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I’d plaster on a happy face for Rob, but inwardly I’d massively mourn that baby I’d been so sure I was having. I felt like they say amputees feel when they loose a limb—knowing it’s gone but feeling it’s still there. Then I’d say, Jill, snap out of it; you can’t miss what you’ve never had. But you can. You can grieve without having lost.
    ‘You can leave me, you know,’ Rob said, in one of my weak moments when I couldn’t mask my despair. We were in bed. Neither of us could sleep. ‘If you left me for somebody who could give you a baby, I wouldn’t think badly of you one little bit.’ I felt one of his tears roll into my hair. ‘I’d still love you,’ he whispered, ‘but with the best will in the world, I’d let you go. And if I saw you walking down the street one day with your new husband and your child, a part of me would feel nothing but joy for you.’
    I bawled my eyes out. ‘Of course I’m not going to leave you! You’re my life. Not some baby that I’ve never consciously wanted until someone tells me I’m not going to have it.’ I planted protective kisses on him, trying to make that feeling go away, of catching myself in a lie. Because I did have my moments where I’d see my life in scenes with some other husband: leaving Rob today, meeting someone else tomorrow, marrying him Thursday and having his baby by the weekend. I’d just have to look at a man with his child and find him instantly more attractive, because he was virile. My old criteria for a partner—tall, dark, handsome, sense of humour, job, no beer belly—seemed a naive and distant second to that glorious F-word: Fertile.
    Infertile. Childless. Barren. We can’t have children. At some point we’ll have to get round to telling everybody. But Rob doesn’t want to yet, so I have to respect that.
    And I’m okay about it. I’ve stopped wanting what he can’t give me. I suppose I’m like that. I can still feel like a woman without being a mother. And I still have a family because I have Rob. Besides, we could always adopt, which we’ve not talked about yet—because, well, we’ve not talked.
    Because Rob has taken it badly. Rob has come to obsess about what he can’t have. Rob feels a failure. Rob feels less than a man. Rob would never tell me this. But I know. After all these years with somebody, you know the things they cannot say. You feel the things they can’t feel. Maybe that’s why he’s gone off sex. Maybe it reminds him of his failure. I try not to focus on it. I keep thinking give it time. Give him time… But then I just get impatient to have everything be good between us again. The few times we have made love since we found out, our inability to make a baby has lain there between us, like some third wheel on a date. But I worry that the time will come when he’ll want to be in the arms of somebody who doesn’t have this history with him, who doesn’t sometimes cry when they’re in bed with him.
    And I bleed for him. I bleed for us because we’ve fallen into this dark place. And I just want to make him all right again, see him happy again, but I don’t know how.
    Now, on this bridge, since seeing that dad and his kid, all the joy seems to have been rung out of him, leaving only a sad and pensive shell. I take his warm hand as we arrive on the Gateshead side in front of the Baltic Centre with its banner advertising the new Antony Gormley exhibition. The sun has been dramatically exchanged for that thin quiet rain that soaks you in seconds. A girl is quickly packing a harp into a case as people scatter onto buses that are switching their lights on. We go inside to take cover, stand by the window and watch it coming down. When it eases off we leave. On our way back across the Blinking Eye, I can feel his sadness. It is palpable. I don’t know what to say to him, so I just take his hand in mine again and give it a reassuring squeeze. ‘Thank you. I love you, you know,’ he says quietly, as though