PREVIOUS PAGES: RUTH TOWELL FOR THE SUNDAY TIMES MAGAZINE. THESE PAGES: COURTESY OF CHRISTINA PATTERSONhe year was 1993, my birthday was looming
and I sent out party invitations. “Growing
Panic at Grosvenor Park”, I put on them,
“as Christina approaches 30!” I added
a skull and crossbones, to underline the
message. I was joking and not joking. I was
trying to bring a sense of irony to the fear
that sometimes gripped me as I lay awake
at night: why was I still single and would
I ever meet “the one”? I was trying, in fact,
to make light of my shame. On the eve of
my fourth decade I had only ever had two
boyfriends. Neither had lasted more than
a few weeks.
One by one, my friends were pairing off.
I smiled when they told me, smiled at their
weddings and smiled when they handed me
wriggling infants smelling of clean cotton
and milk. I didn’t know how they could do
this thing that felt to me like scaling an entire
mountain range without an ice pick or a
rope. How was it possible for someone you
liked to like you? How did you let each other
know? How did you get from a stumbling
conversation to a kiss, a weekend, a life?
I’d met my first boyfriend, Jonathan,
at a party in my second term at Durham
University. I had just turned 19. He had just
turned 21. Like me, he was a member of the
Christian Union. Like me, he had spent his
teenage years at a youth club attached to a
Baptist church and been taught that sex
before marriage was a sin. I thought, as I felt
something flip over in my chest, that it was
happening, this thing I had been waiting for.
We went in his old Datsun on drives
through the moors. We walked in the
moonlight at Seaham harbour. We went to
his college ball and drank cocktails in the
courtyard. We danced to the Pasadena Roof
Orchestra and had buck’s fizz in a punt on
the Wear. A few days after that he bought
me a half of cider and told me it was over.
When my father picked me up from the
station at the end of term, he said: “It will
probably take you years to get over it.” It
was a very good way of making sure it did.
I was still a virgin when, at 26, I met
Patrick. He didn’t make my heart beat faster
but we were both lonely and we started
watching films and cooking meals together
at my flat and his. One day, when he started
kissing me, I didn’t want to pull away. I was
relieved when we had sex. I had lost my
Christian faith by this stage and my virginity
was beginning to feel like a badge of shame.
Our friendship with occasional benefits
fizzled out when I realised I didn’t want a
romance — at least, not with him. He was
angry. I was confused. I wanted to want
him, but I didn’t want him.
There were men I did want, like Martin,
the poet who had done a reading at the
South Bank and flirted with me. Martin was
a crush, a bug, an obsession. I once drove
past his house late at night just to see if the
lights were on. I told all my friends about
him: about how I’d mustered the courage,
for once in my life, to invite a man I was
attracted to for supper with some mutual
friends; about the postcard he’d sent to
thank me, suggesting we go to see a movie
when he was back from his holiday, and
how I’d waited and waited and checked
my answerphone as if it were the pulse
of a patient in intensive care. Martin was
a crush but turned out to be a crushing
disappointment because he never did call.
When I was 29 I fell in love with a man at
work. It was the first time for years that I
had felt that soul-deep yearning for another
human. One day he handed me a catalogue
for an upcoming exhibition and I thought it
must be a sign. I felt as if he were giving me
the keys to a padlock on his heart. We had
only ever had a few conversations, ones to
me that felt highly charged. Sometimes atnight I allowed myself to dream that his
feelings were the mirror image of mine.
When I was allocated the seat next to him
on a work outing, I felt as if, like Krook in
Bleak House, I might actually burst into
flames. I was on fire. Everything was on
fire. I thought I couldn’t live without him.
There was a problem. There was always
a problem. We’d had only a handful of
conversations. And more significantly,
he was married. So that was that.
What makes me sad now is the sense,
in all my flirtations that weren’t really
flirtations, that what was possible for
almost everyone was not possible for me.
My parents had made it look easy — they
had fallen in love at first sight, they always
told me. In the photos from their younger
years my English father looks like a film
star with his intense green eyes, but my
Swedish mother looks mousy and shy. It
was love that changed the contours of her
face and gave her the allure she never lost.
He was 21 and she was 18 when they
met on a three-week language course in
Heidelberg. For the first three years they
lived in their home countries, so their
relationship was conducted via daily
letters. “Never has your voice sounded
so beautiful,” my father wrote after one of
their rare telephone calls. “What a heavy
ache as I put the telephone down! But love
is like that. Love brings the ache of parting
and brings, too, a happiness that those
who do not love do not know.”
I first read that letter 19 years ago, at the
age of 39, and it made me go cold. That was
the year I discovered I had cancer. I’d just
started a job at The Independent when
I found a lump in my breast. In his letter
to my mother, my father had been clear:
“... a happiness that those who do not love
do not know”. Honestly, for a while, the fear
of that was worse than the fear of dying.
The previous year the newspapers had
been full of a book called Baby Hunger,
which was about women of my age who
had put their careers first and left it too late
to have children. The clock was ticking.
I wanted what my friends had: babies to
cuddle, a man to snuggle up with, the sense
of being normal and of being a grown-up.
It made me angry when newspaper articles
talked about “career women”. Yes, my work
mattered to me, but not at the cost of
everything else. I worked hard because
work was what I had.
One morning I heard my mother tell
a friend on the phone that the tragedy
of her life was that she didn’t have any
grandchildren. By now her expectations
had lowered. She had originally hoped for
a doctor, or a diplomat, or a professor, a man
with a brilliant brain and a brilliant career
she could smuggle into conversations with
friends. Over the years that had changed
to a man with a job, or perhaps just a pulse.
“My son-in-law” would have been lovely,
but “Christina’s boyfriend” would haveAs a single woman,
Patterson, centre,
feared dying without
knowing the kind of
romantic love her
parents held dear36 • The Sunday Times Magazine