I get a hello, a kiss on the cheek and a quick hug before Anthony makes his way upstairs. Bath and bedtime are his. School pickup and dinner are mine. It’s a rare and wonderful night when they’re shared. As I pour a glass of red wine—stacking the dishwasher can wait, although answering e-mails can’t—the thought pops into my head that I couldn’t do this if we had another baby. No quiet, tidy-ish kitchen with a glass of wine in hand. No evening stretching ahead of me for conversation with my husband, watching TV undisturbed and a long night of brain-enhancing, relationship-maintaining sleep.
“How was your day?” Anthony is back downstairs. No wine for him tonight, I notice, as he throws some of the pasta I left for him into a bowl.
“Editing, editing, editing. My favorite bit of writing a paper,” I say, my sarcasm heavy. One of my tutors at Oxford once told me that becoming an academic meant a lifetime of homework, and I didn’t believe her at the time, but God she was right. Three beta readers have all read my latest paper on the differences between parenting styles in Denmark and the UK and their impacts on educational attainment, and somehow they all want the paper to change in different, conflicting ways. By the end of an eight-hour day deciphering the comments, I was so exhausted I wanted to throw my laptop out the window. I suggested hopefully to my lovely boss, Margaret, that that probably meant I could ignore them but she just tutted sternly and told me to have an extra-large glass of wine tonight before picking them back up tomorrow.
I explain the witch costume situation and Anthony looks at me seriously. “That’s a good plan,” he says. “Plan A: Witch. Plan B: Normal lady in black.” The gravity with which he approaches these issues when we discuss them is one of the many things I love about him. He would never say, “This is such a silly conversation, why are we having it?” Once, my friend Libby’s ex-boyfriend told her she was being ridiculous raising something—I can’t remember what now—when we were having a double date at a sushi place in Soho. Anthony said, without a trace of humor in his voice, “If she’s bringing it up then it’s not ridiculous. She’s not ridiculous.”
Libby says Anthony is one of the reasons she’s single, because she can see what love should be like. I try to remind her of what we were like at university. We’ve been together half our lifetimes now. You don’t become two halves of a whole overnight. I think I once might have said something about a relationship being a “journey” and Libby refused to talk to me until I’d bought her a double gin and tonic.
After Anthony has finished clearing the plates away, which I kind of, sort of, definitely left for him to do because he’s tidier than I am, I sit back with a contented sigh. He’s looking at me intensely. He either wants to have sex or he wants to have the big F conversation. To have IVF or not to have IVF? The question that couples have only had the luxury of pondering for forty years. I saw in Anthony’s work diary a capital F in the corner of the page for Friday a few months ago. Immediately I assumed, despite no evidence whatsoever, that he was having an affair. Freya? Flora? Felicity? Who is she? For a few weeks I kept dropping women’s names starting with F into conversation worrying that he’d go a bit pink and look guilty but he just thought I was trying to subtly suggest baby names.
I kept checking his diary, every few weeks after that, and kept seeing the F. I don’t know why I didn’t just ask him what the F was. He doesn’t lie to me and it was probably some boring work thing but something about it stuck in my brain. I wanted to figure it out for myself. And then, a fortnight ago I realized. The F was always on a day that we ended up having a conversation about fertility, or my lack thereof. I went back through my journals and there it was. On the day he would mark F, we would somehow end up sliding into our recurring conversation. Anthony is a planner and cannot let things just take their course. It’s wonderful for holidays as I don’t have to do anything and before I know it, I’m in a beautiful hotel in Lisbon that he booked for a decent rate eight months ago. It’s even better for date nights and school admissions. But for the Big Conversations that can ruin a Wednesday evening when you were hoping your husband was trying to seduce you, it’s a bit of letdown.