The Love of My Life(21)

And yet – and yet – ‘Of course there wasn’t a Nature Walk!’ she said, when I asked how often she did this. ‘I just wanted to see you again!’ She laughed, watching me, and slid one of her hands out of its fingerless glove. It stayed on her lap.

‘That was devious,’ I said, eventually. I folded my arms and fixed my eyes on hers.

There was no way I was touching that hand. Not yet.

We sat on the bench in silence, sipping soup, until the shadows lengthened and the cold air began to sting. Then we went back to her yurt, where she had a hairdryer and straighteners and a fridge for gin and tonic. (‘I’m not on a spiritual retreat here,’ she said, when she caught me looking.) She told me about her father dying before she went to university, about the years she’d spent living with her grandmother in Hampstead. She sat close to me on the sofa, often looking me straight in the eye, her face inches from mine.

We talked until, eventually, I couldn’t take another moment. I reached out and traced a finger down the side of her face, down her neck, and she shivered under my fingertip.

We sat in absolute stillness, staring at each other.

‘God,’ she said. ‘You’re lovely.’

‘I am,’ I agreed. I felt as if I might have a stroke if this didn’t happen soon.

She looked away. ‘The thing is, I’m . . . not lovely.’

I thought about this for a moment. ‘I’d like to dispute that.’

She studied me for a while, and said, ‘Oh.’ She seemed uncertain.

‘I have to be honest, Emma. I would not be here, in a yurt, in a field, in the middle of the night, with nowhere to stay, and my boss sending pointed messages about my “food poisoning”, if I thought you were unlovely.’

‘Oh,’ she said again. ‘Well, that’s nice. But you see, the thing is . . .’

‘The thing?’

She sighed. ‘There is a thing. Not a huge thing. Well, a mid-size thing . . .’

‘You’re in a relationship?’

‘No! Of course not!’

I looked around the yurt, full of books and pots and bits of what looked like laboratory equipment. Frogman watched me. How could a woman this clever, this funny, this beautiful not be with someone?

‘Are you sure?’ I asked.

She picked up my hand and took it back to her cheek, closing her eyes for a moment as it touched her skin. ‘I’m sure. It’s just that I . . . that I . . . I’m complicated.’

I laughed. ‘Luckily, I’m very simple.’

She laughed, too. ‘I like you,’ she said, and then leaned in and kissed me.

The tenderness of it. The sense I had of everything changing, as we came to lie on the bed, taking off clothes, at first slowly, then faster, faster.

In the months that followed I returned to that conversation from time to time. I wondered why this woman, who seemed so open and willing to love, would have described herself as complicated. What was it she had been trying to say? I asked her a couple of times, but she just said that she had a long history of relationship-sabotage. ‘I won’t sabotage this one, though,’ she said, and I believed her.

How could I not? She told me all the time that she was madly in love. She wanted to move to London to be with me more. Even though her career belonged on the coast, and she taught at Plymouth University, she managed to get a second job at UCL, lecturing aquatic conservation postgrads on estuarine and coastal ecology. She cut down her Plymouth work to two days per week and put in long hours on trains and the M4. All for me.

She suggested we sell my flat in Stepney Green and her place in Plymouth, and that we make her grandmother’s house our home. She mentioned having children. And it was she who proposed marriage, one night in a Turkish restaurant in Haringay, over a bottle of crap wine we’d bought at the all-night shop next door.

‘Marry me,’ she blurted, just as I put a large forkful of ali nazak into my mouth.

I stopped chewing.

‘What?’

‘Leo! You can’t say “what!” I just asked you to marry me!’

I downed my glass of water, to clear the aubergine. ‘And you can’t just ask me to marry you when I’m eating a kebab.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because you can’t!’

‘Well,’ she said, ‘I just did.’

We sat across the table from each other, defiant.

‘Are you serious?’ I asked eventually, because I always crumbled first. I still do.

She started laughing. ‘I am. I just wanted to get it over with.’

I picked up my wine glass. ‘You “just wanted to get it over with?”’

She was shaking with laughter. ‘Yes. I – sorry . . .’

And then I was laughing too. I couldn’t drink my wine at all. ‘You’re unbelievable,’ I said. ‘Is this actually happening?’

‘I’m afraid so. I love you more than anything else in the world, Leo, and I never thought I’d want to get married but I do; I want desperately to be able to call you my husband. So please say yes.’

We both stopped laughing and stared at each other, just like that first night we spent together.

‘Yes,’ I said quietly, and joy spread through me like a sunrise. ‘Yes.’