Dust clouds hover in every room we enter. It’s a good job we bought a job lot of masks from eBay or we’d be coughing up our lungs by now. I run my fingers through my hair and wish I’d worn a hard hat because it already feels dry and powdery and I’ve only been here an hour. I’m going to give it the conditioning of its life tonight.
The last time I was standing in this kitchen it was galley-shaped, dingy and ridiculously small for a house of this size. Two days later and it’s missing a load-bearing wall and metal poles are propping up the ceiling. The RSJ delivery is due tomorrow. I almost sound like I know what I’m talking about, I think. But I’ve had to learn a lot in the two months since work began. Dave has been project- managing while doing a lot of the renovation work himself. If there’s a workman on site, then so is Dave, following him like a shadow and making sure everything is just how we want it.
I have very definite opinions of what I want and don’t want from these rooms once they’re complete. As part of my public-relations job in London, I’ve organised dozens of photoshoots in homes I’ve hired to show off my clients’ products. And socially, with my ex, I spent a lot of time in the houses of celebrities who’d employed interior designers to turn neglected period homes into palaces. So I know what I’d like to replicate, albeit it on a much tighter budget.
It’s probably the dust and this mask making me queasy, but I’m not entirely convinced the sick feeling isn’t all just in my head. It hits me with alarming frequency whenever I’m here, even if it’s during a lull in the demolition work. It’s the constant reminder of how much money we are ploughing into this, with so much yet to be done before we can even think about moving in. Maybe we should’ve let Debbie and Dave buy it after all.
I have been within a hair’s breadth of throwing in the towel many times. Like when most of the upstairs bathroom ceiling collapsed thanks to a leaky water tank. Or when we turned up on the first week of work to discover the storm had left the top half of the chimney lying on the bottom half of the driveway. Then, I’d wanted to hurl the house keys at Finn, turn around and never set foot in here again.
But what’s the alternative? If we give up now, we’d be leaving it in an even worse condition than when we bought it. And who’d want to take it off our hands? Plus the financial impact would cripple us. We are already cutting back on all spending. Much to my parents’ disappointment, we’ve cancelled our plans to meet them in Long Island and spend a week sailing down to Florida with them. Our belts are drawn so tightly, mine feels like a corset.
I’m really lucky because my boss, Helena, doesn’t need me commuting to the capital five days a week when I can get just as much work done from home. So if I’m not working on my laptop in the Annexe, then I’m rotating my way around a bunch of different coffee shops and cafés in town. You can take a girl out of London but you can’t take a large triple-shot latte with nutmeg sprinkles out of her hand. Not without a crowbar, anyway. My sweet tooth and increasing intake of pastries is actually starting to give me a paunch, or what Finn calls a ‘food baby’. It’s meant as a joke but it’s a little insensitive, considering. Or maybe I’m still a little touchy.
As I head towards the front door, I catch Debbie shuffling her way up the drive with her walking stick. Her leg looks particularly cumbersome today. She doesn’t know I can see her, so perhaps I’m wrong to think sometimes she exaggerates it for sympathy. I duck, hurry through the house and leave via the huge hole in the wall.
It’s great timing because now I can work from the Annexe knowing she’s not lurking around in the main house, waiting to waft in like a bad smell. She has never understood my job or the point of PR. She thinks it’s a made-up, emperor’s-new-clothes career created to fill a gap in the market that doesn’t really exist. And it kind of is. But who cares when it pays so well? I’m sure Finn has told her how much I out-earn him in my ‘made-up job’. Which has probably only caused her to resent it even more.
My friends and colleagues were speechless when I told them I was giving up my flat in Hoxton to live out here in the sticks. A handful even held what they semi-jokingly called ‘an intervention’ to persuade me to change my mind, reminding me I shouldn’t give up anything for a man, let alone one with a job as ordinary as Finn’s. ‘He’s just a plumber,’ more than one of them said. And once upon a time I’d have probably said the same.
But by the time we met, I needed more than the superficial boys I was used to dating. Finn wasn’t a fashion photographer with a man bun and a contacts book that could get me into A-list parties; his parents weren’t titled and living in a country pile; he didn’t spend his weekends bar-hopping with the Chelsea set. He was regular with a capital R. And I was beginning to realise I liked normal. Even now, when we hear Pulp’s song ‘Common People’ playing, he tells me it’s like Jarvis Cocker is singing our story. There’s enough of a grain of truth about that to make me laugh.
I started feeling sick again so, now that I’m outside, I slip off my mask and take some deep breaths. I climb into the car, turn the ignition on and Daft Punk’s ‘Get Lucky’
appears on the radio. I smile as I blast it out. It was playing the night Finn and I met. I was at my friend Priya’s hen night at the W Hotel in Leicester Square, not long after I’d broken up with Ellis. We were in the bar when this strapping six- footer with lashes I’d kill for and eyes as dark as his hair caught my attention.
I couldn’t stop staring at him. He was standing with a group of his friends and, emboldened by Prosecco and encouraged by the girls, I made my approach. He was a little younger than me, I guessed, and more softly spoken than I imagined. I assumed he’d be nothing more than a drunken snog, or at a push, a one-night stand if I was so inclined. Even now, Finn likes to remind me that I thought I was being sexy and seductive when, in reality, I was slobbering all over him with the grace of a Saint Bernard as he politely fended me off. But even my clumsy, gin-soaked haze wasn’t enough to dampen the spark between us.
There was something a little bit different about him. Finn was – and still is – an open book, and admitted straight away that he had a girlfriend, Emma. Yet I still grabbed his phone from his pocket and typed my number into it. I justified it by telling myself the Girl Code only applied if I knew the competition personally. Not cool, Mia, not cool.
We began texting in the days that followed – instigated by him, I might add – and then he FaceTimed me – accidentally, he claimed. The call lasted almost two hours. The next day, he caught a train to London just to take me out for a coffee during my lunchbreak. Soon after, he ended it with his childhood sweetheart. In less than six months, I’d sold my flat and moved to Leighton Buzzard.
Soon after, we married on the beach in the Maldives. We got a huge discount through a client but Debbie and Dave couldn’t afford to join us on this once-in-a-lifetime trip. I expect she has never forgiven me for ‘making him’ do it abroad. And when my parents joined us, it only rubbed salt deeper into her wounds. The framed photographs we gave
her of us saying ‘I do’ on the beach have yet to make an appearance anywhere in her house.
Finn and I began trying for a baby almost immediately. The first year passed unsuccessfully and it wasn’t until my doctor sent me for scans that a specialist diagnosed me with endometriosis in both ovaries. Three years later, and after an operation, two free NHS IVF rounds, two private fertility clinic transfers and three miscarriages, we were no closer to having our much-wanted child. My guilt over not being able to give Finn children was, at times, all- consuming, and I wondered if our marriage could withstand it.
Over and over again I’d ask Finn if he’d have married me knowing what he knows now. Yes, he kept reassuring me, of course he would have. But it was never enough to put my mind at rest. I’d stare at the photograph in Debbie’s dining room of him and Emma on prom night, telling myself how much happier he’d be with her, not someone as broken as me. This was the universe punishing me for stealing another woman’s man.
I even snooped around his phone, reading his text messages and emails and scanning his social media accounts to see if they were sliding in and out of each other’s direct messages. But I found nothing. Finn wasn’t having an affair with anyone, but I risked pushing him into someone else’s arms if I continued behaving like a madwoman. Once I learned to let go of what I couldn’t have, I appreciated what I did have. Finn. My Finn. He was enough. And I stopped behaving like the child I was unlikely to have.
Child. I repeat the word to myself. Child. The notion is fleeting, but it’s there nonetheless. ‘Child,’ I say aloud.
Jesus! This isn’t why I’ve been feeling sick lately, is it? I can’t be pregnant, can I? No, our last round of IVF was months ago. My periods have always been erratic, but now I think about it, I haven’t had one in ages.
I run my fingers through my hair and more dust comes out. Minutes later and I’m driving towards the town centre to find a pharmacy. I need to know for sure whether I’m imagining this or not. Because if I am finally pregnant, this is the best news ever but at the worst possible time.
