Harry （Part 1） #2
Anyway, Harry made me laugh from the outset.
It’s not that he was ridiculously funny – I mean, he wasn’t a stand-up comedian or anything – but he did have excellent delivery and a way of using his body to emphasise the point that really got me going.
So he’d say something averagely amusing but wiggle his eyebrows and wobble a hand from side to side in a way that made me giggle.
So there’s a tip, any hopeless single men out there: forget the candlelit dinner. Just make the girl laugh!
Afterwards we walked together to the crossroads where our paths diverged. It was raining that special kind of English drizzle that makes an umbrella seem absurd but leaves you soaked through without one.
‘So,’ Harry said, smiling lopsidedly and shrugging.
‘So,’ I repeated.
‘The question is, um…’ Harry continued hesitantly. He pushed away a wet curl that had fallen over one eye.
‘My place or yours?’ I offered, cheekily completing his phrase.
‘Oh!’ he said. ‘Christ! You nurses… I would never have dared ask that. From a guy that would count as sexual harassment or something. At the very least unbridled misogyny.’
‘Oops,’ I said. ‘Go on, then. Feel free to finish the far more boring thing you were about to ask.’
‘I was only going to… um, ask…’ He had a confused expression. ‘God, I feel like I’m being a bit stupid here… sort of asking for beer when I’ve just been offered Champagne.’
‘Just say what you were going to say,’ I told him. ‘Really. I’m winding you up.’
‘I was going to ask if I could see you again, but it appears that maybe I can.’
‘Yep,’ I said. ‘Anytime you want.’
‘Oh,’ Harry said. ‘Wow. And that includes the option of, um, right now, does it?’
‘It does. So, the question then is…’ I said, nodding at the crossroads.
‘Your place or mine?’ Harry said.
‘God, that’s so misogynistic!’ I exclaimed. ‘How dare you!’
‘Some chicks like that stuff,’ Harry said, with a weird snarl that made me laugh.
‘Look, my place is fine,’ I told him. ‘But I do have a nosy flatmate…’
‘Me too, only mine’s gone home for the entire week, hehe,’ he said, still doing a funny voice. ‘So we’d be all alone, just you and me, chicky babe.’ He winked and clicked his tongue against the roof of his mouth.
‘That’s settled, then,’ I said, taking his arm and pulling him on along the pavement.
‘Right,’ Harry said. ‘So is this a nurse thing? Because I’m used to girls playing much harder to get. I mean, don’t get me wrong. I like it.’
‘No, not a nurse thing at all,’ I said. ‘I think it’s more of a “I’m really into you” kind of thing.’
‘Right,’ said Harry. ‘Gosh!’
‘Don’t sound too happy,’ I said.
‘Oh, I’m happy,’ he said, sliding one arm around my waist. ‘I actually can’t remember feeling happier.’
Now, when Harry has told that story over the years, he always says that it was love at first sight. But though this will sound cynical on my part, that’s not something I believe in. No, what happened was more a question of compatibility at first sight. Harry just fitted me like a glove.
I found him pleasing to look at – I suppose that was the first thing, the thing that happened back in A&E. I liked the size of him, his big hands and feet. I liked his curly hair and chunky jumper. I liked his old-school brogues.
The conversation felt easy from the outset, too, and I think that was as important as anything else. Harry seemed solid, comforting and amusing, and even during that first meal in Pizza Hut I could imagine us old, still getting on.
The love bit – the hormone rush that makes you unable to think about anything else – did happen, but it happened a few days later.
Within a week, tearing myself from him in order to go to work felt like trying to gnaw through my own arm.
It’s just that didn’t happen – and I don’t believe ever really happens – at first sight.
But I’m sure someone out there will disagree.
Anyway, ours was more love at second pizza and the rest is so classic, so predictable, that I won’t bore you with too many details.
I moved into Harry’s place – it was bigger, brighter and cheaper than mine – and, after we’d graduated that summer, we enjoyed a few years doing the ‘young lovers’ thing with some panache, even if I do say so myself.
We had lots and lots of sex, went to concerts and dropped occasional ecstasy tabs in nightclubs.
We spent wonderful romantic weekends in Paris, Brussels and Rome and had the obligatory massive argument in rainy Berlin.
Nowadays I can’t even remember what that one was about, but I do remember that it was bad enough that we sat as far apart as possible during the journey home.
Once we’d got over our two-week post-Berlin sulk/separation (because it was never that clearly defined), we felt pretty much invincible and decided to get married and also – virtually without discussion – to stop using contraception.
We bought a wreck of a house with a sixties kitchen, a leaky roof and two extra bedrooms for the kids we assumed we’d have, and spent our weekends and annual leave doing it up.
Once the place had been rendered liveable, we shagged until Todd popped out, and once I’d got over that (because, of course, babies do not pop out) we did it all again so that Todd would have a sister he could spend his entire life resenting – Fiona.
Life changed so gradually that we didn’t really notice it happening.
But the sexy trips to exotic cities gradually got swapped for weekends painting walls, and then fraught weekenders in kid-friendly campsites…
Life became packed lunches, sports kit and driving kids around. Lots and lots of driving kids around.
We weren’t unhappy about any of this, I do want to make that clear.
We loved our kids more than anything, and we enjoyed the lives that having children imposed on us.
But it was definitely a different kind of happiness and I’m not sure there was ever a moment when we consciously realised where we were heading.
That’s my main point, I suppose, because if we had known what we were choosing, would we have still done so?
It felt, in a way, like we were following someone else’s groove – or rather, everyone else’s groove.
It did lead, as society promised, to a kind of contentment that was enough to get by on – it wasn’t awful in any way.
But if one were to compare and contrast (which I was always too terrified to do), it would probably rate poorly against the joyful freedom of youth.
Life certainly felt less unpredictable, less exciting, less alive.
People label this ‘settling down’, ‘growing up’ and ‘being sensible’, which makes the process feel inevitable. In the end, you just get on with it, and try not to question things too much, don’t you?
But then suddenly, one day, you might wake up, the way we did, and find that you can’t hold the thought off any longer. Is this really what I want?
Along with the love-at-first-sight thing, I’ve known people who claim their relationship has been one long honeymoon, but I never really believe that either, do you? Not unless they’re admitting that they argued on their honeymoon, too.
No, I’m sure that every marriage has its ups and downs not to mention a few make-or-break crises.
Because we had such exhausting careers, I suspect we didn’t have as much goodwill in reserve as other people. It took less to throw us off our matrimonial stride than maybe it should have. Major life events often left us at each other’s throats.
We had a noteworthy bust-up, for example, around the time Harry’s father died, simply because that was when Harry ran out of patience with everything – the everything including me.
Because nobody wants to be the woman who dumps her partner while he’s grieving, we got through that one and lasted until – with the help of some excellent anti-depressants – Harry got his mojo back.
Other life changes that caused havoc were the birth of Fiona (and specifically the sleepless nights she imposed), buying a bigger house, moving houses, Harry changing schools and me writing off Harry’s brand-new car.
Each of these led to a moment where at least one of us doubted wanting to continue.
Sometimes a mere run of bad luck – a toaster fire, for example, combined with a recalcitrant insurance company at the same time as a roof leak, a missed promotion and a damning report card from one of the kids – could be enough to have us feeling divorcey for a week.
But then the leak would get fixed and the kitchen repainted and I’d wonder why I’d ever cared.
But our jobs, thanks to successive austerity governments, got harder and harder to bear.
When Harry arrived home ranting about a lack of textbooks, lack of discipline and lack of staff, I’d counter with my own list of missing drugs and beds and hours in the day.
From about 2010 onwards we were too exhausted to even listen properly to each other’s complaints.
And then Covid happened and it didn’t just rock our little boat, it sank it.
Being a nurse, I was one of the first to feel its full force.
Our health system had been struggling for years.
Expensive new drugs, an ageing population and million-pound scanning devices could all be paid for from existing budgets, we were told, as could all the money being siphoned to the shareholders of private companies the government increasingly chose to contract out to.
So even before Covid we had eighteen-week waiting lists because operating theatres and surgeons were fully booked.
But when the pandemic happened, well… Unless you were there to witness it, you really can’t imagine how bad it was.
Within days, we’d run out of beds, respirators, anti-virals, face masks and gowns. We were working eighteen-hour shifts with disposable, non-reusable masks we’d laundered at home, held in place with gaffer tape because the elastic had broken.
I remember walking through our front door at 10 p.m. on 31 March and bursting into tears. We were less than ten days into the first lockdown, it was my birthday and my only gift was discovering that the pandemic had already broken me.
Harry held me and made me dinner that night, but within a few weeks no one at home even had the energy needed to empathise with me. They were all too busy fighting battles of their own.
Harry was in a blind panic from mid-April, a state in which he remained for almost two years.
He’d been instructed to create a new online curriculum for both Physics (his subject) and Biology (which was not).
Within a month he’d been told to run off-campus Chemistry teaching as well because the poor asthmatic Chemistry head was in the wheezy process of dying, very slowly, in my hospital.
The pressure from Harry’s principal was apparently unbearable – and I mean that quite literally.
None of his staff could bear it. Two had breakdowns and three left teaching forever.
Add to this Harry’s responsibility for homeschooling Fiona and Todd – because Yours Truly was simply never at home – and you can probably see why he was as close as one can get to a breakdown without ending up in a psych ward.
By then, it didn’t matter if I complained, cried or shouted about my lot – all Harry had to offer was a selection of platitudes combined with his newly developed wide-eyed stare.
Occasionally he’d still get up and hug me, and that was probably the thing that worked best. But once my colleagues started getting ill with Covid no one wanted to hug me much either, in fact they avoided being in the same room.
And who could really blame them? I mean, it’s all very well isolating from other people, avoiding groups, sticking to your bubble, washing your shopping and all that malarky… But what to do about Mum when she’s breathing the same air as a hundred Covid patients every day?