Proust

 

When he asked me to marry him, I knew that my dreams of a proper British academic life would come true. We had settled down immediately and his lecturer’s salary at the university was just enough to cover a small cottage in the back of an old church near a graveyard. I was 22 and had just graduated and my head was filled with dreams of musty 1930s books and vicars and rambles in the countryside. He was 48, already losing his hair and developing a bit of a stoop. But I loved him – or rather the idea of him- my dreamy academic. My childhood in India had left me plenty of time in old library of my girls’ school to read old books.

 

When we scrimped and saved for holidays, we found a cheap hotel in the Algarve where we went every year. His idea of fun was to read these Proust novels to each other. One day he told me that when we finished the books, he thought that we should start over from the beginning. And that’s when I saw the next 10 years of my life stretched out before me – the same as the last ten. I realized I had never seen the world. I had never figured out my own story. So I said to him – we’ll never finish these books. And then I packed my bag and left him.