“Fifteen.” I was laughing, too.
“I hope you wrote them a strongly worded letter.”
I stayed silent.
“Oh my God! You actually did!”
I put my head in my hands.
“Oh, Carrie, this is priceless. Did they reply?”
“To the third letter, yes.”
Robin roared with laughter.
“I have a very high-achieving mother. And my grandmother was even worse. None of us were fitted with an off switch. But trust me, not everyone has found this trait as appealing as you.”
At his request I told him a little of my mother and of her mother, who’d come over to England from Malaysia because her family would not pay for her to receive a university education. Against all odds, my grandmother had become a professor of epidemiology and even had a stint advising the government. By the time she was fifty, three different men had left her. She was too busy for husbands, Mum alwayssaid. She’d had to hustle ten times as hard as her British colleagues to achieve the same academic credentials, and even then she was always the least likely to get the jobs. If she hadn’t died of cancer in her sixties she would probably have worked until she was a hundred.
“My mum’s different,” I said. “Extremely charming, funny, engaging—people fall in love with her on the spot, although she’s come up against plenty of prejudice too. But she’s no less of a workaholic. She cannot, will not, sit still until she’s saved the world. I’m a good surgeon, but I’ll never have the kind of impact she’s had.”
“Oh, hang on now,” Robin said. He was no longer laughing. “You have plenty of impact, Carrie. I wish I’d…” He broke off. “I had no choice but to write to you, Carrie. No choice at all. I couldn’t think about anything else. It was infuriating and very enjoyable.”
The kissing started when we left the restaurant. I hadn’t kissed anyone since Johan and I enjoyed it even more than I expected to.
—
Luckily, Robin was relaxed about my cautious pace. He arranged excellent dates without any fuss or back and forth; he’d just message me things like,I’m taking you to see the ENO. 7:30 p.m. next Thursday, Coliseum.He took the time to memorize my on-call rotas so that he could plan things I could actually do. And from the very beginning, he was transparent about everything.
Earlier in the year, he told me, he had split up with a woman who’d had several other lovers. He only found out when one of the other men let himself into her house while Robin was there, scrambling eggs in her kitchen.
“It’s been very difficult to accept that I was fooled so easily,” he admitted. “You’re not shady, are you? You’re not living a double life?”
We were walking in Richmond Park in the early evening with binoculars, Robin teaching me basic constellations.
“No. But don’t forget that I married a man who really did have a double life. And that was only four years ago. So if you’re naive, I’m…Actually, I don’t think there’s a word for it.”
Robin glanced sideways at me. “It must have been incredibly traumatic.”
I took off the binoculars and handed them to him. “I’m fine. Honestly. But I have to say I’m not fine with these offensively heavy binoculars. You should try a pair of surgical loupes. They attach directly to your head and they weigh almost nothing.”
“Don’t listen to her,” Robin told the binoculars. They were his grandfather’s 1960 Carl Zeisses and Robin’s favorite “workhorses.” “You’re very quick to make jokes, Carrie, but I find it hard to believe that time was anything other than awful.”
That silenced me for a moment.
“You’re right,” I said, because I wanted no secrets in this relationship. “It was. But it’s part of the experience of being human to suffer, isn’t it? I repaired the damage and I moved on. I’m a surgeon, remember.”
He wasn’t having it. “Buthow? How did you just repair the damage when it was all so violent and shocking? It was yourweddingday.”
I thought again before replying. “My sister made me see a therapist for a while,” I said. “She had some helpful things to say. Then one day I asked her: What’s the formula here? What’s the clinical pathway to healing, in your experience? She said it was a balance between feeling your feelings in a ‘resourced state’ and gently reengaging with life. But of course she couldn’t tell me precisely how to find that balance, so I went ahead and devised my own formula. I allowed myself set times each day to deal with it, and I focused on being helpful and staying busy the rest of the time. Alongside all the usual self-care stuff. I made a plan and stuck to it, and it hurt for a very long time, but it worked. I healed.”
Robin said nothing. I squeezed his hand.
“As I said. I’m a surgeon. It’s how my brain works.”
It was the only noteworthy weakness I sensed in him, this anxiety about my previous life, and he only really stopped asking about Johan when I woke him up one morning, six months in, to tell him I loved him. I felt his body relax, right there, in bed.
To my surprise, he asked me to marry him on the spot. To my surprise, I said yes.
