In Bed With Lord Byron

shouldn’t have had meat,’ Anthony groaned, clutching his stomach. ‘Oh God . . . ’
    We spent the next five days in bed, taking it in turns to use the bathroom. Being in that room was pure hell; when I remember it I can still hear the monotonous whirr of the
fan offsetting the more insidious whisper of mosquitoes and the cacophony of traffic outside, all coalescing into one big pounding noise that thumped against my brain like a hammer.
    After our row, such close physical proximity was both wonderful and awful. There were times when I turned back to him, our row circling over and over in my mind, and a terrible sadness swept
over me. It was a sense of failure. When we’d started this trip, I’d been convinced that for the first time in my life I’d got it right, that the books and movies and magazines
weren’t lying after all: that if you just waited patiently The One would come along and everything would fall into place. Now I felt my vision of our relationship melting like a mirage in the
desert. I had no doubt that when we got back to England our relationship would be over. Yet again, I’d suffered another flop; I felt depressed with the repetition of my love life. Would I
ever get it right or was I going to spend the rest of my life stuck in a cycle of bad relationships? And, a small voice whispered beneath my confusion,
Is it really him or is it actually
me?
    And then there were times when Anthony would hold me tight and we lay, shivering and sweating, kissing feverishly, kissing away our misery, trying to heal each other. And then, one night, he
apologised.
    ‘I know I was being a jerk before,’ he said. It was dark and I couldn’t see his expression, just stripes of shadow moving over his face as the fan slashed the moonlight.
‘I’ve told you about my mum and what happened . . . about how she went off with another guy . . . but at the same time I know it’s really lame just to come up with some Freudian
mumbo-jumbo. It’s just that – this is the very place we all came to.’
    ‘What do you mean?’ I asked, reaching for his hand and gripping it tightly, our palms slick with sweat.
    ‘This is the place,’ he licked his dry lips, his voice weakening, ‘this is the place my parents came to just before they split up. I remember Mum screaming at Dad, and he just
got fed up and brought a girl home, probably to wind her up, and then she got up the next day and left.’
    ‘Oh, Anthony, I’m so sorry,’ I whispered. ‘If I’d have known . . . ’ Now that I thought about it, our trip had been a toss-up between two places; I’d
pushed for India despite Anthony’s reluctance. ‘We should have gone back to Paris.’
    ‘We definitely should have gone back to Paris,’ he echoed and we both smiled weakly.
    Back in England, things just weren’t the same.
    We didn’t call or text for a few days. Then we organised a dinner out. Anthony took me to an expensive restaurant, but I couldn’t relax. Every time I glanced around the room I was
paranoid Anthony was watching me and thinking,
Lucy’s sizing that guy up
. By the end of the meal I felt sulky and fed-up. Conversation turned into long silences. Back at my flat, we
tried to make love but my heart felt too scrunched up with resentment; I couldn’t open up to him. So I told him I had a headache and we both lay in bed, pretending to be asleep. The moonlight
slid in sad silver beams across the ceiling; the room felt blue and cold. Even though he was right next to me, I felt so alone. As though he was a stranger. I thought sadly:
this is it.
It’s over
.
    Finally, I asked my sister for advice.
    ‘He’s being awful, isn’t he?’ I said.
    ‘Absolutely,’ she said thoughtfully, sipping her Martini.
    ‘I’m going to have to break up with him,’ I said sadly.
    ‘Absolutely not!’ she cried.
    ‘Why? What d’you mean?’
    ‘Lucy, you always come to me for advice and you always decide whoever you’re going out with is dreadful and then decide to dump them. But look, nobody is perfect. You’re always
going to have something wrong in a relationship. So he has a jealousy problem – well, it sucks, but it’s not as though he’s an axe murderer. You just have to talk to him about it
and sort it out.’
    ‘Yeah, maybe—’
    ‘You’re always reading all those books and expecting to find a Mr Darcy or a Heathcliff—’
    ‘I am not,’ I replied indignantly. That’s the trouble with family, they always remember you