Ours was a secret relationship and our universes were very much separate. The man didn’t want to join lives—he had his life and I had mine. In this private, secure space, he explained, there was us. Guard it jealously, he instructed me, it was a special thing we had. That was what was important, not whether I met his friends or whether mine even knew about him. When I tried to broach the topic—I loved my friends and felt horrid saying nothing—the man got angry, so I learned to let it go. But he got angry often. If I were out and didn’t reply to his text messages immediately, if he rang and I didn’t pick up the call because I was at a dinner (if I did pick up, he would chat away, suggesting that I leave the dinner to speak to him), if I told him something he didn’t like (it was hard to know what he would and wouldn’t like), if I planned a trip away with friends, if I disagreed with him. In the early days, he would call me on the phone and go silent, testing me, saying nothing, waiting to see how long I would wait. I never put down the phone. He often stormed out of restaurants, threw tantrums and left me alone in strange cities and gave me the silent treatment for days.
Once he surprised me by turning up in town unexpectedly. I was working on a script with Michael Radford, the Oscar-nominated director and screenwriter, a great friend. We were adapting one of my novels and it took me 17 minutes to apologize to Michael and leave. I know how long it was because when I called the man and said I had managed to get out, he screamed at me for making him wait so long, slammed the phone on my face and didn’t see me or talk to me for the rest of the day. More than once, getting out of a taxi with the man, cabbies turned to me and said, “What are you doing, love? He doesn’t treat you right.” But they didn’t know him like I did. He was in a bad mood. He was stressed. I made many excuses for the man. He had to shout, he would explain sadly, because I didn’t listen otherwise.
Why did I stay? Honestly, I don’t know. I loved him. I felt alone in the world and the man had helped my grief. I thought he had magic in him and could fix what hurt me, even as he wounded me himself. I wanted to build a life and settle down. But most of all, I wanted to be a mother. Obviously, the man wanted children too—why was I painting him to be a monster? It just wasn’t the right time. It was too soon to settle down, he wasn’t ready, his life was demanding, why was I nagging him? If you’re not happy, just leave.
I turned 30 and then 32 and then 35 and then 37 and through all those years, the right time never appeared. For a while this disjointed relationship, where I maintained my independence and the man essentially remained a bachelor, was fine. I wrote my books, I traveled around the world giving talks, and we would meet every few months. It was exciting and spontaneous, but it was not the life I wanted. I wanted a family. I wanted to have children and raise them. As the years passed, I shrunk into a tiny version of myself. I lost weight, I hid too many secrets from my friends to be close to them in any meaningful way, and felt more and more isolated. I was a stranger in my own life, unrecognizable to myself and unable to ask for help because I didn’t understand that this sort of thing could happen to a woman like me. I was strong-minded and independent and took no prisoners in any other part of my life, so how could I be in a coercive relationship?
If you want children so badly and don’t want to run out of time, go find someone else. Do you even know if you can have children? Why don’t you check? You have plenty of time to have babies, you’re only 39. Maybe next year we can talk about it. “Maybe” doesn’t mean “yes.” Why don’t you freeze your eggs if you’re so worried? Plenty of women have babies in their 40s.