Fifteen years earlier
You began leaving notes in the library cubicle where I worked.
I’d go off to look for a book and when I came back I’d find a folded piece of paper on my desk, emblazoned with your spiky blue scrawl.
Lunch?
I wondered how you had found out exactly where I was, my preferred spot in the library, away from the second-floor socialites and the back-and-forth traffic by the loos.
I wondered if you were hidden in another cubicle close by, watching me open your note with your arms folded and that downturned smile.
How was I meant to find you even if I was considering having lunch with you – which, I told myself, I absolutely wasn’t.
There was Sam to consider, after all, and I knew your kind, the decadent, excessive crowd you ran with; I knew to steer clear.
But still each new note made my heart beat a little faster.
Is today the day? read one.
Do you like oysters?
asked another.
Without acknowledging it to myself, I was spending a little longer getting dressed these days, casting aside one jumper in favour of another, bothering with make-up, intensive brushing of hair.
The next Milton tutorial came and went, but the chair next to mine remained empty; the hour, the Professor’s weak voice, the decoding of Book IV, were interminable.
I was desolate walking back to the library, desolate.
Get a grip, I told myself, you have a boyfriend.
Well, almost, an almost boyfriend.
Sam and I had been taking our time, friends first but always with that suggestion of something more, smiles meant only for me, his dark-eyed gaze watching me when he thought I wasn’t looking.
Finally at the beginning of our second year a moonlit walk around the harbour, where we’d tentatively held hands, and then, a few nights ago, our first kiss.
He was all I thought of during my first year at university, this tall, football-mad, star-gazing scientist, until you crashed into my medieval English tutorial and tipped my world on its head.
There was an edge of magic in the way the next note materialised, while I was working, studying my Milton text, head bent over my books.
I must have been concentrating hard for I saw and heard nothing; gradually I became aware of another foreign piece of paper in the corner of my desk.
This one was different.
I opened it up to find a pencil drawing so detailed and atmospheric I gasped in the formal hush of the library.
A restaurant, one with walls made of wood like a ski chalet and tables covered with gingham cloths.
Jam jars of flowers so accurately drawn I knew they were gerberas, I could picture the intensity of their petals, cerise or tangerine orange, I thought.
One of the tables had a bottle of wine and two glasses filled almost to the rim, and beside it you had written, Ours?
And just that simple pronoun filled me with an illicit blood rush.
At the bottom of the drawing, an instruction: I’ll be outside the library at one o’clock.
Your blue script was familiar to me now; I recognised the loops at the top and bottom of your l’s, the curlicue y, the aesthetic, I understood, of an artist’s handwriting.
This drawing of yours had given me an unexpected insight; it had propelled me forwards into a place of less resistance.
There was an oversized white clock on the wall and I glanced up at it.
Ten to one. The world tilted with possibility as I watched the minute hand click through its passage of time, looking down at the intricate sketch – posters on the walls I saw now, miniature forks with all four prongs in place – and back up again at the countdown to my future.
At exactly one o’clock, I picked up my books and left my desk.