‘You’re right,’ Anna said, but inside, she wasn’t sure. If they never had children, she thought, what else was there? There was work. She loved her job, and she was good at it. Deborah’s faith in her hadn’t come from nowhere. There was each other. Lazy weekends and carefree holidays and dinners out and trips to the theatre. That was all good, wasn’t it? That was the kind of thing her friends with babies said they missed, that they longed for. She could have that, without it being a compromise. It could be her normal. Was it enough, to fill a life?
Anna wasn’t sure she could talk about it any more. She changed the subject, asked Nia to tell her something, and Nia launched into a story about her colleague who was going through a divorce and spent, according to Nia, at least 50 per cent of her working day doing things to express her anger at her soon-to-be-ex-husband.
‘This morning,’ Nia said, ‘she printed about a hundred of their wedding photos off on the office printer. Full colour, the works. Then she sat there at her desk, cutting his face out of them. Humming. When the boss came prowling round to check up on us, I had to create a diversion so she could get all the photos off her desk. I had to pretend I had an Excel question. He bloody loves Excel questions, he thinks he’s the only person in the world who knows how to use it, so he was in his element. Leaning over my desk and breathing all over me. And all the time, I could see Ellen out of the corner of my eye and she was checking the printer and sweeping masses of paper straight offher desk and into a drawer and I could see that there were two little husband heads on the floor but I couldn’t alert her to it without Mr Excel noticing.
‘So after he’d finished showing me how to insert a row or some such thing, he went over to her and he bent down to pick up one of the husband heads and I felt like everything was changing to slow motion and I saw her noticing and her face falling and I had to do something, because last time, when he caught her making one of those ransom note things using letters from different newspapers telling him exactly what she thought of him – the ex, not the boss – he said she was on her last warning, and I could tell he meant it. So I launched myself out of my seat and took the husband head out of his hand and said it was mine and I must have dropped it, and they both stared at me for ages until I said that I was on a dating website and I liked to carry pictures of my next date around with me so I could work out whether I was interested. And we all looked down at this tiny picture of Ellen’s husband, who’s about fifty and has a porn-star moustache, and then the boss slunk off back to his office without saying anything else. And then – get this – later, Ellen came up to me and asked if I was really going on a date with her husband. Tears in her eyes and everything!’
Anna laughed. She loved Nia’s work stories, even though she suspected they were massively embellished. She’d met Ellen and Nia’s boss in the pub a couple of times and they both seemed quite normal to her.
Before she knew it, it was time to go back to work. At the door of the pub, Nia wrapped her in a hug and kissed her cheek.
‘Happy anniversary,’ she said. ‘What were we doing this time two years ago?’
Anna looked at her watch. One thirty. ‘Photos?’ she said, unsure.
‘God, you looked amazing.’
‘So did you.’
‘You know, you said earlier that you might not be enough for Edward. But I think the question is more whether he’s enough for you,’ Nia said.
Anna was surprised. She looked at her friend, and Nia met her gaze and didn’t smile or frown. Just showed that she was serious.
‘I’ve always felt lucky to be with him,’ Anna said. ‘He has this great career and he looks like he should be modelling suits or something. I’ve always wondered why he chose me.’
Nia rolled her eyes. ‘You’re the shit. He’s the lucky one.’
Anna tipped her head to one side slightly, as if it might help her see the world, and her relationship, a different way. Was Nia right? Was Edward lucky to have her? Nia started walking away. They never said goodbye. It was a thing of Nia’s, that every meeting was just a continuation of the last. All the way back to the office, Anna tried to make herself see things the way Nia saw them.
6
YES
Thursday 5 June 2003
‘What shall we do?’ Edward asked.
‘Nothing,’ Anna said.
They were lying on their backs, fully clothed, on a bed in a hotel room in Brighton, their eyes closed. They’d arrived ten minutes before and had collapsed there.
‘If we were going to do nothing, we could have stayed at home,’ Edward said. But it didn’t sound like he was trying to persuade her into anything. He wasn’t standing up.
Anna opened her eyes momentarily, to check that Edward hadn’t opened his. He hadn’t. ‘That’s not true at all,’ she said. ‘If we were at home, we wouldn’t be able to do nothing. We’d have to do everything, like we always do. That’s precisely why we’ve come away.’
They’d sold their flat, bought a house. It hadn’t needed loads of work but there was always something to be painted or tidied up or cleaned, and that was on top of them both working and looking after Thomas. Anna felt exhausted all day, every day.
‘What do you think he’s doing?’ Edward asked. He turned on his side, to face her.
Anna opened her eyes again, met his gaze. ‘He’s probably terrorising my mum. She’ll never offer to have him again.’
‘We’ve only been gone for a couple of hours.’
‘Still, I wouldn’t be surprised.’
Anna hadn’t told Edward quite how much work it had taken to get her mother to agree to this. His parents adored Thomas, and if they didn’t live up in Scotland she was sure they’d offer to have him all the time. With her mum, she’d had to introduce the idea slowly and fabricate a story about Edward being stressed at work and on the verge of collapse.
Thomas was one and a half. It seemed like all the other mums gave their children’s ages in months, but Anna refused to. She’d done the weeks thing for a while, then switched to months, but once he turned one, she told people he was one. She didn’t mind adding a half, but she felt fourteen months or twenty-one months was unnecessary. He was one and a half. He could do all kinds of things now, like running very fast away from her in car parks and climbing onto dangerous objects. He could sniff out anything inedible and slip it into his mouth when her back was turned. He could launch himself into her legs when she was carrying a just-boiled kettle. Anna wasn’t bored any more; that boredom of the early days felt very far away. Now, she was terrified. Constantly on high alert, constantly checking his small mouth for foreign objects and prising tiny pieces of plastic from his surprisingly strong grip.
