240 oblivious passengers only one thin door panel away.
It’s cramped in the bathroom, but Kirsten manages to unzip Rabih and take
him into her mouth. She has mostly resisted doing this with other men in the
past, but with him the act has become a constant and compelling extension of her
love. To receive the apparently dirtiest, most private, guiltiest part of her lover
into the most public, most respectable part of herself is symbolically to free them
both from the punishing dichotomy between dirty and clean, bad and good—in
the process, as they fly through the glacial
lower atmosphere towards
Scheveningen at 400 kilometers an hour, returning unity to their previously
divided and shamed selves.
The Proposal
Over Christmas, their first spent together, they return to Kirsten’s mother’s
house in Inverness. Mrs. McLelland shows him maternal kindness (new socks, a
book on Scottish birds, a hot-water bottle for his single bed) and, although it is
skillfully concealed, constant curiosity. Her inquiries,
beside the kitchen sink
after a meal or on a walk around the ruins of St. Andrews Cathedral, have a
surface casualness to them, but Rabih is under no illusion. He is being
interviewed. She wants to understand his family, his previous relationships, how
his work in London came to an end, and what his responsibilities are in
Edinburgh. He is being assessed as much as he can be in an age which doesn’t
allow for parental vetting and which insists that relationships will work best if no
outside arbiters are awarded authority, for romantic unions should be the unique
prerogative of the individuals concerned—excluding even those who may have,
not
so many years ago, given one of the pair her bath every evening and, on
weekends, taken her to Bught Park in a pram to throw bread to the pigeons.
Having no say does not mean, however, that Mrs. McLelland has no
questions. She wonders if Rabih will prove to be a philanderer or a spendthrift, a
weakling or a drunk, a bore or the sort to resolve an argument with a little force
—and she is curious because she knows, better than most, that there is no one
more likely to destroy us than the person we marry.
When, on their last day together, Mrs. McLelland remarks to Rabih over lunch
what a pity it is that Kirsten never sang another note after her father left home,
because she had a particularly promising voice and a place in the treble section
of
the choir, she isn’t just sharing a detail of her daughter’s former
extracurricular activities; she is—as much as the rules allow—asking Rabih not
to ruin Kirsten’s life.
They take the train back to Edinburgh the evening before New Year’s Eve, a
four-hour ride across the Highlands in harness to an aging diesel. Kirsten, a
veteran of the journey, has known to bring along a blanket, in which they wrap
themselves in the empty rear carriage. Seen from distant farms, the train must
look like an illuminated line, no larger than a millipede, making its way across a
pane of blackness.
Kirsten seems preoccupied.
“No, nothing at all,” she replies when he asks, but no sooner has she uttered
her denial than a tear wells up, more rapidly followed by a second and a third.
Still, it really is nothing, she stresses. She is being silly. A dunderhead. She
doesn’t mean to embarrass him, all men hate this kind of thing, and she doesn’t
plan to make it a habit. Most importantly, it has nothing to do with him. It is her
mother. She is crying because, for the first time in her adult life,
she feels
properly happy—a happiness which her own mother, with whom she has an
almost symbiotic connection, has so seldom known. Mrs. McLelland worries
that Rabih might make her sad; Kirsten cries with guilt at how happy her lover
has helped her to become.
He holds her close to him. They don’t speak. They have known each other for
a little over six months. It wasn’t his plan to bring this up now. But just past the
village of Killiecrankie, after the ticket collector’s visit, Rabih turns to face
Kirsten and asks, without preamble, if she will marry him—not necessarily right
away, he adds, but
whenever she feels it is right, and not necessarily with any
fuss, either. It could be a tiny occasion—just them and her mother and a few
friends—but of course it could be bigger too if that’s what she prefers; the key
thing is that he loves her without reservation and wants, more than anything he’s
ever wanted before, to be with her as long as he lives.
She turns away and is, for a few moments, perfectly silent. She isn’t very
good at these sorts of moments, she confesses,
not that they often happen, or
indeed ever. She doesn’t have a speech ready—this has come like a bolt from the
blue—but how different it is from what ordinarily happens to her; how deeply
kind and mad and courageous of him to come out with something like this now.
And yet, despite her cynical character and her firm belief that she doesn’t care
for these things—so long as he has truly understood what he wants and has noted
what a monster she is—she can’t really see why she wouldn’t say, with all her
heart and with immense fear and gratitude, yes, yes, yes.
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