Surrogate – a psychological thriller (4 page)

Afterwards, Currie bought us dinner at an Italian restaurant round the corner. We must have made a funny-looking group sitting round the table. Currie tried to do his worst as best man, embarrassing me with his stories about our nights on the town. He raised his glass and proposed a toast. I felt intensely proud. "The bride and groom," he said, partly for the benefit of the other diners in the room. Some of them turned and looked at us. I stood up and made a mock pompous speech too before looking directly at Mole. "I want you to know that everything I do from now on will be a flame for you to warm your hands by," I told her.

My bride looked so beautiful that evening. I remember it as being the happiest moment of my life.

I don't remember when exactly we started talking about having children. There was one conversation we'd had lying in bed just before going to sleep, and we had both dived under the covers as if the decision was too momentous. Funny, really. I mentioned to Currie that we were already trying for a baby, and he said, "Well, the practising is fun." That might have been true in the early days, but it soon wore off. Mole became obsessed with her monthly cycle and the right time when she was ovulating. She started using an ovulation stick and gravely informed me that we both had to cut out alcohol, coffee and even chocolate.

I remember one afternoon in my office, going over some revenue forecasts with Brian Sibley. My BlackBerry pinged with a text: "Come home right now." There's nothing more inhibiting than trying to perform to order, let me tell you. Sometimes we had a window of just an hour where she was at peak fertility, and I began to feel as if I'd volunteered for some medical experiment. This was not exactly what you would call passionate lovemaking. I mean, the whole thing felt so ... robotic.

This went on for months. Our inability to conceive was always there, hanging over us like a cloud. One night, an underwriter pal invited us over for dinner and his wife announced that she was pregnant with their first child. I glanced at Mole, knowing how badly she would take this. Sure enough, in the car on the way home, it all came out: how she hated hearing about other people's pregnancies, the message popping into her work email telling her another friend was expecting. It made her want to roll on the ground and bang her fists in frustration.

"It's early days yet; we've only just started trying," I said, trying to make her feel better. "Mole, darling, you've got to let go of this. It's not healthy for either of us. You're becoming obsessed."

"Sometimes I eat my sandwich in the park and I see mothers pushing prams, and it makes me feel sick. Jealousy's a terrible thing. I look at them and think, why can't it be me? Why can't I have what they have? Have you ever wanted something with a long, bitter want? Well, that's how I feel."

"One thing there isn't enough of in this world is love," I said. "There are plenty of children out there who need parents. We could always adopt." Even as the words came out of my mouth, I thought about how badly that would go down with Dad. He wouldn't be too thrilled about his grandson being Romanian or, God forbid, even black.

Mole looked at me, and I could see she was on verge of tears again. God, women's emotions were like the weather. Please don't start crying, I thought. "That's not the same. I love you, and I want to have your baby. All this money, all this
stuff
, don't you see, it doesn't mean anything."

The trouble was that I knew it wasn't me. What I had never told my new wife was that I had got a girl pregnant once, a receptionist at the office. We used to go round to the nearby Council flat she shared with her mother and have sex upstairs during the lunch break. It was when I had just started at Berkshire RE, and she probably thought she was getting her hooks into the chairman's son. "I know what you've been doing," her mother would say when we came downstairs. I remember the cold shame of sitting in the abortion clinic, the other women watching me suspiciously as I waited for the girl to come out. As ever, Dad got me out of trouble by rubbing the magic salve of money into the wound. The girl was paid off and left quietly.

And then, early one May morning, there was a shout from the bathroom. It had been one year since I had met Mole, and we had been trying for a baby for six months without success. I was still half asleep and on my way to the kitchen to make coffee when Mole called for me. I found her naked sitting on the toilet with a plastic predictor wand in her hand. Hell, neither of us was wearing any clothes. "I'm pregnant," she said quietly. We both whooped and yelled and danced round the bathroom.

We developed a rich fantasy life for our child during those first few weeks. Mole imagined our baby swimming around in her tummy like a little fish, and so we nicknamed it "Fishy." I realise how cloyingly sentimental this must sound, but we both felt as if we were holding hands on the top of a hill looking down into a new landscape we were about to walk into. Our future.

It must have been about a month or so after Mole discovered she was pregnant that my phone went in Leadenhall Market. Lloyd's of London had closed, and I had gone out for a quick sharpener with a colleague before heading home. Harry, the barman at Cheese, was telling me a joke as my phone rang. I could see it was Mole, and I mimed apologising while I ducked outside to take the call. "Could you come home?" she said. "I'm bleeding. I don't know what to do."

The train seemed to take forever getting back to Woolwich.

As I dumped my keys on the hall table, I noticed that our bedroom door was closed. I pushed it open and saw the room was dark. "Darling, are you all right?" I asked, pressing the light switch. The white bedroom exploded into light, the halogen lamps leaving purplish spots fading before my eyes. Mole was lying in bed with her back to me and the duvet pulled over. I sat down beside her and touched her hair. It was only then that I noticed the dried blood smeared on her cheek and that she was trembling. Slowly, I peeled back the duvet to reveal the sheet sodden in blood. It was absolutely soaking in the stuff. Then the smell of it hit me. "I'm so sorry," she whispered, her face still turned to the wall.

Our dream of having a little family of our own died that evening.

Seeing her curled up like that, I felt so much compassion. I slipped off my shoes without saying anything and got into bed next to her, hugging her tightly. I could feel her shaking and vowed that no matter what, we would get through this.

I got her into the shower and cleaned up while I stripped the bed. Brown dried blood had even soaked into the mattress. The thing that we wanted the most had been denied us and, if anything, the miscarriage made me even more determined that we would have the family that other people had. All this money, all this stuff, was going to be put to good use. Money can't buy you love, the song said, but it sure as hell could buy you a child.

The next day I came home early to give my wife the biggest bunch of flowers you have ever seen in your life. I wanted to do anything to make her feel better. I found Mole in the kitchen chopping vegetables, pretending nothing bad had happened, which was typical of her. It pained me to see her like this. I just felt, well, so impotent, and I took her hand to stop what she was doing.

Mole laid the flowers on the counter carefully. "They're beautiful," she said. "I know what you're doing. You don't have to do this."

"What did the doctor say?"

"She says there's nothing wrong she can pinpoint. My periods have been regular, and I haven't felt ill. She wants me to go and see a specialist. Apparently he's the god of fertility. She says that if there's anybody who can get to the bottom of what's wrong with me, he can."

"How are you feeling now?"

"Sore."

"Has she given you anything for the pain?"

"Some ibuprofen. I hope you don't mind, but I've made an appointment for us both to go see him."

"Why do we both need to go?"

"Darling, it might not just be me." That's what you think, I reflected bitterly.

"What's his name?"

"Jean-Luc For-zhay. You know, spelled like forget."

I stroked my wife's beautiful hair and kissed her forehead. She smelled so wonderful. "Everything is going to be all right, just you see," I reassured her.

We tripped up the steps to Doctor Forget's clinic in Harley Street a few days later. A discreet brass plaque had the practice name on it. A pretty receptionist answered the door, admitting us into what looked like a busy country house. Telephones rang. We were shown into a waiting room with thick sofas and a selection of newspapers and magazines on a rosewood table.
Financial Times
and
Daily Telegraph
for the grown-ups and old
Beanos
for the children. The room was full of women. "I had no idea there were so many others," Mole whispered. The idea that we were not alone in this was somehow comforting, and the waiting room, with its baby snapshots on the walls from grateful patients, felt warm and inviting.

I had just settled down to read Companies and Markets in the
FT
when Doctor Forget stuck his head round the door. "Mr and Mrs Cox?" he said.

The first thing that struck you about Jean-Marc Forget was his energy and how handsome he was. He was a dead ringer for George Clooney. I had Googled Mole's gynaecologist during an idle moment at work and come across a profile of him in one of those posh women's magazines. "Meltingly handsome" was how he was described, and he was much in demand with models and actresses, which did make me wonder how much this was all going to cost. We both rose from the sofa.

Doctor Forget's surgery was more like a cosy bookish study than an antiseptic clinical surgery. A gas fire bubbled away. Immediately you felt comforted, and you had the sense that whatever he told you, nothing truly bad could happen here. There were silver-framed photographs on the bookshelves, and I noticed one black-and-white photo of his family posing with a Labrador; his attractive blonde wife and their predictably gap-toothed, floppy-haired son. Forget began leafing through some printed-off emails and made a few notes with his Mont Blanc fountain pen.

"Forget's an unusual name," I said. "Where does it come from?"

"My father is French but my mother is English," he said, not looking up.

I smiled at Mole encouragingly because I could tell how nervous she was.

"Now," said Forget finally. "Why have you come to see me?"

"I had a miscarriage last week," Mole began. "I'd only discovered I was pregnant three weeks before. My doctor suggested I come and see you. Before that we'd been trying for, what, about six months?"

I nodded gravely.

Forget pressed his fingers together and sat back in his chair. "Six months isn't very long. It can take years."

"Now this has happened, I need to know what's wrong with me. I need to know whether I can have children." She went over the circumstances of her miscarriage in detail.

Forget had an annoying drawl, his sentences dropping and rising like a plane looping-the-loop. "The first thing I want to do is get you to fill out these forms. Your medical history. Then I want to get a closer look at you, Mrs Cox. It's called a hysteroscopy. Basically, I'm going to X-ray your fallopian tubes. Don't worry, there's nothing to be afraid of. It's not going to hurt."

"What, you mean now?" I asked dumbly.

"There's no time like the present. I'll just go and see whether the nurse is free."

Forget left us alone while we completed the forms. Occasionally we looked up at each other. There were questions about how much I drank and what kind of exercise I took, whether I had ever caught any sexually transmitted diseases or if I was HIV positive. My darling wife gave me a brave little smile when the nurse arrived to take her away.

The next time I saw her she was lying on a trolley in what looked like a dental surgery, with her abdomen covered and her legs raised. Forget and the nurse were both wearing face masks, and he was holding what looked like a wand with a balloon on the end of it, which I realised he was about to insert.

"Now, I'm going to try and be as gentle as I can," his muffled voice said through his mask. I put my face close to Mole's and told her that, whatever happened, to just keep looking at me. She winced and reached for my hand the moment the catheter entered her. Forget made muffled noises of encouragement. Suddenly Mole grimaced and gripped my hand, grunting with pain. She later told me that the moment the catheter came in contact with her uterus, she thought she was going to pass out. It was as if something white hot had touched her brain, and a tear ran down her cheek. Right at that moment, I would have done anything to change places with her, anything to save her from this ordeal.

Minutes later, Doctor Forget was snapping the X-rays onto a lit-up wall. "Well, there's nothing physically wrong with you, that's for sure," he said, pointing to a ghostly black-and-white blur. I didn't understand what we were looking at. "If anything, you're too healthy."

"What do you mean, too healthy?" Mole asked.

"Mrs Cox, the truth is that nearly every woman who comes to see me has the same problem."

"And what's that?"

"Let me ask you a question. When was the last time you got ill?"

Mole looked at the gynaecologist blankly. "I really can't remember–"

"What, not even a cold or feeling run-down?"

"No, come to think of it, I've never had a day off work."

Forget looked at me as if to say, I rest my case.

"Your immune system is too strong. Your body is rejecting the pregnancy because it sees it as an invasion."

"So wait, you're saying that my wife is too healthy to get pregnant?" I said.

"That's pretty much the sum of it. Of course, it will take weeks to ascertain what is
exactly
wrong with Mrs Cox’s immune system, but I would bet my bottom dollar that's what the problem is."

"What happens if I get pregnant again?" Mole asked.

"Your body would reject the pregnancy and abort it," Forget said matter-of-factly. "I could give you a lot of old flannel and string you along for months with IVF. Believe me, your chances of getting pregnant and carrying the baby to term are almost non-existent. You'd end up spending thousands of pounds to end up just where we are today. I'm sorry, but that's the sum of it."

I could have throttled him for the brusque way he spoke to my wife, for his lack of bedside manner. It was almost as if he enjoyed it. Then his voice softened. "Look, may I give you some advice? Go down the surrogacy route. That way you can be assured of having a baby. It would be your eggs and sperm, just with another carrier."

"Surrogacy?" I repeated. "You mean, getting somebody else to have our baby?"

Forget gave me a withering look. I felt as if I was playing catch-up with the two of them. "It's more sophisticated than that these days. The fertilised egg is placed in the womb of the carrier mother. There's no human contact. Of course, you could ask a girlfriend to be a surrogate, but I wouldn't recommend it ... gets messy. Go through a clinic. There are some good ones. There's one in Wiltshire ..."