In Bed With Lord Byron

I’m not taking my husband’s surname. I like my name very much, thank you.’
    Anthony grinned.
    ‘You could always go double-barrelled.’
    I found myself automatically thinking: Lysander Lyon-Brown. Gosh, that sounded deliciously grand. Then I quickly wiped the thought from my mind.
    ‘What about you?’ I asked.
    ‘I like Claire or Chloe for a girl, Joshua for a boy.’
    A brief silence.
    ‘Anyway, I always thought you didn’t want kids,’ I retorted, though the funny thing was, I’d always felt he did.
    ‘Of course I want kids,’ said Anthony hotly. ‘Life without kids would just be lame. I mean, it’s OK now, but to get to forty and spend your Christmases alone, without
family – well, that would be pretty sad, I think. Anyway, I want to do it because I think I’d be good at it. There are so many rubbish parents out there. I was on the Tube the other day
and this kid was running all over the carriage and his dad was just swearing away at him. Maybe it’s easy to be arrogant and say, I can do better. But I reckon I can.’ He gave a
slightly self-conscious laugh and a sheepish shrug.
    I stared at him, wide-eyed. It really sounded as though he had been putting a lot of thought into this.
    ‘Of course, if we’re going to have kids—’ said Anthony. Then he realised his faux pas and blushed furiously. ‘So how is work?’
    ‘Um, fine, fine, bit busy but fine,’ I said, my ears burning. ‘Um, work is fine. How about you?’
    The baby subject was closed and we didn’t return to it again that evening.
    Many hours later, after we had watched a video and sipped hot chocolate and hugged goodbye, I put the dirty plates into the sink, idly squirting in Fairy Liquid, sloshing pans
with water to soak. Anthony’s presence still lingered in the flat: his laughter, his voice, his sweet teasing. I paused and stared into the reflection in the window, picturing a fantasy
scene. A few years on, I’d be in the kitchen, preparing an amazing meal, and Anthony would come in from work. Our kids (two: one boy, one girl) would run out, shrieking, ‘Daddy!’
He’d scoop them up in his arms and shower them with loving paternal kisses. He’d ask them about their schoolwork; Perdita would, of course, be a genius, whilst Lysander would be a
musical prodigy. And then he’d come over and give me a big kiss and say, ‘God, Luce, that smells delicious, what’s for dinner?’
    And I’d say, um, burnt chicken, burnt peas, burnt gravy . . .
    My fantasy scratched to a halt. I was a lousy cook. Besides, I was hardly the staying-at-home housewifey sort, was I? I’d be bored out of my skull without intellectual fodder for my hungry
brain. So we’d have to get a nanny. I had another vision of Anthony and me in a car in the rush hour, snarling at commuters as we raced to get to a crèche to pick up our screaming,
neglected offspring before it closed. I thought of all those offputting articles about working mothers getting only three hours’ sleep a week and having to go to the office like walking
zombies in a haze of exhaustion before coming home to begin their second job of feeding and changing nappies all night.
    But then I pictured Anthony and me lying in bed, our little baby between us, and the look of soft joy on Anthony’s face, and I went all gooey again. That was the trouble: my emotions kept
on conjuring up images that my fierce intellect wanted to bat out of the way. It was a true battle between my head and my heart.
    It’s not really a battle at all, though, I told myself as I changed into my pyjamas. Because you’re not together. You’re not even going out any more.
    I decided to stop this mental nonsense by watching some TV. But there was nothing on but boring celebrity TV shows, so instead I curled up in bed with a mug of warm milk, and Lyra as my
hot-water bottle, and my old, lovingly dog-eared copy of
Wuthering Heights.
An hour passed and I grew pleasantly sleepy.
See,
I told myself,
if you had a baby, you wouldn’t
be able to loll about like this in your spare time. You’d have to break off in mid-Heathcliff-swoon and attend to screams or a dirty nappy.
    It was moments like this that made me feel uncertain, that reminded me of how self-sufficient I was, of how I loved my own company, my peace, my privacy. After all, children were handcuffs that
signalled the end of freedom. I remembered a wistful remark my mother had made a few weeks ago when she had been lecturing about Anthony.