Everything I Know About Love

by Dolly Alderton

  ‘Thank you,’ she said, taking a sip of her Prosecco and pausing to think. ‘I vow to always let you grow. I’ll never tell you that I know who you really are just because we’ve known each other since we were kids. I know you’re going through a period of big change and I’ll only ever encourage that.’

  ‘That’s a good one,’ I said, clinking her glass. ‘OK, I vow to always tell you when you have something in your teeth.’

  ‘Oh, always.’

  ‘Particularly as we get older and our gums start receding. That’s when the leafy greens can really get lodged.’

  ‘Don’t make me more depressed than I am,’ she said.

  ‘Do a vow to yourself.’

  ‘I vow to never lose sight of my friends if I fall in love again,’ she said. ‘I’ll never forget how important you all are and how much we need each other.’

  On what would have been the night of Farly’s wedding reception for over two hundred people, we got a taxi up to a hilltop restaurant with a view over the sea.

  ‘You would have been making your speech now,’ she said. ‘Did you ever write it?’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘Whenever I’ve been a bit pissed and emotional I’ve written some ideas for it in my iPhone notes. But I hadn’t written it up yet.’

  ‘I wonder if I would have been happy for the whole day or whether I would have found any of it stressful.’

  I thought about an article I had read about premature death after Florence died; the one in which an agony aunt advised a grieving father not to think of the life his teenage son would have led had he not been killed in a car crash. This fantasy, she said, was an exercise of torture rather than of comfort.

  ‘You know, that life isn’t happening elsewhere,’ I said. ‘It doesn’t exist in another realm. Your relationship with that man was seven years long. That was it, that’s what it was.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Your life is here, now. You’re not about to live a tracing-paper copy of it.’

  ‘Yeah, I suppose it’s better not to dwell on what could have been.’

  ‘Don’t think of it as Sliding Doors.’

  ‘I love that film.’

  ‘And thank God it’s not because no one could ever pull off that blonde haircut Gwyneth Paltrow had in it.’

  ‘I’d look like Myra Hindley,’ Farly said flatly, signalling for another carafe of wine. ‘Did you have doubts about me and him?’

  ‘Do you want to know honestly?’

  ‘Yes, I really do,’ she said. ‘It doesn’t matter now anyway, and I’d like to know.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I grew to truly love him and I believed by the end that there was a future where you could be very happy. But, yes, I always had doubts.’

  She looked out on the setting sun, sitting on the horizon of the deep-blue Mediterranean like a perfect peach balancing on a ledge.

  ‘Thank you for never telling me.’

  The sea swallowed the sun and the sky slowly turned to dusky blue and then night as if operated by a dimmer. It never was as bad as that day again.

  After a week together, we drove down to another coastal town where Sabrina and Belle met us. The holiday continued in a similar vein: we drank Aperol, we played cards, we lay on the beach. Belle and I left the apartment at six a.m. one morning, stripped at the beach and swam naked in the light of the sunrise. Farly had good days and quiet days for our final week, which was to be expected. We all talked a lot about what had happened – the underlying reason for the holiday itself. But she also started talking about the future rather than the past; where she was going to live, what her new routine would look like. Over the course of the fortnight it felt like she shed one of her skins of melancholy. One night she even got so drunk – more drunk than since we’d been teenagers – she started hitting on the manager of a local restaurant who looked like a sixty-something Italian John Candy; surely the most recognizable rite of passage and one that indicates you’re into a new phase of getting over a break-up.

  Things felt very different when we returned to London. Her twenty-ninth birthday marked three months since that morning I woke up to three missed calls. It felt like a milestone and we celebrated it properly; we went to one of our favourite pubs for dinner then we went out dancing. She wore the dress I’d found her for the hen do that never happened. It was black and cut low at either side and flashed a tattoo she got when she was nineteen, a disastrous, impulsive mistake at a parlour in Watford. Two small stars – one coloured in pink and one coloured in an ill-thought-through yellow (‘A Jew with a yellow star tattooed on her! I ask you!’ her mother despaired).

  On the afternoon of her birthday, she went to another tattoo parlour to amend her error from a decade ago. She had the stars filled in with dark ink; she painted it black. She put an ‘F’ next to one of them for Florence and a ‘D’ for me. A reminder that no matter what we lose, no matter how uncertain and unpredictable life gets, some people really do walk next to you for ever.

  I Got Gurued

  Early in the summer of Farly’s heartbreak, I was asked to write a first piece for a magazine about the dangers of people-pleasing. The editor I was working for suggested that I speak to a man who had written a new book on the subject. His name was David, he was nearing fifty; he was an actor turned writer. I googled him before we spoke on the phone and noticed he was also very handsome: olive skin, salt-and-pepper hair, gentle brown eyes. His publisher sent me a PDF of the book and it was a frustratingly brilliant read. His work focused on the human need for validation and how it cuts happiness short. Reading it felt like something – or someone – had grabbed my shoulders with a pair of strong, trusted hands and given me one big, sharp, much-needed shake.

  We emailed back and forth for a while then organized a time to speak. His voice was deep and soft; far more pronounced and theatrical than I had imagined. His general vibe seemed to be that of an out-and-out hippie, but he spoke like an RSC ensemble member. I asked him questions about the book and the things that had really stuck with me; he told me that when we are children, we are constantly told to contain our behaviour. He described how being told not to be bossy or not to show off or not to be a clever-clogs puts up barriers around certain recesses of who we are; and we’re scared to ever revisit them again as adults. Instead, we hide those parts of ourselves, the bits that are dark or loud or eccentric or twisted, for fear of not being liked. It was those parts of ourselves, he argued, that were the most beautiful.

  Because the piece was written from a personal angle, we had to talk about my own experiences. I told him I had started seeing a therapist this year.

  ‘The danger of a person like you doing therapy is that you seem clever,’ he said. ‘You will get the theory of it all very easily. You’ll be able to be academic about yourself in conversation. But, you know, all the talky-talky stuff will only take you so far. You need to really feel it in your core, that change. It can’t just be stuff you discuss with a therapist. You need to feel it in your body –’ his voice slowed – ‘you need to feel it in the backs of your knees, in your womb, in your toes, in your fingertips.’

  ‘Hmm,’ I said in agreement.

  We talked for about forty-five minutes, drifting from passages in the book to the research and work he’d done for years and to my own experiences. He spoke to me directly, with no formalities or politeness. I felt like he had somehow got straight to my inner equator, just through a phone call.

  ‘Pinch that little cheek of yours,’ he said as if he’d known me for years. ‘You don’t need someone else to tell you what to do or who to be. You’re your own mother now. You have to listen to what you want.’

  ‘Hmm,’ I managed again.

  ‘And for every day for the rest of your life, I want you to take that job seriously.’

  ‘But what about being appropriate? How does that work when you’re being yourself all the time?’

  ‘Have you ever fallen in love with a man because he’s appropriate?’

  �
��Well, no.’

  ‘Oooh, that Greg,’ he said in a lustful voice. ‘He turns me on, he’s so fucking appropriate.’

  ‘No, no,’ I said, laughing.

  ‘I’m not interested in appropriate. Darkness and edges and corners is where buried treasure lies. Fuck appropriate.’

  I felt like he was flirting with me, but I couldn’t tell if he was talking to me so intimately simply for the sake of good quotes for the piece. By the end of our conversation we had drifted into a general chat that didn’t feel at all like an interview. I could tell he also wanted me to disclose if I was in a relationship, but I kept that information vague. He told me he thought I could use a one-on-one session with him.

  ‘If you feel like you can show all of yourself to someone without fear of being judged,’ he said, ‘your intimacy will go through the roof.’

  ‘Yeah, that’s always been a huge problem for me,’ I said. ‘Intimacy.’

  ‘I know, I can feel that in you.’ There was a sudden silence between us. Maybe he was talking guru bullshit; maybe everything I had always pushed down was far more visible than I thought.

  ‘Hmm,’ I managed once more.

  ‘I hope you have someone in your life who really holds you, Dolly.’

  ‘I have a therapist,’ I replied.

  ‘That’s not what I meant,’ he said.

  I came out of my flat and blinked into the light like I had just woken up.

  ‘I’ve just had the most extraordinary conversation,’ I said to India and Belle, who were sunbathing in our garden.

  ‘With who?’ India asked, taking her earphones out.

  ‘That guy for the article – that guru guy.’

  ‘What did he say?’

  ‘I don’t know, it was like he was speaking to something inside me that hadn’t been spoken to before; it was like something was yawning and waking up for the first time.’

  ‘That’s what they do though, isn’t it, they make you think that’s the power they have,’ India said lugubriously, turning on to her front. ‘I’d never trust anyone who called themselves a guru.’

  ‘To be fair, he doesn’t call himself a guru,’ I said. ‘Everyone else does.’

  ‘OK, well that’s better,’ she replied.

  ‘It’s a bit like being a “maven”,’ I continued. ‘Or a “mogul”. You have to wait for someone else to say it, I think. You can’t say it about yourself.’ I took my top off and joined them on the towels they had thrown on the grass.

  ‘Did you get what you needed from him?’ Belle asked.

  ‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘He was a great interviewee.’ I closed my eyes and let the strong English sunshine give me a rare hug. ‘Jesus, I am not going to be able to stop thinking about him.’

  ‘In, like, a sex way?’ India asked.

  ‘No, I don’t think so. In a I-want-to-eat-your-soul way. I just want to find out everything about him, I want to listen to everything he has to say.’

  ‘Ask for his number,’ she said.

  ‘I already have his number. I just interviewed him on the phone.’

  ‘Oh yeah,’ she said. ‘Well then, just text him.’

  ‘I can’t “just text” someone I interviewed for a piece.’

  ‘Why not?’ Belle asked.

  ‘Because it would be inappropriate,’ I said, catching the words in my mouth. ‘But whoever fell in love with appropriate?’

  I listened to the recording again when I was in bed that night, his words bouncing through me like a ping-pong ball. The next morning I wrote up the piece, sent it to the editor and forgot about him.

  A couple of months later, I was coming home late from a party when I got a WhatsApp message from David. He told me he was on holiday in France and had just been for a long walk under the stars and suddenly remembered our interview and that he hadn’t seen it anywhere.

  ‘This is obviously my narcissism speaking – when is the piece out?’

  ‘Not narcissistic at all,’ I replied. ‘It’s been held over for an issue, sorry. I’ll text you the day it’s out next month. I can send you a copy if you’re not in the country.’

  ‘I’ll be back by then. How are you?’ he asked. ‘You seemed on the edge of something the last time we spoke.’

  ‘Still on the edge of something,’ I typed. ‘Still trying to shift into a different paradigm. Easy-peasy. How are you?’

  ‘Same.’

  He told me that he was a few weeks out of a very long-term relationship. He said it was the right thing – an amicable and mutual separation. He told me that sometimes a break-up can be nothing but a relief for both parties; like an air-conditioning unit has finally been turned off, the low, relentless hum of which you hadn’t realized was there until everything is silent.

  We texted for hours that night, learning the fundamentals of each other we hadn’t gleaned in our first conversation. We both grew up in North London, we both went to conservative boarding schools, which is why he had a voice I suspected he hated as much as I hated mine. He had four kids – two boys, two girls – and he was obviously very taken with all of them. I could spot a man using his kids as a chat-up line from a mile away – this was not one. He knew every tiny detail of each child’s character and passions and dreams and daily life and he talked about all of them with genuine fascination and devotion.

  We talked about music, song lyrics. I told him that my favourite singer was John Martyn; that his music had been the only love affair I’d had with a man that had lasted longer than a handful of years. He told me a story of how he bought one of John Martyn’s guitars off his ex-wife and said I could have it if I liked, as he could tell how besotted I was with his music. We talked about a book we’d both read that turned me vegetarian; we both got angry about the same stats and passages. We talked about our childhood holidays spent in France. We talked about our parents. We talked about the rain. I told him how much I loved it; more than blue skies and sunshine. I told him how the rain had always cradled and calmed me – how as a kid I would ask my mum if I could sit in the boot of her car parked outside when it rained. I told him that when I read in Rod Stewart’s autobiography that he would stand in the middle of the street with his arms outstretched when it rained once a year in LA, all because he missed it so much, I realized I could never leave England. We said goodnight at three a.m.

  The next morning I woke up and felt I was recovering from a vivid dream. But sure enough, there was a new message from David on my phone waiting for me under my pillow like a bright, shining pound coin from the tooth fairy.

  ‘You woke me up at about five this morning,’ it read.

  ‘What do you mean?’ I replied. He sent me a recording of the sound of rainfall, hard and then soft, on the window of his bedroom.

  ‘Am I the rain?’ I asked, suspending my well-worn cynicism in a way that would become a fixture of our interactions.

  ‘Yeah, you are,’ he replied. ‘I felt you come closer.’

  I had to tell my friends about David because I never got off my phone to him. We messaged each other from the moment we woke up to the moment we went to bed. I reserved about five hours of the day for working, eating and washing, but even in those enforced windows of time, I was thinking about him. I had lunch with Sabrina and she told me she could tell my eye was on my phone screen for the entire time.

  ‘Right, enough with the phone,’ she said.

  ‘I’m not on my phone!’ I said defensively.

  ‘You’re not physically on your phone, but I can tell all you’re thinking about is speaking to him.’

  ‘No I’m not.’

  ‘You are, it’s like I’ve taken my thirteen-year-old daughter out for lunch who wants to be back on MSN Messenger talking to her foreign exchange student boyfriend.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I’m not thinking about him, I promise.’ My phone lit up.

  ‘What’s that he’s sent there?’ Sabrina asked, peering down at the screen. I showed her the photo of an elaborate illustration of a lio
n.

  ‘He thinks my inner spirit is a lion.’

  Sabrina gave me a few bewildered blinks.

  ‘Yeah, I don’t think we’ll have much in common, me and your new boyfriend,’ she said flatly.

  ‘No, you will, you will. He’s not a serious, humourless guru, he’s really funny.’

  ‘OK, just cool down all the texting,’ she said. ‘Please. For your sake. You’re going to ruin your relationship before it’s even started. It’s like he’s a human Tamagotchi.’

  ‘But he’s in France for three weeks,’ I said. ‘I’m not going to not speak to him until he’s back and we can meet.’

  ‘Oh my God, I bet he’s told you to fly to France, hasn’t he?’ she asked, shaking her head. ‘Why is it always so extreme with you and men?’

  ‘Come on, I’m not actually going to go,’ I said. I didn’t tell her that I had looked at flights, out of curiosity.

  My friends, quite rightly, thought I was insane to have become so quickly obsessed with someone I didn’t know. But they were also used to it – me finding a new love interest had always been like a greedy child opening a toy on Christmas Day. I ripped the packaging open, got frustrated trying to make it work, played with it obsessively until it broke, then chucked the broken pieces of plastic in the back of a cupboard on Boxing Day.

  I emailed Farly the recording of me and David’s original interview.

  ‘Listen to this,’ I wrote. ‘And then you’ll understand why I’m acting so nuts about this man.’ An hour later I received an email back from her.

  ‘OK, I understand why you’re acting so nuts about this man,’ it read.

  A week after we started texting, we spoke on the phone. With the dynamic of interviewer and interviewee changed, everything felt different to the last time we spoke months before. It was late and quiet and I could hear his breathing and the crickets in the French countryside. I closed my eyes and could almost feel him next to me; the magic of this strange intimacy we’d created in the last week.