Read Online The Sudden Departure of the Frasers by Louise Candlish - Free Book Online Page B

that. Vanessa’s boss was a woman, but these days women are as much our enemy as men are, maybe even more so.’
    ‘I’d agree with that.’ Personally, I’d never doubted for a moment that women were the more dangerous sex; their interest in others was far sharper than men’s, which made their suspicions more intelligent.
    ‘Will you be looking for a job again soon, Amber?’
    ‘Maybe.’ No need to confide that the prospect was repellent to me. ‘The idea is to have a baby.’ As it happened, directly before Felicity’s visit I’d had an appointment with my new GP and, still naive, had lapped up his advice about folic acid and other aids that my body could then mock for their ineffectiveness. ‘Though there’s no sign of one yet,’ I added.
    ‘You make it sound like the number 3 bus,’ Felicity said, smiling.
    ‘I haven’t seen one of those yet either,’ I joked, though I rarely bothered with public transport. ‘Sod’s law, I’d find a great job and then discover I’m pregnant within a week of starting.’
    ‘Most women have the job
and
the child,’ Felicity said, though she was kind enough not to condemn me for having neither. ‘Not everyone is in a position to choose.’
    ‘I know,’ I said agreeably. ‘One day I’ll look back on this period and think how lucky I was.’
    ‘Yes,’ she said, thoughtful, even moved. ‘I imagine you will.’
    I’m convinced that this business of trying for a baby affected the dynamic between Jeremy and me in some crucial way. It wasn’t that I disliked having sex with him, not at all, only that in changing the purpose of sex we had somehow also changed the conditions. What had once been a recreational thrill was now a necessary errand, not quite on a par with registering for council tax and shopping for cheaper car insurance but certainly closer than it should have been. Once nothing had been riding on copulation beyond pleasure, but now a great deal was, no less than our whole future. As my friend Helena had remarked the last time we met, ‘The sooner the scientists take you two in hand, the better.’
    But Jeremy didn’t want to see any scientists, not yet.
    ‘Is it time to make an appointment at a fertility clinic?’ I asked him, when my first Lime Park period made itself known.
    ‘No,’ he said. ‘It takes some couples longer than others, that’s all. We have to be patient, otherwise the thinking it isn’t going to happen will become a self-fulfilling prophecy.’
    ‘I don’t believe that for a moment,’ I said. ‘This is basicbiology, not mind over matter – at least it is for most people. If it wasn’t, the human race would have died out by now.’
    He glanced up at my darker-than-usual tone. ‘I just mean try not to worry about it, baby. Let’s give it till after the summer and then we can think about getting some advice. It might work out better that way – you don’t want to be breathing in all this dust when you’re pregnant, do you?’
    ‘I suppose not.’ It was unprecedented for me to be the impatient one; if either of us had an interest in hurrying the plan to fruition, it was him. ‘It’s just … well, you’ll be fifty-two at the end of the year.’
    ‘That doesn’t bother me.’ He reminded me that his famously spry mother was about to celebrate her seventy-eighth birthday and his still compos mentis aunt had just turned eighty.
    But I didn’t like to think of my husband at eighty. As I say, I was still young enough to believe that I was the exception to the universal rule of ageing, and Jeremy’s enduring youthfulness and energy had to date encouraged me to persist in this delusion.
    In retrospect, of course, it’s clear that I was suddenly pushing for medical advice because I knew, either consciously or subconsciously, that a baby was the only thing that could save me from Rob. No pregnant woman would embark on an adulterous affair, and no man would want her – well, not the type of man that he was, anyway: the