The Happiness Glass Read online

  Day thirteen: the second day of liquid restriction. I am mad with thirst, and look forward to that litre of mineral water. In the waiting room, the woman who had three eggs collected has had three embryos returned and is now an outpatient, awaiting the result. Another woman had five eggs collected but only one returned. Yet another is pregnant. We are all stunned at the news, geared as we are towards failure.

  Back at the beginning of my fertility investigation, which like a biblical plague would persist for seven years, a general practitioner in Hastings, East Sussex, referred me to a gynaecologist. In those days, in England, it was common for specialists to work from consulting rooms at home, and I arrived for my first appointment at a substantial Victorian house set in a rambling garden.

  The doctor’s wife answered the door, a pleasant-faced woman wearing a floral dress and a cardigan. As we stood together on the threshold, there were gunshots. I must have looked alarmed, because she hastened to reassure me that there was nothing to worry about.

  “It’s my husband,” she said. “He’s down the back shooting doves.”

  She led me inside then and up the stairs to her husband’s office, where I would later undress and allow him to examine me. When he appeared he explained that they had just moved in and that the previous owners had left behind a dove-cote, and the doves refused to leave.

  “Such a nuisance.”

  I have often wondered why I did not pull on my clothes and flee. Instead, at my next appointment, I would submit to the excruciating Sims-Huhner Test, the post-coital test for infertility.

  The Sims-Huhner is used to assess the interaction between sperm and the cervical mucus. It is performed mid-cycle after a period of sexual abstinence. Then, after intercourse, and with no post-coital genital hygiene, the female presents at the doctor’s surgery for sampling. The procedure is more or less identical to a Pap smear, with the sample being immediately transferred to a glass slide and viewed under a microscope.

  Apparently the shortest recorded interval between intercourse and clinical testing has been ninety seconds, and the longest around seven to eight days. I was ordered to present myself to the killer of doves within two hours of having sex with my husband. The only upside to this bleak experience was that the doctor let me look through the microscope. The spectacle of sperm avidly hunting eggs made me smile – at least those little guys were wide awake.

  One of the men this test was named after was J. Marion Sims (1813–1883), an American physician known as the ‘father of modern gynaecology’. He developed a surgical technique to repair vesicovaginal fistula, a severe and deeply distressing complication of obstructed childbirth. He also invented the precursor to the modern speculum using a pewter spoon and strategically placed mirrors. To achieve his results Sims experimented on enslaved black women.

  In Alabama, between 1845 and 1849, Sims performed surgery on twelve black women in his backyard hospital. Three of them – Anarcha, Betsy, and Lucy – underwent multiple surgeries, with Anarcha being operated on thirteen times before her fistula was successfully repaired.

  Although ether was available as an anaesthetic from as early as 1842, Sims performed his procedures without pain relief. It was commonly believed at the time that black people did not feel pain as white people did, and thus did not require anaesthesia. When he operated on Lucy in the presence of twelve doctors, he experimented with the use of a sponge to wipe urine from the bladder. Sims left this sponge in Lucy’s urethra, and afterwards she contracted septicaemia. Post-surgery, Sims administered opium to the women.

  In the midst of the fertility investigations, a routine Pap smear returned a slightly irregular result. Alarmed that he would lose me to cervical cancer, my husband insisted I consult a Harley Street specialist. So I went up to London on the train, and reported to the great man’s rooms. At this distance all I remember is the intimidating atmosphere, with him seated behind an enormous, bare and gleaming desk, and me in a small tub chair. When I asked him what the irregularity in my Pap smear meant his reply seemed to come from on high – perhaps even from beyond the clouded English sky. It was a ‘pre-cancerous indicator’, he said. Or something of that sort: I still didn’t fully understand what it meant, or how it might have occurred.

  He leaned forward. “Put it this way,” he said slowly. “Nuns don’t get irregular Pap smears.”

  Nuns? Did he mean real black-robed women belonging to a religious order, or did he mean ‘nuns’?

  Stung, I asked no more questions.

  To my relief, we were on the verge of departing for Australia. Once there, I was admitted to hospital for laser surgery. In this treatment, a very strong, hot beam of light is directed at the cervix, and the abnormal cells are destroyed. Before they used the laser, and while I was under anaesthetic, the Pap smear was repeated and found to be normal. They lasered my cervix anyway, but I have often wondered whether there was ever anything wrong. Perhaps the pathology laboratory in Hastings had mixed up the results.

  I have read that at the moment when a sperm penetrates an egg there is a tiny flash of light. In a natural conception this occurs within the private dark inside the woman’s body. In a computer-generated film it appears both miraculous and utterly right. What else can this spark be but the beginning of consciousness, the light that persists until it is extinguished at death? Where it comes from, and where it goes, are the great mysteries.

  In that winter of 1984, in a neighbour’s garden in the Adelaide Hills, I was one of perhaps twenty adults watching a great many children as they ran and shrieked and danced around a bonfire. Sparks spiralled upwards through the frosty air towards the blinter of stars. Mulled wine warmed us, and eased the conversations between virtual strangers.

  I had been chatting with a man who lived further up the hill from us. It’s hard to imagine what we discussed, but we must have found something, as neighbours do. Finally, he gestured towards the children capering around the bonfire.

  “Which ones are yours?” he said.

  Soft hollow structures like the womb are difficult to X-ray. In hysterosalpingography a dye is pumped into the uterus and ovarian tubes; this dye, called a contrast agent, blocks X-rays so that the structures being examined show as white. A fluoroscope allows the radiologist to watch the contrast agent fill the uterus and fallopian tubes. In a normal hysterosalpingogram, the contrast fills the uterus, enters the uterine tubes, and spills out of the ends of these tubes into the body cavity.

  In Adelaide I was sent for the test. A screen was tilted towards me as I lay on a trolley, and I watched the dye creep through my body until I began to feel uncomfortable. It was another of those moments when I should have pulled on my clothes and fled, but I was too invested in the result, too desperate to prove that my fallopian tubes were viable.

  The dye was pushed at pressure against what must have been a blockage. It went on and on, until the pain became so intense that I almost lost consciousness. Weakly, I signalled that I might throw up, and an assistant handed me a kidney bowl. Still I did not protest, so badly did I want the result. When it was over, I could barely walk to the car. At home, I went straight to bed and did not get up for a week. When I did rise it was to go to the hospital, where I was put onto an antibiotic drip to treat a pelvic inflammatory infection that put an end to my slender hope of a normal pregnancy.

  At 10.55 a.m. on 4 August 1984, at Flinders Hospital in South Australia, two tiny embryos are lifted from glass petri dishes where they have developed – one to the four-cell stage and one to the two-cell stage – and are transferred into my uterus via a long glass pipette. For the next three hours I lie on a hospital trolley, scarcely daring to breathe. I fear they may be expelled by even the slightest muscle movement – these precious embryos that are already our children. Can they sense, through the surrounding tissue, my tenderness towards them, my overwhelming desire for their survival? There is nothing I want more. Nothing. After three hours I am transferred to my bed on the ward where, even after I have been given per
mission to move, I remain on my back with a pillow under my knees. I must wait fourteen days to learn whether I am pregnant.

  In The Best Australian Essays 2016, Tegan Bennett Daylight’s essay ‘Vagina’ details her post-natal struggles after a birth in which her obstetrician resorted to using forceps and scissors. The epidural she had been given only dulled the contractions; it did not mask the sensation of instruments being manoeuvred into her vagina. Reading her essay, I thought of J. Marion Sims and the women who suffered in his backyard hospital without even an aspirin. Women’s medicine has improved since 1849, although not as much we might have expected. Yet despite her suffering, Tegan Bennett Daylight gave birth to two healthy babies, and I knew that if it would have guaranteed the survival of our tiny sparks I would have taken scissors to my own vagina.

  I was at school in Broken Hill when my brother was born in Wilcannia, so I only have vague memories of my mother when she was pregnant. But I do know that she often wore a straight skirt with a scoop cut out of the front to accommodate her stomach. There were no stretch fabrics then, so dressmakers had to be creative. Over the skirt she wore a loose, concealing smock.

  Unlike today’s proudly flaunted baby bellies, women in the 1950s masked their pregnant stomachs as if the sight of them would betray what they had been up to in the night. The language used to describe their condition revealed this latent shame. Women fell pregnant. They were, in a sense, fallen women. Needless to say, nuns do not fall.

  In Broken Hill, my grandmother liked to knit in the evenings while she watched television. Her arthritic fingers, ever industrious, turned out exquisite little baby bootees. When they were finished she would stuff them with balls of cotton wool and store them in pairs in any small cardboard box that came her way. She stockpiled them to give as gifts to expectant mothers, and each time I visited she would tell me she was keeping some for me. Eventually, when the waiting had been long, she handed them over, ‘just in case’: a pair each of pink, blue, and white bootees, to cover all possibilities.

  Having passed beyond the age of childbearing, my concern has shifted to wear and tear on hip joints and vertebrae. An MRI scan to inspect their condition detects something I have not asked them to search for. My doctor points to a shadowy area in the pelvis that I would, if I had a choice, avoid looking at.

  “There is a large calcified fibroid in the uterus,” he says.

  “Oh!”

  It is a benign, smooth, muscle tumour. He stresses ‘benign’ so as not to frighten me, but I am not so sure it is harmless. Later, when I summon the nerve to Google it, I will find that fibroids commonly appear in women during the mid to late childbearing years, that a fibroid can compromise an embryo’s ability to implant. This is ancient water under an ancient bridge now, and I do not want to explain to this doctor how it saddens me, this useless growth. A year later, another scan shows that the fibroid has not changed, which I suppose is good.

  “I don’t want to hear about it,” I tell him.

  “Really! Why?”

  “It makes me angry. I’d rather not know.”

  He is a kind man, and he persists. “Are you angry that it is there, or angry that you need to hear about it?”

  “Both.”

  He gives me a look, and decides to let it go.

  In the geography of grief, our deepest sorrows shudder through us like earthquakes. Pliny the Elder described earthquakes as ‘underground thunderstorms’, and in the language of grief these personal quakes cause seismic shifts and slides and thunderous collapses at the most profound level of being. Carrying grief is exhausting, too, and some days, by around three in the afternoon, I must lie down and close my eyes, or else implode. People joke about napping nannas, but it is the weight of the past rather than age that propels me towards the relief of sleep. All one can hope is that gran temblors don’t occur too often in a life, or strike too close together.

  I have experienced two actual earthquakes. The first was in Wellington; I was in bed at the top of the wooden house on Tinakori Road when I woke to find the furniture performing a strange slow dance. It took a moment to realise what was happening, as the little house shuddered at its roots, my bed rocked gently and the wardrobe door swung wide. The air felt volatile, and stretched, about to tear. I threw back the bedclothes, and everything fell silent. The room settled for a moment into that eerie silence, and then the second slow shake began. Should I run or stay? I clutched the wooden sides of the bed – perhaps the house would fold around me, and I would be buried alive on Tinakori Road.

  The second time I was in bed in a residencia in Valparaiso, Chile, where the streets were already strewn with rubble from the last big quake.

  Grief wakes up parts of us that we haven’t known were asleep. Old griefs bed down beneath layers of scar tissue but can be laid open at the lightest touch. The chaos of grief caused by the loss of a child only ever lies dormant. As survivors of the female life we learn to bear up, for bearing up is the only option.

  Time Passes

  The two girls lay on their stomachs, absorbed in the colouring books Lily had found to keep them occupied while she dealt with lunch. They appeared quiet and companionable, but Lily knew trouble could flare at any moment – it was usually Belle who provoked her older sister, but Molly couldn’t be trusted either. With their sharp little faces and reddish-blonde hair they reminded her of a pair of fox cubs. She couldn’t risk leaving the baby with them. Rowan was almost fourteen months old, a placid, rosy little boy, who from the start had offered Lily his trust. Belle and Molly competed for her attention, but they remained guarded. There had been other nannies and from little things Belle had said Lily suspected that losing one or two of them had been painful.

  With Rowan in her arms, Lily went upstairs into the public lounge, which was empty, and out through the main entrance of The Mariners Rest into Rye High Street. As always, she paused on the threshold, overawed by the age of everything in the old cinque port town, from the worn cobbles to the grey facades of the buildings. The George Hotel stood on the corner of Lion Street. Lily crossed to it and went up the steps and into the warm, beer-scented lounge where people had congregated around the open fire. The children’s mother, Bet Levin, was not among them: Lily would have to look for her in the bar.

  This ritual of drinks before Sunday lunch was a nuisance. It dragged Lily away from the kitchen just when the roast her employers required her to cook for them was at its trickiest. Once she found Bet she would go back and finish off the gravy; with luck, the vegetables would not be soggy. Bet’s husband Gerald would drift in from somewhere just as she was carving the meat. It was a mystery how he knew when lunch was ready, but he always did. Once they had eaten, and the washing up was done, Lily would have the afternoon to herself, and she couldn’t wait to take out her notebooks and finish the story she was writing.

  In the entrance to the bar, two couples she had been introduced to by Bet called out a greeting. Lily waved but did not go over to them, worried that if they struck up a conversation she might muddle their names. The one with the moustache, who she thought might be Tony, saluted her with his pint of beer.

  “Well, I must say, you look as if you were made to carry a baby on your hip.”

  Lily smiled, and her arms tightened around the child. Rowan must have felt this nervous squeeze, for he suddenly buried his face in her shoulder. His small warm body fitted perfectly into her curves, a barrier against this roomful of falsely jolly strangers.

  “Bet’s at the other end of the bar,” Tony’s wife shouted.

  “Thanks!”

  Lily moved further in until she could see Bet Levin perched on a bar stool. In her mid-thirties, slightly built but with a firm, boyish body, Bet was a strawberry blonde, like her daughters, and with the same sharp-chinned, predatory face. She was laughing up at the man leaning over her, a fellow with a wine-coloured silk scarf knotted at his throat. His mouth looked a little loose. Lily thought she had seen him behind the counter at the gallery in Lion
Street. Bet spotted her, and when Lily raised her hand to signal that lunch would be ready in ten minutes, she checked her watch and nodded.

  A man sitting alone at one of the small tables at the back of the bar met Lily’s gaze and held it for a moment: Thomas Raines. Amid the roar of conversation he seemed to occupy a quiet bubble that was all his own. Grey eyes, beautiful cheekbones. She might put him into a story some time. Not like the story she had written about Desi Brickle, and really, she might scrap that one, even though it had taken her a long time. There was not enough in it that was true, and the one true thing – that Desi’s father had died in gaol – wasn’t there at all. The town was in it though, and her beautiful aunts, and the racecourse. How far from damp grey East Sussex it seemed, that dry-roasted mining town, and her grandmother’s house where Desi had once come to collect one of her famous dog rugs.

  Lily transferred the baby to her other hip, and Rowan gave her one of his brilliant smiles. When she had seen her own baby brother for the first time she had been so disappointed. Lily had pictured a playmate, someone nearer Beth’s size, but Jam was a tiny blob, propped peacefully against their mother’s shoulder.

  “Is that him!” she had said in disgust.

  Her mother had gone into fits of laughter then, letting Lily know that she was not going to take her disapproval to heart. It was not really his size, but the look on her mother’s face as she held him that had cut through Lily. Ginny had never been able to disguise the helpless adoration she felt for her son. Beth, with her sensible, generous nature, had always been philosophical, but even now Lily was sometimes surprised to find herself resentful of their closeness.