Always and Forever

Her beloved Alex was linked to the three questions that Daisy really hated. First up was, ‘Are you and Alex ever going to get married, Daisy?’

Short answer: ‘Perhaps,’ delivered with a little smile that hinted at plans for something elegant on a far-flung beach where the party could pick exotic blooms to hang behind their ears as they stood, barefoot, in the sand. A Vera Wang dress, privately designed rings, and a select beachside party for their small group of friends, followed by a relaxed gathering in a restaurant when they got home from the honeymoon.

Daisy’s real answer was: ‘I’d love to but Alex’s not interested. We’ve talked about it but he’s not really into marriage. Why fix what’s not broken, he says.’

She’d said it to Mary Dillon, her partner in the shop.

‘That’s such a man thing to say,’ remarked Mary, who was just divorced and still inhabiting the all-men-are-pigs zone. Mary had started Georgia’s Tiara ten years before, and Daisy had come on board shortly afterwards. Together, they made a great team.

‘Getting married isn’t about not fixing anything. It’s a bigger commitment, that’s all,’ Mary went on. ‘It’s Alex saying he wants the world to know he’s going to be with you for ever. Living with someone can’t do that. Mind you,’ she added gloomily, ‘if I’d just lived with Bart instead of being stupid enough to marry him, we mightn’t have ended up paying the lawyers so much. Every time I see my lawyer in his new Porsche, I feel like saying I own an eighth of that car, so when can I borrow it?’

‘Yes…’ said Daisy, wishing she hadn’t started this. Mary was not the sort of woman to call a spade a metal digging implement and Daisy had just broken her own steadfast rule about couple loyalty. Never speak about your loved one in a negative way. Anything else was too like what she’d grown up with. ‘I suppose I can see Alex’s point,’ Daisy went on untruthfully, backtracking out of guilt. It had been a private conversation with Alex. What on earth had made her spill it all out to Mary? ‘We are happy as we are. I must be premenstrual, that’s it. Ignore me.’

The only plus about not having plans to get married meant that Daisy didn’t have to think about the dilemma of inviting both her parents to the wedding. It had been years since Daisy’s mother had tolerated being in the same town as her father, much less the same room. Nan Farrell had insisted that her husband move out of Carrickwell years ago so she could pretend – to herself, at least – that she was still a person of consequence in the town. Daisy’s father had drifted in and out of her life for years. He lived in San Francisco now and seemed perfectly happy to send and receive nothing more than a Christmas card.

Whenever Vogue had a feature on beautiful brides, Daisy contented herself with the know ledge that she had commitment without the need for an intricate seating plan to keep all her family happy. Her family had been a bit of a non-family all her life. And surely, she reasoned, it was more modern to live with a loved one than rush up the aisle just for the sake of it?

Her second most hated question was even more personal.

‘How did you lose all the weight?’ interrogated all the people who hadn’t seen her for years and who remembered Daisy as the rounded creature she would always remain in their heads.

Ignoring the rudeness of the question – weight was a terribly personal matter and yet so many recklessly demanded to know what you ate for breakfast if it would help them lose a few pounds – Daisy would say that she hadn’t done a thing. Honestly.

For all his charming sociability, Alex was incredibly private and hated anyone knowing he’d been sick, so she couldn’t say that the sheer worry she’d gone through over the two years of his mystery illness meant the weight, three stones of it, had just melted away.

‘Not WeightWatchers, not the Atkins?’ people would then say suspiciously, clearly convinced she was lying through her teeth, lived on nothing but cabbage soup and probably had terrible problems with bad breath.

‘Not a thing,’ Daisy replied, privately wondering was there an opening in the book world for the Epstein Barr Virus Diet.

Alex looked great now. Thanks to the last year as a patient of the fabulous Dr Verdan, he was glowing with health and brimming with his old energy. He was taking enough health supplements to open his own shop, but they all seemed to be working. She hoped the ones she’d begged him to ask Dr Verdan for were helping.

Which led on to the third question, the one that wasn’t asked quite as often. Apparently, people were more aware of the delicacy of asking it these days, so that when a woman reached a certain age and no children had appeared, only the bumbling lumbered in and asked: ‘What about kids? Don’t you want them?’

Unfortunately, there were lots of bumblers out there, people who thought it was perfectly acceptable to ask a healthy thirty-five-year-old woman with a long-term partner if she’d ever considered the notion of children.

Hell, no, Daisy wanted to yell at them. ‘We thought about it but we’ve heard that a child costs 30,000 euro in its first five years, so we’re going to the Bahamas instead.’ Only an answer so flippant could disguise the genuine physical pain she felt when asked such a question.

Because Daisy didn’t want children. She craved them, yearned for them, cried for them in her sleep.

When she was thirty, she’d stopped taking the pill.

‘It’ll be fun making babies,’ Alex had said at the time.

And it had been. Making love and hoping to get pregnant instead of the reverse was very sexy.

‘The mother of my children,’ Alex liked to murmur when he lay above her, his naked body moulded perfectly against her soft lush one.

Daisy had no particular love for her body. It was so defiantly different from what she’d have liked it to be, with rounded everything and fat that spilled out over her size fourteen waistbands, making her move miserably on to size sixteen. But when Alex was holding her gently, and her strawberry-blonde hair streamed around her, creamy skin pillowed out below him as they tried to conceive their child, that was the only time when she felt that she was almost beautiful.

Making babies didn’t work out to be as straightforward as they’d thought, however. It was as if simply deciding to have one, instead of trying hard not to, had suddenly made pregnancy very difficult to achieve.

Magazines were full of miserable stories about declining fertility and how women were leaving it too late to conceive. Daisy hated those articles ever since the day she’d grasped the horrific news that women were born with all the eggs they were ever going to have and it was all downhill from then on.

‘You mean, we don’t make new eggs all the time?’ she asked Paula, who worked in the shop and was addicted to health websites. ‘I thought everything in the human body got replaced every seven years. I read that, I know I did,’ Daisy added anxiously.

‘No,’ said Paula cheerily. ‘You’ve got your lot, I’m afraid. When you’re thirty, so are your eggs.’

Daisy blanched at the thought of her then thirty-year-old eggs and all the things her body had been through.

Could too much alcohol affect your eggs? Think of all those mad nights in her twenties when she’d had so much to drink that she’d almost drunk herself sober. Or drugs. Remember Werner, the Austrian student friend of Alex’s who’d been very keen on smoking dope and who’d encouraged a disapproving Daisy to have a joint with the rest of them on that holiday. She’d never done drugs before, she disapproved of drugs, for heaven’s sake, but she’d been stupid and said yes, and she knew that would come back to haunt her. Stupid cow, how could she not have known about her eggs?

Paula, who was younger than Daisy, didn’t seem too worried about the state of her ovaries and the fact that she hadn’t hatched anything, so to speak.

‘Ah, sure, what’ll be will be,’ she said optimistic ally.

‘Life is not a Doris Day song,’ a little voice inside Daisy’s head raged bitterly. Aloud she said: ‘You’re dead right, Paula. It’s crazy to obsess over these things. We’re only young, after all, and there’s loads of things they can do now to help you have children.’

That thought, the thought of experiments at the cutting edge of science where people would be able to have babies without even being on the same continent as each other, kept her going.

Cutting back on caffeine didn’t kickstart Daisy’s reproductive system. Neither did eating all the so-called superfoods. The vegetable basket looked almost alive with all the green stuff in it, and Daisy did her best to cut down the glasses of wine at the weekend. But her periods came with a regularity she’d sworn wasn’t there in the days when she hadn’t wanted to get pregnant.

Still, there was time on their side, she counselled herself. They were young, healthy, successful in everything they touched.

Georgia’s Tiara became more and more prosperous. Mary gave Daisy a share in the shop.

‘I can sell ice to the Eskimos but I wouldn’t be able to sell it unless you got the right ice,’ Mary said firmly. ‘You’ve put so much effort and energy into this business, you deserve to be a partner.’

Daisy had covered her mouth with her hands like a child. ‘Mary, I can’t believe it. You’re so good to me.’

‘Nonsense.’ Brisk was Mary’s middle name. ‘You’re so good to me, and for the shop. Running a business is second nature to me but I could spend a month of Sundays trying to learn what you do, and I’d still never manage it.’

Buoyed up by this – even her mother would have to say she was doing well – Daisy decided that she wasn’t pregnant because the time wasn’t right. It was like that old Buddhist saying: when the student is ready, the master will appear. She obviously wasn’t ready. Career women had so much trouble balancing kids and work that it was probably easier at this point in her life not to have a child. Then, after a year of baby-making, Alex became sick. It seemed incredible that it had taken so long to get a diagnosis and they had gone through the seven valleys of hell before they’d found out what it was. Even now, Daisy quaked at the thought of what it could have been. She and Alex had suspected leukaemia. Now, she always put money in collection tins that had anything to do with cancer as if to ward off the evil.

But the bugbear had been Epstein Barr, an autoimmune disorder that turned normally energetic people into wrecks. Hard to detect and even harder to cure, the illness had taken its toll on both Alex and Daisy. Baby-making had not been on the agenda then, but it was at the back of Daisy’s mind constantly, the sense of time passing slowly and of her elderly eggs getting even older. She also worried, although she would never say it, that Alex’s illness was part of the problem.

And now they’d come out of the fire, together. For the past two years, Alex had been healthy and said he felt great. She felt great. She was going to get pregnant. It was her time, time to find out why she wasn’t conceiving, if there was a problem with Alex’s sperm due to the Epstein Barr, and to do something about it. The student was ready.

Standing in front of the mirror in their bedroom on a dark Sunday afternoon, Daisy said it out loud: ‘I’m ready. I’m ready to get pregnant. Now.’

Nothing happened. No thunderbolt from on high to tell her that God was listening, no rustling of curtains to tell her that her guardian angel was hovering and would do his or her best.

There was no sign, just as there had never been any sign before.

‘Alex, I want us to have tests to find out what’s wrong. We can’t afford to wait any longer. I’m getting older and…’ Daisy’s monologue to the mirror trailed off. She didn’t want to tell the mirror – she wanted to tell Alex, and now.

She’d spent the weekend thinking of nothing else because, with Alex away, she had lots of time to reflect. He was in London with a group of investors on what he described as a ‘bank hooley’, where good food and expensive wine were laid on to help lubricate people’s cheque books.

Although she hated being alone, his being away gave Daisy a chance to catch up on all the boring household chores, like cleaning the oven before it went up in flames. The oven now gleamed, thanks to much scrubbing on Saturday. But the wardrobe tidying had proved to be a bit of a marathon task.