Page 37 of The Life She Could Have Lived

NO

Anna stood at the kitchen counter making cups of tea while Ben and his daughters ate chocolate biscuits at the kitchen table. He’d just picked them up from school, and they were staying for three nights.

‘Stella, no more until Anna has had some,’ Ben said.

Stella shrugged and walked over to the fruit bowl. She picked up two apples and a satsuma and juggled with them for a few seconds, before dropping them all on the floor, picking them up and taking a big bite out of one of the apples. She didn’t look at Anna. She rarely looked at Anna.

Anna took the drinks over to the table and sat down opposite Tess.

‘You okay?’ she asked her.

‘Why aren’t you at work?’ Tess asked.

‘Your dad and I both took the week off,’ Anna said.

‘You know that,’ Ben said, giving Tess’s arm a playful tap. ‘We just got back from Paris.’

Ben reached across the table and put his hand on Anna’s wrist, and she knew he was trying to reassure her.

He told her, often, that she didn’t need to try so hard with the girls, that she should just be there, and let them learn to trust her.

Ben had had one other girlfriend since the end of his marriage, and he’d told Anna that he’d introduced her to the girls too soon, and they’d been disconcerted when the relationship ended, as if they were now to expect a series of breakups, one after another.

Anna wished for a moment that they were back in Paris, wandering the streets hand in hand, drinking wine in little squares in the afternoon and going back to the hotel to have sex and sleep before a late dinner.

While they’d been there, it had been as if their real lives didn’t exist.

‘What shall we do?’ Ben asked. ‘Does anyone fancy Monopoly?’

Anna hated Monopoly. She willed the girls to say no.

‘Can’t we go out?’ Stella asked.

‘Out where?’

‘Bowling and pizza?’ Tess suggested.

Her voice was hopeful, and Anna saw the little girl in her.

So often, she was trying to be more like Stella, to care about how she looked and what she was wearing, but when she was caught off-guard, it was clear that she didn’t care about any of that stuff, not really.

She was ten, her front teeth still a bit too big for her face.

She had reddish hair and freckles, and she looked nothing like Ben, but not a great deal like the photos Anna had seen of the girls’ mother, either.

Stella was twelve and much more like her dad.

Tall and wiry, her hair dark and a little unruly in a way that Anna thought would be the bane of her adolescence but which she’d learn to use to her advantage as an adult.

Because of her similarity to Ben, Anna could see Stella as an adult, but she couldn’t do the same with Tess.

She was still a while away from puberty, still sometimes came into their room in the night when she’d had a bad dream. Still a girl.

‘What do you think?’ Ben asked Anna.

‘Let’s do it,’ she said.

Anna knew that Ben struggled with getting the balance right, when it came to part-time parenting.

They’d talked about it late into the night, several times.

He didn’t want to always be treating the girls, for them to see their mother as the tough parent and him as the fun one, but he wanted to make them happy, too.

Anna had been careful about what she’d said.

It wasn’t her place to offer advice on parenting, she thought, but she firmly believed that Ben’s daughters were good people, and that Ben didn’t need to worry quite as much as he did.

It seemed impossible to avoid, though, the worrying.

Even Anna had started worrying about them in the quiet hours between three and five in the morning when she sometimes lay awake.

What if one of them was being bullied and they had no idea?

What if they were exposed to some kind of predator online?

It was the worrying that alerted her to the fact that her feelings for them were deepening.

Tess put her arm in the air and pulled her fist down in triumph, and Anna thought she saw Stella grinning between bites of her second apple.

A couple of hours later, they were sharing pizzas.

Anna was glad the bowling was over, but the kids seemed to have enjoyed it.

Ben, too. She liked seeing him in dad mode.

It was like opening up another facet of him.

She loved how kind he was with the girls, how endlessly patient.

Now, he turned to her, his expression a little worried.

‘Stella’s been gone a while, hasn’t she?’ he asked.

Stella had been a bit sullen, but she often was. She’d gone to the toilet a few minutes before.

‘Shall I go and check on her?’ Tess asked .

Ben nodded and she trotted off.

‘What are you worried about?’ Anna asked. ‘Maybe she has an upset stomach or something.’

‘I don’t know. It’s probably nothing.’

It was a whole new world, Anna thought. Knowing when to step in and when to stay back. And it must have been hard for Ben, with girls, who might have secrets they weren’t prepared to divulge to a man, even if that man was their loving father.

Tess was back. ‘She wants you,’ she said, looking at Anna.

‘Me?’

‘Will you go?’ Ben asked.

‘Of course, I mean…’ Anna didn’t finish her sentence. She picked up her bag and went into the toilets.

There was no one standing by the sinks, and only one of the three cubicles was occupied.

‘Stella?’ Anna asked.

There was silence for a minute, and Anna thought about saying her name again, but it seemed pointless. They were the only two people in there, and she knew Stella could hear her. She waited.

‘I’ve got my period,’ Stella said eventually. ‘And I don’t have anything with me.’

Anna could hear tears in her voice and she felt this urge to pull Stella towards her, and it was the closest she’d come to feeling like a mother.

She almost laughed, not because it was funny, but because her own periods were becoming irregular and she thought it was probably the beginning of the end.

She couldn’t quite imagine being back there, where Stella was, right at the start of it all.

She’d been having periods for over thirty years, and for what?

All those cramps, those clots, those days of feeling full of rage and desperate for comfort food, and no babies to show for it .

‘Is it the first time?’ she asked.

‘No, I’ve had a few, but they’re not regular. I just didn’t think…’

Anna set her bag down by the sinks and started rooting through it. In a zipped pocket, she found two tampons. And then she realised Stella might not have started using tampons. The murkily lit toilets of a pizza place were not the place to learn.

‘Don’t worry,’ Anna said. ‘Pad or tampon?’

‘Pad, if you have one,’ Stella said.

Anna didn’t, but she looked around the room and saw there was a machine on the wall. She found the right change in her purse, and then she handed the wrapped package over the top of the cubicle.

‘Thank you so much.’

‘Of course. Is there any blood on your clothes?’

‘Just my knickers. It’s fine.’

Anna didn’t know whether she should wait for Stella to come out or go back to the table. Would Stella be embarrassed by this? Probably. Being a pre-teen girl hadn’t changed that much since she was one. She waited, leaning back against the sink in a way she hoped looked casual.

‘Thanks,’ Stella said again, when she emerged. She was flushed, and she didn’t look Anna in the eye.

‘Stella, it’s nothing, really. I’m glad I could help.’

‘I don’t know what to say to Dad.’

Anna thought about that. She remembered being around this age and feeling embarrassed about everything. She hadn’t had a dad, but if she had, she was pretty sure she wouldn’t have felt able to talk to him about what was going on with her body or her mind.

‘We could say the lock was stuck? ’

Stella was washing her hands. She laughed, and the sound of it brought Anna a wave of joy.

‘Can we?’

‘Of course we can.’

They walked back to the table, Anna in front and Stella just behind, and Anna knew that something had shifted between them. She wasn’t na?ve enough to think Stella would never again be grumpy with her, or angry, or try to shut her out, but they’d taken a step forward and that was enough.

Later, in bed, Ben asked about the incident in the pizza place.

‘Was it her period?’

He was propped up on one elbow, gazing intently at Anna. Would it be a betrayal of Stella, to tell him? She decided it wouldn’t be, as long as Stella didn’t know.

‘Yes, but please don’t talk to her about it. She’s embarrassed.’

Ben nodded. ‘God, I wasn’t ready for this. I mean, I know she’s twelve, but she’s still so young in my head. When she’s with her mum, and I think of her, I picture her at about four.’

Anna tried to imagine how that would be. How it would feel to have known someone since their birth, to have loved them and lived with them all that time, and for them to be changing from a child to an adult in front of you.

‘I’m glad she asked for your help, though,’ Ben added.

‘Me too.’

‘I know it’s not always easy, with them. I know you must feel pushed away sometimes.’

Anna felt tears prick at her eyes. It was hard, knowing where the lines were, when it was okay to step in and when she should stay out of it.

Early on, Stella had been pretty horrible to her a couple of times, said that she would never like her or accept her relationship with Ben, and Anna had taken it hard, despite knowing that she, Stella, was going through something tough too.

‘I want them to trust me,’ she said. ‘I want to be part of their lives. But you can’t just create something out of nothing. It has to be built.’

‘And it will be,’ he said. ‘It is being built. And I’m so grateful to you for wanting all of that.’

Anna lay on her back, letting the tears fall.

They slipped down to her cheeks and fell off the sides of her face, and she just let them.

After a few minutes, she sensed that Ben was asleep.

His breathing had deepened, and his body was still.

Early on in their relationship, they’d talked about children, about whether she felt she’d missed out, whether she wanted to try.

Ben was happy as he was, with his girls, but he made sure she knew that he would go through it all again with her, if that was what she wanted.

And if they were able to. Anna had said no.

It had passed her by; it was too late. She still felt, at least 90 per cent of the time, that it had been the right decision.

Perhaps if she’d met Ben earlier, it would have been different.

She’d been thinking more about it, since her mother had died.

She’d always been scared that she wouldn’t be a good mother because she hadn’t had a good mother, that her relationship with any potential children would be deeply flawed or, worse, almost non-existent.

She’d felt untethered since the news, since the funeral.

She’d seen her mother so rarely that the weeks since her death could just have been weeks in which they didn’t visit one another or speak.

And yet, there was something about knowing that she was no longer in the world that had winded Anna a bit.

Ben had been brilliant, but she knew he didn’t quite understand the nature of her grief.

His parents were both alive and well, and he was close to them.

They loved him uncomplicatedly, loved the girls the same way, and they seemed to be starting to love Anna, too.

In all kinds of ways, she was part of a family in a way she’d never been before.

And yet, she had no biological family left at all.

When they’d got back to the house that evening, Anna had slipped out again, bought Stella a pack of pads.

She’d debated buying new underwear too, but she would have had to guess Stella’s size and she wasn’t at all sure of her tastes.

Plain black pants from Marks seemed safe enough, but what if Stella thought she was crossing a line, going too far?

No. She was bound to have brought spare knickers in her weekend case.

Anna had knocked on the door of the room the girls shared when she got back, handed the pads to Stella discreetly.

Tess was sitting on her bed with her legs crossed, a book in her hand. She was miles away.

‘Thanks,’ Stella had said.

And just as Anna was backing out of the room, she’d spoken again.

‘Thanks for everything, Anna.’