And as his lips moved in sync with mine and his hands travelled possessively up and down my back, suddenly I did remember. I remembered how deeply I had fallen in love with him as a teenager; how much he had meant to me back then. I remembered him, as women do the world over, in the way they never forget their first love. But I also remembered how I’d brutally severed him from my life when Jimmy died, cutting away all vestiges of memory of our relationship. And what I remembered most of all, was that while ending things with Matt had caused me pain, it had been insignificant weighed up against the incomparable agony of my grief. And if it did transpire that those events had only ever existed in my imagination – and the evidence for that was now pretty compelling – well, you didn’t need a degree in psychology to work out the message my subconscious had been trying to get across.
I didn’t push him away from me, but my lack of response eventually filtered through.
‘Rachel?’ he murmured into my ear, pausing to nip gently upon my neck, making me shiver in spite of myself. He drew back to survey my face, his own a clear portrait of passion and desire.
‘Too much for now? Do you want me to stop?’
I nodded silently, and thankfully he understood. I could see the effort it took him to regain his composure and I felt horribly guilty at having led him on, knowing all the while that this was probably something I shouldn’t be doing. I wondered if this was exactly how Jimmy had felt the night before. The thread that wound the tapestry of our lives together suddenly seemed heavily laced in irony.
‘Maybe we could just look through the stuff Dad left out?’ I suggested lamely.
‘If that’s what you want,’ he agreed, but added in a soft vow, ‘But don’t think I’m giving up on you that easily.’
I’m certain he meant it as a pledge of things to come, so why couldn’t I shake the feeling his words sounded more like a threat than a promise?
Three albums and several hours later I was no closer to remembering anything and I was totally bored with looking at pictures of me with people I never knew, in places I had never been. Although Matt could supply a large proportion of the missing data, a whole host of photographs taken during my university days remained a mystery.
‘Looks like I had a good time,’ I proclaimed, plucking a photograph from the pile, which captured me with my arms flung around the shoulders of several friends, beer bottles in hand, all smiling broadly, and somewhat drunkenly, at the camera.
‘Uni was good,’ Matt proclaimed, then breached my defences by leaning over and planting a kiss upon my lips. ‘But now is better.’
You couldn’t help but admire the man’s unshakeable confidence. Still, I didn’t want things to progress any further down that road, so I quickly stumbled down a conversational side-track.
‘And we managed to survive the long-distance relationship thing?’
Was there something that flashed quickly through his eyes, some small hesitation?
‘Well, we’re still together, so we must have done something right.’
There was something there in his voice that didn’t sound quite so sure, and this was confirmed when he tried to divert me with a little side-tracking of his own.
‘And now we are engaged,’ he declared, undeniable satisfaction in his voice.
‘And now we are engaged,’ I echoed, my own voice full of another emotion entirely.
‘Are you sure you don’t want to join us, Tony? You’re more than welcome.’
The words were polite enough, and I wondered if my dad could hear that the sentiment wasn’t entirely heartfelt. I saw the twinkle in my father’s eye and knew he understood perfectly.
‘No, no, you two run along and enjoy yourselves. You don’t want me tagging along and ruining your dinner. And besides, I have to make up the spare room for Matt.’
Touché, Dad, excellently done.
Matt said nothing until we were safely inside the leather cocoon of his car.
‘So I’m to be banished to the spare room again, am I?’
I tried not to smile but I could feel my quivering lips beginning to betray me.
‘I’m sure he thinks we’re still teenagers,’ he complained, softly gunning the engine with unnecessary vigour before pulling away from the kerb. ‘He’s still got that old “not under my roof” thing going on. What does he think we get up to in London?’
As I actually didn’t know what we got up to in London, I thought it best not to respond.
‘Anyway,’ said Matt, turning to me with an irreverent wink and a grin, ‘I still remember which of the floorboards in the hall creak, so just remember to leave your door unlatched.’