She was the first person I told about my pregnancy. By the time we’d munched our way through almost the entire packet of Hobnobs, Abi commented, ‘Bizarre to think there’s an actual baby in there.’ She was staring at my still reasonably flat stomach.
‘I’m going to get so fat,’ I said, laughingly. Weirdly, this seemed a matter of mirth.
‘Yeah, you are,’ she asserted, sniggering too.
‘And no one is ever going to want to marry me.’ Suddenly, I wasn’t laughing anymore. I was, to my horror and shame, crying. The tears came in huge, uncontrollable waves. I gulped and gasped for air in pretty much the same way I had when I’d been laughing, so it took Abigail a moment to notice.
‘Oh no, don’t cry,’ she said, pulling me into a tight hug. She smoothed my hair and kissed the top of my head, the way a mother might comfort a child that had fallen over. Abigail was beautiful and sensuous – everyone wanted to touch her, all the time – but she generally chose when any contact would happen.
‘Who will want to marry me when I have a kid trailing around after me?’ I hadn’t actually given much thought to marriage up to that point in my life. I wasn’t one of those who’d forever dreamed about a long white dress and church bells, but I’d sort of assumed it would happen at some stage in the future. It frightened me that the undesignated point seemed considerably more distant and blurry, now that I was pregnant.
‘You’ll still get the fairy tale,’ Abi said with her usual cool confidence. ‘I mean Snow White had seven little fellas hanging off her apron and she still netted a prince.’
This caused another round of near-hysterical laughter. I laughed so hard that snot came out of my nose. It was embarrassing at the time. A few months on, I became much more blasé about wayward bodily fluids. She hugged me a little tighter. ‘They will call you a slag, but it will be OK,’ she assured me.
‘Will it?’
‘Yeah, it really will,’ she said cheerfully. I felt a wave of something like love for Abi at that moment. I loved her and I believed her.
That feeling has never completely gone away.
From the moment Abigail saw Rob she found him completely irresistible. It wasn’t an exclusive club; he was to many. Bad boys often were. That had always been their problem.
Irresistible. Such a silly word. It didn’t get near it.
It tore at her. What she felt for him back then ripped a hole in her and she knew no one could plug it but him.
There were several undergraduates vying for his attention in those early days. Nubile, brilliant, interesting, beautiful young women by the bus load. He’d flirted with a whole string of them. At least flirted.
She wasn’t someone who was accustomed to being turned down, to being told no, and she wasn’t prepared to settle for what the others did: heady evenings at the pub, one night of fun and thank you, move on. She had to have him. Make him hers. For real. For ever. He was studying for his PhD when she was just an undergrad. He took tutorials. Taught and formed young, willing minds and yet, as he was still studying himself, he was somehow one of them at the same time. He drifted around the university, unique and glamorous, enigmatic and brilliant. There was an element of power, otherness; it was very attractive. Her body leaned into his when he walked into a room, like a compass pointing north. Her throat dried up; everything else was wet. She pulsed, beat like a huge heart. It sounded ridiculous now, so romantic. Too romantic. All these years on. But at the time she thought she’d been peeled back, stripped bare. That she wasn’t anything more than a huge, bloody, exposed heart. Beating for him.
It was hard for Abigail to recall that now, that intensity, that certainty. It had been smothered. Years of living together had normalised them. Respectability and maturity had dampened the fire. Put it out. Layer after layer of ordinary things: shopping for groceries, one telling the other they had food stuck between teeth, listening to over-familiar stories, worrying about promotions, deadlines, accolades, choosing wallpapers and cars. Those things build layers around a pulsing heart – at once protecting it and smothering it.
And the baby thing.
And the other women.
Combined, those factors meant it was impossible to recall the unadorned longing, the wanting.
But back then, he was everything. She couldn’t see or think about anyone other. The boys that were buzzing around her, undergraduates, she swatted them away like flies. Rob was seven years older than she was. Enough of a gap to make him seem far more interesting than he probably was. He seemed more confident, knowledgeable, erudite. He was athletic and toned although not overly worked out. Tall. He took her to fancy restaurants, the theatre and arthouse cinemas. They talked about politics, novels, travelling. He was fiercely ambitious and focused. She couldn’t deny that ambition and focus had panned out for him. He was, undoubtedly, a success, as he’d always wanted to be, as he’d always said he would be. She couldn’t deny that she’d enjoyed the fruits of his labours. He provided an enviable lifestyle.
When they first met and he was messing about with a few undergraduates, he explained to her he was owed a bit of crazy time. He’d not so long since split up from his girlfriend of five years. They’d split because that girlfriend had fallen pregnant and he hadn’t wanted the baby. They’d agreed on an abortion but, afterwards, there wasn’t much hope for them as a couple. They’d both found it hard to move past what had happened to them, past what they’d done. The ex maintained it was an accidental pregnancy. So many pregnancies in those days were. Fertile young people. Rob had never quite believed her story about throwing up the pill after eating a dodgy takeaway. He’d felt trapped. He felt the net fasten around him.
‘She was just about to haul me onto the fishing boat and bash my brains out,’ he’d said, laconically, as he pulled on his cigarette or took another swig of Merlot. ‘We simply wanted different things.’ These words, delivered with a shrug, somehow made it sound as though he was the victim and Abigail ought to feel sorry for him. Which she did.
He did choose her in the end; she became his official girlfriend. It took quite some months. Months of strategising, teasing, being in the right place, saying the right thing. But she did it. She was so happy, delirious, although never quite sure why she was the one he’d picked. She wanted to know. She thought if she knew exactly why he had chosen her, she could maintain whatever it was that had attracted him. If only she could pinpoint it exactly. Yes, she was attractive – she knew it then and she remembered it now – but many of them had been attractive. She was also buoyant, and independent, and confident.
Those things were harder to recall.
Maybe, she was simply the most persistent. The last woman standing.
Or just the most foolish.
Maybe the others got bored of his petulance, his pretentiousness, his unwillingness to commit. They settled for nice guys in their own year, even if those boys thought a great night was eating pizza from a box while watching Futurama. One day those boys would talk about political affairs and Booker winners. Everyone grows up eventually.
So that’s what it was. She saw it clearly now. Her twenty-year commitment began on the back of another woman’s heartache.
And now, it had ended in her own.
I don’t work on Mondays, which today I am particularly glad about. I can’t wait to get home from drop-off and re-read Abi’s email.
Dearest