It doesn’t take long for the boys to cotton on that my mind and attentions are elsewhere, Piotr nudging me in the ribs and delivering the sort of crude remarks that make me thankful the last four years of his doctorate haven’t entirely thinned out his Polish accent. It is Jack, our lab technician, a man who dedicates forty hours a week to breeding newts, who makes the only sensible remark of the night.
“What have you got to lose, eh, Frank?” he says. “Another night in a cold single bed?”
When I see you stand up to get your round in, I know it is my chance, and the boys aren’t going to let me lose it. The moment you are up, squeezing yourself off the bench and holding the empty glasses precariously between your fingers, I am sent in with what is left in the kitty.
The pub is warm inside, and my glasses steam up quickly. I curse my eyesight and almost wish I had taken the risk of leaving my frames at home. I’d tried that once before, on the sole date I’d managed in the last two years, with a research assistant over from Glasgow. Let’s just say Fiona wasn’t too pleased when I came back from the bathroom and sat down at another woman’s table.
I blot the lenses on my jumper. It is one of Mum’s finest creations, a Christmas-tree scene, and the little glittery threads from the knitted baubles keep catching on the screws. Finally, I manage to clear away the condensation, but my resolve seems to have dissipated with it. I suddenly feel ridiculous—what was I thinking, hoping a girl like you would cast your eye on me, let alone agree to a date? I am about to concede defeat and send Jack for our next round when Piotr enters, en route to the loo, and he is as unsubtle as ever when he slaps me on the back, enough to turn me back around and, in the tight squeeze of bodies by the bar, knock me straight into you. For a second, there is terror that your stack of empties will fall, and I stick my hands out blindly, catching one, then steadying myself just in time to save some face.
“I’m so sorry—” My face flushes as red as my hair, my words pouring over one another. Blessedly, you cut me off.
“Thank you!” you shout over me. “I am always biting off more than I can chew! Here, can I get you a drink—token of my appreciation and all?”
“No. Thank you, though. I mean I’d love to, but”—I jangle the coins in the pint glass as a weak explanation—“I’ve got to stand my round!”
“I admire a man with principles.” You smile. I cannot tell if it is my imagination or if you are taking a step toward me.
Before I can analyze you any more, you turn around and make your order, winning over the barman, who laughs at something you say while you peruse the ciders on tap. As your drinks line up, it is on the tip of my tongue to ask if, actually, we could postpone that drink—another night, after Christmas, just us?
Instead, I burn up, my cheeks on fire, my palms sweating. In a bid to calm my flaming face, I think of the evolution and gene-mutation paper folded in half and rammed in my back pocket. “DNA Mutations in Xenopus Toads,” I seem to remember. But no data set or scatter graph on adaptive change is sufficient distraction from my crippling embarrassment. Not for the first time, it strikes me that if I carry on at this rate, it will be a biological marvel if I survive my twenties and have any chance of reproducing.
All too soon you have your drinks, and a tray this time too. You look up at me, pushing your curls behind your ear. “Well, thanks again . . .”
“Frank,” I offer. “‘It’s Frank.”
“I’m Maggie,” you say. “Margot, really, no thanks to my mother. It seems so old-fashioned, and besides, I’m not French, no delusion of being either.”
“I’ll remember that.”
“What? The not being French or the not being deluded?”
“Both, I’d say.”
You smile at that. “And how will I remember you?”
I am not imagining it this time. You take a step toward me, so close now that the lip of the tray brushes my chest.
“Frank, the man of principle. Despite what this jumper might say to the contrary.”
The garish metallic baubles flicker under the harsh light overhead. You laugh, head thrown back, and for a second there is nothing. The roar of the pub dulls to silence. My peripheral vision goes blurry. You become my foreground, background, and everything besides. This is my chance to ask, but it feels almost sacrilegious to break this moment.
It’s Piotr who breaks it. “Frank! Frank, get the drinks, eh?”
“You’re being called!” you shout over the din of some drunken carolers who have just arrived and slam their palms down on the bar. “Better get the round or they’ll worry where you’ve been.” And then, more quietly, as if it is a secret, just for us two, “Merry Christmas, Frank.”
And just like that, you were off, back to the garden. I’d missed my spot at the bar and I’d missed my chance.
What should I have said, Mags? Well, asked you on a date, that’s for sure. But that wasn’t enough. You would have had other men chasing you, I knew that as good as certain. I wanted you to know that how I felt was different. How, when my glasses steamed up, I knew exactly how far in front of me you were because there was something about you that felt programmed into me. I knew then that you were it, that you were my Forever Girl. I wouldn’t have said that then, though. I didn’t want to scare you away. But I knew then what I have always known. You were my Forever Girl, Mags.
Chapter 3
After our first meeting in the pub, there weren’t five minutes that went by when I wasn’t thinking about you. That magnetic smile, your easy charm. And to think there was just a tray between us. A day later, still kicking myself for losing my opportunity, I went back to Guildford alone, much to my parents’ disappointment, although Chessie had brought her fiancé, and that diverted the spotlight somewhat, even if she is two years younger than me.
Regular as clockwork, all the relatives asked in turn, “Is there someone special? A lady you are going steady with?” and I brushed off their inquisition brusquely, pretending to be reading for my next paper or doing battle with the crossword. My perpetual singleness had always been a great source of amusement at home. I’d yet to bring a girl home, and in between bouts of concern, there was plenty of fodder for their entertainment as they mimicked me trying to analyze patterns in flirting on a scatter plot and applying them to my own chaotic attempts with limited success.
How on earth was I meant to explain that I had met the girl of my dreams and had let her slip away into a smoky pub garden without so much as asking for a date? I imagined you there, with my parents, on our Boxing Day walk, staying over in my childhood bed and sharing the single duvet, generating our own heat when that didn’t suffice. I tortured myself over the turkey with images of you with another man on New Year’s Eve, ringing in the New Year with a sparkle of your infectious laugh and a sparkler on your ring finger too.
Try as I might, I couldn’t get you out of my mind. Back in Oxford, the boys from the lab didn’t help matters, refusing to let me live down my failure to launch. That January was grueling by anyone’s standards; I barely slept, barely ate (although a researcher’s stipend made that practically a prerequisite), and was barely surprised when I developed a hacking cough.