Page 6 of The Elements

I was never what you might call a natural mother, but I loved my daughters and did everything I could to ensure that they enjoyed a happy and secure childhood.

My own had been untroubled and, having come through it without any noticeable scars, I simply emulated my own mother’s behavior.

Businesslike and efficient, without being overly sugary.

I am, I suppose, part of that last generation of Irish women who did not recognize that they had the right to a career outside the home, and the courage to demand one.

I just took it for granted that, one day, I would meet a suitable man, marry, bear children, and live a standard middle-class existence. I didn’t expect or ask for more.

When Brendan and I married, he was keen to start a family immediately, but, as I hoped to wait a few years, I made the mistake of suggesting that we use the condoms that were finally accessible in Ireland.

Too embarrassed to go into a chemist’s and ask for them from a judgmental pharmacist, I had made my way into Trinity College, where I’d half-heartedly completed an undergraduate degree in English literature a few years earlier, and where enthusiastic, priapic students handed them out free of charge to all and sundry from large plastic tubs, a kick to the governments and clergy that had controlled the state for so long.

There was something erotic about accepting a handful of prophylactics from a handsome, grinning boy only a few years younger than me, who smiled as if to say, You’re doing it, then?

So am I! We could do it together, if you like?

, but when I presented a trio of foil-encased liberators to Brendan, he looked at me as if I was the Whore of Babylon and insisted that I throw them away.

“What did we get married for if not to have children?” he asked, and I couldn’t think of a good answer to his question, which is to neither his nor my credit. So we went about things in the usual way, five or six nights out of seven, but, try as we might, no baby was conceived.

Despite his old-fashioned tendencies, I was happy with Brendan during those early years.

His unconscious disdain for women seemed no different to that of most Irish men, although not, perhaps, the sensual boy who had given me the johnnies under the shade of Front Arch, his fingers stroking my palm as he did so, and whose face, for some inexplicable reason, remained in my mind for years afterward, occasionally supplanting Brendan’s at the moment of climax.

No, that boy looked like he loved, adored, and worshipped women.

As if he couldn’t get enough of us. But, a decade older than me, Brendan was more attuned with the previous generation than his and didn’t care for the tide of change that was decanting across the land.

He would switch channels whenever President Robinson appeared on the news; her voice, he claimed, gave him a headache.

He had an inexplicable hatred for Hillary Clinton, who had only recently risen to prominence.

And while he addressed all the boys who were making their way through the junior ranks of the National Swimming Federation by name, those lacking in a penis were simply called “The Girls,” a homogeneous and indivisible collective.

As head of that organization, at a time when swimming was becoming a more high-profile sport in Ireland, Brendan thrived on his minor celebrity status, embracing every opportunity to appear before a camera or microphone.

He was a regular contributor to radio programs and, once in a while, would be invited as a guest on The Late Late Show , where I would sit in the audience and play the part of dutiful wife.

Perhaps it was his growing arrogance that proved the reason why he was loath to confide in a doctor our failure to conceive, particularly when the doctor in question was a woman.

Her name was Dr. Jennifer Soren, and, at our first meeting, she asked what I assume was a perfectly standard set of questions about our sex life.

Naturally, I felt a little awkward answering them, but I rec ognized their necessity.

Brendan, however, found them intrusive, and when she asked whether I had been sexually active before meeting my husband, he practically leaped from his chair in outrage.

This, in fact, had long been a bone of contention between us, for when we were dating we had revealed our sexual histories to each other, and it turned out that while I had had three previous lovers, two of whom had been one-night stands, Brendan was still a virgin.

Although this might seem a little bizarre for a thirty-four-year-old man, in 1995 Ireland it was not quite as eccentric or worrisome as it would be today.

And I rather liked the fact that he was an innocent.

It suggested to me, wrongly, that he respected women and did not see us as creatures who existed purely to satisfy his needs.

The truth was that his parents had instilled a fear of sexuality in him from an early age, convincing him that he should be ashamed of his natural desires.

I never knew them well—within five years of my meeting Brendan, they were both dead—but I always felt they believed there was something distasteful about their son having a girlfriend at all, let alone a wife.

The day he moved out of their home, which coincided with our return from our honeymoon, was an exercise in mortification, his mother crying at the kitchen table and his father despairing over who was going to cut the grass from now on.

Repression was their legacy to their son, who struggled with my inconsequential sexual history, and I teased him about being so conventional until I recognized that he did not appreciate the joke.

It was a subject that soon became out of bounds for us, but, when we argued, he could always be relied upon to suggest that he should be congratulated for taking me as his wife when other men would have walked away.

The implication, of course, being that I was a slut.

But, in the minds of men like Brendan, all women are sluts and are to be treated as such.

The words might have changed over the years, each one replaced by something more toxic and violent, but there is always one in common parlance, mostly uttered by men, but sometimes by handmaiden women, each one designed to make us understand how deeply men’s desire for us makes them hate us even more.

Things grew more difficult when, having conducted a series of tests and found nothing amiss, Dr. Soren invited Brendan to produce a sperm sample for analysis.

He was enraged by the suggestion that our inability to conceive could have anything to do with him and, at first, refused, which led to the first great argument of our marriage.

“I think you’ve been dishonest with me,” he said as we sat at home, Brendan fuming at the indignity of being asked to masturbate into a cup, especially as he knew that he would ultimately have no choice but to submit to the doctor’s request if we were ever to have a baby.

“In what way?” I asked.

“I need you to tell me the truth, Vanessa,” he said. “Those fellas you were with before me. Did you get pregnant by one of them, is that it? Did you go across the water?”

“You can’t possibly imagine that I would keep something like that a secret from you,” I said.

“Well, what else am I to think?” he roared. “I’ve read about it. Women who don’t keep themselves tidy, then take the boat to Liverpool to have the baby sucked out of them, and then they can’t get pregnant afterward. Sure, their insides are all destroyed.”

“Dr. Soren has already said that there’s nothing wrong with my ‘insides,’ as you put it,” I replied, trying to control my temper. “I’ve never been pregnant, I’ve never had an abortion, but if I had, I would have told you, and I wouldn’t be ashamed of it.”

“That doesn’t surprise me,” he said. “Sure you had no shame about riding those other lads before me, did you?”

“Not a bit,” I said, wanting to hurt him now, just as he was hurting me.

“You’re just jealous, that’s all, that you didn’t get your share when you were younger.

I’m surprised you’re so offended at the idea of wanking into a cup; you must have spent years playing with yourself in your mammy’s upstairs room. ”

He didn’t like that one bit, but it was the truth, I knew it was.

We didn’t speak for days afterward, and something shifted in our relationship then.

Eventually, however, fuming and discomfited, he submitted to Dr. Soren’s requests.

And, as it turned out, there was nothing wrong with him either.

We were just being unlucky. The only advice she could give us was to keep trying, which we did, and then, in time, I fell pregnant with Emma.

I should add that unpleasant moments like this were the exception between us and not the rule.

For the most part, Brendan was a kind and attentive husband, the sort of man who might surprise me with an unexpected dinner out or a weekend away.

He chose birthday and Christmas presents with care—I never woke up to a food blender, unwrapped and still in the Arnott’s bag, with the receipt languishing at the base—and kept himself fit and well groomed, as much for my sake as his own.

He only unearthed his nasty side whenever his fragile masculinity was brought into question.

And I loved him, I truly did. Although, of course, as it turned out, I barely knew him at all.