stuck with the plan. I must admit I was proud of myself in that I progressed off the nursery slopes, but not very far. ‘You ski?’ I asked.
‘Occasionally.’
There was a silence broken only by the sound of coffee being poured into his cup. I waited to see if he put milk or sugar or sweetener in it. You’ve guessed it. There’s a lot you can tell about someone from how they take their coffee. He was a straight-up man. No added extras. And he drank it smoking hot. I watched as he took his first mouthful without even wincing at the steamy heat.
‘What does your husband do?’
The question caught me off guard. I was too busy watching the way his mouth had shaped around the rim of his cup. Why had I thought his mouth hard and uncompromising? He had the sort of mouth that would make Michelangelo dash off for a chisel. The lower lip was sensually full and the top one neatly defined. I don’t think I’d ever seen such a beautifully sculpted mouth. I began to wonder what it would feel like pressed to my own …
‘Pardon?’
‘Is your husband a doctor too?’
Something about the way he said the word ‘husband’ made me think he was putting it in inverted commas or even in italics. It was the way he stressed the word. That, and the way his mouth got a slight curl to it as if he thought the notion of someone wanting to marry me was hilariously unbelievable.
‘No, erm, he’s a stock analyst.’
‘In London?’
‘Yes.’
There’s an art to lying and I like to think I’m pretty good at it. After all, I’ve been doing it all my life. I learned early on not to tell people the truth. Living in a commune with your parents from the age of six sort of does that to you. I wouldn’t have lasted long at school if I had Shown and Told some of the things I’d seen and heard.
No, it’s not the lying that’s the problem. That’s the easy part. It’s keeping track of them that gets tricky. So far I hadn’t strayed too far off the path. Andy was a stock analyst and he worked in London. He was currently seeking a transfer to the New York branch of his firm, which, to be frank, I welcomed wholeheartedly. London is a big city but I didn’t fancy running into him and his new girlfriend any time soon. It was bad enough having him come to my house to collect all his things. I made it easy for him by leaving them in the front garden. Yes, I know, it was petty, but I got an enormous sense of satisfaction from throwing them from the second-floor window. It wasn’t my fault it had snowed half a metre overnight. I’m not in control of the weather.
I decided in order to keep my lying tally down I had to ask some questions of my own. ‘Are you married?’
‘No.’
‘In a relationship?’
He paused for a nanosecond. ‘No.’
I wondered if he had broken up recently, or if the break-up—if there had been one—still hurt. ‘Kids?’
He frowned. ‘No, of course not.’
‘Why of course not?’
‘Call me old-fashioned but I like to do things in the right order,’ he said.
I tilted my head at him. ‘So let me guess … you haven’t lived with anyone?’
‘No.’
I pondered over that for a moment while he took a packet of sandwiches from the small fridge and sat down at the table. He opened one of the newspapers on the table and began to eat his sandwiches in what I could only describe as a mechanical way. I’m the first to admit hospital food isn’t much to get all excited about, but the sandwiches for the doctors’ room were always freshly made and contained healthy ingredients, or at least they had since I’d spoken to the head of catering a few weeks back.
‘That’s bad for you, you know,’ I said. I know it was none of my business what or how he ate but the silence was there and I wanted to fill it. Needed to fill it, more like.
Matt Bishop didn’t bother to glance my way. He turned the newspaper page over and reached for another sandwich. ‘What is?’
‘Eating and reading. At the same time, I mean.’
He sat back in his chair and looked at me with an inscrutable expression. ‘You have something against multitasking?’
I didn’t let his satirical tone faze me. ‘Eating while performing other tasks is a bad habit. It can lead to overeating. You might be full by page three but you keep on eating until you get to the sports page out of habit.’
He closed the newspaper and pushed it to the other side of the table. ‘How long were you going out with your husband before he asked you to marry him?’
There, he’d done it again. I wasn’t imagining it. He’d stressed the word ‘husband’. What was with the sudden interest in my private life? Or did he think it impossible anyone could be remotely interested in me? With the end of my engagement so recent I was feeling a bit fragile in terms of self-esteem. Come to think of it, my self-esteem has always been a little on the eggshell side. ‘Erm, actually, he didn’t ask me,’ I said. ‘I asked him.’
He lifted one of his dark eyebrows. ‘Oh?’
‘You don’t approve.’
‘It’s none of my business.’
I folded my arms and gave him a look. ‘I fail to see why the man has to have all the power in a relationship. Why should a girl have to wait months and months, possibly years for a proposal? Living every moment in a state of will-he-or-won’t-he panic?’
‘Don’t blame me,’ he said mildly. ‘I didn’t write the rule book.’
I pursed my lips, not my most attractive pose, but still. Jem calls it my cat’s-bottom pout. I had the strangest feeling Matt Bishop was smiling behind that unreadable look he was giving me. There was a tiny light in his eyes that twinkled now and again.
‘So how did he take it when you popped the question?’ he asked.
‘He said yes, obviously.’ Not straight away, but I wasn’t going to tell Matt Bishop that little detail. Andy and I had discussed marriage over the years. He just hadn’t got around to formally asking me. I got tired of waiting. I know it’s weird, considering my non-traditional background, but I really longed to be a proper bride: the white dress and veil and the church and the flowers and confetti and the adorable little flower girl and the cute little pageboy.
My parents had never formally married because they didn’t believe in the institution of marriage—any institution, really. They have an open relationship, which seems to work for them. Don’t ask me how. I’ve never said anything to them, but every time I looked at the photos of their thirty years of life together I’ve always felt like something was missing.
Matt picked up his coffee cup and surveyed me as he took another sip. ‘How long have you been at St Ignatius?’
‘Ten and a half months.’
‘Where were you before
