The Longing: A bestselling psychological thriller you won’t be able to put down. Jane Asher

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СКАЧАТЬ of making love to order had told on both of them. Even the simple gesture of holding each other had become inextricably linked with their determined attempts to conceive; it was hard to remember a time when they’d had close physical contact for the sheer joy of it.

      ‘It’s not you. I just can’t bear myself, you see.’

      ‘I know.’

      ‘No, I’m sure you don’t. You’ve no idea how I loathe myself most of the time.’ She was looking up at him now, still in his arms but pulling away slightly, not crying but with such despair in her eyes that Michael thought it must be only seconds until she was. ‘I feel so empty, and so foolish – it’s hard to explain – as if I’ve just been pretending – how can I—’

      ‘Pretending what?’

      ‘I don’t know how to – pretending to live. Pretending I was getting up, pretending I was going to work. No you don’t know what I’m talking about, of course you don’t. I mean – I’m a sham. I’m not real.’

      Apart from the necessary discussions about the love-making cycle, it wasn’t often that the subject of the non-existent child was touched upon openly now. For most of the time it was left as an unacknowledged hollow at the base of their marriage, only occasionally referred to obliquely by Juliet as in, ‘Well, at least we don’t have baby-sitter problems.’ Or, ‘I don’t suppose we’d be able to afford this holiday if things had gone according to plan.’ The small upstairs room had always been called the nursery, and the name had become so familiar and ordinary that neither had thought to stop using the word when it became less and less suitable. They had discussed things enough to confirm a willingness on both their parts to pay their way out of the Situation if it were possible, but it always filled Michael with hope when he felt Juliet was trying to put across to him how she really felt. These moments often seemed to follow patches of intense irritation with him, as if something in her was fighting every inch of the way against revealing her true feelings until they burst out of her unbidden and released themselves in a wave of weeping.

      It was this intense distress of Juliet’s that made it so difficult for Michael to talk about his own sense of inadequacy and loss. For a man who liked to think he was rational and in control of his feelings it amazed him how much guilt he, too, felt at his failure to produce the required son and heir (it never occurred to him to wonder why he always imagined his offspring as male). But it was more than that – he had unexpectedly found a deep sadness within himself at the thought of never carrying his child in his arms, never kicking a football in the park with a miniature version of himself, never proudly watching the young Evans collecting his degree. As time went by his thoughts became almost biblical: phrases such as ‘Fruit of his loins’, ‘Evans begat Evans’, ‘Thy seed shall replenish the earth’ rattled round his head. The child became a clear picture in his mind until he could have described every detail of hair, figure, expression and face as if the boy really existed. Sometimes he felt he was going mad, but comforted himself with the realisation that this life of the imagination at least gave him a release of emotion which might otherwise have unleashed itself on Juliet.

      Even at work he remained good-natured and outwardly at peace. He sometimes envied the ability of his colleagues to release their frustrations in outbursts of swearing and shouting, marvelling at their capacity to show strong emotion on such subjects as parking fines or politics. He thought with amusement of how violent, on a scale ranging from parking meters to childlessness, the manifestation of his own unhappiness would be if it truly reflected the deep wells of despair buried inside him. Not that his restraint made him seem in any way weak or inadequate; on the contrary his gentle but slightly cynical analysis of office problems betrayed a wisdom and maturity that were clearly lacking in the overheated reactions of those surrounding him. His childhood in Nottingham, as the bright-eyed boy of the manager of a furniture shop and a piano teacher mother, had led him to be aware, from his entrance into the local grammar school to his departure from Manchester University with a degree in economics, of how much was expected of him. Ever since seeing his parents’ anxiety at his admittance of any blip in the smooth upward curve of the life they had planned for him, he had learnt to keep his worries to himself.

      But the distress over the non-existent child was different. For the first time in his life he felt the lack of any kind of real escape valve for the emotional pressure building inside, but was inhibited by his keen awareness of her own suffering from unburdening himself to the only other person who would be completely in sympathy. He found himself becoming increasingly attached to Lucy, the labrador, but consciously steered clear of imbuing her with too many human attributes, having seen in other couples how easily a pet can become a child substitute, involving, in his eyes, a lack of dignity for both parties.

      As it was, he liked to think that Juliet was unaware of just how much he minded, and concentrated on supporting and cheering her.

      This policy may have been a mistake.

Chapter Three

      ‘And?’

      ‘Polycystic ovaries.’

      ‘Poly-what-ovaries?’

      ‘Cystic.’

      ‘Oh, right.’

      There was a pause while Harriet let this mysterious information sink in.

      ‘And is that bad?’

      The two women stared at each other for a moment, then Juliet made a face. ‘Well I suppose so.’ She went on looking across at her friend, then they both laughed. ‘Well, evidently.’ They laughed more. ‘How would you like cysts on your ovaries’. Not just one, mind you, not just your monocystic, but the full poly. It’s not madly glamorous is it?

      Harriet was giggling now, bending over in her chair, relieved to see the old Juliet emerging once more out of the midst of this alien affliction. And Juliet was laughing in relief too, knowing this was the only person she could ever talk to in this way, able to unburden herself without facing the over-solicitous reactions of Michael or the demanding worry of her mother. She was always smugly aware of Harriet’s envy of her own happily surviving marriage, but Juliet’s searing jealousy of her friend’s two children counterbalanced it, giving them a spurious emotional equality. Juliet had sometimes imagined a world where the two of them could combine – a creature half-Harriet and half-Juliet; the perfect happily married mother of two. The other halves – merging to create a woman not only abandoned but also barren – could wander in some eternal limbo for those that don’t fit, for those that break too many of the rules of social acceptability.

      ‘No, but I mean what can they do about it? Can’t they sort of scrape them off or something?’ This produced another burst of giggling. Harriet scooped her long brown hair (too long for thirty-five as Juliet sometimes idly considered telling her) back behind her ears and wiped smudged mascara from beneath her eyes.

      Juliet leant forward and spoke more quietly. ‘You should see how they look inside you, it’s really bizarre. They said I had to have a scan, so of course I thought it would be like the ones you had with Adam, but it’s completely different.’ She pictured herself back on the couch in the small dark room in Weymouth Street; the radiographer had explained what was going to happen, but she had still been taken aback by the jellied penis-shaped instrument with its ultrasonic eye inserted gently into her vagina to gaze unashamedly up and around her womb and ovaries like an all-seeing joyless dildo.

      ‘God, I just feel so pleased that they’ve found something. I don’t care what I’ve got so long as there’s something СКАЧАТЬ