You may recall the exact night of conception. It was the night after I came over to yours all dressed to the nines in my satin blouse and my high heels, the night we drank two bottles of champagne and had sex three times.
I’d thought it would be a long-term project. I had more plastic pots waiting in the freezer, let’s put it that way. But it turned out I didn’t need them. I’d been charting Ellie’s ovulation for a couple of months, making sure to dole out the pads and tampons on a day-by-day basis so I’d know exactly when she was bleeding and how much. And I hit the jackpot the first time. I stood by with the tampons and the towels, waiting for Ellie to ask me for them. But two weeks passed, three weeks, then four. And then she started to be sick every morning and I knew.
I waited until Ellie was about four or five months along before I told you about the baby. I put it off for as long as possible so the period of subterfuge would be as short as possible, because of course if it was to be your baby, then you needed to think I was pregnant. And in order for you to think I was pregnant, I needed to look pregnant. And if I was going to fake a pregnancy, then that was the end of our sex life. So I told you the doctor had said the placenta was low-lying and so there was to be NO SEX. So, there was no sex, but as you probably recall we did plenty of other things because of course I had to keep you, more than ever then, I had to keep you.
I said I’d been to the scan alone, really hammed it up, do you remember? “Oh, I couldn’t take it if the baby was gone again. I couldn’t bear to let you down again.” You were sweet about it, but I could tell your heart wasn’t in it. I could tell that without the sex, without the intimacy of sharing a bed with me, of passing your hands around my body, of the shared bottles of wine and the lie-ins on a Saturday morning, that I really wasn’t a good fit for your life. The baby was neither here nor there to you. I could tell. I felt, in a way, that you were hoping
I’d take the baby as a consolation prize and disappear somewhere with it, like a low-ranking lion taking a scrap of old skin from a kill and slinking away with her tail between her legs. We’d never been close, not in the way that other people see as close, and the little that had held us together all those years was starting to crumble, like mortar between bricks. I could feel us coming loose from each other and I didn’t have a clue what to do about it.
The only hope I had was that when the baby came you’d fall in love with it, that you wouldn’t be able to live without it and that we’d be inextricably linked. Forever.
