It took me hours to register that she’d only brought two soup cups. That there was no ‘Nature Walk’ poster on the tree at the top of the quay, even though there were posters for just about everything else. Even then, I couldn’t quite believe she might have made the whole thing up to engineer another meeting.
And yet – and yet – ‘Of course there wasn’t a Nature Walk!’ she said, when I asked how often she did this. ‘I just wanted to see you again!’ She laughed, watching me, and slid one of her hands out of its fingerless glove. It stayed on her lap.
‘That was devious,’ I said, eventually. I folded my arms and fixed my eyes on hers.
There was no way I was touching that hand. Not yet.
We sat on the bench in silence, sipping soup, until the shadows lengthened and the cold air began to sting. Then we went back to her yurt, where she had a hairdryer and straighteners and a fridge for gin and tonic. （‘I’m not on a spiritual retreat here,’ she said, when she caught me looking.） She told me about her father dying before she went to university, about the years she’d spent living with her grandmother in Hampstead. She sat close to me on the sofa, often looking me straight in the eye, her face inches from mine.
We talked until, eventually, I couldn’t take another moment. I reached out and traced a finger down the side of her face, down her neck, and she shivered under my fingertip.
We sat in absolute stillness, staring at each other.
‘God,’ she said. ‘You’re lovely.’
‘I am,’ I agreed. I felt as if I might have a stroke if this didn’t happen soon.
She looked away. ‘The thing is, I’m . . . not lovely.’
I thought about this for a moment. ‘I’d like to dispute that.’
She studied me for a while, and said, ‘Oh.’ She seemed uncertain.
‘I have to be honest, Emma. I would not be here, in a yurt, in a field, in the middle of the night, with nowhere to stay, and my boss sending pointed messages about my “food poisoning”， if I thought you were unlovely.’
‘Oh,’ she said again. ‘Well, that’s nice. But you see, the thing is . . .’
‘The thing?’
She sighed. ‘There is a thing. Not a huge thing. Well, a mid-size thing . . .’
‘You’re in a relationship?’
‘No! Of course not!’
I looked around the yurt, full of books and pots and bits of what looked like laboratory equipment. Frogman watched me. How could a woman this clever, this funny, this beautiful not be with someone?
‘Are you sure?’ I asked.
She picked up my hand and took it back to her cheek, closing her eyes for a moment as it touched her skin. ‘I’m sure. It’s just that I . . . that I . . . I’m complicated.’
I laughed. ‘Luckily, I’m very simple.’
She laughed, too. ‘I like you,’ she said, and then leaned in and kissed me.
The tenderness of it. The sense I had of everything changing, as we came to lie on the bed, taking off clothes, at first slowly, then faster, faster.
In the months that followed I returned to that conversation from time to time. I wondered why this woman, who seemed so open and willing to love, would have described herself as complicated. What was it she had been trying to say? I asked her a couple of times, but she just said that she had a long history of relationship-sabotage. ‘I won’t sabotage this one, though,’ she said, and I believed her.