The Woman He Loved Before (54 page)

serena

‘Serena Gorringe, I love you.’

Oh my God! It’s going to happen
. It’s really going to happen. After nearly 15 years of wanting this, hoping for this,
praying
for this, it’s going to happen. He’s going to propose.

Or, maybe he isn’t. Maybe I’m having one of my ‘moments’ where I’ve so completely immersed myself in a fantasy, it seems real.

I glance around, searching for proof in my surroundings that I’m not making it all up. We’re at a table for two outside our favourite Brighton restaurant – a small, family-run Mexican cantina that sits on the edge of the beach. It’s a clear, warm night and the sky is teeming with stars. The rhythmic ssshushing of the dark sea mingles gently with the loud music spilling from inside the restaurant, while the smell of spicy food fuses deliciously with the salt air. To my left Brighton pier is adorned with hundreds upon hundreds of lights, and to my right Worthing pier’s lights seem more demure than its more famous cousin’s but are still pretty. This is such a perfect setting for a proposal, it can’t possibly be real, I
must
be dreaming.

I focus on Evan again. He is down on bended knee, staring at me with a serious expression on his face. This is no fantasy. It can’t be. Because in all my imaginings, Evan has never been prostrate in front of me – it’s so far removed from his normal behaviour, I’ve never been able to conjure up what he would look like doing it. Big gestures with him are so few and far between that this one is like seeing a unicorn walking down Brighton seafront – I could only believe it if I saw it. So this must be real, because I am seeing it.

‘Serena Gorringe, I love you,’ he repeats, and I know this is definitely real. Only the real-life Evan would know that I would have flitted off into one of my ‘crazy worlds’ as he calls them, as soon as he got down on one knee and started speaking. Only the real-life Evan would know that I’d need to go into one of my crazy worlds to double-check this was actually happening. And only the real-life Evan would know that when I returned to this reality, he would have to continue by starting again.

‘I want to spend the rest of my life with you.’ He reaches out and takes my left hand in both of his large hands, holds on to me tenderly but securely. ‘I don’t normally say things like this, so when I tell you that you’ve made my life so much more than it would have been and I never want our time together to end, you know I mean it. So, would you do me the honour of marrying me?’

‘We’re already married,’ I reply.

My husband’s face softens from his serious expression into a huge, warming smile. ‘Again,’ he says. ‘Will you marry me, again?’

I slide slowly and gently into silence to savour this. This
proposal.
I was robbed of this last time around. And this finally proves he wants to be with me for ever. Yes, he’s already committed to it by marrying me, but he actually
wants
to do it. Last time it was all rather ambiguous and necessary when we decided to do it.

May, 1996

We lay fully clothed, side by side on the bed in his small London flat, staring at the ceiling. I’d just told him that the morning-after pill I’d taken after the condom split hadn’t worked and I was pregnant. A missed period and three tests had told me so. (I’d waited until we were horizontal to break the news because I suspected he’d fall over.) ‘Oh, OK,’ he said, before sighing a deep, slightly mournful sigh of resignation and defeat. I sighed, too, knowing what he meant, how he felt. It wasn’t terrible news, it wasn’t even bad news, it was just lifechangingly unexpected. I wasn’t ready, I was sure he wasn’t either. But here we were, ready or not. A baby was on its way.

‘We should probably get married,’ I stated.

‘To stop our parents freaking out,’ he replied.

‘Because they would,’ I said.

‘Freak out. Yeah.’

‘Yeah.’

Evan didn’t realise that when I said ‘should probably’, I meant ‘have to’. If it was just about me, I wouldn’t have cared, I wouldn’t have minded not getting married. But after what had happened to our family a few years earlier, what I had put my parents through, I could not do this to them as well – I could not add ‘unmarried mother’ to my list of crimes… I had to show them that I wasn’t who the world thought I was, I was a respectable girl and I could do things the right way. I
had
to get married.

‘It’s not as if we weren’t going to get married at some point, anyway,’ Evan said, trying to rally, trying to rescue the situation by sounding positive. ‘We might as well do it now.’

‘Yeah, I suppose,’ I replied. And six weeks later we were married and that was that. No romance, no story to tell and retell, there wasn’t even an engagement ring to show off.

Ever since then, I’ve had a niggling doubt about where we would be if we hadn’t been married at the wrong end of a shotgun. Without doubt, if he knew Serena Gorringe at the end of the eighties, if he knew the person who was all over the papers and who had been accused of something terrible, he would not have married me. But he did not know her. He met and got to know the real me. And I’ve always wondered if the real me was good enough. If the real me was the person he
wanted
to marry, instead of
had
to marry simply to satisfy ultratraditional parents.

‘Last time, we didn’t get the chance to do it properly,’ Evan says. ‘I want that for us this time. I promised myself on the day we did that we’d do it again properly. Since our first wedding, I’ve been putting money aside so we could do it. Big church, white dress, huge party, honeymoon – the lot. We can have everything that we couldn’t afford or didn’t have time to do before, including…’ He reaches into the inside pocket of his favourite suit jacket and pulls out a small, blue velvet box. He opens it up to show me and there, languishing on a silk bed, is a large, many-faceted, square-cut diamond on a silver band.

The air catches in my throat.

‘An engagement ring. This time, an engagement ring as well as a real proposal.’

‘Is that a real diamond?’ I can barely form the words to speak in its presence let alone think about touching it.

‘Of course. We can afford it now. And it’s on a platinum band, from the same place where we got our wedding rings.’

My hands fly up to my face as tears fill my eyes and swell in my throat. He’s thought about it, he’s planned it and has done it all because I am good enough: he does want to be with me. He does want to be married to me, just as much as I want to be married to him.

I’ve never wanted to be with someone as much as I want to be with Evan. ‘
What about you-know-who?
’ whispers my conscience. It is the part of my conscience that lives in the past; it worships the past, clings to it, is always determined to drag the past into the present. ‘
Wasn’t you-know-who the love of your life?
’

My conscience is wrong, of course. Evan is The One. He’s the only one.

‘Are you sure, Serena?’
mocks my conscience.
‘Are you absolutely sure about that?’

I’m sure, I’m one hundred per cent sure. There really is no one but my husband for me. What I had with
you-know-who
wasn’t love, it wasn’t like what I have with Evan. It wasn’t even the same creature, how could it have been?

‘Babe
?’ Evan says, in a way that suggests he has called me a few times.

‘Sorry,’ I say, ‘miles away.’
Another life away.

‘I’m getting a cold knee and a little nervous,’ he says.

‘Nervous? Why?’

‘You haven’t actually said yes.’

‘Haven’t I?’ I ask.

‘No, you haven’t.’

‘Oh.’

He grins that grin of his. ‘Do you want me to ask you again?’

I nod eagerly. Just one more time, especially now I know there’s a ring involved.

‘OK,’ he says with a slight, mock-exasperated shake of his head. ‘Serena Gorringe…’ He pauses to slip the ring halfway up my finger, and I hold my breath, trying to remember every detail because I will recreate it for the kids, for my sisters, for my parents, for anyone who cares to listen. ‘Will you make me the happiest man on earth by marrying me and becoming Mrs Gillmare all over again?’ He pushes the ring into place beside my wedding band.

I almost forget to breathe as I examine the two rings. They slot together almost seamlessly, and they look like they were made for each other. Like nothing will ever tear them apart.

‘Of course I will,’ I say and leap up as he struggles to his feet. ‘Of course I’ll marry you again.’ I throw my arms around his neck and he grins at me before he scoops me into his arms and then dips me backwards for a deep, show-stopping, movie-style kiss. Another unicorn-on-Brighton-seafront-type gesture. He is full of them tonight.

I immerse myself in it all. In the kiss, the proposal, the man. I’m only vaguely aware that we’ve had an audience and now the air around us is full of the sound of people clapping.

I’m going to hang on to this moment. I have to. I know how easily everything can be taken away. Everything is fragile, when you’re like me. Very few things are permanent. I live on a precipice of falling into my past, of people finding out what I have been accused of, how I was publicly branded, and being judged all over again on that. I live with the constant fear that someone or something is going to tip me over the edge.

But not tonight, eh? Not right now. Right now, I am the woman who Dr Evan Gillmare wants to spend the rest of his life with.

Right now, I am the happiest woman on earth and nothing bad could possibly happen to me.