Read I Saw a Man for Free Online

provoked by a joy so palpable that by its very nature it was unbearably fragile, too—beaten thin in its expansion, ephemeral before the certainties of life, death.
    As Caroline showered, she, too, became aware of a shift in her perception. In previous relationships her single life had been a whispering promise she’d had to keep at bay. But now that whisper had faded to silence, and she realised where once she’d only ever wanted herself, now she wanted Michael too. As she’d lain on top of him the previous night, both of them breathing like sprinters, distant cars sounding over the bridge, she’d felt a subtle conception somewhere deep within her. Not of a child, but of what, if she allowed it, could happen next. Because this was no longer about sex or feeling wanted or new experience. And this is what she told Michael over their breakfast that morning. That it wasn’t about infatuation or abating loneliness. It was about something else now, but whatever it was, she could speak of it only in terms of what it wasn’t because she’d never felt it before. But, she said, pouring them coffee and tucking a strand of hair behind her ear, what she did know was that she wanted more of it. Whatever it was, she wanted more.

―
    The following spring they watched, Michael’s arm across Caroline’s shoulders, as the removal company’s lorry manoeuvred its way down the lane towards Coed y Bryn. As it lumbered towards them, rocking in the potholes, broken stalks of cow parsley shivered in its wing mirrors, as if it had been decorated expressly for this, its arrival at their marital home.
    For the first week they went nowhere other than the local shops or takeaways. As they opened each packing crate and box, the objects of their previous lives began to fill the low-beamed rooms of Coed y Bryn. Lamps from New York, rugs from Kabul, a set of chairs from Berlin. Caroline, Michael discovered, owned two guitars, neither of which she could play. He, meanwhile, to appease her pleading, agreed to try on his student fencing kit she’d found, gutting it with glee from a musty kitbag. The creases in the jacket were stiff with age, but it still fit him, as did the breeches, streaked with long rust stains from the blades they’d been wrapped around. Pulling on the equally rust-patched mask, Caroline had picked up one of his épées, its coquille dented and scratched, and come at him with it, slashing at his arms, crying, “Defend yourself! Defend yourself!”

    In the afternoons, despite her inexperience, Caroline attacked the garden with equal enthusiasm, working quickly and haphazardly. She didn’t know what she was doing, but she didn’t care. She wanted, she told Michael, to feel this turn in their lives between her fingers, in the soil of their new home, in its moisture seeping through her jeans as she knelt at the bramble-choked shrubs and bushes.
    While the shadows of the May evenings lengthened over Caroline in the garden, a haze of midges blurring the air above her, Michael continued working inside, unpacking and arranging the furniture of their single lives. At night, whether it was cold or not, they lit the wood stove, opened a bottle of wine, and fitted themselves into a single armchair to talk about their future and watch the hills through the window turn inky against a darkening sky.
    But already, even in those first months, Michael could sense the cottage alone might not be enough for Caroline. Their rhythms were complementary but different, and the move to Coed y Bryn had revealed this in a way their London lives had not. Both he and Caroline were storytellers, not of their own lives but of others’. It was this vocational territory, of exploring and shaping beyond themselves, that they’d first shared. It was what had first brought them together. But where Michael always retreated to his desk to tell his stories, Caroline had simply moved on to the next. For her their telling was a need, a hunger. Her belief in the