Daisy had no particular love for her body. It was so defiantly different from what she’d have liked it to be, with rounded everything and fat that spilled out over her size fourteen waistbands, making her move miserably on to size sixteen. But when Alex was holding her gently, and her strawberry-blonde hair streamed around her, creamy skin pillowed out below him as they tried to conceive their child, that was the only time when she felt that she was almost beautiful.
Making babies didn’t work out to be as straightforward as they’d thought, however. It was as if simply deciding to have one, instead of trying hard not to, had suddenly made pregnancy very difficult to achieve.
Magazines were full of miserable stories about declining fertility and how women were leaving it too late to conceive. Daisy hated those articles ever since the day she’d grasped the horrific news that women were born with all the eggs they were ever going to have and it was all downhill from then on.
‘You mean, we don’t make new eggs all the time?’ she asked Paula, who worked in the shop and was addicted to health websites. ‘I thought everything in the human body got replaced every seven years. I read that, I know I did,’ Daisy added anxiously.
‘No,’ said Paula cheerily. ‘You’ve got your lot, I’m afraid. When you’re thirty, so are your eggs.’
Daisy blanched at the thought of her then thirty-year-old eggs and all the things her body had been through.
Could too much alcohol affect your eggs? Think of all those mad nights in her twenties when she’d had so much to drink that she’d almost drunk herself sober. Or drugs. Remember Werner, the Austrian student friend of Alex’s who’d been very keen on smoking dope and who’d encouraged a disapproving Daisy to have a joint with the rest of them on that holiday. She’d never done drugs before, she disapproved of drugs, for heaven’s sake, but she’d been stupid and said yes, and she knew that would come back to haunt her. Stupid cow, how could she not have known about her eggs?
Paula, who was younger than Daisy, didn’t seem too worried about the state of her ovaries and the fact that she hadn’t hatched anything, so to speak.
‘Ah, sure, what’ll be will be,’ she said optimistic ally.
‘Life is not a Doris Day song,’ a little voice inside Daisy’s head raged bitterly. Aloud she said: ‘You’re dead right, Paula. It’s crazy to obsess over these things. We’re only young, after all, and there’s loads of things they can do now to help you have children.’
That thought, the thought of experiments at the cutting edge of science where people would be able to have babies without even being on the same continent as each other, kept her going.
Cutting back on caffeine didn’t kickstart Daisy’s reproductive system. Neither did eating all the so-called superfoods. The vegetable basket looked almost alive with all the green stuff in it, and Daisy did her best to cut down the glasses of wine at the weekend. But her periods came with a regularity she’d sworn wasn’t there in the days when she hadn’t wanted to get pregnant.
Still, there was time on their side, she counselled herself. They were young, healthy, successful in everything they touched.
Georgia’s Tiara became more and more prosperous. Mary gave Daisy a share in the shop.
‘I can sell ice to the Eskimos but I wouldn’t be able to sell it unless you got the right ice,’ Mary said firmly. ‘You’ve put so much effort and energy into this business, you deserve to be a partner.’
Daisy had covered her mouth with her hands like a child. ‘Mary, I can’t believe it. You’re so good to me.’
‘Nonsense.’ Brisk was Mary’s middle name. ‘You’re so good to me, and for the shop. Running a business is second nature to me but I could spend a month of Sundays trying to learn what you do, and I’d still never manage it.’
Buoyed up by this – even her mother would have to say she was doing well – Daisy decided that she wasn’t pregnant because the time wasn’t right. It was like that old Buddhist saying: when the student is ready, the master will appear. She obviously wasn’t ready. Career women had so much trouble balancing kids and work that it was probably easier at this point in her life not to have a child. Then, after a year of baby-making, Alex became sick. It seemed incredible that it had taken so long to get a diagnosis and they had gone through the seven valleys of hell before they’d found out what it was. Even now, Daisy quaked at the thought of what it could have been. She and Alex had suspected leukaemia. Now, she always put money in collection tins that had anything to do with cancer as if to ward off the evil.
But the bugbear had been Epstein Barr, an autoimmune disorder that turned normally energetic people into wrecks. Hard to detect and even harder to cure, the illness had taken its toll on both Alex and Daisy. Baby-making had not been on the agenda then, but it was at the back of Daisy’s mind constantly, the sense of time passing slowly and of her elderly eggs getting even older. She also worried, although she would never say it, that Alex’s illness was part of the problem.
And now they’d come out of the fire, together. For the past two years, Alex had been healthy and said he felt great. She felt great. She was going to get pregnant. It was her time, time to find out why she wasn’t conceiving, if there was a problem with Alex’s sperm due to the Epstein Barr, and to do something about it. The student was ready.
Standing in front of the mirror in their bedroom on a dark Sunday afternoon, Daisy said it out loud: ‘I’m ready. I’m ready to get pregnant. Now.’
Nothing happened. No thunderbolt from on high to tell her that God was listening, no rustling of curtains to tell her that her guardian angel was hovering and would do his or her best.
There was no sign, just as there had never been any sign before.
‘Alex, I want us to have tests to find out what’s wrong. We can’t afford to wait any longer. I’m getting older and…’ Daisy’s monologue to the mirror trailed off. She didn’t want to tell the mirror – she wanted to tell Alex, and now.
She’d spent the weekend thinking of nothing else because, with Alex away, she had lots of time to reflect. He was in London with a group of investors on what he described as a ‘bank hooley’, where good food and expensive wine were laid on to help lubricate people’s cheque books.
Although she hated being alone, his being away gave Daisy a chance to catch up on all the boring household chores, like cleaning the oven before it went up in flames. The oven now gleamed, thanks to much scrubbing on Saturday. But the wardrobe tidying had proved to be a bit of a marathon task.
She’d kept some of her ‘fat’ clothes for when she was pregnant. That silky sweater from Italy, the flowing Pucci shirt, they’d look lovely over a pregnant belly. Daisy had such plans for being a fashionable pregnant woman and now, faced with these clothes and no use for them in sight, her heart ached.
By five on Sunday afternoon, as she turned the bedroom lights on, Daisy realised she’d like nothing better than an early dinner in front of the box, but she still had to put away loads of clothes. At least fifty per cent of everything she owned was in heaps on the floor.
She was holding up a sweater – black, and expensive, so how could she get rid of it, even though it didn’t really suit her? – when the phone rang.
‘Alex, hello.’ Daisy sank onto his side of the bed, cradling the phone into her shoulder, her voice softening with love. ‘How are you? Miss you, you know.’
‘I know, Daisy. But I’ll be home tomorrow evening.’ From his businesslike tone, it was clear that he wasn’t alone.
‘Can’t talk, huh? No problem. How’s it going?’ she asked, suppressing the slightest tinge of irritation that he hadn’t slipped away from the group for a moment to phone her privately. He was on his mobile, it seemed, and she hated those brusque ‘All fine here, how are you?’ conversations.
‘All