The Day We Met (27 page)

This is the corner of the napkin I gave to Claire to dry her face with on that first night in the café. I think about it as the first night, because it was. It was the first night of Claire seeing me again, the way she used to, even though she thought I was someone else, someone new.

I didn't go there to try and trick her. I didn't know what would happen until it did. Ruth rang me to tell me that Claire had walked off after the hospital, and somehow I just knew where she would be.

At first it hurt me when she didn't recognize me, and then it hit me. It didn't matter who I was. It only mattered that she saw me—that she talked to me the way she used to. It was just a glimpse of how things used to be, can still be, from time to time, but it was enough to keep me going, to give me hope. And I still believe that it was me Claire was talking to, and that she always
knew it, on some level. Because I believe that when two people are in love, the way that we are in love, the love lasts, whatever else happens. Perhaps for Claire everything about me was altered when we met in the café. But the love…the love stayed the same.

I didn't plan to keep that meeting a secret, either, but it was just so special. So rare. I didn't want to scare Claire off by talking about it.

No one really noticed that when we were both in the house, her house, Claire was becoming ever more distant and cold to me—no one except me. In the house, I became a stranger, an invader. Claire tried to be kind to me. She did her best, but she couldn't hide how it felt to have me there.

Outside of the house, though, I was a different person entirely to her—different, but still the person she loved.

Claire used to say it took her a lifetime to fall in love with me, and it did. This second time, though, it took seconds. Because we were already in love.

The second time, when I came to bring her back from looking for Caitlin, I did hope that it might happen again. I wished for it. And when it did…it felt miraculous. And that was when I realized, if I could just keep this connection with her—this bubble where we could love each other—then perhaps she would see me as her husband again. She might recognize me. It was selfish, it was unfair, especially when I met her in the library. It was wrong to put Ruth through that, but what else could I do? I had to be with her, whatever chance I got, and I had to hope that it would be enough to make her remember our marriage.

And then she found me in the garden. I hadn't been able to sleep, I was so unhappy, so confused by everything that was happening. I went outside because I wanted the cold to numb the
pain out of me, and then suddenly she was there. I don't think I have ever felt so close to her as I did in those few minutes.

She said goodbye to me, for good. Left me and chose me, and our marriage, all at the same time. She told me she needed to be with her family, and that I should go and find my wife. And that is what I decided to do.

Then the most miraculous, wonderful thing happened. When I arrived in Manchester, my wife was waiting for me. Perhaps we didn't have very long to be together again like that. And perhaps it might never happen again.

But now I know that I can hope, and I know that I will go on hoping, always hoping, that she will come back to me, one last time.

This is the quote—handwritten on a piece of headed paper—the quote Greg gave me on the day he came to the house for the first time to look at my loft. Caitlin was away on a school trip and I had just come off the phone to Mum, who'd called me to discuss the article she'd cut out of the
Daily Mail
for me, about how chocolate gives you cancer. Mum always liked to follow through on her helpful handouts with a chat.

I wasn't ready for him arriving, and I didn't plan to be: I didn't know I was about to meet the love of my life.

I didn't think I needed to worry about the hole in my slightly too-tight jeans, the surge of flesh that burgeoned over the top of the waistband, or that I was wearing one of Caitlin's old T-shirts that had a picture of a skull on the front and a rip along the neckline. Or that I was sweating from trying to clear the attic of all the accumulated stuff that had built up over the
years I had owned the house. It was chock-full of memories, some of them important, some of them just moments in time that meant something to me and no one else. I think I even resented his arrival as I pushed boxes into corners, mentally making a note of all the things I would have to throw away just to have an extra room in my loft, which, on reflection, I didn't really need.

The doorbell sounded while I was still up the ladder, and it took me a few seconds to climb down, so while I was stumbling down the stairs, it sounded again. I was quite cross. My cheeks were shiny and red, and I smelled of dust and perspiration when I opened the door and first met Greg.

“Mrs….Armstrong?” There was the faintest pause between the two words, as though, somehow, he sensed they didn't go together.

“Ms.,” I said, the way I always do. “I don't feel the need to be defined by my marital status.”

“Fair enough.” He didn't seem to care one way or the other. I let him into the house, which was hot and full of sunlight, showing every streak of dust and carpet scuff.

“So, it's upstairs,” I told him.

“Lofts generally are,” he quipped, and I glared at him. I didn't need a funny builder.

I climbed the ladder into the loft first, and he followed me. I remember feeling excruciatingly aware that this man's nose was inches from my bottom, and wondering what my bottom looked like these days. It had been an awfully long time since I'd bothered to consider it.

We stood there for a moment, bathed in the light of a naked electric bulb, as he took a pencil out from behind his ear and noted a few things down. He wore a tape measure on his belt, like a Wild West gunslinger.

“Pretty straightforward job,” he said. “I'll do the drawings, the calculations for you, and we'll get a structural engineer to sign off on it. You don't want stairs, just a better ladder and a couple of Velux, so it's going to be pretty quick. Need an extra bedroom, do you?”

“No,” I said, my hands on my hips as I looked around, trying to imagine this room the way I wanted it: flooded with sunlight, the floorboards stripped and varnished, the walls whitewashed. “I want to write a book, and it seems like all the rooms I have in the house already have a purpose that stops me from concentrating on it. So I thought a book-writing room would be the answer.” I smiled at him. “I expect that seems like craziness to you.”

“Not at all,” he said. “It's your house, and writing a book seems like a better idea than some.”

He smiled, not at me but at the space around us, and I could see him picturing it finished, too, and that the idea gave him pleasure. And that was the first time I noticed how broad his shoulders were, or how muscular his arms were, or the contour of his stomach muscles under his shirt. And then suddenly I did, and I registered too that my hair was screwed up into a Muppet knot on top of my head, and I was wearing my daughter's ripped T-shirt and a pair of jeans that technically didn't fit me anymore. Oh, and that I was certainly older than him, although I wasn't exactly sure by how much. I realized all of those things, and at the same time I was annoyed with myself for caring.

“So, shall we go downstairs, and I'll work out a quote for you—just a basic one at this stage, to give you a ballpark? Then if you decide to go with me, I'll do you an itemized quote and a contract, so you know exactly what you are paying for, okay?”

“Fine,” I said, suddenly only able to utter words of one syllable.

He went down the ladder first, and then me. I was about halfway down when I lost grip in my stupid flip-flops and fell the rest of the way, stumbling back off the ladder and into his arms. There wasn't a moment—no lingering, no touching a fraction longer than needed. He just set me straight on my feet with workmanlike efficiency.

“Never did quite get the hang of that standing up on my own two feet thing,” I said, blushing inexplicably.

“Well, we can't all be good at everything,” he said. “I can't even imagine writing down anything longer than a quote.”

I'm not sure precisely when I decided I was in love with him, but I think it might have been at that moment, the moment he went out of his way to put me at my ease. I followed him down the stairs and by the time we reached the bottom step, it was official. I was besotted, and that's the right word for it. Besotted. Because I knew right then it was a hopeless love, a love that could never come to anything, because I could never be that lucky.

We walked into the kitchen and he leaned against the counter and started to write. I spent the entire time looking at his bottom, smiling to myself about what an idiot I was being, and thinking about how Julia would laugh with me at school the next time I saw her. Just the thought of how mortified Caitlin would be, if she could see me, leaning up against the fridge, ogling this beautiful example of manhood like a crazy woman, made me giggle out loud.

Greg looked at me over his shoulder and then, seeing me smiling, turned around.

“What's so funny?” he asked me.

“Oh, I…oh, nothing.” I giggled despite myself. I giggled like a teenager bumping into her crush. “Ignore me, I am just being really, really stupid, for no apparent reason.”

His smile was so sweet, so slow, so full of humor. “I don't think so,” he said. “I'm very good at first impressions, and you are certainly not stupid.”

“Oh, really?” I asked him archly, knowing I was flirting fruitlessly, and deciding I didn't care. “What am I, then?”

“You are a woman who is going to write a book.”

I look back on that time now and wonder if I was right and if I was wrong at the same time. I knew that Greg and I were too good to be true, that it couldn't last, and I was right but also wrong. It can't last, but not because we don't want it to—and it will last even when it's over. It will last within Greg and me, no matter what separates us. And it will last in Esther and Caitlin, and the baby. It will last and last, even when it's finished forever, because in my heart Greg and I will always be holding hands, like the husband and wife in “An Arundel Tomb.”

And in the end, I did write a book. We all did. We wrote the story of our lives, and I am here, among these pages. This is where I will always be.

This is the first photo taken of you and me, Claire, in my hospital bed, sitting up with my bedcoat on, especially crocheted for me by my mum. Husbands didn't stay for the birth in those days: they visited, for an hour a day, and then got sent packing. And I was glad—I was glad to have that time alone with you, my new baby, my fresh little person. This tiny soul that I had made and brought into the world. I didn't want to share you with anyone.

Then, in your first few days, your hair was a jet-black down, with no hint of your father's red hair anywhere to be seen. Your face was scrunched up and closed, your eyes tightly shut against this bright and unfamiliar world. The midwife said I had to put you down at nap-time in the nursery with all the other babies; she said I had to get some sleep. They came round and collected all the babies at a certain time, wheeling them off down the corridor in a long procession. But I wouldn't let you go, Claire. She
tried to take you, demanded it, but I said you were my baby and I wanted to hold you; and then, to be extra rebellious, I let the bottle of formula go cold on the bedside table and I breastfed you myself. They left us alone after that.

It was almost a full day before you really and truly opened your eyes and looked at me. They were the brightest blue, even then. Babies' eyes aren't supposed to be so blue, but they were. Luminous, even, and I thought it must be because this tiny little bundle I held in my arms was so full of life, so full of promise, and so full of future.

Before I met your father I thought that love and peace would change the whole world, but looking into your eyes, I knew that all I had to do was let you be whoever it was that you wanted to be, and to love you, and that would be the best and closest thing I could ever do to change the world for the better.

“You are going to be brilliant,” I told you. “You are going to be clever, and funny. Brave and strong. You're going to be a feminist, and a peace campaigner and a dancer. And one day you are going to be a mother yourself. You are going to fall in love and have adventures and do things that I can't even imagine. You, little Claire Armstrong, you are going to be the most wonderful woman, and you are going to have the most amazing life: a life that no one will ever forget.”

Those were the first words I said to you, Claire, that first time you opened your eyes and looked at me. I remember those words exactly as though I were in that room right now, holding you in my arms at this precise second. And Claire, my beautiful, brave, clever girl, I was right.

For my mum, Dawn

Thanks so much to my lovely editor, Linda Marrow, Elana Seplow-Jolley, and all the fantastic team at Ballantine—I am so thrilled to be published by such a wonderful house. Also thanks so much to my U.S. agent, Jill Grinberg, whose faith in me and hard work on my behalf I have very much appreciated.

And huge thanks to my agent and friend, Lizzy Kremer, who is a constant source of strength and inspiration. Also the very lovely Laura West and Harriet Moore at David Higham Ltd, a true dream team and a writer's best friends.

Thanks to my friends, who put up with me during the writing of this book, especially Katy Regan, Kirstie Seaman, Catherine Ashley, and Margie Harris.

Special thanks to my husband, Adam, who does so much to help and support me, and to my beautiful, noisy, energetic, constantly busy children, who keep me on my toes.

And finally, a thank-you to my mum, Dawn, who this book is for. You taught me how to be a mum.