‘And Mike’s too close to allow him to see it. Because he’s hurting, too, and you don’t want him to feel bad for you.’
‘When did you become so clever?’
A fleeting shadow passed over Kate’s face, and Fran was so preoccupied she nearly missed it. Not quite, though, but she had no idea what had prompted it, and Kate was smiling now.
‘Oh, I’m not clever, Fran,’ she said softly. ‘Just human. Maybe I just try and put myself in someone else’s shoes, and I know the difference Jem’s made in my life, so it’s not hard to imagine how I would feel if I’d been unable to have him.’
Fran didn’t know what to say. She hadn’t been in Penhally when Kate’s husband had died, but she’d heard about it from her parents, and how sad it was that he couldn’t have known that Kate had been pregnant after several years of marriage. But she didn’t feel she could say anything about that now. It had been years ago, intensely private and nothing to do with her.
So she sipped her tea, and sniffed a bit more, and blew her nose again, and all the time Kate just sat there in a companionable silence and let her sift through her thoughts.
‘Have you noticed,’ Fran said finally, as the sifting came to a sort of conclusion, ‘how just about everybody seems to be pregnant at the moment? I don’t know if it’s just because I’m hypersensitive, but there seems to be a plague of it right now, especially among the school mums. Every time I look up, there’s another one.’
Kate nodded. ‘And it hurts.’
‘Oh, yes,’ Fran said very softly. ‘It really hurts. You have no idea how much I want a baby, Kate. It’s like a biological ache, a real pain low down in my abdomen—No, not a pain, it’s not that sharp, but a sort of dull awareness, an emptiness, a sort of waiting—does that sound crazy?’
‘No,’ Kate murmured. ‘It doesn’t sound crazy at all. I’ve heard it before, so many times.’
‘The frantic ticking of my biological clock—except it’s not ticking, is it? The spring’s broken, or it needs oiling or something, but nobody can find out what exactly, and sort it out. And in the meantime we’ve run out of time on the NHS, we don’t have any money to pay for another cycle of IVF privately, and even if we did, Mike’s been so odd recently I don’t even know if he wants a baby with me!’
Kate studied her tea thoughtfully. ‘Do you want a baby with him?’ she asked gently. ‘Or do you just want a baby?’
That stopped her. She stared at Kate, opened her mouth to say, ‘Of course I want a baby with him!’ and then shut it again without saying a word, because suddenly she wasn’t sure, and she felt her eyes fill again.
‘I don’t know,’ she replied instead, looking down and twisting the tissue into knots. ‘I really, really don’t know.’
‘Do you still love him?’
Again she opened her mouth, then shut it, then said softly, her confidence wavering, ‘Yes. Yes, I do, but I don’t know if I can live with him like this. And I don’t know if he loves me any more.’
‘Then you need to talk. You need to spend time together, find out if you’ve still got what it takes, because there’s no point killing yourselves to have a baby together if you don’t in the end want to be together. If being with Mike, with or without a child, is the first and most important thing in your life, then go ahead and keep trying for a baby. But if it’s not, if the baby’s more important than being together, then you need to think very carefully before you go ahead. And so does he.
‘Think about it,’ she went on. ‘Talk to Mike. Take some time together. And play, Fran. Take time out. The weather’s gorgeous now. As soon as you break up at the end of the week, try and find some time away from the farm and all its distractions. Is there any chance you can get away?’
She laughed, but with very little humour. ‘Not exactly. There’s the milking, and the cheese making, and then we share the weekends with Joe, so they each get one weekend off in four. Well, Saturday afternoon and Sunday.’
‘And when’s your next one?’
‘This weekend,’ she said slowly. ‘But Mike won’t stop. He’ll just use the time to catch up on paperwork.’
‘So stop him. Find a little hotel or a guest house or something, and go away for the night.’
‘I doubt if he’ll wear that. Anyway, we’ve got Sophie coming for tea on Sunday because she’s away the next weekend.’
‘You can be back by teatime.’ Kate stood up and put a hand on Fran’s shoulder. ‘Try it. You’ve got nothing to lose. And you might have everything to gain. And in the meantime, I’ve heard some very interesting things about miscarriage and diet and the relationship to damaged and defective sperm.’
Fran frowned. ‘Are Mike’s sperm defective? I don’t think they said anything about it at the fertility clinic—well, not to me, anyway.’
Kate shook her head. ‘Not particularly, according to the report from the clinic, but although there were a good number, a slightly higher proportion than one might hope for were defective or sluggish. That in itself might have been enough to cause your miscarriage, if it was a damaged sperm that fertilised the ovum. And this diet is supposed to reduce the numbers of defective sperm quite significantly, according to the study I’ve heard about. If you’re going to try again, maybe you need to take a while to make friends again, and while you do that, you could try the diet to boost Mike’s sperm production. It might as well be as good as it can be, and even if you decide not to go ahead and try again, it won’t do either of you any harm.’
It sounded a good idea, but she wasn’t sure she’d get it past Mike. ‘Is it freaky?’ she asked. ‘I don’t want to start giving him weird stuff. He’ll ask questions or refuse to eat it. You know what men are like. And he’s always starving.’
Kate laughed softly. ‘Typical man, then—and, no, it’s not freaky. It’s more a supplement to his normal diet rather than any radical alteration. I can let you have all the details, if you like—why don’t you come and see me tomorrow after school? I’ve got time, and we can go through it then properly.’
Fran nodded slowly. ‘OK. Thanks. I will.’
And in the meantime, she’d try and talk him into going away. Just a few days, right away from the pressures of the farm.
She felt a shiver of something that could have been fear and could have been excitement. Maybe both. Probably.
She’d ask him tonight.
CHAPTER THREE
‘THIS is ridiculous.’
Fran stared out across the yard. She couldn’t see the farm office on the other side, but she could see the spill of light from the window, and she knew exactly what he’d be doing.
Avoiding her.
Night after night, week after week for months now.
It was becoming a pattern. He’d get up at the end of their evening meal, kiss her absently on the cheek and thank her, then go out, Brodie at his heels, to the farm office.
And he’d stay there, wrestling with the accounts and the endless paperwork, until nearly midnight. Sometimes she’d hear him come to bed, sometimes she wouldn’t. And in the morning, when the alarm went at five, he’d get up and go into the bathroom and dress, then go out and do the milking.
On a good day, or at the weekend, she’d see him for breakfast before she went to work herself. On a bad day, and there were increasingly more of them, she wouldn’t see him at all.
Tonight was no exception. He’d kissed her vaguely on her cheek, said, ‘Don’t wait up for me, I want to get those quota forms filled in,’ and he had gone.
Well,