“This is Eloise,” says James, taking a seat at the opposite end of the room from her. “She started renting a space at the studio last month.” Eloise is petite, with a pierced septum. She’s wearing a fifties-style rock ’n’ roll skirt.
“Hi,” she says, sipping from a can of premixed piña colada.
I sit on the carpet near James and watch him shuffle Scrabble tiles around on his rack. I can see a six-letter word (onward) that would bag him the triple word score, but he won’t let me help. It’s right there, I want to shout, right there in front of you. He plays the word down for eight points. Two turns later, Eloise gets the triple word score with offal. Forty-one points.
Later, when everyone has gone, I stand at the sink with my back to James. “She seems nice,” I say, as I wash glasses. “Have you known her long?”
James takes the bottles to the front door for recycling. “A few weeks,” he calls. “She was based at a studio in Newquay, but they closed down. I’ve been following her on Instagram for a while. She specialises in Polynesian blackwork. She’s good.” He comes back into the kitchen.
I empty a couple of bowls of leftover crisps into the sink.
“When’s your next dive? This bin bag is overflowing.”
“August.” I turn to face James, forcing a smile. “That gives us two more months before I go. Two attempts.”
“You’re in the mood?”
“Let’s go to bed,” I say, with conviction.
James stares at the crisps clogging up the plughole. I can see that he’s having to exercise great willpower to leave the sink as it is. “Right. Great. Let’s go.”
We shut Cola in the back room, which is something we’ve started to do when we have sex. The whining and snuffling is off-putting. It upsets Cola to hear James like that. That’s a joke that comes into my head as we walk upstairs.
James closes the bedroom curtains. I wish he wouldn’t do that. It really underlines the point that it’s just the two of us that have to make this thing happen. No distractions. No input. No help.
We kiss. There’s a smell that James has that I’m not keen on. I’ve tried to get him to wear aftershave, clean his teeth, eat more fruit, drink less coffee. None of it makes a difference. It’s his natural odour. Coffee and garlic. He says that I smell of rosemary and roast chicken. Apparently, that’s a turn-on.
“I’ve missed you,” he says, lifting my jumper over my head.
“This top suits you.” I take off his T-shirt.
“Wearing nothing suits you best.” James pauses. “What happened?”
I’d forgotten. The graze on my shoulder, where I scrubbed it in the shower. It’s round, planet-like, more revealing than a lipstick mark on a collar—it’s Mars, staring James in the face. “Scraped it on a piece of equipment,” I say, amazed at how easily the lie surfaces. “My own fault.”
James kisses the wound, and his hot, garlicky lips make it sting.
I think about Evie. I think about Eloise.
“Home sweet home,” I say, as James’s ribcage slams into mine.
24
“There’s such a thing as the psychogenesis of infertility,” the woman in my earphones tells me. I’ve swapped my science podcast for an infertility one. I know we’ve been trying to conceive for only half a year, and in the grand scheme of things that’s nothing—it’s normal—but I can’t bear seeing all these failed pregnancy tests. Now, from the moment I wake up to the moment my head hits the pillow, the voice drones on: You’re thirty-seven, Solvig. Past it. An infertile old mule. Time for the knackers.
I’ve given up on my twenty-mile runs because too much exercise might have an adverse effect on my fertility. So, I’m going for a long walk instead. Currently, I’m power-walking past the bakery. I can smell marzipan.
“The psychogenesis of infertility,” explains the woman on the podcast, whose name is Mellon, “is a theory developed in the 1950s, which says that a woman who feels ambivalent about having a baby can end up causing her own infertility. In my anecdotal experience, as a reproductive counsellor, I believe that the theory is true.”
I stride quickly along the high street, dodging the pushchairs. The key to a good power walk, so they say, is to incorporate gradients into your repertoire. If you’re hitting a plateau in your fitness levels, give yourself an uphill struggle.
“Be careful not to confuse ambivalence with indifference,” says Mellon. “Ambivalence refers to having split feelings about something. You might simultaneously be desperate for a baby, and at the same time, or in the very next moment, feel repelled by the thought of having one. I’ve worked with patients who have been trying to conceive for years, who have broken down in tears about how much they want to be mothers, but they can’t make peace with the idea of pregnancy. ‘If I could go off into the forest for nine months,’ one woman told me, ‘to deal with my changing body in private, then maybe I could do it.’ Many of my patients suffer from tokophobia, which is a pathological fear of pregnancy. It occurs even when women have no particular reason to harbour such a fear.”
The word “harbour” takes me out of the podcast, and I look down an alley between two shops on my left. The harbour looks so peaceful. I wonder what sort of stuff I’m harbouring—what fears, anxieties, prejudices. Surely harbouring your negative feelings is quite sensible?
I pick up my speed now, walking so fast that people keep looking behind me to see if I’m being chased, or ahead of me, to see who I’m chasing.
There are so many reasons not to procreate. The money, the carbon footprint, the physical toll, the emotional strain. It strikes me that I haven’t asked James whether he has any reservations about parenthood. I’m worried that if I open up to him,
