Desperately Seeking - By Evelyn Cosgrave Page 0,35
I began to believe him.
‘Do you want to walk down slowly, or will we get a cup of coffee first?’
‘No, no, I think I’m ready to go down. It was just the lift… so high and so crowded. I couldn’t breathe in there.’
‘It was a foolish idea to go all the way to the top, anyway. God knows we’re high enough here.’
‘But I wanted to see the top.’
‘Another time…’
We started our descent, and while the climb down those steps didn’t bother me, something was still niggling at me, something other than claustrophobia or the mortification of making a public spectacle of myself. I didn’t know what it was or how deeply it was buried but something had made me panic in that lift, something other than a mild fear of heights and a distaste for crowds
‘Come on,’ I said to him, when we got to the bottom, ‘let’s go and get drunk.’
The rest of our holiday in Los Almiras was passed in typical style. We did the trip to the one landmark in the region that had any pretensions towards archaeological importance; we visited the neighbouring beach, which wasn’t half as nice as our own; we met the other Irish couple, who could have been our doppelgängers except that they actually were on their honeymoon; we had several walks on the beach and while none of them was moonlit, they were delightful; we made love every day and had orgasms like they were going out of fashion. By our last evening I was truly regretting that we had to leave. I’d thought Keith might drive me a little crazy – but what do you know? He hadn’t.
We were having dinner with that other Irish couple, Don and Lorna, on the terrace restaurant. It was their last evening also; they had been on our flight out from Shannon and would be on our flight home. They were maybe a little older than us and had only been going out together a year before they got married. Both of them had been in long-term relationships before in which they had nearly made it up the aisle.
‘I just woke up one morning,’ said Lorna, ‘and realized that Steve didn’t love me. I suppose I’d sort of known it for ages but when you’ve been with someone nearly for ever you don’t analyse every little feeling you have about them. You just presume.’
‘Yeah,’ said Don. ‘It was similar for me. Aine and I had been going together since school. It was a running joke with both our families and all our friends that we still weren’t married. But by the time we’d both finished with college and had done a bit of travelling and were saving for the deposit on a house, we kind of realized that we’d done with each other. It was almost like we’d lived a whole life together and were ready to move on. It was a shame, but it was true. It hit our families the worst.’
‘My break-up was pretty messy, though,’ continued Lorna. ‘I knew Steve didn’t love me and I knew there was no point in us getting married but a big part of me wanted to get on with it and be married and deal with the rest later. Steve was furious when I confronted him. We’d already spent an awful lot of money on the wedding and everybody had been invited. It was the money and the humiliation that bothered him most. Eventually he admitted that he was just going along with it to keep me happy. He said that, no, he didn’t think realistically he would have been faithful.’
‘And then we met,’ said Don. ‘Speed-dating, would you believe?’
‘I didn’t want to go,’ said Lorna, ‘but a group of my friends dragged me along. As soon as I saw Don I knew he was the one.’
‘I felt the same way,’ said Don. ‘You just know when it’s right.’
‘Oh, you do,’ I said emphatically, because it was what their two pairs of expectant eyes were demanding, but it made me wonder if I had ever had that feeling deep in my gut that it was right with Keith. Anyway, what does ‘right’ mean? Nobody can know for sure that they’re going to live happily ever after. There mightn’t even be any such thing.
I had enjoyed their company over the few days, but I was glad they lived in Fermanagh. Nobody expected you to keep in contact if you lived in Fermanagh.