Penny

I’ll probably be writing to you a bit less from now on. The original intention of the letters was, as you know, in order to become a partner with my emotions and to avoid feeling like a cork bobbing about on the sea of fate. Well I no longer feel like a cork because by beginning this cycle of IVF, gruesome though it is, I really feel a lot better and that I’ve taken control of my destiny. I don’t like to admit it, but I feel very slightly confident. I mean, although the chances are reckoned at about a fifth, I’m top of the list in terms of the perfect patient. I’m still relatively young, very young for IVF, I have nothing apparently wrong with me. My husband appears to be packing a full scrotum. All the signs are good. I don’t even feel strange about trying to get a baby this way, which I thought I might. In fact just the reverse. I’m quite combative on the subject.

I was talking to Joanna at work about it and she said something I hear quite a lot. She sort of shook her head in disbelief and said, “Wow, isn’t it amazing? I mean we really are playing God these days, aren’t we?” Now she wasn’t trying to be mean, quite the opposite. She’s very supportive, but nonetheless I bridled. People do still seem to see IVF as a deeply unnatural process and so it is, but no more unnatural than taking antibiotics or flying in an aeroplane. Left to themselves people’s teeth would fall out in their twenties and they’d die of pneumonia. Everything we do is unnatural but nobody ever shakes their head in disbelief about eating apples out of season or talking on the phone to people in Australia or being able to get from Highgate to Spannerfield Hospital, which is in West London, in under an hour (depending on the traffic). It’s just babies that people get funny about. But I won’t have it. All IVF is, when you get right down to it, is the process of getting the sperm and the egg to meet outside the body. That’s it. It’s my egg. It’s Sam’s sperm. If it works it’ll develop inside me. All they do is create more ideal conditions for the moment of conception than the inside of my plumbing. As far as I’m concerned, it’s like a Caesarean but in reverse. Millions of women have their babies removed by the hand of man. I’m just going to have mine inserted, that’s all. I said all this to Joanna and she said she hadn’t meant to offend and I said that she hadn’t, but I suppose in a way she had. I don’t feel remotely different or weird because I have to go through this, and I can do without people shaking their heads in gentle disbelief at my situation and talking about playing God.

I just took a moment out to inject my leg. Sam hates this and turns away (as if I enjoy it!). Just wait till he starts having to give me my bum injections, that’ll give him something to think about. Actually, he probably turned away because my legs look so horrible. These injections leave awful bruises (maybe I’m not doing it very well). I look as though I’ve been beaten up by a midget.

Dear Sam

Nigel and Justin have been asking again about the ending. They want to know when they can expect to see it. I’ve told them that I’ll do it soon, but I’m not sure when. Lucy’s and my IVF cycle will last a few weeks and I can’t decide whether to commit myself to saying how my story ends before I know our result or after. After, I think, so I’ve told them that it’ll be a month and a half. They don’t like it because we’ve planned to begin shooting by then, but I’m being firm. Surprisingly, Ewan is being tremendously good about it. He says it’s only one out of a hundred scenes and since the whole story is one of doubt, hope and unanswered questions he rather likes the idea of leaving the ending ambiguous for as long as possible. He says it’ll be very healthy for the actors to discover their parts in the same ignorance and confusion that the characters are in themselves. I find myself warming to Ewan.

I’ve now bought four diaries from W.H. Smith identical to the one Lucy uses for her journal. One of them is bound to have a key that fits hers. Tomorrow, when she’s gone off to work, I intend to return to the house and read her story.

Dear Penny

I wasn’t going to write to you tonight but then I thought I would because Sam’s been acting very strangely this evening. From the moment I got back from work it’s all seemed rather odd. He’s been alternately offhand and angry-looking and then suddenly very huggy and affectionate. Normally he doesn’t express much emotion either way but tonight he seems to be aglow with it. Perhaps it’s his hormones. I’ve heard that when women are pregnant their partners sometimes react in sympathy with them, experiencing the same symptoms. Who knows, maybe it’s the same with IVF?

I must say I’m feeling pretty strange myself, in fact. I’ve started having hot flushes, so the injections must be working. Their purpose is to sort of shut down my reproductive system so that the hospital can take over. Amazing, really, and pretty scary. Basically they induce a sort of premature menopause. That’s nice, isn’t it?

Dear Sam

Well, I’m devastated. I just don’t know what I think any more. They do say that eavesdroppers never hear good of themselves. Well, nor do diary readers.

Lucy very nearly had an affair.

I’m stunned. Absolutely amazed. It is the absolute last thing I would have expected of her.

What’s more, I have to seethe in silence. I can’t say anything about it, of course, because the way I found out is absolutely unforgivable. And what would I say, anyway? I don’t really know what I think about it at all. Of course part of me is riven with jealousy. The thought of that fucking shit Carl Phipps sneaking about trying to screw my wife and actually managing to get his hands on her, albeit briefly, makes my blood boil. I’m furious. I’m livid. I want to punch him and give her the biggest piece of my mind in history.

On the other hand, she was pissed, and she didn’t do it, did she? There she was, drunk, with a top star, a star whom she has always fancied, a star who was putting the hardest of hard words on her (That bastard. I’d like to kill him) and she didn’t do it. She pulled back because she loved me. Would I have done the same? Me, who is capable of sneaking about and invading the private diary of the woman I love? I mean if I honestly ask myself, if I was drunk, on Winona Ryder’s bed, and she’d taken her top off and offered to kiss me all over and shag me all night, would I have held back the way Lucy did?

That’s why I feel so confused. Part of me is angry and hurt and jealous and part of me is thrilled. Thrilled that after all these years, and with me being such a grump most of the time (plenty about that in her book), Lucy still loves me the way she does, loves me enough to walk away from a fantasy when the crunch came.

When I read about it I was furious. I literally felt I was burning up with anger, but now I’ve calmed down a bit, in a way I think it makes me love her more. I’m still seething, though, and very angry with her and I still hate Carl Phipps’s fucking guts.

Of course one positive thing is that now I know she nearly betrayed me it makes me feel slightly better about betraying her. Well, I think that’s fair, surely.

Dear Penny

I feel pretty awful, I must say. Now I know how Mum felt a couple of years ago. Looking back, I don’t wonder that she was moody, and I’m not even allowed to slap HRT patches on my bum.

Sam’s not himself either. He seems emotionally confused. He kisses me a lot, but then I catch him glaring at me. I think in a strange sort of way he’s jealous, control of my body now being in the hands of the hospital and him reduced to the role of a near bystander in this dreadfully and intimately intrusive process.