Reader, I married him

Sometime in Spring, two years ago, my brother Henry received a hand-written letter from a woman in Ireland he’d neither met nor heard of. It was a letter of introduction. The person being introduced was Edward, “a decent, entertaining fellow. We have known him all our lives.”

A month or two later, I phoned to say I’d be arriving that evening from L.A. for a couple of weeks in the DC office. Henry pressed the letter into my hands as I arrived on the doorstep. He was rushing to the airport and thought I might have more time to take an interest.

The letter came via a circuitous route from a tenuous connection; Meg, Edward’s godfather’s wife who was also my mother’s friend Mary’s book club companion. It was prompted by a misunderstanding between a son who was monosyllabic about his social life and a mother who thus assumed he had none. It came from the peculiarly Anglo-Irish practice of proper letter-writing, and directly from that rare person who said ‘I must write them a letter’, and actually did.

For all that, it arrived into an insanely busy household of people who didn’t have time to meet their own friends, let alone pluck new ones from the ether. It languished there for several weeks. And when it finally got to someone with a moment to do something about it, I very nearly didn’t.

The letter said the man in question had been born in Ireland, educated in England, and was now working for some sort of military attaché in the British embassy in Washington. “Spook!” my friends cried.

Apparently, he was finding it a challenge to make friends in DC because everyone in the embassy went home to their families every night. Johnny-no-mates, I thought. Though at least it also said he didn’t know the letter was being written.

And it said twice that he was “a decent, entertaining fellow”, which, added to the very proper, English military thing, made him sound as dull as mud. You see, the thing about receiving a Victorian letter of introduction is that, however romantic it seems in retrospect, it makes the man in question sound about as exciting as the dutiful Dobbin in Vanity Fair.

I said to my sister-in-law, Nicole, if I don’t ring him this evening, I’m not going to. I thought he’s probably a braying Hoorray Henry with jug ears, the height of whose year is the Glorious Twelfth. He’s tall and gangly, with sticky out years, probably red-haired, and hasn’t finished a book since Eton. Nicole said this was quite an assumption. And anyway, I loved red hair.

I phoned him up. It was a Thursday night about half past nine. He was utterly bemused but couldn’t hear a word. He was at the 9.30 Club to see a band. Hmmm. Not a social write-off, then. We texted and agreed to meet the following night.

But on Friday night we were on different sides of the city with different groups of friends. We phoned back and forth with arrangements. I confided my fears about him and he insisted he was a jug-eared ginger who went by Lord Haw Haw. The calls got flirtier, but the logistics got harder. We didn’t meet.

On Saturday, I had lunch with my boss Paul’s boss, Paul. Over a beer and steak near where the buses leave for New York, I told him the story and showed him the letter. Spook! He said. (He would.) And then ordered me out onto the pavement to call the guy, saying if I didn’t I may as well not turn up to work on Monday. Thanks, Paul.

On Sunday, I bought a new, short skirt and rang on the bell of a stranger’s house in Dupont. Ed opened the door and my initial thought was … hmm. Bit skinny, bandy legs. Nice accent; kind of posh but Irish, too. Likes my jokes. Considerate. Lovely brown eyes and golden skin.

There then followed, in short order, a date in a pub to watch Munster play rugby, to which we each brought reinforcements. I later found out he has no interest in the sport. He flirted with another girl and I, in revenge, went after the helicopter pilot he’d invited as wingman. Him falling drunkenly asleep in an exhibit in the Spy Museum. Definitely not a spook, then. The evening ending in separate taxis and disarray. Mutual apologies the following morning and the scheduling of a proper date. Me encouraging my toddler nephew to call him from my mobile, accidentally on purpose. Him just dropping by on a seven mile run in one hundred degrees. Me inviting myself on his Californian holiday. Him accepting.

And in longer order; a cross country move for work, the sudden loss of my job, home and visa, family bereavements on both sides, unemployment in Dublin, me getting a new job in DC just weeks before he left for his next posting, and months and months of uncertainty at long distance. Then I did something uncharacteristic. I stood my ground and waited.

Because about half way through an adult life where I’d followed one opportunity to the next, moved house every nine months, lived in no country longer than three years, and always thought the point of it all would be revealed in the next job, the next city; I had stumbled into something stronger than my own will, something whose logic and grammar I intuitively accepted with questioning but not doubt. And waiting for the person chosen for me to feel that too, for the next job and the next home and the next ones after that to be willed by someone else, and for all other possibilities to be forever foreclosed, I was calm and perfectly still.

This day last year, in a sunny cottage garden in the Luberon, he crouched down beside my chair and gave me a handful of wild lavendar and thyme he’d picked as he walked and struggled to decide. He began a speech so pained and passionate that I could not tell if it meant the beginning or the end for us. I retained none of it as I concentrated on keeping my face neutral and my breathing steady, ready to bear the worst with dignity, until the very end when the tumble of words paused and he said “… and that’s why I want to marry you.”

We went walking down a country lane to gather ourselves, pulling flowers from hedges as the sun set and pausing to listen to children divebombing into a swimming pool, marveling that the exchange of a few words had changed everything for us.

We married four months later in freezing Dublin. Meg, the author of our happiness, and Mary, the book club queen, were guests of honour and read out an epic poem of our romance. It’s now hanging in the downstairs loo.

Ten days later, Ed left on exercise in east Africa and was out of contact for much of three months. The day we re-united and got the keys of our married quarter in Scotland, he charged out the door for Libya (only to spend a week cooling his heels in Brize Norton before returning home horribly behind on his email). Every time the headlines say ‘the army may be called in’, his phone starts buzzing. It’s like being married to an anti-Superman; when trouble calls, he’s ready. Oh, and that’s it. Phew.

Now, in the present, I see hideous army curtains and a professional life shoe-horned into a new home every year or two, with an unlikely infantry officer who reads me poetry in the bath and whose steady gaze brought me to tears when I ardently vowed to cherish him. And in the future; deployment and more absence, love letters on thin blue sheets, perhaps a welcome redundancy and many more fresh starts, this time together.

‘Reader, I married him’ is just the beginning of the story.