Leo continued cramming in day trips and evenings out into our time together, which was fine on the one hand, but I was starting to fantasise about a day pottering about at home. Leo didn’t understand why I didn’t want to potter about in the Cotswolds or Lisbon. He was baffled when I tried to explain it was because my favourite blanket wasn’t there, or my Hattie Hood cappuccino mug. I simply didn’t find a swish hotel as relaxing as my own house. It was enough adjusting to Leo’s semi-detached rental, after so many years living with Shay. It turned out I was a woman who liked a place for everything, and everything in its place. Including me.
This, alongside the continuing tension with my co-directors about the marriage, meant that I’d initially been less than enthusiastic when Leo said he’d booked us a surprise mini-break in Edinburgh for Valentine’s Day, requiring me to take two days off. But after a brief internal whinge, I ordered myself to buck the hell up, because it was my first Valentine’s Day with my brand-new husband and he wanted to treat us to a gorgeous break. Last year I’d gorged on takeaway pizza, then fallen asleep while watching the newest Top Gun movie with Shay.
Edinburgh was delightful. After driving up in the morning, we wandered along the Royal Mile and stopped for afternoon tea before visiting the castle, then headed back to the hotel where we’d booked dinner.
It was only much later, when brushing my teeth before bed, that I realised I’d forgotten my contraceptive pills.
I was on the wrong side of tipsy and after a wonderful evening, heady with the promise of twelve luxurious hours in our upgraded room, I couldn’t face telling Leo that our early night was not going to be as anticipated.
And then, my foolish, drunken brain thought, Do I really need to mention it? What’s the worst that can happen?
According to an article I’d read recently, my thirty-two-year-old eggs would need more than one pill-free night to spring into action. Other women my age were doing everything they could to get pregnant. And the unexpected flash of disappointment this produced made it easy to make up my mind. Perhaps I’d ask Leo how he felt about me forgetting to take a few more… Reluctant to put a dampener on our plans with a badly timed discussion about children, I said nothing.
Three weeks later, still sceptical that skipping one pill could have resulted in ovulation, let alone conception, I bought myself a pregnancy test. Away from the romance of Valentine’s, snowed under with paperwork as we headed towards the end of the financial year, I had complicated feelings about the potential result. Despite working hard to convince myself that a late period was probably down to stress, I had an inkling. A gut feeling – or, more accurately perhaps, a uterine feeling – that this was going to be Big News. Leo had been fighting a nasty flu virus so I decided not to bother him until I was sure, taking the test in the bathroom at work.
It was with a mixture of astonishment (because despite the inkling, things like this didn’t happen to people like me), panic and excitement that the fattest, bluest of blue lines appeared on the stick within seconds.
I sat on the toilet lid for the whole two minutes, in case the line disappeared again, and then several more, while every connection in my nervous system went haywire.
When our head of accounts messaged for the third time asking if I was going to make the scheduled meeting, I wrapped the stick in toilet paper and stuffed it in my bag, slapped some life into my ghostly cheeks and stepped back into a world that had changed completely.
I had no idea how Leo would feel. We’d talked about having children one day, but only in a light-hearted ‘what name would we call them? Boy or girl?’ type way. While he was always up for a challenge, a baby would put a serious spanner in his free-range lifestyle.
If I was honest, that might be a bonus.
An image flashed into my head of me, clad in my pyjamas, cuddling a baby while watching Anne with an E, and it felt like bliss.
So, mind made up that this was brilliant news, I stopped off on the way home to get Leo’s favourite Mexican takeaway, a bottle of non-alcoholic champagne, and a box to put the pregnancy test in, so I could hand it to him like a gift.
It didn’t stop my hand trembling with nerves as I unlocked the front door and called hello. Hearing no reply, I made my way around the living room and kitchen-diner, but he wasn’t there. His phone was on the worktop, so I left the takeaway bag and bottle on the side and went to look upstairs.
I found my husband unconscious on the bathroom floor.
Three hours later, as I sat hunched on the most uncomfortable chair ever invented, my predominant thought was, Why am I the only person here who doesn’t know what the hell has happened to my husband?
The ambulance had arrived after a merciful twenty minutes. Kieran and Shay were there seconds later, Shay helping me out of the way and into the kitchen where she made me a mug of tea that was still on the side when I arrived back, an eon later.
Kieran stayed with the paramedics because, a) he wasn’t freaking out, crying and wailing and generally being a nuisance, and, b) the sobering truth was he knew more about Leo’s medical history than his wife did.
I felt as though my skull was stuffed with cotton wool, my thoughts sluggish and nonsensical as I allowed myself to be bundled into Shay’s car and driven to the hospital. We ended up in one of the private relatives’ waiting rooms, which, even in my hazy fuzz, I knew was the place they sent you when someone was dying.
Phrases like ‘As you will know, this was always a potential risk… his situation means that it isn’t as straightforward… due to his history, we will need to monitor extra closely…’ echoed off the walls, causing a wave of anger to build alongside my unbridled fear and confusion.
‘I don’t know,’ I blurted as soon as the doctor had left. ‘I don’t know anything. I don’t know what’s happened, or why it’s happened or why everyone, including that stuffy, pompous cardiologist, knows more about what the hell is going on with my husband than I do!’
After an ominous silence, Kieran came to sit beside me, taking hold of my hand. His face was grey, a sheen of sweat on his forehead. He looked at me, and what I saw in his eyes made my own heart shrink away in dismay.
‘Leo has endocarditis,’ Kieran said.
‘I don’t know what that is,’ I sobbed. ‘Am I supposed to? What is this, Kieran?’
‘It’s a bacterial infection in his heart.’ He paused, swallowing hard. ‘In the prosthetic heart valve.’
‘The what?’
Kieran told me that when my husband was nineteen, he’d collapsed playing football. It turned out to be a heart-valve defect. After a few years of increasing breathlessness, tiredness and other symptoms, he’d ended up having a replacement valve.
Open-heart surgery.
