The earliest they would know was in 14 days time when they returned to the little room with the telephone and the tissues to have a pregnancy test.

The next fortnight was an emotional roller coaster.  Brennan practically talked himself into being the father of triplets.  They told their families.  They told their friends.

Silly, perhaps to incite such excitement, but Brennan was probably on the verge of getting his Aston Martin and couldn’t not tell anyone.

Every twinge, every movement, every bodily function on Julie’s part was analysed.

Did she feel pregnant?  Was she sore?  Had they stuck? What was going on in there?

They had even got around to giving them names. They argued over boys’ names and Brennan refused anything prissy or over-fashionable for the girls.

The anticipation was matched in intensity only by the regular levelling and deliberate lowering of hopes as they begged themselves not to pin all their hopes on it.

The odds were heavily stacked against them.  The chances of it working first time were so small as to be dismissed. 

But still…

Their second trip to the local hospital meant a two-hour wait in casualty.

They only wanted a 30-second blood sample taken and Brennan could probably have done it himself, but he wasn’t supposed to and the hospital was.  Julie’s blood pressure rocketed and she was in tears.  Months of drugs and all that aggro and the NHS couldn’t take a blood sample without stressing her out when she should have been trying to relax. 

It was the day before the pregnancy test and there were two receptionists and only one doctor who could take the sample.

So they waited.

And then, there they were, in that little room with the telephone and the tissues.

The nurse had asked Julie how she felt and when she told her, the nurse had smiled ruefully.

Brennan’s hot flush started.

He knew Julie would be extremely upset if she wasn’t pregnant and somehow or other he knew – he just knew – that she wasn’t.

And he got all detached, watching himself as he stared out the window, having a hot flush.

The minutes dragged on as the nurse tested Julie’s urine and Brennan’s hot flush proceeded and his mind continued to analyse.  It was his wife who should be having a hot flush.  Why in God’s name was he having it?

And then he knew.

This was no Aston Martin.  How could he have been so foolish to draw the allegory between this and a bloody car?  How could he have come so far, been through so much, and not known.  He wanted this more than anything he had ever wanted before and he hadn’t known it.  And the hot flush was because he knew he wasn’t going to get it.

Not this time.

The door opened and Brennan dragged his eyes back into the room, his face flushed and damp, his eyes pleading the nurse to say it had worked.

But her face said it all: that rueful, sympathetic smile.

She looked at them.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

* Steve Brennan and his wife Julie underwent five attempts at IVF at the Radcliffe Hospital.  One resulted in an ectopic pregnancy which almost resulted in her death.  The couple have now divorced.  Julie met a new partner and resumed the IVF treatment, which worked first time.  She is now mother to a little girl.  Steve has remarried, to Kate.  They have a beautiful daughter called Niamh, conceived naturally.