His lip quivered once. When I offered up the loss of my mum, Kit simply said, ‘Oh, Laura, I’m so sorry. That’s no age for grief.’
The floor between us suddenly contained two graves, one full and overgrown, one empty and waiting. I became aware of the background music and for a long time neither of us said anything. When the CD whirred to its end, Kit gulped a couple of times, as if he was working up to a big speech, before mumbling into his jumper, ‘I like your hair.’
(I like your hair, or some variation on those words, was the first thing most people said to me back then. It had been waist-length mousy-brown string when I arrived at university; desperate to reinvent myself, I’d bleached it in my halls-of-residence bathroom on my first night away from home, turning it into a skein of bright white silk. I’ve worn it that way ever since, doing the roots every three weeks. It makes me sound incredibly high-maintenance, but I don’t wear much make-up and I don’t follow fashion. When you only have one vanity, I think you’re allowed to indulge it.)
Kit reached over to pick up a strand; it looked luminous in the candlelight. ‘I could never lose you in a crowd, even in the dark,’ he said. When he put his hand to my cheek, I could feel his heartbeat in his palm.
We had fumbled, disappointing sex by the dim light and feeble heat of a two-bar electric fire. It was nerves that ruined it; nerves and the unspoken mutual knowledge of how much it already mattered. But January nights are long, and by the morning, apprehension had worn off and something new had taken over. I felt swept clean by Kit, rewritten, unable to think I had been with anyone else. We never had that conversation. I joined the dots between his anecdotes and worked out that before me, his love life had been a series of false starts. And if he was doing the same with me – extrapolating the data, as he would have said, from my own carefully pared stories – well then, he must have known that nothing else had come close to what we had. From his own stories, I soon understood that no one outside his family had ever noticed Kit much unless it was for passing an exam, and felt sorry for everyone who’d overlooked him or hadn’t tried to get beyond his clumsy exterior. They were missing out on a whole world. That he let me in was an honour, and a point of pride; I took the responsibility I felt for his heart seriously and vowed every night to live up to his image of perfection.
Only a very young woman would think this way.
The longed-for I love you came in different words, spoken in Kit’s bed in Oxford, in the middle of the night.
‘Laura.’ My own name broke urgently into my sleep. ‘Laura.’
‘What’s happened? What’s wrong?’ I tried to search his face in a shaft of weak light from the landing, but caught only an unreadable silhouette. His fingers threaded themselves through mine, as if to prevent escape.
‘I’m sorry, I couldn’t sleep. I need to know.’ He sounded on the edge of tears as he took my hot hands in his cold ones. ‘This. Us. Is it the same for you as it is for me? Because if it isn’t . . .’ He was shaking. I finished the sentence for him in my head. Because if it isn’t, I don’t think I can handle it. Because if it isn’t, end it now. I wanted to laugh at the simple beauty of it, but could tell how much courage it had taken him to ask.
‘It’s the same for me,’ I said. ‘I promise. It’s the same.’
That conversation was our marriage proposal. From the following day we talked unselfconsciously in terms of ‘when we’re married,’ of our future children, the house we’d live in when we were old, and when Kit spoke of eclipses he would travel to ten, twenty, thirty years in the future, it was taken for granted that I would be there too, holding his hand under the shadow.
Chapter 4
LAURA
18 March 2015
A peachy dawn breaks gently over Alexandra Palace, a graceful backdrop to my VAT return. Keeping my PC offline, I fill in a spreadsheet in the study, grateful for the distracting humdrum logic of the task. The paranoia of last night hasn’t faded with the dark. If anything I’m getting worse, the closer Kit gets to boarding. It’s one of those days when I wish I worked in an office, so that I could flush out anxiety with small talk about last night’s telly or whose turn it is to get the teabags in. Instead, it’s just me and a red telephone that seems to glow with menace.
A couple of weeks ago, I dropped my guard at a conference and was caught in a publicity photograph. The women’s refuge I sometimes work for posed with their sponsors holding one of those giant novelty cheques. Since I closed the deal, I was there in the background. The refuge has put the picture on their website, and I need to ask them to take it down, or to crop me out or even Photoshop me out. At least they haven’t printed my name. Kit and I decided when social media was in its infancy that we would leave no digital footprint. In the days where you can find anyone at the click of a mouse, we have to work harder than ever to make ourselves untraceable. I do what I always do when I’m faced with a phone call I don’t want to make, and write a list of what I want to say, refining it into bullet points. When I’m training new fundraisers, I tell them that the single most important thing – even more important than believing in your cause – is to have a script. Never make a phone call without one. If you can’t condense your pitch into four bullet points, you’ll never hit your targets. It never usually fails me, but now I stall after the first point.
? I cannot have my picture published on the internet.