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I sit in the car and let myself be hypnotised by the lights of the car in front of us. Dom’s got the news on the radio, but I don’t want to hear about people dying and fighting. I want to be still. ‘Can I turn this off?’
‘Sure.’
It’s Sunday night. We’re on our way home from Stockport, which apparently is different from Manchester. Dom’s mum was quite vociferous on that point. ‘Do you think it went okay?’
Dom nods. ‘Yeah.’
‘You sound surprised.’
‘No.’ His eyes are fixed straight ahead on the road. ‘Mum liked you.’
‘Do you think?’ Doubt starts to creep in. I thought it went all right. I accepted all the food and drink I was offered, even the vegetables that appeared to have been on to boil since the beginning of time, and the pudding that came out of a tin. I didn’t say a word about the separate bedrooms, but maybe I could have done more. Helen was right. Family’s important. I’m not sure I did enough to make her like me. One comment sticks in my head. She asked me about work, and I explained that I was a personal assistant. ‘Oh. Like a secretary?’ she said. ‘So you’re not a career woman?’ ‘I thought she wanted someone more career focused.’
Dom laughs. ‘Oh god no. She’s very traditional. She’d hate me to be with somebody who put work before family.’
‘But she sounded so proud of your career.’
He doesn’t answer for a second. ‘By traditional, I mean incredibly old-fashioned. I think her and Dad always had a plan for me, and a traditional marriage to a nice girl is definitely part of it.’
I keep staring straight ahead. He mentioned the M-word. We’ve never talked about that before.
‘They sacrificed so much to send me to this fancy school. It was a bus ride and then a train and then another bus every day to get there, and if there was problem with the trains my dad had to take half a day off work to take me to school, and there was always a plan that I was going to do better than they did, have a better life than they did.’
I keep listening. I saw the pictures at his mum’s house. Dominic in school uniform – the whole works, with a cap and everything. The photo was in pride of place on the mantelpiece next to Dominic’s graduation, and then Dominic’s PhD graduation.
‘They were so proud when I got my PhD, and then when I got a lecturing job, but it was weird.’
‘Weird how?’
‘Sometimes I feel as though they worked so hard to make me different from them that we ended up with nothing left in common.’ He stops talking for a moment and swallows. I glance over at him. He’s still staring straight at the road but his eyes look wet. I’ve never seen Dom cry. ‘Sometimes I think I let them down. I think they had in mind that I’d be married with kids by now.’
‘There’s nothing wrong with that.’
‘No.’
I daren’t look at him. ‘It would be nice to have kids. I can picture me with children and a husband and a house. The whole thing.’ These are the things that everybody wants, aren’t they? Not flirtations, or maybes, but something guaranteed. ‘I’d want to be a proper mummy though. I want to be looked after and look after a family. And I’d have a house with a garden big enough for a climbing frame, and near to my dad, maybe even with an annex he could live in when he got old. I’d have my whole family around me. I think I’d feel safe then.’
‘Don’t you feel safe at the moment?’
I don’t answer.
He tries a different question. ‘What do you have bad dreams about Em?’
I’ve never told anyone this before. I keep staring at the road in front of us. ‘I dream that everyone’s left me. I dream that I’ve been abandoned.’
He moves his left hand off the steering wheel for a second and strokes my leg.
‘I don’t like people leaving me. I like things to be settled, you know, secure.’
‘I know.’ He glances over at me. ‘So how many children are you picturing?’
I’ve thought about this. ‘Three. I don’t want an only child.’
‘Why not two?’
‘Two would fight with each other.’
‘But with three, won’t one be left out?’
I think about it for a minute. ‘Four then?’
He laughs. ‘Then I think we’re going to need a bigger house.’
We? He said we, didn’t he? The tense, bubbly feeling that lives in my tummy subsides a tiny bit for the first time in a very, very long time.