Page 13 of The Woman Who Said Yes

‘Well, um… she might?’ he says with a trace of hope.

Andie exhales. ‘Sam, she’s asked me round to discuss dresses and cakes!’

‘Yes, I realise that⁠—’

‘I need a strategy,’ she declares.

‘Yeah, okay,’ he murmurs, knowing she’s right. But how can he help? He has never approached anything strategically. Not his line of work – he’d just taken an inkling to study graphics and then, later on, to learn the craft of framing – or even starting a family. For years, Bibi had been certain that she hadn’t wanted kids. She hadn’t wanted to get married either. ‘I don’t see the point of it,’ she’d insisted. Sam loved her and supposed that he respected her decision – both on the marriage issue and (a little trickier, this part) on not having children.

Bibi was a dancer in the choruses of West End shows. As her job was exhausting, he took on most of the domestic stuff. He felt useful then – working at a small graphic design agency in Camden, and knocking up supper for the two of them, and listening as she bemoaned her schedule and railed against the choreographers and directors who hadn’t selected her this time.

However, at thirty-six, Bibi performed an unexpected U-turn. Suddenly, she wanted a baby more than anything else on earth. ‘Something’s clicked in me,’ she announced. ‘I feel like I’m ready now.’ She wanted sex at every opportunity: the minute he’d come home from work, at a crucial moment during the stirring of a risotto, and even when his father was due to drop off his floor-sanding machine.

In between the hectic shagging, Bibi had also wanted the flat all spruced up and ready for the baby. Would they even be able to conceive, Sam wondered? Fifteen years together and there had never been an accidental pregnancy or even a scare. But then, virtually as he’d wiped away the last of the terrible dust from the sanding, there it had been.

Two lines on a pregnancy testing kit. They were having a baby. The baby who grew into a lumbering six-foot twenty-year-old who can hardly bear to inhabit the same room as him now.

While attending to a customer, Farrah reappears briefly in the workshop and Sam breaks off to answer a quick question. It’s struck him that, at twenty-three, she too is Gen Z. Yet unlike Theo, she doesn’t regard him with the kind of revulsion normally reserved for a mould-furred courgette squished up at the back of the fridge. But then, Sam isn’t her dad. He’s her boss, her employer – but it’s never really felt like that either. When she started here a year ago, they had slipped quickly into an easy working relationship for which Sam is grateful every single day.

‘Sorry about that,’ he tells Andie, switching his attention back to the call.

‘Oh, no, I’m sorry,’ Andie says quickly. ‘I know you’re busy.’

‘It’s fine. And I do think you’re right,’ he says, more assertively now, ‘to try and talk to her this afternoon.’

‘Okay, so how will I do that?’

He sweeps a damp cloth over his workbench in preparation for the next job. ‘You could say you’re wondering if she’s rushing in…’

‘It’s not just me,’ she corrects him. ‘It’s us, isn’t it? We both feel this way!’

‘Well, yes,’ Sam concedes. But you’re there, he reflects, and I’m not.

‘And we know she’s rushing in. There’s no wondering about it.’

‘Okay,’ he says, ‘so tell her we’re concerned that she might be “acting in haste”…’

‘“Acting in haste”?’ He can sense Andie smiling. ‘You’re speaking like a legal letter.’

‘Well, just say it’s our concerned opinion⁠—’

‘Yes, that’ll do it. “Eva, Sam and I wish to counsel you with our concerned opinion that you appear to be engaging in matrimony”—’

‘— “at a velocity exceeding advisable limits”,’ he concludes, and they are laughing now.

‘I should write that down,’ Andie says. ‘The velocity thing.’

‘That’s probably best.’ Sam smiles. ‘Read it to her, like a script.’

Andie is still chuckling and something lifts in him, as always happens when he hears her laugh. ‘You’re a genius,’ she teases. ‘Right, wish me luck, okay? I’m going in.’

9

ANDIE

As Eva beckons me in I know there will be no talk of velocity exceeding advisable limits. Because she is wearing a ring – an engagement ring – and I am momentarily blinded by the dazzling rock. ‘Isn’t it gorgeous?’ she enthuses, hand outstretched like a starfish. ‘What d’you think?’

My first thought is that it can’t be real. I’ve seen such colossal gems in the Natural History Museum, several of which Marnie became obsessed with, begging to go and gaze at the Koh-I-Noor diamond and slabs of tiger’s eye, as golden and glossy as honey. She’d made her own little magazine, optimistically naming it Rock & Gemstones Weekly (to be quietly discontinued after two issues) and for a while it felt like the museum’s Minerals Gallery was our second home. ‘Shall we hide at closing time,’ she whispered once, ‘and spend the night in here?’ We’d chuckled at the very idea – but would it have been any crazier than Eva marrying a man she’s known for a matter of weeks?