I weighed myself in India. There were scales in the hotel bathroom and I stepped up out of idle curiosity. I’d lost weight. In the three weeks since I’d met Cow Girl on a dating website, I’d lost three-quarters of a stone. I hadn’t even noticed.
I weighed myself in India. There were scales in the hotel bathroom and I stepped up out of idle curiosity. I’d lost weight. In the three weeks since I’d met Cow Girl on a dating website, I’d lost three-quarters of a stone. I hadn’t even noticed.
Later I rang her to report a conversation I’d overheard in the hotel gym. A perspiring English banker was telling the polite gym attendant how marriages were arranged in pre-industrial Japan. After the relatives had got together and made a match, said the sweaty banker, the prospective couple met once or three times, but twice never. This was because old Japanese culture understood that if two people liked one another enough at the first meeting to want to meet again, that was that: the third meeting would be at the marriage feast.
This seemed to me, and then to Cow Girl when I told her, the most sensible and enlightened thing we’d ever heard. From now on we would think like a young pre-industrial Japanese couple, we said. We’d met twice. There was no going back now. No more hotels or hotel beds with prickly blankets and satin counterpanes in which you have to mind the gap. The next time we met, we said, would be in front of a registrar.
I was hooked, mind you, way back at the emailing stage, before we’d even spoken on the phone. It was her writing voice that did it. It was as clear as a bell. The honesty was a bit worrying — I assumed she was crackers — until I got used to it and then I loved it. It took her longer to make up her mind. My writing ability is negligible compared with hers, and she needed to speak on the telephone first, then actually meet me, of all things, to be convinced that I was the man for the job. She must have been convinced, however, because between our first and second stay at the hotel she lost five pounds in weight and hasn’t looked completely well since.
But when I came back from India, we unfortunately rescinded our decision to next meet at the altar, and we met once more at the hotel, this time for three days. To our credit, we were shamefaced at our betrayal of old Japan, our adopted culture. The excuse was that neither of us could find our birth certificates. These are required when giving notice to the registrar of a forthcoming union. Duplicates apparently take up to five working days to be processed and sent. Worse still, the law says we will have to wait a further 15 days after giving notice before we can fix a day. Waiting that long before seeing each other again was totally out of the question. One of us would have been in hospital on a drip if we’d had to wait that long.
And were we deliriously happy? We were not. Those old Japanese gods must have been frowning on us. For three days we were overwrought, miserable and, occasionally, fractious and ill-tempered. Nothing was as easy or delightful as it had been on the two previous occasions. The room was exactly the same in every respect as the two others we’d been given previously. But now, instead of being our cosy little bower of chintz, it felt like an intolerably stuffy prison cell. Emotionally and physically exhausted to begin with, we only deteriorated.
Even the act of getting ourselves up and dressed and into the restaurant in time for breakfast caused some bitterness between us. Breakfast was served only until ten o’clock. She always set the alarm clock for 9.45 because unlike me she was back on solids, and usually ravenous by then. I was off my grub completely by now, though admittedly I was permanently in need of the amphetamine-strength coffee they served up. Before we could go in to breakfast, though, we had to stand beside a lectern and ‘wait to be seated’.
So each morning at one or two minutes to ten, as the Polish waitresses were clearing the tables as if it were an Olympic event, this couple of hurriedly dressed, hollow-eyed, depressed scarecrows could be seen waiting with bovine patience beside the lectern, leaning against each other for mutual support. They waved us in wearily but sympathetically, these waitresses, and all of them knew our room number better than we did.
In the end she decided to go home early. She couldn’t take any more, she said. She’d had enough now. She needed to go home to rest and sleep. After she’d gone I sat motionless on the chair in the fetid room and studied my deadpan face in the bedroom mirror. Half an hour later the door opened. She’d come back. She’d forgotten to take her water-filter jug. We didn’t speak. She came over to where I was sitting and grasped my little finger with one of hers. Then she emptied her jug in the sink and was gone.
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