It was Halloween. Gangs of witches, goblins, and ghosts knocking on my door, holding out sacks and baskets. Having made another donation to British dentistry, I found myself standing barefoot in the kitchen, feeling like a container of milk that had been left for too long in the fridge.
My laptop was open on the kitchen table. On either side were piles of typewritten pages. For three months I’d been transcribing tapes for a writer called Nicholas David Fyfle, who penned biographies of famous soldiers and war histories. He would courier me tapes and I would send back the transcripts. Our only other contact came via the quirky notes he wrote in the margins if he wanted me to retype certain sections.
I wondered if he was flirting with me. I wondered what he looked like. I pictured a quiet, tortured artist creating beautiful prose in his garret, or a wild-haired, hard-drinking war correspondent living life on the edge. I knew him only from his notes and his voice on the tapes, which sounded gentle and kind, with a slight stutter at certain syllables and a nervous laugh when he lost his place.
I made a decision. Instead of posting the transcripts, I delivered them by hand, knocking on the door of his house in Highgate. Nicky looked surprised, but also pleased. He invited me inside and made tea. He wasn’t as handsome as I’d hoped, but he had a nice enough face and a skinny body that seemed to be growing into his clothes.
I asked him about his books. He showed me his library. “Do you read?”
“I used to read a lot when I was little,” I said. “Nowadays I struggle to choose.”
“What sort of stories do you like?”
“I like happy endings.”
“We all like those,” he said with a laugh.
I suggested I transcribe the tapes at his house to save on the cost of couriers and speed up the process. I would arrive every day at 9 a.m. and work in his dining room, breaking occasionally to make us tea or microwave something to eat. It took weeks of flirting before Nicky kissed me. He was a virgin, I think. Tender and considerate, attentive, but not skillful. I wanted him to moan or cry out when we made love, but he was always silent.
Around his friends he acted like a typical lad, enjoying a pint and a punt on the horses, but with me he was different. He took me on long walks in the countryside, investigating ruined castles and spotting woodland birds. Nicky proposed to me on one of our “expeditions” and I said yes.
“When am I going to meet your parents?” he asked.
“You’re not.”
“But they’ll come to the wedding, won’t they?”
“No.”
“They’re your parents.”
“I don’t care. We have plenty of other guests.”
Even after we were married, Nicky kept trying to negotiate a reconciliation. “You can’t just stop talking to them,” he said. But I could and I did. It was like any relationship—if both parties cease to make an effort it will wither and die.
The ground slopes gently away from me as I follow a riding path dotted with puddles. Periodically I look over my shoulder. Nobody is following. My pregnancy is hidden beneath an overcoat, but I can feel the weight of the baby in my hip joints and the pressure in my pelvis. Clumsily, I climb an embankment, using saplings as handholds. Twigs and dead leaves snap and crumble beneath my boots. I come to a ditch and jump across with all the grace of a leaping hippo.
The sun has steadily strengthened and I’m warmer now, sweating beneath the coat. Following a zigzagging track, I reach a clump of trees next to the ruins of a farmhouse. I hear water falling into a deep pond at the base of a weir that is farther down the slope.
Kneeling on the damp earth, I clear away vines and weeds, pulling out clumps of vegetation and clods of earth. Slowly, I reveal three small pyramids of stones, spaced at equal intervals around the clearing. When I’m satisfied, I take off my coat and lay it on the ground as a makeshift picnic blanket, leaning my back against the crumbling wall of the farmhouse.
I found this place long before I met Nicky. I must have been eleven or twelve when I rode my bicycle along the towpath past Kirkstall Abbey and the forge towards Horsforth. Pedaling in my cotton dress and sandals, I remember waving at the canal boats being maneuvered through the locks. As I turned a corner I glimpsed the remains of a chimney just visible through the trees. Fighting my way through brambles and vines, I found the ruined farmhouse, which felt almost enchanted, like a fairy-tale castle that had been put to sleep a thousand years ago.
Much later I brought Nicky here and he fell in love with it too. I said we should buy the land and rebuild the house; he could write and we’d have lots of children. Nicky laughed and told me to hold my horses, but I was already trying to get pregnant.
Unprotected sex was like buying a scratch-lotto card every twenty-eight days, waiting to win a prize. I won nothing. We visited doctors and fertility clinics and alternative healers. I tried hormone injections, vitamins, drugs, acupuncture, hypnotherapy, Chinese herbs, and special diets. IVF was the obvious step. We tried four times, using up our savings, and each failure became another heartbreak. A marriage of hope had turned to desperation.
Nicky didn’t want to try again, but did it for me. On our last throw of the dice one embryo clung to my womb like a limpet on a rocky shore. Nicky called it our “miracle baby.” I worried every day because I didn’t believe in miracles.
Weeks passed. Months. I grew bigger. We dared to choose names (Chloe for a girl and Jacob for a boy). I was thirty-two weeks when I stopped feeling the baby moving. I went straight to the hospital. One of the midwives hooked me up to a machine and couldn’t find a heartbeat. She said it was probably just in a weird spot, but I knew something was wrong. A doctor came. He did another ultrasound and couldn’t find any blood flow or heartbeat.
I had a dead baby inside me, he said. Not a life. A corpse.
Nicky and I cried for the longest time, grieving together. Later that day they induced the birth. I went through the pain and the pushing, but there were no baby cries, no joy. Handed a bundle, I stared into the eyes of a still-warm baby girl who didn’t live long enough to take a breath or grow into her name.
This is where we brought her ashes, Nicky and I, burying Chloe beside the crumbling farmhouse, above the weir, our special place. We promised to come back here every year on Chloe’s birthday—which is today—but Nicky could never bring himself to visit. He told me we had to “move forward,” which is a term that I’ve never understood. The planet turns. Time passes. We move forward even when we’re standing still.
Our marriage didn’t survive the fallout. Within a year we had separated—my fault, not his. My love for a child will be greater than my love for an adult because it is a singular love that isn’t based on physical attraction, or shared experiences, or the pleasures of intimacy, or time together. It is unconditional, immeasurable, unshakeable.