DAY 26

Breaking the spell

It was I who broke the spell. Stupidly. But spells of magic, spells of great joy must always break eventually, just like spells of sunny weather. These months of pure bliss – for this was our one true honeymoon, when it came to the crunch – must always come to an end. We can’t sustain a mood of high excitement, perfect happiness, for very long. After a month I needed to escape from it, just as you need to throw out the Christmas tree and all the lustrous sparkle that goes with it, and move again in plain rooms. Or as you may wish, for an unaccountable perverse moment, to return to the chill banality of foggy autumn workdays, even as you stroll around an ancient white village on a Greek island, drenched in eternal summer. Too much happiness hurts your eyes. We can sustain grief and sadness for considerably longer than joy, oddly enough.

I didn’t know this, then, when I was twenty-four. You can take more bright lights and rich sunshine when you’re young, you think warm days will never cease. But I had already suspected that Bo would not be able to sustain his level of euphoria. I liked to think of myself as a calm individual. I believed I could keep a rein on myself, even when I was flying high, or racing down a ski slope at a hundred miles an hour.

Bo’s emotions ran higher and faster than mine. He was more excitable. He was like a child with a wonderful new toy – love, I think, rather than me as such.

Slow down, you move too fast, I had been thinking. But how can you ask an enthusiastic child to slow down, to dampen their joy? It would be like waking a dreaming toddler from a delicious sleep. Or, perhaps, like forcing a toddler who is delirious with the joy of playing to stop and go to bed.

For years Bo had been suffering loss. The end of his marriage had hurt him deeply. When you’re young, even when you are as young or as old as forty-three, the only way to fall out of love with the person who is lost is to fall in love with someone else. I knew that much, as every twenty-four-year-old who has loved and lost knows it. There’s just one really effective cure for a broken heart.

No wonder he was on top of the world. Bo, whose capacity for optimism and enthusiasm, whose love of life was greater than anyone’s – although the life he loved was not the common one, but encompassed, as well as nature and people and food and music and ordinary fun, knowledge, learning, the life of the mind. He had the capacity for boundless joy, and his character was tempered by pain and loss. But I suspected that he couldn’t stay on top of the world, where the oxygen is thin, although the snow and the air are glittering, for very long. I didn’t know about manic depression, or bipolar disorder, and Bo did not suffer from these conditions. But there was something – some capacity or tendency to be overexcited that made me uneasy. When will we meet again? Tonight! Let’s buy that lovely big house on the corner, you’d like that. There was something not quite bearable in going so far, so fast. But maybe I was wrong. There was so much I didn’t know about him. He was a stranger from a foreign land and a different generation. He seemed invulnerable, omniscient, sure of himself, and in ways he was. Maybe he could stay on the top of Mount Everest?

I myself pulled him down. I shattered our idyllic happiness as if it were a china bowl that I took from the cabinet and hurled against the floor.

Oliver had come round to talk to me. First it had seemed like a friendly visit – he made enquiries about my plans to go to Denmark, which someone had told him about and which had taken him aback. When I told him about Bo and our relationship, he panicked. To make a long story short, he soon wanted me back. Breaking up had been a huge mistake.

Oliver became increasingly desperate. He couldn’t sleep, he walked around Dublin at night, plagued by worries and regrets. He begged me to forgive him and resume our relationship.

In retrospect, it’s easy to understand what was happening. Oliver and I had had a fairly long and serious relationship. But the romance had gone out of it for him, if it had ever been there, and had not been replaced by anything deeper. Now that I was involved with another man, whom he admired, I was once again the object of desire. All too often, we realise that we value someone when it’s too late, when we’ve lost them. What we possess we take for granted. While I was alone, Oliver could assume, probably unconsciously, that I was available, still in love with him. But as soon as another man came on the scene, that presumption vanished. People, especially men, are competitive in love. The rival had to be displaced.

Oliver was a good person who genuinely believed that my relationship with Bo was a mistake. The prejudice against the age gap was universal. Bo was forty-five, but in Oliver’s eyes he was about eighty. ‘All he wants is a nursemaid!’

Why did I tell Bo about this?

Perhaps I hoped he would solve the problem? I could have solved it very easily myself, and very simply, and very obviously, by telling Oliver to get lost. Some young women must spend half their lives fending off admirers.

A more determined person, sure of her attractiveness and of her feelings, would have done just that. But I was not determined, and the return of Oliver had confused me. Three or four months ago I had been heartbroken. If he had come back at any time then I would have gladly gone back to him. But now I was in love with Bo. Or was I? What is love? What is infatuation, even? It seems to be focused on one individual, to be a connection between two individuals. But the emotion is affected by third parties. Oliver did not love me when I was alone, and available, eager to be with him. Now it was obvious – he was not bluffing – that he believed he was very much in love with me because I was connected to Bo and not available.

What did I imagine Bo would feel when I told him all this? For a month he had been in love with a girl young enough to be his daughter, he had risked his reputation as a professor, he had promised to marry me. He was an entirely trustworthy and reliable man, and his trust had been betrayed. Again.

He dealt with the problem rationally.

‘Well, dearest darling,’ he said, opening his eyes and raising his eyebrows. ‘You must decide between me and Oliver. I can’t make up your mind for you.’

He spoke to me now like a teacher to a student. He was sitting at one side of the kitchen table and I at the other. It might have been his little desk in college.

‘I love you,’ I said.

The light was grey. It was a heavy June day, leaden.

‘Yes, apparently,’ he said. ‘But I am old enough to be your father.’ He sighed. ‘We must remember that, when all is said and done.’

I, who had been full of joy, was full of tears.