The Whole Day Through by Patrick Gale Read Free Book Online Page B

and European royalty, however, AIDS and its related charities became fashionable for a while and Chloë found a way to make the situation work for her. Through her connections she had walked into a job in a merchant bank. In her free time, though, she took part in fundraisers, she volunteered as a driver for patients and she gave up every fourth Saturday to work for the AIDS equivalent of meals-on-wheels. But then the predicted holocaust failed to materialize, at least among the moneyed white, and the charities shifted their focus as Ben’s wards were filled with less easily huggable sufferers, increasingly refugees – many of them conflict-numbed rape victims from Rwanda, Zimbabwe and Sudan and their infected babies – and drug addicts, who the volunteers had to learn to call drug users.
    But in a way Ben would never have predicted, Chloë discovered that she liked being involved on more than just a fundraising level. She liked getting her hands dirty, at least metaphorically. She enjoyed the unpredictable human contact. Whether this was because she was developing a taste for doing good or simply that she was discovering there was a pleasure to be had in goading her father, he couldn’t have said.
    The turning point came when St Stephen’s was closed for its grand rebuilding as the Chelsea and Westminster. While Ben and his patients were temporarily rehomed,Chloë startled him by negotiating only part-time employment at the bank so as to volunteer two days a week at a school for the mentally disabled – a Special School – in Wandsworth. Banking was boring, she said. She had enjoyed her contact with the children on the ward and wanted something more challenging in her life. They could cope financially – her mother had bought them the flat as a wedding present – and the new work, which could turn into a career if she decided to take some formal training and commit to it, made her happier and easier to live with.
    What neither of them had foreseen was the hunger it stirred in her for motherhood. From the day they met she had always been meticulous in her birth control, adamant that the thought of motherhood repelled her. This had saddened him a little at first but only because it felt like a rejection of him but he had long since grown not just used to the idea but secretly relieved by it. Perhaps it wasn’t as much of a volte-face as it seemed? Perhaps she had been becoming broody for years but not admitting it to herself?
    Had she simply become pregnant the usual way, unexpectedly and without advance discussion or planning, their marriage might have trundled on in its uneventful, unsurprising way. Her coming off the pill had seemed so dramatic. They had actually celebrated it and convinced themselves a pregnancy would make itself known in a matter of weeks. But with each month that passed, each disappointing period, the matter changed from groundfor joy to being a subject best avoided. At last she submitted to some tests and found she couldn’t conceive, or not easily. Given the high failure rate in couples over forty, the doctors they saw were actively discouraging about their seeking IVF.
    Inspired by days spent with some of the more beguiling toddlers at the Special School, Chloë then hit on the idea not just that they should file for adoption but that they should actively seek to adopt a baby with what were euphemistically called special needs. She was tenacious and pursued the idea alone, finding out all the details, littering the normally tidy flat with pamphlets and forms. And, all unwittingly, she brought Ben to the shocking realization that he didn’t want to have a child with her, still less adopt one. Passion had cooled, as passion did, but he assumed that love, a steady, undramatic kind of love, would take its place. Had he loved her, he would surely have wanted to raise a family with her. He would surely at least have masked his lack of enthusiasm so as to make her happy. Instead he found he