Iona wasn’t pregnant.

It wasn’t really a devastating surprise – after all, she’d dealt with not being pregnant every single month for the last seventeen years -  but what did surprise her was the sense of bitter disappointment which engulfed her. How let down she felt by her own body. How shocked she was that things hadn’t worked out the way she expected. All the same, she reflected ruefully, it was probably a bit much to hope that their first serious attempts at actually conceiving a baby would’ve ended up with the desired for result. She knew that it could take ages. She knew that for some women it never even happened. But she’d been quietly confident that in her case it would be different.
Because, Iona thought, all of those other times, the nights over the past four years when they’d come together beneath the sheets and cried out in mutual passion – all those  times had been about themselves and the pleasure that they were giving to each other. But now it was different. Making love this last month had been a unique experience because there had been a new purpose to it, and the thrill of their nights together had intensified as a result. Iona hadn’t thought it possible that she could love Frank any more passionately than she already did. Or that their sex lives could have been any more fulfilling. But she’d been wrong. Trying to make a baby with him was the most intense and passionate experience of her life.
They’d talked about it first, of course. There’d been a long and involved discussion about the whole idea of bringing another life into the world. It was Iona who’d had the serious doubts. Too many wars, she’d said, wanting Frank to understand that she was taking the long-term view for their child. The world was an unstable place. And there were environmental issues – every day some scientist came out with another doom-laden prediction about the ecosystem and the fact that the planet was doomed. Their child might be born in Dublin, she said, but Ireland might end up as dry as the Arizona desert. How fair a trick was that to play on an unsuspecting infant? And then there were the hopeless politicians with rotten policies who’d make a complete mess of everything in the future just like they were doing in the present. The reality was that there were too many potential problems. Too many things that the children of the future with have to deal with – struggle with, probably, she added persuasively.
Frank had looked at her as she’d said all this and had then gently reminded her that the human race had managed to survived a whole range of wars, including two world wars even though everyone had predicted doom and gloom then too; that people adapted to whatever the environment threw at them; and that politicians would always be a waste of space but just occasionally someone good came along and maybe that someone would be their very own child. After all, he told her, with the baby being a mixture of her genes and his wasn’t he going to be an absolute and utter survivor no matter what? And wasn’t he – or she, he’d added after Iona poked him in the ribs and muttered about being sexist – wasn’t she likely to be bursting with brains and probably be an absolute stunner in the looks department too? Maybe, Frank told her, their baby would end up being Taoiseach or President. Who knew?
Iona had conceded that his points were valid but then she played her Joker. She told him that her biggest fear was quite simply that she just wasn’t sure that she’d be much good as a mother. She was an independent sort of person, she reminded him, and the idea of someone being dependent on her, needing her for every little thing – feeding, changing, comfort or whatever else – simply terrified her. It was shockingly scary and the more she thought about it the more shockingly scared she felt. She simply wasn’t sure that she was up to it. Besides (and not that she wanted to sound like a selfish cow or anything, she told him), but having her own life was important to her. Even her job - although she always hoped one day to do something a bit more meaningful than working for a house rental company - yet even her job was something that she enjoyed. The idea of swapping designer suits for track suits and morning meetings for morning feeds was difficult to accept. To be absolutely one hundred percent honest, she’d told him seriously as she’d lain beside him in the bed, being a mother seemed a terribly grown up thing to do.

Frank had kissed her then (he always kissed her to shut her up) and told her that she was a grown-up. She was thirty-two years old. She had a mortgage and a car and she coped with grown-up things all the time. Hadn’t she had to deal with that episode where the tenants of one of her houses had been dealing in drugs? Hadn’t she had to behave like a real grown-up in dealing with the police (who wanted to raid the house) and the landlord (who was having hysterics at the idea that his house had become den of drug dealers)? Hadn’t everything worked out fine? There was no need for her to be scared of a baby! Besides, he’d be with her every step of the way.
‘Promise?’ she’d been touched by the sincerity of his words.
‘Promise,’ he replied.
And then they’d made love with the hope of having  a baby and it had been the most wonderful of all their nights together. But now, Iona had to admit, wonderful and all though that night and the other baby-making nights that followed might have been, they was still just more nights of great sex because she wasn’t pregnant after all.
She hadn’t needed the sudden pain in the small of her back or the crucifying cramping of her stomach to tell her. Deep down, despite the hopes that fourteen nights of unprotected sex couldn’t but lead to immediate pregnancy, she’d suspected all along that it hadn’t worked. Somehow she felt as though she’d have guessed if she were already pregnant, that she would immediately feel different. She knew that a lot of women often didn’t even suspect until they missed a period, but she was convinced that she’d be different. After all, she was in touch with her own body – she ate well, worked out, did her yoga sessions – so she was pretty certain that she’d be alert to a life-changing experience like becoming pregnant once it happened. But she hadn’t felt any changes over the last couple of weeks and so she wasn’t truly surprised by the evidence of their failure to conceive. But she was surprised at how down she suddenly felt and how silly some of the things she’d done since they’d made the decision to try for a child had been.
As soon as they’d agreed that having a baby was what they wanted to do, she’d set up a Children area in their house, even though she knew Frank thought that her Feng Shui addiction was completely potty and he only put up with it out of a sense of amusement. But, she’d pointed out, there was no harm in harnessing whatever power there might be around the home (hadn’t leaving the toilet lid down worked its magic as a way of stopping money leaking out of the house – he’d landed a major contract the day he’d moved in, hadn’t he, which proved it really) and so she’d placed a few photos of her niece, Charlotte – aged six, and nephew, Gavin – aged four, on the plain oak sideboard at the south end of the living-room; then she’d added a home enhancer crystal bowl with the supportive elements of glass nuggets, candles, petals and tokens onto the wall shelf nearby. By the time she’d finished upgrading the energy of the home she’d felt certain that getting pregnant would be an enjoyable formality given all the effort she was making.
Frank had teased her gently but hadn’t made her feel in the slightest bit silly about it, so she’d gone out and bought him a dragon plant to clear the air of his tiny southside office, which, she told him, would help his business dramatically. And, she added, they’d need improved business and a few more major contracts if they were going to be adding to the household.
She debated for a moment or two whether or not to phone him now and tell him the discouraging news about the baby but she decided against it. It wasn’t the sort of conversation she wanted to have with him first thing in the morning and she was pretty sure it wasn’t the kind of conversation he wanted at that hour either. But she was glad that he was coming home that night so that they could hold each other tight and promise each other that maybe the next time they’d be successful.
Iona had never told Frank that it had taken her own mother five years to get pregnant. She didn’t tell him of the many despairing visits that Flora Brannock had made to the doctor to find out whether or not everything was all right and her mother’s subsequent slavish adherence to a range of different diets, lifestyle regimes and goodness knows what else to help things along. Because in the end it hadn’t mattered – Flora eventually succeeded with Iona’s older sister, Amber; then a couple of years later Iona; and finally Craig. There hadn’t been a production problem really, just a delay in getting started as she’d told her daughters when giving them her practical facts of life discussion as soon as they’d asked the inevitable ‘where did I come from’ question.
Iona twisted the thin gold wedding band on her finger. She wouldn’t have the same problems as her mother, she knew she wouldn’t. Charlotte and Gavin were Amber’s children and Amber hadn’t had any problems in conceiving. So there was no big issue here just because Iona hadn’t got pregnant on the first attempt.

But still, she thought, as she broke the seal on a box of Tampax, it would have been nice to have the whole thing sorted. She wasn’t good at waiting. She knew that.
Flora had always called her the impatient daughter. Amber was the serene daughter – nothing every upset or perturbed her and she seemed to float through life without any stress whatsoever. Iona, on the other hand, was always anxious for things to happen, cut up with frustration when she was told that she was too young or too small or just plain not allowed to do something she desperately wanted. Iona had been the one to make the forbidden climb onto the roof of the garden shed, and the one to rip her leg on the thorns of the rose bush as she’d jumped off it. Iona had been the one, at aged six, to try riding a two-wheeled bicycle on her own without any supervision whatsoever and who’d managed to wobble a few yards down the road before crashing into the wall of Delaney’s house, splitting open her lip, banging her nose and knocking out her two front teeth. As a teenager, she’d been the one who’d stayed out past the accepted coming home time, sneaking in the bathroom window for three nights in a row before getting caught because Flora had moved the cactus plant on the windowsill and Iona had sent it clattering onto the tiled floor as she’d put her foot inside the open window. At twenty, she’d been the first to move out of the family home, wanting a place of her own while Amber was still content to live with their parents. Craig, the youngest, was simply ‘the son’. Craig was tall and broad with deep and soulful eyes which made him look particularly sensitive and meant that the impressionable girls on the estate where they lived fancied him like crazy and hung around outside their house to get a glimpse of him. Iona grinned to herself as she thought of her younger brother, now working as a telephone engineer in China and probably still breaking hearts. Their father had been a new man sort of bloke long before it became fashionable for men to do the washing up and show their emotions in public; and she had no doubt that David Brannock had loved both his daughters dearly and expected great things of them; but when Craig had been born there was a whole thing about ‘the son’ that hadn’t been around for ‘the girls’.
Iona didn’t care. She knew that her parents loved them all equally. The son and heir thing – well, it might be old fashioned but a part of her understood it. Even though, as she’d pointed out to her father, she’d kept the family name after her marriage so that everyone still knew her as Iona Brannock. And the agreement with Frank was that daughters would carry her surname, sons would carry his. It would all work out fine, she knew. All she had to do was get round to having the children.
She finished in the bathroom and walked into the tiny bedroom. This was something that would have to change when all the lovemaking finally paid off. Right now, she and Frank lived in a  two-up-two-down artisan house near the Iveagh Markets in the Liberties district of Dublin. It was a great house in a great location because it was so convenient to the city centre and meant that if she didn’t need the car during the day to drive to rental showings she could walk to work; but it wasn’t very big, especially since one of the bedrooms was used by both of them as an office. Frank had his own company, DynaLite. He arranged the installation of complex lighting systems in hotels and nightclubs and customised lighting shows for special occasions. It was extremely successful for a venture that operated from their back bedroom and from a serviced office on the south side of the city, although that was because Frank was totally committed to the company, travelling throughout the country every week to meet his clients and sometimes having to stay away for days on end to get a particular project completed on time.

Iona, whose job at the rental agency allowed her to work from home sometimes, also used the bedroom as an office though not as much as Frank. But it was there that they kept all of their work related stuff; there where they kept the computer and printer and fax, and there where one or the other of them retired when the absolutely didn’t want to be disturbed. That didn’t happen very often. With Frank spending so much time away from home they liked to be together as much as possible when he returned.
But using the bedroom as an office meant that they essentially lived in a one-bedroomed house. Iona felt a bit guilty about her assertion that they’d have to move once they started a family since she knew that years ago enormous families were reared in the two-up two-down houses, but times had changed since the nineteen thirties and forties. And besides, their house had been bought from some lunatic interior designer who had done a fantastic job on it but who had styled everything with a single male occupant in mind. Iona was perfectly certain that the trendy glass staircase and angular units would be a death-trap for a toddler even though they fitted perfectly with her personal Zen ideas.
She smoothed the skirt of her blue hound’s-tooth Zara suit over her hips. Last night, when she’d been two days late and begun to allow the hope of pregnancy grow in her mind despite herself, she’d thought about maternity clothes and wondered where she’d be able to buy stylish clothes that would take her  through her pregnancy. She knew that there were plenty of maternity boutiques around the city because she remembered Amber enthusing about them when she’d been expecting Gavin. But she couldn’t remember the name of a single one. She’d stood in front of the mirror with a pillow stuffed beneath her pale pink T-shirt and contemplated her potential change in figure. It would be radical, she thought, because she was (as her father so often pointed out) a mere slip of a girl – exactly five feet and one inch tall (that inch was very important to her), with short ink-black hair which she sometimes wore in gelled spikes but more often allowed to settle into a gamine crop framing her heart-shaped face. Her eyes were blackberry-blue and her lips, even without lipstick, a pouting rosebud red. Her nose was small and neat, though a tiny bump (a legacy of the crash into Delaney’s wall) robbed it of any cuteness it might otherwise have had. Iona’s looks were exotic rather than beautiful but then she’d never much cared for beauty over interesting. Anyway there was no point in her caring since Amber was the one who’d been handed the beauty genes with her clear, smooth skin, violet eyes and burnished copper hair which fell in soft waves around her heart-shaped face. Amber’s nose was perfect. Iona knew that she’d obviously been handed the left-over height genes too, because Amber was a willowy five-six with an enviable figure which had looked fantastic even when she was pregnant. Iona wondered what being fat thanks to pregnancy would look like on her – the stuffed pillow just made her look stupid. It was amazing, she reflected as she turned in front of the mirror, just how much the baby thing could take over your life. At a younger age she couldn’t have imagined caring about maternity clothes. But now she did.
It doesn’t matter, she told herself now as she shoved her mobile into her bag, checked her normal appearance in the mirror once more and picked up the house keys. Nothing has changed yet. Everything is still exactly the same.

The rental agency had its offices in Dame Street, close to the imposing (though, thought Iona, incredibly ugly) Central Bank building with its smooth piazza, fountain and bronze sculpture facing onto the street. The office was also near Trinity College, a building which Iona much preferred and where she often went during sunny lunchtimes to eat a sandwich on the grassy lawns. Today, despite the promise of clear blue skies and a warm breeze from the south, there would be no lunching on the lawns of Trinity or anywhere else. Her agenda was full – administration in the office for the morning and then back to her house to collect her lime green Volkswagen Beetle so that she could drive to the six different apartments she was showing that afternoon and evening.
Her stomach was cramping again as she sat at her white wood desk and logged on to her computer. She hated this time of the month. She hated the bloated feeling that always engulfed her, the nagging pain in the small of her back and those damn cramps which wracked her for the first day or two. She opened her desk drawer and took out a couple of gel capsules. When you’re pregnant, she reminded herself as she swallowed them down, the pain will be worse. Much, much worse! She shivered a little. She was definitely ready to be pregnant now but she was scared of the potential pain as well as everything else. Although she was absolutely and utterly determined to do everything as naturally as possible, she worried that the intensity of the pain might stop her. It was extraordinary, she mused, that will all the evolutionary things that had gone on over the past few millennia, humans hadn’t yet come up with a better way of having babies. Hens had it cushy, she thought. An egg was a much better shape for the birth process – no inconvenient arms and legs which might present themselves at the wrong moment.
‘Morning, Iona!’ Ruth Dawson, who looked after rentals on the north side of the city greeted her. ‘How’s it going?’ She saw the packet of Evening Primrose Oil and Starflower capsules on Iona’s desk and grimaced sympathetically.
‘I’ll be fine,’ said Iona, ‘though I wish I hadn’t agreed to so many viewings this afternoon.’
‘Take some Feminax,’ suggested Ruth. ‘I have…’
‘Thanks but no thanks.’ Iona smiled at her. ‘These work fine for me.’ She winced.
The other girl opened a desk drawer and took out an assortment of aspirin, paracetemol and ibuprofen which she spread out on the desk in front of her.
‘Sure?’

Iona looked at the display and shook her head again. ‘You should have shares in Glaxo,’ she said disparagingly.
 ‘I’ll give you the name of my yoga guru, much, much better for you than all that.’
Ruth snorted and then picked up her ringing telephone.
‘Rental Remedies,’ she said. ‘Ruth speaking. How can I help you?’