She heard him flump onto his back and then utter a soft, slightly self-mocking groan. “You’ll think I’m such a cliché.”
“Yes, because I know so many landscape architects who also make cakes on TV.”
“Honestly, it’s appallingly first world problems of me. I just—” He broke off and then tried again. “I find my job very fulfilling, and—I’m afraid I don’t know how to say this without sounding boastful—I’ve achieved quite a lot of what I expected to achieve in my life. But sometimes I find myself wondering if there isn’t something...something else. Something I’m missing out on.”
This was all very familiar to Rosaline, albeit for very different reasons. “I don’t think that’s a cliché. I think that’s normal. I mean, I hope it’s normal because I feel like that all the time.”
“I’m sure you shouldn’t,” he offered reassuringly. “In fact, I probably shouldn’t. But I think it’s a—well, I suppose it’s a hazard of education. It teaches you how large the world can be, but you can never quite encompass all of it. Certainly it’s not a feeling I can imagine the guests at that wedding knowing much about. They were perfectly content with season tickets to Manchester United, large-screen televisions, and the occasional opportunity to harass a woman from the top of a building site.”
“Oh, don’t. Once when I was about eighteen, somebody yelled at me like that. And I’d had enough so I stopped and turned around and said, ‘All right then, you and me, right here.’ And he got really offended, and said, ‘Steady on, love; I’m married.’ Like I was the one out of line.” She huffed out an aggrieved sigh a decade in the making. “You can’t fucking win.”
“It sounds to me like you won.” In the dark, his voice was rich with approval. “He tried to make you feel small and you turned it back on him.”
At the time, it had felt like he’d set out to make her feel small, she tried to stop him, and he’d made her feel small anyway. And even now, she was pretty sure that once she’d walked away, the builder and his mates had laughed about what a desperate slag she was. But she liked Alain’s version a lot better.
Unfortunately, contemplating the sociological implications of their gendered reactions to an anecdote about a building site had distracted Rosaline for just long enough that Alain was able to say: “It feels like we’ve been talking about me forever, which, while I’m not shouting at you from a building site, I’m uncomfortably aware is still quite rude and a little bit sexist.”
“No, no, it’s fine.” It was about to happen, wasn’t it? “I’m interested.”
And here it came, as inevitable as climate change. “Tell me about you, Rosaline-um-Palmer.”
“What about me?”
“Well, we could start with what you do when you’re not getting stranded at railway stations and work our way up from there.”
Rosaline opened her mouth and closed it again. The thought of saying anything close to the truth suddenly seemed impossible. Because here was someone sharp and confident, with experiences and opinions and an exciting career he was passionate about. And he seemed to think Rosaline was like him. That she belonged in his world of feeling you’d achieved everything you set out to achieve and having lakes moved at your command and still finding time to bake at a nationally competitive level. How was she supposed to tell someone like that that she’d got pregnant at nineteen, dropped out of university, and worked part-time as a sales assistant while doing an at best adequate job of parenting an eight-year-old? And what the fuck did that say about her? She wouldn’t have traded Amelie for all the degrees and opportunities in the world, but just in that moment, she couldn’t quite bring herself to admit her daughter existed.
“I’m a student,” she told him.
A worrying pause. “Gosh. I . . . I wasn’t expecting that.”
“A mature student,” she clarified, detecting at once the Shit, I’ve hit on a teenager tone in his voice.
“Oh, thank God.” He let out a nervous breath. “I think sharing a room with a woman you’ve barely met is one thing. But sharing a room with a woman you’ve barely met who’s fresh out of a school gets you on page three of the Daily Mail.”
“I think,” said Rosaline helpfully, “that’s usually reserved for pictures of scantily clad women. As a sex pest you’d probably be on page four.”
“Good to know. That’s exactly the detail I was concerned with.” He paused. “I should also say, in my delight at discovering you’re not a teenager, I didn’t mean to imply that you look old. Would you mind if I just asked what you’re studying, and we can pretend the earlier part of this conversation never happened?”
“Medicine?” It was . . . only half a lie.
“And here I am talking about architecture like it’s important when you’re learning to save lives.”
This was . . . this was bad. The sensible thing to do was come clean now. Right now. “I don’t know, no point saving people’s lives if they can’t go to a park afterwards.”
He gave a soft laugh. “You’re very sweet. But that’s clearly nonsense. You’ve worked hard and been successful, and you should be proud of that.”
“Thank you,” she said, feeling more than a little nauseous.
“Did you not want to go into it straight from school?”
Okay. Get out of the lie hole, Rosaline. Because if you don’t, it’s lies all the way down. “Oh . . . I . . . took a gap year?”
There was a silence like he was waiting for more.
Which was when Rosaline realised that a single year probably didn’t explain the difference between the age he assumed she was and the age of the average undergraduate. “To Malawi,” she continued.
“To Malawi?” he repeated, in a devastatingly interested voice.
“Yes? And I . . . liked it so much I stayed out there for a while. Working on . . . irrigation.” Stop Rosaline stop Rosaline stop Rosaline. “But then I looked at some studies, which suggested that Western tourists going to less economically developed countries and doing what is essentially unskilled labour might do more harm than good. So, I came home. And reapplied to university.”
“Good Lord,” he said, “you have lived a fascinating life. I confess, I just thought you might have decided to retrain or something.”
Fuck. That would have been way more plausible and raised far fewer questions. “Yeah. No. Um, I guess a lot of people do that, don’t they?”
There was a rustle of bedclothes in the darkness—the sort of sound you might make as you settled in to hear a remarkable and well-travelled woman tell you her life story. “I’ve always wondered—” he began.
“You know”—Rosaline cut him off urgently—“we’re probably going to have to get up really early tomorrow morning, and I’m sure neither of us want to screw up week one because we stayed up all night talking.”
There was a glow from the floor as Alain checked his phone. “You’re right. I didn’t realise how late it was.”