I was in gothenburg two weeks ago, I took the train there alone, stayed in a hotel and walked a few blocks to a fertility clinic the next morning. It looked like any other doctor’s office, only more pleasant, brighter, with yucca plants in large pots and tranquil-looking images of mothers and babies or eggs and birds on the walls. The doctor’s name was Ljungstedt, and from his office there was a full view of the gym across the street. I found myself staring directly at people running on the treadmill and lifting weights. He pronounced my name the Swedish way, not like Ee-dah, but more like Ooh-dah, the first syllable lingering at the back of his throat as he tapped away at his computer keyboard without looking at me. He went through the process quickly, at what point in my cycle I’d start hormone treatment, how they’d remove the eggs, the fact that today he’d just be running a few blood tests and carrying out a gynaecological examination.

‘Oh yes, freezing one’s eggs has become ever so popular,’ he said, as if he were selling me something, even though I was already there. 12

‘So I gather,’ I replied with a chuckle.

Everything felt open, the summer holidays were just around the corner, it was lovely and warm in Gothenburg and I’d reserved a table somewhere to savour a nice lunch with some expensive white wine, to toast the fact I’d be spending my savings on having my eggs removed and banked, on opening an egg account.

‘It’s a wonderful opportunity,’ he said. ‘If you don’t have a boyfriend or don’t want children quite yet.’

‘Precisely,’ I said. ‘I was thinking of going ahead with things after the holidays.’

‘Perhaps you’ll have a boyfriend in a few years from now, you could use them when you’re forty-two or forty-three,’ he said, tapping away on his keyboard. ‘That would be wonderful.’

I tried to picture this boyfriend, imagining a tall man with a beard standing there in the office with me in a few years from now. I couldn’t picture his facial expressions, but I imagined him putting his arm around me in the lift on the way out, we’re going to be parents, Ida. One day, I thought as I lay there in the gynaecology chair, one day things have to work out, one day, after a long line of married and otherwise committed and uninterested and uninteresting men, things have to work out, just lying there made me believe both man and child might materialise, just the fact that I was there and actually doing it was a promise that there was more to come, one day.

The doctor and I looked at my uterus on the ultrasound screen, he asked what I did for a living and I told him I was an architect.

13‘You must draw some lovely houses,’ he said.