Caroline smiled to herself as she thought of the wry grin with which Jennifer faced the world. When she was 12, Caroline had once overheard her mother refer to her younger sibling as “our precious little surprise” and had wondered whether the surprise factor made her more valuable. Certainly Jennifer was much closer to their mother than Caroline was. She had always found Zosia more welcoming, even before her mother had disappeared into hospital and returned with a small yowling bundle in a pink bunny rug. The closeness between Jennifer and their mother had been cemented when the younger daughter paid her mother the compliment of following her into a nursing career. But Caroline liked Jennifer too much to begrudge her their mother’s preference. Besides, she had always considered herself well compensated by her father’s beaming pride in her achievements.
A sudden juddering and shaking jerked her back to the present. As the plane hit a pocket of turbulence, the Fasten Seat Belt signs lit up. She noticed that her neighbour had returned from the lavatory, his grey jowls now shiny and smooth-looking. Feeling her glance, he shot her a questioning look before picking up his copy of the Financial Times and turning, with ostentatious flapping and folding, to the foreign exchange listings.
Caroline closed Byron, reached into her handbag and pulled out the fat envelope containing Karl’s letter, addressed to Mrs Caroline James, 25 Joseph’s Lane, Holloway, London, Great Britain. The handwriting was neat, if a bit small. It had been written in fountain pen. She smiled at the Mrs. No teacher of mathematics in a German secondary school, not even one who had spent two years in England as an exchange student, could be expected to know that the English did not follow the German habit of addressing an unmarried woman of a certain maturity with the honorific Frau.
At least the error told her that Karl wasn’t in the habit of writing letters like these – or not in English anyway. She skimmed the six closely written sheets, stopping at the last page and reading it slowly:
I can think about nothing else but the prospect of seeing you again. I find myself returning obsessively to the Kosmos, and watching the door just in case you might walk in. I know that you’re back in London writing your magazine articles. But to me that nightclub is so full of the atmosphere of you that I can’t help expecting to see you. Am I being foolish in hoping that my feelings might be returned? You seemed so off-handed when we talked about the possibility of seeing one another when you took your holiday in Portugal. Yet you agreed that we should meet again. I know we have only spent a few hours together – and on a Greek Island, of all things. As you read this, you’ll say that I’m suffering a touch of the sun and I’m just talking myself into a holiday romance because I’m responding to all the clichéd associations of Greek Islands. But I just can’t help thinking about your smile, your shiny eyes and the salty taste of your kisses. After a year of living on my own I am ready to fall in love again and I feel it should be with you. I hope you don’t think I am being foolish in revealing my emotions like this. I wish only that you be honest with me in return. I think that, at our age, lies will always hurt much more than truth.
Caroline put the letter away, her cheeks red. Its sentiments had charmed and flattered her at first. But after reading it, re-reading it and taking it to the office to show Anna, she found her initial delight gradually giving way to anxiety. Only two types of people were likely to make emotional revelations like this at such an early stage of an acquaintance: romantics and desperate neurotics. How would she be able to tell which group Karl belonged to? Or did being German put him into a third group altogether? The protagonist of Goethe’s The Sufferings of the Young Werther had killed himself for love, sparking off a frenzy of suicides among fashionably poetic young Prussians of the late eighteenth century. This attitude to matters of the heart might have seared itself into the German character.
Caroline didn’t remember the novel very well, but she thought she detected something dangerously Werther-like in Karl’s letter. Didn’t he know that courtship was most fun when it was treated like a game with certain fixed rules, the most important of which was that both partners should feign a slight degree of detachment at the beginning? It might be obvious that both were making light of feelings that they hoped would deepen, but that knowledge only intensified the delicious tension.
Why did he have to show his hand like this? And why so quickly, in a letter that arrived only 10 days after she returned from Mykonos? She had agreed to meet him in Portugal because of their mutual sexual attraction, not because of any talk of love.
In principle, Caroline was very taken with the idea of someone falling in love with her. Both of her previous serious relationships had started with the man in question wooing her while she remained indifferent, at least initially. She needed time to get used to the idea of a particular man as the object of more than mere sexual desire: time alone, time to miss attention and company that she might otherwise take for granted.
She liked the days that often elapsed between meeting a man and receiving his first phone call. It gave her a chance to realise that she wanted to hear from him again.
Karl had deprived her of that opportunity. There had barely been time to reflect on their brief meeting before his letter had dropped into her mailbox. If she had only received a couple of amusing postcards from him and then a chatty phone call to confirm the tentative arrangement that they had made on the beach at Mykonos, she might have been looking forward to seeing him again.
Still, who was she to criticise him? She had been hasty in consenting to meet him in Portugal. He was just being rash in another way. Still, his letter made her feel uncomfortable. She wasn’t ready to be romantic yet. She wanted to take up their acquaintance exactly where they had left it, at a stage where the keynotes were sexual attraction and laughter.
Predictably, her colleagues at London Woman had thought she was being unfair. How rare, Paula and Anna had chorused, to find a man who could talk about his feelings, and in a language that he had only learnt at school.
‘He sounds like a real old-fashioned romantic,’ said Paula, stroking the thick parchment-like writing paper of Karl’s letter with her long, elegant fingers. ‘I bet he’d never give you an electric ladies’ shaver for a birthday present.’ Six months earlier Paula’s husband James had thought he was doing the right thing, having seen her cut her legs with his razor.
‘You’re so hard to please,’ Anna chimed in.
‘The poor chap says all the right things and you’re not happy because you think he’s saying them too early.’
‘Well, I don’t think there’s such a thing as love at first sight,’ replied Caroline. ‘If someone thinks they’re in love with you after a few hours, then it’s not you they’re in love with.’
This level of interest in Karl was typical of the attention usually given to Caroline’s affairs. As the only single member of the three-woman writers’ room, Caroline had a kind of totemic status to her married friends. They followed her adventures with an intensity of interest which they claimed was pure envy, but which Caroline knew was also composed of equal parts of pity for the lack of security in her life.
Anna, who had just discovered she was pregnant with her first child, made much of the dullness of her suburban life in comparison with what she called Caroline’s “adventures”. On more than one occasion she had offered to take Caroline’s place on the Greek island holiday on which she had met Karl.
This holiday, an invitation to spend an all-expenses paid week on Mykonos as the guest of a man she had met only days before, had been the cause of much debate in the office. Rob Davidson was a close friend and a colleague of an old boyfriend of Caroline’s, David Fenton, a former journalist who was now making a huge salary as a public relations man. The two men had dropped into London on their way to Mykonos for two quiet weeks windsurfing. But their plans had been upset by the arrival of David’s fiancée, Julie, a spoiled 25-year-old with no apparent interests beyond her own career prospects as an actress.
‘Save me, Caroline,’ Rob had pleaded at their second dinner since his arrival. ‘I couldn’t bear to spend a week listening to Julie ordering waiters around. I’ll die for lack of adult female conversation.