynaecologist. Still I hadn’t allowed myself to get too alarmed, thinking there would be some simple explanation, a remedy, like a course of antibiotics or a prescription to de-stress my life.

There was no way I’d been prepared for the diagnosis. Premature Onset Menopause was the official label. Apparently it affects about one woman in a thousand under the age of thirty, and I was one of those women. My ovaries had shrivelled and died, and so I could no longer produce eggs. No eggs, no baby. I tried not to mind. Maybe if I’d had some proper career that I could concentrate on, the reality might have been easier to bear. But I didn’t. I’d always had unimportant little fill-in jobs. I’d worked in shops, waitressed in restaurants, been a receptionist in a smart hairdressing salon in Mayfair; I’d done all sorts of meaningless jobs that barely managed to pay my rent and food bills. The sort of life I’d been prepared for culminated – if viewed in terms of a successful career path – in marriage, and children. I’d got the husband, so now I needed the baby to give me the kind of purpose in life that I had been bred for. I had it all worked out in my mind; Dan would be the breadwinner and I would be the homemaker. Mum had seen to the fact that I wasn’t fit for anything else. I’d been far too busy taking care of her to find time to study. Daughters didn’t study, daughters carried out domestic duties. I was expected to marry, knock around earning a bit for a year or two, before getting on with the proper business of producing babies.

We had to start exploring all the other options, otherwise I knew I would have gone mad.

But how did she know? Was this all some horrible coincidence, some lucky guessing on her part? Or was there any way at all that she could have circumvented all the safeguards, all the anonymity laws, to track Laura down? It simply wasn’t possible. There were only three people in the world who knew about Laura’s conception, and they were Dan, me and my mother. Not Laura. Laura didn’t know. I hadn’t told Laura. I hadn’t told Laura because I was afraid that she’d reject me for not telling her the truth so much earlier; that she’d reject me for lying to her for all of her life; that she’d reject me because I wasn’t her genetic mother. And that was why Dan was, deep down, angry with me, because I hadn’t been honest, and why I was angry with Dan because he had nothing to lose. That was why I believed Dan considered Laura to be
his
daughter, and not mine. We were all living a lie and it was my fault.

So how did
she
know?

I’d been in her house for over two hours. I needed to get home and plan what I should do next. Reluctantly I put the manuscript back. I took a last look around, checked that everything was as I had found it and finally replaced the key in its little box at the edge of the terrace. I somehow drove home, and although my body was back in my own kitchen, my mind was still reading over Ellie’s poisoned prose. I dragged my thoughts back to the mundane domesticity of the scene I had left; was it really only two hours since I’d been listening to that radio play and thinking about sterilizing jam jars? None of that seemed remotely relevant or important anymore. I replaced the preserving pan on the simmering plate of the Aga, going through the mechanical motion of finishing off the chutney, scraping a wooden spoon across the base of the pan to see whether or not it left a clear trail of silver in the bottom. As I scraped, the liquid started to bubble into large blisters of heat which then exploded like tiny geysers, spraying my hand with molten sugar, but they didn’t seem to hurt. Maybe my pain receptors were so overloaded that they’d broken down.

In my muddled head I tried to piece together the evidence, like the shattered fragments of a beloved object, broken beyond repair. I’d had an egg donor. I now knew her name: Ellie. We had ‘egg shared’. Her husband had a low sperm count, so her eggs had to be fertilized
in vitro
. So in return for reduced fees, she had offered her surplus eggs to some other poor woman who was struggling to conceive. A wonderful gesture; a gesture for which I had felt nothing but gratitude ever since my pregnancy had been confirmed. But, according to her manuscript, her attempts at conception all failed. She was left childless, but with the knowledge that somewhere in the world, a child of hers
did
exist, and she might never meet her.

As I’d read on, I had learned more and more about my daughter and her biological mother. Ellie had, apparently, written to the clinic some years ago, when the anonymity rules changed. She’d told them that she realized she had no right to contact her genetic child, but she knew that at the age of eighteen, the child would have a right to contact her. She hoped that by letting the clinic know that she had no objection to being contacted, they could pass on her details, if ever they were requested. As simple as that. All she had to do was wait.

The manuscript informed me that ‘Sophie’ had written to the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority after her eighteenth birthday, asking if there was any information about her genetic mother and whether she had any siblings. She said that as an only child she had always been saddened by the thought she had no brothers and sisters. So she was curious to find out. Somehow the HFEA had put the two of them in touch and Ellie had found out where we lived so that she could come into our lives and fuck everything up. What was it she’d written?
 

‘I felt like my life had been stolen along with my child. I needed to know this man who had created a child with me. And when I met him I knew how much I wanted him.

And so I made up my mind I’d take the whole thing back.’

So she was here to get both Laura and Dan, to steal them from
me.
But how did Laura find out, if there were only three people in the world that knew? And was Ellie really having an affair with Dan? Were they meeting up after dark, after I’d gone to bed, Dan having plied me with some ridiculous sleeping cocktail?

Oh my God! The hot chocolate. No . . . it wasn’t possible . . . he wouldn’t . . . not Dan . . . No, the whole thing was just too daft, too crazy, too
insane.
But I didn’t know Dan any more. I didn’t know what Dan was capable of. I didn’t know he kept a locked box which contained his secret treasures, did I? My Dan wasn’t my Dan at all.

I’d thought it was strange that night – the fact that he’d woken me up to give me something to help me sleep, when I was already asleep. And then the other nights, when he was being so attentive. This was crazy. This was mad. I tried to picture Dan in the kitchen, mixing hot chocolate powder with milk while, at the same time, grinding up sleeping pills in the pestle and mortar to knock me out so that he could creep out and go have fun with Ellie. It was daft. Okay, you read it in novels, maybe even in murder trials, but not in middle England with boring middle-aged couples. Even so, I visited the medicine cabinet just to see, just to put my mind at rest. We kept all the pharmaceutical stuff in an old pine wall cupboard in the bathroom upstairs. It was one of those cupboards I kept meaning to sort out, with plasters that had lost their stickiness; leftover antibiotics that would never be any good to anyone, but which had been saved, just in case; Benylin bottles with sticky outsides; and half-finished packets of Lemsip. As I sifted through the contents there were several incomprehensible names stamped on white cardboard packaging, remnants of long-forgotten ailments. But sleeping tablets? I couldn’t remember when either of us had taken them. Although there was lots of stuff in the cupboard which was unrecognizable, there was nothing that looked remotely sinister.

Dan wouldn’t . . . I knew he wouldn’t. I closed the cupboard doors and refolded the towels on the rail, picked up the bathroom bin to empty it, and then I thought . . . ‘What if she gave them to him? What if she’d got sleeping pills and passed them to him?’

There was one more thing I needed to find out.

CHAPTER

16

‘Well you never know what the day’s going to bring, do you? What a surprise,’ my mother said.

‘What have you said to Laura?’

‘Well hello, mother dear, and how are you today?’ My mother was sitting in her usual place, the armchair in front of the window, dressed like she was going to a Tory Ladies’ Lunch.

‘I need to know. What have you told Laura?’ The smell of TCP seemed more pungent than usual.

‘About what, dear?’

‘About me. About her. You know what I mean.’ I went over to her chair. I put my hands on either side of the wings and loomed over her menacingly. I had often fantasized about killing her, but she could have no idea just how close I now was to making that fantasy a reality. ‘Tell me, mother. Just bloody tell me.’

‘Stop it!’ she shouted. ‘Stop that at once. Go and sit down this minute.’

‘No!’ I continued to hold the chair. ‘I’m not afraid of you. There’s nothing you can do to me anymore.’

‘Well it was obvious that you were never going to do it. She needed to know. I did the right thing.’

‘When did you tell her?’ I could almost feel the flesh of her throat between my fingers. I wanted so badly to squeeze that flesh, to squeeze all the breath out of her. But I let my hands slip from the chair. How was it possible that I had come from her womb? The idea repulsed me. I straightened up and took a step back so that I could see into her eyes more clearly. ‘When?’

‘When she came to see me after her eighteenth birthday. Hadn’t you always said you’d tell her then? And you didn’t. It wasn’t right that you didn’t. She had a right to know.’

‘You had no right. No right at all. You’re an evil old witch and my father knew that. That’s why he couldn’t stand to live with you anymore. He chose death, rather than carry on living with a monster like you.’

‘That’s not true. It was an accident.’

‘An accident? What do you think he was doing with a rope around his neck swinging from the garage roof? An accident? Come off it, mother. You can’t go on rewriting history because you can’t face the truth.’

‘Like you’re doing,’ she said. ‘What’s the difference? And your father loved me.’

‘Then why did he choose the ultimate way to leave you?’

‘Because I neglected him, because of
you.
Because I had to look after
you.’

‘No. Not my fault. You just made his life unbearable, like you’ve tried to do with mine, but it hasn’t worked, has it? Because I’ve had Dan and Laura. But you couldn’t bear that, so you wanted to take that away from me. You just couldn’t bear it that I should be happy.’