When he returned from the kitchen, he was reading from his iPad. ‘Dry robes,’ he announced. ‘Those weird coats everyone was wearing at the Forty Foot? They’re a sort of changing room/coat mashup. We need them.’
‘You want to make it a regular thing?’
‘To get the benefit, I’d have to do it every day. And I don’t want to do it without you, so you’d need to be here every day too.’ He enlarged something on his screen. ‘Would you like a black one with blue lining? Or red lining?’
‘What? One of those giant coats?’
‘Dry robe. Not a coat.’
I was so grateful I lived in a time when oversized was fashionable. A giant top made the rest of me look less giant and, God knows, you’d think I’d have outgrown that sort of thinking, but I hadn’t and from the looks of things I never would.
But those coats were insane. And once had been enough to know that the freezing water wasn’t for me.
‘Stop, Quin, you loon. Don’t get me one.’
‘The colours are a bit basic,’ he was muttering. Then, ‘You don’t want to make the swimming a regular thing?’
‘… Ah, I don’t think so. I’m not as dissatisfied with life as you are.’
That made him laugh. ‘But what if you lived here all the time, Rach?’
It kept coming back to this.
‘Our lives are busy,’ Quin said. ‘Both of us, we’re out a lot in the evenings. It would be so good to come home to each other. And Crunchie loves it here.’
She did. But … ‘Crunchie loves it anywhere.’
There were a lot of considerations about moving in with Quin, the most important being his two children. I got on fine with Liberty and Finley but it would be different if I moved in full-time.
And what about my house, which I loved? And my garden, which I actually might have loved even more? When I’d first moved in, five years ago, I was still in shock that Luke and I were over and had no interest in making a home. Functional was all that had mattered – a bed to collapse into, a couch to slump on, a microwave to make popcorn when I remembered to eat.
The furniture that Luke and I had owned in New York had gone to Goodwill. I’d arrived back in Ireland with very little money, so only the barest essentials were purchased.
But time really is a healer – because one day I’d found myself shelling out an unholy sum of money for a sixties-style dressing table. From Ebay! I hadn’t even seen it in real life, but some certainty was humming in me that it would work – and it did.
It must have been around then that Claire and I took to haunting a second-hand furniture market, because Claire’s best frenemy had come by a fabulous low-slung Mad Men-esque coffee table there. But Claire found the scratched wood and torn upholstery of the market repellent. ‘Life’s too short to see potential in something. Give me the completed article, don’t waste my time.’
But I was all about the potential. The day I found two battered but deliciously angular mid-century armchairs at a stall, I immediately asked the price. Claire said, genuinely confused, ‘What d’you want them for? Mulch for your’ – she threw a snigger into the word – ‘“shrubs”？’ （Her garden was gorgeous because she paid a lot of money to a landscaper and his team of skilled Slovakians. She had never picked up so much as a trowel and my little hobby baffled her.）
Feeling thrillingly directional, I’d had the chairs reupholstered and now they occupied pride of place in my ‘study’。
‘You’d better not become one of those smug fuckers,’ Claire had warned. ‘With their one-off “pieces”。’
It was an identity I’d have been delighted to embrace but, to date, the chairs remained my biggest success.
‘I love my house,’ I said.
‘It’s great – if it was just the two of us. But the kids need their space.’
‘I know.’
‘We can dig up your cherry blossom and replant it here.’
But there was another reason I was resistant: the terrible way Luke and I had ended. ‘Quin, if things went sideways for us …’ I tried to find the words. ‘And I had to leave …’
‘Things won’t go sideways.’
I could have laughed. It didn’t take him long to snap back to his cocky, confident self.
‘Even if they did,’ he said, ‘you’d be okay. You’ve survived a lot, you’re able.’
He was right, I saw, slightly surprised.