Another Love Read online

  She had, over time, developed a shell into which she could retreat, just like the much maligned common garden snail. She liked all invertebrates, but insects were her special thing. She hid her face inside books and chose bigger and heavier glasses, prompting her classmates to make jokes about Coronation Street’s Deirdre Barlow. She took to offering her views in a whisper so as not to offend or dominate, happy to hide in the shadow of her sunnier, prettier sisters.

  Romilly grew up, left school, won a place at Bristol University and was happy. Content. Not that life was always perfect, far from it, but she had never seen the point of craving what she didn’t or couldn’t have – longer legs, better skin or a flashier car. She was one of life’s satisfied. Unlike her sisters, she had never sat with her nose inches from the table while holding out a finger to measure the precise amount of orange juice their mum had poured into each of the three glasses. She had never whined, ‘She’s got more than me!’ She was just happy to get the drink.

  At least that was the case until she met David. David Wells. David Arthur Wells, to give him his full but rarely used name. She couldn’t say the words without smiling. Because as she said them she pictured his face, his beautiful face, and then she let her mind’s eye travel down to his hard chest, and then she pictured his muscled arms closing around her, tightly, and she remembered the feeling of utter, utter bliss as she submitted, losing herself against him. And that made her smile all over again.

  The first time he’d sat next to her in the library, Romilly had tried not to show her surprise, tried not to notice him. She hoped he hadn’t seen her neck bulge with a huge swallow of anticipation as she surreptitiously ran a finger around her nose and mouth, searching for any untoward secretions.

  He flashed her a smile and she blushed and went back to her books, leaning forward so that a curtain of hair fell over her face. She squinted at the text and continued to read. Onychophorans are soft-bodied, full-lipped, beautiful boy sitting next to me… For God’s sake, Rom, concentrate. She gave a small cough and tried again. Onychophorans are soft-bodied, muscly arms, gorgeous face, and smells wonderful… It was pointless.

  Engrossed in her prop, she didn’t see him lean forward to write on the side of her notepad, so close she could feel his warm breath against her skin. It sent a shiver down her spine, making her skin taut beneath her goosebumps. With his hand at an awkward angle, he scrawled, Can I borrow a pen?

  She pulled her hair across her face and hooked it behind her ear, raising her eyes to his. ‘You’ve got one,’ she whispered, pointing a finger towards the biro with which he had written the request.

  Wide-eyed, he tapped his forehead lightly in mock admonishment. Leaning forward again, he wrote, I’m a klutz!

  She got it. He was taking the piss. She shifted in her seat and twisted her body away from him, trying to ignore him. She wondered what had prompted the strange interaction. Maybe he was just trying to amuse himself. Nerd-baiting had been popular when she was at school, but she’d hoped that university would be different. She heard the scrape of a chair on the next table and felt him turn towards the sound; an accomplice maybe? Ah, yes, that would be it, a dare. Well done, Mr Good-Looking. Job done.

  The next day, however, he sat next to her again. This time he took his biro and drew a smiley face on her folder. She felt confused, welcoming the interaction but so unsure of his intentions that she feared making a fool of herself. She reciprocated in the only way she knew how, by drawing a ladybird on his folder. He encased it in a bubble and added an arrow pointing in her direction, above which he wrote, You.

  Her scrawled reply was swift. A ladybird? Really?

  To which he replied, It’s the eyes…

  She had the last word. And the spots!

  On the third day, he greeted her with a whispered, ‘Hey, Bug Girl!’

  She smiled, very much liking the idea of being his Bug Girl, happy to have this connection. Even if it was only because he admired her bookishness, it was still a thrill.

  They quickly established a ritual whereby whoever arrived first would place their rucksack on the seat next to them and ward off anyone else with a steely stare. Their contact was confined to the library. This was unsurprising as Romilly rarely ventured to the Student Union bar and was not a frequenter of the bars and clubs favoured by David and his cronies. And David had never even heard of the volunteer programme at Bristol Zoo, where she spent many hours in the butterfly forest explaining lifecycles and other fascinating facts to the general public.

  Three weeks after their first encounter, they met in the stairwell. Heading in opposite directions and both with large folders held tightly against their chests, they hovered, she above and he below. It felt coincidental but also opportune; it was what she had been longing for, a chance meeting. Both were rooted to the spot, unmoved by the tuts and yells and the trundling feet forced to navigate around them. It was as if they were each in a force field of their own, singled out from the crowd and marked as being of special interest.

  For the first time, he spoke to her in a voice louder than a whisper. ‘Hey, Bug Girl.’ And all of a sudden she felt a spike of envy. It was an unfamiliar sensation, a bit like hunger and fear and anger all swirled into one. She could taste the sour note of jealousy that blossomed on her tongue as she stuttered her response. For she knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that boys like David Wells didn’t fall in love with bookish, ginger-haired, spectacle-wearing girls like her. They went for leggy, long-haired gigglers like Carrie and Holly, girls who knew sexy stuff and weren’t afraid to be manhandled, unfazed at the prospect of their T-shirt riding up or inadvertently flashing their pants.

  Romilly had never been that sort of girl. Being clever was her thing, her nose always firmly inside a book as she crept from the library to lectures and back again. The boys that courted her were the ones who also studied science and who also wore specs and who knew every word to the entire series of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and weren’t afraid to spend an entire coach journey to Dartmoor and back again proving this. David was in another league entirely and it was a league in which she wasn’t even a minor player.

  ‘It’s Romilly.’ She nodded.

  ‘David Wells.’ He smiled.

  They continued to sit close to each other in the library, getting to know each other little by little via whispered exchanges, some gentle teasing and the scrawling of information and ideas in gel pen across each other’s notes and files. They would then stroll back to halls together, down the steep pavements of Park Street or up towards Whiteladies Road, meandering and chatting, whatever the weather.

  ‘How can you spend all day, every day, studying one tiny creature?’ he asked one afternoon as they ambled nonchalantly along. ‘Don’t you ever get bored?’ He prodded the textbook in her arms, whose cover displayed various pictures of the mayfly, her insect of special interest, about which she would write her dissertation.

  She wrinkled her nose beneath her glasses and took her time in forming a response. ‘Quite the opposite. The more I learn, the more I want to learn. I don’t think there can be anything as fascinating in the whole wide world, absolutely nothing, as a creature that is born knowing it will catch only one sighting of the moon. Just one! A creature that seeks the sun, knowing it has to live an entire life in a day! That’s incredible, don’t you think? The very opposite of boring. And that question is actually comical, coming from you, Mr Numbers. I mean, accounting and finance? Now that’s proper boring! I mean, God, if I had to look at numbers all day, I’d just say, shoot me now.’

  She glanced up at him uncertainly. Had she gone too far? Shut up, Romilly! Just shut up! You’re rambling because you’re nervous. He’ll think you’re a loser.

  His suggestion of a date came a whole month later, as they stood on the steps of the Wills Memorial Building. It left her speechless, quite literally staring at the space above his head, wondering if it was a joke or whether it was even worth it. The disappointment of him rejecting her after one dat
e was possibly more than she could bear. She figured that if there had been any romantic intentions on his part, he would have made his move a while ago.

  His expression was searching. ‘So, is that a silent “Yes, I’d love to come for a light supper on the docks,” or a silent “Sod off”? I can’t tell.’ He laughed, that easy laugh that showed his beautiful teeth.

  ‘I’d love to,’ she squeaked.

  ‘Yes!’ He punched the air, and for the first time in her life, Romilly felt like a prize.

  Tessa, a girl in her halls, had insisted that she have a drink before she went off to meet him. Dutch courage, she called it, although there was nothing Dutch about the Russian vodka shot that she hurled down her neck. Romilly wasn’t fond of booze, didn’t like the taste much, apart from sickly sweet cocktails, fizzy wine and Pimm’s and lemonade in the summer. But this was not the time to be picky; booze flowed in every room on campus and she needed something to give her confidence, anything that might loosen her tongue and enable her to shine a little in front of this beautiful boy.

  It was just the one measure, but as the alcohol glazed the back of her throat with its heat, she felt her eyes widen and her cheeks flush. She smiled at the warm glow, which, she had to admit, took the edge off, just a little. She had ditched her glasses and positively shimmied out of her halls.

  From that night on, she and David fell effortlessly into coupledom. They were always invited out as a pair and referred to as a unit. It felt great.

  The day she took David to her parents’ house in Pewsey, Wiltshire was one she wouldn’t forget. Nerves had rendered her silent. Trying to control the quake in her gut, she wondered what he would make of her ordinary family in their ordinary house. Her dad, who grew enough tomatoes to keep Heinz in production; her mum, who scoured the hob until the shiny surface lifted; and her sisters, who lounged on the sofa in their tiny shorts and vests, sending pheromones out into the atmosphere with their utter, utter gorgeousness.

  Carrie and Holly did a double-take at the sight of their sister’s catch. He was far, far from the dorky, scrawny bibliophile that they’d been expecting. Her mum went into fussy overdrive, telling him just how clever her oldest daughter had always been, while force-feeding him Victoria sponge, homemade of course. She had whispered to Romilly through a sideways mouth as they ferried plates and cups to the kitchen, ‘You should have told me!’ Romilly was perplexed. Should have told her what? That David was good-looking? Well mannered? Smart? What would that have meant, two Victoria sponges? Her dad had packed him off with an old Raspberry Ripple container piled high with ripe, earthy-smelling ‘tommyatoes’, as he called them.

  Romilly waited for David to end their relationship, convinced that it would only be a matter of time before she, like her mum’s hob, lost her shiny veneer and he got distracted by something newer, glossier and less timid. She woke each day with nervous anticipation that today might be the day he came to his senses and binned her. A couple of glasses of wine before they saw each other became the salve that ensured she could cope with whatever occurred. She soon discovered that if she topped herself up with a couple more glasses when they arrived at their destination, and downed the odd tequila slammer chaser, she became someone else entirely. And that someone else was the kind of girl no man could resist, particularly the fabulous David Wells.

  With the syrupy booze flowing through her veins, she felt taller and sexier and was not averse to hitching up her skirt and dancing where and when the mood took her. David would sit back in slack-jawed admiration, a little the worse for wear himself but delighted and enthralled by the smart, sexy girl who garnered appreciative looks from other Bierkeller drinkers.

  Cocktails flowed and became the backdrop to their social life. Sometimes the evening would end with Romilly doing the honours, propping David up like a sack of spuds, his arms dangling forward, his speech slurred. She would manoeuvre him in and then out of a cab, then dump him onto the single bed in her room. As he lay there, pissed and snoring, she would stare at his profile and touch her finger to his cheek, feeling wave after wave of love for him, before pulling the duvet up to his chin and tucking him in.

  One night, when it was her turn to be ferried home in an inebriated state, she lay with her arms crossed above her head on the pillow and told him for the first time that she loved him. ‘I really, really, really, really do. Like proper love, not just sexing love, not just one-day-Mayfly love, but proper love.’ She grinned as he sank to his knees and stroked her hair away from her face.

  ‘I love you too, even when you’re pissed. I just hope you remember this in the morning.’ He laughed.

  ‘Write it down for me!’ She reached towards the bedside cabinet, knocking a half-filled glass of water onto the carpet. ‘David, David, write it down!’ she insisted, waving her hand in the general direction of her desk, cluttered with books, pens and biscuit crumbs.

  ‘Okay! Okay!’ He stood with palms upturned and found a pen and stack of Post-its. On the top one he wrote, I love you, Bug Girl, and you love me. We are joined forever. Proper love. Do not forget this! Then he stuck it on the shade of her lamp and budged her into the corner to make room for him to sleep.

  When she woke up, shivering and smiling at the duvet thief who had hogged not only the majority of the inadequate bed, but also the bed cover, her eyes fell upon the yellow square fluttering on her lamp. She felt a jolt of joy that left her breathless. These were happy, happy times.

  Romilly worked hard at her studies, arriving at the lab full of enthusiasm, throwing herself into every experiment and reading her textbooks late into the night, determined to get the First she knew she was capable of. Whenever she was on top of her workload, she would down her syrupy dancing juice and vamp it up for her man.

  On occasion, her nagging insecurity still reared its ugly head. Any message that went unanswered or any apparent distraction on his part would send her reeling to a dark place. Fearing the worst, with muscles coiled in tension, she would wait for the inevitable ‘It’s not you, it’s me….’ conversation.

  One evening they’d strolled across the Downs and along Ladies Mile, hand in hand under the full-canopied trees whose leaves had begun their transformation into shining golds and russets. The air was Bonfire Night bright and the blue-grey sky seemed to accommodate more stars than usual. The two walked along the footpath that skirted the Avon Gorge, breathing in the cool night air and chatting as they went.

  Eschewing the lure of the bustling pubs, they made their way along the Gloucester Row. Romilly hesitated, taking tentative steps out onto the suspension bridge, trying to quell the leap of fear in her gut. She looked up at the magnificent structure as night closed around it, the cliffs of the gorge blurring into shadow behind the bright light of the bulbs illuminating it. It mattered little that this incredible feat of engineering had held fast for the last one hundred and fifty years; she still pictured the taut stays snapping and the tons of Meccano-like metal collapsing into a twisted pile two hundred and fifty feet below, with her buried somewhere beneath.

  Halfway across the bridge, David stopped suddenly and stood in front of her. He took her hands inside his and drew a deep breath.

  Romilly held his gaze. This was it. Don’t cry. Don’t give him the satisfaction. It’s okay, I knew it was never going to last. As her thoughts whirred, she watched him struggle to start, the wind licking his face, lifting his dark fringe. His lips were dry and he swallowed, as if he had a lump in his throat. I always knew that someone better than me would come along and steal you away, so just say it, get it over with and don’t patronise me, just give it to me straight. She remained silent, not wanting to make it easy for him.

  ‘Rom…’ He exhaled from bloated cheeks and shook his head, looking into the distance.

  This was clearly harder than he’d thought and that gladdened her, made her feel a little less disposable.

  ‘It’s okay. I know. I know what you’re going to say.’ She blinked, trying to keep the catch from her v
oice, looking down at the river far below and imagining flinging herself into it. Was it true that you died or lost consciousness before you hit the water, she wondered? Or was that just a white lie, trotted out to ease the pain of the bereaved?

  ‘You do?’ He stared at her.

  She nodded.

  ‘Okay then.’ He released her hand, ran his fingers through his hair and waited, breathing out slowly.

  After an interminable pause, he raised his voice. ‘So, come on! Tell me, Bug Girl! Is it yes or no? Don’t leave a guy hanging.’ He peered over the edge at the twist of the River Avon beneath them.

  Romilly glanced across at the cars scurrying along the Portway like rows of common ants, purposefully following the same meandering path in two opposing, evenly spaced lines.

  ‘Come on, Rom! I don’t like this pause. It was bad enough when I first asked you out. Is this also a silent “Yes, I’d love to,” or is this one meant to be a silent “Sod off”?’

  ‘What do you mean?’ she asked.

  ‘I mean, are you going to marry me or not?’

  ‘Am I going to… what?’ She needed it repeating as she gripped the side of the bridge for support.

  Despite the other pedestrians, mostly tourists coming from the Leigh Woods side of the bridge, who giggled at them, their cameras poised, David dropped down onto one knee and took her hand inside both of his.

  ‘Romilly Jane Shepherd, you are amazing. I’ve never met another girl like you. You make me laugh, you look after me when I’m sloshed and you are the smartest, most interesting person I have ever met. I love you and you love me, proper love that lasts forever, so will you marry me?’

  Romilly stared at him and felt her mouth fall open as her knees bobbed with weakness. He wanted to marry her. David Arthur Wells, who could pick anyone in the whole wide world, had chosen her. She leapt into his arms as he held her fast and kissed him passionately on his beautiful mouth.