and guided him up the stairs to our room. He fell in through the door and slumped across the bed. I took off his shoes and tie and loosened his belt. I squeezed myself in beside him and turned on the television. The late-late movie, Brief Encounter, was about to begin.
The following morning, despite his hangover, Keith was up and packing the car before I was awake. I wasn’t sure whether or not I had a hangover, but I had a knot in my stomach. I decided to skip breakfast and join him. He was waiting for me.
‘Are you ready to head, so,’ he said, without catching my eye.
‘Yeah, I’m ready. Do you want to say goodbye first?’
‘I don’t want to see anybody.’
‘What about your parents?’
‘Look, Kate, I’d really just like to get going.’
‘OK.’
I got in beside him, and before I had my belt on he had backed out of his space without checking his mirror and was heading out of the car park at twice the speed limit… This was not like Keith. In fact, nothing would ever be like Keith again.
It wasn’t until we were back in my flat that he told me. He emerged from the bedroom having carefully placed my bags by the bed; his own he had left in the car. He was ashen. I don’t know why I was quite so unprepared for what came next. Surely I knew that things weren’t right between us. Or maybe, as Keith suggested later, my mind had been occupied elsewhere. He walked to the couch and sat down. He put his head into his hands and, for a moment, he was crying. I sat beside him and put my arms round him. He didn’t resist. He steadied himself. Then he sighed deeply and took my hands in his. ‘It’s not going to work,’ he said.
‘What do you mean?’ I asked.
‘We can’t get married.’
‘What do you mean?’ I said again, thinking that perhaps he had lost his job or something, and thought we couldn’t afford to get married. I was all prepared to assure him that we could work it out; we could get married without a wedding – it was all unnecessary expense anyway, as his mother had said. It even occurred to me that that was why he had been in such bad form at his cousin’s wedding – he was afraid he wouldn’t be able to do the same for me. I had it all worked out in my head.
But that wasn’t it.
He looked straight into my eyes, just as he had when he’d asked me to marry him a few months earlier, and he said that I was the most gorgeous creature he had ever known. He said that he loved me more than anything in the world and that he probably always would, but he couldn’t marry me.
I was afraid. What had he heard? Who had been saying things? What exactly did he mean?
‘Why?’ was all I managed.
‘Because you don’t love me.’
My only impulse was to deny.
‘I do love you! I do love you!’ I said, grabbing his shoulders and shaking him. ‘I do love you,’ I repeated. ‘Why do you think I don’t?’
He got up and walked over to the window. With the light behind him, his features were slightly blurred, which added to the sensation that this wasn’t the Keith I knew, that somehow my Keith had been switched with a Keith who was breaking all the rules.
‘You’ve never really loved me,’ he said. ‘I’ve always known that. I’m not a fool.’
‘That’s not true, Keith. I do love you. Stop saying that.’
‘Oh, you probably think you do, and maybe you do in a way, but you don’t love me enough for for ever.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ I said, speaking far too quickly. ‘What’s for ever anyway? Nobody knows if anything will last for ever. You just have to go with it and hope for the best. You said you love me, you have to believe I love you too.’
I stopped. There were so many things wrong with this conversation. ‘Where did all this come from, anyway?’ I asked.
‘It’s been coming for a while. You must have known it. I thought for ages that it didn’t matter, that you’d eventually love me in the same way, or that it didn’t matter as long as we were married. But it does matter. It matters a lot.’
I felt powerless. I couldn’t deny that much of what he was saying was true, but I’d had no