‘Oh, I see! Sorry, sorry.’ He stopped pressing and looked at her. ‘I think we’re going to do it. I think it’s going to work.’
‘So do I.’
He pressed again and the locks lifted with a satisfying click.
After a week and a half of using a nasal spray containing a drug to ‘shut down her system’ as they put it, Juliet started the course of injections which was to stimulate her ovaries and start her on the journey towards egg collection. She was offered the choice of going to her own GP for the injections, going to the clinic daily or even letting Michael administer them, but she had chosen to go to the clinic, loving the feeling of having something positive to do every day, and each time looking forward to the contact with the nurses who were always happy to answer questions patiently and discuss the thrilling subjects of pregnancy and birth over and over again for as long as she wished. She went every day at eight-thirty in the morning before going to work. She would chat to other women undergoing treatment, some of them into their third or fourth try, and sometimes she would feel panic at the thought that this might be her in a year or two’s time, growing ever older and more desperate, nearer every minute to the watershed of forty, and then reaching it and passing on to the downhill slope that would lead further and further from any hope of success. But on the whole it was comforting to be with others who understood and who had already been through the processes that still lay ahead of her.
Every day she was ushered into a small room subdivided by screens and she became quickly accustomed to watching the ritual of her treatment. The top of a glass ampoule would be broken off, the clear liquid it contained sucked up into a syringe, squirted back into a second ampoule of white powder which dissolved instantaneously, then sucked up again before a new needle was attached and plunged into her buttock where the magic liquid was slowly pushed into the waiting muscle. Then after a few minutes relaxing she would set off for the office, feeling better for being filled with a mysterious substance which would work silently inside her body, bringing the fantasy of the baby ever closer to reality.
As the days passed she began to feel quite bloated, and imagined huge sacs of eggs ever expanding inside her.
‘I’m like a chicken, Hattie. If only I could just lay one of the bloody things and let it hatch in one of those incubators.’
‘How do they know when you’ll be ready?’
‘When I’m ripe you mean?’ Only with Hattie could she joke so lightly about this most important of all possible events in her life. With Michael it was too fragile, too serious to discuss in any but the most hushed and reverential of tones, and it was a relief to be having lunch with her friend again in one of their familiar haunts in Kensington, smiling over the lasagne and chatting about eggs and babies as if it were no different from discussing the weather or the government; just much more interesting.
‘They scan me every few days to see how they’re doing. More jellied eyes. I’m getting quite used to it.’
‘And how’s Michael?’
‘Oh, he’s fine. He’s terribly worked up about it, of course. He thinks it doesn’t show, but I can feel his tension zinging about inside him. To tell you the truth it really irritates me sometimes.’ Juliet leant forward over the pink-clothed table. ‘I mean it’s not as if he’s got to do anything but just wait – I’m the one who feels like a battery hen. And who has things stuck up her all the time.’
‘Don’t knock it, darling.’ Harriet raised her eyebrows. ‘Some of us could do with a bit more of that, I can tell you.’
‘Oh no, you’re not pulling that one on me! It’s the most unpleasant experience and even you couldn’t possibly find anything remotely sexy in it at all. Much more fun to produce them the way you did. Michael and I haven’t had it for weeks now. It’s really weird – all those times we were so careful when we were going out together; we’d have given anything not to have had to worry about condoms and all that, and now that there’s no need, it – well, sex just doesn’t seem to have any point somehow.’
‘Mmm. I guess so.’ Harriet took another swig of her wine, covering up the old familiar wince she felt at the reference to love-making with Peter. He had called her the previous night to talk about Adam’s problems at school, and she had hated hearing the television on in the background, unable to stop herself picturing Lauren’s horribly long legs tucked up on the sofa while she watched News at Ten; Lauren’s large, long-lashed eyes fixed on the screen; Lauren’s perfect pink ears half aware of her lover on the phone to his old, discarded, sagging wife.
Professor Hewlett was studying Juliet’s latest scan report and smiled up at her. ‘Well, Mrs Evans, we’re ready.’
How strange it is, thought Juliet idly, that this man who has looked up, through and round me still doesn’t feel he knows me well enough to call me by my Christian name.
‘Oh good. So when do I—’
‘Right, this is what happens. I’ll make an appointment for you to come in tomorrow morning with your husband. We’ll give you a very light anaesthetic and pop you under for a little while. Collect as many decent eggs as we can and introduce them to your husband’s sperm, and then it’s over to Nature for a bit. It’s a very minor procedure and you’ll feel absolutely fine once you’ve woken up and had a cup of tea.’
It was a particularly beautiful October day; after a brief shower the sky had cleared and as the taxi took them up through Hyde Park the sun caught the few wet leaves still hanging on the trees in glints of liquid gold that were almost dazzling. Juliet had taken trouble with her hair and make-up and was wearing a cream jumper under a tan wool suit that, set against the yellow of her hair, echoed the autumnal colours around them. Michael glanced across at her and saw how good-looking she was. The lines beginning to settle into her skin around her eyes and mouth seemed merely to add to her beauty, giving her face a look of thoughtfulness and weariness that made him long to stop the car, take her in his arms and squeeze the unhappiness out of her until nothing remained but the carefree young girl he had first met. But he too sensed the solemnity and significance of the occasion and had put on one of his best dark suits and the blue patterned silk tie Juliet had given him the previous Christmas, as if the indignity ahead of him could be mitigated by an appearance of ordered formality.
They hadn’t wanted to bring the car, not knowing how long they would have to be, and not trusting to their hitherto good luck in finding a nearby parking space. The taxi dropped them off on the corner of Wimpole Street and Weymouth Street and they walked the few yards to the door of the clinic. Although the building was familiar after Juliet’s many visits for her injections, today it felt different and somehow threatening, and her physical discomfort added to her feeling of unease. Her abdomen felt more bloated than ever, and it frustrated her to carry round what felt like a grossly distended belly and to look down on herself and see a shape only fractionally more rounded than her usual flat contour. The feeling of fullness that she had longed for more than anything in the world was a sham – and to know she was filled not with a baby, but with a chemically induced swelling of her ovaries made it all the harder to bear. On the way there, she had found herself noticing, as she always did, just how many prams and pregnant women they passed on the way. The world seemed to be entirely populated by successfully fertilised females, and she could swear they smiled at her mockingly as she stared at them out of the taxi window. They seemed to belong to a club that was at one and the same time exclusive yet – for everyone but herself – easy to enter.
‘Come with me now, Mrs Evans. The big day, eh?’ Juliet was pleased when Janet’s friendly face appeared round the waiting-room door. The friendly Irish girl was her favourite nurse, and she was relieved to find her on duty. ‘I’ll take you through to change, my dear, and Mr Evans – can you go and do your duty upstairs now?’
Juliet was whisked away and Michael was ushered