W
hat kind of a man did that? What kind of a man waited until the woman he professed to love was forty-one, and had started taking her folic acid supplements, before telling her it was all over, he had got a research post in Italy, and he had no intention of taking her with him? Not that she would have necessarily gone if he’d given her the choice, because she had her own career, but she would have liked to have been given the option.
But there was no option. Eight years eradicated in the blink of an eye. And the pain of realising that the man you had hoped would be the father of your child wasn’t the person you thought he was. That he was selfish, deceitful and arrogant. And cruel. Almost inhumanely cruel. In the event, Helena was grateful that she hadn’t got pregnant by Neal, because she wouldn’t have wanted a child of hers to inherit the capacity to hurt someone even half as much as she had been hurt.
She had watched him pack his things up in their flat, and had been astonished by the cold and calculating manner in which he had divided up everything they had bought jointly. In the end, she told him to take the lot. What was the point in having three espresso cups each? He might as well have the whole set in his Florentine apartment: she couldn’t remember the last time they’d used them anyway. Who made posh coffee at home when you had Starbucks? Besides, she was grateful for a clean slate. She would go and buy everything new, as part of the therapeutic process. It wasn’t as if she couldn’t afford it.
Which was, she suspected, where the problem lay. Her success, her status, her prestige. His male ego simply couldn’t take it. She was a cardiothoracic consultant at a big hospital in Bristol. He was an artist, with a chaotic studio he shared with another load of artists in the backstreets of Totterdown. OK, so maybe producing enormous canvases smothered in thick oil in seventeen shades of grey wasn’t on a par with giving someone the gift of life several times a day, but Helena had never thought any less of Neal because of it. The world needed art and culture as much as it needed life-saving surgery. It would be a bleak and empty place without it.
Whatever the reason for his flit, she hadn’t been able to talk him out of it. She had raged, she had wept, she had tried to assume a calm and reasonable tone and discuss it like an adult, but he was adamant. He barely gave her a reason: it seemed he didn’t want to justify his decision with a rational explanation, just a blanket statement that it was for the best.
On his last night, she had tried to seduce him. He was always putty in her hands in bed. Maybe, just maybe, she would get pregnant, although she knew it was a little too early on in her cycle. They hadn’t officially tried yet - she had only been off the pill three months, she had wanted time to let the supplements kick in before conceiving. But he had resisted her advances. Never, ever in their entire relationship had he turned down sex. It broke her completely. Her staff would have been astonished to see the mighty Helena Dickinson - goddess, role model, ruler of the CT ward with a rod of iron - on her knees, sobbing like a baby, begging him to think again.
What on earth had she done to deserve it? It wasn’t as if he’d found out she’d been banging the director of the health trust, or selling the organs of dead patients for profit. Their relationship had been symbiotic. Passionate. Fun. Fulfilling. Easy, for heaven’s sake. They rarely argued over trivial matters - though they did engage in heated debate about things that were important to them.
Was it because she was too old? She was aware of the age gap. She was a woman - of course she was. Although Helena came across as sexy, confident, sure of herself, there were still times when she looked in the mirror and wondered where that fresh-faced medical student had gone. She bought ridiculously expensive creams to keep the wrinkles at bay. She exercised religiously to stop middle-aged spread. She had the grey in her hair covered professionally and regularly. As a result, to the casual observer she looked no older than Neal’s thirty-seven, but maybe he saw the cracks. Maybe he’d had a glimpse into the near future and didn’t like what he saw.
She didn’t want to think this was the reason. She would go mad if she did. No one knew this, but Helena’s appearance was her Achilles heel - surprisingly superficial for one who had achieved so much. She hid her insecurity well, because it didn’t really suit the image she had constructed for herself, but nevertheless she watched herself like a hawk for signs of deterioration, and addressed them with whatever weapon she could find, although she had yet to resort to surgery.
Instead, she told herself it was Neal’s fear of how a baby would affect their relationship that had made him bolt. His inability to be mature enough to face fatherhood, because Neal was effectively a child himself. Although they had discussed it at length, and reached the decision to try for a baby together, he must have had some objection that he couldn’t voice. It wasn’t uncommon for a man to get cold feet about recreating. Helena had been through the experience with enough of her colleagues to know that they came round in the end and became doting fathers. Try as she might, she couldn’t get Neal to admit that this was the problem.
‘Then what is it?’ she pleaded.
‘I don’t know. I can’t explain. But it’s not you. It’s me.’
Great. The most frustrating platitude of all time. Of course it was her.
Nevertheless, Helena didn’t miss a beat. She drove him to the airport, bought him a copy of
Status Anxiety
by Alain de Botton from the bookshop, kissed him, watched him disappear through the gate in his battered corduroy jacket and jeans, his dark curls touching the collar, and tried not to imagine who would be the next person to run her fingers through them. She sobbed all the way back in the car, then stopped at John Lewis and bought a new set of hideously expensive bed linen, china, glasses, a teak salad bowl with matching servers, a food mixer, a massive chenille floor rug - totally schizophrenic retail therapy, and so much that she had to arrange to have it delivered the next day, but it might all replace the lack of Neal in the atmosphere. By the time she got home she was calm. She poured herself a glass of champagne and sank onto the sofa to decide what she was going to do next.
If she sat quietly enough, she was sure she could hear her body clock ticking, like the crocodile in
Peter Pan
. Of course, she only had herself to blame for leaving it so late. It was her bloody ambition, her drive to succeed, her desperate need to get to the top. All the time she had been working all the hours God sent and scrambling up the career ladder she had ignored the little voice inside that had told her to stop, take a break, get things into perspective and think about what she wanted as a woman rather than a doctor. And when she had finally listened to that voice, her partner of eight years had let her down.
Helena Dickinson had run out of time.
Just over a month later, she was sitting in the sunshine on the balcony of a beach hut at Everdene Sands, her feet up on the railing, taking in the magnificent view. It wasn’t the sparkling sea that interested her so much as the people in it, the black blobs that were lurking behind the wave line ready to catch a ride into shore. She smiled as she wondered if one of these would be the suitable candidate, the one she would choose.
It was, she knew, a daring, audacious, madcap, slightly crazy plan, and one she hadn’t shared with anyone else, because anyone with a scrap of common sense would have talked her out of it. But Helena had thought through her options, viewing the issue from all sides and giving it as much care and consideration as she did the treatment of any of her patients. She weighed up the pros and cons, the ethics, the risks, the alternatives. She was known on the ward as a bit of a maverick, the consultant who would take the risky option, the one who was prepared to be experimental, and she was simply following this through from her professional to her private life. And to her, the plan made perfect sense.
She wanted someone to father a child. Quickly. There was no time to embark on a relationship - it could take weeks, months, even years to reach the stage where she and a partner would agree on procreation. And she’d thought and thought about it but she just didn’t fancy the idea of a donor. She wanted some sort of human contact with the father of her baby and besides, although she knew the ethics of the donation industry were pretty watertight, she still couldn’t be sure that whatever characteristics she requested weren’t overlooked, or that someone else’s wish-list might be mixed up with hers, or that one of the lab technicians might be having an off day and might think ‘That one will do’, lobbing an unsuitable match into the Petri dish.
So she was going to pick up a stranger. Sleep with them. Anonymously, so that if she did become pregnant and have their child, they would never know. After all, this was a journey she was quite prepared to travel alone. Helena had always been independent, and she certainly wasn’t scared of being a single mother. She earned a good salary, there was an excellent crèche at the hospital, and at least that way she would get her own way over all the usual dilemmas, from whether to give the MMR jabs onwards. In fact, she thought being a single parent was far easier than trying to negotiate your relationship through sleepless nights and projectile vomiting. She’d seen even the most solid of partnerships buckle under the strain.
Of course, it wasn’t ideal, but her situation wasn’t ideal. Ideal would have been Neal sticking round long enough for her at least to conceive, even if he had then done a bunk. Helena was used to weighing things up quickly and making an informed decision, and this one had been easier than a lot of the decisions she had to make on behalf of her patients, because at least she knew her own mind and wasn’t second-guessing what someone might want, or what was the best thing to do for them.
The only slight guilt she felt was on behalf of whoever she chose as the potential father. Would it be wrong to keep from them the fact they had a child? She overcame this by assuring herself that they would never know. Her mother had been fond of saying, ‘What the eye don’t see, the heart don’t grieve over’, and Helena wasn’t going to deprive herself of the opportunity to have a child just because of the sensibilities of someone who wouldn’t have a clue anyway.
And so, having overcome all the moral issues in her own mind, there only remained the practical question of where to find a donor. The hospital was out of the question. Tempting though it was to select a medical student or a registrar, it was too close to home. The chances of having to work with the father of her child in the future were too high. Besides, Helena knew enough about genetics to know that you didn’t breed like with like. She didn’t want her child to be highly strung and overbred. More than anything, given the job she was in, she wanted it to be physically strong.
Hitting on Everdene as her hunting ground had been inspired. She’d been there frequently when she was a registrar at the hospital in Exeter, more years ago than she cared to remember. She remembered it as a happy, positive place where the sun always seemed to shine, and, she recalled with a grin, it was populated with any number of hunky surfers. And surfers were usually fit, intrepid, with a sense of adventure. They might not be rocket scientists but their philosophy of life was usually a positive one, and their qualities set off her more cerebral attributes. A surfer, Helena decided, would be the perfect sire.
And so here she was, in the beach hut she had rented for a week to coincide with her most fertile period. She felt relaxed as soon as she arrived. The atmosphere was so laid-back, in total contrast to the atmosphere of the hospital where every second of her day was timetabled. Here she could eat when she liked, sleep when she liked, read what she liked - her time was her own and no one else’s. It didn’t belong to a fellow consultant, or an anxious patient, or an over-conscientious nurse, or the infinite paperwork that went with the job. Helena was practised at teaching herself to switch off, and she knew that if she wanted to conceive it was of the utmost importance not to be uptight and tense.
You couldn’t be tense here. She looked out at the perfect curve of the beach, the pale green of the burrows behind it and the darker green of the hills behind them. The sea, which changed every moment, unfurling every shade of blue (she tried not to think of Neal and his painter’s eye when she looked at it). The lightest breeze danced on her skin. The sun caressed her with a gentle warmth. She stretched out with a sensual languor and reached down to the platter of mango, pineapple and melon she had cut for herself.
She wasn’t going to think too hard about what she was about to do. It was like any physical challenge: the more you intellectualised it, the more you saw the potential hazards and the less likely you were to do it. Like abseiling, or skiing, or diving off the top board, she wasn’t going to look down, she was just going to jump.
Besides, just driving through the tiny village and down to the car park that served the beach huts had convinced her she was doing the right thing. Everywhere she looked there were broad-shouldered, toned, fit young men, boards under their arms, striding out towards the waves. OK, so not all of them were prime specimens, but there were plenty to choose from.
She waited until the sun started to drift downwards towards the sea before making her move. She remembered the sunsets here as being spectacular, and tonight’s was no exception, washing the sky in extraordinary pinks and oranges and golds that didn’t seem real. Once again she was sharply reminded of Neal - no matter how strict she was with herself he still sneaked back into her mind uninvited, and she had to harden her heart, reminding herself of the cruelly trenchant position he had taken.
The sun was just kissing the horizon, a gilded ball of salmon pink, as she got herself ready. She pulled on a pair of faded boot-cut jeans with high black ankle boots, then added a belt with a big silver buckle and a tight white T-shirt. Her breasts were still pert, aided and abetted by an uplifting Aubade bra, her legs were long, her waist narrow. She didn’t look like a CT consultant, more like the wife of some seventies rock icon, with her choppy blond bob and glacial blue eyes. There was no full-length mirror in the hut she had rented, so she had to hope for the best, but she was fairly confident of her ability to attract the opposite sex.