Pete comes to see me in London after the holiday. I am in a state, my face now definitely reacting to light. But the sensitivity seems to change at random, making it hard to establish how much I can tolerate, and how bright. Sometimes the curtains need to stay shut, sometimes it is OK to go for a walk towards evening, occasionally I make it to the shops, at other times any of these activities causes horrible burning that lasts for hours. So many places, I am discovering, have fluorescent lighting—buses, trains, supermarkets, the GP’s surgery, which I visit to be signed off work. I have taken to wearing my straw hat and a long cotton scarf round my neck that I can hold up over the lower part of my face. It mitigates, but does not remove, the pain of exposure.
I know that it would be good for me to leave smelly London, and stop trying to cope on my own. I do not know what is happening to my relationship with Pete; most likely it is crumbling—everything else in my life seems to be coming to an end. But I haven’t got time for niceties and subtleties, the way one is supposed to negotiate with a boyfriend of two years. A ferocious drive for self-preservation has grown up within me, and it has eaten most of my pride.
We sit in the small kitchen at the back of my first-floor flat. Cool drinks stand on the pine table, and outside summer rages, in a riot of dayglo blue and green.
I take his hand across the corner of the table. There is one particular possibility that I have to eliminate or confirm. “I’m going to ask you something,” I say, “and please don’t worry about saying no. I will absolutely understand.”
“OK,” he says. “What is it?”
The words wait behind my lips, I feel them push against my teeth. How strange, I think, suddenly detached, that mere vibrations released into air can change the course of lives.
I take a breath and let the words fly free. “Can I come and stay with you for a while?” I look past his head, at the kitchen shelves with their piles of plates and bowls. “I’m sorry to have to ask.”
He says nothing. For I am asking, of course, for more than house room. I am asking him to help me interact with the outside world, and to burden himself with a girlfriend who is rapidly becoming a freak.
“Can I think about it?” he says.
“Of course you can.” I squeeze his hand. “Now, what shall we do about dinner?” I get up from the table, and find my legs are shaking and can hardly bear my weight.
Later that night, I can’t sleep. I turn over in my mind what the other options might be if he says no, focusing on ruthlessly practical thoughts. I try to anaesthetise myself to the true implications of what I have done—that if he says no, it means that everything is over, and I face the future alone.
We make inconsequential small talk over breakfast. I try to divine from his manner what is going on in his mind, but what words lurk behind his lips I cannot tell.
Eventually he says, “I’ve thought about what you asked. I must say I didn’t sleep much last night. Anyway, I’ve decided yes.”
Relief crashes over me in a huge clean wave. “Thank you,” I say, jumping up to hug him.
“I think we should have a trial period,” he continues, “just to see how it goes. Say two months?”
In my guts, I feel a clutch of dismay. So then—not completely overwhelmed with delight. But I should have expected something of this sort. Pete is organised, orderly and circumspect, in contrast to my more spontaneous nature. We complement each other—it is why things have worked well.
So I hug him again, and force away my misgivings, and say, “Yes, that’s a sensible idea. Who knows? A few weeks in the same house and we might both go barking mad.”
“Woof,” he says, and kisses my neck.
IF WE COULD only see the future.
Reacting on my face is bad, but surely hats, scarves and avoidance will be the limit of my limitations? We have no inkling of the strange reversal that awaits us, that within a year, relieving my face will transfer the problem, intensified, to the rest of me, and immure me, helpless, in the dark.
We will look back, then, to this time as to a golden age, and if we ever could rerun this day, knowing what will come, I am quite sure he would not take me in, and as for me, I know that I would never dare to ask.