Page 9 of The Life She Could Have Lived

YES

‘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.

He could cuddle, too. For months, he’d been putting an arm loosely around her, but it was only recently that he’d gripped her tight, pulled her close.

It had made her gasp, the first time. He only did it to her, and while she longed for Edward to experience it, she secretly thought it was sort of lovely, too, that he’d singled her out for this expression of affection.

A few days before, she’d rushed to nursery from work to pick him up, hoping like she did every day that she wouldn’t be the last one there.

When she’d arrived, he’d been sitting with his key worker, Carly, looking at a book.

There were two or three other children still there.

Anna had watched him silently, grateful for this chance to see how he behaved there without her.

He’d traced the picture on the page with his finger and dissolved into giggles when Carly had pretended to be a monster.

And then he’d looked up without warning, spotted her watching.

She’d expected him to smile, but instead he’d pressed a hand to his mouth and then thrust it towards her.

‘We learned to blow kisses today,’ Carly had said, shrugging.

And Anna had reached for him, lifted him over her head, and he’d done the throaty chuckle she loved so much.

‘Shall we call?’ Edward asked, dragging Anna back to the present.

‘It’s too soon,’ she said. ‘It would be pathetic to call so soon.’

Anna thought about the story her friend Steve had told her last week.

He and Theresa had gone to Paris on the Eurostar for Steve’s birthday but had spent half the time on the phone to Luke because they missed him so much.

And just like that, she was thinking about Steve, imagining being in Paris with him, her hand folded in his.

Nothing had happened between them, at least outside of her head.

But she’d found that she liked talking to him as much as she liked looking at him.

He seemed to understand her without even really trying.

‘I miss his face,’ Edward said. And Anna snapped back to the present, to Edward, to talking about Thomas.

Edward pulled his phone out of his pocket and scrolled through some recent photos, and then he played a video of Thomas giggling while Edward danced just out of shot. Anna moved across the bed until her head was resting on Edward’s chest, and indicated for him to play it again.

She felt a pang, thinking of Thomas. That was natural, she supposed.

Her love for him was all physical. All that agony when she’d pushed him out of her body, the toe-curling pain of early breastfeeding.

And now, this dull ache when she wasn’t with him and she thought of him.

‘Did I tell you what he did when you were out with Nia last week?’ Edward asked.

‘No,’ she said, although she thought he probably had. She was hungry for new stories.

‘He took a photo of you to bed,’ Edward said.

Anna felt her heart clench, and if he’d suggested getting in the car and going back, she would have done it.

His little face. She wanted to squish his cheeks between her fingers.

But, she reminded herself, that was something she could do every day.

And lying in the quiet on a bed in the middle of the afternoon was not.

‘I’m going to read for a bit,’ she said.

She got up from the bed and went over to her suitcase, pulled out a slightly battered proof copy of the novel Wings of a Dove .

She opened it up where her bookmark was and checked the page number.

‘Do you know, Ellie at work gave me this proof when I was pregnant with Thomas. Two years, and I’m still only on page sixty-eight. And I work in publishing!’

When Anna had got back from maternity leave, Ellie had been promoted.

Senior publicist. It wound Anna up because she knew she was better at the job than Ellie, or could be, given the chance.

But Ellie was the safer bet, still in her mid-twenties and probably years away from having a family.

Years away from being called urgently in the middle of a meeting because her child had stuck something up his nose at nursery .

‘Don’t beat yourself up,’ Edward said. ‘You can’t read every book.’

‘I can’t read any book!’ she said, but she was on the edge of laughter, thoughts of work starting to melt away, and Edward saw that and began to tickle her ribs.

He kissed her open, laughing mouth and stopped moving his hands, letting them rest on the sides of her ribcage, and she let herself go, let herself stop thinking.

Edward pulled her onto his lap and Anna became fixated on the places where their bodies were touching.

He reached up and slipped one strap of her vest top off her shoulder, then buried his face in the side of her neck, and Anna groaned a little.

She could feel him getting hard against her.

With one index finger, he traced around her left nipple in small circles.

He didn’t kiss her mouth. Sometimes he didn’t kiss her mouth until she felt like she would die from the lack of it.

Their sex life had been whittled down to its bare bones, to the essential elements.

They were masters at making each other come in a matter of minutes.

But this, this was like the old days. When there was so much time to tease and play, and no chance of the sound of little feet padding along the landing.

Anna turned her head to kiss him and he pulled away, a smile playing at the corner of his lips.

She tried again, and again he pulled back.

Meanwhile, his hands were inside her top, inching their way up her sides.

She felt her nipples harden, waited impatiently for him to touch them, to pull her top off and take one of them in his mouth.

She wrapped her legs around his back and put her own hands inside his T-shirt, ran them over his smooth chest. And then he was pushing her backwards, so that she was lying back and he was on top of her, and then he did kiss her, and she didn’t expect it, and she let go of everything she was holding on to in her brain and let the joy of it all wash over her .

A little later, Edward sat up. ‘Shall I book us in somewhere, for dinner?’ he asked. ‘What do you fancy?’

Anna thought about that. It was true that they didn’t have the opportunity to eat out very often, and it was something she missed.

But she felt so relaxed, lying here on the bed, that the thought of having a shower and doing her makeup and squeezing into the black dress she’d brought – the one that had never quite fitted her since she’d had Thomas – was exhausting.

‘What I really fancy,’ she said, ‘is going to a supermarket and buying whatever we feel like that you don’t have to cook – cheese, bread, crisps, pastries, chocolate – and then coming back here, getting in our pyjamas and eating it all with the TV on.’

Edward looked at her, and she thought he was going to screw up his face, but then he broke into a smile. ‘Can we get a jar of Nutella and stick our fingers in it?’

‘Whatever you want. It is our night.’

‘It’s oooooooooooour night,’ Edward sang, like he was an eighties crooner.

Anna slapped his arm. ‘Come on.’

They were like teenagers in the shop, giggling and slipping things into the basket without the other one seeing, so that when they got back to the hotel room, Edward pulled out a box of two chocolate eclairs that Anna didn’t know were there. She screeched, grabbing for the box.

‘I wish we were in France,’ she said.

‘I know,’ Edward said. ‘Because the eclairs there have custard inside instead of cream…’

‘Yes! And they don’t only come in chocolate. You can get coffee ones, or vanilla…’

‘Strawberry?’ Edward asked.

‘I don’t know. Who would want strawberry?’

‘Er, me. ’

Anna bit into one of the eclairs and Edward took a bite from the other end and she pushed him away, playfully.

‘Get your own!’

‘These are my own. I put these in the basket!’

Anna was on the edge of sleep when the thought crept in. She had to ask Edward straight away. She put a hand out and touched his shoulder. ‘Are you still awake?’ she whispered.

‘Just.’

Anna sat up, pulled him up a little too. ‘Three years ago,’ she said, ‘on our anniversary, you asked if I wanted to try for a baby.’

‘I did,’ he agreed.

‘And I did, and we did, and now we have Thomas.’

‘I know all this,’ Edward said, rubbing his eyes.

‘Well, I was wondering how you’d feel about having another one?’

Edward looked at her, checking that she was serious. ‘I didn’t think you’d want to, so soon.’

‘Well, in for a penny and all that,’ she said. ‘I mean, he’s our life now, isn’t he? And I’d like him to have someone. And I think I might be better at it, second time around.’

‘You’re good at it,’ he said. ‘Don’t think you’re not good at it.’

Anna smiled. ‘I’ve found it hard,’ she said. ‘There’s no denying that. But I think it was partly the shock of it, and I know what it’s like now. I think we should do it again.’

Edward lay back down and smiled. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘You know how I feel about kids. I’d have a whole bunch of them. Yes.’

Anna kissed the tip of his nose, and a second later, he was asleep.

He always found it easier than her, in new and different places, to rest. She lay awake for a little longer, thinking of the way Thomas’s face had looked on the screen when they’d called him earlier, the way he’d tried to put his arms around them, the way it had made her feel.

Loved, in love. Why did she always doubt herself?

Maybe if they had another one, her confidence would kick in.

Maybe she would find her stride, and be the together one.

She tried to imagine another baby, a girl, perhaps.

Or a second boy. Tried to imagine Thomas as a big brother.

She felt a little fizzy with the excitement of it, and it was a long time before she relaxed enough to sleep.