Truly Madly Guilty

'I always wanted children,' said Oliver. 'Always.' His voice thickened. He cleared his throat.

'But eleven rounds of IVF?' said Clementine to Erika. 'And you never told me? You went through all that without saying a word? You kept it a secret for the last two years? Why wouldn't you tell me?'

'We just decided to keep it to ourselves,' said Erika uncertainly. Clementine sounded hurt. Almost angry. Erika felt everything shift.

Wait ... was that wrong? It had never occurred to her that she had the power to hurt Clementine but now Erika saw that yet again, she'd got it wrong. Clementine was her closest friend and you were meant to share things with your friends: your problems, your secrets. Of course you were. My God, everyone knew that. Women were notorious for sharing everything.

The problem was that Oliver had been so insistent that they tell no one about any of it, and to be fair, Erika hadn't objected. She had no desire to share. She didn't want to tell anyone about it. Her fantasy had been calling Clementine with the good news. The good news that never came.

And, after all, she had plenty of experience keeping secrets.

'I'm sorry,' she said.

'No, no!' said Clementine. She still hadn't eaten her cracker. Her face was pink. 'I'm sorry. Gosh, this isn't about me. Of course, it's fine if you didn't want to talk about it. I respect your privacy. I just wish I could have been there for you. There were probably times when I was complaining about the girls and you were thinking, Oh for God's sake, shut up, Clementine, don't you know how lucky you are?' She sounded like she was close to tears.

There had been times like that.

'Of course I never thought that,' said Erika.

'Anyway, we know now,' said Sam. He put his hand over Clementine's. 'So, obviously, anything you need ...'

He looked wary. Maybe he thought they needed money.

There was silence for a moment.

'So the reason we wanted to talk to you today,' began Oliver. He looked at Erika. This was her cue. But it was all wrong. She'd stuffed it up. If she'd just been like a normal friend about this the whole way through, if she'd told Clementine, right back at the beginning, when they'd first started IVF, then this conversation would have had a proper, solid foundation. Each disappointment, each failure over the last two years would have been like a deposit of sympathy. They could have called on that deposit. But now, Erika sat opposite a confused, hurt friend and there was nothing in the bank to withdraw.

Self-loathing rose within Erika's stomach like nausea. She never got it quite right. No matter how hard she tried, she always got it just

a tiny bit wrong.

'My doctor has said that the only option now for us is to find an egg donor,' she said. 'Because my eggs are of very poor quality. Useless, in fact.' She tried to bring some lightness into the conversation, the way it was in the hallway, but she could tell by everyone's faces that it wasn't working.

Clementine nodded. Erika could see she had no idea what was coming next.

A memory came to her of blonde, pretty Diana Dixon marching up to Clementine in the school playground and grimacing at the sight of Erika, the sort of grimace you might give a cockroach. 'Why are you playing with her?' said Diana, and Erika never forgot either Clementine's lightning-quick flash of humiliation, or the way she lifted her chin and told Diana, 'She's my friend.'

'So we wondered ...' prompted Oliver. He waited for Erika. It was clearly her job to ask the question. Clementine was her friend.

But Erika couldn't speak. Her mouth felt dry and hollowed out. The tablet, maybe. It was probably a side effect. She'd meant to read the little leaflet about side effects. She fixed her eyes on the yellow daisies on Clementine's skirt and began to count them.

Oliver spoke up, like an actor saving the day by taking someone else's line in the script. There was a thin edge of hysteria to his voice. 'Clementine,' he said. 'We're asking ... the reason we wanted to talk to you today, well, we're wondering if you would consider being our egg donor.'

Erika looked up from the daisies at Clementine's face and saw an expression of utter revulsion fly across it as fast as the flash of a camera. It was there and gone so quickly she could almost choose to believe she'd imagined it, but she hadn't imagined it because reading faces was one of her skills. It was a legacy of a childhood spent reading her mother's face, monitoring, analysing, trying to modify her behaviour in time, except that her skill rarely allowed her to get things right; it just meant that she always knew when she got things wrong.

It didn't matter what Clementine said or did next, Erika knew how she really felt.

Clementine's face was composed and very still. It was the look of focused concentration she got when she was about to perform, as if she were taking herself to another plane, a transcendent level of consciousness that Erika could never reach. She pushed back a stray lock of hair behind her ear. It was the same long curly lock of hair that fell towards her cello when she played, somehow never quite touching the strings.

'Oh,' she said steadily. 'I see.'

chapter seventeen

The day of the barbeque

'So, this is a big thing we're asking of you, and it's absolutely not something we'd expect an answer on right away,' said Oliver. He leaned forward with his elbows resting on his knees, his hands locked together. He brought to mind a mortgage broker who had just given a lengthy explanation of a complex loan arrangement.

He looked gravely at Clementine and indicated a cream manila folder on the coffee table in front of him.