The Family Gift Read online

  ‘Support group or counselling. Have it set up by this time next week. I’ll phone.’

  I feel like a chastened child sitting in the headmistress’s office after she’s been given a telling off.

  ‘If I didn’t have ten patients sitting in the waiting room, I’d take you out for a coffee and a talk. We’d work through this. But I don’t have time, so help yourself, Freya,’ says AJ. ‘You have serious issues but you need help and perspective. There are people in here who are dealing with cancer, are watching relatives sink into dementia, are terrified their child will die, you name it. Not everyone can get through these things. Some crack because the burden is too huge but so many, in unbelievable circumstances, get through. You’ve got to get help, other than pills to make you sleep, Freya. Obviously, if you feel in crisis, come right back in. You have my mobile number and I’m always available for you. Unless Carla is cooking up something completely amazing, in which case you’ll have to wait till I’m finished.’ We both laugh. Carla is an amazing cook. ‘But deal with this, I know you can. Find a group, phone one of those therapists I recommended.’

  ‘’K,’ I shuffle out of his office, clutching my Zimovane prescription and feeling like Gollum muttering: ‘my preciousss’.

  The small baby, whose crying has reached a crescendo, is called next as I wait to pay.

  I suppose I’m going to have to do this bloody group thing, because I’ll never sleep without the tablets, but how do I sit down in front of people I don’t know and tell them stuff? Tell them about the nightmares, discuss it all?

  I can’t. But AJ says I must.

  I’m sitting at home, reluctantly looking up victim support groups when I’m supposed to be spending the rest of the day working on recipes, when Scarlett phones.

  ‘Hi, sis,’ she says.

  She sounds as if she’s been crying.

  ‘What’s up, honey?’ I ask.

  ‘I’ve been asked to a christening and I need advice on whether I have to go or not.’

  The baby being christened has been born to her old school friend, Charlotte.

  ‘Alfie,’ she says, her voice low and sad. ‘That’s the baby. He’s Charlotte’s second baby, and she’s having a big day out because she and Mick have been trying for another baby for so long. You know what they call it when you have one child and you can’t seem to have another baby?’

  I say no, although I do know what this is called, but Scarlett wants to tell me, needs to tell me. I let her.

  ‘Secondary infertility,’ she says. ‘So you’ve one baby and you want another baby, and you can’t have that child: that’s called secondary infertility. It must be horrendous. I, I can feel their pain but . . .

  ‘They have one child.’ She’s husky with pain and weeping. ‘That’s all we are looking for. One child. We’ll stop at one. We don’t care, we’re happy, but just one.’

  ‘Scarlett, can I come round to you? You shouldn’t be on your own.’

  ‘I’m like this so much of the time,’ she says wearily. ‘Trust me, nobody can live with me twenty-four/seven. Even Jack can’t cope. But I just can’t help it.’

  I’m silent on the other end of the phone. Scarlett’s pain is another ache in our family, another reason nobody should have to know what I’m dealing with. Because I’m strong but this has weakened my beloved Scarlett so much.

  Before I can start comforting her, she gets there: ‘There’s nothing you can do,’ she says simply. ‘I feel like such a bitch for hating Charlotte. No.’ She corrects herself. ‘I don’t hate her, I just . . . but she has two children now, and she knows how hard it’s been for me and she hasn’t given me an out for the christening. She could have said, look, don’t come if it’s too much for you. But she hasn’t. So I have to go and smile, hold the baby and pretend . . . ’

  The pretending is the hardest, she told me once. Seeing other people’s babies – because they are everywhere, Scarlett insists – and then pretending to be happy for the new parents.

  ‘They don’t see how hard it is for anyone else.’

  And now in two weeks she’s got this christening and I honestly think, for the first time ever, that this battle is going to break her.

  I glance briefly at my notebooks which are empty of recipes and I close down the computer with its support group details.

  ‘Look,’ I say, ‘I’m coming round to you now, OK?’

  ‘I’m at home,’ she says dully. ‘I called in sick, I’m not going to have a job soon and I need one because we are so in debt, but who am I kidding? I don’t really care anymore.’

  I hop in the car to drive to her house and want to cry myself. Scarlett is three years younger than I am, closer in age to me than I am to Maura. And Maura is always giving out about Scarlett’s name.

  ‘It’s so much fun,’ she wails, ‘Scarlett O’Hara it’s the best name ever. Why is she called Scarlett and I’m called Maura?’

  Mum called Scarlett and me after wonderful characters’ names in books that she was reading.

  I like to tease Maura by saying she could have been called Amber after Forever Amber. And then she straightens up a bit, and you can see the steel coming to her spine.

  Forever Amber was the sort of book that we stole out of Mum’s bookshelves when we were teenagers in the hope that there would be lots of rocking goods in it. It wasn’t really that sexy in our day; although it was probably considered the height of sexiness when it was written. By the time we were growing up, it was positively tame. Maura had a friend whose mother was addicted to Harold Robbins, and we read plenty of those.

  We all agreed that once you’d read Harold Robbins, you didn’t need the non-existent Catholic schoolgirl sex education classes.

  Scarlett is so used to her name that she doesn’t think about it, but it does make people look up. She looks like a blonde Scarlett: her hair is the same striking blonde as all of ours, for which we thank many deities all the time, because really it requires no time in the hairdressers, and she is prone to smoky eyes and the odd bright red lips that drive men wild. But the only man she’s wanted to drive crazy, ever, is Jack.

  Jack is an amazing man, although not as amazing as my darling Dan.

  Con, my brother, says Jack’s amazing for putting up with Scarlett at all, but the women in the family – myself, Maura and Mum – all make faces at Con when he says this and say ‘shut up, Con.’

  Jack is all the things that Maura half wishes her husband Pip would be. Jack is romantic, given to public displays of affection and buys the right presents.

  ‘He knows how to cherish,’ says Maura, mournfully.

  Jack gets hold of impossible-to-find foreign perfumes for Scarlett for Christmas or buys her sea glass necklaces encased in filigree silver. Pip trots down to the shop of Maura’s choosing and follows instructions: ‘enter the shop, turn right, take two paces to Clarins stuff. Talk to nice woman there who is already prepped on what I need: that new serum to stop my face meeting my chin.’ Said gift is then wrapped for him and he pays. Done.

  Since Jack and Scarlett met ten years ago, they have been like twin souls who navigate the universe together: voyagers on a difficult journey across the oceans. For them, the difficult journey has been trying to have a child.

  Dan says he’s lost count of how often they have gone in for infertility treatment, but I know. Five times. Five times that has put them into debt.

  Not only do I love Scarlett, but I admire her so much because I don’t think I’d have been able to cope with what she has gone through. First all those years of trying to get pregnant, then the endless tests, then having been told there was a great chance in one clinic and two full cycles and one frozen cycle, and nothing.

  ‘I can’t understand it,’ Scarlett said to me the second-last time, sitting at the kitchen table in our old house and resting forward with her face in her hands, so that her hair covere
d her face. ‘I don’t think I can stand it anymore, the pain, the emptiness.’ Her hands slid down to her empty belly, almost in disgust. ‘Why is it that it’s women who have to bear babies? Why did bloody evolution put this one on us?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ I sat beside her, so I could pet her head the way I used to when she was little.

  When people say that sometimes there is nothing that you can say, it’s true.

  Sometimes there is literally nothing you can say, nothing that will take away the pain.

  Somehow, Jack and Scarlett managed to pull themselves together, go to a different clinic and do it twice again, which brought them to their fifth and latest failure.

  Don’t let anyone tell you that infertility and infertility treatments only affect the woman. Jack was devastated each time. He didn’t cry to me or Dan or anyone in our family, but to his brothers, all of whom had big glorious families: the types made up of three or four children, a scattering of dogs and cats, a ferret and two parrots even – their houses veritable menageries of creatures while Scarlett and Jack had nothing.

  I nearly hit Dan the day he said, ‘Do you think that’s the problem? That they keep trying. They need to accept it’s not going to happen, not now, not at Scarlett’s age – what is she? Forty soon? It’s not happening.’

  I rounded on him with rage. I never got angry with Dan, not properly angry.

  ‘How dare you say that,’ I’d hissed. ‘How can they give up. Would we have given up?’

  I’d rarely felt such anger towards him, not even when he was dealing inadequately in the early days with stupid Elisa, when Lexi was just a little girl, used to a neglectful form of mothering and my rage against Elisa had burst its banks and washed over him.

  But he held his ground this time.

  ‘I’m just saying,’ Dan said calmly, ‘that I don’t know if I’d be able to keep going.’

  ‘You don’t know because we have three beautiful babas. Our lives are so full, but Scarlett and Jack – it’s a totally different situation. Plenty of people choose not to have children and more power to them but Jack and Scarlett are not among them. They want a baby. More than anything.’

  ‘I suppose,’ said Dan.

  Scarlett and Jack’s house is a slender house in a terrace: pretty and with a murderous mortgage. It’s not far from Summer Street but while Mum and Dad’s house is a bit rambling with higgledy piggledy extensions added on over the years, Scarlett and Jack’s home is a small two up, two down.

  Inside, it’s ironically the sort of house you’d imagine could never welcome children: all white wooden floors, off-white couches with pale throws draped across them. Yet Scarlett loves having children there, adores it when my three are visiting, and she just laughs and says ‘It’s a washable cover,’ when Teddy gets the inevitable bit of chocolate/ice cream/raspberry juice on the couch.

  We all have keys to each others’ homes and she’s upstairs lying on the bed in her and Jack’s bedroom, which is equally white and yet still cosy with its nubbly curtains and a soft grey throw made of mega-chunky wool on the bed, an item Maura insists she could have made.

  ‘Well, I could,’ Maura says when we look at her.

  ‘If you ever have time, I’d love another one in cream for downstairs,’ Scarlett said kindly, even though she and I both know that finishing craft projects is not what Maura does.

  ‘Mum is addicted to buying wool,’ her daughter, Gilly, says naughtily. ‘Not making anything – just buying wool.’

  Even Maura laughs at this.

  ‘Touché,’ she admits.

  Today, Scarlett is wrapped up in the chunky grey throw and is watching daytime TV, one of the sadder shows about people who are genuinely trapped in their houses by hoarding.

  Mildred, please don’t, I beg. I am not going to be that person. I’m just not good at throwing stuff out.

  No shit, says Mildred caustically.

  Scarlett’s paler than usual and her hair is unwashed.

  ‘Hello darling, let’s talk,’ I say.

  Scarlett hugs me back and then says: ‘No, let’s not talk. I might cry and when I cry, I can’t stop. Let’s go shopping.’

  ‘But I thought—’

  ‘We’re going to the damn christening,’ she says fiercely. ‘I want something fabulous that makes people not even think of asking if we’re ever going to have children. I want them to imagine us with a glorious life full of holidays and fun, and no desire to be parents whatever. I don’t want naked pity on anyone’s face.’

  She showers, I make coffee as per her instructions and I decide she must be taking some anti-anxiety medicine. It would explain a lot.

  ‘Are you taking something?’ I ask straight out when she arrives downstairs, back to being Scarlett, beautiful, albeit with sad eyes.

  ‘Yes,’ she says almost defiantly, ‘and they’re helping me cope. They make me tired, though. I don’t want to talk about it: I just need a hit of coffee.’

  Worryingly, I almost ask what she’s taking. Maybe AJ will give me those? I won’t sleep, but I’d be happy.

  ‘Will we talk or shop?’ I say, handing her a cup of something so dark that it’s even black-looking when a smidge of almond milk has been added.

  Scarlett puts a slender hand on mine.

  ‘No talking. I’m all talked out. Let’s get this done,’ she says, her voice wobbling. ‘Love you, Freya.’

  ‘Love you too, Scarlett,’ I say.

  It takes two hours to get an outfit she can bear. Scarlett is a fabulous shopper. I am hopeless. Sometimes I take photos of me dressed in clothes the show’s stylist has picked in order to remember how to hang the scarves properly or what way to tie belts. Yes, I am that bad. But buying the clothes that the TV stylist on my show finds for me is how I finally have a decent wardrobe.

  Mum has such great style and an eye for stunning colours that make her glow, while Maura has a particular look, made up of neatly fitted skirts and colourful blouses. Scarlett has exquisite taste and can wear anything. I am the one that style forgot.

  You can’t be good at everything, Mildred remarks.

  Mildred? What gives? Are you listening to my mother telling me how great I am? Mildred keeps schtum.

  Now that Mum is in my head, I have to say it.

  I’m driving Scarlett home and then I’ll work on recipes.

  ‘Have you seen Mum this week?’

  ‘No, going over tomorrow evening.’

  I pause; saying this is going to make everything more real, but I have to. If I said it to Maura first it would be like ordering DEFCON 4, so saying it to Scarlett is sort of the easier option.

  ‘I’m a little bit worried about her, I dropped in the other day and she looked tired . . .’ my voice trails off.

  ‘Well of course she’s going to look tired,’ says Scarlett, stirring sugar into her coffee.

  ‘Not just ordinary tired: tired in her eyes. I mean, Granddad would drive anyone to drink and Granny, though she’s a complete darling, does require a lot of petting and minding, it’s . . .’ I stop for a minute. ‘It’s Dad, it’s taking care of him – it’s looking at this man she loves and knowing he’s in another place. That’s heartbreaking.’

  Scarlett looks me in the eye. She doesn’t say it but I can tell what she’s thinking: people with heartbreak recognise it in other people. That she and my mother are on one side of the tragic divide. They both deal with huge pain.

  I can’t compare mine to theirs.

  So I need to fix myself in order to be there for my beloved family. That’s my job.

  13

  When you can’t find the sunshine, be the sunshine

  In the evening, Dan takes one look at me and can tell I’m upset.

  ‘Babe,’ he says, dropping his briefcase onto the kitchen floor and reaching out. I go into his arms and rest my head on
his shoulder, breathing in his scent, feeling the solid muscle underneath his jacket.

  ‘What’s up?’

  ‘Scarlett,’ I say, still resting my head against him.

  I want to stay here all evening: to not cook dinner, but just stand in this warm circle of comfort and feel healed. No matter what’s going on in the world, Dan can make me feel better.

  ‘Right. Did you go over to see her?’

  I tell him the story of our shopping trip, and eventually, we migrate to the kitchen table where he sets me in a chair, makes me tea, finds my hidden stash of chocolate and puts four squares in front of me so that I can eat them quickly before the kids come in and want some. Eating chocolate secretly is a risky business in our house.

  He then looks into the oven to see the progress of dinner.

  ‘I know you hate when I say this, Freya,’ he says, looking marvellously domestic with gingham oven gloves on as he checks the home-made fishfingers we are all going to eat because I was too exhausted to make grown up and kid meals, ‘but you can’t take Scarlett’s pain. It’s like you think you’re the family’s bomb-proof chamber and all bombs can be detonated inside you because you can deal with it. You can’t.’

  ‘I can,’ I say wearily. ‘I’m like Dad: he could take it all and now that he’s gone, I do it. So? You and Zed mind your mother because she has nobody else.’

  ‘It’s not the same.’

  ‘It is!’ I protest.

  ‘No,’ says Dan evenly. ‘We look after Mum but we don’t think we can fix her. Nobody can fix another person. You, on the other hand, try to fix everyone: Scarlett, your mother, everyone. You can’t . . .’

  He sits back down again, pulls off the oven gloves and takes my hands in his big ones. ‘. . . we used to talk about this stuff. We don’t anymore. You don’t tell me how you’re doing.’

  ‘Fine,’ I say, and I am lying. I never used to lie to Dan – apart from that one time I secretly got Botox and hated it, but couldn’t bring myself to tell him, so said I had laser hair removal instead.

  ‘If you’d let me come to one of your meetings,’ he begins. ‘I’m sure they let family members of people who’ve been hurt in?’