around.
Becca answers the door and when I walk into the living room, she and Dan are standing there, laughing at a joke I’ve not been privy to. He turns to look at me and hands me a bunch of red roses. There’s hope in his eyes, but also nervousness.
Becca makes the same sort of noise Sophie used to make when watching cute cat videos on YouTube. ‘Awww … aren’t you sweet,’ she tells Dan and then she gently prises the roses from my hand. ‘Why don’t you two get off? I’ll put these in water.’
I want to snatch them back. I want to tell Becca I’d rather do it myself, to delay the moment when I have to walk out that front door with Dan and be on my own with him, but I don’t. I don’t know how to say it without seeming rude. Or slightly insane.
Becca practically shoves us out the front door and into the hallway. ‘I won’t wait up!’ she jokes and, as the door closes behind us, I wonder if she knows, if Dan has confided in her, and two things strike me – one, that I wonder why I hadn’t twigged that he was going to propose this night the first time around, because I had a suspicion at the time he was working up to it and, two, that I’m jealous. I don’t like the fact that my husband-to-be and my best friend have shared a secret and left me out of it. Hypocritical, really, when I’m seriously considering breaking his heart this evening. Until I came back here I hadn’t realised how selfish I can be, how wrapped up in my own stuff that I don’t see what’s going on under my nose.
‘Shall we?’ Dan says, and offers me his arm. I smile at him, a smile that’s warm and bright and about as substantial as candy floss.
Dinner is a blur. I eat, I drink, I nod and laugh in the right places, but the only sensation I can really remember when it’s over is a growing sense of panic. As Dan takes my hand and heads towards the river my heart starts to pound. I can hear the echo of it rushing in my ears.
We walk past the crowded pubs with drinkers spilling out across the narrow street and onto the embankment. We keep going until their laughter and chatter is more distant, until we reach the rowing club. There’s a break in the railings and we walk down to the far edge of the shallow concrete slope the rowers use to put their boats in the river. As we stand there, staring across at the tree-lined bank on the other side, I can hear the music of the water slapping against the hulls of the little motor boats moored close by.
Dan seems paralysed. I keep shooting glances in his direction, wondering when he’s going to make his move, but he just keeps staring at the darkness in front of him. Was he like this before? I wonder. If he was, I didn’t notice it. I remember the night being balmy and warm, the lapping of the gentle river waves romantic.
Just when I think he’s chickened out, he sucks in a breath and turns to me. We’ve been still for so long it makes me jump, and that makes him smile. The serious look he’s been wearing for the last ten minutes vanishes.
He reaches for my hands and I swallow.
‘You know how I feel about you …’ he says softly.
My heart can’t help cracking a little at his words. How can you love and hate a person at the same time? I want to slap him across the face, hard enough to make my fingers sting, but I also want to kiss him.
‘… and I know that we’re young and everyone is going to say this is a bad idea, but I can’t imagine my life without you in it.’
I still don’t say anything. Partly because I have no response, but partly because I’m realising I really can imagine my life without Dan in it. It’s been something I’d been doing even before this strange experience happened to me, after all. I just hadn’t expected my wishing to make it real or, at least, the possibility of it real. Dan, however, takes my silence for agreement and he carries on.
My heart stops. Just for a beat. Because as he draws his next breath I know exactly what words are about to come out of his mouth, and I still don’t know what my answer will be.
‘Maggie,’ he says, and his voice catches on the last syllable, ‘will you marry me?’
I stare back at Dan. His face is full of hope. Hope, I realise, that neither of us have left for our marriage back in our other life. A hole rips open inside me, deep and long. How can this man – the man who looks at me with such tenderness and worship – have turned into the one who’s sneaking around behind my back, who’s let slide all the promises he’s been holding so faithfully for the last twenty-four years?
I don’t have an answer for him. Not the one he wants, anyway. Not the one I gave him last time. ‘I don’t know,’ I finally stammer, and then I watch all that hope melt away and turn to confusion.
‘Don’t you love me?’
I nod. ‘Yes … no … I don’t know.’ And then I begin to cry.
He scoops me into his arms and holds me tight. I can tell he’s staring over my shoulder, asking the night sky what went wrong. I know he’s hurting and confused, that his instinct was to back off and protect himself, but the fact he’s chosen not to do that, to comfort me instead, just makes me cling on to him all the harder.
‘What’s wrong?’ he whispers. ‘You haven’t been right, not for the last couple of weeks.’
I let myself mould against him, just for a moment, and then I lift my eyes and look at him. I shake my head as the tears fall. ‘I’m sorry,’ I say, and then I find I can’t stop. I say it over and over and over.
‘No,’ he replies and silences my litany with a kiss. ‘I got ahead of myself. It’s too soon.’
I shake my head, because I know in another version of our lives it wouldn’t be too soon. The problem is, I’m not sure I want that reality any more, even though the thought of losing him suddenly seems much bigger and more final than I ever realised.
It’ll be like him dying.
Because I won’t just grieve him the way I would if we’d split up when I was twenty-one. I’ll grieve for all the extra years we’ve had that he’ll never know about – the way he looked when Sophie was born, as if he could burst with pride and love for the both of us. How nervous he was on our wedding night. Even silly little things like that cup of tea he always brings me when he gets home from work.
That Dan won’t ever exist in this world, and I feel the loss of him like a physical pain in my chest.
He hasn’t got a hanky, so he uses the cuff of his shirt sleeve to dry my tears.
It’s not you, it’s me, I want to say, but I’m aware it sounds over-used, even in this decade, so I don’t. Or maybe it’s us. The us we will become. I’m setting us free from that, from the boredom and the simmering resentment. From the disappointment of knowing that even though we once thought we could be everything to each other, we clearly can’t.
By silent agreement we walk back towards the High Street, heading for the bus stop. When we reach my flat, I open the front door that leads into the communal hallway of our converted Victorian house, but Dan doesn’t cross the threshold with me.
‘Aren’t you coming in?’
He shakes his head.
‘This doesn’t mean I’m breaking up with you,’ I say. ‘Just that I need time to think. You’re right – we are both so young, we need to be sure this is the right thing. For both of us.’ I stop then, because I know that I’m lying, that as much as I’m pretending nothing’s changed, there’s been a seismic shift in our relationship.
He shrugs and looks at his shoes. ‘I know that. It’s just that … I need time alone. I need time to think too.’
I would have accepted that without a doubt once upon a time. After all, it’s a perfectly natural response for someone whose proposal of marriage has not been as enthusiastically received as it was delivered