If I Never Met You(6)

Not for the first time, she felt appreciation, a bump of pride in ownership, admiring how much early middle age suited him. He’d been a kind of jolly-looking chubby lad in their youth, puppyish cute but not handsome, as her gran had helpfully noted. And with a slight lisp that he hated, but oddly enough, always had women swooning. Laurie always loved it, right from the first moment he had spoken to her. Now he had a few lines and silver threaded in his light brown hair, the bones of his face had sharpened, he’d grown into himself. He was what the girls at work called a Hot Dad. Or, he would be.

‘You couldn’t sleep again?’ she asked. His insomnia was a recent thing, due to him being made head of department. Three a.m. night sweat terrors.

‘No,’ he said, and she didn’t know if he was saying no, I couldn’t sleep or no, that’s not it.

Laurie peered at him. ‘You alright?’

‘About you coming off the pill next month. I’ve been thinking about it. It’s made me think about a lot of things.’

‘Has it …?’ Laurie suppressed a knowing smile. The atmosphere and anxiety now made sense. Here we go, she thought. This was a clichéd moment in the passage to parenthood. It belonged in a scripted drama, shortly after a couple had seen two blue lines on the wee stick.

Should he trade in the car for something bigger? Would he be a good father? Would they still be the same?

1. Nah. There’s no room out there to park a people carrier anyway.

2. Of course! He could try to be less sulky, perhaps, but that was about it. Kids had a way of automatically curing excess self-pity, from what Laurie could tell. At least for the initial five years.

3. Yes. The same, but better! (Actually, Laurie had no idea about the last answer. If they procreated, it would be the best part of two decades before this household belonged to the two of them again, and inviting a tyrannically needy midget intruder to disturb their privacy and contented status quo was scary.)



But the done thing in a couple was to pretend to be sure about the imponderable things, whenever the other person needed comfort. If necessary, deploy outright lying. Dan could pay her back when she asked tearfully after returning from a failed shopping trip, whether her body would ever look like it did before.

‘I don’t know how to say any of this. I’ve been sitting here since you left trying to think of the right words and I still can’t.’

This was hyperbole, because Laurie left him having a shower with the Roberts radio broadcasting the football game, but she didn’t say so.

‘Look,’ Dan said. ‘I’ve realised. I don’t want kids. At all. Ever.’

The silence lengthened.

Laurie sat up, with some effort, given her foolish shoes – strappy silver slingbacks she fell for in Selfridges, ‘look good with plum toenails’ according to the sales girl – weren’t anchoring her to the floor very steadily.

‘Dan,’ she said gently. ‘This doubt is totally normal, you know. I feel the same. It’s frightening, when it’s about to become real. But we can do it. We’ve got this. With having a kid, you hold hands, and jump.’

She smiled at him, hoping he’d snap out of it soon. It felt like a role reversal, him demanding a deep talk, her wanting to do enough to make him feel taken seriously so she could go to bed. Dan was flexing his fingers, steepled in his lap, not looking at her.

‘And it’s me who has to push it out,’ Laurie added. ‘Don’t think I haven’t googled “third-degree tearing”.’

He wouldn’t be easily joked out of this, she realised, looking at the depth of his frown lines.

She felt them running at different speeds, her carrying the noise and trivia of the night out with her like a swarm of bees, him evidently having spent a pensive period staring at the shadows in the sombre Edward Hopper print they hung over the fireplace, worrying about the future.

‘It’s not just having kids. I don’t want anything that you want. I don’t want … this.’

He glanced around the room, accusingly.

Stripped floorboards?

‘What do you mean?’

Dan breathed in and out, as if limbering up for a feat of exertion. But no words followed.

‘… You want to put it off for a few years? We talked about this. I’m thirty-six and it could take a while. We don’t want to be mucking about with interventions and wishing we’d got on with it … you know what Claire says. If she knew how great it would be, she’d have started at twenty.’

Invoking this particular member of their social circle was a stupid misstep, and Laurie immediately regretted it.

Claire was both a massive bore about her offspring and a general pain in the hoop. Ironically, if they hadn’t suffered her, they might’ve have reproduced already. Occasions with her often concluded with one or other of them muttering: you’d tell me if I ever got like that, right?

‘You know what they say. There’s never a perfect time to have a baby,’ Laurie added. ‘If you—’

‘Laurie,’ Dan said, interrupting her. ‘I’m trying to tell you that we don’t want the same things and so we can’t be together.’

She gasped. He’d say such an ugly, ridiculous thing to get his point across? Then she did a small empty laugh, as it dawned on her: this was how much men could fear maturity. It ought not to be a revelation to her, given her dad, and yet she was badly disappointed in Dan.