The Things We Need to Say Page 16

  ‘Most people start by teaching a couple of classes alongside their current job,’ Fran goes on. ‘Then see what happens. Is that what you were thinking?’

  Katrin looks away. ‘I want to walk away from it all,’ she says. ‘From the thesis, the lecturing, the endless dinners and formalities. I want to walk away from Trinity College and never go back.’

  Fran doesn’t know what to say. She always thought Katrin was happy, that she was one of those people who had managed to create the life she’d planned, who’d got everything she wanted.

  ‘Is this what was wrong the other day?’ Fran asks.

  Katrin nods, still not meeting Fran’s eye.

  ‘Well if you’re unhappy and you think you’ve made the wrong career choice then you probably need to talk to someone.’ Fran pauses. ‘Perhaps not me though. I’m no expert. What does your fiancé think? Would he be able to support you if you took the yoga teaching route?’

  Katrin turns to look at Fran then, her eyes swimming with tears. ‘I don’t love him any more,’ she says.

  Her words echo in the silence of the studio, orbiting around Fran’s head like the dust motes that are lit up by the rays of sunlight streaming in. She doesn’t know what to say next. What is there to say?

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Katrin says eventually. ‘None of this is your problem.’

  Fran reaches over, takes Katrin’s hand in hers.

  ‘Perhaps not,’ she says. ‘And perhaps there isn’t anything I can do to help, but I told you I was here to listen, so please don’t apologise.’

  Katrin doesn’t say anything.

  ‘Have you said anything to him about how you feel?’ Fran asks.

  Katrin shakes her head. ‘I don’t know what to say. How do you tell someone you don’t love them any more?’

  Fran thinks of Jamie and Izzy. She doesn’t know for sure but she’s almost certain the only thing that went wrong in their marriage was that they fell out of love. And she thinks of Will and how much she still loves him, how he says he still loves her, and how different everything could have been if they’d talked more.

  ‘I don’t know how you tell someone that,’ she says. ‘But I know that if you don’t talk about problems when those problems first appear, it only makes everything harder later on.’ She squeezes Katrin’s hand. ‘And I also know that everything has a habit of working itself out in the end.’

  ‘The universe?’ Katrin asks, looking up, raising an eyebrow.

  ‘Maybe,’ Fran replies. ‘Or maybe it’s just dumb luck.’

  ‘What am I going to do?’ Katrin asks.

  ‘Talk to your fiancé, talk to people you work with, try to work out what your next steps are. And if you decide you’d like to take the yoga teaching path, I will do everything I can to help you.’ Fran thinks for a moment about her baby, and how, if everything works out, she’ll be needing someone she trusts to cover her maternity leave.

  ‘Thank you,’ Katrin says, standing up. ‘I’m so sorry.’

  As Katrin turns away Fran feels a wave of energy wash over her and she remembers what David said about human touch, about love. She calls Katrin back quietly and opens her arms. The two women fall against each other, holding on, finding the strength together to step out of their fear and into their futures.

  Fran knows how lucky she is to do the job she does, how lucky she is to be surrounded by people who understand her, by people who aren’t afraid to speak up about their own problems. Everyone on this retreat is carrying their own heartbreak, their own loss, and knowing that is beginning to help Fran carry hers more comfortably.

  Will

  ‘If you’re not going to go to work, you can make yourself useful,’ Will’s father Tom says to him on Monday morning. Will had noticed the worry in his father’s eyes when both he and Jamie had turned up drunk to dinner the previous evening, like teenagers. He sees the worry again now as Tom finds him still at home and not in the office in the middle of the day.

  ‘One of the fences in the top field needs fixing,’ Tom goes on. ‘You can come and help.’

  They work in silence on the fence. The sky is overcast and grey and hangs over them. A thunderstorm threatens. The air feels as heavy and oppressive as Will’s hangover. He tries to concentrate on hammering the stakes into the ground; he tries to keep his mind on each movement.

  After a while Tom gets out a Thermos of coffee and pours two cups, handing one to Will.

  ‘Are you going to tell me what’s going on?’ he asks eventually. ‘You might be able to fool your mother into thinking you’re just missing Fran, but you can’t fool me. What have you done?’

  Will looks at his father for a minute. How did he know? It takes one to know one he supposes.

  ‘I cheated on her,’ he says quietly. It sounds so matter-of-fact, as though he’s talking about someone other than himself.

  ‘You stupid bastard,’ Tom replies softly.

  ‘You think I don’t know that? I’ve heard all this from Jamie. I don’t need to hear it from you as well.’

  ‘Jamie knew?’

  ‘Not until it was over. It’s been over for months, but Fran only found out the day before she went to Spain. It doesn’t matter now anyway – I’m not going into detail.’

  ‘I don’t want you to,’ Tom replies. ‘And let’s face it, unlike your brother I’m in no position to judge. But believe me, you’d better do something to try to save your marriage other than sitting around here all day moping. You aren’t going to find another Fran in a hurry.’

  ‘There’s nothing I can do,’ Will says sadly, draining his coffee cup. ‘She wants me to leave her alone. She wants to have some time to think. It’s the least I can do in the circumstances.’

  Jamie and Will hadn’t known about their father’s affairs until years later, and when they found out they’d never really understood why their mother had forgiven him, taken him back. Will swore he would never be like that and when his first wife cheated on him he thought it was the end of the world. He hadn’t believed he’d ever get a second chance. And then he met Fran.

  ‘Why did you do it?’ Tom asks.

  ‘Why did you?’ Will snaps back.

  Tom sighs. ‘We’re not talking about me,’ he says. ‘I always thought you were better than me.’

  ‘I don’t know. I just wanted everything to be perfect. When it wasn’t …’ Will stops, drains his coffee. Tom looks as though he’s going to say something but changes his mind, shakes his head. They finish the fence in silence. ‘Are we done here?’ Will asks.

  ‘Are you OK?’ Tom asks.

  Will nods. ‘I thought I might walk down and see Oscar,’ he says.

  ‘Do you want company?’

  ‘I’d really like to be on my own for a bit,’ Will says. ‘Do you think Mum’ll mind if I take some flowers from the garden?’

  ‘No, son. Do what you need to do. We’ll have some lunch when you get back.’

  Will wanders around his mother’s flower garden, a place from which he and Jamie and cricket balls were banned when they were boys. He has no idea which flowers are which. Fran would know – she always knows things like that. He chooses things he likes, bundling them together before walking down through the back field towards the church in the village where Oscar is buried.

  He hasn’t been to his son’s grave since Christmas. He hates the fact that he never comes. Fran never wanted to visit, but she never stopped him from coming. He hopes to be able to convince her to come for Oscar’s birthday in August, if she is home by then.

  The grave is easy to spot in the churchyard, so small and new, the marble of the headstone so white. He spent a fortune on that headstone and it still didn’t seem to be enough. Nothing he does will ever be enough. He really does feel as though he’s let everyone down – his parents, his son, his wife.

  He squats by the side of the grave and places the flowers down carefully. The grave has been tended and there is a bunch of roses he recognises from his mother’s garden in a vase near th
e headstone. His parents must come here every Sunday after church and he remembers again that he hasn’t been since Boxing Day. Fran had refused to join him, still lost in her own cloud of grief, so he sat here on his own in the bitter cold trying to wash away the guilt he felt about Karen and trying to convince himself that now his affair was over he could get on with his life.

  He knows now that Jamie is right. He knows now that his life is never going to be the same, that he may never be a father and that he and Fran will never be the people they used to be. The only hope he has left is that they can start again together, rather than apart.

  He runs his hands over his son’s headstone, looking at the dates. Oscar may only have lived for a week, but Will knows the huge impact that tiny person made on his life and how he will never, ever forget him. He remembers all the things he dreamed of them doing together: fishing, cricket, skiing. He remembers the excitement he felt when they found out it was a boy – even Fran knew he was lying when he said he would have felt the same if it had been a girl.

  He’s lost four babies now. He can’t lose his wife as well, even though he deserves to.

  ‘We tried so hard,’ he says to the memory of his son. ‘So hard.’

  Maybe they had always tried too hard.

  JULY 2014

  We thought moving to the Old Vicarage would be the miracle we needed, but nothing changed. After three miscarriages, I couldn’t get pregnant at all. It was as though my body had given up. It was nearly four years before I fell pregnant with Oscar and in those four years we tried nearly everything.

  Will was keen to try IVF. I was nearly thirty-five by then and there was no getting away from the fact that age wasn’t on our side any more.

  Despite that, I wanted to do this naturally. I didn’t want IVF. I couldn’t bear any more tests, any more procedures. I didn’t want anything else to come between us. I avoided talking about it whenever Will brought it up. I couldn’t bear to see the look on his face when I said I didn’t want to try. But he went on and on until I couldn’t hold in my fears any longer.

  ‘It’s OK for you,’ I said to him. ‘All you have to do is wank in a cup.’

  I could already see he was angry that I wouldn’t consider it, I could tell by the set of his jaw. I should have talked to him about how I felt weeks before, when he first brought it up. I shouldn’t have let it get this far. He didn’t really understand why I wouldn’t want to try anything to have a baby. He didn’t really understand why I couldn’t bear the intrusiveness of it all any more.

  ‘All I seem to do these days is wank into cups,’ he said, pale with anger and frustration. I knew he was as tired of all the tests we’d had as I was. I knew he’d had enough of this.

  He stood up then, walked out of the room. Five minutes later I heard the front door slam behind him.

  I was in bed by the time he came home. He lay down behind me, wrapping his arms around me.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. He smelt of beer. He wasn’t supposed to be drinking, neither of us were.

  ‘I just want to do this properly,’ I said. ‘Naturally.’

  I heard him sigh behind me, but he pulled me a little bit closer.

  ‘What if we go through all that and I miscarry again?’ I went on. ‘And you know Ellie went through IVF twice and she still doesn’t have a baby.’ Ellie was one of my friends from the yoga studio. She’d been remarkably open and honest about it all, but ultimately she was heartbroken. I didn’t know how much more heartbreak either Will or I could take.

  I felt his lips against the back of my neck. ‘I love you, Fran,’ he said. ‘I’ll do anything you want.’

  ‘I’m sorry I made you wait,’ I said quietly. ‘We should have started trying as soon as we were married.’

  ‘I was already too old by then.’ He’d read an article once, years ago, about how – contrary to popular belief – male fertility starts to drop after thirty-five. That the father’s age can increase the chance of miscarriage. He’d blamed himself when he read that, and no number of perfectly healthy sperm counts would change his mind.

  I turned around to face him then, ran my fingers down his jaw like I always did when we lay face to face.

  ‘Plenty of couples our age have babies,’ I said.

  ‘Maybe not us though.’

  I closed my eyes so he couldn’t see that I was trying not to cry.

  ‘Do you want to keep trying?’ he asked after a while.

  I didn’t say anything at first. I didn’t know what to do for the best.

  ‘Let’s give it another year,’ I said, eventually.

  We tried everything we could. I cut down on the number of classes I was teaching, particularly in the evening, and Will tried to finish work a little earlier so we could spend more time together: cooking, catching up on films we’d missed, trying to learn to relax. Neither of us were very good at relaxing.

  I started seeing an acupuncturist for stress and fertility and Will started to see an osteopath for his tension headaches. I went to yoga classes every day again and my colleagues at the studio were full of suggestions. Some to do with diet, nutrition and supplements were helpful; others were a little too weird for Will. He was happy to try Reiki (‘it was nice – I fell asleep’), but he did draw the line at an Ayurvedic chef cleansing our kitchen. We both gave up alcohol and caffeine.

  The seasons came and went but every month, regular as clockwork, I got my period.

  It was July, a few days before my thirty-sixth birthday, almost a year to the day since we’d had the argument about IVF, and I still wasn’t pregnant. I got home from teaching to find a bottle of Will’s favourite Rioja on the kitchen table, Will sitting there looking at it.

  ‘I’m sorry, Fran, I can’t do this any more. It’s not like it’s helping is it?’

  I sat down next to him, put my arm around him. ‘Get the corkscrew,’ I said.

  At no point had Will ever criticised any of the things I had tried in our attempt to get pregnant. But over time I noticed a growing sense of sadness behind his eyes, as though he was slowly giving up on ever being a father. Somehow that made me more determined to give him what he wanted, more convinced that if I didn’t, he’d leave me.

  Everywhere I went I seemed to be surrounded by pregnant women: at the supermarket, at the doctor’s surgery, every time I went to the hospital for tests. In all those years that I couldn’t fall pregnant, eleven of my yoga students did, two of them for the third time. I tried so hard to be happy for them, but after class I would sit in my car and cry my eyes out. I was angry and frustrated. Why couldn’t I do this? Why couldn’t I do this one thing that every other woman around me seemed to be able to do? What was wrong with me?

  Opening that bottle of Rioja was a turning point for both of us. It was as though we’d given up. We’d given up the striving and the desperation. Even sex had become a chore – both of us forcing ourselves to do it just because I was ovulating. I think we’d both got to the point where we didn’t even enjoy it any more. Opening that bottle of wine was like drawing a line in the sand. We’d tried everything that was reasonably possible and it looked as though we were going to be one of those couples who couldn’t have children.

  ‘We can have a good life, Fran,’ Will said, as he poured another glass of wine and started making dinner. ‘We’ve got a gorgeous niece and nephew – you know Jamie and Izzy are always happy to palm their kids off on whoever will take them.’ He smiled but I knew it hurt him that his brother had been able to have children so easily, and yet complained about them all the time. ‘We can take more holidays, like we used to – maybe I could take some time off work and we could go travelling?’ he went on.

  ‘Would that make you happy?’ I asked, standing up and leaning against the counter next to him. He didn’t seem to have been happy for months.

  He stopped chopping peppers and put the knife down, reaching over to pull me towards him.

  ‘You make me happy. I know you think I’m going to trade you in for a
younger, more fertile model.’ He smiled, looking at me under his eyelashes – those eyelashes that I fell in love with. ‘But I’m not going anywhere.’

  ‘I don’t think …’

  ‘Janine told me.’

  I didn’t say anything. I’d told her that in confidence.

  ‘I’m glad she told me,’ Will said quietly, as though reading my mind. ‘But I’m not going to leave you.’ And as we stood in the kitchen, by the half-chopped vegetables, he wrapped his arms around me. ‘Let’s just be Will and Fran again,’ he said.

  So that’s what we did. We went out for dinner, to the theatre. We went away for weekends at spas, spent three weeks travelling around Greece and Italy and had lots of sex that wasn’t planned around whether I was ovulating. When we came home Will started coaching the junior cricket team. He seemed happier, had fewer headaches.

  We both began to relax, our jaws less set, our shoulders less tense. We started to enjoy life and, when we passed a group of children or a woman pushing a pram, Will would just squeeze my hand and we’d carry on, not mentioning it.

  Six months later I was pregnant.

  ‘Who knew that all it would take was a little bit of sunshine and a lot of Rioja?’ Will said with a grin.

  JULY 2016

  Fran

  ‘How do you feel?’ Fran asks.

  ‘Like a warrior princess,’ Molly says, laughing. ‘Although God only knows where that phrase just came from.’ Molly had asked for a private session with Fran before the very last class of the retreat. ‘A week ago I would never have believed that just a couple of yoga classes a day could make me feel like this.’

  ‘I’m so pleased you’ve enjoyed yourself.’ Fran smiles. ‘I didn’t think you were going to on the first day.’