Pieces of My Life

‘Actually, I—’

‘You see, I’ve been thinking a lot about the future lately,’ Harry continues regardless, pausing only to chink his glass against mine with a self-satisfied smile, then take a slurp. ‘Since that money came in from old Aunt Mabel, it’s really helped me re-evaluate things.’

‘Yes…’ I breathe, gazing up at him. I can hardly bear it any longer.

‘We’re not getting any younger, we’re doing okay financially, and I´ve realised life is just too short not to strive for your dreams.’

‘Yes, oh, Harry…’ This is the part where he grabs me by the waist, lifts me effortlessly and carries me into the bedroom, growling sexily in my ear, ‘Let’s make a baby.’

‘So…’ Harry puts his glass of wine down purposefully on the kitchen side, obviously gearing up for his grand finale…

‘…I think we should take some time out and go to South America.’

***

At university, society was divided into two groups: those who had taken a ‘gap year’ in a far-off country, and those who were left at the gate by their mum on the first day of term, contemplating life alone for the first time. I fell into the latter category.

Members of the Gap Year Gang were easily recognisable: a colourful chakra pendant, the flash of a Mayan symbol tattooed on an arm, or the swing of a hand-woven alpaca wool handbag gave them away.

Not to mention their subtle air of intellectual superiority. After all, these were people who had seen the world.

The rest of us wore clothes from Primark and felt homesick and lost for the whole first term. At least.

Until then, travelling hadn’t really appealed to me; maybe because I’d always known it wasn’t an option. Mum could only just afford for me to go to university, so I could hardly ask her to help me fund a voyage of self-discovery and intellectual growth in some distant land.

Only when confronted with the Gap Year Gang in all their exotic glory did I start to feel like I might be missing out on something.

Their stories of hitchhiking across South East Asia or getting wasted and waking up on a beach in Bali, or escaping an armed robbery on a night bus to Cape Town, fascinated and frustrated me in equal measure.

Compared to them I felt inexperienced and twee. I once asked a girl in my law and social change seminar where she got her lovely woven bag from as I fancied buying one. She looked me in the eye and said witheringly, ‘Thailand.’

Harry, of course, was in a category all of his own. He had enjoyed his first gap year (inter-railing in Europe) so much that he decided to take another one (hiking and backpacking across South America), then another half-one after that (six months fruit-picking on a working holiday visa in Australia). When he finally made it to university, aged twenty-two, he pretty much got straight off a plane from Sydney and strolled into his first art history lecture, both on the same morning. He was the eldest in each of his classes by several years and was revered among the Gap Year Gang as some kind of prophet, the Wise Man of Travellers or similar nonsense.

We couldn’t have been more different, and I could barely believe it when he asked me out.

Although we were studying for different degrees, both Harry and I took an extra module of Spanish language. I did it because I’d read on careers websites that having a second language would give a law graduate a competitive edge in the careers market. I think Harry did it just because he could.

It was hard not to notice him in the classroom, partly due to his tall, blond handsomeness and tendency to turn up to lectures in tatty leather flip-flops, regardless of the weather conditions – but also because he already spoke excellent Spanish. Needless to say, a product of seven months spent meandering around Latin America.

There’s nothing more attractive than real talent or skill. I could overlook Harry’s unusual dress sense and messy hair – this man spoke Spanish like a native. He might not always have bothered with correct grammar, but he could make the perfect, tongue-rolling ‘rrrrrr’ sound. It was sexy. Infuriating as well, of course, as he just rocked up to our first class and started chatting away at the speed of a Mexican football commentator. Meanwhile I clawed my way up to his level through three years of hard study and sticking vocabulary post-its all over the house, much to my flatmates’ annoyance.

But it was still sexy.

I spent the first year of university lusting after him discreetly from a few rows back, and impatiently plodding through the week until our Friday afternoon Spanish lecture. I don’t think we exchanged a single word in all that time, even though there were only ten people in the class, so he must have at least known my name.

Then one day Harry sidled up to me in the Student Union bar, set his beer down on the table in front of me, and asked what I was doing that night.

From then on, it was a whirlwind. Harry himself was a whirlwind. When we graduated, he took me to Rome. I never admitted to him it was the first time I had ever left the UK.

I also never got round to telling him he was my first proper boyfriend. I hadn’t been the most popular girl at school, nor the most unpopular, I had just kept myself to myself. A few boys had asked me out, but they always seemed so immature and boring. I was happier studying, going to the cinema with my friends and working at the café round the corner to help out my mum with the bills. I’d never seen any point in having a boyfriend until Harry.

As our university days passed, I got to know the man behind the traveller’s legend. To my surprise, and – if I’m honest – slight dismay, Harry was actually from a middle-class, prosperous family. Their renovated oast house in Kent was worlds apart from Mum’s little terraced property in the part of Essex that gives the whole county its reputation.

His family were very refined. My first dinner at his parents’ house was like that scene from Titanic where Leo sits down at the table and has no idea which set of cutlery to use first. Ashamed, I found myself wishing my mum spoke Italian or my dad could discuss my university essays with me, like Harry’s parents. In fact, I would have been happy for my dad to want to discuss anything with me, but that´s another story.

It was Harry’s parents who generously gave us half the deposit for the house, and I still remember with a pang that Dad didn’t even come with us on the morning we collected the keys.

‘You know what he’s like, love.’ Mum had tried to sound kind as she patted my shoulder, standing awkwardly removed from Harry and his family as we all waited for the estate agent to finish scrabbling around in drawers and find our keys. It hadn’t been much comfort, though. She had been able to separate from him years ago and rebuild her life at an amicable distance. It was different for me – you can hardly divorce your father.

Anyway, from the moment we finished uni it was as if life picked up speed. I landed a place at a London university to study for a year-long legal practice course – something I’d need to do before I could actually use the law degree I’d worked so hard for. Harry got a job as an art tutor at a prestigious private boys’ Academy, stopped wearing flip-flops and took out life insurance. I deferred my place at the university to move with Harry to the middle of nowhere in the South Downs, near the Academy. We both scrimped and saved and lived on pot noodles for two years, then stumped up the deposit on our little house in Fenbridge, the nearest village to the school and the very last stop on the southbound rail line offered by the southernmost railway service in the country.

It wasn’t all bad. Fenbridge was the kind of place where everyone knows and greets each other by name, and where there is no supermarket, just ‘Terry’s’ (the butcher’s), Raj’s (the newsagent’s) and ‘round Brenda’s’ (the pub). Within just a few weeks ‘Harry and Kirsty’ were welcomed unconditionally into the local village fold, and soon became regulars at the pub, coffee shop, and even sometimes the biweekly car-boot sale on the football green.

In many ways it made a nice change from the part of Essex where I spent my childhood, where you had to keep an eye not only on your lunch money but also your shoes, coat and scarf when running the danger-filled gauntlet between home and school. Here, you could literally leave the front door wide open and go out to do your week’s shopping, get the car washed, swing by the garden centre and stop off for a free coffee at Waitrose on the way back, and nothing would have happened. Plus the fact it was only one short, winding, country lane away from Harry’s school. It was important to live close by, we soon realised, as the school’s location at the bottom of a valley made it completely inaccessible by car after heavy rain or the slightest hint of snow. And it would be no good for a whole class to be cancelled just because the art teacher couldn’t make it in.

It just wasn’t the kind of place where very much happened. At all. It certainly wasn’t the kind of place where people regularly left their jobs and took off to go exploring South America.

So, for ‘Harry and Kirsty’, every day was pretty much the same, our daily routine overlapping with my growing ache to become a mother.

Every day except this one.

I’m distantly aware Harry has been talking the whole time I’ve been standing here, wine glass in suspended animation halfway to my mouth, watching the last six years of our life together flash before my eyes. Snippets of what he’s saying filter through, like the words ‘sabbatical’ and ‘mortgage holiday’ and ‘new horizons’. He seems to be pacing the kitchen and waving his arms around.

Finally, Harry remembers I’m here and stands still, flushed and bright-eyed, smiling expectantly at me. ‘Well, what do you think then, babe?’

Of all the things I want to say, everything I’ve kept inside, waiting for a moment like this when I have Harry’s undivided attention, what I actually say, in a small voice that doesn’t sound like my own, is:

‘I’ve forgotten all my Spanish.’

Harry’s laughing. Wrapping his arms around me. Spilling the wine.

‘Come on, Kirst, that’s rubbish! You were the hardest worker in our whole class – you used to memorise a new verb every night, remember?’

‘I did not! You make me sound like the most boring—’

‘Sure, you always got top marks in those vocabulary tests, too – photographic memory!’

‘Liar! I didn’t ever get top—’

‘Okay, okay! We’ll prove it. I bet you can recite ten Spanish verbs in the past tense, right here, right now.’ He’s frowning down at me now, arms crossed.

I slam my wine glass down on the counter, anger and pain and disappointment boiling over.

‘I fucking well CAN’T, actually! I can hardly remember the present tense for most of them! You’re so WRONG!’

I hurl myself out of the room, hot tears flowing, distantly aware of how ludicrous it is to argue over something like Spanish verbs when the things that really matter remain unspoken.

I feel Harry’s eyes boring into my back as I run upstairs, and don’t need to turn round to see the shocked expression on his face. I never, ever shout at him. And rarely cry. But right now, the grating disappointment of his Big Surprise and frustration at his comments about my Spanish combine to make my tears overflow. He’s right – maybe I did do well at university – but he should know better than anyone that there is more to me than that. I went through school being known as part of the nerdy crowd, and if the other kids noticed me at all, all they knew about me was that I was quiet and got good grades. They didn’t actually know me. They didn’t know, for example, that in the summer holidays before the end of upper sixth, I dragged my cousin halfway across the county to do a skydive – we took a weekend course and everything, then threw ourselves right out of a plane above the Essex countryside. I’d been so terrified on the way up that I almost threw myself out two stops early. But I still did it.