It's bothered me more in the last year or two since I met Mike I think if I'd met him earlier I

It's bothered me more in the last year or two, since I met Mike I think if I'd met him earlier I would have But I have my work, which I'd not miss for the world And we have each other. He's a friend again now, funnily enough, but it's taken a while.""I meant, are you sorry you didn't have kids?""I still could, in theory, just about. What did you expect I'd be doing?""I always imagined you'd marry early and work for a couple of years, then have children and not work again.""Almost the opposite I married at 30, divorced at 35, and I haven't had kids But I've worked a lot.""Are you sorry about that?""No We shouldn't have married in the first place He was a good friend, someone I met at university He should never have been my husband. Then I got married, and it didn't work out, and I went into therapy. Then I worked with Relate, then more therapy, more training and here I am.""It's amazing.""No, it isn't.

I got my degree at 28 ...""Degree?""Yes, I realised leaving school early had been a mistake, and I went back to college. Who do you counsel?""Mainly women with relationship problems.""You mean marriage problems?""I mean relationships Many of them aren't married.""So you trained.""Yes It all happened very late. I had done my time."So are you working?" I ask, as she pours the ginger ale into her third whisky, well over the limit, flushes of red in her skin, that endearingly skewed top tooth."I'm a counsellor.""A counsellor?""Don't sound so surprised.""It's just ...""You thought I was a dimbo.""Bimbo.""Dimbo, bimbo, whichever.""No," I lie, "just counselling doesn't seem your sort of thing. Mutely, meekly, she went back to Barnoldswick and the letters dwindled and the relationship petered out At Christmas I didn't contact her A year had passed since that moment on the nylon carpet.

At the bus station, when I saw her off, she dallied in the cafe, staring deeply into an ashtray and saying she wanted to say something I waited, but whatever it was didn't come We walked out through the drizzle to the bus. I hid her away from my friends most of the weekend, wanting them to notice her beauty but not to engage her in conversation, telling myself she'd be bored, and fearing they'd take her silence (as even I'd begun to) for stupidity. She came down one weekend in the first term, chastely staying in the guest bedroom of the hall of residence, as perhaps no other girlfriend in the history of British universities had done till then or has done since. Every week I wrote from my campus cell, assuring her of my love and even meaning it Her replies were shorter. But all I wanted to say was the one thing I couldn't: that our going out together had no point any more, no future, was merely cruel to both of us.I couldn't even say it when I went off to university that autumn, though we did say an intense goodbye. But there was never the moment when one of us said, overwhelmed by the silence of the other's thoughts, "A penny for them." I was afraid, perhaps, that her secret wish was to become engaged, just like her sisters - that she was waiting for me to ask.