Desperately Seeking - By Evelyn Cosgrave Page 0,29
good. You should have said something – Ruth always has a stash of Valium for emergencies… or I might have been able to scare up a joint.’
The bar was surprisingly busy for a quarter past eleven on a Saturday morning, and the clientele weren’t all foreigners either. I ordered us two vodkas and orange, and made his a double. He drank his quicker than I’d ever seen him down a drink, so I ordered another. He was smiling feebly at me, begging me to forgive him.
‘It’s OK,’ I reassured him. ‘You’ll be fine in a minute.’
‘But I’m ruining your holiday…’
‘No, you’re not. It’s our holiday and nothing’s ruined.’
Of course, all I could think about was missing my run round Duty Free, at best, or never getting off the ground, at worst. Poor Keith had probably worked himself up into an awful frenzy about this holiday. Part of the reason he was so keen to get away was that he thought he’d have a better chance of pinning me down to talk dates and times and which side of the city we wanted to live on: he’d been trying to broach these subjects for weeks and I kept evading or jokingly dismissing him. On holiday, with little to do all day except lie about and pick a restaurant for the evening, he must have thought he’d have a better chance of getting me to agree to something.
It had been more difficult lately: there’s only so long you can dance round a topic that needs an airing. Even more than setting a date, Keith was anxious about a house. I tried reminding him that we both had houses and suggested we couldn’t possibly want the hassle of buying another. But he saw this conjugal buying of the family home as an important symbolic move. He was more than ready to sell his own house in Clareview, bought purely because it was a sensible thing to do with his money and on the right side of town for work. He saw my flat as a good investment and a steady source of extra income if we decided to let it. He also saw it (though he would never admit it) as a steady source of income to replace mine when, inevitably, I gave up work to start a family. It wasn’t that I objected utterly to his unconscious forward planning or that one small part of me wouldn’t go along with it all (who was I kidding, anyway, that I had a career?), but that the whole thing was far too real, far too practical to consider when I was only barely used to the idea, to the theory, of marrying him.
He had been coming home every day recently with brochures from estate agents, many of them big glossy portfolios detailing the forty-five fabulous bedrooms you could have for barely half a million if only you were willing to move out to the sticks. Which I wasn’t. Even Keith had to admit, since he’d been practically living in my flat, that being in the middle of everything had its advantages, but he had in his head something he must have seen in a picture book as a child. He wanted it all – big rooms, lush garden, wooden shed, privet hedges, picket fences, the lot. I thought men weren’t supposed to care about things like that.
His moving in had taken place accidentally. Neither of us suggested it; he didn’t want to be presumptuous and I know how he likes an ordered living environment so I thought he’d probably prefer to live at his own place. Yet, gradually, after a couple of late weekend nights, he hadn’t gone home. And when he did go home he came back with clean clothes, toiletries, some books and CDs. I thought at first I’d find the place claustrophobic with him around all the time but he was very quiet and, apart from the way he kept tidying up after me and the way he kept cooking really nice meals, I hardly knew he was there. And in bed he was so warm and reassuring. In a way it was as if we were already married, had been for years. He was still passionate, and very easily aroused, but mostly he was like that comfort bear you had as a child. The one you didn’t pay a lot of attention to during the day, because he was old and sad-looking, but wouldn’t go to bed without. Maybe the