I owe him my seriousness, though, as it is a serious subject. ‘I do want children, Justin – just to finish this point. Very much. But I would never rush into something to make it happen. I tend to be the kind of person who accepts things for what they are. Everything happens for a reason. So if it never happens, then some things are just not meant to be. I’ll be at peace with my life, whether or not kids are a part of it.’
A lovely warm expression lights his eyes; I can’t stop looking at them. ‘I love that you have that perspective on things.’ He takes hold of my hand, momentarily mesmerised by the sight of my fingers in his. ‘It’s just important for me that you know that I’m not going to string you along. I’m not the kind of person who would do that to someone. I didn’t do it to Lisa, and I’d certainly not do it to you.’
Lisa. Justin rarely speaks of his ex-girlfriend. I am still not crystal clear on why they broke up. So when her name suddenly comes up again, it resonates with me perhaps more than it should.
I go on looking at him. He wants marriage and a baby. He’s a fair person – he truly cares about me, perhaps on the same level as he cares about himself, because he doesn’t want to string me along, any more than he wants to be strung along himself. How did I find this fabulous man? And yet am I ready for all that he is? Can I be the lawyer’s wife, and mother of his children? Can I cope with his structure? With the intense, serious, sorted-out person he is – who, in many ways, is the very opposite of me? And then it dawns on me: What am I thinking? Of course I can cope! It’s everything I’ve always wanted. Love. Stability. Family. A decent man. And I love him. Let’s not forget that.
He gets up. He crosses the room and gazes out of the window into the spotted nightlights of Newcastle. ‘I know we’ve not known each other forever, and I hope you don’t think this is all moving too fast, but I feel something. It’s just a sense of optimism every time I look at you. I felt it from day one.’
I am with him on this. I’d have called it rightness. Overwhelming, incontestable rightness and belonging. Yet coming out of his mouth, optimism feels bigger. I stare at his back, his broad, bare shoulders, suddenly remembering what he said about the ill health in his family. I say a silent prayer, even though I am not the praying type: Please God, don’t let anything happen to him, like it did to his dad.
He turns around, meets my eyes and smiles. The qualities that make Justin different from any man I’ve known are the things that make me love him and yet are also the things that make me worry. He isn’t emotionally one-dimensional. He doesn’t seem to roll with the punches. There is a soft, gentle, thinking side to him that makes me wonder how strong he would be when push comes to shove. Though he would hate that I thought this.
‘So . . . are we in love?’ I ask him. I think of him just mentioning Lisa and wish he’d never said that name.
‘Are you in love?’ he asks.
Not how the answer was meant to go. ‘Well . . .’ I try to sound light. ‘I’ve always had this policy of not being the one to say it first.’
It isn’t true. Normally, I am the first one to say it: sometimes the only one. And the crazy thing is, sometimes I’d said it when I hadn’t even felt it, which makes me wonder why I had this need to declare bogus feelings just to get them to state where they stood. Why did I want to know if they loved me first, before deciding whether it was mutual? It felt more than a little messed up.
‘I’m not prepared to settle for anything less than in love, Justin. I sold myself short in my other relationships. And I don’t know if that was because, at heart, I’m a bit like my mother – I tend to fall for unreliable men – or if I just have questionable self-esteem. But I’m determined not to do that again. I just don’t need to be with someone so badly that I’ll take whatever terms they offer me.’
I sense he’s listening to me with every fibre of his being. He watches me for a long time, processing my words, processing me – or so it feels. I don’t know what he’s going to say, but somewhere far inside of me I almost want to say, Don’t, anyway.
‘Alice.’ He’s so damned grave. ‘The one thing I can say is you deserve someone who is so completely sure that you’re the one thing in his life he could never stand to lose.’ He pauses. He’s going to say, But you’re right. I’m not him. Only instead he looks distantly across the room and his face floods with something more indelible than sadness; I can’t say what it is, but I almost can’t look. ‘You know, all my life I’ve wanted to be like my father. The kind of man he was. The kind of husband, dad . . . My father loved my mother so much. They seem to draw energy and purpose from one another, and the spark that existed between them, well, you couldn’t not see it. Even I saw it, and I was just a kid. And yet look how fast my mother remarried after he died, which made me wonder all over again . . . Had it all just been an illusion?’ He looks back at me. ‘Were they both acting a role, and doing it so damned convincingly because their values had made them believe they had to? Then I wondered, do you ever really know someone? Is there really only one person for us in this world? Or is that all a bit of a myth of evolution that we are sold to somehow make us commit, produce offspring and feel inadequate if we screw it all up? Could you probably love, and live with, anyone if you put your mind to it?’