Page 4 of Such a Good Couple
The taxi passed under a sign for the airport and she pulled away from the growing abyss of unease. She resolved to talk to him, but not until after the holiday. Under no circumstance was the holiday to be ruined with reality. Especially as it was all probably in her head anyway.
He literally doesn’t have the hours in the day for an affair, she thought wryly.
CHAPTER 2
As crowds milled around her, Annie snapped a selfie holding her passport and sent it to Slags For Life.
Annie: It’s happening! Cannot wait to see you guys!
Beside her, her partner Conor was grim-faced as he hauled the big case up onto the conveyor belt at the bag drop. ‘We need to get to security before Clara and Ollie. I amnotgetting involved with their chaos.’
He snatched the receipt from the machine and immediately turned and started marching through the crowds, a good head taller than pretty much everyone. Annie hurried after him, smiling apologetically at every disgruntled person left in his wake.
‘I need to go to the toilet, Conor,’ Annie tried to whisper-shout over the din of the departures hall. It’d been a frantic day and Annie had still not had time to test her urine from that morning. Between packing and fielding Conor’s customary travel panic that was escalating with every passing minute, she’d left it in the jar she always used and forgotten all about it, only remembering right as they were leaving.
With no time to get the ovulation strips out then and there, she’d decanted the wee into a small plastic water bottle, planning to duck away to test it at the airport.
Before leaving the house, she’d sent a pic of the bottle of weein her handbag to her friend Rachel:
Carting my wee around with me feels like a new low.
Rachel had replied:
From what I hear there’s a whole host of new lows after people become parents!
As Annie had read this reply, it’d struck her that this was definitely the type of thing she would’ve had a laugh with Conor about before.
Before when? She wasn’t quite sure anymore. Eighteen months of Babygate was really affecting the atmosphere between them but lately Annie had started to wonder if things had been more strained than she wanted to admit even prior to that.
Annie knew that sprinting (completely unnecessarily) through the airport was not the place for the grim soul-searching that accosted her with more and more frequency now but she couldn’t really pick and choose when these thoughts assailed her. She had stopped trying to vocalise them to Conor. It was strange that after twenty years together, after effectivelygrowing uptogether, there was suddenly a topic of conversation off the menu. And such an important bloody topic. But any mention of it Conor seemed to see as a dig. He had been the one urging them to put off trying for a baby – he was obsessed with them having all their ‘ducks in a row’ before becoming parents. And now that having a family was starting to seem like an increasingly remote possibility, it was hard for her not to give in to the creeping resentment.
No one is ever ready for kids, for God’s sake. Usually, she was quick to pack away these thoughts because feeling angry and resentful was not going to make their efforts to have a babyany easier. Plus, she had also probably been a bit laidback about it until she’d turned thirty-nine and insisted they get real about their age.
Still, she thought, as she watched him muscling through the relaxed holidaymakers, his backpack jostling them, she should be able to bring it up without him getting defensive and then distant, which had become something of a pattern.
The distance was especially hard to take and Rachel had come into Annie’s life at a particularly lonely time. She’d joined the gallery as artist-in-residence at the beginning of the year and they’d bonded fast. Rachel was very open and Annie found that encouraged her to be more open also. Also, Rachel understood much better than Maggie and Clara what Annie was going through. Rachel was on a similar trajectory; she wanted a baby too and was keen to adopt, but it was proving painful and extremely frustrating.
‘The system’s not loving that I’m single and self-employed.’ She had rolled her eyes ruefully. ‘Apparently painter is not exactly a bankable, stable career for a would-be adoptive parent. I’ve made some excellent life choices, haven’t I?’
These days Annie’s own life choices didn’t feel much better. She’d be forty-one in October.
She tried to get Conor’s attention again. ‘Conor! Babe! I gotta wee!’
‘Again?’ Conor tossed over his shoulder, still ploughing through the ambling holidaymakers. ‘You went before we left.’
Weshould be ambling. Annie felt resentment rising as her shoulder bag banged rhythmically against her hip.This is a fun trip. We’ve loads of time. Why am I sweating and tense already?
Conor was never a chill guy but put him in an air-travel situation and he could quickly become rabid.
‘Conor! Please can we stop for a minute, I need—’
‘Annie.’ Conor turned. His handsome, sharply hewn features were taut, but she sensed he was making the effort to sound placating rather than irritated. ‘Can’t you go on the other side of security? I’d just feel way better if we got through in good time.’
Annie hesitated. Things between them had been flat, with occasional spikes of anger and frustration, for as long as her period had been showing up, unwelcome, for a year and a half now. She didn’t want to start the holiday on a bad note, and bringing up the domineering little strips that had been dictating their sex life for so long would darken the already murky mood.
‘Fine,’ she said. She could do the test on the other side once Conor was distracted with the bookshop and the duty free.
Maybe it wouldn’t be so tense if we hadn’t held off on trying for so long …?Though a lot of the time, it really felt like she was the only one trying.
