Dinner for Two Read Online Free PDF Page B

facts in the leaflet only one remains lodged in my head: thirty per cent of first pregnancies end in miscarriage.
    One in three people .
    I look around the room and count out three people from the dozen or so with whom I am sharing it: a young girl reading a magazine; a middle-aged woman with a bandaged leg; I look down at my trainers and count myself.
    Two people get away with it for each time that another doesn’t. This time I’m the unlucky one. But it doesn’t seem fair that it has happened. The fact that, as the doctor told me, ‘Sometimes these things just happen,’ didn’t help me to understand why it had happened, clutching as I do to the eternally optimistic theory that bad things shouldn’t happen to good people.
    When I eventually get to see Izzy she doesn’t look any different. She’s still wearing the clothes I saw her put on this morning. This morning when everything was so different from how it is now. It makes me think – if only for a second – that this is a bad dream. That somehow everything will still be all right.
    ‘I love you,’ I say, holding her tightly. ‘We’ll be all right.’
    ‘I didn’t love him enough,’ says Izzy, as tears stream down her face. ‘That’s why he’s gone.’
    ‘No.’ I wonder why she’s made up her mind that the baby would’ve been a boy. ‘You’re wrong. You did love him. You loved him more than enough for the two of us. And, if it was possible for him to know anything, he knew that. It wasn’t anybody’s fault, Izzy. It’s just one of those things.’

    past
    When the news emerges everyone is incredibly supportive: Trevor and Jenny say they’re available to help whenever help is needed, and Stella and Lee call constantly for updates. They’re all really good friends to Izzy and me.
    Several days after Izzy is discharged from hospital we decide to spend some time away from London and head for Izzy’s mum’s holiday cottage in Wales. I think we assume that somehow we’ll be able to leave our problems behind if we aren’t at home. All we want is to stop feeling what we’re feeling but we can’t manage that. Neither of us has the strength even to bring up the subject of the miscarriage. Neither of us wants to remind the other of the terrible thing that has happened. This is ridiculous, of course, because those key hours in hospital are our constant companions: we review them separately, time and again, wishing that the past hadn’t happened.

    long
    When something terrible happens and you’re in the middle of it you really do feel like you’re never going to be the same again. You feel like every day of your life from now will have about it the same dull greyness. Sometimes you feel like you’ll never smile again. Then, of course, the day arrives when the anger and bitterness are not as intense as they were the day before, and eventually the catastrophe seems like a distant memory from some other lifetime. You begin to feel . . . okay. Not great, not good, but not bad either. You can laugh without feeling guilty. You can smile without wanting to cry.
    As things get better Izzy and I treat ourselves a million times better than we ever have before. We buy a new car – a 1964 white Mercedes 280 SL convertible that’s in relatively good condition. The first weekend we have it, we drive to Brighton with the hood down. It makes us feel free. It makes us feel young again. The miscarriage made us feel like fully-fledged adults, which we both resent. The car gives us back our youth and returns to us our right to be carefree.

    grand
    It’s a couple of weeks later and we’re in the car driving to a restaurant in Ladbroke Grove to meet up with Trevor and Jenny. It’s raining and one of the windscreen wipers is making a terrible screeching noise. The guy who we bought the car from had installed a CD player in it and we’re listening to Rod Stewart’s Never a Dull Moment because I think it’s good driving music. Izzy and I are both singing