Like One Day’s Dexter and Emma, we were best friends for years before getting together
HE wore a new shirt and shoes. I wore an old jumper and trainers. He arrived early. I arrived late. ‘I know you once said you didn’t like waiting in public places by yourself,’ he said, by way of explanation. I ordered a drink and started to regale him with stories about a man I was in love with but who no longer loved me.
This was supposed to be a blind date, set up by my sister, who worked on the same magazine as Will. Except it wasn’t blind exactly, because I had seen Will before. I was a student back then, recently moved down from Manchester to London.
He was a southern, hard-drinking writer for a men’s magazine. I had passed by a party the magazine was throwing one night and had seen Will from across the room. He had hair the colour of scrambled egg and was drunkenly shouting at the top of his voice at no one in particular.
‘What an idiot,’ I remember thinking, and left.
I agreed to the date because I was heartbroken: feeling desired by another man seemed at least one way to try to remedy that.
Will listened patiently as I mourned the loss of a relationship
I was never quite in. Then he fin-ished his drink, paid the bill and told me he had to go.
I bumped into him months later at an art exhibition. He came and said hello. We laughed about the date. I felt able to be myself when he was around. That was a new feeling for me.
I was 21 and didn’t feel confident about my view of the world yet. I borrowed other people’s opinions, phrases and points of view. But not when I was with Will.
The point in our lives we became friends is significant in many ways. The year before, Will had stopped drinking. By his own admission, he was a ‘mess’ before we found one another: drinking, drugs, alienating people when drunk.
He needed someone he could watch films with, travel with,
spend an evening with that wasn’t at the pub. I was wounded and didn’t want to get close to another man romantically again, but a male friend I could deal with.
Our friendship started small — trips to exhibitions, lunch, walk-ing round London. He was al ready an award- winning writer, well- known for daring, gonzo- style journalism. I desperately wanted to be a writer but was instead working the door at the members’ club, Soho House. Will lent me good books to read and talked about writing with a passion I’d never seen before.
Unlike Dexter and Emma, the characters in the David Nicholls novel One Day, we were not from different class backgrounds, though we did come from different ends of the country — he from Tunbridge Wells, me Salford.
But he was different to every other man I’d ever met. He would listen to classical film scores while walking the streets of London at
night because he enjoyed it. Eve-ryone I knew at that stage in my life was pretending to be someone else. But not Will.
A few months into our friend-ship, a girlfriend let me down at the last minute when we were supposed to be going to Stock-holm on a three-night mini-break together. So, I asked Will. ‘OK,’ was his reply. And off we went.
All the things I wanted to do — travel, walk or cycle across the city until the early hours, I could do because Will was with me.
I, too, made him feel more confident to take on the world.
Without alcohol, he told me, he felt awkward in social situations: tongue-tied and out of sorts. But not when I was with him.
When we landed back at Luton airport, we stayed and ate jacket potatoes at a terrible airport cafe just so we could have another few hours in one another’s company.
Some years later, on a mini break to Paris together, I persuaded him to come shopping with me. I tried on coat after coat until, at last, I found a pretty buttercup-yellow mac. I asked Will to take a picture of me in it. He did, then abruptly left the shop. Years later, he admit-ted he was overcome with sadness at the thought of me wearing that coat with another man.
I had my own moments, too. Like the night we went to a concert and he had started to
grow a small beard. I remember being taken aback by how hand-some he was — something I had never noticed before.
‘I quite fancy you like that,’ I recall saying to him on the train home. He looked appalled, so I laughed it off. But all I wanted to do was kiss him.
By the time I was 25, we’d known each other for almost five years. I was finally a writer on a magazine; he’d just got his first book deal.
Then the older man I had been in love with all those years ago entered my life again, unexpect-edly. This man, who I had put on a pedestal for years, seemed meagre in comparison to Will — less thoughtful, less generous, certainly less sensitive and not half as funny or smart or even handsome.
I’d spent much of my early 20s fearing I’d remain in hopeless, unrequited love with this man for the rest of my life. Now, almost overnight, it was over. Will had rescued me. But Will and I did not get together straight after that. That would be too neat a conclu-sion. Six months later, in the sum-mer of 2003, it happened.
Despite the fact I had serially dated men throughout our friend-ship, Will had never really dated. He had gone to Glastonbury without me, then phoned me his first night there, music blasting in the background.
‘It’s not the same without you,’ he shouted over the noise. ‘There’s all these funny things and no one finds them funny in the way that I know you would.’
I remember the delight I felt at being missed; at being needed. Then there was a pause. ‘But I have met someone . . .’
When I heard that, my body became a snow-globe of emotions: panic, sadness, fear. The last four
and half years of our time together suddenly flashed before my eyes. If Will met someone, it was likely he would fall in love, and then I would lose him altogether. I knew I couldn’t let that happen.
‘Why don’t you just come back to London?’ I said.
He left the festival straight away and took the first train. I found myself doing my hair, choosing the right clothes, putting on lipstick.
He arrived at my flat just before midnight. He came through the door and we kissed like lovers who’d not seen one another in years. Behind that kiss was every mini-break we had ever taken, every walk around London, every laugh we had ever had.
It was a relationship that had become something much more than friendship. Friendship with love? Maybe. Or love that was dressed up as friendship while we found our feet in the world.
Today, I am 45; Will is nearer to 50. He has known me for more than half of my life. I know him deeper than anyone else in his life.
I remember reading One Day in 2009. Rather than a grand love story, I saw it as a small love story — one where Dexter and Emma’s relationship grows through the small, everyday acts of friendship.
I was grateful that a book had finally acknowledged the role great friendship can play in a love story, rather than silly notions of ‘instant connections made across a crowded room’ that had popu-lated culture when I was growing up — and wrongly informed my ideas about relationships.
I read a piece by the book’s author recently which underlines this. ‘(One Day) is an epic love story,’ he writes. ‘But revisiting it now, it seems to me to be a book primarily about friendship, about our capacity to change each other’s lives for the better through conversation and care.’
I hope every lost 21-year- old woman watching this Netflix series will come to realise that, too.
I didn’t want to get close to a man romantically
We kissed like we’d not seen each other in years