Chapter 1 Chapter 1 One day I see a wild deer. It is evening, the second month of lockdown in the spring of the pandemic. I am outside in my friend MC''s garden with my pregnant dog, Coco. She is days away from delivery, her very first, but she doesn''t look like she is pregnant at all: her stomach is almost concave, and aside from a week when she was ravenous, her appetite is delicate, her mood strange. The vets in this Oxfordshire village where my best friend, Allegra, and I have decamped to ride out what we imagine will be the only wave of this virus won''t give us an appointment. "It''s not an emergency," they tell me on the phone, "we are only seeing emergencies during Covid." No one knows what Covid is yet, none of us knows how to behave. What does the virus have to do with a pregnant dog? My dog''s stomach is hollow, there is stillness when I place my hand on her belly.
It''s not a phantom pregnancy, she''s had one of those before. We had a scan, and it confirmed that she is carrying a litter of puppies. But something doesn''t feel right. "She sounds fine," these new vets--who we don''t know and have never met--tell me on the phone. We are not from Oxford--we are far from home. Beyond the lockdown and this new terrain, I am in further limbo because I have spent nearly a decade waiting for a man who has made promise after promise to me and, diligently and with impressive commitment, has broken them all. We are both unmarried. He confesses that he has never met a woman he could settle down with until me, that I am the first woman he has wanted to build a life with.
But I come from a public family and have chosen to be a writer, hardly the life of a private civilian. He has his reasons. The man tells me that this public gaze makes him uncomfortable, maybe things will change in the future but for now he wants nothing to do with it. I can''t change who I am, but neither can he. He would like it very much if I didn''t drag him and our relationship out into the open, where he believes it will lose everything that is special about it. And it is special. I am hypnotized by him. He is unlike anyone that I have ever met: uninhibited, blazingly sure of himself, so much so that he calls his parents "darling" when he speaks to them, as though he is the parent.
It also doesn''t hurt that he is beautiful, rugged, and old-school masculine. He tells me that we are soul mates. And so I don''t resist the hidden quality he demands of our relationship. I just want to be with him. I will do anything. Tell people about us? Why tempt people''s envy? Meet my friends? No, he''d rather not, thanks. Meet his? Why? What do you need to meet them for? Live together? Get engaged? Oh no, that''s not how things are done. These things take time.
Besides, he''s not sure he''s cut out for that sort of life. He''s a free spirit. Marry? Please. But there is so much that is precious about what we have, he reminds me when I despair at the dictates he has laid down, how can I not see that? He persuades me to follow him, to believe in him. I am thirty-eight years old and have no family, no children, no one besides a small Jack Russell as my charge. It feels uncomfortable to say that this man isolated me from my world, but, in effect, I''ve since realized, he did. The man is older than I am, and initially I believe that he knows so much more about life than I do; after all, he knows how to face all manner of difficulties with calm and sangfroid and always seems to get his way. He expended no effort on how he dressed or looked, wearing the same shirt three days in a row, but was somehow always radiant with a large smile and warm, tanned face and green eyes that crinkled at the corners when he laughed.
If he woke up one morning and decided that he wanted to learn how to parachute, he''d just go off and learn, flinging himself off a cliff or out of an airplane as though it were the most natural thing in the world. As a result, there was seemingly nothing that he didn''t know how to do--skiing, motorcycle riding, martial arts, tennis, photography, baking. You name it, the man did it. Nothing made him nervous; on the contrary, he seemed to delight in things that would give the rest of us pause--walking through rough neighborhoods late at night, getting lost in unknown places, changing plans and disrupting itineraries midway through travel. He was a terrible dancer, but who cared? He was so confident, if he felt like it, he danced anyway. The established confines that restricted the rest of us from behaving like libertines didn''t apply to him. He was a teetotaler who never smoked, but still a pleasure seeker. If he wanted to spend a day in a botanical garden, examining the roots of rare plants, he just did that--no matter what else you might have had planned.
If a shop he felt like visiting was closing, he persuaded the owners to keep the shutters up just a bit longer, and before they knew it, they''d changed their opening hours, only for him to mosey around for as long as he liked and leave without buying a thing. He seemed to have no fear, no shame, no embarrassment, and no respect for other people''s boundaries, even though he guarded his own fiercely. He could tell you what kind of person a total stranger was by observing them for five minutes--proving himself correct by going up to said stranger afterward and asking them to confirm his private hypotheses--and when he was in the mood, he could be a great mimic and funny, and he was a patient and generous teacher. When he wanted to help you, he would devote hours and days to your problems. When he turned his bright attention to you, you felt as though you had been baptized into some intimate and glorious order. The man had an extraordinary ability to make you feel that he alone understood you and had some unique insight into what ailed you. When I saw his attention drift, when he turned toward someone else who had a problem that needed solving, like a teacher''s pet, I became jealous. I wanted his attention, all of it.
When he sensed this, he did the opposite of reassuring me: he would cut me off, depriving me of exactly what I wanted. My mood became quickly tethered to his; I needed him to feel safe, secure, to feel good. He was demanding and difficult from the outset, and though he could be dazzling, handsome, and intelligent, he also had an indefatigable capacity to be cruel. Understanding this dynamic, and how much I needed him, he seemed to take a certain delight in putting me down, in disparaging my country or finding positive reviews of my work and asking me, with incredulity, if I really believed any of that praise. I never showed him my writing because no matter what a piece was about, he was always a breath away from telling me that my thinking was facile, or that I was trying too hard to prove I was clever (there was never a bad occasion to remind me that he was smarter than I was), or that I didn''t understand the issue I had written about, not deeply, not like he did. He also had fits of rage. Many times, when we were sitting in a restaurant, if I happened to say something he didn''t like, he would shout at me, stand up, and storm off. He went through moods that lasted days when he would simply stop talking to me, even if we were out together, as though I no longer existed.
He would smile at a waitress and compliment her shoes, or ask her what her name meant and listen with fascination just to show me that he could speak nicely to someone if he wished, he just didn''t wish to speak to me. On the occasions when I would tell him I was leaving if he insisted on dragging me around while ignoring me, he would glower at me and threaten me in a low voice: "If you leave, you will never see me again for as long as you live." As an accompaniment to his cruelty and anger, he had a sense of humor that could be childish and mean. He taunted you with exactly what he knew would hurt, laughing in your face as you tried to recover your composure. One day, out of the blue, he bit my hand so hard that I lost feeling in the area where my thumb meets the flesh of my palm. Nothing had happened to provoke the bite (what possibly could have happened?)--I was looking at my phone and he was playing chess on my iPad when he just reached over and bit me so hard that even after the bite marks had faded and the bruise had gone down, I couldn''t move my thumb without discomfort. He thought it was funny. Months later, in London, I went to an acupuncturist I sometimes saw for headaches and showed him my hand, as it was still in pain.
He looked at it quietly while I thought of what to say. My brother bit me? But one brother was twenty-five then and the other eleven. I walked into a door with my hand? "I, uh, was playing with my dog," I said sheepishly, "and she bit me." "That badly?" the acupuncturist asked. I didn''t have the heart to furnish the lie. "Actually, I think it''s a damaged nerve from a previous injury." My dog would never, ever bite me. I was always able to excuse the man for some reason or another: he works hard, he has a complex character, he had a painful childhood, he''s stressed, he''s not used to expressing himself.
These were all excuses he had fed me about his behavior, sighing resignedly as he admitted these seemingly unfixable faults. I forgave him over and over because I loved him. And I knew, no matter how he acted, that he loved me too. And admittedly, there was something in me that found our strange, disjointed situation convenient, romantic even, fueled by spontaneity and impulse rather than dreary domestic routine. I am independent and need plenty of room to myself in order not to feel suffocated. In the early years, I didn''t mind that we lived in different cities. It suited me. I sensed the man was controlling and I didn''t wan.