I Saw a Man Read Online Free PDF

inside the taxi. With her hand on the door, she called across the pavement to him again.
    “Let me know when it’s over,” she said, before closing it and leaning forward to give the driver her address.

    As the cab edged into the traffic Michael didn’t wave, and nor did Caroline, but neither did they take their eyes off each other. For as long as they could, Caroline framed in the cab’s rear window and Michael from the pavement, they watched as she became just another car on the road, and he became just another man on the street, his tall body silhouetted against the illuminated entrance to the Tube.
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    In the months following their meeting, Michael and Caroline’s friends often agreed it was timing, more than anything else, that had brought them together. Few thought them compatible, and no one mentioned love. But whatever had happened that night, at least they all recognised it was mutual, and that rather than heady or rash, the climate of their meeting had been surprisingly calm, like a return more than a beginning, a recollection coming clear.
    The next time they saw each other was for dinner in Covent Garden. Caroline, who Michael had last seen climbing into that cab wearing her jeans, boots, and a jumper, arrived at the restaurant in a floor-length grey coat over a tightly fitting black dress and high heels. She’d straightened her hair and was wearing makeup. As she left her coat at the desk and walked towards him Michael saw the eyes of other diners catch on her as she passed. Caroline, he realised, was a woman who, if she chose to, could provoke this kind of reaction on a daily basis. As he stood to meet her it was the fact that she didn’t, as much as her attractiveness, that excited him. When he pulled out her chair for her Michael felt as if he’d somehow won a suitors’ competition that had been running, without his knowledge, for years.
    As far as Caroline was concerned, she’d already decided she wanted Michael. Not just because of what else she wanted in her life, and not because she was attracted to the subtlety of his humour and his looks, both of which had grown on her gradually, like a secret she’d been let in on. She’d found these qualities in previous relationships, and had learnt they were insufficient, in the end, to hold her attention. But what she’d never encountered before was Michael’s stillness, his capacity to hold the world lightly without appearing aloof or frivolous. She wasn’t aware of it over that dinner, and perhaps she never came to appreciate it over their brief marriage, but it was a manner born more of place than of character. Had she ever travelled to Cornwall and visited the coastal villages and towns where Michael was brought up—Gorran Haven, Saint Mawes, Mevagissey—she’d have met other men possessed of a similar quality. Fishermen, farmers, storekeepers. In all of them she’d have been able to trace that same wary ease with the world, an outlook bred through generations of coastal families by the giving and taking of the sea. It just happened that rather than stay close to the landscape that had shaped him, Michael had left for London, where a resonance of that coast remained with him. In later years he’d even go so far as to wonder if it hadn’t been the Cornish sea with which Caroline had fallen in love. As if what she’d sensed making her whole wasn’t as much himself as the place he was from, unseen to her yet known through its echo in him.

    They slept together for the first time that night, in the flat Caroline was renting in Farringdon. As her small hands explored under his shirt Michael unzipped her dress and pushed it off her shoulders. Her body was taut, spare, her underwear surprisingly ordinary. But she was not. He’d stayed and the next morning she’d woken him with her hands again, guiding him inside her from behind as they lay half-dazed with sleep, sunlight washing through the sheet she’d hung as a curtain.
    It was several