‘Of course it’s no-one’s fault,’ said Joy doubtfully, although she’d quite like to ascertain where the fault did lie in each of these break-ups.
‘Does anyone need –’ began Savannah.
‘We’re fine,’ Stan cut her off.
There was silence for a moment. Stan kept idiotically clutching his balloon. Joy didn’t know if it was fury or nausea rising in her belly. Was she about to vomit or yell, faint or cry? All of them seemed like possibilities.
Troy said, ‘Seeing as the curve balls are coming from every direction, I might throw one more.’
‘Fabulous,’ said Joy through gritted teeth. ‘You do that, Troy. Throw us another curve ball. You throw it right at me, darling.’
‘Right, well, okay then, Mum,’ said Troy. He actually looked nervous. It couldn’t be another break-up. He wouldn’t bother telling them. He was in and out of relationships all the time. ‘I was considering keeping it a secret, but to hell with it. I could do with your advice.’ He moved his glass to one side, sloshing red wine onto the white tablecloth. Was he drunk? Was Joy herself drunk? She really did feel very strange indeed.
He said, ‘So, you remember Claire?’
‘Well, for goodness sake, Troy, yes, we remember Claire,’ said Joy.
Claire was Troy’s ex-wife, once a much-loved member of the family, just like Indira and, to a lesser extent, Grant. It was like a death each time her children broke up with someone, and over the years there had been many, many deaths.
（She would write that in her memoir: When I look back over the last decade, it’s like looking at a battlefield strewn with the corpses of all the perfectly lovely young men and women who have been in unsuccessful relationships with my annoying, ungrateful children. What would the little innocent teacher think of that? She did say to try to be colourful.）
Troy said, ‘So, I saw Claire when I was in the States –’
‘Are you getting back together?’ Amy’s face was full of foolish hope.
‘Of course they’re not getting back together,’ said Joy, to conceal her own foolish hope. Surely not. Hadn’t Claire gone off to Texas or somewhere like that – somewhere that made you think of cowboys – and married an American cardiologist? A friend of a friend from when Troy and Claire lived together in the US?
‘No, she’s happily married, permanently settled in the US,’ said Troy. ‘She’s ready to have a baby.’
‘Well, I’m not surprised. She was ready to have a baby with you all those years ago,’ said Joy bitterly. Claire and Troy had been in the process of going through IVF when their marriage broke up. Apparently Troy had been unfaithful and at the time Joy had been so angry with him she hadn’t been able to look him in the eye for a good six months. She shivered violently. It was too hot or too cold in here.
‘So, she and her husband have been trying for a long time now and apparently they haven’t been having any luck,’ said Troy.
‘Oh no,’ said Brooke. ‘Tell me she doesn’t want to use –’
‘Yes,’ said Troy. He looked at his sister, who seemed to have guessed something that Joy couldn’t even imagine. ‘Yes, she does.’
‘Use what?’ asked Stan.
‘Well, we’ve kept our embryos on ice all this time. From when we were doing IVF. Claire has been paying the storage costs. Anyway, now she’s wondering how I would feel if she . . . tried her luck with one of those.’
Joy felt like she was stumbling about in the dark for a light switch. ‘You mean Claire wants to have your baby? But I don’t understand, why can’t she do IVF with her new husband? Make some new . . . embryos?’ She tripped over the word ‘embryos’。 When she was getting pregnant, there had just been babies or no babies.
‘She had low ovarian reserve back when she was doing IVF with Troy,’ said Brooke, who remembered everyone’s medical histories. ‘She’s probably got no more eggs.’
‘But you’d be this child’s father,’ said Joy, and she saw Troy as a baby: the cutest and naughtiest of her babies. He’d wail so loudly each time he woke you’d think he was dying, and Joy would go running, tricked every time, and the instant she picked him up the crying would stop like a switch had been flicked and he’d smile that heart-melting smile, crocodile tears still wet on his fat rosy cheeks.
‘She wants her husband to formally adopt the child as soon as it’s born,’ said Troy, and Joy heard him trip on the word ‘husband’ in the same way she’d tripped on ‘embryo’。