So the following morning I trooped around to his house at 7 a.m., with a kale, carrot and Brussels sprout smoothie, which, trust me, may look like a glass of mowed grass, but doesn’t taste nearly as revolting as it sounds. It turned out Bernard lived in exactly the sort of house I’d have pegged for him; no uber-cool penthouse bachelor pad for this guy. Instead his home was – and is still – a sturdy, well-built Victorian cottage right in the heart of Stoneybatter, otherwise known as the arty quarter of Dublin. With a crossbar bike in his hallway and piles of hardback books scattered all over every surface. The whole place was higgledy-piggledy, charmingly disorganised chaos, and it was only months afterwards when he took me to meet his parents, that I realised the apple hadn’t fallen too far from the tree.
‘Oh dear Lord, look at you,’ he smiled, opening up the front door, all set to go in his tracksuit and trainers. ‘You look so fit and fresh at this god-awful hour. How is that even possible? I’m afraid I’m one of those chaps who can barely string a coherent sentence together until I’m on my third pot of tea.’
‘Follow the programme and you’ll feel twenty years younger in no time,’ I said firmly, and to be fair to Bernard, stick with the programme he did.
So gradually over time, he and I began to fall into a sort of routine. Twice a week I’d call over to him with smoothies at the crack of dawn, before dragging him out for a jog through the quiet of the early-morning streets. After a while, we grew so comfortable with each other that we even started joking and messing; I’d hammer on his front door and he’d answer still in his dressing gown, then try to cajole me inside for rashers, eggs and croissants. And from there, the conversation would go thusly: ‘Are you having a laugh?’ I’d playfully chide him. ‘You’re paying me to get fit, and we’re going to do it right. So come on, trainers on and grab a warm, woolly fleece, we’ve a brisk two-mile jog ahead of us.’
‘Oh God, the exquisite torture,’ he’d mock-groan. ‘Are you sure I can’t tempt you with a lovely pot of Earl Grey tea? As a compromise, if I drink it with that wretched half-fat milk you insist on? And if I’m a good boy and cut out the blueberry muffin I always have whenever you’re not around to goad me into good behaviour?’
‘Bernard,’ I’d grin back at him, ‘what am I always telling you? Sugar is the Devil’s food. I’m trying to detox you and here’s you trying to put the equivalent of rat poison through your system!’
So this Tweedledum and Tweedledee carry-on went on for weeks; me using a combination of nagging and cheerleading to try to wean him off complex carbs, starch and sugar; him only ever willing to jog all the way to the Queen of Tarts café in Temple Bar, so he could collapse through the door and order one of their famous chocolate pecan pies.
Then after I dropped him back at his house after one early-morning jog, to my utter astonishment, Bernard, still all sweaty and panting, asked me out. To go and see – get this – a screening of a French art house documentary about the Napoleonic Wars that was showing at the Lighthouse Cinema that weekend.
‘You mean … on an actual date?’ I blurted out, flabbergasted. In a million years not seeing that one coming.
‘Well … erm … it’s just my way of saying thank you really,’ he said, and I remember thinking how endearingly flustered he looked, whipping off his specs and absent-mindedly wiping them on his tracksuit top, the way he does whenever he’s embarrassed. ‘Thanks to you, Tess, I’ve lost a full two pounds this week, so I thought I’d celebrate with a large bucket of non-fat popcorn with absolutely no hint of butter on it whatsoever. If you’d care to join me, that is?’
A date. An actual date. My first one since … well, since all of that. Initial reaction? To feel nervous and scared, with a tummy full of butterflies, the whole works. But then I thought: am I really going to let my past define my future? Isn’t it time to let go and take a chance? And with who better than a gentleman like Bernard, who I knew in a million years would never dream of putting me through what I’d just come out of?
So to the movies I went.
The movie itself turned out to be a subtitled documentary all about the Napoleonic victory against the Prussians at the Battle of Jena, 1806. Bernard of course adored it and while I kind of wished Bradley Cooper or Matthew McConaughey would pop up on the scene to liven things up a bit, all in all, we’d a pleasant, relaxed, easy time together.
And so slowly, over the next few weeks, he and I morphed into a couple, in spite of a plethora of objections from both sets of our friends and from my family in particular. ‘He’s way too old for you,’ they all chimed. ‘A professor of Art History? Who likes to go on walking tours of the Alps and whose overriding passions in life are art, the history of art and absolutely anything to do with Napoleon? What the hell can the two of you possibly have in common?’
Most stinging of all came from my sister Gracie, who, the first time she met Bernard, immediately wrote him off as the most boring man on the planet and had absolutely no problem in telling me so.
‘He’s a rebound guy for you,’ she told me out straight, ‘and nothing more. He’s the total antithesis of Paul; he’s like the anti-Paul. That’s the only reason you’re bouncing straight into this, you know. As long as you remember that, you won’t get into trouble.’ Nor has she changed her mind since, but then that’s a whole other story.
And true, Bernard’s core group of colleagues – mostly all confirmed bachelors working in academia – did intimidate me a bit at first, with all their shop talk about Kierkegaard’s Theory of the Excluded Middle, and seventeenth-century Dutch art, but by then Bernard had really started to grow on me, so of course I soon started to see everything connected with his life through love goggles.
‘You keep me young,’ he’d often say to me, after a night out in a restaurant with my pals, or an evening at the multiplex seeing one of the slightly more commercial movies that would be a bit more to my taste. And for my part, I really fell for the fact he’s so cultured and intelligent and passionate about what he does. I never went to college, and suddenly this man came along and opened my eyes up to a whole new world of opera, theatre and art exhibitions that I’d ordinarily never have gone within six feet of.
He’s good to me, I’d tell all my family and pals. And after the emotional wringer I’ve just been through, I deserve someone like him. He’s the equivalent of snuggling into a comfy pair of slippers after years spent in excruciating high heels that only ever made my feet bleed, if you’ll pardon the tortured shoe metaphor. He’s a man who calls when he says he will and who buys me flowers for no reason. Non-garage flowers too. And he’s kind and polite and always gives money to homeless people when he sees them in the street.
OK, so maybe these aren’t the sexiest qualities you look for in a life-partner, but in the long term, they work. Bernard and I work.
Besides, I’ve done the whole ‘madly in love, this is Mr Right for the rest of both our lives’ thing and where did that land me? Having to crawl back home at the grand old age of twenty-eight with my tail between my legs, that’s where. Back to my old bedroom under Mum and Dad’s roof, with Gracie in the room next door banging on the walls and yelling at me to turn the TV down. Back to months of humiliation and heartbreak and pain so searing it should nearly come with a safe word. That’s where ‘The One’ landed me.
Long story and, I’m sorry, I’m not even going to go there.
So no matter what anyone else says or thinks, come what may, four weeks tomorrow, Bernard and I are getting married.
And jury service can just feck right off with itself.
More Sinned Against that Sinning,
Spring 2001