That night, Anna phoned home before bedtime, like always. The Wi-Fi in their hotel room wasn’t strong enough for a video connection and it was strange to hear her boys’ voices without being able to see their faces. After telling her a bit about their days, they disappeared to watch TV and it was just her and Edward.
‘I think Nia’s about to start a fling with the barman,’ she said.
Edward laughed. ‘Of course she is. That’s so Nia.’
He trusted her completely, she thought. There wasn’t a flicker of worry in his voice. It wouldn’t cross his mind that she might sleep with the barman, or anyone else.
‘We miss you,’ he said, after a pause.
Anna felt tears prick her eyes. He hadn’t said that before. Had she? She’d said it to the boys, but not to him. But she didmiss him, she realised. She missed him more than she’d expected to.
‘I miss you, too.’
There was a silence, and she wondered whether they’d been cut off. But then she heard Edward’s voice again. ‘Sam made me show him where you are on the globe, and then he said it looked so close that maybe you could come home to give him a kiss at bedtime. So that kickstarted a discussion about how big the world is and how far away countries are from each other.’
‘Are they okay, the boys? School and everything?’
‘Did Sam tell you he lost a tooth?’
Anna felt a pang. The first time he’d lost a tooth, she’d sat on her bed after he’d gone to sleep, holding it in her hand and silently weeping. It was a rite of passage she struggled with, parts of her children’s bodies falling out and being replaced. She wished she was there to hold him, take in the clean scent of his warm neck, to be the one to sneak into his room in the middle of the night to replace his tooth with a coin.
‘You won’t forget to do the tooth fairy thing, will you?’
‘I won’t. We’re fine, Anna. But we’re ready for you to come home.’
Anna nodded, although she knew he couldn’t see her. She was ready to go home too, she thought. It had taken five days of doing exactly what she wanted to realise that she quite liked what she already had.
‘I’ll see you soon,’ she said.
‘See you soon. Oh, and Anna?’
‘Yes?’
‘Happy anniversary.’
23
NO
Sunday 5 June 2011
Anna looked at her watch, even though she knew what time it was. It was a good twenty minutes after the time she’d asked Marco to meet her.
‘Maybe he went to a different Pizza Express?’ Nia suggested.
‘I mean,’ Jamie added, ‘there is one on practically every corner in central London.’
‘Maybe he isn’t coming,’ Cara said, and both her parents gave her a stern look.
Anna sent him a quick message, confirming which Pizza Express they were in, and saying that if he wasn’t there in ten minutes, they were going to have to leave without him. While she was looking down at her phone, she felt safe, but she knew that when she looked up and saw the pity in Nia’s eyes, she might feel like crying.
She’d met Marco at work a few months earlier – he’d burst into her team meeting and sat down, all flustered, and then realised that everyone had gonesilent, and that he was in the wrong room, and had been incredibly charming and apologetic. A week after that, she’d stood behind him in the queue for coffee and noticed the way his shoulders filled out his shirt and when he’d turned, unexpectedly, she’d found herself blushing slightly, and he’d said, ‘Oh, it’s you, the meeting room woman.’ There’d been a coffee, and then a drink after work, and they’d been seeing each other for about four months. Nia had met him, had declared him ‘ludicrously hot’, and he’d started to spend two or three nights a week at her flat. He was a little younger than Anna, a little more junior in his sales role, and he lived in a houseshare that he wasn’t keen to take Anna back to.
It was going pretty well, she thought. When Nia had suggested this particular outing, she hadn’t been sure. She and Nia were taking Cara to see a matinee ofThe Lion Kingwhile the men were going to go for some drinks. But Marco had seemed keen when she’d brought it up, so she’d said yes. And now, she was watching her friends finish their dessert and feeling increasingly like she’d been stood up.
‘We have a while yet, Anna,’ Nia said, reaching across to rub her arm. ‘Do you want to finish my cheesecake?’
Anna nodded and Nia pushed the dish towards her.
