Second Chance - Jane Green [53]
When she met Paul, she knew he was perfect for her. After she left him on the very first day he interviewed her and well before he started pestering her about things he had forgotten to ask, she phoned her mother. ‘Mum? I’ve met the man I’m going to marry,’ she said, and her mother knew that she had, because when Anna stated something, it always happened.
So when Anna announced they were trying for children, everyone knew that Anna would have a baby within the year. It was partly why they bought the barn: what a wonderful place for children, how perfect to spend summers out here with the kids, or come down on winter weekends for leaf-stomping, and hot chocolate in front of a roaring fire in the huge stone fireplace at one end of the enormous great room.
Anna’s obstinacy is why they cannot give up on IVF. Why Anna refuses to believe there will be a last time. She cannot believe that this will not work when everything else in her life has gone according to plan.
So far they’ve spent around fifty thousand pounds on IVF, a huge chunk of the savings they had put aside. The work on the barn has started. The walls that were rotten have been replaced with reclaimed barn siding they found at an auction, and the roof has been done. Kitchen and bathrooms were ordered and then cancelled. The house is half done. Piles of sawdust everywhere, dust sheets on half-sanded floors, unpainted window frames. The last time they went up to have a look, Anna burst into tears.
‘This was our dream,’ she said to Paul. ‘And now we cannot even afford to finish it.’
‘We will one day,’ Paul said, so sorry that he wasn’t able to pull out a magic wand and make it happen, so sorry that his work didn’t provide him with enough money to take over when the going got tough. ‘I promise you, one day this will be finished.’
They left that night and stayed at a local B&B – a few hundred steps down from the Relais & Chateaux along the road where they used to stay before starting IVF, but a lot of things have changed since the treatment began.
‘If they could see me now,’ Anna sang, picking her way gingerly down the hallway, having run lukewarm water into a cracked bath in the bathroom at the other end of the hall, and Paul shrugged.
‘We have to stop the treatment, you know,’ he attempted carefully. ‘This is ridiculous that we can’t afford anything any more. We can’t keep going like this.’
‘Hopefully we will not have to.’ Anna squeezed his arm. ‘I have a feeling this one is going to work,’ and Paul sighed. She said that every time. But having to watch every penny was stressful, to say the least, particularly when it had never been an issue before.
Although if you didn’t know, you’d never know. Anna still looks the part – she has to for her job, and no one is a better PR for Fashionista than Anna herself –but watch her carefully and you’ll see that she isn’t frivolous in the way she used to be.
Her make-up is always from work. No longer does she run to Space NK to replenish the jar of Eve Lom that’s almost finished. Now, if she can’t get it sent to her through Fashionista, she’ll change brands. Her finances have dictated that her brand loyalty is no longer important.
Her hair is no longer cut and coloured at Bumble & Bumble. For cuts she goes to the local hairdresser on the high street, and she has discovered that Sun In, thanks to her natural fair Swedish locks, does almost as good a job of highlighting her hair as Enzo used to.
They don’t go out to the expensive restaurants any more unless it is for work and either Anna is expensing it or someone else is paying, and frankly there is always more than enough to eat and drink at the hundreds of fashion parties that are going on all around London on practically any given night.
Not that they can’t afford to feed themselves – heavens, no! But where Anna used to absentmindedly put whatever she wanted in a shopping trolley with no thought to the price, now she will look at the price and, if it is too much, she will think about whether they really need it.
She will no longer wander round