She replied, “Why not?”
We parted on a handshake, which is how we separated after more dinner dates until one night I asked about her man trouble. She said briskly, “No trouble at all.”
“Has he come to heel?”
“He doesn’t exist,” she said, smiling.
I said, “You’re better without him — I’m sure he never deserved you.”
To change the subject I described at length the finding of my ideal home and the furnishing of it. She cried out, “I see! I see!” and giggled. I asked what amused her. She said, “I knew you must have some sort of private life, but this is the first time you’ve mentioned it.”
She asked me more questions until I said, “The topic interests you so I’d better drive you there to see it some weekend.”
Which I did, after going there earlier to prepare the place.
The day was bright and windy after a long spell of rain, so the burn was in spate, its gurgles mingling with the thrashing tree branches. The house surprised her. “But won’t it be awfully damp?” she asked. I took her inside where the central heating had made the air pleasantly warm with no hint of dampness. I showed her all over, from the upstairs bedrooms to the store cupboards and emergency generator in the cellars, though it was not yet linked to my water wheel. This most aroused her wonder and amusement.
She said, “You seem to have thought of everything, how funny!”
The table in the kitchen above was set for two people, with glasses and a good bottle of wine. I removed a cold, cooked chicken and salad from the fridge saying, “I try to think of everything.”
Being the driver I drank only one glass, which was all she wanted. As we sipped coffees afterward in the living room I said, “Would you like to live here?”
She stared at me. I added, “As a married woman. This is a proposal of marriage.”
After a pause she said, “I wouldn’t like travelling so far to work in the morning.”
I said, “You wouldn’t need to work. I am an old-fashioned sort who will thoroughly support the woman I marry.”
“Give me time to think about that. You’d better take me home now,” she said, and I did.
Would I have escaped what followed if I had tried to kiss her then? Perhaps, but her reserve made such an attempt seem wrong. I drove her to the house she shared with a younger married sister. This was on Saturday. On Monday in the office she agreed to marry me. I will not describe our preparations and the registry office wedding. Neither of us wanted a public ceremony, despite the Victorian quality of our engagement. She never said there must be no sexual intercourse before the honeymoon, but that is what I assumed, and was charmed by such unfashionable modesty. It was passed on a luxury liner cruising the Mediterranean, the first foreign holiday of my life. She had been on trips with friends to Paris, Rome and Barcelona, so I was surprised and slightly hurt that she stayed on board when I went ashore to see Venice, Athens, Istanbul and Cairo, also when she said hardly a word to most of the other passengers. Her social confidence in the office had not prepared me for her lack of it with our dining companions aboard ship. Most were English, and richer than us, and perhaps she felt they would despise her Scottish accent. Yet they obviously found mine entertaining — one of them called it “charming”. She made one friend, a younger, shyer girl travelling with a wealthy invalid granny. The granny spent most of the voyage commuting between her cabin and a deckchair. Our cabin had an ample double bed, but as a honeymoon the cruise left a lot to be desired. I hoped this was due to travel sickness, though her chilly remoteness was the only sign of it. But many couples have found their honeymoons less than ecstatic. I thought things might improve when we finally got home. “To travel hopefully is better than to arrive,” says R.L.S.
Early one morning the ship berthed in Liverpool and I drove us back to the house where we had never lived before. We arrived in the evening of a pleasant summer day with the sun still bright in the sky. Leaving the car at the front door we entered and I was pleased to find thermostats and a time-switch had kept the air at skin temperature. She sat down in the living room and, sounding tired, asked for a gin and tonic. I served her, took the car round and down to the basement garage, unloaded our luggage and unpacked it. Back in the living room I suggested we go to our lounge on the top floor. She said, “Leave me alone for a bit,” so I carried my own gin and tonic upstairs. The house is among trees, but their tops before the upper windows are pruned to allow a view of perhaps the widest valley in Scotland. I enjoyed it, sipping my drink until I thought she might have recovered a little from her tiredness. I found her sitting downstairs exactly as I had left her. I said softly, “There’s going to be a lovely sunset sky. Come upstairs and see it.”
She said, “I can’t hear you.”
I said the same thing more loudly. She said, “I still can’t hear you when you mumble like that.”
I said the same thing again loudly, so that she was bound to hear. She turned to me a face as rigid and pale as marble, and in a distinct, monotonous voice said, “As soon as you’ve got me trapped in this horrible lonely place of yours, you start yelling at me!”
Then she wept passionately, wretchedly, interminably, and I knew her antagonism was powered by a will as unyielding as my own, and perhaps stronger.
GOODBYE JIMMY
IN WHAT IS BOTH A STUDY AND LABORATORY our Headmaster is contemplating an array of crystalline forms when one of his deputies arrives from a distant province. This visit has been long expected, yet the Head nearly groans before turning enough to give the visitor a mildly welcoming smile and say, “Hullo Jimmy. What brings you here?”
He has the mandarin voice of a lowland Scot unlocalized working class, though not Englished by a university education. His employee answers in a slightly plebeian Dublin accent, “You know well why I’m here. You’ve stopped answering me emails.”
The Head says gently, “I know what they say.”
“What use is that if you’ve no advice to give?”
The Head sighs with a slight shrug of his shoulders.
“Is that meant to be some kind of answer?” demands Jimmy. “Are you giving my wee place up as a bad job?”
The Head contemplates his crystalline models again but cannot shut his ears to the cry, “Then I’m giving it up too! Abandoning that nest of graceless ignorant self-destructive creatures! Leaving it! Done with it!”
The outcry becomes wild sobs which slowly quieten and end.
After a pause the Head murmurs, “You can’t leave that job. You’ve nothing else to do.”
Then he suddenly adds loudly, “Unlike me!”, grinning so impishly for a moment that the younger, careworn man seems faced by a mischievous child. A moment later the Head’s old serene look returns, and to change the subject he says in a comradely way, “I have my own worries, you see.”
“Life on other planets?” asks the visitor dryly.
“Yep!”
“Any luck with it?”
“Nope. I’ve produced a lot of the usual microbes in submarine volcanic vents, but changes in the chemical environment keep wiping them out before they can even evolve into annelid worms. A planet supporting much life needs a lot of water and some chemical stability. You can’t get that without a near neighbour as big as Jupiter to hoover up the huge meteors, a satellite like your moon to grab most of the others. In this universe the chance of getting a planet like that are over a zillion squared to one against.”