Mid-Life Ex-Wife Page 26

  I was feeling surer about what I wanted than I had in quite a while. I knew that if this didn’t work, I was finished with online dating. I had no more energy to give. I couldn’t be attractive and available and fascinating anymore, nor have any more over-sharing email conversations with men. A sudden repugnance had struck me. I think this was to do with the naturalness of my friendship with Edward, and the way he and I had started to be when around one another. I’d begun to be repelled by the idea of being listed at all. I’d begun to be repelled by the emailing, the attempts to woo by written word, and embarrassed by how much of it I’d done. It had seemed the obvious way to deal with the system, and the problems it presented, but it’d been time-consuming, and often defensive, and much of it had been a total waste of effort. Mostly, though, I was afraid of heartbreak. I was afraid that Edward would have a revelation, that one day he’d sit down next to me with a look on his face and say, “Look . . .” and I’d know what was coming. I had no confidence in permanence anymore. I began to worry about the responsibility we’d apparently taken on, the responsibility of making each other happy. Did I want to be married again, or at least coupled-up and behaving like we were married, rattling around in a department store Home section discussing bowls? (We’d already done this, restocking his woeful rental kitchen.) What if Edward had a dark night of the soul and thought, Wait, what am I doing? This isn’t the woman I should settle for; why am I settling? He might go into retreat and find he couldn’t move forward again. In short, I was a neurotic mess.

  There were things I loved about being single. I did what I wanted, when I wanted. There was no one to object to how I lived, scheduled, prioritized, behaved: no husband-audience, no husband-editor. I didn’t feel the need to say why I couldn’t see someone tonight, composing a defense in advance. I didn’t have to think in the constant first-person plural. Do I really want that? I asked myself. I wasn’t sure.

  And so, when the first misunderstanding arose, when we disagreed, I had an exaggerated reaction to it. Edward made a joke about my being upset, using humor so as not to confront the issue (his words, afterwards, and not mine). He tried to joke me out of being distraught, not realizing how serious it was, and how much thinking and insomnia lay behind it. I went quiet, which is my own way of dealing with suffering. I found that I was shaking. What on earth is the matter? he asked, still thinking that it was half a joke, or at least something fleeting. We’d found our first incompatibility, at exactly the wrong time. I began to have extreme thoughts, and come to extreme conclusions. This isn’t going to work, I thought, talking to myself, and you had better end this now, while it’s still all reversible. There was spiraling panic and intensifying fear. His ability to joke about my upset had made the fear worse. None of this really matters to him, my inner voice said; he’s given the impression of being embedded, but actually he can take this or leave this; he’ll recover quickly and move on; better get out of this now before you get seriously hurt. The spiral accelerated, but Edward, unable to see this invisible escalation, was still trying to jolly me out of what he’d characterized as a bad mood. We didn’t understand one another at all, I decided. At the first real test, the relationship had proven to be as much an illusory bubble as my unrequited passion for Andrew had (I told myself). I’d been caught out again, and this time I’d gone deep—I’d felt trust and hope, and had made my trust and hope obvious, but it had all been as idiotic and self-deluding as before, the panic voice told me.

  I stared at Edward and he stared back, smiling, because (innocently) he thought smiling would help. I said that I thought we should slow this down. He was shocked. I saw a tremor pass through his face, though he was on top of it instantly. He didn’t give any sign of his own fear. He didn’t want to fight; he didn’t even argue the point. He just said, “What?” His surprise seemed quite neutral to me. He’s a man of extreme self-control, of mental discipline. I’d admired this in him, up until then, but now I saw its implications. I said we were too different. I said it wouldn’t work. I said I could see the signs. “What signs?” he asked, infuriatingly calmly. I told him he was too Spock-like. He frowned at me in reply. I told him I couldn’t do this, rush into this; it was all moving too fast. He stepped forward and took hold of me, and wrapped his arms round my shoulders, pressing my face to his chest. “I’m sorry if it’s moving too fast,” he said. “I thought you were happy.”

  I extricated myself—why was he hugging me, as if that made everything all right? Why do men take physical charge of women when we’re upset? I thought. Is it comfort, or is it a way of blunting our responses and shutting us up? I was stirred up and felt unwell, and the row could have been far more decisive. I told Edward, while stepping back to a safer distance, that I needed a break. What kind of break? he asked, stepping forward again and looking down into my face. I saw it then—his own upset, the shadow of it. His mouth looked less certain than it had, and his eyes were hurt. Just a break, I said; I see you every day and I need some space. (I’d never uttered these words before, nor understood them.) When he’d gone home I had a good cry. I had no idea anymore what I thought about anything. My thoughts were racing, as was my heart. I felt unpleasantly unwell. I was absolutely in turmoil.

  A text arrived as I was making a cup of tea and on my third handkerchief. It said: “Please don’t do this. I love you. I like your laugh. We love each other.” It was true. I was in love with him and it was scaring me. I wanted to hide from it and to be safe.

  Edward went to Germany the next morning and kept up a steady drip of communication, without expecting me to reply. He was just keeping in touch, keeping the line open, he said; he wanted to give me the space that I needed, but when things happened or when he had a thought, it was me he wanted to tell. They were short messages, saying what he was doing and what the city was like. He sent pictures of the cakes he’d eaten, and said that he loved me, mentioning this as an incidental extra fact, each time. In the evening he Skyped from his hotel room, and I saw his face, and it was sad and concerned. I felt a rush of love and guilt and shame. It couldn’t have been helped—doubt was a stage I had to go through, but I felt bad, all the same. “How are you?” he asked me gravely.

  “I’m fine, darling,” I said. “I’m sorry. I seem to be a basket case.” His continuing attentiveness could have been the worst thing possible for a woman who felt cornered, but it was strangely de-cornering. I didn’t feel suffocated, but loved. I was loved. The crisis began to pass. We spent much of the evening video-calling, and ended up redrafting Tales of the Riverbank. We capsized Hammy Hamster’s boat but he survived.

  Lesson Ten: don’t expect people to be rational all the time. Humans aren’t rational all the time, and especially not when there’s a lot at stake, or when things are rapidly in flux. Let things play out properly and the dust settle before rushing to conclusions. Be prepared to say, “I was wrong.”

  Late in the day that Edward flew home, the buzzer sounded at the flat and there he was. I went out onto the landing and saw him running up the stairs three at a time, holding a bunch of flowers. We had a long, long embrace standing on my doorstep, hearing each other’s heartbeats, each other’s breathing. I had a tremendous feeling of belonging, simultaneously reassuring and alarming. The alarm hadn’t dissipated entirely. It still had little flare-ups. Did I dare give my heart, properly give it, or was I going to be on guard, on alert, half anticipating disaster for the rest of my life? “Next time,” he said, “I’d like you to come away with me. Would you like to? I have to go to Copenhagen next.” He had a work commitment there on the Monday, but we could go on Friday night, he said, and have the weekend together.

  The day before we went, I looked at my small carry-on bag and saw the size of the challenge. There were what to pack (and how to be) questions, and three full nights ahead. We’d never spent a whole night together before, sharing our wake-up habits and navigating that sometimes tricky passage between an extended date and the morning’s domestic ordinariness.

 
; During our long weekend in Denmark, we learned things about one another. He learned that I’m not good at walking past a museum. I learned that he’s not good at walking past a cake shop. I took photographs of almost everything. (He took one, of me standing in a square.) I learned that he isn’t any good at lying in bed in the morning, not even on holiday. The day ahead excites him, and by 7 a.m. he was showered and reading. I’d seen books about popular science, history, polar exploration, piled on the bedside at his flat, but on holiday a weakness for 99-cent Kindle thrillers was revealed. When he got back into bed he whispered to me to sleep some more. “Or would you like a cup of tea?” He hummed as he made it, and volunteered to test the biscuits. Later, when I admired a necklace at a crafts stall, he insisted on buying it. He protested that he needed nothing when I tried to buy him a present in exchange, though I managed to gift him a woolly hat. “What about this?” I said, when I found it at another stall. It was hand-knitted, cotton-lined, made of a soft gray wool. He realized immediately that this was a part of my campaign against the red hat, and was highly amused. “But this is actually great,” he conceded, putting it on and grinning at me. “I do like gray.”

  We discovered, on that weekend, that we’re both schedulers, who like to study a map and plot a course. “We can vary the plan as we go,” I said.

  “As we come across new places and get distracted,” he added.

  “And then we can change the plan,” I said.

  “Exactly,” he agreed.

  When we returned to the hotel in the late afternoon to rest, I discovered that he’s a fan of pre-siesta sex. I also discovered, that evening in the restaurant, that he knows some Danish. Under pressure of questioning, he admitted that he could speak a little Finnish, but had better Japanese. He’s one of those people who has a facility for languages, and can get by in two dozen. I teased him that it was another thing he should have listed on his dating profile. This had become a running joke. He said I should have mentioned that I like sci-fi; I would have got a lot more dates. I told him he should have mentioned that he grins during romcoms, and is ace at ironing. He said I should have mentioned my talent for anagrams. We took a crossword into a restaurant and puzzled other diners (Edward had enough Danish to translate our neighbors’ reaction as “What the hell?”). We both like to look at cryptic puzzles while we eat. Admittedly this is a tad eccentric. We’re equally eccentric, and how freakishly lucky is that?

  It was in Copenhagen that our togetherness first became self-evident; a fact. We were together in the world, now, not just as an idea, but physically. I had proof of this. I saw us in shop windows as we passed by, and our shadows stretching ahead of us on pavements. I saw Edward holding on to my hand. It was cold and windy so we spent a lot of time on the tourist bus, going round and round, talking about the buildings and random subjects, and hopping off for wintry sightseeing. The Little Mermaid was smaller than expected, but the weekend was much, much easier. We were both relaxed and lighthearted. Silences, when they came, were easy and contented. I began to feel that I’d known him for a hundred years.

  Standing at passport control on the way back, I was struck by how everyday it seemed that we were traveling together. I looked at his serious face as he stood in the queue, and groped for the right word. What was the word? Safety. I felt safe, in multiple dimensions. I can’t begin to tell you what a relief this was. A scene from When Harry Met Sally came to mind, in which Carrie Fisher, playing Sally’s (Meg Ryan’s) best friend, says to her boyfriend, about dating, specifically the relief of being able to abandon dating: “Tell me I’ll never have to be out there again.” He (Bruno Kirby) tells her, with affecting solemnity, “You will never have to be out there again.” Thank you, Nora Ephron. One of the great romantic moments of cinema.

  I’d have thoughts like this and then I’d wince, because feeling safe still felt presumptuous. But Lesson Eleven was this: don’t over-analyze everything to bloody death.

  What Happened Next

  Some time has passed between then and now, since the end of the last chapter and the beginning of this one. Some time has passed since we went to Copenhagen, since I went through the tricky period of realizing that I was in love and that it was okay to be. Fear of my own vulnerability held me back for a while, though of course if you’re really properly to connect with someone and know them, mutual vulnerability is the one vital thing. It was genuinely difficult, though, for a while. The crust of suspicion and cynicism took its time to be shed. The strong defenses that had built up over years had to be relaxed, had to stand down. T. S. Eliot in The Waste Land talks about spring being painful, lilacs pushing through dead land, the agony of dull roots being revived by spring rain, and it can be that physical, like an illness, like an attack, when you find yourself feeling again, and hoping, and loving. It hurts, when the rusted machinery of your heart cranks back into action. When finally it happened, after so much disappointment, it made me emotional. It made me panicky. It made me want to fight off those new feelings and be safe again. But we got through it. Edward saw what was happening and stood firm and waited. The storm came and went and the sky grew blue, and I held on harder to his hand afterwards, grateful that he’d weathered it. We’re over the crossover zone, now. If we’re no longer dating, it’s only because we’re past that point.

  We’re partners now. We’re not only still together, but intend to be together for the rest of our lives. We talk about the future, and what we’ll do in our old age, and how we’ll live and where we might be. When people ask, “So how did you two meet?”—which is something people want to know when you’re in a new relationship and you’re past fifty—I admit that I hesitate for a moment before answering. It took me a while to start being open about it. I used to say, “Oh, through friends of friends.” Sometimes I still do. It’s not that there’s any stigma, exactly, but on the other hand I don’t want to get into it. People are fascinated by ordinary-looking relationships emerging out of what the media informs them is a soup of depravity, and so they’re desperate to hear the whole story. They’re likely to take hold of your wrist, at a party, and lead you off somewhere quiet so you can tell them about the ins and outs, metaphorical and literal. Sometimes I smile to myself, imagining the two of us—Edward and me—as two old-timers, about ninety years old, way in the future, asked by young people for the story of how we got together, and me saying, in my elderly croaky voice, “Well, it was a dating app I didn’t often use because it was full of players and leg-over merchants.” It’s not massively romantic, as a How We Met story. (Except, in a way it is, because of all the bloody adversity.)

  Let’s consider how the two of us would have been dealt with by an online algorithm. I’m not sure it would even have let us see one another, after dating site pre-selection, because we’re so obviously incompatible. Let’s also consider the wish list. I had a picture in my mind of the man I’d end up with, when I first signed up. He’d be a bit bohemian, maybe, perhaps an academic in a linen jacket and a neckerchief, maybe with a leather wristband and a satchel. It wasn’t the only image I had of the man I might find, but it was certainly one of them. He didn’t have a face and he often looked quite overweight—sturdy, anyway—but he had a certain style. He’d be good in the kitchen and he’d like to dance. He’d be gregarious and make me go to parties. I envisaged re-entering the world via his slipstream, after a long period of social awkwardness.

  Not really any of the above has come to pass. Edward’s not an academic, or sturdy or a neckerchief and wristband wearer, nor remotely bohemian. He’s the most conservative dresser I’ve ever met, though at the same time strangely wacky. He’s color blind, which explains a lot. He wears loud checked shirts with clashing patterned jumpers. Sometimes he’ll add a tie, a third dissonant feature. He wears odd socks. He has two pairs of shoes, because that’s all he needs, and recoils at the idea of a man bag that isn’t his manly black rucksack. He hates parties—which is secretly a relief—and has never been in a nightclub in his life and if he
did he’d wear a suit (and a tie). Left to his own devices he’d live on pizzas, pasta and ice cream, and cold meat with potatoes. He has a very serious addiction to pudding, and afternoon tea, and Saturday-morning pastries, and it’s difficult to resist joining in. I’ve been putting on weight and have had to call a halt to the cake-fests, asking that he get his doughnut fix at the office instead. Foodie he is not, though in a restaurant he’s fairly daring. At home he undercooks things and insists they got the full twenty-five minutes the recipe dictated, and glowers when they go back in the oven, which is funny.

  There’s plenty of on-paper incompatibility. I like the Rolling Stones and Edward likes the Beatles. I tease him for having Enya on his iPod; he teases me for having Fleetwood Mac on mine, and for singing along. On the face of it we’re travel-incompatible, too. Most of the countries on his bucket list are northern ones. Iceland. The Arctic Circle trip from southern Norway. Alaska, so that he can see bears catching salmon. I want to camp in a desert at night, and travel on a train through Indian hills, and I want to go to Africa. (We’ve agreed we’ll try to do all of it, his list and mine.) Counterintuitively, he can’t bear to be cold. He hogs the duvet and insists that he doesn’t. He has to be coaxed into the Mediterranean Sea with promises. He stands at hip depth, the place where anyone who knows about acclimatization ought never to stand for long, while I shout, “Plunge! Plunge!” and, “It’s warm when you get in!” It’s like he’s not even British. He’ll only swim in heated pools, while I’m a human golden retriever, likely to jump into a puddle at a moment’s notice.

  We’ve been of cultural service to one another. I’ve become fascinated by new developments in astronomy. He knows more about art and world cinema than he used to, and has been initiated into the ways of Scandi crime drama. We’ve brought our differing professions and interests together into the mix. We’re learning a language together, though he’s much quicker to absorb its patterns than I am. We’re learning more about history and natural history. We’re studying maps and making plans. Furthermore, I’ve allowed my hair to turn from dark brown—its dyed equivalent to the dark brown of my youth—to its natural silvery gray. I embrace my age; I acknowledge it and am a survivor. It’s a gift that love has given me.