by Stella Grey
And Then He Kissed Me
AS WINTER TURNED TO SPRING, AND YEAR THREE BEGAN . . .
The third date pub was just as rammed as the last one and we had to stand at the bar. I had a plan, for when things didn’t go well: I was going to say that perhaps we should stop dating and be friends. (Of course in the romcom narrative that would be an indirect route to true love, though I’ve never found that life coincides with the romcom narrative.) When Edward turned to me to hand over my beer, I told myself to stop feeling that this was an interview, and relax—not something I’d ever found easy in the two years I’d been on the quest. I decided to pretend that he was someone I’d been at university with. We’d known each other thirty years ago, I decided, and were comfortable with one another, and could be subversive as well as newsy.
One of the killers of any authentic process of getting to know someone is the weight of expectation. Too often, midlife dates are like waking up on Christmas morning with a stranger. (Where do you start? What shall we do, what’s your tradition, and who are you?) It came to me that that was the question to ask. “So who are you, really, Edward?” I asked. His face softened and his posture relaxed. I’m fairly certain he was as anxious as I was. I said that I’d start. (Nothing to lose.) I summed myself up, using some pungent Anglo-Saxon, and he laughed and joined in with a pithy summing up of himself. A table became free and we grabbed it, and I realized I was hungry.
“Do you have any really unhealthy bar snacks?” he asked the barmaid. We ordered the gourmet platter of terrible bar snacks and retreated to our corner.
“If you could bear a fourth date, I’d like to cook for you,” Edward told me.
My heart jiggled happily. “Are you a good cook?” I asked him, surprised.
“Not really, but it’s basically chemistry, and I like doing chemistry.” There was a brief diversion into how we’d changed as people since our marriages ended. “We change, and change is fascinating,” he said.
I found myself watching his mouth as he spoke, and met his eyes again. You know the way a person looks at you, that look in their eyes when they’re thinking of sex? It was possible there was that. His expression was warm and intense. “What would you cook for me?” I asked him.
He told me he’d been trying to imagine what my favorite meal was, aside from a French steak in peppercorn sauce. After he’d said that, we were off; we talked and talked. I’d been sure this was a man I wasn’t interested in, and that he was even less interested, but what I thought now was, Perhaps I haven’t blown it after all. It was as if we were meeting properly for the first time.
It was much chillier when we came out onto the street, and we put on our hats and scarves, buttoning up against the cold. “What I’d like to do, if it’s all right, is walk you to your door,” Edward told me. “Let’s not get the bus; let’s stride out—come on. I love walking through the city at night, don’t you?” It was something else we had in common, because I do love it: that feeling of ownership of the place, in the dark when the city’s off duty, when it’s dormant: the cars whooshing by and the buses and cabs, the silhouettes of magnificent buildings and the million lights. I was still rooting around for my gloves when Edward said, “Here, take my hand.” He removed one of his enormous padded gloves, his winter cycling gloves (he isn’t a man who has more equipment than he needs), and took my hand in his much bigger one. His was warm and soft. He squeezed my fingers lightly and said, “That’s better.”
The thought that came to me then—I’m confessing this—was, Oh my God, this is a Mr. Darcy situation . . . well, okay, maybe just a Mark Darcy one.
We talked more as we walked along and it seemed, now, that there was a lot of ground to cover. I don’t know if he was excited. I was excited. Something was happening to me; something was cranking into life. Interrupting our stream of conversation, we paused at lit-up shop windows and amused ourselves discussing the merchandise with brutal honesty. Eventually we got to my corner. Ordinarily I ran from the bus stop, on ink-black nights, because I got spooked by the road’s being lonely and deserted. I didn’t tell Edward this, but nonetheless he insisted on going out of his way. We walked along the empty street, still holding hands, and stood at my door saying goodnight. When goodnight had been said several times, and we had both added comments to it, necessitating saying goodnight again, and had come to a halt and had nothing else to offer, when I expected Edward to take his leave, going off with a wave . . . he remained standing there, looking down at me. He didn’t move. He looked more serious-faced than ever, like a man with something important to say. He took his other glove off and unbuttoned my coat—it only had two buttons, so this wasn’t a prolonged event—and put his hands around my waist. This took me by surprise; I’d associated his general reticence with probable sexual reticence; I hadn’t thought of him as likely to be even this physically assertive. He made deep eye contact, throughout these rather erotic few moments. (You know the way a person looks at you, that look in their eyes when they’re thinking of sex? It was possible there was that.) Moonlight glanced off the warm intensity of his eyes. He said, “I’ve enjoyed tonight. What are you doing tomorrow? Can I cook you dinner?” And then he leaned down and he kissed me.
I went upstairs and into my flat, and closed the door by reversing into it, and stood with my back against it, laughing. I grinned while I took the dog out for his last pee of the day. I wished passersby on the street a good evening, with perhaps excessive chirpiness for the lateness of the hour. As I stood in the kitchen and made peppermint tea I joined Alison Moyet on the iPod in singing “Dido’s Lament.” The song always moves me, but that night there was something transcendent about it. Time seemed to slow. I was alive, my senses fizzing, feeling all the feelings at once. My life has never flashed before my eyes, like they say happens in near-death experiences, but I had a sort of concertina of flashbacks, standing there and singing along. My brain was growing hectic and I had to calm myself. I took the tea to bed, and sat up with the duvet pulled up to my shoulder, and laughed some more. “Oh my God,” I said aloud. “Well, that was surprising.” I chuckled softly to myself, from time to time, as I lay trying to sleep.
So, the morning came, a fine Saturday morning, and Edward and I were all set. We had a plan, cooked up via text message at 8 a.m.; he’d warned me already that he was an early riser. We’d meet straight after lunch, go for a mooch, have coffee, read papers, do the crossword—we were both crossword fans—and look at paintings. He was more than happy to go to a gallery and have me talk at him, he said (I’d warned him I might; I get enthusiastic in museums). He didn’t visit galleries much, he’d told me, not on his own, but he’d been to a cinema showing of a film made at an exhibition, and I’d been to the same one. I wasn’t ready to go to his flat and be cooked for, so we were going to end the day at a small Indian restaurant. Crosswords, art, curries; similarities were being ticked off. The plan was all set.
I left the house shortly after we’d finished texting, pulling on clothes before washing because the dog was restless and couldn’t wait—and brought coffee and croissants and newspapers home. I had a leisurely breakfast, and then I went into the bathroom intending to have a shower. But when I opened the door things were not as I’d left them. Water was spurting out of the inlet pipe of the toilet, out of the joint in the pipe leading into the loo. I’m not just talking about a drizzle of a leak. There were fountains. There was already a lake on the floor. My first instinct was that I should call Edward. It didn’t occur to me to try to find a plumber—a plumber could easily have taken hours to arrive; even a job classified as urgent might, in reality, have been fourth or fifth on his list. It was perfectly possible, likely even, that Edward was going to tell me I needed to call a tradesman, and that was fine. I thought that he might have good ideas about what to do in the interim, though. As I dialed his number I was already heading for the kitchen to find the floor-washing bucket.
“Help, there’s water spurting out of my toilet!” I said without pre
amble, when Edward answered. “Not the pan, I mean, but the pipes, and I don’t know what to do.”
“Let me find my tools and I’ll be right there,” he said. “Turn off your water supply; I’m coming.” A little while later he arrived, on his bike, and parked it in the downstairs hall of the flats, and raced up with his tool bag. It transpired that he’d re-plumbed and rewired his first home; it was the kind of challenge he enjoyed.
And so Edward spent most of our fourth date on his hands and knees in front of my water closet. The fault was tricky to get at and the repair didn’t go smoothly. He cursed and twiddled and cursed some more. “The pipes don’t line up,” he said, “and the plastic thread has largely been stripped and PTFE tape isn’t holding it, and also I notice you need a new ballcock.” This last comment wasn’t said with any innuendo—he’s not an innuendo kind of a guy—so it was only my mouth that twitched. I confined myself to nodding knowledgeably. He went off on his bike, twice, to get parts, and I hovered intermittently at the bathroom door saying how grateful I was, and how I really must learn some of these skills, and would he like a bacon sandwich? (He would. He ate two, and had three cups of tea.) He didn’t finish the job to his own satisfaction until just after four. Then he had a shower with a borrowed towel and drank more tea, and sat at my kitchen table in his now grubby clothes, looking strangely wildly attractive. Don’t tell me that I shouldn’t have felt this attraction, and that it was only down to a conditioned female response to men good with spanners, one that obliterates centuries of feminism. For one thing, so what: my feelings were mine; they were feelings, and weren’t pushed through the fine mesh filters of gender politics. Furthermore, and far more importantly, what was really happening in my mind, in my heart, was more of a response to his selflessness.
Edward ate a lot of biscuits and then he ate most of some leftover cake. We did the crossword and I held my own in helping solve it, and felt totally relaxed around him. I was relaxed around him in a way I absolutely hadn’t been with any of the men I’d seen since my divorce. It was strange. The whole episode had marked some decisive sea change. Both of us, in the course of the day, had stopped trying to be ourselves with one another, and had abandoned all effort to please, and just were ourselves. It was as if we’d survived a disaster. The loo disaster had brought us together. All the usual date-related anxiety had vanished and there had been some sort of reset, so that being around one another felt completely normal. It was a bit like being married again and spending a lazy weekend afternoon at home, and it was a good feeling. As I was thinking this my phone buzzed with a text message. “Are you still coming at 8 p.m. for drinks?” it asked. “Oh God,” I said, “I completely forgot, I’m supposed to be somewhere tonight for somebody’s birthday.” Edward took this in his stride. He hugged me at the doorway, holding me close for a good long moment, then kissed me and said we should do something tomorrow. I heard him whistling as he wheeled his bike out into the street.
That evening, I might have annoyed my friends by talking about Edward a lot. The conversation kept coming back to him. I had been dismissive of him, I imagine, in the way I’d spoken about him previously, so now I felt the need to set the record straight. There needed to be a stark and total corrective. I had to account for the way things had changed, via two moments: the way he’d taken his glove off on Friday, to hold my hand, and the way he’d come to my rescue today.
“Oh my God,” Chief Sensible Friend said. “You’re falling for him, aren’t you—you’re falling in love with him.”
“No, no,” I protested. “It’s way too early to talk like that; but he spent five hours cheerfully fixing my loo.”
The group is all midlife and separated/divorced, and conversations at these get-togethers with wine aren’t ordinarily oriented towards admiration of men. We’ve all dated and we have our stories. My obviously being smitten might have been a bit irritating. I intuited this after I was told, “For God’s sake, will you just shut up about Edward?” In the week that followed there’d also be some divorced-women’s-group eyebrow-raising about how many evenings we were spending together. I saw him on four of the five days that followed the Great Plumbing Incident. We went to the cinema, the theater, did more crosswords in pubs, and talked more about our marriages and their implosions. We found we shared a retrospective distance. Like me, Edward wasn’t the instigator of divorce. As in my case, his long-term relationship was the victim of midlife concepts of newness, the great midlife restlessness that had infected both of our exes.
But then the next weekend loomed, and its yawning unscheduled time was making me a little anxious. What would happen if I stopped initiating conversation? What if the ease of the previous weekend deserted us? Dating experience had brought falls onto hard, unforgiving surfaces, when such social pedaling failed. I needn’t have worried, though. When Saturday came, Edward turned up looking completely relaxed. The gray V-neck was off and tied round his neck, signaling playtime. He said, “I have this car I hardly use; let’s go out and about in it.” We went to see some very modern art, and I was confident he’d be a traditionalist, but he surprised me by being interested in the installations and the big conceptual stuff, more so than I am. He stood looking at things I’d walked right past. He was interested in the construction and the engineering, he said.
We went back to his flat on that Saturday night, and my heart was skipping nervously, because I’d discovered that sometimes sex can mark the end of the affair. He lived in a classic divorced-man pad—he was renting and searching for something affordable to buy with his settlement 50 percent. The flat was dismal, tired, tiny, with technology in abundance and leads stretching across the floor. He’d bought himself a new bed, though, and had dismantled the rental one. He’d been to John Lewis for nice new bedding.
He decided he was going to cook for me. I sat on the sofa drinking wine, and he sang along to Lou Reed and the Alan Parsons Project while he made dinner. He came back and forth with the wine bottle, and lost track of time, so that by the time we came to eat, the chicken was tough, the potatoes had disintegrated and the mangetouts were soggy. “I’m better when I have a recipe,” he said. “I tried to wing it and lost confidence.” We ate, and he tidied up, and then he came back into the sitting room, and kneeled solemnly in front of me.
I’d wondered, as I’ve already said, if Edward would prove to be as hesitant in matters sensual as he’d been in other areas of his life. I’d thought that perhaps, being a person who lives so much in his head, he wouldn’t be particularly sexual. But I was very wrong. That’s all I can tell you. Very, very wrong. Anticipating that this might be the night, I was wearing the Sex Shirt, the one that also acts as a baggy cotton dress and is invaluable for post-coital bathroom visits. I did my usual whole disguise routine. Edward read the situation instantly. “You don’t need to hide, you know,” he said. “I approve of every inch of you.” He kept marveling, in bed, at how soft my skin was and how good I smelled. He had the smooth palms of a man who’d spent his life working at intellectual problems rather than with his hands (other than days fixing people’s toilets, obviously). Nor did he have a boy-man’s porn-fan’s issue with female body hair. It wouldn’t occur to him to judge. You’re incredibly beautiful you know, he said, and though I’m not, not remotely, he seemed to be completely sincere. I could sense that he was smitten, that there had been a collapse of his defenses, that he might already be mine, and I felt the first spasm of fear.
On Sunday we drove out into the country and walked through the gardens of a manor house and ate scones in their tearoom. I cooked for him that evening, and because I had people staying with me he was plunged into meeting members of my family, who of course were all madly curious. Edward was adept, coolly friendly under their scrutiny, and survived; he wasn’t remotely rattled. For the three nights that followed this we cooked and ate together and lay in bed afterwards, talking in the dark, discovering more about each other’s music collections. Meanwhile, the work days were interrupted by interm
ittent (text only) Skype chatting. Edward was having trouble concentrating, he said. He was happy; was I happy? I was. And yet . . . I was having trouble adjusting. Suddenly it was all full-on. It was moving at top speed into something settled, into the rhythm of a partnership. In the space of a month, two shy, unsure strangers had begun dating, had become a couple, and were now more or less living together, even though they hadn’t yet spent a night in the same bed.
By the following week Edward and I were in constant communication. Some days I had to say, “Stop, stop talking, I’m getting so far behind.”
“Me too,” he’d say. “And isn’t it great?”
“I’ll get stressed if I keep being interrupted,” I had to say. “I’ll see you tonight, so tell me then.”
He stopped Skyping but continued to send texts, telling me about funny things that’d happened, and work frustrations, and random thoughts and how he was missing me. Which was truly, deeply, lovely. But I began to be afraid. Was this it? Dare I be this happy? It wasn’t asked consciously but the subconscious started to nag. The conscious mind was horrified that I could be so ungrateful. It occurred to me that Edward wanted very much to be settled. He needed his domestic life to return to a contented, predictable state, so that he could function properly. He hadn’t been good at being alone. He’d been worse at it than I had.
What happened, under this pressure, was that eventually we had a row. Like most rows, it wasn’t about what it was apparently about. That would be like saying that earthquakes are caused by the ground rising up. What really caused it was that I was scared. I was afraid of declaring the search over and another phase of life beginning. I was afraid it wouldn’t last. I was continuing to wonder if I should have canceled the memberships—for yes, I’d canceled them. I’d been around the dating sites and had deleted my profile at every one.* (*Though somebody told me several months later that I was still listed at two of them, where people who’d canceled remained on show so as to boost their numbers, which is a shameful practice.)