Page 72 of Is She Really Going Out with Him?
Will is not happy about this outing, which he makes clear with an array of sighs and grunts, but he is more confident in the direction of the hill than I am. The moon and Will’s torch afford us little light, and it takes a good fifteen minutes to cross the field in the valley and find an incline. After walking in silence for a few minutes, I pluck up the courage to ask a question I’ve been wanting to ask all night. “Can I ask you something?”
“I imagine you’re going to,” he replies.
“What happened with you and your ex, Maeve? Why didn’t it work out?”
“Why do you want to know?” he asks, his voice uncharacteristically terse.
“When you mentioned it in Hay, I got the feeling there was a story there.” I pause, and he doesn’t answer. We walk in silence a few more steps and now I regret bringing it up.
“If you must know, I asked her to marry me in a busyrestaurant, with her friends and family waiting in the bar next door to congratulate us,” he says with a sardonic laugh.
“Oh no. Will, I’m sorry,” I say, my heart tightening in my chest just imagining it.
“She said no, was embarrassed I’d made a scene.” He pauses, his voice strained in the dark. “She said I’d fallen too deep too fast, gotten carried away, that it was way too soon.”
“Was that it then, was that the end?” I ask, wishing I could see his face.
“She said she didn’t want to break up, but it’s hard to come back from that.” He pauses. “It was my fault, I misjudged it. Once I’m in, I’m all in. I thought she felt the same.”
“These things are rarely one person’s fault,” I tell him. “But yeah, if you ever propose to someone again, a crowded restaurant is never the way to go.”
He laughs surprisingly loudly, then reaches out his arm, pulls me into a gentle headlock, and messes up my hair. “Thanks for the advice, Appleby.” Laughing, I push him away. We walk a little way in silence, and then Will asks, “How did your husband propose to you?”
“In our flat in Bristol. I was already pregnant with Jess,” I tell him.
“I know it’s probably not a simple answer, but can I ask what happened with you?” His voice is cautious.
“Everyone has their own version of events, so I can only give you mine,” I say, pausing to look up at the night sky. “There was no big fracture, no third party involved, it was more a gradual slipping away. We met when we were twenty-one, we were different people back then.” I sigh. “For me, falling in love feels like gazing up at a dark sky. First, there is nothing but blackness, then gradually your eyes adjust, a few stars come into view, then suddenly, you see everything—thousands of stars, an infinite spectrum oflight. It’s mind-blowing. Falling out of love feels the same but in reverse. One by one the stars recede, gray clouds sweep in. Then one day you realize you are alone in the dark, there’s nothing out there.”
“That’s a poetic answer,” Will says.
“The less poetic answer is too depressing,” I say with a smile. “Going through a divorce is the hardest thing I’ve ever done.”
Halfway up the slope, my phone gets a bar of life, and I squeal with relief.
“You realize I get the chair now,” Will says.
“This doesn’t count. This is an emergency.”
“Oh, this definitely counts, Appleby,” he practically growls. On my phone, there are a few texts from Jess and one from Dan, several e-mail alerts. I scan through them, just to check there’s nothing urgent. “Anna, I’m not standing out here freezing my bollocks off while you check your e-mail.”
“Sure, sorry. One minute,” I tell him, bouncing from foot to foot to keep warm.
I find Reconnect Retreats’ number on an e-mail and dial it with numb fingers. It goes straight to answerphone. “This is Reconnect Retreats. The office is open from eight a.m. to eight in the evening. If you’re calling outside of those times, please leave a message and we will get back to you. If it’s an emergency, please call the emergency services.”
“It’s an answerphone!” I wail. “Now what? Hey, where are you going?” Will has started walking back down the hill toward the woods, and I’m forced to run to catch up with him.
“I’m going to bed,” he says. “I’m cold.”
“But she said we could call in an emergency.”
“Maybe she meant you could call an ambulance or the fire brigade, if it was a real emergency.”
“But this is a real emergency. I don’t have anywhere to sleep!” I cry. “How far did she say their office was, three miles away?”
“No one will be there now. You can have my bed. I’ll sleep on the floor.Pleaselet’s just go back. We can’t call the emergency services because we only have one bed.”
He’s right, of course he’s right, but I’m still tense with frustration. How would this even work? The cabins are tiny, there’s hardly room for him to sleep on the floor. Could I call a cab, drive to a hotel? But we’ve walked out of mobile reception now, and I suspect Will might kill me if I ask him to escort me back up the hill to make another call.
