down, tilers who used the wrong grouting, the distressed-pine kitchen fitter, who disappeared mid job, with four out of seven cupboards unfitted, and who, when we rang, leaving messages on his answerphone, seemed to have disappeared into thin air. Phil eventually tracked him down. His wife, it transpired, had had a miscarriage. But Phil had him back working in an instant, albeit looking as distressed as his cupboards, I thought, as I took him a cup of tea.
‘It’s the second baby they’ve lost in two years,’ I told Phil as I joined him in the garden, where he was tying up runner beans.
‘So I gather. But life goes on.’
I shot him a look. ‘I hope you didn’t tell him that.’
‘Why?’
‘Wouldn’t be terribly tactful.’
He shrugged. ‘Maybe not, but it does.’
We continued to do the beans in silence.
Teamwork, that was the key. And of course it would be an even stronger team when we were three. When we had a baby. Even I could spot the sink-estate mentality inherent in that notion, but it disappeared the moment I discovered conceiving wasn’t that easy; when nothing happened for a year or two, when we had something else to pit our wits against, another cause to campaign for, besides the house.
Phil read books, went on the Internet, and declared that the first thing to do was to identify the culprit.
‘The culprit?’
‘Yes. See whose fault it is.’
‘Bit soon, isn’t it?’ I said doubtfully. ‘Shouldn’t we – you know – try for a bit longer first?’
‘What, and waste more time?’
‘Might be fun. I read somewhere that if you do it every night for a month you stand more chance of hitting the egg. Blanket bombing.’
I smiled flirtatiously, but he’d already turned back to the computer. And within a twinkling, had made appointments for us both in Harley Street. Me to have my tubes blown, him to fill a test tube, assisted by a girly magazine. This fascinated me. Not that a smart Harley Street joint provided such a thing, but the idea of Phil looking at one. The results came back and we were both declared innocent, which I could tell surprised Phil.
‘Why, did you think you were firing blanks?’
‘Oh, no, I knew I’d be OK.’
After that our marriage roared into action, with Phil at the helm, morphing swiftly from house restorer to infertility doctor. He knew the temperature of my body to within a whisker, knew when my ovaries were ripe and rumbling portentously, could pinpoint to the hour when conditions were ideal for copulation. He knew when I was hot, in the strictest, David Attenborough sense of the word. There was to be no blanket bombing, but once a month he’d ring me at work to tell me to hustle home sharpish and get my kit off, and if that sounds sexy, it wasn’t. Not when your husband is grimly plunging his testicles into freezing-cold water beforehand without cracking a joke – I tried one, about cold fish, and it didn’t go down very well – and not when I was instructed to lie doggo for at least an hour afterwards, the only laugh coming when I suggested he lie with me. Personally I wondered if the tight Lycra cycling suit he squeezed back into afterwards and wore ninety per cent of the time was helping matters, but since I was rapidly losing interest in the whole project, I decided not to mention it.
Why was I losing interest? Why was I finally succumbing to what can only be described as torpor as I rumbled home every night on the train from the West End to what should have been my enviable country love nest? Because everyone has their saturation point. And happy as I wanted us to be, little by little, drip by drip, as the months, then the years ticked by, I was coming to the mind-numbing conclusion that I’d made the biggest mistake of my life.
My epiphany came as I was standing at the kitchen window one Thursday morning, on one of my precious days off from work, looking at the list of ‘Things to Do’ he’d left me, the last of which read: Have your hair cut.
I reached for the phone to tell Jennie I needed a coffee, pronto, and also to tell her I was leaving him. Her answering machine was on. I knew she was in, though, because I’d seen her in the garden a few moments earlier. I was about to go round and tell her, when I