Chapter 20 #2
‘I thought you might. You know, we’re all dealt different hands in life and we can’t feel guilty about them.
It’s what we make of the hands we’re dealt that counts.
And obviously it happened to your brother, but it happened to all the rest of you too.
You’ve lived through terrible trauma seeing that happen to your brother and you haven’t crumbled, you’ve stepped up and been a wonderful support to the rest of your family. ’
‘I can’t crumble.’ The least I’ve been able to do for Max and my parents is stay strong.
‘I know.’ She inches closer to me and places her hand on mine for a moment. ‘Which is a big burden in itself. You have to deal with your own grief over what might have been for your brother. And you have the worry for the future, I’m guessing.’
‘Yeah, that’s one of the reasons I work such long hours doing this job. I mean, I genuinely think I would have been happier being a carpenter or a tree surgeon. But I need the money, for the future, so that I’ll always be able to look after Max.’
‘You’re wonderful and I think you have to understand and truly accept that you shouldn’t feel guilty that it happened to him and not you.
It’s so destructive to happiness feeling either guilty or jealous.
Every single one of us can look around and see people who we love who are on the face of it unluckier than us, and similarly luckier than us.
We can’t compare or feel guilty or envious; we can only do the best we can with our own circumstances.
I hope it doesn’t sound insensitive for me to say that things could be worse for Max.
He could have had the same accident but not had such a wonderful, supportive family.
And things could be a lot better for you: you could have had a family that didn’t experience such terrible trauma. ’
I’m frowning and I’m also almost smiling. Somewhere through her speech I’ve started to feel lighter.
‘It’s weird,’ I say. ‘Sometimes you can carry something with you for a long time and just one sentence or short conversation can make you feel differently about things. I think you’re right.
And I think I’m going to remember this moment forever.
I feel… better.’ I put my arm round her and hug her into me briefly before releasing her.
‘Thank you. Really. I’m incredibly grateful. ’
She shakes her head. ‘You have nothing to thank me for. It’s all just true, and you are a wonderful person, and your family are lucky to have you, and I’m just glad if something I said helped at all.
’ She looks at me for a moment, and then says, ‘I had a thing with Lizzie on Wednesday. She said some stuff that made me think about things differently too.’
From the way Freya’s looking at me, I feel that Lizzie might have said something about her views on romance. I would very much like to ask but I’m really not sure how to frame the question. Given that I do have a vested interest.
So I say, ‘Oh?’
For a moment I feel as though Freya’s going to say something kind of big, from the way she’s pressing her lips together, then relaxing them, and then slightly screwing her face up.
But then she says nothing.
And suddenly, I go for it. ‘Going back to our conversation the other day, I wondered what it was that happened to you. What the thing was that made you decide that relationships aren’t for you? If that isn’t too much of an intrusion.’
‘Yeah, no, it isn’t an intrusion. And I suppose it’s very simple.
As you just said, sometimes you have a one-off event or conversation, or hear just one sentence from someone, that makes a huge impact on you and affects the way you see things forever more, or causes you to make a big life decision.
And, yep, I do know when it was. It was the day of my father’s funeral.
And, coincidentally – well, not really coincidentally; it was because of you – I had a similar conversation with Lizzie the other day.
She told me that she thinks I’m not rubbish at relationships and talked me through every single one of my many failed romances and pointed out that they weren’t my failures. ’
She pauses and takes a sip of the water she brought outside with her.
‘So after that conversation,’ she continues, ‘which was on Wednesday, I got thinking. And yes, I do know the catalyst for me realising that I can’t do relationships.
It was after the funeral, at the drinks, and there were a lot of bitter exes of my dad’s there – one of them my mother – and I wondered why you would go to the funeral of someone you really loathed.
And they did definitely loathe him; they weren’t holding back.
And then I realised that they had all still loved him and had had bad relationships with him.
And that it was his fault. And then someone – one of his colleagues – told me that I was very similar to him and I was simultaneously pleased, because I’d kind of always wanted his approval, and not pleased, because of his disastrous relationship history, and the fact that I had a terrible track record too. ’
She pauses again, takes another sip, and then concludes with: ‘Yes, so that’s it. That was the moment.’
‘But you haven’t left a string of exes who hate you?
’ I say. ‘I mean, obviously I don’t know any of your exes.
’ I actually feel like an ex myself even though we did not have a relationship at all, we just had a weekend of sex.
‘But I know you – somewhat, at least – and I find it hard to believe that you’ve upset people. ’
‘I’ve made some people angry,’ she says, as though she’s sticking up for herself. ‘I had a couple of quite controlling boyfriends and they were not pleased when I left them.’
‘That isn’t you being, horrible, though?
’ I want to hug her again as she frowns in a very cute manner as she digests my words.
‘Going back to something you said, and at great risk of sounding like a complete amateur psychologist quack, and without wishing to criticise your father in any way, if you always wanted your father’s approval do you think the facts are that he was a difficult man and you were perhaps – in other relationships – seeking reassurance and approval from men similar to him?
And you aren’t in fact like him? Perhaps when his colleague said you were similar to him they actually meant you looked like him?
And weren’t necessarily particularly like him personality-wise, or temperament-wise, or certainly not relationship-wise?
’ God, I hope he did look like her, otherwise I could just have made matters a lot worse. ‘If you do. Did.’
‘My goodness.’ Freya sniffs. ‘You are an amateur psychologist.’ She sniffs again and wipes a finger under her eyes. ‘I think you’re a good one. I think you’re right.’ She puts her glass down and wipes again, with both fingers this time. ‘I think this might be a conversation I remember forever too.’
I want to ask her right now if she’ll go on a date with me.
I’m terrified to, though. I don’t want to destroy this, here, what we seem to have now.
So I just say, ‘Beautiful evening for big conversations. The sky’s so clear.’
‘Yep. The stars.’
She isn’t looking at the stars, though, she’s looking at me. Her lips are slightly parted and I can’t take my eyes off them.
There are a lot of her friends and a lot of my friends just on the other side of the balcony doors, though, so us kissing right now would be a really bad idea.
And maybe it would be anyway.
I really, really like Freya. If there’s any possibility of us starting a relationship, we should probably spend some time together actually getting to know each other better away from Sonja and her cameras before we leap into bed together again.
‘Are you free tomorrow afternoon?’ I hear myself asking. ‘Would you like to meet for a walk?’
Freya smiles. ‘That would be nice.’
We chat a little more, and then we go inside.
I feel as though we’ve had exactly the same thought about resetting things and getting to know each other better before anything else happens, if it does, because at about midnight Freya tells me that she’s ordered an Uber and will see me tomorrow for our walk; there’s no suggestion of me accompanying her home, which I think is absolutely the right thing.
When we meet on Wimbledon Common the next afternoon for our walk, I’m pretty sure that my face is split into a foolish grin, and I’m pleased to see Freya beaming at me as we approach each other.
‘Hello,’ she says.
‘Hello.’
We begin to walk, side by side, no hand-holding, and we just chat.
We chat a lot. We walk from where we met, next to a large pond in a big open expanse of grass, across the Common to where there’s a windmill, with a tea shop.
We get tea and cake and talk the whole time.
Sometimes it’s serious; most of the time it’s just chat.
We smile, we laugh, we listen. When we’ve finished our cake, we wander down to another pond and look at the ducks and moorhens, before continuing our walk.
Our arms brush a lot – we’re definitely walking more closely together than you would with someone who you thought of as just a friend – and at some point – I’m not even sure how it happens – we begin to hold hands.
It’s a great, great walk.
‘We’ve been so lucky with the weather,’ Freya observes as we complete our big loop of the Common and end up back where we started.
‘Yeah.’ I feel a lot luckier about the company than the weather, though.
We decide to go to a nearby pub for a drink, and then we decide that we’d both like fish and chips. Eventually, it’s last orders and time has apparently flown.
I walk Freya home, and at her front door we kiss.
It’s a long, tender kiss that, certainly on my side, feels full of promise.
It would be so nice to go inside with her, but I feel as though I want to take things slowly, prove to her that she’s right in her realisation that it isn’t her, it’s just that her other relationships were bad; she can totally have a great relationship.
I’m very much hoping she feels the same way, though, because in reality I don’t think my self-control would actually stand up to her inviting me in.
‘I’ve had a nice day,’ Freya says eventually.
‘Me too. I should probably get going. Work tomorrow.’
‘Yeah.’
And then we share another lingering kiss before I say, ‘Goodnight, then.’
‘Goodnight.’
That was Sunday. We meet on Wednesday. And Friday, with friends. And Saturday, with friends. And Sunday, just the two of us.
And then we continue to meet.
We go for walks, to the cinema, out for dinner. We play tennis, we do a pub quiz, we go to Camden Market.
It’s nice. Lovely. Wonderful. Perfect.
Three weeks in, Freya comes to my house for dinner on the Saturday evening, with Dan and Lizzie. We agreed that we owe them and we also agreed that we will cook together, with Freya in charge.
She comes over early afternoon; we’ve agreed that we’re going to do most of the dinner prep then (I have no idea what she’s talking about but I’m sure it will all become clear), then go for a walk, and then finish off the cooking before the others arrive.
Earlier in the week, I suggested reprising our Sonja MasterChef challenge.
Freya said, ‘Or we decide what we’re cooking and just buy the right ingredients? For an easier life?’
I said that was a good point and she placed a supermarket order online to be delivered to my house.
So here we are, in my little-used (but very well-equipped; it was refurbished straight before I bought it) kitchen, about to cook.
‘Okay.’ Freya fishes two navy-and-white-striped aprons out of her bag. ‘Do you remember how to chop an onion properly?’
‘For a usually very relaxed woman you’re very fussy about your vegetable-cutting,’ I tell her.
‘If you’re going to do something, do it properly,’ she says severely.
‘Harsh,’ I say.
‘Excuse me.’ She nudges me in the ribs and I – obviously – catch her in my arms and plant a kiss in the nape of her neck, and she – obviously – turns and winds her arms around my neck, and I kiss her on the lips, and next thing I have her lifted and sitting on the kitchen counter, her legs round my waist, and from there we do things that should probably never be done in a kitchen.
It’s a good job I keep almost nothing out on the worktops.
Some time later, I pick her up in my arms and carry her through to the big sofa in the living room next door, and we carry on there.
It’s amazing. This is the first time we’ve had sex since the team-building weekend, and it’s even better in some ways, because now we know each other so much better, and this isn’t a frenzied one-night stand, pure passion thing; there are – from my side, anyway – definite feelings involved.
Okay, it’s still quite frenzied, but there’s laughter and there are terms of endearment, there’s knowledge of each other, there’s…
well, maybe there’s something that could definitely turn into love. It’s tender along with the frenzy.
It’s pretty bloody amazing basically.
Eventually, Freya – stark naked (as am I) – sits up from the sofa and then dives back down on top of me (which I’m startled by, because it does not seem particularly amorous, but am not complaining about).
‘It’s the middle of the day,’ she hisses. ‘And the curtains are open.’
‘Hmm.’ I think about the angle of the window and the back of the sofa, and the tree between the window and the road. ‘Hopefully no-one will have seen anything.’
‘Where are our clothes?’ Freya lifts her head and looks around the room.
‘I think they might be in the kitchen.’
‘Okay. I’m going to crawl to get them.’ And she slides off the sofa and commando-crawls naked towards the door before standing up and scuttling into the kitchen. She emerges with her clothes clutched around her. ‘Bathroom?’
‘Upstairs, first on left.’
And off she dashes, still naked, holding her clothes.
The whole thing is one of the sexiest things I have ever seen in my entire life. Possibly the sexiest.
I think I’m in love.
Too soon to mention it, though.