Me Before You: A Novel

gazing at each other, but gradually Will’s eyelids grew heavier, until he murmured apologetically that he thought he might … His breathing deepened, he tipped over that small crevasse into sleep, and then it was just me watching his face, looking at the way his eyelashes separated into little points near the corner of his eyes, at the new freckles on his nose.
    I told myself I had to be right. I had to be right.
    The storm finally blew itself out sometime after 1am, disappearing somewhere out at sea, its flashes of anger growing fainter and then finally disappearing altogether, off to bring meteorological tyranny to some other unseen place. The air slowly grew still around us, the curtains settling, the last of the water draining away with a gurgle. Sometime in the early hours I got up, gently releasing my hand from Will’s, and closed the French windows, muffling the room in silence. Will slept – a sound, peaceful sleep that he rarely slept at home.
    I didn’t. I lay there and watched him and I tried to make myself think nothing at all.
    Two things happened on the last day. One was that, under pressure from Will, I agreed to try scuba diving. He hadbeen on at me for days, stating that I couldn’t possibly come all this way and not go under the water. I had been hopeless at windsurfing, barely able to lift my sail from the waves, and had spent most of my attempts at water-skiing faceplanting my way along the bay. But he was insistent and, the day before, he arrived back at lunch announcing that he had booked me in for a half-day beginners’ diving course.
    It didn’t get off to a good start. Will and Nathan sat on the side of the pool as my instructor tried to get me to believe I would continue to breathe underwater, but the knowledge that they were watching me made me hopeless. I’m not stupid – I understood that the oxygen tanks on my back would keep my lungs working, that I was not about to drown – but every time my head went under, I panicked and burst through the surface. It was as if my body refused to believe that it could still breathe underneath several thousand gallons of Mauritius’s finest chlorinated.
    ‘I don’t think I can do this,’ I said, as I emerged for the seventh time, spluttering.
    James, my diving instructor, glanced behind me at Will and Nathan.
    ‘I can’t,’ I said, crossly. ‘It’s just not me.’
    James turned his back on the two men, tapped me on the shoulder and gestured towards the open water. ‘Some people actually find it easier out there,’ he said quietly.
    ‘In the sea?’
    ‘Some people are better thrown in at the deep end. Come on. Let’s go out on the boat.’
    Three-quarters of an hour later, I was gazing underwater at the brightly coloured landscape that had beenhidden from view, forgetting to be afraid that my oxygen might fail, that against all evidence I would sink to the bottom and die a watery death, even that I was afraid at all. I was distracted by the secrets of a new world. In the silence, broken only by the exaggerated
oosh shoo
of my own breath, I watched shoals of tiny iridescent fish, and larger black and white fish that stared at me with blank, inquisitive faces, with gently swaying anemones filtering the gentle currents of their tiny, unseen haul. I saw distant landscapes, twice as brightly coloured and varied as they were above land. I saw caves and hollows where unknown creatures lurked, distant shapes that shimmered in the rays of the sun. I didn’t want to come up. I could have stayed there forever, in that silent world. It was only
when James started gesticulating towards the dial of his oxygen tank that I realized I didn’t have a choice.
    I could barely speak when I finally walked up the beach towards Will and Nathan, beaming. My mind was still humming with the images I had seen, my limbs somehow still propelling me under the water.
    ‘Good, eh?’ said Nathan.
    ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ I exclaimed to Will, throwing my flippers down on the sand in front of him. ‘Why didn’t you make me do that earlier? All that! It was all there, all the time! Just right under my nose!’
    Will gazed at me steadily. He said nothing, but his smile was slow and wide. ‘I don’t know, Clark. Some people just won’t be told.’
    I let myself get drunk that last night. It wasn’t just that we were leaving the next day. It was the first time I had felttruly that Will was well and that I could let go. I wore a white cotton dress