his mum had said when he told her he was moving in with Louise came back to him. ‘What about her family?’ she’d wanted to know.
He had told her there was no problem, but he had never been sure. Louise’s mum and dad had been friendly enough. Her father had been some kind of manager, and now they lived by the sea. That was all. He had kept their visits short and resisted getting any closer to them, telling himself that he couldn’t be sure how long he would be with Louise. The ties between them were about their life in London. Somehow the life she’d had before seemed like a threat but she had seemed hurt when he tried to explain this to her.
‘I don’t want to know them,’ he told her. ‘I don’t want to be part of their nice, quiet life.’
At the back of his mind had been the fear that this was the life she wanted. Although he had tried to hide his feelings of doubt from his mother, somehow, though, she guessed. In any case, he’d known already that she would dislike Louise’s parents. She hadn’t yet met them, but he knew her well enough to guess. In her mind these were the same boring, narrow-minded people from whom she’d had to protect him. ‘Straights’, she called them.
‘You do go for these nice, sensible young ladies,’ she used to say, teasing him.
The strange thing had been that in his own mind he’d agreed with what she felt. On the other hand, something about the fact that she didn’t approve had pleased him.
‘I know what I’m doing,’ he had told her. ‘You’re just a sucker for romance.’
Now he could see that she was somehow troubled.
‘Don’t feel you have to get married,’ she said, ‘just because of the baby. This is your life, and her life. A long time. You should decide what you want to do, then think about the baby.’
‘We’re getting married,’ he told her. ‘And that’s the end of it.’
His mother watched him, frowning a little.
Knowing that she had already guessed that he had doubts made him more angry. ‘You’ve got these ideas about romance,’ he told her. ‘It’s like you want me to go out and fall madly in love with some crazy girl. Well, I’m not like that. I want a mortgage and a home and I want my kid to grow up feeling safe. I don’t want him to worry his whole life about what’s going to happen next.’
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