Also, I really cherish our gang. I didn’t want to do anything to harm it. I kept thinking: what if you’re (somewhat justifiably) repelled and weirded out, and it ruins everything? I knew it would change things between all of us, whether you felt the same way or not. Especially if not.
Then that night in the Trip, I looked over at you. You were talking to Nick Hennigan about his micro scooter, which takes patience and a big heart. I couldn’t stop gazing at you – the way you smile and lower your eyes when you start to crack up, as if you’re doing something you shouldn’t. I live for that smile. (Sorry I’m bad at this. This is how a love letter works, isn’t it? You just embarrass yourself horribly?)
And I realised – I couldn’t bear to let you leave without you knowing how I felt, whatever the consequences. I had to say it, just once.
By the way, E, I don’t want you to think it was some spur of the moment whim, faced with being apart. I’ve spent two years infatuated with you. (Does this sound creepy? I sound creepy, don’t I.) What I’m trying to say is: you’re *everything* to me. If you want to be mine, well, I am already yours.
Write back.
Ed xxxx
PS it occurs to me that if you are finding this too heavy and too much, and a quick snog – after 4 pints of Old Scruttocks Buttocks or Ferret’s Achy Hole cloudy cider at 6.5% or whatever it was we were drinking – didn’t mean much more than ‘yeah sure OK, bye Ed,’ – I get it. I also get that explaining yourself might feel awkward. If you want to go back to being friends, at Christmas – leave this letter unreplied to, and I’ll get the message that way.
Hah. I had already stocked up at Ryman’s for this task, with mint-green notelets, and immediately embarked on a five-page epic. Despite lots of rethinking and rewording, it was on its way, envelope flap tamped down with Sellotape for privacy and security, before the last post.
Ed never wrote again, and while I agonised about this, I already knew how he felt, and how I felt. And I rationalised: maybe he was both swooning, and overwhelmed with First Terming.
It added to the build-up of seeing each other. To be safe, I texted him short friendly updates about uni life, signed with a newly risqué ‘xx’. He always replied swiftly, in kind, an ‘xx’ at the end too. So it was OK? I thought. I hoped.
Sending another letter, when the last had been so febrile and detailed, seemed overkill. Was it my fevered prose, was it too much? No, surely not. I remembered the intensity of that kiss, and the look in his eyes. I was a nervous, insecure teenage girl but not so insecure that I could believe a man in love wouldn’t want to hear his bones were jumpable.
Maybe a phone call? I steeled myself on two lager and blacks, and got his answerphone. He rang back a day later and I missed it, though the whole twenty-four-hour lapse had already spooked me. Wouldn’t he have returned it when he saw it? Then lots of ‘What are we like!’ texts, Ed flannelling me that: lol, perhaps face to face chat was best? Still, two kisses.
Thank you for your letter xx
I concluded, hoping to prompt a gear shift, and getting only:
xxx
in response, which stopped somewhat short of ‘F. Scott Fitzgerald to Zelda’.
I should take the bull by the horns, I knew it, but I was deeply inexperienced with bulls, horns, and how to take bulls by them.
It was weird. It felt like avoidance, but his tone was affection. It looked clingy to push it. If you want to be mine, well, I am already yours. He’d said it, I had my pledge.
The first meet-up back home was on a smokily cold December night. As I put my eyeliner on wonky and had to sponge it off and re-draw it, I finally acknowledged to myself that my anticipation had curdled into apprehensiveness. Something felt badly off.
Shouldn’t Ed have immediately asked for a date for the two of us, an emotional homecoming, squirrelled away in the corner of a country pub with mullioned windows, doing what tabloid papers call ‘canoodling’?
Susie arrived before the lads. After we traded stories of Fresher grot, Susie said:
‘I can’t believe Ed has a girlfriend already.’ She wasn’t looking at me, absently patting her pockets for her tobacco tin, unaware she had verbally stabbed me with an eight-inch serrated knife.
A girlfriend a girlfriend what the fuck – A WHAT?! my inner monologue screamed, deranged.
Susie was busy rolling her roll-up on the fag-ash-strewn metal table in front of the chain bar in town we’d chosen for our reunion. It was a ‘pitchers of Sea Breeze for a tenner’ rowdy kind of place that you never see the inside of again after the age of twenty-three. TLC’s ‘Waterfalls’ billowed from the doorway.
Funny how trauma gives you a pin-sharp recall for detail.
My heart boom-boomed like the bass from a passing car.
‘Girlfriend?’ I asked, in a tiny voice.
A vain hope: by ‘girlfriend’, did she mean me? Had Ed presumptuously taken it upon himself to break our news, omitting my identity for a shock reveal? My gut already knew the answer.
I had been frightened he’d cooled on me, but I had been too naïve, too trusting, too mutually in love, I thought, to imagine there could possibly be a usurper.
My nervous smile felt like a jagged line on a polygraph as I took a shaky drag on my Vogue Superslim Menthol. (I was trying out being a smoker for six months, until I got a cough and decided I had lung cancer. Susie banned me from then on. ‘You like to think you’re the risk-taking sort but you’re not, Eve. You like the uniform but not the hours.’)
‘Yeah, didn’t he say to you, too? Hester. There’s something so very Ed about going off and obtaining a future wife as an undergrad, isn’t there. It was written. It was bound to be. Like him ending up president of all the societies.’
Hester. Hester? I was speechless, I couldn’t respond. The casual cruelty had disembowelled me. Ed had my heart, and he’d behaved like Hannibal Lecter with it.
My mum liked to tell me I had no idea what bastards men could be – I thought my dad abruptly emigrating upon divorce had made it pretty clear, but apparently my mum thought being on the daughter rather than wife end of that decision made it less hurtful.
Right now, I felt the full force of that maternal threat, made good.
That someone as gentle, known to me, and, I thought, sincere as Ed Cooper could do this? It was unfathomable. It was savage.
‘Ah, there they are, our common-law husbands!’ Susie said, as Ed and Justin lad-swaggered towards us, through the Friday night throng. Yeah, my bigamous common-law husband.
Ed could barely meet my eyes, even as we hugged hello, somehow managing not to make any bodily contact. He radiated pure culpability.
‘It’s brass bollocks out here,’ Justin said, blowing on his hands. ‘Never mind you two’s filthy habit, we’re going inside.’ (He started smoking a month later, following the law that anything Justin claims to be censorious about, he is usually thinking of doing.)
‘Eduardo, how can you have coupled up this fast?!’ Susie said, not missing a beat, once we had drinks. Ed mumbled indistinct, U-rated things about having lots of tutorials together and I stared furiously at the rosy phantom of lipstick mark that wasn’t mine, on the side of my glass.
‘And you’re going down to Cornwall to spend Christmas with her family?!’ Wow. Ed had sure kept me carefully out of the loop.