‘Have you thought about names?’ she asked, apparently, and Anthony twigged immediately what she meant.
‘I like Luke,’ he said, after a pause. It was the first name that popped into his mind.
‘Is it a boy then?’ Mum asked him.
‘We don’t know,’ Ant told her. ‘If it’s a girl, we’re thinking maybe . . . um . . . Lucy.’
‘Oh yes!’ Mum said, ‘Lucy! Lucy’s a lovely name.’
When I got back from my walk, Anthony seemed strange, avoiding eye contact and fleeing the room. As I sat down to take his place, the seat was still warm.
‘Yes, Lucy’s a lovely name,’ Mum said.
‘I’m sorry?’ I said, shrugging my way out of my coat.
‘He says you’re going to call her Lucy,’ Mum said. ‘If it’s a girl.’
‘Oh,’ I said, swallowing with difficulty. ‘Did he?’
‘Or Luke,’ Mum said, ‘if it’s a boy.’
‘Yeah.’ I coughed. ‘Do you, erm, approve?’
‘Completely,’ Mum said. ‘They’re lovely names.’
I apologised in the car as we were leaving. ‘I didn’t want you to find out like that,’ I explained. ‘I was going to tell you, but there’s just never been a right moment.’ I couldn’t find words to explain that I hadn’t wanted to taint this news with that news, but that when one event so strongly influenced the other, it seemed hard to avoid putting them within the same set of brackets.
‘It’s OK,’ Ant said, surprising me. ‘I get it. There’s been a lot going on.’
After driving in total silence to Mum’s house, where we were staying, he asked me if I wanted to get married.
‘Married,’ I repeated flatly. My mind felt too numb to properly consider the concept.
‘Yes, I thought you might want to get married before . . .’
‘Oh, before the baby’s born?’ I said, trying to use logic to fill the void left by my inability to actually feel anything about his suggestion. It seemed, indeed, to be something we should consider.
‘Yeah . . . No . . .’ Ant spluttered. ‘I mean, before . . . um . . . While your mum can still make it to the wedding.’
‘Oh,’ I said, turning to look out of the side window and fighting back tears. I think it was only at that moment the inevitability of her death finally dawned on me.
‘I think it would make her happy, don’t you? To know that you’re all safe and sound.’
‘Maybe,’ I said, barely able to breathe. ‘Maybe it would.’
We booked a mid-May wedding, but had to cancel a week before. We dealt with both cancelling the wedding and registering Mum’s death during a single trip to the register office, something that would forever link those two concepts in my brain.
After the funeral, I went to Ant’s place. I couldn’t face being alone, and my beloved cat was there, after all. Other than to pick up my stuff, clean the flat and hand over the keys, I never went back to my own place again.
In June, we drove down to Broadstairs to give Marjory the news. She guessed as soon as she opened the door – I was, after all, starting to show.
‘I know it’s a sad time for you, darlin’,’ she said, ‘but try to let yerself be ’appy.’
I’m sure that she was right and, perhaps, for once, what she said was intended kindly. But my hand balled into a fist and it was as much as I could do not to punch her.
Have you ever looked at a couple and thought, simply, how? How on earth did he manage to snag her? How on earth does she put up with him? What could they possibly have in common? I certainly have, which is something I suppose you might describe as ‘ironic’.
But the thing about other people’s relationships is that you only ever see the tip of the iceberg. So you never get to understand that your dumpy friend’s drop-dead-gorgeous boyfriend is broke, or lazy, or impotent – or all three. You don’t get to see quite how nice Brian’s horrible girlfriend was when they met way back when. Or how much trauma he was dealing with. Or how needy, or depressed, or suicidal he was before she helped him. You never get to understand quite how big the debt he’s paying off might be.
In my case there were plenty of warning signs, I’ll admit it. Anthony was too tidy, he did have too much hi-fi; he did make too many rules and was far too subservient to his really-not-very-nice mother.
But I was lonely and needy and quite probably a little traumatised too. And when I was at my neediest, Anthony was at his nicest. He genuinely helped me through the worst period of my life, and by the time I came out the other side of what felt like a very dark cloud, we were living as a family with our daughter, Lucy, with another one on the way as well.
Did I think about leaving him as things soured over the years? Constantly. But did I ever make a plan to escape? Inexplicably, no, I didn’t.
I want to explain to you how he made me dependent on him, but I’m struggling with that word: made. It seems like such a black hole of a word – a black hole into which personal responsibility vanishes. He made me. Because, did he? Can someone make you do something? Does anyone really have that power? And yet that’s honestly how it feels, looking back.
Anthony dug away at my sense of worth in such a sustained, methodical way that it’s hard for me to see it as an accident. It’s almost impossible for me to imagine that he wasn’t following some nasty plan of his own.
Slowly but surely, he chiselled away at my confidence in the things that I was good at, while obtusely complimenting me on attributes I knew that I didn’t have.
Thus I came, over time, to believe that I’d never been much good at my job (and so there was no point
