The doorbell sounded while I was still up the ladder, and it took me a few seconds to climb down, so while I was stumbling down the stairs, it sounded again. I was quite cross. My cheeks were shiny and red, and I smelled of dust and perspiration when I opened the door and first met Greg.
“Mrs….Armstrong?” There was the faintest pause between the two words, as though, somehow, he sensed they didn’t go together.
“Ms.,” I said, the way I always do. “I don’t feel the need to be defined by my marital status.”
“Fair enough.” He didn’t seem to care one way or the other. I let him into the house, which was hot and full of sunlight, showing every streak of dust and carpet scuff.
“So, it’s upstairs,” I told him.
“Lofts generally are,” he quipped, and I glared at him. I didn’t need a funny builder.
I climbed the ladder into the loft first, and he followed me. I remember feeling excruciatingly aware that this man’s nose was inches from my bottom, and wondering what my bottom looked like these days. It had been an awfully long time since I’d bothered to consider it.
We stood there for a moment, bathed in the light of a naked electric bulb, as he took a pencil out from behind his ear and noted a few things down. He wore a tape measure on his belt, like a Wild West gunslinger.
“Pretty straightforward job,” he said. “I’ll do the drawings, the calculations for you, and we’ll get a structural engineer to sign off on it. You don’t want stairs, just a better ladder and a couple of Velux, so it’s going to be pretty quick. Need an extra bedroom, do you?”
“No,” I said, my hands on my hips as I looked around, trying to imagine this room the way I wanted it: flooded with sunlight, the floorboards stripped and varnished, the walls whitewashed. “I want to write a book, and it seems like all the rooms I have in the house already have a purpose that stops me from concentrating on it. So I thought a book-writing room would be the answer.” I smiled at him. “I expect that seems like craziness to you.”
“Not at all,” he said. “It’s your house, and writing a book seems like a better idea than some.”
He smiled, not at me but at the space around us, and I could see him picturing it finished, too, and that the idea gave him pleasure. And that was the first time I noticed how broad his shoulders were, or how muscular his arms were, or the contour of his stomach muscles under his shirt. And then suddenly I did, and I registered too that my hair was screwed up into a Muppet knot on top of my head, and I was wearing my daughter’s ripped T-shirt and a pair of jeans that technically didn’t fit me anymore. Oh, and that I was certainly older than him, although I wasn’t exactly sure by how much. I realized all of those things, and at the same time I was annoyed with myself for caring.
“So, shall we go downstairs, and I’ll work out a quote for you—just a basic one at this stage, to give you a ballpark? Then if you decide to go with me, I’ll do you an itemized quote and a contract, so you know exactly what you are paying for, okay?”
“Fine,” I said, suddenly only able to utter words of one syllable.
He went down the ladder first, and then me. I was about halfway down when I lost grip in my stupid flip-flops and fell the rest of the way, stumbling back off the ladder and into his arms. There wasn’t a moment—no lingering, no touching a fraction longer than needed. He just set me straight on my feet with workmanlike efficiency.
“Never did quite get the hang of that standing up on my own two feet thing,” I said, blushing inexplicably.
“Well, we can’t all be good at everything,” he said. “I can’t even imagine writing down anything longer than a quote.”
I’m not sure precisely when I decided I was in love with him, but I think it might have been at that moment, the moment he went out of his way to put me at my ease. I followed him down the stairs and by the time we reached the bottom step, it was official. I was besotted, and that’s the right word for it. Besotted. Because I knew right then it was a hopeless love, a love that could never come to anything, because I could never be that lucky.
We walked into the kitchen and he leaned against the counter and started to write. I spent the entire time looking at his bottom, smiling to myself about what an idiot I was being, and thinking about how Julia would laugh with me at school the next time I saw her. Just the thought of how mortified Caitlin would be, if she could see me, leaning up against the fridge, ogling this beautiful example of manhood like a crazy woman, made me giggle out loud.
Greg looked at me over his shoulder and then, seeing me smiling, turned around.
“What’s so funny?” he asked me.
“Oh, I…oh, nothing.” I giggled despite myself. I giggled like a teenager bumping into her crush. “Ignore me, I am just being really, really stupid, for no apparent reason.”
His smile was so sweet, so slow, so full of humor. “I don’t think so,” he said. “I’m very good at first impressions, and you are certainly not stupid.”
“Oh, really?” I asked him archly, knowing I was flirting fruitlessly, and deciding I didn’t care. “What am I, then?”
“You are a woman who is going to write a book.”
I look back on that time now and wonder if I was right and if I was wrong at the same time. I knew that Greg and I were too good to be true, that it couldn’t last, and I was right but also wrong. It can’t last, but not because we don’t want it to—and it will last even when it’s over. It will last within Greg and me, no matter what separates us. And it will last in Esther and Caitlin, and the baby. It will last and last, even when it’s finished forever, because in my heart Greg and I will always be holding hands, like the husband and wife in “An Arundel Tomb.”
And in the end, I did write a book. We all did. We wrote the story of our lives, and I am here, among these pages. This is where I will always be.
epilogue
friday, august 27, 1971
claire is born
This is the first photo taken of you and me, Claire, in my hospital bed, sitting up with my bedcoat on, especially crocheted for me by my mum. Husbands didn’t stay for the birth in those days: they visited, for an hour a day, and then got sent packing. And I was glad—I was glad to have that time alone with you, my new baby, my fresh little person. This tiny soul that I had made and brought into the world. I didn’t want to share you with anyone.
Then, in your first few days, your hair was a jet-black down, with no hint of your father’s red hair anywhere to be seen. Your face was scrunched up and closed, your eyes tightly shut against this bright and unfamiliar world. The midwife said I had to put you down at nap-time in the nursery with all the other babies; she said I had to get some sleep. They came round and collected all the babies at a certain time, wheeling them off down the corridor in a long procession. But I wouldn’t let you go, Claire. She tried to take you, demanded it, but I said you were my baby and I wanted to hold you; and then, to be extra rebellious, I let the bottle of formula go cold on the bedside table and I breastfed you myself. They left us alone after that.
It was almost a full day before you really and truly opened your eyes and looked at me. They were the brightest blue, even then. Babies’ eyes aren’t supposed to be so blue, but they were. Luminous, even, and I thought it must be because this tiny little bundle I held in my arms was so full of life, so full of promise, and so full of future.
Before I met your father I thought that love and peace would change the whole world, but looking into your eyes, I knew that all I had to do was let you be whoever it was that you wanted to be, and to love you, and that would be the best and closest thing I could ever do to change the world for the better.
“You are going to be brilliant,” I told you. “You are going to be clever, and funny. Brave and strong. You’re going to be a feminist, and a peace campaigner and a dancer. And one day you are going to be a mother yourself. You are going to fall in love and have adventures and do things that I can’t even imagine. You, little Claire Armstrong, you are
going to be the most wonderful woman, and you are going to have the most amazing life: a life that no one will ever forget.”
Those were the first words I said to you, Claire, that first time you opened your eyes and looked at me. I remember those words exactly as though I were in that room right now, holding you in my arms at this precise second. And Claire, my beautiful, brave, clever girl, I was right.
For my mum, Dawn
acknowledgments
Thanks so much to my lovely editor, Linda Marrow, Elana Seplow-Jolley, and all the fantastic team at Ballantine—I am so thrilled to be published by such a wonderful house. Also thanks so much to my U.S. agent, Jill Grinberg, whose faith in me and hard work on my behalf I have very much appreciated.
And huge thanks to my agent and friend, Lizzy Kremer, who is a constant source of strength and inspiration. Also the very lovely Laura West and Harriet Moore at David Higham Ltd, a true dream team and a writer’s best friends.
Thanks to my friends, who put up with me during the writing of this book, especially Katy Regan, Kirstie Seaman, Catherine Ashley, and Margie Harris.
Special thanks to my husband, Adam, who does so much to help and support me, and to my beautiful, noisy, energetic, constantly busy children, who keep me on my toes.
And finally, a thank-you to my mum, Dawn, who this book is for. You taught me how to be a mum.
the day we met
Rowan Coleman
A Reader’s Guide
a note from the author
About three years ago I was sitting at my desk in my office, looking out the window, thinking about a dream I’d had years ago. It’s a very long story, but I first met my now husband, Adam, when we were both twelve, starting a new school at the same time. I fell in love with him at first sight, I actually did, just like they talk about in movies and books.
Years went by, years of nothing much happening between us (well, we were only twelve) and then around the age of sixteen there was a romance, and there continued to be on and off again for the next twenty-five years. But we never did quite get it together; something, maybe fate, would always conspire to keep us apart. Around fourteen years ago, after a really long time without seeing or hearing from Adam, and believing that that door was finally shut for good, I woke up from a dream so strong and so powerful that I had to check that it wasn’t real. I’d dreamed that I’d married him. I dreamed that a few years earlier, when we had been together, we’d run away and gotten married. And then things fell apart again. My head knew that that had never happened, we had never gotten married, but my heart believed it. My heart remembered how I felt about him, and how I always have felt about him, and it wouldn’t let that feeling go.
Another ten years would go by between that dream and finding him, quite by chance, again. This time we would not be parted, and four years ago we were married at last.
So as I sat in my office and thought about that dream, I thought about how even when life changes everything, everything around you, some things are so indelibly printed on your soul that they never go away. Love will always remain, whether you want it to or not. And that thought, that memory, was the very first inkling of the idea that would become The Day We Met.
There was another incident too: a few years earlier I almost lost my mother. My mum is an amazing woman; she was married in the fifties and was raised to be a wife and mother. For twenty-eight years that was what she did—until my dad left us. Mum had no choice but to change completely, change everything she knew. Battling grief and loss, she went out and got a job, supported my brother and me, and guided us single-handedly into adulthood. My mum brought me up to be strong and independent, to always try my best, to never give up, to believe that my gender would never prevent me from doing anything I chose to do. She encouraged me to take the chances that she never had, and she taught me how to be a mother. So when over a period of years she became increasingly ill, forgetful, and uncoordinated, with a severity that increased in slight but devastating increments, my brother and I feared the worst. She was diagnosed with high blood pressure, with having most likely suffered transient ischemic attacks (sometimes described as mini-strokes), but that never really felt right to me. I saw her change; I saw her personality descend into depression. There would be attacks when she didn’t know us, when she forgot that a friend had died and would insist on ringing his wife at three in the morning to prove that I was an “evil liar.” It was hard, and although she wasn’t even seventy, I believed that the relentlessly cruel disease of dementia was taking a grip on her and taking her away from me. Then one Christmas she became so ill that she was rushed (against her will) to hospital. They were on the point of sending her home, deciding she had overeaten, when I insisted on a CT scan. They discovered that there was a large cyst in her brain, and she was at once rushed to another hospital, where the cyst that was putting enormous pressure on her brain was drained. I will never forget walking into her hospital room just hours after the operation: my mum, the woman I loved and admired, was sitting up in bed, talking and laughing. I had my mum back, and I thank God for it every day since. But it didn’t stop me from thinking about dementia and Alzheimer’s and how this devastating disease is so little understood, and I knew that one day I wanted to write a book about it as best as I could—a book that would somehow open up the mind of a sufferer and show it to the world.
Well, on that day that I remembered my dream about Adam, these two ideas collided, and Claire was born. Several months of research, writing, and rewriting followed, and I found myself pouring my own memories into The Day We Met. Claire’s red wedding dress is my red wedding dress. Claire and Caitlin’s dance to Rhapsody in Blue actually happened when I was a girl. My mum sends me newspaper clippings every week. (Even though I see her in person more than once a week!) I watched my little girl dance and sing solo in the school play full of fear and anxiety and then relief as she came into her own and showed me a strength I never knew she had. Those are some of my memories that are in the book, and there are others too.
So, sometimes when you are working on a novel, there occurs, so rarely, a kind of alchemy that produces from a jumble of words and ideas, thoughts and emotions, something precious. And that’s how I feel about The Day We Met. I hope you do too.
—Rowan Coleman
questions and topics for discussion
1. A consistent thread throughout the novel is that of history repeating itself. Both Caitlin and Claire get pregnant young and without husbands, and Ruth must watch her husband and her daughter succumb to the same disease. What do you think Coleman suggests about fate? Do we have the ability to carve our own destiny? Can we be prevented from making the same mistakes that our parents and their parents made?
2. After watching Caitlin in a play, Claire realizes, “Being a mother is about protecting your children from every conceivable thing that might cause them hurt, but it’s also about trusting them to live the best way for them, the best way they can; and trusting that even when you are not there to hold their hand, they can succeed.” Do you agree? Was Claire right to shield Caitlin from the truth about her father? If you were Claire, what would you have done?
3. Why do you think Claire can confide in Ryan more easily than she can confide in the rest of her family? Why is an outsider more appealing to her at this time in her life?
4. At one point, Claire realizes that people have started seeing her as the crazy person, as “the one that no one looks in the eye anymore.” How do you think it would feel to be aware of being a pariah? If you saw Claire in her altered state, what would you think/assume?
5. Do you agree with Caitlin’s decision not to find out if she has the Alzheimer’s gene? What would you have done in her situation?
6. If you and your loved ones were making a memory book of your life, what would you want to include?
7. How did you feel about Claire’s relationship with Ryan before and after it was revealed that he was Greg? Were you surprised? Was Greg right to mislead her? Why is
it important that she have this experience?
8. At the end, Claire says, “I did write a book. We all did. We wrote the story of our lives, and I am here, among these pages. This is where I will always be.” Beyond an exercise assigned by her doctor, why do you think the book becomes so important to Claire?
9. If you knew you had early-onset Alzheimer’s, would you change anything about your life?
10. As Claire starts to lose her memories, she worries that she’s starting to lose hold of her identity. Do you believe identity and memory are intrinsically linked, or can they be separated?
about the author
ROWAN COLEMAN lives with her husband, and five children, in a very full house in Hertfordshire. She juggles writing novels with raising her family, which includes a very lively set of toddler twins whose main hobby is going in opposite directions. When she gets the chance, Rowan enjoys sleeping and sitting, and she loves watching films; she is also attempting to learn how to bake.
The Day We Met is Rowan’s eleventh novel; others include The Accidental Mother and the award-winning Dearest Rose, which led her to become an active supporter of Refuge, the charity against domestic abuse.
Rowan does not have time for ironing.
www.rowancoleman.co.uk
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