I miss the train by exactly fourteen seconds. I know this because the little digital clock on the Redhill station platform is actually working today, reading 17:30:14, and the dim red tail-lights of the train are still just visible in the distance. Resignedly I slow to a walk and slump down on to one of the metal platform benches, pulling my coat more tightly around me against the chilly late-autumn wind.
The next train isn’t for an hour.
But at least you’re not working in London, I tell myself firmly, beginning the timeworn conversation I have inside my own head every day at around this time. That terrible commute all your friends complain about. I settle back into the seat and shut my eyes, calling to mind the next item on my familiar list of the advantages of rural rail transport. All those people, getting pushed and jostled about on overcrowded city platforms… Then I momentarily draw a blank. What comes next?
At least on train connections here in the depths of Surrey you can always get a seat.
Yes! That’s it. The abundance of available seating.
And what was it Mum came out with the other day? The terrorist threat. Of course!
In more remote areas there is less of a terrorist threat. People passing through London Bridge or Victoria every day must be really scared. I nod fervently to myself. Really scared.
A crackling voice over a speaker jerks my mind back from determined visualisations of abandoned rucksacks and hordes of panicked travellers.
‘The eighteen-thirty has been cancelled, due to a fault on the line. Will all passengers travelling to Horsham, Southwater, Partridge Green, and… Fenbridge please make their way to the front of the station where an alternative bus service has been arranged.’
I wearily haul myself to my feet, rolling my eyes at my only other fellow traveller, an elderly woman smoking a cigarette on the next bench along.
‘What they really mean is someone’s topped themselves again,’ she tells me with a conspiratorial wink as we make our way over to the lone bus waiting for us at the station entrance.
I nod politely and take a seat at the back of the bus, rummaging in my handbag for my phone. The replacement bus service always takes ages, so I’d better drop Harry a message to let him know I’ll be late. Although by the time he reads it I might be home anyway.
To my surprise, there’s already a text waiting for me. I blink at it for a few moments, savouring the quick thrill of excitement at that little digital envelope. Unopened, full of potential. Of course, it might not even be from him.
U on way yet? Can’t wait to see you. Got wine. Love x x x
My heart rate quickens. Harry hasn’t used the word love in a text for… well… a while. Even as I’m staring at it, my phone vibrates and another message pops up below it.
I really want to talk to you… we may have reason to celebrate x x x
Excitement pulses through my veins and my hand actually starts to tremble as I type my reply. Oh my goodness, this could be it. It!
No, he won’t be proposing to me. Ever since I met Harry at university six years ago, he’s been very clear about his views on marriage. He sees it as a man-made societal structure designed to control and suppress. Or something like that. I don’t share his views, but Harry’s unique outlook on life was one of the things that drew me to him.
Is. Is one of the things that draws me to him.
Besides, what’s the point in feeling deprived of one thing in life, when we already have so much.
So I’ve accepted it won’t be marriage Harry wants to talk about tonight. But it might be… something even bigger.
The something that, if I’m honest, has been present in many conversations between Harry and me lately, without actually being said out loud.
Ever since a chain of events began that clearly only pointed at one thing. My job became permanent. After a year of living from month to month on a ‘temporary contract’ within the legal support team at Home from Home, a local housing charity, I came in one morning to find an envelope on my desk offering me a permanent contract. It was hardly the winning lottery numbers or Willy Wonka’s lucky golden ticket, but at least it meant financial stability. The following year Harry got promoted to Head of Art at the boys’ Academy (the youngest person ever to achieve this role, their annual newsletter told us proudly). The next year our mortgage rate went down by two per cent. Then, earlier this year, Harry’s Great-Aunt Mabel died, leaving him a decent lump sum. Everything was coming together perfectly.
We have the space. Okay, so our second bedroom may not be very large and Harry is currently using it as a study. (When I say study, I really mean part art-studio and part man-den, where oil paints and sketch pads and X-box chairs with inbuilt speakers all coexist in a cornucopia of organised chaos. I’m not allowed in there.)
But we could easily convert it into a nursery.
I start imagining what it would feel like to go in there and give it a really good clean out. Resting my head against the cold, damp bus window, I allow myself to be absorbed by one of my favourite daydreams. I’d start with the magazines – they’re all going in the recycling. Terrible how the world’s forests are being depleted daily, and Harry probably owns half of them in the form of gaming magazines, dating back to 1998, stashed in untidy piles. Right, the magazines are gone. Mentally I dust my hands off and survey the rest of the room. The art stuff can stay, I suppose. I’ve always quite fancied Harry after he’s been working, when he re-emerges from that room after several hours of activity, all tousled blond hair and stubble and paint splatters. Admittedly, that hasn’t happened in a while… but just in case, I imagine carefully packing away the paint cartridges, only throwing away the empty, dried-out ones, and maybe a few of the more sludgy colours I don’t like.
Now that just leaves the X-box, and of course that chair…
Caught up in a fantasy of hauling the X-box chair roughly by its arms into the garage, I almost miss my stop.
‘This is Fenbridge, love,’ the driver announces helpfully, and I realise the bus has stopped moving and I’m the only person still on board.
***
By the time my key is turning in the lock ten minutes later, I’m absolutely certain Harry wants to talk about starting a family.
We’ve discussed it before, of course. Ever since I was a teenager I’ve known it was one of the top criteria for my future life partner – like being in steady employment and having decent table manners. They must want children.
Yes, we had talked about it, but Harry and I met when we were so young that at first any conversations about children were hypothetical: one day, it would be nice to, when we’re older, etc…
It had come up again when we bought the house, naturally. I’d wanted to go straight in with a three-bed, but Harry convinced me it was more sensible to start off smaller, not to stretch ourselves or be ‘tied down’ to a really big mortgage, so that ‘one day’ (there it was again), when the first child came along, we wouldn’t be struggling financially. He hadn’t actually said when the first child came along, but I knew that was what he meant. That was three years ago and I had been starting to wonder when ‘one day’ might be, but I didn’t say too much because it always seemed to be me who brought the subject up and I didn’t want to come across as one of those barmy women who only thinks about having babies.
But deep down Harry knows I’m ready. Over the last few years I’ve managed to keep the balance between making it clear what I want and actually turning into a living, breathing fireball of oestrogen. He knows it’s down to him now to decide when he’s ‘ready’, and all the signs are pointing to the fact that today is the day.
It would explain the wine – we hardly ever drink, can often go weeks without a drop – but it would make perfect sense for Harry to want to treat me to a nice bottle of wine tonight. One last night of getting tipsy together, before going upstairs to… create a new life.
I’m grinning from ear to ear as I burst into the house and sling my handbag down. Harry is in the kitchen leaning against the worktop, watching the door, and when he sees me he also breaks into a huge smile. Wow, when he looks this happy he’s really sexy. How could I have forgotten that?
Had I forgotten it?
‘Hello, gorgeous.’ He beams at me, and comes over to give me a big kiss. ‘You took ages.’
‘I missed the train by fourteen seconds, and there was a replacement bus service.’ My transport issues already feel like they happened a thousand years ago. ‘Get that wine open then.’
Harry gives me a cheeky look out of the corner of his eye as he turns to uncork the wine, as if to say ‘all good things come to those who wait’, or something equally corny and innuendo-laden. I know him so well he doesn’t have to say it. I know what he’s thinking.
‘So, you’re probably wondering what I want to talk to you about?’ Harry twinkles at me, handing me a large glass of red then turning back to pour his own.
‘Actually, I—’
‘You see, I’ve been thinking a lot about the future lately,’ Harry continues regardless, pausing only to chink his glass against mine with a self-satisfied smile, then take a slurp. ‘Since that money came in from old Aunt Mabel, it’s really helped me re-evaluate things.’
‘Yes…’ I breathe, gazing up at him. I can hardly bear it any longer.
‘We’re not getting any younger, we’re doing okay financially, and I´ve realised life is just too short not to strive for your dreams.’
‘Yes, oh, Harry…’ This is the part where he grabs me by the waist, lifts me effortlessly and carries me into the bedroom, growling sexily in my ear, ‘Let’s make a baby.’
‘So…’ Harry puts his glass of wine down purposefully on the kitchen side, obviously gearing up for his grand finale…
‘…I think we should take some time out and go to South America.’
***
At university, society was divided into two groups: those who had taken a ‘gap year’ in a far-off country, and those who were left at the gate by their mum on the first day of term, contemplating life alone for the first time. I fell into the latter category.
Members of the Gap Year Gang were easily recognisable: a colourful chakra pendant, the flash of a Mayan symbol tattooed on an arm, or the swing of a hand-woven alpaca wool handbag gave them away.
Not to mention their subtle air of intellectual superiority. After all, these were people who had seen the world.
The rest of us wore clothes from Primark and felt homesick and lost for the whole first term. At least.
Until then, travelling hadn’t really appealed to me; maybe because I’d always known it wasn’t an option. Mum could only just afford for me to go to university, so I could hardly ask her to help me fund a voyage of self-discovery and intellectual growth in some distant land.
Only when confronted with the Gap Year Gang in all their exotic glory did I start to feel like I might be missing out on something.
Their stories of hitchhiking across South East Asia or getting wasted and waking up on a beach in Bali, or escaping an armed robbery on a night bus to Cape Town, fascinated and frustrated me in equal measure.
Compared to them I felt inexperienced and twee. I once asked a girl in my law and social change seminar where she got her lovely woven bag from as I fancied buying one. She looked me in the eye and said witheringly, ‘Thailand.’
Harry, of course, was in a category all of his own. He had enjoyed his first gap year (inter-railing in Europe) so much that he decided to take another one (hiking and backpacking across South America), then another half-one after that (six months fruit-picking on a working holiday visa in Australia). When he finally made it to university, aged twenty-two, he pretty much got straight off a plane from Sydney and strolled into his first art history lecture, both on the same morning. He was the eldest in each of his classes by several years and was revered among the Gap Year Gang as some kind of prophet, the Wise Man of Travellers or similar nonsense.
We couldn’t have been more different, and I could barely believe it when he asked me out.
Although we were studying for different degrees, both Harry and I took an extra module of Spanish language. I did it because I’d read on careers websites that having a second language would give a law graduate a competitive edge in the careers market. I think Harry did it just because he could.
It was hard not to notice him in the classroom, partly due to his tall, blond handsomeness and tendency to turn up to lectures in tatty leather flip-flops, regardless of the weather conditions – but also because he already spoke excellent Spanish. Needless to say, a product of seven months spent meandering around Latin America.
There’s nothing more attractive than real talent or skill. I could overlook Harry’s unusual dress sense and messy hair – this man spoke Spanish like a native. He might not always have bothered with correct grammar, but he could make the perfect, tongue-rolling ‘rrrrrr’ sound. It was sexy. Infuriating as well, of course, as he just rocked up to our first class and started chatting away at the speed of a Mexican football commentator. Meanwhile I clawed my way up to his level through three years of hard study and sticking vocabulary post-its all over the house, much to my flatmates’ annoyance.
But it was still sexy.
I spent the first year of university lusting after him discreetly from a few rows back, and impatiently plodding through the week until our Friday afternoon Spanish lecture. I don’t think we exchanged a single word in all that time, even though there were only ten people in the class, so he must have at least known my name.
Then one day Harry sidled up to me in the Student Union bar, set his beer down on the table in front of me, and asked what I was doing that night.
From then on, it was a whirlwind. Harry himself was a whirlwind. When we graduated, he took me to Rome. I never admitted to him it was the first time I had ever left the UK.
I also never got round to telling him he was my first proper boyfriend. I hadn’t been the most popular girl at school, nor the most unpopular, I had just kept myself to myself. A few boys had asked me out, but they always seemed so immature and boring. I was happier studying, going to the cinema with my friends and working at the café round the corner to help out my mum with the bills. I’d never seen any point in having a boyfriend until Harry.
As our university days passed, I got to know the man behind the traveller’s legend. To my surprise, and – if I’m honest – slight dismay, Harry was actually from a middle-class, prosperous family. Their renovated oast house in Kent was worlds apart from Mum’s little terraced property in the part of Essex that gives the whole county its reputation.
His family were very refined. My first dinner at his parents’ house was like that scene from Titanic where Leo sits down at the table and has no idea which set of cutlery to use first. Ashamed, I found myself wishing my mum spoke Italian or my dad could discuss my university essays with me, like Harry’s parents. In fact, I would have been happy for my dad to want to discuss anything with me, but that´s another story.
It was Harry’s parents who generously gave us half the deposit for the house, and I still remember with a pang that Dad didn’t even come with us on the morning we collected the keys.
‘You know what he’s like, love.’ Mum had tried to sound kind as she patted my shoulder, standing awkwardly removed from Harry and his family as we all waited for the estate agent to finish scrabbling around in drawers and find our keys. It hadn’t been much comfort, though. She had been able to separate from him years ago and rebuild her life at an amicable distance. It was different for me – you can hardly divorce your father.
Anyway, from the moment we finished uni it was as if life picked up speed. I landed a place at a London university to study for a year-long legal practice course – something I’d need to do before I could actually use the law degree I’d worked so hard for. Harry got a job as an art tutor at a prestigious private boys’ Academy, stopped wearing flip-flops and took out life insurance. I deferred my place at the university to move with Harry to the middle of nowhere in the South Downs, near the Academy. We both scrimped and saved and lived on pot noodles for two years, then stumped up the deposit on our little house in Fenbridge, the nearest village to the school and the very last stop on the southbound rail line offered by the southernmost railway service in the country.
It wasn’t all bad. Fenbridge was the kind of place where everyone knows and greets each other by name, and where there is no supermarket, just ‘Terry’s’ (the butcher’s), Raj’s (the newsagent’s) and ‘round Brenda’s’ (the pub). Within just a few weeks ‘Harry and Kirsty’ were welcomed unconditionally into the local village fold, and soon became regulars at the pub, coffee shop, and even sometimes the biweekly car-boot sale on the football green.
In many ways it made a nice change from the part of Essex where I spent my childhood, where you had to keep an eye not only on your lunch money but also your shoes, coat and scarf when running the danger-filled gauntlet between home and school. Here, you could literally leave the front door wide open and go out to do your week’s shopping, get the car washed, swing by the garden centre and stop off for a free coffee at Waitrose on the way back, and nothing would have happened. Plus the fact it was only one short, winding, country lane away from Harry’s school. It was important to live close by, we soon realised, as the school’s location at the bottom of a valley made it completely inaccessible by car after heavy rain or the slightest hint of snow. And it would be no good for a whole class to be cancelled just because the art teacher couldn’t make it in.
It just wasn’t the kind of place where very much happened. At all. It certainly wasn’t the kind of place where people regularly left their jobs and took off to go exploring South America.
So, for ‘Harry and Kirsty’, every day was pretty much the same, our daily routine overlapping with my growing ache to become a mother.
Every day except this one.
I’m distantly aware Harry has been talking the whole time I’ve been standing here, wine glass in suspended animation halfway to my mouth, watching the last six years of our life together flash before my eyes. Snippets of what he’s saying filter through, like the words ‘sabbatical’ and ‘mortgage holiday’ and ‘new horizons’. He seems to be pacing the kitchen and waving his arms around.
Finally, Harry remembers I’m here and stands still, flushed and bright-eyed, smiling expectantly at me. ‘Well, what do you think then, babe?’
Of all the things I want to say, everything I’ve kept inside, waiting for a moment like this when I have Harry’s undivided attention, what I actually say, in a small voice that doesn’t sound like my own, is:
‘I’ve forgotten all my Spanish.’
Harry’s laughing. Wrapping his arms around me. Spilling the wine.
‘Come on, Kirst, that’s rubbish! You were the hardest worker in our whole class – you used to memorise a new verb every night, remember?’
‘I did not! You make me sound like the most boring—’
‘Sure, you always got top marks in those vocabulary tests, too – photographic memory!’
‘Liar! I didn’t ever get top—’
‘Okay, okay! We’ll prove it. I bet you can recite ten Spanish verbs in the past tense, right here, right now.’ He’s frowning down at me now, arms crossed.
I slam my wine glass down on the counter, anger and pain and disappointment boiling over.
‘I fucking well CAN’T, actually! I can hardly remember the present tense for most of them! You’re so WRONG!’
I hurl myself out of the room, hot tears flowing, distantly aware of how ludicrous it is to argue over something like Spanish verbs when the things that really matter remain unspoken.
I feel Harry’s eyes boring into my back as I run upstairs, and don’t need to turn round to see the shocked expression on his face. I never, ever shout at him. And rarely cry. But right now, the grating disappointment of his Big Surprise and frustration at his comments about my Spanish combine to make my tears overflow. He’s right – maybe I did do well at university – but he should know better than anyone that there is more to me than that. I went through school being known as part of the nerdy crowd, and if the other kids noticed me at all, all they knew about me was that I was quiet and got good grades. They didn’t actually know me. They didn’t know, for example, that in the summer holidays before the end of upper sixth, I dragged my cousin halfway across the county to do a skydive – we took a weekend course and everything, then threw ourselves right out of a plane above the Essex countryside. I’d been so terrified on the way up that I almost threw myself out two stops early. But I still did it.
At university, I didn’t care what anyone thought except a few close friends who really knew me. A few close friends… and Harry. He should know better than to use my grades at university against me at a time like this. Just to convince me to go along with something he wants. Again…
I shut myself in the man-den. I know if I go into the bedroom he’ll follow me straight in to try and make up. We’ll sort it out before going to sleep, of course, we always do. But right now I just need a few moments alone.
Sitting down on the floor among the gaming magazines, I wipe my tears away on my sleeve and pull myself together. Then, wedged on a shelf between an art textbook and a box of CDs, something catches my eye.
Lonely Planet Travel Guide to Bolivia, Ecuador and Peru, 2003.
Sniffing, I yank it open at a random page.
Riding the Devil’s Nose railcar in Ecuador is an experience that will stay in your memory for ever. Negotiating a series of heart-stoppingly deep ravines and spindly bridges, the train will take you over 1,000 metres down the Andean mountainside and show you truly spectacular views of the Ecuadorian landscape and distant volcanoes.
I slam it shut again, trying not to hear the voices of all my friends, reacting in disbelief when I told them I was buying the house with Harry: A mortgage? Aren’t we a bit young for all that… what about your training course? Not to mention all the holidays? Are you sure you want to do this before you’ve seen anything of the world? And then, inevitably, Why are you in such a hurry to settle down? That last question was one I had been asked many times by various friends and never felt able to answer out loud. I have my reasons, I would say, and tolerate with good humour the subsequent teasing about ‘Kirsty the serious one’ and the jokes about old married couples. I did have my reasons, and couldn’t expect any of my friends, with their happily married parents and stable home lives, to possibly understand.
Feeling a presence behind me I look over my shoulder to see Harry standing in the doorway, a stricken expression on his face, wordlessly holding his hands out to pull me to my feet. I reach up and take them. As I stand, he pulls me into his arms and my head tucks under his chin. Despite my residual anger I welcome the feeling of things sliding back into place, the universe aligning again. We haven’t had a row like that in a long time. I hug Harry back tightly and try to squeeze away the uncomfortable realisation that we haven’t actually talked to each other as much as that for a long time, either.
‘Kirsty, I’m so sorry,’ he murmurs into the top of my head. To my dismay I hear his voice crack with emotion.
I pull back to look at his face, and don’t recognise the pale, serious man staring intensely back at me.
‘Er… it’s okay. I’m sorry I reacted like that,’ I mutter, feeling increasingly alarmed by the fierce way he is staring into my eyes.
‘Please be patient with me,’ he whispers, holding on to my arms more tightly. ‘I know you want… more. And I want us to have that…’
This sudden outpouring of emotion is so unlike Harry, so unlike us, that all I can do is stare back at him with my breath held, waiting for whatever will come next.
‘…But I really need to do this. Just one more trip. We can see it as the last adventure before…’ His voice wavers alarmingly again. ‘Then, after this, Kirsty, I promise – I’ll be ready to move on to the next level with you.’
Somewhere on the outskirts of my surprise and alarm, it strikes me that even in a moment like this Harry can talk about our lives as if they were a game on his X-box.
‘It’s fine.’ I find the words springing from my mouth before my head has fully made its mind up. ‘Let’s do it.’ I try to smile convincingly. ‘Let’s have your adventure. But just a few months, okay? If we can get the time off work, that is—’ My voice is swallowed up in Harry’s jumper as he hugs me back so tightly I’m practically lifted off my feet.
‘Babe, you’re so amazing – I love you!’ His face is transformed, so lit up with relief and joy that I feel twinges of guilt for ever reacting so negatively. He leans down and plants a kiss on my mouth then turns to hurry out of the room. ‘Just gotta write an email quickly, then I’ll bring the rest of the wine up!’ he calls over his shoulder, and I can hear him thundering back downstairs, full of boyish energy, the Harry I met at university suddenly returned with full force. I sigh and slump back against the wall, looking down at the travel book still in my hands.
Taking two or three months out of our daily lives won’t make much difference, will it? We’ll get back older, wiser, the wanderlust well and truly out of our systems. Well, out of Harry’s system… I’m still not entirely sure it’s even in mine. After this, Kirsty, I promise… Harry’s words ring in my ears and I imagine him stepping gratefully back over the threshold of our home, scooping me into his arms and saying ‘That was crazy and fun, but this is where I want our family to grow up’.
As we get older, our travels will give us an edge; we’ll be cooler, more interesting, sophisticated.
Better parents.
In fact, there is no reason we can’t start trying for a family while travelling, right? I lose myself briefly in a daydream of falling asleep in Harry’s arms in a beach hammock, his hand resting contentedly on my newly rounded tummy as the sun sets behind us. We could even name our future son or daughter something exotic to forever remind ourselves of the moment. Something like… Rio. Or Havana.
No, that’s a ridiculous idea. Too… Posh Spice.
But maybe Harry really does have a point. If we’re going to see anything of the world, our time is now. Two years ago we didn’t have the money, and in two years’ time we’ll be stumbling around like the walking dead on three hours’ sleep a night with perma-vom splattered across our baggy, unfashionable sweaters, having conversations about poo consistency and bedtime routines. Well, I hope we will.
I tuck the travel book inside my jumper, planning to have a good read later. Something has to change… and if we’re not going to have a baby yet, then maybe we should have an adventure.