What's Yours Is Mine Read Online Free PDF Page A

hand: the estate agent who’d just been saddled with it after the death of the previous owner (penniless and in debt to the tune of hundreds of thousands of pounds, something we didn’t discover until it was far too late) happened to be there, walking the property. He must have thought his ship had come in when we turned up before he’d even had a chance to write up its particulars.
    We agreed to a price that at the time we thought was a steal, and in retrospect turned out to be daylight robbery. In the seven years since then, we’ve replaced the slate roof (twice; the first builder used tiles that didn’t conform to its Grade II listed status), dredged the moat of bicycles and beer cans, spent three months camping out in Claudia and Blake’s spare room while the asbestos lagging on the pipes was replaced, awoken one Christmas morning to find eighteen inches of raw sewage in the basement after the cesspit overflowed, rewired the place from top to bottom, and coped with a thousand minor inconveniences from backed-up lavatories to rising damp. It’s cost us everything we made from the sale of our London flat, plus Tom’s inheritance from his parents and a small legacy from my maternal grandmother, but it’s been worth it. I love this house. I want to grow old here.
    The only room we haven’t yet touched is the third-floor turret nursery, which came to us complete with anoriginal carved Victorian rocking horse. We were waiting to see if we needed to paint it pink or blue.
    Blake clatters up from the basement, but instead of two glasses of Tom’s brew, he’s clutching a bottle of champagne from their last boys’ booze cruise to northern France, which he and Claudia store in our wine cellar.
    Tom looks confused. “Cracking open the bubbly? Am I missing something, mate?”
    Claudia smiles secretively, and her hand flutters to her stomach. She doesn’t know Tom and I have been trying for a baby. It’s always seemed too private to share; something that belonged only to Tom and me.
    She’s my best friend, and I love her, but oh, God,
it isn’t fair
.
    LATER, AFTER BLAKE and Claudia have left, awash respectively with champagne and delight—“I know we said no more babies until the twins were at school,” Claudia whispers, as she hugs me goodbye, “but we just couldn’t wait”—I finally sit Tom down and tell him about my conversation with Dr. Janus.
    And Tom doesn’t mind. He’s upset for me, of course, because he truly loves me and he knows how much this means to me; but he’s not upset for himself.
    I should be pleased; relieved, even, that my husband finds me enough. He wanted children, certainly, it was his decision to try for a baby as much as mine, and he would have been an involved father, a “hands-on dad”; but itseems he’s equally happy now to adjust his ideas of the future to focus on just the two of us. But I’m not pleased or relieved. I don’t feel thankful he feels this way. I’m hurt and angry. His stoicism seems like a betrayal. How can he not grieve the way I do? Why isn’t he railing against Fate? How can he just
accept
this?
    â€œOne thing I don’t understand,” Tom says, as I sit on the bed and furiously brush my hair. “If it’s inherited from your mother, why didn’t it affect Susannah?”
    The million-dollar question.
    Carefully, I put the brush down, fighting the impulse to throw it at the wall. “The drug was only prescribed until the early seventies, to prevent miscarriages and premature babies. My mother had lost two babies before she had me. But by the time she was pregnant with Susannah three years later, it’d been taken off the market.”
    â€œYou’re going to be all right, though?” Tom asks anxiously. “You’re not going to get sick, or anything?”
    I want to scream, No, I’m not going to be all