And then Edward launched into a story about his friend Rav at work and a senior manager who kept getting the two of them mixed up, despite them being different races and Edward being at least six inches taller, and Anna was laughing again, her sides hurting with it. They got up, walked out hand in hand, people turning to look as Edward kept up his impression of the manager, who had a strong Scottish accent.
‘But didn’t I talk to you about this last week? What do you mean that wasn’t you?’
She suggested getting a taxi home and he agreed. Her feet were hurting and she didn’t fancy the Tube and the walk up the hill to their flat at the other end. She hailed a black cab and they climbed inside, and she took her shoes off and he put his arm around her, pulled her in to his chest.
They lived in a two-bedroom flat in Clapham. It was a Victorian conversion, and they had the downstairs, which meant they had a garden, but it also meant they could hear their upstairs neighbours walking around at all hours. Edward let them in and Anna put the kettle on. When she brought the drinks through to the living room, he was looking at the door, as if waiting for her.
‘Sit down,’ he said, patting the space next to him. He reached out and took one of the mugs she was holding, and she put the other one down on the coffee table and sat. ‘I want to talk to you about something.’
Perhaps he was about to suggest a holiday, she thought, or even a prolonged period of travelling. He knew that Anna regretted not taking a year out like so many of her friends had, that she’d never backpacked around Asia visiting temples and experimenting with Buddhism. Would she be a different person, if she had? Maybe he was going to suggest taking some time out of their lives and exploring. She pictured herself, barefoot on a beach.
Edward reached for her hand, took hold of it.
‘I want us to have a baby,’ he said.
A baby. Anna felt as though she’d been punched in the stomach.
It wasn’t like they’d never talked about it, but it had always felt abstract, somehow. Something for the future. She hadn’t expected to be making a decision about it yet. But she had to ask herself why not. She was thirty. She was married. She owned her home. Some of her friends were starting to have babies. Why did the suggestion come as such a surprise?
Anna closed her eyes and tried to imagine herself as a mother. A baby in her arms, in this flat. Edward a proud father. She could see it; of course she could.
When she didn’t say anything for a few moments, he began to prod her with words.
‘You know, I understand your reluctance,’ he said.
Anna looked at him. Did he? She wasn’t even sure she did.
‘We won’t be like your parents,’ he said.
Anna felt rankled. She’d done her fair share of moaningabout her parents to him, but it felt different when he mirrored that back. Harsher, somehow.
‘My mum did her best, she just had to work so hard, because of my dad leaving…’
Edward picked up her hand from where it was resting on her lap. ‘But I won’t leave, and you won’t have to work hard, and it will all be so different for us. I promise.’
At the mention of working hard, Anna thought of another objection.
‘I just started in my new role,’ she said. ‘What will they think?’
‘Anna,’ Edward said. ‘That’s your job, and this is your life.’
It was true. But it had taken her so long to get to this stage, and it was only the first step on the ladder she wanted to climb. She went back over his words.It will all be so different. Would it be different? Anna had sometimes thought that you must learn how to be a mother from your own mother. And she didn’t feel like she’d learned so much. What if she made the same mistakes? Never saying I love you, never saying she was proud. What if that was just a pattern she was destined to repeat?
‘Anna?’ Edward asked. ‘What do you think?’
‘Talk to me,’ Nia said.
Anna had locked herself in the bathroom to call her best friend. She kept her voice low, tried to remember how to breathe normally.
‘Edward wants us to have a baby,’ she said.
‘And? What do you want?’
What did she want? When they’d been about fifteen, Nia sleeping over at Anna’s house, both of them lying on Anna’s bedat two in the morning, they’d talked about the future. About what they wanted, what they dreamed about. For Nia, it had been clear. She’d wanted a job in TV production (she had a cousin who did something similar) and a husband who was funny and rich (possibly the star of one of the TV shows she worked on), who had dark hair and blue eyes. She wanted children, a busy house, school photos on the wall and notes stuck to the fridge with alphabet magnets. Anna had struggled to articulate her own dream, which was fuzzier, more blurred. She’d talked about feeling content, secure, loved. She didn’t know by whom. It was more a feeling than a vision. She wanted to be part of a team. She wanted someone who knew all her stories and still laughed at them, who made her feel like she was important. Who didn’t try to change her into something else. Nia had listened and said that she could do all that, and didn’t Anna want passion and everlasting love, too? And shortly after that, Nia had fallen asleep and Anna had gone on thinking about it.
‘Remember when we were teenagers and we used to talk about what we wanted our futures to look like?’
Nia laughed. ‘Anna, that is half our lives ago. And yes, of course I remember. You rambled about this feeling that you were looking for… and you had no idea what it should look like, in practical terms.’
