direction of Katy who was an amazing cook, helped prepare a four-course feast: a pear and Roquefort salad, followed by a roasted rack of lamb with rosemary and crushed potatoes, possibly the most heavenly panna cotta I have ever tasted, followed by a board of cheeses (all Welsh) which Katy had found at a market in a place called Rhiwbryfdir the previous day.
At midnight, we sat out on a little terrace at the back of the cabin, wrapped in thick woollen blankets, toasting the New Year with chilled champagne, as a light dusting of snow began to fall over the mountain above.
‘Bet you’ve never spent a New Year anywhere quite as beautiful as this, have you?’ Dom asked, and immediately my mind jumped to the beach in Cape Town, but I just said, ‘No. Never.’
Later, in bed, he asked me to marry him again. It was the third time – it had become our New Year’s ritual. And for the third time, I said no.
The first time he asked me, back at Alex’s place in Oxfordshire, it had been a total shock. The second time he asked me, I couldn’t claim to be surprised.
‘I’m not ready, Dom,’ I told him. ‘I’m twenty-eight. And I think people who marry very young often live to regret it, you know?’
‘Twenty-eight is not that young, Nicole.’
‘Well, you’re not helping your cause by calling me old.’
That New Year, when he asked me for the third time, as we lay in the four-poster in the log cabin in Wales, I said no again.
‘I can’t settle down now, Dom. There’s too much to do!’
Blake Productions, the TV company I’d set up, had until this point been making worthwhile but very minor films which aired in the middle of the night on unwatched cable channels, but had just been commissioned to make its first really major documentary, due to air in a prime time slot on BBC One.
And then there was the road trip, mark two. That April, Alex, Jules and I had taken three weeks off to drive the length of the Atlantic coast of Europe: starting out in Cherbourg, we drove south along the French coast, across the border to the Basque country, around the coast of Portugal and back into Spain, up the Costa le la Luz, finishing up in Tarifa. And since Jules had mentioned a second road trip to me on the phone a couple of days previously, I’d been thinking about it. We could aim bigger this time.
‘We could combine work and holiday,’ I told Dom. ‘I’d love to work with Jules. We could film it, or do a blog or something: but it would need to be a big trip, something amazing, like Cape Town to Cairo.’
‘You can’t do Cape Town to Cairo, Nicole, because that would entail driving through Sudan, which is much too dangerous.’
‘Says who?’ I asked him, and he hugged me closer.
‘Says me. In any case, all this is beside the point. You’re making excuses.’
‘I am not.’
‘Why do you think that you can’t be married and have a successful career or go on holidays with your friends? What do you think is going to happen? That the moment we walk down the aisle you’ll find yourself chained to the sink, barefoot and pregnant? Marriage doesn’t have to change who we are, Nic.’
‘So why do it then? What’s the point?’
‘If I have to explain that to you, then you really aren’t ready.’ He rubbed the small of my back and kissed my neck. ‘It’s okay. One day you will be ready. And I’ll be here.’
At 4 a.m. I woke with a start from a bad dream I couldn’t properly recall. Dad was in it, and so was Alex and so was Julian. Something in my heart felt heavy and I wanted to talk to someone, to Mum, to make sure everything was okay. I got up and stumbled through the house in the darkness searching for my handbag. Eventually I found it, I turned the phone on, but there wasn’t any signal. I knew there wasn’t any signal. Still, I spent ages wandering around the house, holding the phone above my head, bashing into furniture, I even pulled on a pair of wellies and went outside into the snow, but not a single bar appeared on the display. Eventually I went back inside and slept fitfully until dawn.
We had to leave first thing in the morning. Dom was in the middle of an important case and they wanted him