Least Said by Pamela Fudge

on the grounds that he had fathered Will without any help.
    It was only later, when William had finally been persuaded up to bed after sharing every little detail of the lovely time he’d spent with Lucy and her children, that my thoughts turned to the difficulties and dangers that might arise once we came into contact with the medical profession again.
    We hadn’t hung around after the low sperm count result bombshell had been dropped on us all those years ago. In fact, Jon had stormed out of the doctor’s office immediately after we were given the news, flatly refusing to discuss the matter at all - not with me, his own wife, and definitely not with any member of the medical profession. So, what if – and I shuddered at the thought – the result had shown that his sperm count was so low that the chance of us conceiving without intervention was virtually impossible? Such information was bound to open up all kinds of questions concerning Will’s conception? I knew I just couldn’t risk it.
    Now that Jon had made up his mind to deal with any problems we might currently have with the level of his fertility head on, he seemed keen to get started, as soon became apparent as he spread butter on his toast with a lavish hand the following morning.
    ‘I’ve been thinking,’ he said, and I could tell he was making every effort to inject a note of eagerness into his tone, despite this being a subject he had always found difficult to deal with. ‘We should make an appointment at the surgery sooner rather than later – get this baby-making show on the road.’
    ‘Are we going to a baby-making show?’ Will piped up round a mouthful of Cocoa-pops, looking very interested. ‘Will it be at the Pavilion, like the pantomime at Christmas?’
    I threw Jon a look and shook my head. ‘Daddy was just joking,’ I said quickly, ‘but we might go to see The Lion King at the proper theatre in London before you go back to school – if you’re a very good boy.’
    He was immediately distracted, and I indicated to Jon by rubbing my fingers together, that his thoughtless remark was going to cost him. He just grinned sheepishly and shrugged his shoulders.
    ‘I’ve been thinking, too,’ I said, ‘that there are probably a lot of things we can do for ourselves before we resort to medical intervention. You’re right that it is early days and I was probably expecting far too much for it to happen right away. I’ll do some searches on the internet, look for natural ways of aiding fertility, and try to be patient.’
    Despite Jon’s apparent eagerness to take medical advice, I thought he looked relieved.
    ‘We should think back to when Will was conceived,’ he said as he kissed me goodbye on the doorstep, ‘because something obviously worked back then and it could do again.’
    I waved him off, trying not to think about the ‘something’ that might have worked back then because I had no intention at all of going down that route again. If I couldn’t conceive a baby that was definitely Jon’s – despite his low sperm count – then there would be no baby, it was as simple as that.
    The first thing I learned when I logged onto the internet was that sperm production takes almost three months, which was disappointing, but not the end of the world. I reminded myself how many people became pregnant just when they were least expecting it and determined to get in plenty of practice while looking at ways to increase our chances and putting them into practice.
    Poor diet seemed to be top of the list when it came to the cause of male infertility. Too few vitamins and the toxins in processed foods wreak havoc on a man’s sperm cells apparently. I was careful about the food I cooked but, I realised, we did give into William far too often when it came to fast food, so that was one thing that would have to change.
    I printed off a sheaf of pages from the most helpful site I discovered and called William in from the garden. ‘We’re going