The Course of Love

The Sacred Start

In the early days of their marriage, and for many years thereafter, it is always the same question for Rabih and his wife: “How did you two meet?”—usually accompanied by an anticipatory air of playful, vicarious excitement. The couple then typically look at one another—sometimes a little shyly when the whole table has stopped to listen—to determine who should tell it this time. Depending on the audience, they may play it for wit or for tenderness. It can be condensed into a line or fill a chapter.

The start receives such disproportionate attention because it isn’t deemed to be just one phase among many; for the Romantic, it contains in a concentrated form everything significant about love as a whole. Which is why, in so many love stories, there is simply nothing else for the narrator to do with a couple after they have triumphed over a range of initial obstacles other than to consign them to an ill-defined contented future—or kill them off. What we typically call love is only the start of love.

It is peculiar, Rabih and his wife observe, how seldom they are asked about what has happened to them since they met, as if the real story of their relationship didn’t belong to an area of legitimate or fruitful curiosity. Never have they publicly fielded the one question that truly preoccupies them: “What is it like to have been married awhile?”

The stories of relationships, maintained over decades, without obvious calamity or bliss, remain—fascinatingly and worryingly—the exceptions among the narratives we dare to tell ourselves about love’s progress.

It happens like this, the start that gets too much attention: Rabih is thirty-one and a resident in a city that he hardly knows or understands. He used to live in London but recently moved to Edinburgh for work. His former architectural practice shed half its staff after the unexpected loss of a contract, and redundancy forced him to cast his professional net wider than he would have liked—which eventually led him to accept a job with a Scottish urban-design studio specializing in plazas and road junctions.

He has been single for a few years, since the failure of a relationship with a graphic designer. He has joined a local health club and signed up with a dating Web site. He has been to the opening of a gallery exhibiting Celtic artifacts. He has attended a stream of events loosely connected to his work. All in vain. A few times he has felt an intellectual connection with a woman but no physical one—or the other way around. Or, worse still, a glimmer of hope and then the mention of a partner, usually standing on the other side of the room, wearing a prison warden’s expression.

Still, Rabih doesn’t give up. He is a Romantic. And eventually, after many empty Sundays, it happens at last, almost as he has been taught—largely by art—to expect that it will.

The roundabout is on the A720 heading south from central Edinburgh, connecting the main road to a cul-de-sac of executive homes facing a golf course and a pond—a commission which Rabih takes on less out of interest than because of the obligations that come with his modest ranking in his company’s pecking order.

On the client’s side, the supervisory role is initially assigned to a senior member of the city council’s surveying team; but the day before the project is due to start, the man suffers a bereavement, and a more junior colleague is moved across to take his place.

They shake hands at the construction site on an overcast morning in early June, a little after eleven. Kirsten McLelland is wearing a fluorescent jacket, a hard hat, and a pair of heavy rubber-soled boots. Rabih Khan can’t hear anything much of what she is saying, not only because of the repetitive shudder of a nearby hydraulic compressor, but also because, as he will come to discover, Kirsten often talks rather softly, in the voice of her native Inverness that has a habit of trailing off before sentences are entirely complete, as though she has halfway through discovered some objection to what she has been saying or has simply moved on to other priorities.

Despite her apparel—or, in truth, partly because of it—Rabih at once notes in Kirsten a range of traits, psychological and physical, to whose appeal he is susceptible. He observes her unruffled, amused way of responding to the patronizing attitudes of the muscular twelve-man construction crew; the diligence with which she checks off the various items on the schedule; her confident disregard for the norms of fashion; and the individuality implied by the slight irregularity in her upper front teeth.

Once the meeting with the crew is finished, client and contractor go and sit together on a nearby bench to sort through the contracts. But within a few minutes it begins to pour, and as there is no room to do paperwork in the site office, Kirsten suggests they walk around to the high street and find a café.

On the way there, beneath her umbrella, they fall into a conversation about hiking. Kirsten tells Rabih that she tries to get away from the city as often as possible. Not long ago, in fact, she went up to Loch Carriagean, where, pitching her tent in an isolated pine forest, she felt an extraordinary sense of peace and perspective from being so far away from other people and all the distractions and frenzy of urban life. Yes, she was up there on her own, she answers; he has an image of her under canvas, unlacing her boots. When they reach the high street, there is no café in sight, so they take refuge instead in the Taj Mahal, a somber and deserted Indian restaurant where they order tea and, at the owner’s urging, a plate of papadums. Fortified, they make their way through the forms, concluding that it will be best to call in the cement mixer only in the third week and have the paving stones delivered the week after.

Rabih examines Kirsten with a forensic focus while trying for discretion. He notes light freckles across her cheeks; a curious mixture of assertiveness and reserve in her expression; thick, shoulder-length auburn hair pushed to one side; and a habit of beginning sentences with a brisk “Here’s a thing . . .”

In the midst of this practical conversation, he manages nonetheless to catch the occasional glimpse of a more private side. To his question about her parents, Kirsten answers, with a note of awkwardness in her voice, that she was brought up in Inverness by her mother alone, her father having lost interest in family life early on. “It wasn’t an ideal start to make me hopeful about people,” she says with a wry smile (and he realizes it’s the left upper front tooth that is at a bit of an angle). “Maybe that’s why the thought of ‘happily ever after’ has never really been my thing.”

The remark is hardly off-putting for Rabih, who reminds himself of the maxim that cynics are merely idealists with unusually high standards.

Through the wide windows of the Taj Mahal, he can see fast-moving clouds and, in the far distance, a hesitant sun casting rays on the volcanic black domes of the Pentland Hills.

He could restrict himself to thinking that Kirsten is rather a nice person with whom to spend a morning solving some vexing issues of municipal administration. He could curtail his judgment as to what depths of character could plausibly lie behind her reflections on office life and Scottish politics. He could accept that her soul is unlikely to be casually discernible in her pallor and the slope of her neck. He could be satisfied to say that she seems interesting enough and that he will need another twenty-five years to know much more.

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.