18.

Then

Lydia

‘I can’t do this,’ Lydia says tearfully to Joe in their bedroom the second he walks in. He’s been taking back the hire car, to save money, which irritated Lydia. Holidays are not for saving money on. Holidays are for not really knowing what fifty euros is, exactly, in pounds, and spending it anyway.

‘What?’ Joe says, stopping dead, like he’s heard a gunshot.

‘Another negative test.’ She kicks her feet against the bed. ‘That’s all,’ she adds in a small voice, his overreaction making her infertility seem trivial, though she knows that’s irrational. She hates that this is ruining her holiday. That she’s letting it.

Her infertility. That is how Lydia has begun to think of it. In the early months, she would tell herself that it would happen soon. That, if not, they would access fertility tests, IVF, even. She kept a note of all of this on her phone: a list of all of the reasons why things will be fine, why they will work out. And these things are happening, she tells herself forcefully now. They are accessing it. But, like a patient in a coma who has never once responded to any stimulus, lying there day after day as new things are tried, it’s hard to keep the hope alive. Rationalizing worry or lying to herself. She isn’t sure. Her mind chunters away at this particular worry, thinking and thinking and thinking about it. All pointless.

Joe’s face falls into sympathy. ‘It’s me,’ he says immediately. ‘I bet it’s me.’

‘It’s not fucking you,’ she says. She turns away from him. His bluntness, his anxiety, it is so selfish, sometimes. ‘It’s nothing,’ she adds. ‘It’s neither of us.’

‘It is nothing,’ he agrees immediately, to his credit. ‘It’ll happen. Nothing ever stays the same.’

He’s right. People conceive all the time, don’t they, even after they have struggled? People who go on holidays. People who have arranged the first adoption interview. People who have one-night stands. Desperate people. Relaxed people. It can still happen for them. Lydia raises her eyes to the bedroom window. She will be a mother, she knows it, and she can’t wait to meet her children. Although she is certain they will be delinquents, raised by somebody who is – already – obsessed with baby-led weaning and the no-cry sleep method.

Joe comes right up to her and kisses the very end of her nose. ‘Is my Lydia sad?’ he says to her.

‘She is sad,’ Lydia says back to him, leaning into him.

‘The end of your nose is wet now,’ Joe says, still kissing it. ‘Like a lovely little dog.’

Lydia laughs. God, he can always make her smile. He’s as mad as she is.

She wonders how it is for him. Infertility. She asked him, once, and he lolled his head against the doorframe like a teenager and said he was fine.

The thing is, he has Paul. He is Joe’s compensation, but Lydia doesn’t have that, doesn’t speak to a single member of her family. It was shortly after she met the Plants that it all went wrong at home for Lydia. A prying teacher at school, asking how come Lydia sometimes seemed so sad. A concealed bruise uncovered. An accidental secret told, and then the rest. The social workers. The anger-management classes her father failed to attend and her mother laughed off. The temporary relocation a social worker told her would take place as she collected her from school on a Thursday one November. How Lydia watched temporary become permanent, as the trees lost and regained their leaves, though nobody said as much. A Christmas with a foster family who had different traditions, who did presents after lunch.