Love to Hate You (33 page)

“I was thinking about my flat,” replies Ian.

“You mean
my
flat,” says the Duke, rather inelegantly.

“I mean the flat I pay rent for. But I have no difficulty with moving out and looking for another, if that's the problem.”

His grandfather looks at him icily. “Of course not. That's not the point.”

“Yes, I'd worked that out for myself,” replies Ian, growing increasingly angry. “May I know exactly what this insurmountable stumbling block might be, then?”

A silence descends suddenly on our table and no one dares to breathe.

“Well?” prompts Ian.

“You can't really imagine that you two are compatible,” says his mother, looking serious.

“Mother dear, if you and father think that
you
are, then I am very happy to be totally incompatible with Jenny—”

His mother looks at him in annoyance, but says nothing else.

But I was sure that his grandfather would not be able to restrain himself, and I'm proved right. “Ian, you cannot seriously be considering going through with this: Miss Percy is a very intelligent, very interesting person, nobody denies that, but if you are serious in your intentions then you must see that you have chosen entirely the wrong kind of person.”

I was afraid that sooner or later someone would say something like that. And that my mum wouldn't be able to overlook it.

“Excuse me?” she says indignantly, raising her voice. “What exactly do you mean?”

Ian's grandfather looks perplexed. No one ever addresses him in this way. “No offence, ma'am, but we are one of the most important families in England and we have always regarded alliances in marriage as being of the most vital importance.”

My father laughs. “Right, so Prince William can marry a girl whose ancestors were miners but your family can't mix with commoner blood?”

Ian's grandfather is extremely annoyed. “Without detracting from the royal family, please remember that you are talking about a German line whose pedigree is not comparable in any way to ours. There is a difference of something like five hundred years of history.”

From bad to worse. At this rate, blood's going to flow.

“Something tells me that your blood's too blue and it needs a bit of new life. Too much inbreeding must have given you lot brain damage,” says my mother spiritedly.

Lady St John at this point feels obliged to speak. “It is more than just a matter of blood. No offence, but there are some essential qualities that a future duchess should possess.”

Oh greeeeeat…

I can't hold back a nervous laugh. “Fine. Well, since we've brought out the big guns, let's at least try and speak our minds,” I suggest to all, trying not to show how offended I am by her intimations.

But my mother has been stung. “Do you perhaps mean that my daughter isn't pretty enough? Are you kidding? Jennifer's gorgeous! Not to mention that she has more brains than all the girls that you're son's been out with put together.”

Apparently it took a nightmare meal like this to finally drag a compliment out of her.

Ian looks at her with a discouraged expression. “That's the way I feel too, mother.”

My mother is in full flow, though. “Anyway, it's your son who doesn't deserve Jenny! Somebody so vacuous, who only cares about appearances—”

“Mum,” I try and cut in, “let's not go too far.”

“Jennifer, please. This is serious.” As though I hadn't realised that for myself. “You can't really be thinking of moving in with Ian, knowing how he was raised and the world he lives in.”

Well, it doesn't take much more for total war to break out, with everyone screaming at each other and nobody listening to anybody else.

I knew it would end like this.

Maybe Ian can continue to kid himself that things can work between us, but I know they can't.

We might even decide to move in together, but eventually these quarrels between our families would affect us too, and they would gradually create a fracture that would ultimately bring the whole house of cards tumbling down, leaving only rubble.

I love Ian. It's strange to realise the fact right now. I love him so much that I'm convinced that these tensions will wound him. And maybe a small wound today is better than a mortal one tomorrow.

I wish there was an alternative, but I can see no other way out.

“Ian,” I whisper, trying to get his attention in the pandemonium.

He turns a disheartened face to me. I understand.

“Ian, I knew this would happen. If we'd thought about it for a moment we could have imagined it from the beginning.”

He looks at me quizzically.

“Our families will always be a problem, there's no point telling yourself that they won't. No one lives in isolation. These people brought us up and they affect our decisions. I'll be honest, I don't think that there's anything else we can do but split up, right now, before we move in together.”

Ian looks at me dumbfounded – he clearly didn't expect anything of the kind.

“What you are talking about?” His voice is hard.

“I care about you, I really do, but we can't go on like this.”

His sweet expression suddenly becomes frosty. “If you're going to give up at the first stupid bloody obstacle, then you obviously can't love me very much.” His voice is hurt and disbelieving.

In truth, the problem is totally the opposite: I love him too much. “I always tend to be the more realistic of the two of us, you have to admit that,” I say quietly. “So if I decide to do something like that it's because I really don't see another way out. We'd end up rowing, saying hurtful things, and in the end we'd hate each other. And I don't want that. So it's better to end it here. We knew from the start that we were too different.”

Ian gets up angrily from the table, so abruptly that all present suddenly go silent and turn towards him.

“You're windbags, the lot of you. You ought to be ashamed of yourselves!”

And he storms out.

I try to follow him, but once outside the restaurant it's as though he has evaporated into thin air.

I arrive fifteen minutes late. Not like me, but these last two weeks have been so surreal that I'm just amazed that I'm functioning almost normally, to be honest. I eat (a bit), work (not very well) and try to sleep, but don't manage much, as the epic bags under my eyes testify.

I suffer from a disease that was completely unknown to me, the one called 'impossible love'. The love I feel for Ian is so deeply rooted inside me that I can hardly function, and at times I even feel as though I'm literally unable to think. It's pretty pathetic get to thirty before finding out what it's like to really fall in love.

I suppose sooner or later it was bound to happen to me.

In any case, after crying non-stop for a couple of weeks, Stacey and my friends have finally convinced me to set foot out of the house, so this evening I'm in this Italian restaurant because I'm meeting Eliott.

Stacey arranged the meeting, not so much to force me to go out with another man as to talk to a psychologist.

A waiter leads me to the table where Eliott is sitting patiently waiting for me and smiling. Lucky him, still having reasons to smile.

“Hello, Jenny,” he greets me, happy to see me.

“Hi Eliott,” I answer, sitting down.

“Normally I'd tell you that you look great, but you don't, to be honest.” I understand that the many sleepless nights are impossible to hide, despite the make-up.

“I appreciate your sincerity, really I do,” I say, smiling. “I do still walk in front of the odd mirror, and what I see isn't exactly reassuring.”

It's the truth, no point trying to get around it.

“At least you're aware of the problem. That's a first step towards healing,” he says in a professional tone.

If only it were all that simple. “I'm afraid this illness will be very long and painful,” I admit, becoming immediately gloomy.

“I take it there wasn't a clean split, then,” says Eliott. We both know who he's talking about, we don't even need to say his name.

I look at him in resignation.

“Clean? Is there any such thing as a clean split? Let's say that in our case, external causes played a role,” I confess. It must be obvious to him that the wound is still raw. “Never get the families involved,” he says, sensing the problem immediately.

“I know, I know. But ours are so difficult that we
had
to involve them. It would have been totally irresponsible not to,” I explain.

Eliott looks at me as if he was actually dealing with a little girl. “And what does Ian say about it?” he asks. Just hearing his name makes me wince.

“I don't know, to tell you the truth. I haven't had any idea for two weeks,” I admit, not particularly proud of myself.

“You mean you haven't spoken since?” he asks, in surprise.

“Frankly I feel too awful to talk to him. I suppose he feels the same way, because he's never tried to talk to me about it. And if we pass in the hallway, we just try to ignore one another. Perhaps he didn't love me as much as he wanted to believe after all—” I say, pretending not to feel as horrified at the idea as I do.

Eliott laughs. “Believe me, the man I met that evening was one who was very determined and very much in love.”

“We can agree about 'determined', at least.”

“Excuse me, Jenny, but if being apart makes you feel so bad, why not try to get back together?”

It's a question that's anything but stupid. I have asked myself it several times.

“It's not like I haven't thought about it, believe me. I don't like admitting it, but of the two of us, the one who was most certain was Ian. Without him, I don't know how to do it. It's as if I'm suddenly wandering around in the dark.”

Eliott looks at me kindly, with understanding. “So if you could go back in time, you wouldn't break up with him?” he asks.

I look at him with sad eyes. “No, I don't think I would. It was a stupid thing to do. Now I understand that our families are important, but not as much as us. They can't tell us how to live our lives. I'm afraid I've learned the hard way that they either accept us the way we are, or… or they can piss off!”

Eliott looks very satisfied with my answer. “So what's stopping you from going to get him back?” he asks.

I rest my elbows on the table and hide my head in my hands in desperation. “But how?” I moan. “He's bound to have got somebody else already. His diary's probably full of dates with one of his brain-dead barbies.”

I hear my psychologist friend chuckling softly. “Something tells me that it isn't—” he says, enigmatically.

I lift my head. “What do you mean?”

Eliott points to the figure of a man who has just entered the restaurant. Unfortunately, I'd recognize Ian anywhere and at any distance. As he walks over, I realise with surprise that he's not looking too great either: he's got a few day's growth of stubble and his eyes are lacking their usual electricity.

With long, determined strides, he approaches our table.

“Ian,” I exclaim in surprise, with an expression that must be a mixture of joy and terror. What the hell is he doing here? And above all, how did he know that he would
find
me here?

Ian says a quick hello to Eliott, who greets him in an almost amused tone, and then stares at me intensely. “Jennifer—” he says, sounding very resolute.

I'm about to speak but he cuts me off with a gesture of his hand. “I know that it wasn't a great idea just turning up here like this—” he says.

“I'm not—” I say, but he cuts me off again.

“Please don't interrupt me,” he says, and gets even closer. “I prepared a bit of a speech while I was driving over here and I'm afraid I'll forget the lot if you don't let me finish. I haven't been sleeping that well for the last couple of weeks, so I'm not quite myself.”

“Tell me about it,” I reply softly, but he doesn't hear.

He takes my hand as soon as I stand up, while the entire restaurant around us watches the scene.

“First of all, I shouldn't have gone off like that during lunch. I should have stayed there and tried to make you think straight,” Ian says. “Because I know that eventually I could have talked you round.”

“Actually—” I tell him, but he stops me again.

“Second thing, I shouldn't have gone on about moving in together, because the truth is that I'm not really the living-together type.”

I look at him blankly, not understanding what he's talking about: so in the end he didn't even want to live with me after all? I try not to show how hurt I am, but it's hard.

“Jenny, I'm not that type of guy. I'm sorry, but I have to do this and I have to do it my way. When I've finished you can answer me and send me packing for good, if you want. I swear that I'll never barge in on you while you're having dinner or you're out on a date again.”

What on earth is he talking about?

“And so—” he starts, as he hunts for something in his jacket pocket. He pulls out a small blue velvet box and takes a deep breath as he visibly steels himself.

Suddenly I start trembling and feeling as though I might be sick. Still holding my hand, which in the meantime has gone very cold, Ian kneels down in front of me. The whole restaurant breathes a unanimous sigh of surprise.

“Jennifer Percy, I know that you're going to tell me to get lost, and maybe I deserve it, but I have to ask you anyway.” For a moment there's a pause during which there is no sound, not even of cutlery.

“Will you marry me?” he asks, the emotion audible in his voice.

And so saying, still looking me straight in the eyes, he opens the box containing the biggest diamond I've ever seen in my life. I guess this is the famous five carats the Duke was talking about that day…

I stand there for a moment, speechless and too surprised to answer.

From behind me, I hear a girl say, “I swear to God, if she doesn't marry him,
I
will!”