I wanted to do anything and everything I could to chivvy along the process. I took folic acid, I started to meditate, I stopped drinking altogether. Simon picked up the slack. Instead of sharing a bottle over a meal, he started to polish one off on his own. I didn’t mind, he was funny and relaxed when drunk. I’m not saying he was usually uptight, but he is quite a reserved man in some ways. Most comfortable in a one-to-one situation.
On our second anniversary I suggested he too might like to stop drinking. That maybe we needed to go back to the doctors and get some tests done. He agreed to the tests.
They examined my fertility first. I don’t know why, maybe because medically women are more often the cause for concern, or maybe it’s just sexist. I wasn’t surprised when the tests came back and said I was to blame for our problems. I had fibroids: non-cancerous, oestrogen-dependent benign tumours, growing in my uterus. These tumours cause pelvic pain and heavy menstrual bleeding. They can also cause infertility. It was recommended that I have a myomectomy to remove them. We did that, another two years passed, we still didn’t get pregnant, so we saw another doctor. She recommended that they run some tests on Simon too. I couldn’t believe it when the results came back. He also had problems. Sluggish and poor-quality sperm. We were both to blame.
It was a very difficult time. It seemed that we looked at one another in a slightly different light. I didn’t want to, but I found myself thinking he was a little less perfect, not quite so golden; I realised that he’d probably been thinking as much about me for a while.
My story, our story, is not particular or peculiar. Everyone knows someone who has struggled with infertility. The very regularity of the story is a tragedy. We started IVF shortly after our fifth wedding anniversary. It takes its toll. I think any couple who has been through it would agree. When we’d been trying to conceive naturally we’d still had a bit of fun, we’d tried different positions, we’d had lots of sex. IVF was not fun. There’s no sex involved – well, other than the thing Simon had to do into a pot. I don’t think jerking off to porn counts as sex after the age of about fourteen.
I can’t bear being in this room. True, we have never visited Dr Martell before, but we’ve been to enough similar clinics that it makes me feel tired and sad. I reach over to Millie and brush her hair out of her eyes with my hand. I want to lean into her, cover her in kisses, but I resist. I have to try very hard not to smother her in love. There’s such a thing as too much. She’s confident, content, happy practicing her points. I leave her to it.
When we were going through IVF, I started to think of my body as the enemy. As I mentioned, I’ve never had the sort of body that filled me with pride, but it had, up until the infertility point, been functional. I’m not often sick, I’ve never broken a bone, but suddenly it was failing me. Even after four financially and emotionally costly bouts of IVF, my body failed me.
People kept telling me that I should think about something else. ‘Don’t worry, it will happen!’ my friend Connie would say cheerfully. She’d then tell me a story about someone she’d known for years who had given up trying altogether when bang, it happened, she conceived. My mum kept telling me to, ‘Take up a hobby. Forget about this business for a while.’ Rose suggested a holiday. ‘Relax!’
They meant well.
Simon and I would smile, nod, agree. We didn’t point out that we didn’t have any spare cash to spend on a holiday, repeated rounds of IVF had cleaned out our savings. Rather than taking up hobbies, we were giving them up. Simon played less golf, he’d left his club, the fees were expensive. He said he’d go back to it, but it never happened. It was put on hold. Many things were. We were in limbo. Waiting. The advice was hollow, irritating. Alone together, Simon and I didn’t bother to pretend to believe in it. Simon knew my cycle as well as I did. On the day my period was due our house was awash with a terrible expectancy and fear. When I came on, which I did with cruel regularity, I’d simply say, ‘Not this month’, and he’d say, ‘Next time.’ Neither of us believed him.
At that point I think we were close to giving up, not only on conceiving, but maybe even on our marriage too. Wanting something that much is damaging. Longing nudges so easily into despair. I didn’t know what to do. I was prepared to do anything.
But then everything changed. It happened, just when I thought I had no more reserves of hope. Millie was a miracle. Conceived without any medical intervention.
A miracle. She saved us.
Habit meant that Simon glanced around the office with an interior designer’s eye. He could see where the exorbitant consultancy fees were going. Dr Martell sat behind a huge mahogany desk with a superb, mellow antique patina. It wasn’t his specialist area, but Simon would date the desk at about 1880. French. It was well figured with a brass inlay, brass mouldings and beadings and shallow bun feet. You wouldn’t get much change from £3,000. Behind Dr Martell was row after impressive row of expensive-looking shelves that housed fat, daunting leather-bound medical books. Simon would bet money on them being first editions in many cases. The floor was a polished parquet, his trainers landed on a rich, woollen Persian rug. It was of incredible quality; all the natural dyes had held their exquisite jewel colours. The pile was thick and soft; it was like stepping on velvet. It was about the same age as the desk. You didn’t step on a Saruk Ferahan rug in the NHS, thought Simon. The doctor stood up, shook hands and then gestured towards one of the two seats that were placed side by side, facing across the desk.
‘Your wife joining us?’ The consultant’s voice tolled like a bell announcing his expensive education at Westminster, then Cambridge.
‘She’s just out there with our daughter. We didn’t want to bring Millie in here.’
The doctor nodded, an efficient bob of the head; he understood and didn’t want to spend any more time on the matter. He opened the file on the desk and started talking.
Simon had heard a lot of the words before. They burnt his ears; the heat of the sting hadn’t gone away even after all these years. Even after Millie. Asthenospermia, motility, zona pellucida binding. He had been quite good at science at school, but he quickly became lost. He was trying to concentrate, although annoyingly he found he was drifting in and out, hearing the words but not absolutely one hundred per cent making sense of them. Not quite able to string them together. This did happen to him from time to time. Occasionally in client meetings, after a lunchtime jar, or when Daisy was telling him something about his mother. He didn’t mean to lose track. It just happened. Percentage motile concentration, average path velocity, non-progressive motility. He wanted to get to the bit where the doctor asked if he had any questions, because he did. One. ‘Would there be another miracle?’ That was all that mattered, that cut through all these big words and small percentages.
Non-progressive motility though? That couldn’t be good. It had the damning prefix ‘non’. The doctor continued to intone, Simon reminded himself just how much this consultation had cost and redoubled his efforts to concentrate, to take it in.
‘It is estimated that one in twenty men has some kind of fertility problem with low numbers of sperm in his ejaculate. However, only about one in every one hundred men has no