Page 31 of The Life She Could Have Lived

NO

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 gone silent, 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 of The Lion King while 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.

‘I don’t know why you can never finish a dessert,’ Jamie said, laughing.

‘I could finish it. I just know how much Anna likes dessert.’

‘So it’s a pity half cheesecake, is it?’ Anna asked, managing to smile.

‘Look, if he doesn’t come, nothing’s lost,’ Jamie said. ‘I can just head home, it’s no big deal.’

And Anna was about to answer, but then the door opened and he was there, scanning the restaurant for them. Anna put up a hand, waved him over. She knew she should be annoyed with him but she couldn’t really be bothered with it. She was just so relieved that he’d come.

‘I’m so sorry,’ Marco said, leaning across the table to kiss Anna, then pulling a chair over from a vacant table nearby.

Anna waited a beat for him to offer an explanation before realising he wasn’t going to, that he didn’t have one.

‘Why were you late?’ Cara asked.

Anna loved this little girl for her ability to just say what everyone else was thinking, but she could see that Nia was poised to tell her off.

Marco looked flustered. ‘Trouble with the Tube,’ he said, clearly unused to having to explain himself to a six-year-old girl.

Nia disappeared to pay the bill and they got ready to leave. In the confusion of picking up bags and jackets, Marco took Anna’s hand in his and whispered in her ear. ‘I really am sorry. I’ll make it up to you later.’

Anna felt her insides turn to liquid. Marco did things to her, without even touching her, that no other man had.

Just his voice, that hint of an Italian accent, turned her on.

She went up on tiptoes and kissed his full lips.

It was little more than a peck, pretty chaste, but there was a part of her that was ready to give up on the whole afternoon and take him back to her flat.

She closed her eyes for a moment, imagined pushing him inside the door to her room and up against the wall, how he would press himself into her body and then very slowly start to remove her clothes.

She snapped back to the present, chastised herself for letting her sex thoughts in on this family day out.

‘Anna,’ Cara said as they bustled out of the door and into the street, ‘you’ve gone red.’

Anna laughed and made eye contact with Marco, whose expression told her he knew exactly what she’d been thinking about .

‘So Marco,’ Jamie said, clapping him on the back. ‘Are you a football guy?’

‘Of course. I mean, you know I’m Italian, right?’

Anna watched as they got into an animated conversation about football.

She’d worried that they might have nothing in common, but she needn’t have done.

Nia had predicted that sport would be their common ground.

Nia was holding Cara’s hand and Anna noticed that Cara was holding out her other hand for Anna to take.

The street was crowded but she took it anyway, letting the men go on ahead, dodging the crowds.

‘Is there a real lion in the play?’ Cara asked.

‘No, just people dressed up as lions and other animals,’ Nia said.

Cara looked disappointed.

‘And is there singing?’ she asked.

‘Yes, lots of singing.’

‘Have you seen it before?’

Nia nodded. ‘Twice, I think.’

‘Have you, Anna?’

‘No. It’s my first time.’

‘If you are scared of the animals, you can hold my hand. But remember that they’re only people,’ she said, a very serious expression on her face.

At the theatre door, they parted ways.

‘Do you know where you’re going to be?’ Nia asked. ‘We can come and find you, after.’

‘Not sure yet,’ Jamie said. ‘We’ll message you. Have fun, girls!’

Anna looked at Marco and Jamie standing side by side, trying to work out whether he might be a permanent fixture in her life. She didn’t love him, not yet, but she loved the way he touched her, and she loved the fact that she didn’t think about David when she was with him.

Inside the theatre, they went straight to their seats.

Everyone had been too polite to say, but Marco’s lateness had meant they were only just on time.

Anna noticed Cara’s jaw drop open when they stepped into the darkness of the theatre and she saw the stage, and she tried to remember what it had been like to see things for the first time, to be so impressed by the everyday.

She couldn’t, of course. She was too far from her own childhood to recapture it.

Perhaps that was one of the reasons why people had children, she surmised.

To regain that sense of wonder. To see it through their eyes.

They had good seats, near the front of the circle, and they sat with Cara between them and waited for the curtain to go up.

‘What do you think was going on with Marco?’ Nia asked in a whisper. ‘Just late?’

Anna shrugged. ‘He’s always late,’ she said. ‘Drives me crazy.’

She thought of Edward, how he’d always been early, but how that had been a tiny thing when compared to everything that was wrong between the two of them.

‘Is everything okay with you two?’ Nia asked.

If they’d been in a bar, without Nia’s child sitting between them, she would have said that she was having the best sex of her life, and it made up for a host of other things.

That she was ignoring the fact that Marco was younger than her and a little unsettled, that he sometimes talked about moving back to Italy.

That she was really trying to just focus on the present and the way he made her feel when they were together.

But they weren’t, and Cara was watching them avidly, her eyes swivelling from her mum to Anna to make sure she didn’t miss a whispered word.

‘I don’t think it’s forever,’ Anna said. ‘But things are fine.’

Nia pulled a face that Anna knew meant ‘let’s talk about this another time’ and then the curtain started to come up and Cara did a huge gasp and the people sitting around them smiled and laughed a little.

And Anna turned away from her friend and towards the stage and allowed herself to be swept up in the magic of it all.

Halfway through the final rendition of ‘ Circle of Life’ , Anna heard a shriek and turned to see that Cara had a hand clasped to her mouth. There was blood on her fingers. Nia was rooting in her handbag for a tissue.

‘Are you okay?’ Anna asked.

Cara shook her head.

‘Her tooth’s come out,’ Nia whispered. ‘Just looking for something to wrap it in to keep it safe.’

An older woman in front of them turned around and gave them a stern look, and it made Anna want to laugh.

She tried to remember what it was like to lose a tooth, but she couldn’t.

She put out a hand for Cara to hold and Cara took it, slowly pulling her other hand down from her mouth.

It was one of the big front ones, Anna saw, and she had a brief flashback to one of her own school photos.

Her gappy smile. Cara’s hand was warm in hers, and Anna gave it a squeeze.

But when Nia had finished wrapping the tooth in a tissue and stashed it away somewhere, she pulled Cara towards her and she dropped Anna’s hand.

And for a second, Anna felt like she’d lost something precious.

And then she turned her attention back to the stage and tried to forget.

When they met Jamie and Marco after the show, the men had obviously had a few drinks and were laughing and agreeing with each other about everything.

‘Friends for life,’ Nia whispered to Anna.

Marco stood up and put his arms around Anna. ‘How was the show?’

‘The daddy lion died!’ Cara announced .

‘He did, yes, but we got over that and enjoyed the rest of the show, didn’t we?’ Nia asked.

‘And look, I lost a tooth!’ Cara grinned and Jamie inspected her, gave her a high five.

They all hugged, and then Nia and her family left, Cara between her parents, holding both of their hands.

‘Let’s go home,’ Anna said.

They set off for the Tube.

‘Was it okay, with Jamie?’ she asked.

They were standing on the platform, waiting for a train to arrive. It was busy and hot, and Marco had pulled her in close to him.

‘It was good, he’s a nice guy.’

‘What did you talk about?’

‘Oh, you know, football, work, family. Do you want all that?’

‘All what?’

‘You know, kids. I want that, one day.’

Anna felt a lurch inside her. He’d never said anything like this to her before, and anyway, wasn’t it too soon?

But then she went over his words again and realised he hadn’t actually said he wanted those things with her.

Was this just a general opening up about the future?

Or was he just drunk? And did he know that she was forty-one and had probably missed her chance?

‘I don’t think I do,’ she said.

Marco seemed unfazed by her response. ‘You should think about it,’ he said. ‘We should think about it.’ And then he leaned in and kissed her and Anna forgot about everything other than the dizzy feeling that kissing him gave her.