By the end of the cycle, Lori had produced a worryingly high number of eggs, so high that she was at risk of something the doctors called ‘hyperstimulation’, a possibly fatal condition. They could not attempt to implant any embryos into Lori this time. She’d have to wait three months for another cycle.
Ben had never seen wild grief like Lori’s. He buried his own pain inside him as he tried to soothe her.
‘You don’t understand what it’s like for me,’ she sobbed night after night, as she opened a bottle of wine to try to numb the pain.
That was when Ben felt totally useless. He wanted children too; he wanted Lori’s children, but the pain of failed baby-making was seen as an exclusively female pain. What about a man’s pain? What about being denied the chance to be a father?
The next two cycles, when frozen embryos were implanted into Lori, failed – and cost them all their savings. Then came the miracle: Lori’s great-aunt Janet died and left her a house in Ardagh, a small commuter town outside Dublin. The house was a picturesque two-storey house on Johnson’s Lane, a country road where they had neighbours on only one side, a pair of sweet, elderly ladies.
They thought about selling the Ardagh house, but it was old, and needed renovation. They’d get more money if they sold their own house and moved to Ardagh, thereby freeing up cash for more infertility treatment.
It would mean a longer commute to their jobs in the city, but it would be worth it.
‘It will happen,’ Lori said confidently when their house finally sold. ‘This was all meant to be: Aunt Janet dying, our getting the house – it’s meant to be. It’s like a journey and we had to travel this far to reach the point where our dreams come true.’
She’d looked so beautiful, smiling at him, as young and happy as the girl he’d fallen in love with in London.
‘Let’s go out to lunch to celebrate,’ she went on. ‘A day like today needs a glass of champagne to celebrate the future.’
Ben had felt a frisson of fear then at her utter confidence: there were no guarantees in life or in fertility treatment. Nobody knew for sure. They might spend every penny they had and end up with nothing. But he couldn’t explain this to Lori. It was as if she was living for this dream and without it, she’d crumble. He was worried enough about her as it was.
She was drinking more and more to help her cope with it all and a longer commute meant, Ben hoped, that Lori would no longer be able to party with her colleagues from work. Partying meant drinking, and while Ben could understand his wife’s need to numb her pain with a couple of glasses of wine, she was going out more and more since the failure of the last cycle. And drinking more and more too.
The city was the problem, Ben had decided. Away from the bars, the nightlife and all her old friends from work, it would be like it had been when they were first married. There would be no more slurred phone calls at nine o’clock with Lori saying, ‘Just dropped into the pub with a few pals, I’ve only had two drinks, honestly.’
She never had two drinks. Two drinks per bar, perhaps. But Lori never stopped at two. Ben had read a detective novel once where a virus called a chimera infiltrated a person and changed them utterly.
Lori was like a chimera, the many-sided beast. He never knew which version he was going to get. Sometimes, she’d come home and she’d be the smiling Lori, the one he remembered from London all those years ago before infertility had taken over their life. She’d laugh and hug him joyously, saying, ‘We had such fun! They all wanted to go dancing, but I said no, I had to come home to you, love.’
The muscle in the side of his jaw would stop tensing quite so much. He could handle this Lori, just about. She’d giggle and want to eat crisps or something else they didn’t have in the house. Eventually, she’d grow sleepy and he’d put her to bed, undressing her slowly. The sleepy times were the best. He could almost imagine it was his old wife, the one he married.
Then were nights when she came home in a rage. He’d never discovered precisely what she’d drunk. It probably didn’t matter. Wine versus tequila wasn’t the issue. Something would have set her off; some small thing in her work day: a pregnant woman, an angry customer. And then the rage would emerge, a rage that Lori could apparently only assuage with alcohol.
He got into the habit of talking to her mother every day. It was strange how Yvonne became the person he phoned. He was almost too frightened to phone Lori at work on her mobile. Except on those days when she was guilty and sorry, promising never to do it again.
‘I’m so sorry, Ben,’ she’d cry. ‘I don’t know how you still love me, I don’t know why you stay with me. I’m so horrible. I’ll never, ever do it again.’
There would follow a week of not drinking, a week of Lori coming home on time and making lovely dinners, being the perfect homemaker. Until the next time.
Yvonne, Lori’s mother, seemed to understand.
Yvonne said she’d seen her daughter drunk at too many family get-togethers recently: not falling-down drunk, but the subtle glassiness of the secret drinker who’d been filling her own glass with vodka steadily throughout the evening.
One night at such an event, Ben and Yvonne had helped Lori up the stairs to her old bedroom and the subject had been broached. Ben said he knew that a problem drinker did not need to have lost their job and be living in a cardboard box to be an alcoholic.
‘What should we do?’ asked Yvonne that night, her face drawn and her eyes wet with tears.
Ben shrugged helplessly. ‘I don’t know,’ he said.
That had been nearly six months ago, not long after the move to Ardagh, the move he’d hoped would change it all.
Today, Ben made his daily phone call to his mother-in-law.
‘How is she today?’ Yvonne asked.
Ben could hear trepidation in her voice. He’d grown to hate theirs.
‘Fine today,’ Ben said.
He kept his voice low. Nobody in the marketing department knew what was going on in his life. They thought, laughably, that he had it all: stunning wife, lovely new home in a beautiful town, promotions on the way, no doubt. Life’s biggest irony, Ben thought: there could be such a vast difference between the outer picture and the inner one. If only they knew.
‘We’re going into the clinic on Friday for a consultation about the next cycle,’ he told Yvonne. ‘She never drinks before that. They do so many blood tests. I think she’s afraid of what they’ll find in hers and take us off the programme.’
‘Maybe that’s the answer,’ Yvonne said, startling him. ‘Tell them she drinks every time she’s not on an IVF cycle. Alcohol is definitely a factor in fertility.’
‘She wasn’t drinking that heavily until the last few months,’ Ben protested.
There was an ominous silence on the other end of the phone.
‘She was,’ Yvonne said, so softly Ben wondered if he’d imagined it. ‘She always drank too much, even as a teenager. Her father used to too, but he’s stopped.’
‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ he said, stunned.
‘I was afraid you’d leave her,’ Yvonne whispered. ‘She needs you. I thought if we shocked her with being thrown off the IVF programme, she might stop.’
Ben left work early that day and drove home towards the rolling Wicklow hills and Ardagh. As he drove, he thought of the years he’d known Lori and how he’d never noticed her drinking more than anyone else. He liked the odd glass of wine, but that was it. True, Lori liked to have an open bottle of white in the fridge, but he didn’t see how she could have been drinking without his knowing. Surely