Desperately Seeking - By Evelyn Cosgrave Page 0,50

were both over thirty, we seemed to be very steady, there was no reason why we wouldn’t do what several of our friends had already done – go and get married. But there’s why I didn’t tell you about her – all around that time, before we broke up, I realized I’d been drifting and that I could continue, very easily, to drift into marriage with her. She was a nice girl, we had loads in common, we had good times together, but I knew, deep down, that I wasn’t in love with her. You know? I suddenly thought, Well, this is it. She’s the one. This is your life. And I didn’t want it. I mean, I’d always been the sort of guy who knew he wanted to get married. I’d never seen the attraction in running around and sleeping with girls all over the place. I suppose it’s part of the way I was brought up. That’s probably why I let things with Jacqueline drift for so long. But when it came to it, I didn’t see myself married to her, for good, because that’s what it would have been.’

‘Oh!’

‘Yeah, and when it came to us talking about exes, I didn’t want to remind myself, or admit to myself, how close I had come to something that wasn’t right.’

‘Was she mad as hell?’

‘Ahm, yes. Yes, she was.’

‘Do you feel guilty?’

‘Well, I know I did the right thing but, yeah, I was guilty of stringing her along, of not knowing my own mind. But as soon as I realized it, there was no way I could continue to go along with it. That would have been worse.’

‘Does she hate you?’

‘I don’t know. She probably did for a while. We had endless sessions of thrashing it all out. It totally wrecked my head. But the bottom line was, she wanted to stay together and I didn’t.’

‘Right. I had no idea you had it in you.’

‘Had what in me?’

‘The ability to break up with someone like that. Passion, I suppose. I had no idea you had that kind of passion.’

‘Well, I have. I have it for you, Kate. All my passion is for you.’

I was taken aback. In fact, what he had told me was far more shocking than any love children might have been. It wasn’t the Keith of my imagination. And it scared me. How wrong was I about him? How well did I know him? I liked to believe that he was partly my own creation, and of course that’s not true. He is a man with all that passion I never knew he had.

It’s not an easy thing for a man to do – break up with a woman who thinks she has a future with him. Some men won’t do it and others do it so unsatisfactorily that the women never recover. Keith, it seems, had done it. Daniel O’Hanlon did it. But not very well. The woman is still in recovery.

Things with Daniel started to go wrong when I stopped believing that it was all a perfectly under-control adult entertainment being mutually enjoyed by two equally under-control adults. Things with Daniel went wrong when I started to believe we had a future together. Paris was the catalyst for everything. We were doomed before we ever got on our separate planes from separate cities in our separate lives. Daniel was already feeling the strain of dividing his life and I was feeling the strain of living half a life. I wanted more and he wanted less. It was that simple. In a perfect world we would have continued to see each other occasionally and passionately. We would have loved being together and we would have had enough in between to love being apart. But the world, as we know, is flawed.

After my high-altitude crisis on that first day of our secret romantic tryst, we did go and get drunk. Or, at least, I did. Daniel’s beyond that sort of adolescent behaviour. We holed up in a bar on the Left Bank while I drank very expensively for the rest of the afternoon. I don’t remember the details very well (that’s one of the nice things alcohol can do for you – spare you the memory of your most embarrassing moments) but the afternoon went along the lines of me telling Daniel how much I loved him and how we could be blissfully happy together if only he’d leave his wife, and him telling me that now