They were eventually seen by an exhausted junior doctor who diagnosed Win with a significant tear in his meniscal cartilage and put him on a waiting list to see an NHS physiotherapist while Zoe sobbed throughout the entire process. Then the junior doctor, exhausted though he was, sent someone down from the psych team to assess Zoe, who loaded her up with information sheets on miscarriage, ectopic pregnancy, post-natal depression, regular depression, then put her on a waiting list to see a post-partum grief counsellor.
There was roughly a six month wait for either list, but Win couldn’t spend the next six months experiencing a hundred agonies as he hobbled about on a knee that made a strange clicking sound. So, twice a week, at forty-five pounds a session, Win went to a physiotherapist.
Zoe went with him the one time to be wifely and supportive. As she’d watched Henry, the physio, manipulate Win’s knee joint and do other things that made Win yelp, she wished it were that easy to fix her. Just as Win started every morning by looping his dressing gown cord round his foot and stretching, then strapped on an ice pack every evening, if only there were a series of exercises Zoe could do to heal the ragged hole in her heart and stem the flow of never-ending tears.
She cried as soon as Win left for work in the morning. She cried when she’d gone to see Cath to be especially encouraging and supportive for Clive’s inaugural trip on the newly installed stairlift. She even cried while Skyping her parents and hated herself for it because her mother immediately wanted to fly home. Win was obviously thinking along similar lines because after catching Zoe crying on three separate occasions, he asked her tiredly, ‘Does it help? Crying all the time? I could probably try and extend one of our loans if you want to fly out and see your parents.’
Of course, that made Zoe cry harder because there was nothing she wanted more but they couldn’t afford it and she couldn’t leave Win on his own when he was in such dreadful pain and probably wanted to cry all the time too.
‘I’m fine,’ she hiccupped. ‘It’s nothing. Probably just my hormones having one final surge before they settle down.’
It wasn’t even as if the crying was cathartic and cleansing. It was draining and in between crying jags, Zoe felt dirty and sweaty, like she’d slept in all her clothes.
But it was as she was walking through Highgate Woods, her fingers closed around the familiar shape of the baby’s button in her pocket and the predictable tears about to rally, that Zoe realised that she could just not. She could summon up the strength not to cry, if she really wanted to. If she wanted to move on from this awful sadness, then it was up to her to shuffle in a new direction.
After all, it was spring. Everything in the woods was fresh and green. There were buds and blossom and baby squirrels; the cycle was starting anew and what better time for Zoe to get over herself?
She had read the information sheets the hospital had given her. One in three pregnancies ended in miscarriage, one in eighty pregnancies was ectopic. Which meant that Zoe wasn’t alone. She wasn’t a special, suffering snowflake. There were all these women walking about, writing shopping lists, wishing their friends happy birthday on Facebook, buying their lunch from Pret, managing to get on with their lives while feeling wretched and incomplete.
And there was Libby, who’d been much further along than Zoe when she’d lost her baby. A real baby. Yet Libby had started a new job. Was going to the pub. Keeping appointments in town. Libby was getting on with the business of life, so Zoe at least had to try. To stop crying. To stop wallowing. Answering her agent’s summons so they could talk about Reggie the mouse was a start. One small step in rejoining the world.
When Zoe got off the Tube at Leicester Square, buffeted by the crowds, she was dry-eyed, no threat of tears; she even smiled a little because it felt a bit as if she were coming home. When she’d first moved to London to study at Central St Martins, Soho had been her campus, her neighbourhood, her stomping ground.
She was a little early for her appointment and as she walked along the familiar streets, Libby was on Zoe’s mind. Zoe passed Maison Bertaux on Greek Street, then came to a halt outside the building where the Withers & Withers talent agency had been, which was now home to a juice bar and serviced office suites on the upper floors.
Would Libby still recognise the area? The theatres along Shaftesbury Avenue? The tiny Soho cut-throughs like St Anne’s Court off Wardour Street? Had the legendary Italian deli on Brewer Street, Lina Stores, been there in Libby’s day?
So much had changed even in the fourteen years that Zoe had lived in London. High rents had closed many of her old haunts and huge swathes of Soho nearer to Oxford Street had been demolished to make way for the Crossrail.
‘By the time they’re finished, there’ll be nothing left of London for people to visit,’ Zoe said to Caroline West as they sat down to coffee at the Soho Hotel in a small mews off Dean Street.
‘When I first started work in a tiny literary agency in the eighties, Soho was still full of clip joints and sex shops,’ Caroline said. She was in her fifties and was always stylishly pulled together in interestingly draped dresses and men’s brogues and had let her hair go grey though she had a streak of pure white that sprang up from her widow’s peak. She’d been Zoe’s agent for three years, ever since Zoe’s old agent had retired, and had a fearsome reputation for not suffering fools gladly, which always made Zoe feel rather foolish in her presence.
They talked about the children’s book market. Who was doing well, what was selling, and all the time, Zoe knew this friendly chat was leading towards a reckoning. After ordering a second pot of coffee, Caroline pulled a clear folder out of her slouchy leather bag. Zoe instantly recognised the drawing of a mouse in a baseball cap and big boxy trainers. She braced herself.
‘I can’t sell this,’ Caroline said, putting the folder down on the table. ‘I’m a big fan of your work. It usually has real heart to it but I don’t feel convinced by the travails of Reggie and I’m not sure you do either.’
It was Zoe’s cue to launch into a passionate defence of Reggie but… but… but… ‘I don’t love Reggie,’ she admitted. ‘I wanted to have a solid book proposal for you because I’m out of contract but yeah…’ She trailed off, hoped that Caroline would be brutal but brief when she told Zoe to find another agent. ‘I’ve been feeling quite uninspired. It’s never happened before,’ she added a little defensively.
‘I see.’ Caroline gave Zoe a look, which seemed to miss nothing. That the only effort she’d made for the meeting was to apply dry shampoo to her lank hair and to hunt through bags and boxes until she’d found her one pair of jeans that didn’t have holes in them. ‘When I have authors who are blocked, I like to know if there’s anything happening in their lives that they’re particularly fired up about. I had a writer who was coaching his son’s football team and it sparked a wonderful middle-grade series. What’s exciting you lately?’
Nothing! Nothing excites me, Zoe thought, but she couldn’t say that so she sat in silence trying to rack her brains for the seed of an idea, a tiny nugget of inspiration that didn’t involve endless drawings of a little boy. ‘We’ve just moved,’ she said at last. ‘This house that’s been untouched since it was built in 1936. Huge renovation project…’ And this was her cue to talk about the suitcase, about Libby, because when Zoe was thinking about Libby it was the only time she wasn’t thinking about what had happened, but then sooner or later she thought about those yellowed baby clothes in the suitcase and her hand was in her pocket, fingers curled around the button and she was back to… ‘I lost a baby before we moved. It’s why we moved. I didn’t even know I was pregnant…’
It was the first time she’d had to explain it to someone who wasn’t family or a member of the medical profession. And she was crying. Again. Caroline tactfully moved her chair so Zoe was obscured from the other customers. Then she took Zoe’s hand and didn’t say anything.
It felt like hours before Zoe was able to stop. Caroline nodded as Zoe muttered something about the bathroom.
Zoe splashed her reddened face with cold water and, for once, now that she’d cried, she did feel calm. Resigned, even, as she walked back into the bar and sat down opposite Caroline.
‘I’m sorry. I’m not usually a crier,’ Zoe lied weakly, but Caroline shook her head.
‘Nothing to be sorry for,’ she said firmly. ‘You’ve been through a horrible time; I’m still not going to send Reggie out on submission though.’
It shocked a phlegmy giggle from Zoe. Made her brave enough to say, ‘Do I need to find another agent?’
‘Don’t be silly,’ Caroline said. Then the waiter, who’d tactfully hung back while Zoe had been in meltdown, arrived with their coffee and Caroline advised Zoe to take some time out. Not to try to force the ideas and in the meantime, she could do some school visits and workshops if she was up to it and Caroline would talk to a colleague at the agency to see about getting Zoe some commercial work.
It had gone better than Zoe had dared hope but as she travelled up the escalator at Highgate station, she dreaded returning to Elysian Place. Back to the house to wander through the empty downstairs rooms, unable to see what Gavin and his team had been doing all day.
They were still without a boiler. The plans for the kitchen were at an impasse as no one could agree on just how scaled back the new plans should be. Zoe could imagine both she and Win having to work long past retirement age, coach parties swinging past to take pictures of the house that hadn’t been lived in for eighty years, then had the builders in for another forty.
If she and Win even lasted another forty years. Zoe didn’t know how they could have gone from happy to clinging on to their relationship by their fingernails in the space of six months. Or rather, she knew exactly why.
And before they could talk about it, heal, Win was right, something had to change to free them from the daily grind of house renovations and Win’s bad leg and Zoe crying every time someone looked at her funny.
Something good had to happen.