Beyond the open sash window the
distant hum of an electric lawn mower; the smell of freshly cut grass blows
into the bedroom and the curtains flick gently in the breeze. In short the
perfect English summer’s day. Sarah twists on the bed.
It’s clear from her
body-language that I am expected to take her from behind while she watches –
admiringly, intrigued – in the mirror. I oblige unsure if this is for her or
me, suspecting the latter. In the middle distance the sun catches white
windmills and then the sea. The room is beautiful with thick, luxuriant
carpets. We are naked and comfortable with it. Drinks, laughter. Cadborough
Farm in Rye, East Sussex is the location for this surprise break. Somewhere
I’ve never been, before or since, but a place of significance for me at the
time. I am so overwhelmed that I write the owners a thank you note one year
later on the anniversary of our stay, but by then I’m already battling to keep Sarah.
How had she chosen Rye? I was confused.
‘Did you know that this was
the village where Conrad Aiken taught Malcolm Lowry how to write?’ I’d asked
her.
‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I saw
it in one of the books you’re reading.’
As a biochemist
specialising in neuroscience, Sarah was pretty sharp but I found it hard to
imagine her thumbing through the Lowry biography Pursued by Furies and registering that he’d been in Rye – maybe.
Maybe it was just coincidence. But I don’t believe these things ever happen by
accident, some things are pre-ordained, others are meant, just as some are not
meant. The universe had simply aligned itself in such a way that I was treading
cobbled streets in Lowry and Aitken’s footsteps and falling deeper in love with
Sarah.
We kissed in public,
which was out of bounds in Oxford, and made love in the sand dunes (caught or
nearly caught red handed by a priest); laughing at all the local pubs with
their blackboard adverts for ‘pie and liquor.’ It was one of those hot English
summers which only come around every five or ten years.
Such were the thrills
associated with falling in love with Sarah. It would take me years to recover
once it all went wrong, as it inevitably does.
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