Lisa Tuttle by Ghosts & Other lovers

Author:Ghosts & Other lovers [Ghosts & lovers, Other]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2012-06-04T14:45:42+00:00

White Lady’s Grave

Ithought, when I moved to Scotland, that I was leaving romance behind, but here I am, in it over my head.

Men have called me beautiful, called me princess, wooed me, sometimes left other women, even their wives, for me. Usually in the end I found it was not me they loved but a fantasy-figure, something from their own imaginations. Their love was a private world I couldn’t enter. But I kept hoping, kept trying to get in, to make them see me, to make the happy-ever-after dream come true. All through my teens and twenties I fell in and out of love, recovered, went on to the next man, bruised but still believing. In my thirties my enthusiasm soured. I began to question the truth of this story which had been my life.

Then I met Angus, a stocky, red-headed Scotsman, and although he wasn’t my physical type, he won me over with his gentleness, his warmth, his sense of humor, and his practical attitude toward life. I didn’t have to pretend with him; I didn’t feel I was risking his disappointment every time I opened my mouth to say what I really thought.

Angus wasn’t a dreamer, he was a doer. He had a proposal which appealed to me: we would run a fish farm in Scotland, perhaps doing a bit of bed-and-breakfast on the side, in the season. It would be a wholesome, outdoor, rural life, particularly good for children.

I liked the idea of having children, and I longed to get out of London, which had become murky with memory and the failure of desire. By going away with Angus I thought I could escape my own history and the doomed inevitability of repeating it.

Before, when I’d gone away with a man, whether for a weekend or a life together, there had always been the sense that I was being swept away, that I was only acceding to a force greater than myself. But when I married Angus, it was an act of will.

I willed myself to be happy, and I was. We both were. Our new life together was different and satisfying, and even though, after three years, there was no sign of a child and I was nearly forty, I was determined we would be happy ever after.

So I felt no intimations of danger when I noticed the stranger in the bar of our local hotel that August evening, even though he was looking at me. I thought marriage, contentment, and age all protected me from romance. There were lines on my face, gray in my hair, and my body had thickened with the passage of years. So I looked back at the stranger, feeling quite safe, and accepted his offer of a drink. Angus was just the other side of the room, playing billiards. I was friendly in the way you can be when you expect everyone to know you’re married.

He was handsome: gray eyes in a lean, clean-shaven face; fair hair pulled back into a ponytail; a long, strong-looking body.

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