‘Yes, but a new one. A salmon one. It was really good, actually.’
‘And did he make dessert?’
‘He bought it, apparently. But we didn’t get that far.’ Anna smiled to show she wasn’t annoyed. She tried to push aside the thought that she was glad Nia had called. She felt a hundred times happier and more relaxed here with her friend than she had at home with her husband. And that wasn’t something she wanted to face up to.
‘You’ll have to be dessert when you get home, you lucky thing.’
‘Maybe so. But shall we have another one first?’
‘I can’t believe,’ said Nia, ‘that you’re a proper grown-up who’s been married for… how many years?’
‘Two,’ Anna said solemnly. ‘You were the maid of honour; you’re supposed to remember things like this.’
‘Oh whatever, the years go by like months now we’re in our thirties. Anyway, two years, and I’m still having to call you with problems like being followed home by my ex-boyfriend.’
Anna motioned to the barman for more drinks and looked down at her bare legs and sandalled feet. ‘I don’t feel like a grown-up. Remember Edward’s friend Rav, whose wedding we went to in the spring? They’re having a baby.’
Nia narrowed her eyes. ‘Already? What’s wrong with just being married for a while?’
‘Nothing, as far as I’m concerned.’
‘But not Edward, right? Is he still putting pressure on you?’
Anna thought about this. He wasn’t putting pressure on, washe? He had asked her once, and she had said no, and he hadn’t mentioned it again. But he’d made it clear in a thousand ways that his feelings on the matter were unchanged. And that was a kind of pressure in itself, wasn’t it? And the thing that Anna hadn’t told him, that she’d barely told herself, was that she wasn’t sure it was just a no for the time being, either. She wasn’t sure whether she wanted to have children at all.
‘He wants what he wants,’ Anna said. ‘And I just don’t. Not yet, anyway. We should have talked about it before we got married. I think I was putting it off, because I didn’t know how I felt, and he just assumed I felt the same way he did.’
‘Kids, though,’ Nia said. ‘I don’t feel old enough.’
‘Me neither. And yet we’re thirty-one, and I think we would officially count as old mums these days.’
‘No way. Although I have resigned myself to the fact that if I told my mum I was pregnant now, she’d just say congratulations.’
Anna laughed. ‘We’ve gone way past the point of scandalous pregnancies. Remember how terrified we were of getting pregnant when we were in our early twenties?’
‘I do,’ Nia said. ‘And I still am. I haven’t grown up like you have. And yet here we are, drinking wine together on your second anniversary.’
‘Yes,’ Anna said. ‘Here we are.’
Charlie was long forgotten. They had another two glasses, and when they got up from their high stools, Anna felt suddenly and overwhelmingly drunk. They left the pub arm in arm, and there was no sign of Charlie anywhere, not that they really took the time to look. They shared a taxi. It was almost midnight by the time Anna crawled into bed. Edward had left her bedside lamp on, and she was annoyed by this thoughtful gesture, just when she was feeling guilty for being so thoughtless. He wassnoring gently. The present she’d meant to give him – a book of essays by authors and musicians and actors about the one day that had changed their lives the most – was on her bedside table. When she’d first seen it in the bookshop, she’d thought of him, of how he talked about the day they met as a turning point for him.
She would tell him in the morning, she decided. She would say she wasn’t sure about children full stop. She would get it out in the open, and see where it left them.
4
YES
Wednesday 5 June 2002
Anna looked at Thomas, who was sitting in front of her in the highchair, refusing to eat the carrot she’d peeled and chopped and cooked and blended for him. The preparation for this one tiny meal that he wasn’t eating had been ridiculous. This was her third attempt, and Thomas was yet to swallow anything. She went back to the fridge, cut a long finger of cucumber, ran it under the tap and handed it to her baby. He put it straight to his mouth and sucked, and Anna took the opportunity to drink some of her lukewarm cup of tea.
She thought about sending a message to Edward, telling him that it was a hard day, but thought better of it. It sometimes seemed like every day was a hard day. Edward was sympathetic, but there was only so much he could do. Every morning, when he dressed and prepared to leave the house, she wanted to beg him to change places with her. And every morning, she said nothing. But when he told her to have a nice day on his way out of the door, she felt like pulling the carving knife from the blockon the kitchen side and stabbing him in the heart. Now, he was on his first work trip since Thomas had been born. New York, all week. Anna had been terrified when he’d first mentioned it, and in time some of that terror had turned to jealousy. She knew, when she was being rational, that he’d spend the week in the airport and the office and his hotel room, but her more unhinged self imagined him seeing the sights she’d always longed to see, soaking up that city she’d always been desperate to visit. The one they’d said they would visit together, and never had.
It was nothing like she’d imagined, being a mother. What had she imagined? It was hard to separate it out, now that she was living this life that was definitely not it, now that she hadn’t had more than a few hours’ sleep in one go for months. Had she given it much thought at all? She’d imagined a baby, curled in her arms and sleeping, and not much else. How foolish she’d been. She looked at Thomas. He was perfect. Doing all the things he should be doing and always causing old women and quite a few young women to squeal and coo in the street. He had Edward’s dark hair and eyes but otherwise he was all her. She adored him, could lose hours just watching him sleep, his eyelids flickering and his fingers gripped tightly around hers. The first time he’d rolled over, she had cried with pride.
The day he’d been born, the midwife had put him gently into Anna’s arms, and she had waited to fall in love. It hadn’t come at once, in a rush, like everyone said it did, and she’d been disappointed. But then a few days later, she’d been lying beside him in bed, Edward snoring, Thomas looking up at her with those big eyes and her looking back, and she’d just known that this was a love more powerful than anything else. Through her bleary eyes, she’d smiled at him, knowing he couldn’t yet smile back. She’d whispered her love into his soft hair.
Thomas started to wriggle and squirm, the cucumber long forgotten, abandoned on the highchair tray.
