Instead of which, Rabih feels certain that he has discovered someone endowed with the most extraordinary combination of inner and outer qualities: intelligence and kindness, humor and beauty, sincerity and courage; someone whom he would miss if she left the room even though she had been entirely unknown to him but two hours before; someone whose fingers—currently drawing faint lines with a toothpick across the tablecloth—he longs to caress and squeeze between his own; someone with whom he wants to spend the rest of his life.
Terrified of offending, unsure of her tastes, aware of the risk of misreading a cue, he shows her extreme solicitude and fine-grained attention.
“I’m sorry; would you prefer to hold your umbrella?” he asks as they make their way back to the site.
“Oh, I really don’t mind,” she replies.
“I’d be happy to hold it for you—or not,” he presses.
“Really, whatever you want!”
He edits himself strictly. Whatever the pleasures of disclosure, he seeks to shield Kirsten from all but a few sides of his character. Showing his true self is not, at this stage, any kind of priority.
They meet again the following week. As they walk back towards the Taj Mahal for a budget and progress report, Rabih asks if he might give her a hand with the bag of files she is carrying, in response to which she laughs and tells him not to be so sexist. It doesn’t seem the right moment to reveal that he would no less gladly help her to move house—or nurse her through malaria. Then again, it only amplifies Rabih’s enthusiasm that Kirsten doesn’t appear to need much help with anything at all—weakness being, in the end, a charming prospect chiefly in the strong.
“The thing is half of my department has just been let go, so I’m effectively doing the work of three people,” Kirsten explains, once they are seated. “I didn’t finish till ten last night, though that’s mostly because, as you may already have picked up, I am something of a control freak.”
So frightened is he of saying the wrong thing, he can’t find anything to talk about—but because silence seems like proof of dullness, neither can he allow the pauses to go on. He ends up offering a lengthy description of how bridges distribute their loads across their piers, then follows up with an analysis of the relative braking speeds of tires on wet and dry surfaces. His clumsiness is at least an incidental sign of his sincerity: we tend not to get very anxious when seducing people we don’t much care about.
At every turn he senses the weakness of his claim upon Kirsten’s attention. His impression of her freedom and autonomy scares as much as it excites him. He appreciates the lack of any good reasons why she would ever bestow her affections upon him. He properly understands how little right he has to ask her to look upon him with the kindness which his many limitations require. At the perimeter of Kirsten’s life, he is at the apogee of modesty.
Then comes the pivotal challenge of knowing whether the feeling is mutual, a topic of almost childlike simplicity nonetheless capable of sustaining endless semiotic study and detailed conjecture. She complimented him on his grey raincoat. She let him pay for their tea and papadums. She was encouraging when he mentioned his ambition to return to architecture. Yet she seemed ill at ease, even a little irritated, on the three occasions when he tried to bring the conversation around to her past relationships. Nor did she pick up on his hint about catching a film.
Such doubts only inflame desire. For Rabih, the most attractive people aren’t those who accept him right away (he doubts their judgment) or those who never give him a chance (he grows to resent their indifference) but rather those who, for unfathomable reasons—perhaps a competing romantic entanglement or a cautious nature, a physical predicament or a psychological inhibition, a religious commitment or a political objection—leave him turning for a little while in the wind.
The longing proves, in its own way, exquisite.
Eventually, Rabih looks up her phone number in the council paperwork and, one Saturday morning, texts his opinion that it might be sunny later. “I know,” comes the almost instantaneous reply. “On for a trip to the Botanics? Kx”
Which is how they end up, three hours later, touring some of the world’s most unusual tree and plant species in Edinburgh’s botanical gardens. They see a Chilean orchid, they are struck by the complexity of a rhododendron, and they pause between a fir tree from Switzerland and an immense redwood from Canada whose fronds stir in a light wind coming in off the sea.
Rabih has run out of energy to formulate the meaningless comments which typically precede such events. It is thus out of a sense of impatient despair rather than arrogance or entitlement that he cuts Kirsten off in mid-sentence as she reads from an information plaque, “Alpine trees should never be confused with—” and takes her face in his hands, pressing his lips gently against hers, to which she responds by shutting her eyes and wrapping her arms tightly around his lower back.
An ice cream van in Inverleith Terrace emits an eerie jingle, a jackdaw screeches on the branch of a tree transplanted from New Zealand, and no one notices two people, partly hidden by nonnative trees, in one of the more tender and consequential moments of both of their lives.
And yet, we should insist, none of this has anything much yet to do with a love story. Love stories begin not when we fear someone may be unwilling to see us again but when they decide they would have no objection to seeing us all the time; not when they have every opportunity to run away but when they have exchanged solemn vows promising to hold us, and be held captive by us, for life.
Our understanding of love has been hijacked and beguiled by its first distractingly moving moments. We have allowed our love stories to end way too early. We seem to know far too much about how love starts, and recklessly little about how it might continue.
At the gates to the botanical gardens, Kirsten tells Rabih to call her and admits—with a smile in which he suddenly sees what she must have looked like when she was ten years old—that she’ll be free any evening the following week.
On his walk home to Quartermile, wending through the Saturday crowds, Rabih is thrilled enough to want to stop random strangers in order to share his good fortune with them. He has, without knowing how, richly succeeded at the three central challenges underpinning the Romantic idea of love: he has found the right person; he has opened his heart to her; and he has been accepted.
But he is, of course, nowhere yet. He and Kirsten will marry, they will suffer, they will frequently worry about money, they will have a girl first, then a boy, one of them will have an affair, there will be passages of boredom, they’ll sometimes want to murder one another and on a few occasions to kill themselves. This will be the real love story.
In Love
Kirsten suggests a trip to Portobello Beach, half an hour away by bicycle on the Firth of Forth. Rabih is unsteady on his bike, rented from a shop that Kirsten knows off Princes Street. She has her own, a cherry-red model with twelve gears and advanced brake calipers. He does his best to keep up. Halfway down the hill he activates a new gear, but the chain protests, jumps, and spins impotently against the hub. Frustration and a familiar rage surge up within him. It’ll be a long walk back up to the shop. But this isn’t Kirsten’s way. “Look at you,” she says, “you big cross numpty, you.” She turns the bike upside down, reverses the gears, and adjusts the rear derailleur. Her hands are soon smudged with oil, a streak of which ends up on her cheek.
Love means admiration for qualities in the lover that promise to correct our weaknesses and imbalances; love is a search for completion.