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.
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.
When Nick and I moved here, I wanted to be just like them, but in the past few weeks, the L.K.Bennett riding boots I’d bought on Northcote Road had started to pinch a little.
My thoughts were distracted by the sight of Victoria’s three-year-old Boden-clad daughter marching out of their front gate, followed by an exhausted-looking woman who I presumed to be the latest au pair.
‘Morning, Camille,’ I said, grinning at the little girl a tad overzealously.
She looked me up and down and frowned. It was as though she could sense I wasn’t biologically qualified to be communicating with her. Then she scooted off, her little ponytail swinging briskly. I watched her for a while, then made my way to the station, dodging stylishly swathed pregnant bellies and designer buggies.
I arrived at the Canary Wharf office with a large latte in hand. It felt good to be able to pollute my body again without the potential of embryo toxicity bearing down on my conscience. I pushed open the double doors to reception and took a deep breath. My role as CEO may have been usurped by the venture capitalist’s grandson, Dominic, who’d apparently learned everything there was to know about romantic love at Harvard Business School, but what truly mattered was that the dating agency I had conceived seven years ago was now an international corporation. Matthew might believe my motives were questionable, but over the years I had helped thousands of people find love. I took another sip of coffee and smiled. If that wasn’t a legacy worth leaving then what was?
‘Afternoon, Eleanor,’ Dominic said in his I’m-American-in-case-you-wondered accent. Then he slammed a file onto my desk. ‘Meeting’s in five.’
I gulped down the rest of my latte and leafed through the file, which contained the minutes and action points of the last investor meeting. My smile faded. I pushed it to one side and then switched on my computer, so I could at least reply to a few emails before the investors arrived.
Ten more franchise enquiries. One from Korea.
Matchmaking in Korea? I wondered. Surely they had more pressing things to worry about.
Then one from Victoria and her unnecessarily double-barrelled surname.
Subject title: FW: New hope for IVF-resistant couples.
I deleted it. Then I glanced at my phone. Nick had called five times. I dropped my phone back down on the desk. I knew it was cruel to extend his two-minute wait to an entire day, but I’d decided that a statement such as ‘You have no hope of ever being a father, unless you substitute me for a fresh-follicled twenty-something or we find a psychologically unhinged surrogate on the internet’ was probably best delivered
