Read Online The Secrets of Married Women by Carol Mason - Free Book Online

down Grey Street, Rob stops to gaze at its subtly-descending curve, and the ancient sepia-coloured buildings on either side that seem to stand on military parade. ‘Come hither,’ I pull him to Waterstone’s’s elaborate window because I need a new pink novel to read. We stand beside a couple of serious, bookish types who are chatting about the latest Salman Rushdie bestseller that’s displayed. Rob nudges me. ‘So tell me when you next meet your parole officer?’ he says, loudly. The bookish types stop talking and glare at me. ‘You sod!’ I yank him down the steep bank, pulling him extra hard because I know it hurts his knees. We disappear under the footbridge and come out at the Quayside, chatting about everything from the pants I want to go back and buy (which he now says he hated because they gave me ‘plumber’s bum crack!’) to our puppy having eaten the chord from our Venetian blinds.
    I’m just thinking how we haven’t had a fun day like this in ages when we cross the Blinking Eye bridge. A handsome young father barrels toward us with his kid in a pushchair, wheels rumbling across metal, the little lad squealing with the thrill. I happen to look up at Rob. And I see it. The quiet, covetous gaze.
    When we were first married, we didn’t really talk much about having children. In my twenties the thought of being a mother felt like the end of life as I knew it. And for a sensitive man, Rob has a very unsentimental attitude to family. Maybe it’s from growing up without a father. When his mother was four months pregnant his dad went out to get a haircut and never came back. (Rob was raised as the man of the family, which I believe makes him such a good husband.) Rob would usually grimace on sight of a baby. ‘Look at it. It’s got a face like a worm-eaten sprout. Eat, sleep and shit, that’s all they do. They’ve got nothing to contribute to the world have they? You can’t have a sensible conversation with ‘em. They don’t get any of your jokes. How can they not give a damn about who won the football match?’
    But then, the longer we were married and the happier we were, we no longer had a strong enough reason not to do it. So we stopped using birth control, and decided to let nature take its course. Rob still claimed he was doing it mostly for me. Although he’d say things like, ‘I hope we have a girl. A little you…’ And he’d get that quietly pleased expression. Then I caught him making a crib, which was really crazy given that I wasn’t yet pregnant. ‘A bit ahead of things aren’t you?’ I teased. He looked up at me, with his stain brush in hand, looking very handsome. ‘Just in case she gets an earlier boat.’ We tried for over a year. I got tested and was fine. Then Rob got tested and found out he had a problem. ‘Total sperm count: 0,’ he read to me from the piece of paper that came in the mail. We trouped off to see two specialists. I couldn’t get my head around the diagnosis. I thought that if Rob could ejaculate he had to have sperm. Some sperm. Enough to do the job. I kept thinking of that little egg I saw on my ultrasound, how mesmerized I was to see my body preparing to create life. How sad now that my little egg would be like The French Lieutenant’s Woman in that film, wandering the shores of my Fallopian tubes, waiting for her lover who wasn’t coming. It saddened me to think I’d never have the sights, smells and tastes of being pregnant, like other women. I didn’t go potty and stalk maternity wards or steal babies at bus stands, but I’d take strange dislikes to food, my breasts would be tender and a strange brewing feeling took up tenancy in my stomach. ‘I have to be pregnant,’ I said to Rob. ‘Why do I have morning sickness? Why is my period late?’ Rob would get annoyed. ‘Azoospermia,’ he’d say. ‘I have no sperm. I’m unable to produce a baby.’ But I was sure we were going to prove the doctors wrong. And then my period would come and