ABSTRACT
I was seduced away from the life I had been living not by drugs or doctors or work, nor indeed my own depression. I was seduced by the idea of the future, and what might be possible. One day Matthias said he was going, and suddenly, almost instantaneously, I closed a door on what had once been. Without exchanging a single physical intimacy (despite what our divorce papers claim) James began what was nevertheless to become for me the seduction of the century. He wrote me love letters. He won my heart with words, confessing our lives to each other on a daily basis. I surrendered my ‘sullied’ self to him; in return he kept my secrets and married me. It was as though I was living on pure quicksilver. My whole life changed, and I wanted nothing more than for my grief to be gone and to be touched by the future. We planned to invent a new kind of colour. To write a history of love. To holiday on the moon. To create a ‘supermodern’ kind of family that embraced all comers. We planned for his ex-wife to be his best man at our wedding, for the children to know no pain, and for the oceans to become clean. We imagined everything would all work out for the very best. Who really knew what the 21st century would bring? We married as soon 50as possible after our mutual divorces and became pregnant with Scarlet almost immediately. Soon afterwards, our lives changed with an enormity that we had imagined but not calculated, forever. Let’s just say things did not work out quite as we thought.
