Love Nest (4 page)

‘How did it go?’

‘Really well! He’s definitely interested…’

‘But he didn’t make an offer?’

‘Well, no. Not yet. But it’s very unusual to put in an offer on the spot. I’d say he’ll almost definitely be coming back for a second viewing.’

‘Right.’

‘So I’ll keep you posted. Fingers crossed. Goodbye. Have a lovely day.’

‘’Bye.’ Gemma hung up, bitterly disappointed.

‘Offer on the flat?’ Bridget asked.

‘Not yet.’ She pulled herself together. ‘But looking good, apparently.’

‘You’re not
still
obsessed with getting that family house?’ Bridget sounded amiable enough but she had that look in her eyes that drove Alex mad, a look that said, ‘Christ, how bourgeois.’ As if there was somehow something wrong with wanting to live in a nice house in a nice street. As opposed to a friend’s futon in an area where it was easier to buy class A drugs than fresh fruit or vegetables.

‘It’ll be perfect for children,’ Gemma retorted.

‘I guess.’ There was the tiniest pause and then Bridget asked gently, ‘And how’s all that going?’

The moment had come. Gemma could hardly speak; she felt as if she’d been punched in the mouth. She sipped some tea, then, looking her sister in the eye, said: ‘Well… we sort of know what we’re up against now.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘The specialist…’ She couldn’t help it, a big tear plopped down her face and into her tea. ‘The specialist says I’ve got the eggs of a nine-year-old.’

‘Meaning?’ Bridget looked shocked.

‘Meaning they’re never going to mature.’
It’s so unfair,
her inner voice screamed, as it did all day every day. But she didn’t say it.

‘You’ve never really had periods, have you?’ Bridget said, as if she were an esteemed gynaecologist. ‘I always thought that was the dancing, though.’

‘Well, it wasn’t. It’s just the way I was born.’

‘You never ate much though, did you? And that can have an effect on your menstrual…’

‘I always ate plenty!’ Gemma snapped, then immediately regretted it. ‘Sorry, I didn’t mean to sound so cross. I’m just allergic to so many things.’

‘Like what?’

‘Like butter.’

‘You’re not allergic to butter. Does it bring you out in a rash? Does it make you vomit? You just don’t like eating it because it’s full of calories.’ Right on cue, the chocolate cake appeared. ‘Oh thank you! Yum. Are you sure you don’t want some?’

‘No thanks. I had a late lunch.’ Gemma wasn’t going to have an argument about her allergies. They needed to get this conversation back on track. ‘So the doctor said the only way forward is egg donation.’

‘Using another woman’s eggs?’

‘Uh huh. Mixing them with Alex’s sperm and planting them in my womb.’

‘So it wouldn’t be your baby?’

‘Not biologically mine. But it would be Alex’s. And I’d carry it, I’d give birth to it. But it’s not so easy. There aren’t any eggs in this country. The government changed the law so donors lost their anonymity. Which means hardly anyone is prepared to donate any more in case a child turns up on their doorstep eighteen years later. And the waiting lists are horrific. So now if you want an egg you basically have to go abroad. But of course you have no idea whose eggs you’re getting. I mean they
say
you do but you can’t be sure and there are these rumours about girls from eastern Europe being forced into it and…’

‘Right.’ Bridget reached out and squeezed Gemma’s hand. She’d had a new tattoo done on her knuckles, Gemma noticed as she squeezed back, took a deep breath and blurted it out.

‘So I was wondering if we could use one of your eggs.’

‘Sorry?’

‘One of your eggs.’ She shrugged. ‘If you’d be OK with that.’ She made it sound as if she was asking to borrow a jumper. Not that she’d be seen dead in one of Bridget’s moth-eaten numbers knitted from sustainable llama’s fur, but anyway… ‘I mean, I know we could adopt but we want a
baby
and it’s practically impossible to find a newborn and I’d like to have
some
blood tie and if it’s your egg…’

She looked expectantly at her sister’s face. She’d anticipated delight, disgust, dubiousness, but Bridget seemed merely amused.

‘I don’t see why not. I don’t want kids. Not yet anyway. So why shouldn’t you have them?’

Hot, salty tears flowed down Gemma’s cheeks. ‘That’s so kind of you. I can’t believe it. I don’t believe it. I…’

‘’s OK,’ Bridget grinned, pink in the face and obviously chuffed with herself.

‘It’s wonderful!’ Gemma checked herself. ‘Before you definitely commit you need to know exactly what will be involved. It’s quite an ordeal. You’ll have to take all sorts of drugs and…’

‘Well, it won’t exactly be the first time,’ Bridget chortled.

That laugh brought Gemma right back to earth.

‘Bridget, you can’t take drugs if you’re going to be an egg donor. It would be
incredibly
irresponsible.’

Bridget laughed again and waved a dismissive hand. ‘Chill, Gems. I was only joking. I mean, you can’t discount what I’ve done in the past but I’m clean now. Well, pretty clean… I mean, I do the odd spliff and things but…’

‘You couldn’t do that if you were giving me an egg.’

There was a moment’s silence, then Bridget said, ‘Um. Sorry. I thought I was helping you out. But obviously not.’ She stood up, wrapping her scarf around her neck.

‘No, sorry, sorry! I didn’t mean it like that. I’m sorry, it’s just this means so much to me and I can’t… I’ve lost my sense of humour.’

‘You mean you once possessed one?’ Bridget teased, sitting down again.

Gemma tried to get a grip. ‘Listen, you don’t need to make your mind up straight away. Have a think about it. Read up on it. I can send you some links.’

‘Sure,’ Bridget shrugged, good-naturedly. ‘But I’ll do it. Why ever wouldn’t I?’

Gemma’s phone rang again.

‘Oh sorry, I’d better take this, it’s Alex. Hi, darling! Yes, Lucinda says he’s definitely interested… No, I won’t get my hopes up but it’s looking good… I know, we’ll see, but I might as well be optimistic, for once. And…’ She looked at Bridget, who gave her a perky thumbs up. Gemma was infused with love for her sister and the world in general. ‘I’ve got some other news… I’ll tell you later. Do you think you can get home early tonight?’

3

It was Friday morning in the offices of the
Sunday Post
newspaper and Karen Drake, deputy editor of the
All Woman!
magazine supplement, was trying to edit an article that had just popped into her inbox about how egg-cosies were now gracing ‘the hippest dining tables’ – Kate Moss was a huge fan, apparently, while simultaneously browsing Net-a-porter and listening to Sophie, the features editor, on the phone to one of her mates.

‘I’ve decided I’ll get into jam-making during my maternity leave. As well as doing a bit of painting. And arranging all my photos in albums.’

Karen smiled. Sophie was four months pregnant, and fantasies about what motherhood would be like never failed to tickle her. Karen hadn’t the heart to correct her. She was still grinning as she picked up her ringing phone.

‘Hello?’ she said, tucking the handset under her left ear.

‘Sweetheart!’ said Phil, her husband. ‘Fantastic news.’

‘Oh?’ Phil’s definition of fantastic news was not always the same as hers, his usually concerning the fortunes of Tiger Woods or the English cricket team.

‘Scott’s just sent me details of a new house. It’s perfect. Even better than Doddington. And guess what – we can have the first viewing. Before it even goes on the market.’

‘Ah,’ said Karen. She tried to sound thrilled, but she felt as if she’d just been punched in the stomach. Talk about bad luck. Secretly she’d been delighted when Doddington had fallen through, the sellers having decided, for some bizarre reason, that they didn’t want to leave the rustic ruin, after all. She’d thought it would take months – no, maybe years – before they found a similar property. For the past couple of days she’d even been allowing herself to feel guilty as she wondered how to break the news to the Meehans, who were desperate to buy 16 Coverley Drive, that they weren’t selling after all. But goddammit if Scott, the property finder her husband had employed, wasn’t doing everything in his power to earn his fee.

‘It’s in Devon,’ Phil burbled on. ‘An Elizabethan manor house. Nine bedrooms, ten acres, needs plenty of TLC. A real opportunity to turn it into a viable business. And Scott reckons we can do a deal on the price because they want a quick sale.’

Devon. So they were talking at least a three-hour drive from London. She’d never be able to commute from there.

‘I’ll email you the details, shall I? Ideally we’d go and see it tomorrow.’

‘Bea has a birthday party,’ Karen protested.

‘She can miss it,’ said Phil, as if such a change of schedule were of no consequence, rather than life-shattering, for a nine-year-old. ‘There’ll be other parties. But there won’t be another house like this.’

‘Right,’ Karen said, already bracing herself for Bea’s freak-out. She swallowed hard, as an email pinged on to her screen. Chadlicote Manor, Little Dittonsbury, Devon, read the header. ‘I’ll call you later when I’ve read the details. It…’ she swallowed. ‘It sounds very exciting.’

Karen examined the particulars. Just as she feared. A vast ancient pile with room after room after pointless room set in acres of muddy countryside. Tons of expensive and disruptive work needed to restore it to its former glory. What was the postcode? That would be the litmus test. Karen tapped it into the Ocado website. Great. Just as she’d suspected. They didn’t deliver there. Plus the chances of Ludmila, the au pair, joining them there were as likely as Britney Spears solving the Israeli/Palestinian question.

In other words, Chadlicote signified the end of everything that kept Karen’s life on track.

Karen had never for a second believed in the rustic idyll dream peddled by media offshoots like her own, because she knew the truth. She had been born in a remote corner of Wales where it rained virtually every day of her childhood. There was nothing for miles around except sheep and trees, and the highlight of the year was when a black family stayed in the village B&B and everyone dropped round with excuses just to get a look at them.

At school she was bullied for being clever, so she put her head down and worked hard, determined to get out of that hole at the earliest opportunity. But if term times were miserable, the holidays were even worse. Weeks of boredom with nothing to do but ride her bike up and down the hills and hang out at the bus stop waiting for the twice-daily charabanc into Swansea. Drink cider in copses with her best friend Andrea, flicking through copies of
J17
, which they hoarded like treasure, studying the fashion shots, fantasizing about London, where high culture didn’t consist of a tractor show and Londis wasn’t rated as a shopping experience.

She was determined to get out at the earliest opportunity, and that opportunity came earlier than she’d anticipated, when she was sixteen and Mum and Dad split up. Dad disappeared to Australia, never to be heard of again. Mum had some kind of nervous breakdown and went to live in a commune. She was much better now and worked for the council in Ludlow, but Karen had never really recovered from her abandonment at that crucial stage in her life.

With no one caring and a clutch of O levels (God, that dated her), Karen had headed off to London to seek her fortune. Things didn’t quite turn out the way she’d hoped. Initially she’d stayed with a distant family friend, but after a row when she left her underwear dripping on the radiators she was kicked out.

For eighteen months Karen found herself living in a hostel for the homeless, surrounded by alcoholics and addicts. They were desperate, unpredictable people. Whenever Karen needed to count her blessings – which had been often over the past year – she looked back on that period and thanked God she hadn’t been mugged or raped. So many inmates were. She coped by detaching herself from the situation, pretending it was happening to somebody else, by making herself look as unattractive as possible and stomping around with her keys clutched between her knuckles. She earned a meagre living, waitressing and doing odd jobs. Eventually she got out of there, but things didn’t improve.

Over the next two years she managed to live in seventeen places, each more of a dive than the last. In one the landlord, who had nine convictions for offences like arson and GBH, used to bring his wife and kids to the house every day, lock them in a room and beat them up. Karen had to wear earplugs to block out the screaming. Then there was the council flat on the eighteenth floor of an east London block where people with guns and knives hid behind every pillar and the lifts also served as public toilets. She tried to treat the experience as a great adventure, but her nerves were becoming more and more frayed.

And then she met Phil. And he saved her. Cheesily, he was a customer in the restaurant. She didn’t even register him the first few times he visited; after all, what was there to notice about a man she later – objectively – summed up as ‘ish’: ‘tallish’, ‘plumpish’, ‘fairish’. But he kept coming, leaving her bigger and bigger tips, and eventually they got talking. After about a month of this, they went to the cinema together. Not on a date. Purely as friends. He was a venture capitalist, which, he explained, meant he invested in other people’s businesses in return for a large percentage of their revenue.

‘That sounds grown-up,’ she said as she climbed into his – even more grown-up – BMW so he could drive her home. ‘You don’t look old enough to be doing something like that.’ That, she realized, was why she didn’t fancy him – his cheeks were too peachy smooth, his voice a little too lispy, to take him seriously as a man. He was more like an overgrown schoolboy.

‘I’m twenty-four,’ he said. ‘And I’ve been doing this since I was eighteen.’ He put his foot on the pedal and the car gave a satisfying roar. ‘Where to, madam?’

When they stopped outside the tower block, Phil was appalled.

‘You can’t live somewhere like this.’

‘Why not?’ she shrugged.

He gestured at the ten-foot-high graffiti saying ‘Suk your father’s cock, bitch, Alisha.’

‘I can’t afford anywhere else.’ She wondered what he’d make of her bleak little box with the broken toilet and boiler she couldn’t afford to fix.

‘I’ve got a house,’ he said. ‘You can live there.’

‘I can’t live with you! I mean… I barely know you.’

‘You won’t be living with me. It’s one of my houses. I’m a landlord too on the side, you see. Come on. No strings attached. Look at me. Do I look like a pervert?’

‘I’ll think about it.’

The next day, a fifteen-year-old girl was stabbed in the lifts. She called Phil, trying hard not to cry.

‘If I could stay in your house just for a bit that would be great.’

So she stayed in his house in Kensal Rise for three years, three years during which Phil never laid a finger on her, but – thanks to his never-ending public school contacts – wangled her a job as a PA at the
Daily Sentinel
.

She began writing the odd article when no one else was available and within two years she’d been promoted to a reporter. In her eyes, it was pretty much a dream job. She got to travel all over the country and sometimes abroad on press trips. She knew the inside story on which politician had a lovechild with which TV presenter. She earned a salary, not loads, but enough to pay Phil’s rent and allow her London dream to finally crystallize into a reality.

She went out every night, she drank in the hottest bars – often with a complimentary tab. She saw films months before they were released. She also went out with a series of attractive, louche men who were great fun and who, one by one, broke her heart. It was after yet another humiliation from one of them, Ryan, who revealed a secret partner and two children, that Phil took her out for an expensive meal and several bottles of wine.

At the end of it, sozzled and keen to heal the heartbreak, she fell into bed with him. The next morning they were a couple. At least Phil thought they were. And Karen didn’t argue. Because she was tired. Tired of unreliable men and of having to find someone who wasn’t a cowboy to fix the plumbing and of always secretly worrying that somehow she’d wind up back in the tower block. Phil would take care of everything, make it easy for her. There was no such thing as romantic love anyway, only hormones. Her heart might not sing at the sight of Phil but that was far better than allowing primal urges to blind you. What she’d have now would be mature, sensible, adult. Safe.

They went out for two years and when she was twenty-eight, she accepted his proposal. Around the same time she was headhunted by the
Sunday Post
to become the magazine’s deputy. More money. More status. Lots of free meals in restaurants that wanted a mention, discounts on clothes, complimentary holidays in return for a flattering write-up. Two years later Eloise was born. It was the fairytale ending, only of course it wasn’t because with their first child came the first inkling of discord in the Drake marriage.

‘We can’t live here any more,’ Phil said, gesturing round the living room of their huge flat in a Clapham mansion block.

‘Why on earth not? I love it here.’ All those restaurants and cute shops full of fripperies that had been so important to her pre-children and that she hoped she would be able to frequent again one day without falling asleep in her miso soup or Eloise pulling over a display of tea glasses.

‘Children shouldn’t be brought up in the city. They need country air. Space to run around in.’

‘Phil! You know how I feel about the country. Everyone’s on drugs at twelve, because there’s nothing else to do. Anyway my job’s here.’ Karen couldn’t admit it but she’d been thrilled when her six months’ maternity leave ended. Her colleagues said: ‘Ah, back so soon, don’t you miss the little one?’ (Jamila, who’d now left, had said, ‘I do admire you braving it back here when everyone’s so shocked at you leaving the baby.’) She shrugged and said, ‘Yes, well, we don’t have a choice,’ even though everyone knew Phil’s money meant she could quite easily never work again. But it simply wasn’t acceptable to say you found long days with a small baby duller than watching a darts match.

It was exhausting working all week with no down-time at weekends, but Karen far preferred it that way to the alternative of coffee mornings spent comparing episiotomy stitches and standing shivering in the playground.

Work kept Karen sane. Work was what had made the compromises involved in marrying Phil bearable. It gave her her own identity outside her marriage and children, which made her feel she hadn’t completely lost all of her old self. But her work wouldn’t be possible anywhere but London, where the newspaper offices were.

But Phil still wasn’t happy. He’d always been keen on muddy walks, always yearned for a dog, for easy access to a golf course, shooting and fishing. Of course, he’d been brought up in Croydon, so he had no idea what the real country was like. The argument went on for the next two years until she became pregnant with Bea, which settled it.

‘Look, there really is no room for four of us, and even with the money I’m earning we couldn’t afford the kind of house we’d like in London. But what about this…?’

‘This’ was 16 Coverley Drive, St Albans. When Karen saw the particulars, her initial reaction had been to scream. St Albans? Could you get more suburban than that? A five-bedroom detached property with double garage. Yuk. But Phil persuaded her to go and look at it and to both their surprise she was seduced. The house was twice the size of anything they could have afforded in London, and attractive in a retro kind of way with its gabled roof, and the town, which she’d envisaged as some backwater with a Spar selling overpriced rotting vegetables and a war memorial covered in hoodies drinking cider, turned out to be lovely, with plenty of boutiques and delis.

Karen was already coming to terms with the fact that her priorities had changed. Easy access to the tube and dozens of bars were no longer top of the list. After all, she had started obsessing about the Lakeland catalogue, promising herself that one day she would treat herself to an avocado slicer and wondering what could ever make her worthy of a Remoska cooker (‘A joy to use’, ‘What a gem’). It would be nice to have some outdoor space.

So they’d moved.