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face.
    â€˜Don’t we?’ he repeated.
    Oh no. At that moment Annie knew a speech was coming, or something similar. The unresolved proposal had hung heavily between them.
    Paul put down his coffee, kept both hands curled round it and looked into the cup as if something swam there. ‘You know I don’t go in for this sort of thing much, Annie, but I want to say a few things before you go. Is that all right?’ And he raised his eyes like a hopeful child. Annie nodded but felt a tiny dread.
    â€˜First, I like you very much. You’re good to be with and you’re easy to be with.’
    â€˜Like a bloke, you mean,’ said Annie, before she could think. Immediately she wanted to call the words back. They seemed so sharp. But Paul was unfazed.
    â€˜Well no, not really, for obvious reasons, but yeah, if you mean like a bloke because I’m comfortable in your company, then maybe, yeah and I don’t see what’s wrong with that. You don’t puzzle me and I’m not always worrying about what you’re feeling. I’ve got a pretty good idea I know what you’re feeling most of the time and if I haven’t you don’t burden me with it. So I like living with you. And you don’t keep pressing me to talk about feelings I don’t have. I may not be the most sensitive bastard in the world but I’m not going to start pretending Ihave feelings I don’t have. I mean, what’s the point? I hate lying and you don’t make me.’
    Annie made to interrupt but he held up his hand.
    â€˜Please, I’ve sort of half prepared this in my head. So I like you a lot. But I’ve never said I love you because I don’t know if I know what love is. I mean in the sixth form I was obsessed with this girl called Sandra Walls. She was Barbie doll pretty and I fantasised about her and sort of hung around her like a puppy dog and if she said jump I jumped and I thought that was love. She enjoyed making me jump, of course, but I don’t think she liked me very much as me, so to speak, and the whole business didn’t make me happy and it didn’t lead to anything and I’m bloody glad now it didn’t. Was that love? If so, well, fuck it. If not, well, I don’t know what is.’
    Annie looked down into her own coffee. She’d known plenty of Sandra Wallses and she felt a pang of something that was more sympathy than anything else, affectionate sympathy for gangling seventeen-year-old Paul, but she kept her eyes down and swirled the last of her rapidly cooling latte.
    â€˜But I do know one thing, Annie. I’d like to have kids. Lots of kids. Everyone’s all down on big families, these days. I’m not. I came from a big family and my childhood was happy as hell and I’d like my kids to be happy. And I can’t see the point of living a life without having kids. It’s just a plain dead end and plain bloody selfish, and most people without kids seem to me to be plain bloody miserable. Because their own life becomes their everything and when that fails to live up to what theyhoped, they’ve got nothing to fall back on, no bright-eyed little brats to cheer on as they go into battle against the world.’
    â€˜That’s some speech, Paul.’
    â€˜I haven’t finished. As I said, I don’t think I love you according to what everybody tells me love is or ought to be, but I do like you a lot and I do fancy you and I think you’d be a brilliant mother and if someone broke in here now and tried to hurt you I’d kill them. I mean literally, I’d happily break their bloody neck or whatever, with no doubts that what I was doing was right. And we’ve only been living together for six months.’
    â€˜Eight,’ said Annie. Then, ‘Sorry.’ And she laughed and looked into his face with its heavy eyebrows and he looked straight back at her without smiling and she sensed the urgency in him, the