His fellow college professors had long ago written him off as a young fogey in the William Hague mode and all the students he lectures had jokingly nicknamed him Billy Bunter because of his size, when, to everyone’s astonishment, he suddenly started dating anew. True, he and I were a bit of an odd couple at the beginning, and attracted much head shaking and commenting behind our backs along the lines of, ‘it’ll never last’.
Even now, from the outside we look like a bit of a mismatch. There’s Bernard, in his Clark Kent glasses wearing a crumpled linen suit, dandruff all over the collar and his tie on a bit skew-ways. Whereas here’s me still in my work gear of a Lycra top, leggings, trainers and the warmest fleece I own – insurance against the cold of this house, which even in high summer never seems to get as much as a single ray of sunlight and is permanently freezing.
Even the way we met was a bit unusual and I’m only praying that his best man, a fellow professor, doesn’t raise the subject in his wedding speech. Smash Fitness, you see, the gym where I work as an instructor, is on Nassau Street, slap bang in the middle of town and just across the road from City College, where Bernard lectures.
Anyway, cut to January two years ago and Bernard decided that he was developing a bit of a middle-aged spare tyre (and I hate to use the politically incorrect term ‘porker’, but in his case it was only the truth). In the spirit of New Year’s resolutions, he decided that the only thing that would do him was to join a gym. And so gung-ho was he about his new fitness regime that he even booked a few full-on gut-burning sessions with a personal trainer.
Which is where I came in. But being brutally honest, this was no Hollywood ‘meet cute’. I never really had that whole love-at-first-sight thunderbolt when I gave Bernard his first fitness assessment at the gym. Instead I took one look at this greying, overweight older man and if anything felt pity for the poor sod as I put him through a one-to-one boot camp class.
Boot camp at Smash Fitness, by the way, involves your client doing a range of squats, lunges and press-ups, while the trainer yells all manner of motivational phrases in their face like, ‘faster, harder, higher! Gimme ten more! Come on, burn it off … work through the pain!’ We’re actively encouraged to err on the savage side with our clients, as my boss operates under the perverse notion that the tougher and more insulting you are to people, the more likely they are to keep coming back.
It’s not my way though. Personally, I prefer to encourage clients and cheerlead them towards their fitness goals, reminding them of how far they’ve come and how well they’re doing and that’s exactly the way I treated Bernard from the word go.
God love him though, he got so sweaty and red in the face when I first put him up on a treadmill, I really thought the guy might have a heart attack.
After a meagre ten minutes of what he claimed was medieval torture, he begged for mercy.
‘I’m so terribly sorry,’ he panted, gulping for air, ‘but I’m afraid I’ve got pain in my hamstring muscles that haven’t been used in decades.’
Typical Bernard. Unfailingly polite even when on the brink of an aneurysm. So just to make sure he got value from the full hour he’d paid for, I offered to take a look at his diet, to see what improvements could be made there. It’s fairly standard practice at Smash Fitness to take clients off wheat, gluten, dairy, alcohol and sugar for a full six weeks and if clients can only stick to it, they’ll soon start to look and feel unbelievably fantastic when they see visible results. Of course, Bernard nearly baulked at this when he realised that all his much-loved teatime sherries were now well and truly out, but I held firm.
Anyway, our session was finished and he was about to go his way and I mine, when he suddenly stopped me in my tracks.
‘Tess,’ he panted, still red-faced, sweaty and out of breath. ‘I’m absolutely determined to do this correctly, you know, in for a penny, in for a pound and all that.’
‘Good for you, you won’t regret it,’ I smiled, thinking how posh the English accent made him seem. The guy actually sounded a bit like Stephen Fry.
‘The thing is, your website says that the gym offers an at-home service, where a trainer will call to your house with smoothies and then whisk you off for a brisk morning jog, isn’t that correct?’
‘Absolutely,’ I said, delighted and relieved that I hadn’t scared him off fitness for life. ‘We can call to your home or to your workplace any time that suits you.’
‘Then how’s tomorrow morning for you?’ he asked, taking off his specs and looking at me a little bit shyly.
‘Well, normally we have a rota of personal trainers and I’m afraid I’m not scheduled for tomorrow morning.’
‘Yes, that’s all well and good, but the thing is some of the other trainers are quite brutal, almost to the point of being sadistic here, I find. So if it’s quite alright, I think I’d really prefer it if it was you. In fact, I don’t want it to be anyone else except you,’ he added, the big brown eyes almost pleading with me.
What can I say? My heart went out to the poor guy and I found myself saying yes.
So the following morning I trooped around to his house at 7 a.m., with a kale, carrot and Brussels sprout smoothie, which, trust me, may look like a glass of mowed grass, but doesn’t taste nearly as revolting as it sounds. It turned out Bernard lived in exactly the sort of house I’d have pegged for him; no uber-cool penthouse bachelor pad for this guy. Instead his home was – and is still – a sturdy, well-built Victorian cottage right in the heart of Stoneybatter, otherwise known as the arty quarter of Dublin. With a crossbar bike in his hallway and piles of hardback books scattered all over every surface. The whole place was higgledy-piggledy, charmingly disorganised chaos, and it was only months afterwards when he took me to meet his parents, that I realised the apple hadn’t fallen too far from the tree.
‘Oh dear Lord, look at you,’ he smiled, opening up the front door, all set to go in his tracksuit and trainers. ‘You look so fit and fresh at this god-awful hour. How is that even possible? I’m afraid I’m one of those chaps who can barely string a coherent sentence together until I’m on my third pot of tea.’
‘Follow the programme and you’ll feel twenty years younger in no time,’ I said firmly, and to be fair to Bernard, stick with the programme he did.
So gradually over time, he and I began to fall into a sort of routine. Twice a week I’d call over to him with smoothies at the crack of dawn, before dragging him out for a jog through the quiet of the early-morning streets. After a while, we grew so comfortable with each other that we even started joking and messing; I’d hammer on his front door and he’d answer still in his dressing gown, then try to cajole me inside for rashers, eggs and croissants. And from there, the conversation would go thusly: ‘Are you having a laugh?’ I’d playfully chide him. ‘You’re paying me to get fit, and we’re going to do it right. So come on, trainers on and grab a warm, woolly fleece, we’ve a brisk two-mile jog ahead of us.’
‘Oh God, the exquisite torture,’ he’d mock-groan. ‘Are you sure I can’t tempt you with a lovely pot of Earl Grey tea? As a compromise, if I drink it with that wretched half-fat milk you insist on? And if I’m a good boy and cut out the blueberry muffin I always have whenever you’re not around to goad me into good behaviour?’
‘Bernard,’ I’d grin back at him, ‘what am I always telling you? Sugar is the Devil’s food. I’m trying to detox you and here’s you trying to put the equivalent of rat poison through your system!’
So this Tweedledum and Tweedledee carry-on went on for weeks; me using a combination of nagging and cheerleading to try to wean him off complex carbs, starch and sugar; him only ever willing to jog all the way to the Queen of Tarts café in Temple Bar, so he could collapse through the door and order one of their famous chocolate pecan pies.
Then after I dropped him back at his house after one early-morning jog, to my utter astonishment, Bernard, still all sweaty and panting, asked me out. To go and see – get this – a screening of a French art
house documentary about the Napoleonic Wars that was showing at the Lighthouse Cinema that weekend.
‘You mean … on an actual date?’ I blurted out, flabbergasted. In a million years not seeing that one coming.
‘Well … erm … it’s just my way of saying thank you really,’ he said, and I remember thinking how endearingly flustered he looked, whipping off his specs and absent-mindedly wiping them on his tracksuit top, the way he does whenever he’s embarrassed. ‘Thanks to you, Tess, I’ve lost a full two pounds this week, so I thought I’d celebrate with a large bucket of non-fat popcorn with absolutely no hint of butter on it whatsoever. If you’d care to join me, that is?’
A date. An actual date. My first one since … well, since all of that. Initial reaction? To feel nervous and scared, with a tummy full of butterflies, the whole works. But then I thought: am I really going to let my past define my future? Isn’t it time to let go and take a chance? And with who better than a gentleman like Bernard, who I knew in a million years would never dream of putting me through what I’d just come out of?
So to the movies I went.
The movie itself turned out to be a subtitled documentary all about the Napoleonic victory against the Prussians at the Battle of Jena, 1806. Bernard of course adored it and while I kind of wished Bradley Cooper or Matthew McConaughey would pop up on the scene to liven things up a bit, all in all, we’d a pleasant, relaxed, easy time together.
And so slowly, over the next few weeks, he and I morphed into a couple, in spite of a plethora of objections from both sets of our friends and from my family in particular. ‘He’s way too old for you,’ they all chimed. ‘A professor of Art History? Who likes to go on walking tours of the Alps and whose overriding passions in life are art, the history of art and absolutely anything to do with Napoleon? What the hell can the two of you possibly have in common?’
Most stinging of all came from my sister Gracie, who, the first time she met Bernard, immediately wrote him off as the most boring man on the planet and had absolutely no problem in telling me so.
‘He’s a rebound guy for you,’ she told me out straight, ‘and nothing more. He’s the total antithesis of Paul; he’s like the anti-Paul. That’s the only reason you’re bouncing straight into this, you know. As long as you remember that, you won’t get into trouble.’ Nor has she changed her mind since, but then that’s a whole other story.
And true, Bernard’s core group of colleagues – mostly all confirmed bachelors working in academia – did intimidate me a bit at first, with all their shop talk about Kierkegaard’s Theory of the Excluded Middle, and seventeenth-century Dutch art, but by then Bernard had really started to grow on me, so of course I soon started to see everything connected with his life through love goggles.
‘You keep me young,’ he’d often say to me, after a night out in a restaurant with my pals, or an evening at the multiplex seeing one of the slightly more commercial movies that would be a bit more to my taste. And for my part, I really fell for the fact he’s so cultured and intelligent and passionate about what he does. I never went to college, and suddenly this man came along and opened my eyes up to a whole new world of opera, theatre and art exhibitions that I’d ordinarily never have gone within six feet of.
He’s good to me, I’d tell all my family and pals. And after the emotional wringer I’ve just been through, I deserve someone like him. He’s the equivalent of snuggling into a comfy pair of slippers after years spent in excruciating high heels that only ever made my feet bleed, if you’ll pardon the tortured shoe metaphor. He’s a man who calls when he says he will and who buys me flowers for no reason. Non-garage flowers too. And he’s kind and polite and always gives money to homeless people when he sees them in the street.
OK, so maybe these aren’t the sexiest qualities you look for in a life-partner, but in the long term, they work. Bernard and I work.
Besides, I’ve done the whole ‘madly in love, this is Mr Right for the rest of both our lives’ thing and where did that land me? Having to crawl back home at the grand old age of twenty-eight with my tail between my legs, that’s where. Back to my old bedroom under Mum and Dad’s roof, with Gracie in the room next door banging on the walls and yelling at me to turn the TV down. Back to months of humiliation and heartbreak and pain so searing it should nearly come with a safe word. That’s where ‘The One’ landed me.
Long story and, I’m sorry, I’m not even going to go there.
So no matter what anyone else says or thinks, come what may, four weeks tomorrow, Bernard and I are getting married.
And jury service can just feck right off with itself.
KATE
More Sinned Against that Sinning,
Spring 2001
After that first magical meeting at the departure concourse at Charles de Gaulle airport, Kate and Damien had been seeing each other for just over a year. And it was a very full-on relationship too, even her mother had remarked on it.
Ever since that whole debacle in Paris, Kate’s modelling career had skyrocketed. So now she was travelling the world, regularly flying cross-continent for photoshoots in one fabulous location after another. She was effectively living out of a suitcase, and whenever she was back home in Dublin, it was far easier for her just to stay with her parents, at the old family home, at least until she had the time to buy her own place.
So in many ways, she almost used to think, Damien’s courtship of her had been markedly old-fashioned and Victorian, almost like something out of The Rules book.
Back then, they really were a couple to take notice of. The papers couldn’t get enough of them and in next to no time it seemed like it was the Damien and Kate show. They were everywhere: opening nights at the theatre, movie premieres, days spent in corporate boxes at the races, even the high-society parties. You could hardly open a glossy magazine or Sunday supplement without seeing their good-looking, shining faces beaming back at you. Gossip columnists should almost have paid them royalties, Kate used to think, for the amount of column inches they generated out of the pair of them.
They’d barely been together three months when the press took it on themselves to start dropping ‘gentle hints’, and pretty soon gossipy little articles started appearing that Kate would blush to read:
*
‘High-flying Globtech founder Damien and the glamorous lady on his arm, Kate Lee, were photographed at the opening night of La traviata at the Wexford Opera House last night. When questioned if he had any plans to make the lovely Kate the new Mrs King, Damien’s enigmatic answer was, “just write that when you asked me that, I smiled.”
‘Meanwhile, Kate, one of our top models and the current face of Chanel, is rumoured to be on the verge of taking a small cameo role in the new James Bond movie, to be shot in and around the Caribbean next spring. But when asked whether she’d care to confirm or deny reports about a burgeoning film career, her only reply was a polite “no comment”. When probed about whether she and Damien King were planning to tie the knot, her response was, “you know, I really think we’d better wind this up, it looks like the opera is about to start”.
*
And so in a frighteningly short amount of time, a media couple was born. Because Kate and Damien were dazzling together, one of those rare couples who somehow seemed greater than the sum of their parts.
On the eve of her twenty-fifth birthday, unbeknownst to her, Damien had decided to surprise her with a holiday abroad, to stay at the Hotel Cipriani in Venice, if you don’t mind. All pre-approved by Kate’s beaming mother, who was only too delighted to accommodate this handsome, successful guy who came from such a moneyed background and who seemed supremely confident that he’d go on to make millions more under his own steam. Basically the stuff of any mother’s dreams come true.
But then that was the thing about Damien, he had an almost lethal charisma about him. So much so that just about anyone who crossed his path would end up utterly bowled over by him. Kate had spotted it from very early on; how cha
rming he was to absolutely everyone he met, without exception. From senior executives at his father’s corporation, from whom he’d just borrowed heavily to set up Globtech, to the humblest busboy who came to clear the tables at the Michelin-starred restaurants he’d whisk Kate off to, almost bursting with pride to have this beauty on his arm. He’d smile directly at people, look everyone right in the eye and always, always remembered names. It was one of the things Kate really loved about him, his ability to walk with princes and paupers and to treat them both exactly the same.
When, out of the blue, that birthday trip to Venice came along, Kate was ecstatic. She knew the city, she’d once modelled here for a Victoria’s Secret shoot, but as always on those work trips, her schedule barely left her time to get to and from the airport, never mind do a bit of sightseeing. Months beforehand, she’d mentioned to Damien casually in conversation that she longed to see Piazza San Marco, to explore St Mark’s Square, to sail along the Grand Canal and really spend time at the Doge’s Palace.
And he’d remembered.
The whole trip had been magical from start to finish. From the moment they’d touched down at Marco Polo airport to step onto a speed boat that whizzed them directly to the Hotel Cipriani, Kate had almost felt like she was speeding through an oil painting.
But it was their last night that had been the most memorable of all. It was Kate’s birthday and Damien had insisted on hiring a private chef to cook for them at the villa suite they’d been sharing. They’d eaten out so often and were both exhausted after doing the whole touristy thing, so Kate was delighted, welcoming the fact that it was a rare night in for both of them. Plus, it had just started to lash rain, the kind of Mediterranean rain that comes down in horizontal sheets, so a boat trip anywhere would have been a nightmare.
Dinner was served on their own private balcony overlooking a rain-soaked lagoon, but for some reason that evening Damien didn’t quite seem like his usual affable, charming self. He was acting all jittery and edgy, and conversation between them didn’t seem to flow as easily as it normally did. Every time Kate tried to chat about a fresco or sculpture they’d just seen, he’d just clam up, or else give her a curt, monosyllabic reply. So unlike the Damien she knew, who normally you couldn’t shut up.
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