Sarah

 

It sometimes happens that a man and a woman meet and instantly recognise the other half of themselves behind the eyes of each other. Such a meeting occurred between Sarah and I. It was on an Autumn day in early October at the exact place I had first spotted Carmel on a similarly sunny day nineteen years earlier in Spring. Sarah approached from the same southerly direction on Holloway Road as had my ex-love. Wearing black, and with a youthful step that bounced her toward me on the corner of the junction just a few yards from where once my studio existed, this delightful creature smiled ~ and I was smitten. We both were. From that moment Sarah did not stop smiling, and I did not stop being smitten. It was love at first sight. The almost Portrait of Jennie experience of Carmel appearing out of nowhere and into my life, then disappearing, and reappearing a dozen years later, was dissolved into the mist of a forgotten part of the past which no longer resembled the present, any more than London of the mid-1980s resembled the London of 1967. Sarah was somebody fresh from college with unrelenting optimism, boundless energy, enormous affection, honesty, openness and an almost childlike innocence. It is unsurprising that I would never love another, and that we would remain together for the rest of our lives. I would look back with warmth on those I had known before, but I only wanted to be with Sarah now that I had found her. She is everything to me; as apparently I am to to her. Her family, though never close, exponentially became distant; while my family died off until I had no family. We were all we had, and the love we shared and still share is more than enough. We knew we would never want to be without each other.

Nearly thirty-four years ago, on Passion Sunday, April 1987, whilst staying at her parents’ rambling Wiltshire home, I asked Sarah to marry me. She accepted and the following week, on her birthday, I presented her with a solitaire engagement ring. We had spent the entire day at Avebury where ancient stones stand tall. Four months later we were married in Trowbridge, Wiltshire, at 11.15am. 

Sarah arrived in a vintage 1930s Roche-Talbot. On this thirty-third anniversary of our engagement, which also falls on Passion Sunday, we recall that special day of promising ourselves to each other.

Sarah made a beautiful bride. On the last evening together as single people we had walked in the moonlight at twilight in a wooded area close to her parents’ house. Bats suddenly filled the darkening sky, some swooping to touch us as we stopped to look at them. It was somehow fitting, symbolic of a last brush with a world we had both encountered from different perspectives.