‘How did I first realize, you mean?’
‘Yes.’
‘My periods stopped.’
He noted that down. ‘Yes, yes. That is the way most women first believe they are pregnant too.’
‘Well, obviously.’ He avoided my gaze. There was something he didn’t want to tell me. ‘What is it?’
‘Mrs Cawson.’ He looked at a form on his desk. It was divided into sections, each with a few words of black type above red handwritten words and numbers. ‘The tests we did. There was something we found.’
‘What was it?’ I said, now very worried – had losing the child meant I could never fall pregnant again?
‘I am sorry to tell you that we find your levels of oestradiol are low. Very low. Too low for you to have ever been able to conceive a baby, I must say. Too low for you to have been pregnant before.’
I was dumbstruck. It was impossible, what he was saying. ‘But I was pregnant,’ I stuttered. ‘Before. That’s why I’m here.’
He took his glasses out of their pouch and looked down at them. ‘I am afraid not.’
I stopped. For a second my mind whirled. ‘But I was. I had morning sickness. My husband, he’s a GP. He did a test and told me I was definitely pregnant.’
‘An hCG test?’
‘Yes, yes, that’s what he called it.’
‘Perhaps he said that he thought you were, and you misunderstood.’
But, no – Nick had assured me I was expecting. I recalled how he had kept monitoring my temperature and blood pressure. ‘I was pregnant!’ I stood up and thrust the chair behind me. He watched me without moving. ‘I had a mis–’ I couldn’t complete the word. The sheer pain of that night hit me like a wave. I sank back in the chair and put my hands over my face. I was going through it all over again: the feeling of having a part of me taken away. ‘If I wasn’t pregnant, what was that?’ I insisted.
He put his hand on my shoulder. It felt gentle. ‘I do not think you had a miscarriage. I think that was your period,’ he said. ‘For some reason we do not know, they stopped for a time; so it was more heavy than usual when they started again.’
My mind began to throb. My cycle had always been very regular, so when it stopped, I had been certain it could only be one thing. I tried to speak, to make sense, to know what this meant for Nick and me. ‘Are you saying I’ll never be pregnant?’
He seemed to relax a little. ‘Well, the good news is that there is much research going on into collecting or synthesizing hormones. We have extracted oestrogens from urine; already created a synthetic progesterone – norethisterone – and soon–’
Something leaped into my brain. ‘Norethisterone?’ I asked, interrupting him.
‘Yes,’ he said, looking at me curiously. ‘You have heard if it?’
‘Nick mentioned it once.’ That unknown voice on the telephone had asked if Nick could get more of it. It was right after Nick had said he would do his best to prevent me from finding something out.
‘Well, as I said, it is a synthetic form of progesterone, which is another of the hormones you make during your menstrual cycle.’ He hesitated. ‘Have you come into contact with it?’
‘No. Why? What would it do?’ He moved his glasses to another part of the desk and considered. ‘Dr Clement?’ I waited for an answer.
After a while he spoke, cautiously. ‘I believe it…’ He trailed off.
‘Please.’
He looked at me curiously. ‘Well, I believe it would stop your periods. But…’
My mind was hot. ‘What else?’ I interrupted him. ‘What else would it do?’
‘It could… produce nausea, cramps. Other effects too, probably.’ He returned to that searching look I had seen.
‘As if you’re pregnant?’ He nodded. ‘And if a woman stopped taking it after a while, would her periods return?’
He nodded thoughtfully. ‘I expect so.’
‘And would the first be heavier than usual?’
‘It is probable,’ he said.
My God. What had happened to me?
I stood up and walked to the bed. I placed my fists on it and leaned on them, my head down, my back to him. ‘And what is it used for? Its purpose?’
He fidgeted and glanced at the battered door. ‘It is a little… something there is an argument about. The effect of halting the menses – your periods – means it can be used as a contraceptive. Something to prevent pregnancy.’ He looked at me meaningfully. ‘Of course, no doctor would prescribe such a drug. It would be disloyal. To the Party.’
On the wall outside was a poster of Louise Archer, mother of six Pioneers, bouncing a child on her knee. OUR STATE RELIES ON ITS CHILDREN, ran the slogan.
‘Do people supply this drug? On the black market?’ I asked. He hesitated. ‘Please tell me.’
He cleared his throat. ‘Doctors talk. I have heard of it happening. I do not know if what I heard is true.’
When the voice on the telephone had asked Nick if he could get more of it, Nick had said he had been testing it on a ‘private patient’. ‘It works as predicted. Now it’s time for them to start the course again,’ he had said.
‘Would it be expensive?’
‘I really could not–’
‘It would, wouldn’t it?’
‘I imagine so.’
Expensive. Lucrative. So this was surely the basis of the new ‘big orders’ that Lorelei had told Rachel to expect. It was what they had fought about.
‘What does it look like?’
‘What does it… I do not know. I have never seen it,’ he said.
‘Guess.’
He sighed. ‘A pill, a liquid, it is hard to say.’
‘Would it taste of anything?’
‘I really do not know. Maybe. Probably not. Mrs Cawson, is there something that you want to say to me?’
My throat was hoarse. ‘No,’ I managed to whisper.
Hardly able to think, I stumbled out of the room. My head spun with thoughts and images. I turned at random down corridors and through archways. In the end, I looked up and found myself in an unfamiliar corridor. There was a door beside me with the sound of voices behind it. I didn’t know where I was and I needed someone to help me, so I pushed on the door and it swung open. The sight that greeted me made the ground shake underneath my feet.
I was looking into a huge ward of at least fifty beds. Occupying them were as many young women, sitting up under the blankets, leaning against the walls and breathing deeply or slowly walking up and down the room assisted by nurses. They were all, every one, just hours away from giving birth.
When I was a girl I had a collie dog named Sheba. When she died I screamed and ran out the gate, to the beach. I sat on the sand with my knees pulled up to my chin, trying to reconcile the images of my father who cuddled me on his lap at our warm dinner table, cheerily carving slices of meat while a pipe dripped from his lip, with the man who had tossed Sheba’s body into a pit in the back garden without any emotion at all. Now that image came to my mind again, as the thoughts tumbled. Could it really be that Nick too had this side to him, something cold and hard?
I could hardly think as I wandered out of the hospital and along streets I didn’t recognize, every step feeling like someone else was taking it, until I found myself at the Thames. My fingers twisted through the wire links on the fence that kept us from the water, and I hung there like one of the D-Day survivors who you saw on park benches staring ahead for hours on end.
Nick had hidden his continuing relationship with Lorelei from me, their involvement in black-market medicines. Had he also been using me as a test subject to see if the drug – a drug that mimicked the effects of pregnancy – worked? He had kept monitoring my heart rate and blood pressure. And the night that he was released I suggested that we try for another child and yet he had been reluctant – when he had previously been so happy that I seemed to be pregnant.