Page 69 of Midnight in Paris

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THE EIGHTH SUMMER – 2018

‘I still don’t know why we couldn’t just get the results over the phone,’ Tom complained as they sat in the comfortable leather chairs of his private consultant.

‘Because it’s important,’ she said. ‘What if there’s something wrong?’

He laughed. ‘If I do have gallstones, it’s hardly an emergency,’ he winced slightly, his hand hovering near his abdomen. ‘I’d still want to have the holiday before they whip out my gallbladder or whatever.’

She grimaced, imagining the surgery. ‘Don’t do that,’ she said.

‘What?’

‘Joke about it. I don’t like the thought of it.’

‘Still, it could have waited until we’d got back.’

‘It’s fine. We can go a day late. It’s only Paris. It’s not going anywhere.’

‘Nor are we, by the looks of things.’

It had been Tom’s parents who’d insisted they go private, rather than wait. ‘Poor boy!’ Tom had said, mimicking his mum after taking her call. ‘What’s the point of suffering if you don’tneed to?’ He’d thrown himself down on the sofa next to Sophie and rolled his eyes. ‘I knew it would be better not to tell them anything. They always overreact.’

‘Still, it might be for the best,’ she’d said gently. In truth, she was glad Tom’s parents had forced his hand on this. Nobody should be consuming the amount of antacids he’d admitted he was now taking, and the referral from his doctor would take months. At least this way they could get things sorted.

In all honesty, his chronic indigestion was much more likely to do with stress. She’d been ringing IVF clinics in the past few weeks and her enquiries into fertility treatment had correlated almost exactly with the worsening of his stomach pain. She hoped Tom would get instructions to slow down, eat more healthily, give up drink for a bit – all things she’d tried to convince him to do anyway to aid their chances of conception, but which he seemed to think were pointless. ‘I had my sperm checked, there’s nothing wrong with it,’ he’d say. ‘What harm can it do to have a few biscuits or a drink in the evening?’

She hadn’t been able to tell him. Shifting slightly in her seat and eyeing the only other patient in the room – a man of about sixty years old reading theDaily Mail– she admitted to herself, perhaps for the first time, that she’d been annoyed with him for not changing his lifestyle at all, because it felt that she had to bear all the suffering that came with infertility. And although it was pointless perhaps, it wouldn’t hurt him to join her in it a little, just for solidarity if nothing else. He’d said he’d cut down more than once, but his promises proved empty time and time again.

Nature was cruel to females – she’d known that since her first terrible bout of period pain. And now, this inability to create life in the very womb she’d had to service all these years seemed almost personal. She’d wanted Tom to suffer, just a little. Just a fraction of what she had to. Because it wasn’t fair. If the stomachpains did turn out to be stress, perhaps that would go some way to proving that he was more affected by this than he let on.

She wasn’t proud of feeling this way, knew that if she stepped back from it all and looked at it rationally, that it wasn’t fair. But not being proud of something doesn’t make it disappear. She wondered what dark thoughts Tom had, and whether he ever resented her in the way she’d started to resent him every time her irregular cycle – which teased her periodically by switching from four to six weeks – disappointed her again.

She—

‘Tom Gardner?’ The consultant stood in his doorway, as a woman made her way out and back to the reception area. He was reading Tom’s name from a file, as if there were twenty patients in the room rather than just two. It was pretty obvious who Tom was.

They both stood obediently. ‘Do you want me to come in with you?’ Sophie asked.

‘Why not?’ he said, taking her hand for a squeeze. ‘Don’t want you to miss any of the fun.’

They walked in, feeling a little like renegade pupils being taken before the Head. The consultant sat at his desk and, without talking to them, tapped on his keyboard and looked at the screen for a moment before turning to them and clasping his hands together in front of himself like a character in a TV drama.

‘If you could just wait a moment, our consultant, Mr Sullivan, is going to join us for this one,’ he said.

It was then that something changed inside Sophie. Something icy clenched in her chest. ‘Why?’ she asked.

‘Just protocol,’ he said, smiling authoritatively at her and failing to answer her question at all.

She looked at Tom, staring straight ahead, and suddenly noticed his cheekbone jutting out in a way she hadn’tacknowledged before. He’d lost more weight than she’d realised. And suddenly something sank deep inside her.

Tom grinned at her and raised an eyebrow, seemingly unaware.

But she sensed at that moment – deep down – that what they’d treated as a joke, as something trivial and annoying at worst, was something else entirely.

37

NOW

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