Page 16 of The Life She Could Have Lived

NO

All the way from Heathrow in the taxi, Anna swore to herself that she wouldn’t do it.

But then as they approached Clapham, she leaned forward and told the driver she’d changed her mind.

Not Cathles Road, after all. Hazelbourne Road.

She had him pull up a little way away from the flat she’d shared with Edward, and then she paid him and stepped out onto the street.

It was cooler than it was in New York, but she’d expected that.

She pulled her case behind her and walked past her old flat on the opposite side of the street.

Edward didn’t live there any more. They’d sold it and he’d bought himself something smaller, something further out.

They were still in touch, but not often.

He had a new girlfriend, Anna knew, and she sometimes wondered what she was like.

What she looked like, how pretty she was.

But also whether she made him laugh. And whether she brought out a side to him that Anna had never managed to find.

Anna stopped for a moment and looked. The new owner had changed the curtains, and the hedge was more neatly trimmed than it had ever been when she lived there. She tried to imagine crossing the road and going inside, letting herself in. What would her life look like now, if she’d stayed?

A man with a little boy walked past her. He was on the phone, and she heard him say ‘you’re always working’ in an irritated voice, saw the boy look up at him, his eyes full of worry. Just a little way up the road, the boy dropped his toy rabbit without the dad noticing.

‘Excuse me,’ Anna called, and the man turned. When he looked at her, Anna felt all churned up and she wasn’t sure why. Did she know him? She didn’t think so. And there was clearly no recognition from his side.

‘Can I help you?’ he asked, and Anna realised she’d left it too long without explaining why she’d called out to him. She was embarrassed, felt herself flush.

‘I think your son dropped his soft toy,’ she said.

He ended his call and came back towards her. ‘Thank you so much. We’d have had a nightmare at bedtime if this was missing. Luke, you need to be more careful.’

The little boy grabbed for his rabbit and they walked on, chatting now, the dad’s head angled down towards his son. And as they walked away, Anna had the strangest feeling that she was the one who was losing something. She shook her head as if to dislodge her thoughts.

She could have a child that sort of age by now, if she and Edward had started trying for a baby when he’d first brought it up.

She couldn’t imagine it. And yet, here she was, back in London to meet Nia’s baby.

Was it something in her, some reluctance to grow up and accept adult responsibilities?

Was she somehow abnormal? Her friends were having children left and right and she felt like she was forever buying new baby cards and gifts, and yet she still didn’t feel any closer to wanting that for herself.

With one last look back, she carried on down the road, heading for Nia’s.

Nia opened the door with her baby daughter attached to her breast and tried to give Anna a hug, but Anna was scared the baby would suffocate.

‘Come in,’ Nia said. ‘I probably shouldn’t flash the whole of Clapham.’

They went into the living room and sat down, and Anna really looked at her friend.

Nia’s daughter, Cara, was eight weeks old.

Nia looked tired; more than tired. She looked almost broken.

And then Cara pulled away from the breast and Nia adjusted her clothes and beamed at her little girl and Anna saw that she was transformed, in that moment. She was a mother.

‘How is it?’ she asked. ‘How are you?’

Nia gave her a wobbly smile. ‘I can’t stop crying,’ she said. ‘Thanks for asking. Everyone just wants to look at her. No one cares how I’m doing.’

‘I care,’ Anna said.

‘It’s so weird,’ Nia went on, ‘I feel like my body isn’t mine. My tits are huge and they go from being quite normal to being rock hard with the milk, and my tummy’s all saggy and I just don’t feel like me. Do I look like me?’

‘Not quite,’ Anna said, truthfully. ‘But I think you will, in time.’

‘God, it’s so bloody hard. People tell you about the sleep deprivation, but they sort of talk about it as if it’s a joke. They don’t tell you that you feel like you’re going to die from it.’

Anna thought that perhaps spending time with Nia wasn’t going to change her stance on wanting children any time soon. ‘What can I do?’ she asked. ‘I want to help. I’ll get up in the night, anything. ’

‘Trouble is, I’m the only one who can feed her,’ Nia said, and she looked miserable. ‘I think that’s the hardest bit. Jamie’s brilliant but he can’t help with that.’

‘Then I’ll get up and keep you company,’ Anna said. ‘Get you water. Change her nappy.’

Nia smiled gratefully.

Anna looked around. Jamie had moved into Nia’s flat shortly after they’d announced the pregnancy to everyone, but there wasn’t a great deal of evidence of him.

There was a book on the coffee table that Anna was pretty sure wasn’t Nia’s – something about the history of film – but she couldn’t immediately spot anything else.

‘Where is Jamie?’ Anna asked.

‘Oh, supermarket. We run out of nappies or wipes on an almost daily basis. He won’t be long. I keep forgetting you haven’t met.’

‘I can’t wait to see whether he really looks like Peter Andre. Anyway, while we wait, let me make you tea.’

Nia smiled gratefully.

In the kitchen, in the fridge, Anna could see Jamie’s influence.

Gone were Nia’s out of date yoghurts and bottles of beer.

The fridge was full of cheese and meat, a veritable rainbow of vegetables and, in the door, nestled next to the milk, all sorts of sauces and condiments.

What was it Nia had said about Jamie’s job? Didn’t he work in finance?

‘Is Jamie a foodie?’ Anna asked once she’d made the drinks.

‘God, yes. Didn’t I tell you? I’ve never eaten so well, or so much. You’ll see, while you’re here. He has this dream of opening up a café but I’m not sure it’s ever going to happen. How long are you here, by the way?’

‘I’m over for five days but I’m going to go to my mum’s for a night. Is that okay? ’

‘Of course.’

Cara was asleep in Nia’s arms, and she stood and laid her gently in the Moses basket at her feet. ‘That’s better,’ she said.

‘Can I have a hold, when she wakes up?’ Anna asked.

‘Of course you can! I try not to thrust her on people too much, in case they don’t want to hold her.’

‘I’ve brought you things,’ Anna said. She fetched her suitcase from the hallway and opened it, pulled out the clothes she’d bought for Cara, which Nia exclaimed over, and the scarf she’d chosen for Nia at a flea market, supplemented by the big Toblerone she’d picked up at the airport.

‘We’ll open that right now,’ Nia said. ‘Thank you, really.’

‘Is it what you imagined?’ Anna blurted out.

It was the question she’d most wanted to ask but she hadn’t known quite how.

She didn’t want it to sound like she was asking if Nia had any regrets, not with her beautiful baby daughter lying there, fast asleep with her tiny chest rising and falling almost imperceptibly with each breath.

‘Nothing like,’ Nia said, and Anna couldn’t determine what emotions lay behind those words. She’d always been able to read Nia, but Nia was changed. Anna felt as though she was looking at her friend through a shower screen, or an obscured window.

‘It’s harder,’ Nia continued. ‘It’s really fucking hard.

Did I mention that? And I don’t fully understand why, because there is a lot of sitting around.

I think it’s hard emotionally. And there’s all the stuff about never getting to eat a meal without being disturbed.

That’s hard too. And Jamie and I are never together, because I sleep in the evenings and then I’m up with her half the night while he’s asleep.

And we hadn’t been together that long, had we?

It’s quite a jolt to go from that honeymoon period to talking about how to get shit out of a cot sheet. ’

When Nia stopped talking, Anna wasn’t sure it was because she’d run out of things to say. She gave a slight nod, to show that Nia should go on, but she didn’t, at first. Anna let the silence settle, looked down in case her eye contact was preventing Nia from being able to speak.

‘You know that you can tell me, don’t you?’

‘Tell you what?’

‘I don’t know,’ Anna said. ‘Just… anything. If there is anything. You don’t have to feel like I won’t understand, because I haven’t been through it. Even if I don’t, I’ll listen. I’ll do my best.’

There were tears in Nia’s eyes. ‘I haven’t said this to anyone, but sometimes I feel like I’ve made a huge mistake. I can’t unmake it, of course. I can’t go back. But I feel like this is it now, for the rest of my life, and I don’t know whether I like it.’

‘It won’t stay the same,’ Anna said. ‘Nothing does.’

‘That’s another thing, I go to playgroups and these women with older kids say stuff about how they miss the newborn stage because the baby slept all the time and stayed still, and I want to strangle them. I want to say that if it’s going to get harder than this, I can’t cope with it.’

‘I bet they’ve just forgotten what it’s really like. They say your brain does that, don’t they? It blocks out trauma. Like childbirth. If your brain didn’t forget, no one would do it again.’

Nia shuddered. ‘I’m not doing it again any time soon.’

‘Well, no,’ Anna said. ‘I mean, you’re all set now, aren’t you? One big love, one child.’

It was what Magda had predicted for Nia all those years ago.

‘So now we need to concentrate on you,’ Nia said. ‘Met any J men lately?’

Anna batted the question away, as if she didn’t always feel a twinge of hope when she was introduced to someone she liked the look of that they might fit the bill.