by Sue Watson
‘You haven’t changed,’ I say, making small talk. ‘You look the same – and I guess you still don’t follow the rules. I don’t know many men of your age who’d sit on the grass in a wedding suit.’
‘I try,’ he laughs, ‘but breaking rules isn’t sexy in your sixties, it’s just seen as eccentric or annoying, and it plays havoc with your back.’ He rubs his lower back with his hand as if to demonstrate.
I laugh in recognition. I never imagined him old with aching joints – I still see the eighteen-year-old boy in his eyes and find it hard to reconcile this with the steely grey hair, the weathered skin.
‘With you in your wedding finery and me with ferns and oasis sticking in my hair, we both look eccentric and annoying. If we’re not careful our kids will put us into one of those twilight homes for the old and bewildered,’ I laugh.
‘You will never be old, Rosie – not to me.’ He looks me up and down. ‘Eccentric, a little crazy perhaps, but never old.’ I laugh and nudge him in a mock reprimand. He always teased me, and it’s amazing how quickly we’re slipping back into our former roles. Despite everything that happened, after all this time – we still fit. It strikes me that I still like this man sitting next to me on the grass in the sunshine. I would like him even if I’d never known him before. I am older now, I’m not that teenager in his thrall, I’m in control, yet . . . I know I’m vulnerable to his charm, his attention. He always made me feel like I was beautiful and interesting, it was so infectious I believed it myself.
‘This is nice . . . ’ he says, and I’m not sure if he means the gardens or us, but it doesn’t matter. His smile and easy laid-back way still have the power to seduce me, and my quick responses and confident façade aren’t doing anything to smooth over my mashed-up thoughts, torn between wanting to kiss him or slap him hard across the face. I try to drive these feelings away, smiling up at the sunshine as we sit and stare out at the gardens together. I’m probably in shock, it’s like the past just suddenly appeared and grabbed me by the throat saying, ‘Hey, you . . . do you remember this?’ And the crashing wave continues to overwhelm, enveloping me with the memories and the sheer thrill of it all – along with the fear of drowning.
I see some of the guests milling around the garden area near the bar. ‘I think the wedding is about ready to start,’ I say, not wanting him to miss anything.
‘Meeting you is kind of bigger than a wedding.’ He looks at me. We make no move to go and I wonder what the people in the bar think when they see us here together, just another old couple, I suppose, nothing extraordinary. If only they knew – the strength of passion, the decades of longing and all that happened between us.
He turns toward me, hand on forehead shielding his beautiful eyes from the sun.
‘It’s not every day one meets the . . . well someone who . . . ’ He seems suddenly awkward.
‘Yes,’ I say quickly to cover his embarrassment.
‘You’re married, I take it?’ he says, now staring out at the gardens again, not looking at me any more.
‘Yes. I was, well, I still am in a way. Mike . . . my husband . . . he died, just over a year ago.’
‘I’m so sorry.’ We gaze ahead, watching two children chasing each other around the lake. They are dressed in wedding clothes and look like something from an Edwardian photograph in this setting. He’s smiling – he always liked children and I wonder fleetingly if he has any of his own. It makes me think of what we might have had, what might have been – thoughts I’ve revisited countless times over the years.
‘How old was your husband?’ he suddenly says, breaking the thick silence.
‘Only sixty-four. It seems funny saying “only”. I remember when I was younger I would think someone dying in their forties had had a good innings.’
‘I know, crazy, yes? I always thought if I got to fifty I’d done well and could die happily of old age.’ He shakes his head, smiling in disbelief. ‘We hadn’t a clue, had we?’
I shake my head in agreement.
‘Then again, life seems to go on for so much longer these days.’
‘For some of us . . . ’ I say.
‘Oh, sorry, Rosie. I didn’t mean . . . ’
‘No, it’s fine. It’s been a huge loss, to me and the girls, but we’re starting to regroup and I’m beginning to feel more positive about life. Oh, it’s a cliché, I know – but Mike’s death has made me realise how short life is and how we make all these plans and . . . ’
‘Life happens while you’re making them?’
‘Yes . . . something like that. Didn’t someone famous say that in the sixties?’
‘It was probably me,’ he laughs with a twinkle in his eye.
He’s gently teasing and in spite of myself I can’t help but tease him back . . . he’s bringing out the teenager in me. I can feel her around me, the way I’m holding my head to one side, looking at him under my lashes, playing with my hair. I feel like the girl I used to be – she’s putting her hands over my eyes, ‘Guess who?’ she says, and I’m happy to see her. I thought she was long gone.
‘Was it a happy marriage?’ he asks, and though I’m surprised at the question I’m not offended by it. Peter and I were once so close it feels natural to ask quite personal questions of each other even after all these years.
‘Yes, it was. A very happy marriage. Mike was a wonderful husband and though we married young and had our ups and downs, it was good. He was always there for me . . . and now suddenly I’m lost.’ I hear my voice break, and to my astonishment, my eyes fill with tears. ‘I’m sorry, I don’t know where this has all come from.’ I wipe my eyes with the back of my hand. ‘We haven’t seen each other for all this time and I’m now blubbing everywhere. This is the first job I’ve been on in a year and the girls are worried sick I’m just going to collapse in a heap . . . and you turning up . . . it’s just a bit of a shock.’
‘No, it’s me who should be apologising, I shouldn’t have asked you about your husband, it was thoughtless.’ He reaches into his pocket and hands me a beautifully ironed handkerchief. I take it gratefully and remember he has a wife who probably ironed it lovingly for him.
I wipe my eyes and I’m aware time is marching on but I don’t want to move. I don’t want to say goodbye to him again, I’m not ready to finally close the door on something I’m not finished with. I wonder if he feels the same.
‘Did you ever get to Paris, Rosie?’
I shake my head. ‘No, I suppose it was just a teenage fantasy, and once I was married with kids and a mortgage I found it harder and harder to imagine a real life spent sketching in a café on the Left Bank.’ I wish he hadn’t mentioned it, the thing that held us together. I remember a map of Paris he gave to me – I still have it, but opened it up so many times it’s now held together with sticky tape. I still devour articles on Paris and I’ve bought a million guidebooks, always meaning to go, but in truth the thought of it was never quite the same after.
We sit in silence again. Every word has to be carefully chosen, I don’t want to say something that might set us on the wrong course and ruin this one meeting with my vintage hurt. I want this to be my moment, the day he walks away from me knowing what he lost and regretting what happened, because that’s how he made me feel. I want him to feel it too, to know the pain he put me through.
‘I’ll go, I’ll go to Paris one day . . . before I die,’ I say.
‘Shall we go now? Let’s just run away to London and get on a train to Paris,’ he says, and I see the excited boy under the steely grey hair. ‘It may be a little different than we planned, we probably can’t walk as far, for a start, and there’s my back to consider,’ he adds.
‘Mmm, I’m not sure sleeping on the floor of an artist’s garret would be good for my back these days either,’ I laugh.
‘What’s the line from Casablanca? Bogart says to Bergman, “We’ll always have Paris”, and we will.’
I smile. ‘I suppose so, no one can take away your dreams, can they?’<
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‘It’s somewhere I’ve dreamt about a lot over the years . . . with you, Rosie, always with you.’
I smile at him indulgently, I can’t help myself. I’m remembering again what a dreamer – and a charmer – he was and how impressionable I must have been to go along with it all.
‘I think Paris is a state of mind,’ I say. I won’t be seduced by his twinkly smile and fond reminiscences.
‘In Paris we’re teenagers, the sun’s shining and we’re walking hand in hand through the streets. Let’s be teenagers again, Rosie. After all, it was only the day before yesterday . . . ’
‘You haven’t changed.’ I’m shaking my head and smiling at him. He’s still full of life, but somehow he’s softer, less arrogant than the eighteen-year-old I fell in love with.
‘So let’s book into a hotel and do it in style . . . who cares how we do it, Paris is Paris.’
He’s refusing to be put off his idea – he is joking, of course, but with a little encouragement I imagine he probably would run away to Paris now, a few minutes before the wedding. He always loved an adventure, something new to discover and sod the consequences, he’d deal with those later – or not. He never wanted to be in the same place for too long, and being Peter he never had to be – he was one of life’s lucky ones and always managed to get his ticket out.
‘As much as I’d love to join you on this impromptu Parisian odyssey, there’s the small matter of a wedding.’ I smile. ‘And sadly I have the van keys so I can’t run away to Paris today, the girls won’t be able to get home. One of us has to be responsible. Let’s leave running away until next week?’
‘Okay, next week it is. I was about to grab your hand and make a run for it now over the rose garden.’ He looks at me, his cheeky grin still firmly in place.
‘How romantic,’ I say, but what I really want to ask is, What happened to us? Why did you never try to find me? How could you do that after all we’d been to each other?
But in keeping with my sixty-something respectable businesswoman and widow persona, I keep it light and appropriate, if a little flirty: ‘I don’t think your wife would be too pleased at you abandoning her at a wedding to run off to Paris with an old girlfriend.’
‘My wife? Oh . . . Camille, you mean? She’d be delighted, she’s always trying to get me fixed up, I think she feels sorry for me.’
‘Really?’ I was horrified and intrigued. ‘Do you have one of those open marriages I read about in my daughters’ magazines?’
‘No. Oh God no,’ he laughs. ‘I’m sorry – I still refer to Camille as my wife, force of habit, I suppose. We were married for twenty years then estranged for ten, never bothering to get divorced. We both agree we should never have married, but finally got around to divorcing when she wanted to marry someone else.’
‘Oh, was that difficult for you?’
‘Yeah. Very. He’s more handsome than me, and he has a lot more money. Can’t think what she sees in him.’
He obviously doesn’t want to go into his marital break-up and is trying to play it down with humour, so I don’t pursue it. But I have to confess my spirit lifts to hear he’s divorced. Okay, perhaps I’m understating my response slightly when I say my spirit lifts – I mean it soars and dances around the gardens shouting ‘Yess!’ I have this urge to run along the grass singing, ‘Oh what a beautiful morning,’ but my daughters will, no doubt, be watching through the window and at the sight of this would be also dialling for an ambulance.
So I abandon the song and dance, sit on my hands, lift my chin and try to look seventeen instead. I don’t know why I’m so pleased at his single status, it’s not like anything would happen between us now, we’re both on the wrong side of sixty – it would be ludicrous.
‘So, you’re on your own now?’ I say.
‘Yes, I live in Oxford. Camille had the house in France . . . and so she should, her father paid for most of it.’
‘That sounds nice.’ So he married one of his kind after all.
‘Oh it is, the house in France was featured in a magazine recently; Camille insisted I do the photos, which was nice of her.’ He smiles at the thought. ‘She has a real eye for interior design, very French chic, I think you’d call it.’ I wonder if he still has feelings for her. Did she break his heart like he broke mine? Was she his nemesis in the same way he was mine? ‘I have some of the photos here.’ He takes out his phone and opens up a world of huge, high-ceilinged rooms in eggshell blues and greys. Big sash windows framed by floating white curtains flood the rooms with light and tease glimpses of lavender in the gardens. He shows me a bedroom with an enormous bed, deep, fluffy pillows and beautiful ornate framed photos and paintings. And here I am, looking at pictures of the life he chose instead of being with me.
‘It’s stunning.’
‘It was a wreck when we bought it but within a few months Camille had created this wonderful living space – she’s very talented.’
He continues to scroll through the photos, our heads close together as I peek into his world.
‘Is that your artwork on the walls?’ I say, keen to move on from his ‘amazing’ ex-wife.
‘Some of it, the photos mainly – the paintings are hers.’
‘Oh, she’s an artist?’ I say, amazed at the vague feelings of envy that tingle through me. I could have been an artist. I could have lived with him in a house like this.
He puts away Camille and his phone and we sit in silence for a little. We’ve caught up on the immediate stuff of life, but underneath the smooth and smiley surface so much more is thrumming in my head: Did you really think about me over the years? Have you any idea what happened to me afterwards? Did you even care? But I’ve told him I don’t want to talk about these things and he’s respecting my wishes.
So I just keep things as smooth as his French pillows, and smile politely, continuing our story swap but unable to excavate the depths. ‘Where . . . when did you meet her?’ I say, wondering how long after me she came into his life.
‘I met her when I was at art college . . . in London. Her parents were friends with mine, we’d known each other since we were kids.’
‘Oh, so you went to London after all?’ Why didn’t you tell me, why didn’t you get in touch? Why didn’t you write to me and share the experience I never got to have?
‘Yes . . . I worked for a few months at the vineyard in Italy that year, then I travelled for a while but my father wanted me to come home and start my “real life”, as he called it.’
He looks at me and he’s about to say something and so am I though I’m not sure what, when Pamela appears and calls out to him.
‘Peter, I’m so sorry, darling, but the wedding’s about to start.’
‘I’m not going to lose you again . . . not now I’ve found you,’ he says quietly, waving a hand in acknowledgement at his sister. ‘Can we meet up . . . just lunch, a coffee?’
And I know I shouldn’t, he’s the last thing I need in my life right now, but I feel seventeen again, as we stand gazing at each other for a few seconds. I melt, my heart in a puddle on the ground until Pamela calls again, reality seeps into the rose garden and I remember the last time we said goodbye. Crowds of people, tears streaming down my face, the nauseating smell of burnt sugar heavy in the air and my chest tight with hurt and shock. Then the loneliness, the endless nights lying awake, imagining him far away, living his life – and missing him so much the pain was physical. And here he is now inviting me for lunch or coffee but I can see he wants more. I’m not being presumptuous, I still know him so well, he’s here, asking me to love him a second time, but he’s forty-seven years too late. I’m too old to love again.
‘I don’t know, Peter,’ I sigh. ‘Perhaps we should just say goodbye and walk away. I want to remember the good times we had.’
‘Why goodbye when we’ve only just said hello again? And who’s to say there aren’t more good times to come? I thought we were running away to Paris next week?’
I laugh. ‘I
hope there are some good times to come for both of us, but perhaps not together. You and I already had our time. I have to be realistic, I’m not seventeen any more and neither are you. It would be foolish to go down the same road. I’m a grandmother of sixty-four and I should know better.’ I really should know better, but even as I say this I feel like I’m on emotional sinking sand, rapidly slipping under.
‘I understand. This has all come out of the blue, for both of us, but I’m not asking for anything more than friendship, a remembered past. As I’ve got older I’ve thought more about those teenage years, and I would love someone to share them with. Well . . . you.’
I nod, reluctantly, shrugging and feeling myself being gently swept towards him into the vortex of our past.
‘Look, Rosie, why don’t we arrange to meet once, just once? We can laugh about how naive we were and share some lovely memories. Please say yes?’
After everything that happened I’m discomfited to hear him talk of us being ‘naive’ and sharing ‘lovely memories’. My naivety was in loving him and our happy memories were burned in the wreckage – along with the future we’d planned. But he’s looking at me now with that old smile and the past and the present are twisting together and I want to know his story.
‘Okay,’ I say, unable to resist the pull.
‘Perhaps you could give me your phone number and I could call you sometime?’ he says.
I suddenly feel hesitant. I waited a long time for that telephone to ring. Am I being stupid even contemplating waiting for another phone call just so we can meet up and open all the old wounds? But his eyes are still so blue, and he still has that ‘something’ he always had, and the seventeen-year-old girl who’s now by my side begs me to say yes.