Truly Madly Guilty(33)

There had been times like that.

‘Of course I never thought that,’ said Erika.

‘Anyway, we know now,’ said Sam. He put his hand over Clementine’s. ‘So, obviously, anything you need …’

He looked wary. Maybe he thought they needed money.

There was silence for a moment.

‘So the reason we wanted to talk to you today,’ began Oliver. He looked at Erika. This was her cue. But it was all wrong. She’d stuffed it up. If she’d just been like a normal friend about this the whole way through, if she’d told Clementine, right back at the beginning, when they’d first started IVF, then this conversation would have had a proper, solid foundation. Each disappointment, each failure over the last two years would have been like a deposit of sympathy. They could have called on that deposit. But now, Erika sat opposite a confused, hurt friend and there was nothing in the bank to withdraw.

Self-loathing rose within Erika’s stomach like nausea. She never got it quite right. No matter how hard she tried, she always got it just a tiny bit wrong.

‘My doctor has said that the only option now for us is to find an egg donor,’ she said. ‘Because my eggs are of very poor quality. Useless, in fact.’ She tried to bring some lightness into the conversation, the way it was in the hallway, but she could tell by everyone’s faces that it wasn’t working.

Clementine nodded. Erika could see she had no idea what was coming next.

A memory came to her of blonde, pretty Diana Dixon marching up to Clementine in the school playground and grimacing at the sight of Erika, the sort of grimace you might give a cockroach. ‘Why are you playing with her?’ said Diana, and Erika never forgot either Clementine’s lightning-quick flash of humiliation, or the way she lifted her chin and told Diana, ‘She’s my friend.’

‘So we wondered …’ prompted Oliver. He waited for Erika. It was clearly her job to ask the question. Clementine was her friend.

But Erika couldn’t speak. Her mouth felt dry and hollowed out. The tablet, maybe. It was probably a side effect. She’d meant to read the little leaflet about side effects. She fixed her eyes on the yellow daisies on Clementine’s skirt and began to count them.

Oliver spoke up, like an actor saving the day by taking someone else’s line in the script. There was a thin edge of hysteria to his voice. ‘Clementine,’ he said. ‘We’re asking … the reason we wanted to talk to you today, well, we’re wondering if you would consider being our egg donor.’

Erika looked up from the daisies at Clementine’s face and saw an expression of utter revulsion fly across it as fast as the flash of a camera. It was there and gone so quickly she could almost choose to believe she’d imagined it, but she hadn’t imagined it because reading faces was one of her skills. It was a legacy of a childhood spent reading her mother’s face, monitoring, analysing, trying to modify her behaviour in time, except that her skill rarely allowed her to get things right; it just meant that she always knew when she got things wrong.

It didn’t matter what Clementine said or did next, Erika knew how she really felt.

Clementine’s face was composed and very still. It was the look of focused concentration she got when she was about to perform, as if she were taking herself to another plane, a transcendent level of consciousness that Erika could never reach. She pushed back a stray lock of hair behind her ear. It was the same long curly lock of hair that fell towards her cello when she played, somehow never quite touching the strings.

‘Oh,’ she said steadily. ‘I see.’





chapter seventeen



The day of the barbeque

‘So, this is a big thing we’re asking of you, and it’s absolutely not something we’d expect an answer on right away,’ said Oliver. He leaned forward with his elbows resting on his knees, his hands locked together. He brought to mind a mortgage broker who had just given a lengthy explanation of a complex loan arrangement.

He looked gravely at Clementine and indicated a cream manila folder on the coffee table in front of him.

‘We have some literature ready for you.’ He enunciated the four syllables of the word ‘literature’ with tiny lip-smacks of satisfaction. It was the sort of word that both Oliver and Erika found soothing. Like documentation. Like procedure. ‘It explains exactly what would be involved. Frequently asked questions. The clinic gave it to us to pass on, but if you’d rather not take it now, that’s fine, we don’t want to overload you, because at this stage we’re just, you know, putting it out there, I guess is the right way to describe it.’

He sat back against the couch and glanced at Erika who, bizarrely, had chosen this moment to kneel down beside the coffee table and cut a piece of cheese from the (tiny, Clementine didn’t know they made them that small) wheel of Brie.

Oliver looked away from his wife and back at Clementine. ‘All we’re saying today is: Is this something you would possibly consider? But, as I said, we don’t need any response at all from you, and, by the way if, down the track, you were to say you would consider it, there’s a mandatory cooling-off period of three months. And you can pull out any time. Any time. No matter how far we progress. Well, not quite any time. Not once Erika is pregnant, obviously!’ He chuckled nervously, adjusted his glasses and frowned. ‘Actually, you can pull out right up until when the eggs are inseminated but at that point they legally become our property, um …’ His voice drifted. ‘Sorry. That’s far too much information at this early stage. I’m nervous. We’re both a bit nervous!’