We Married Late and Went Looking for Quiet

The register office and the choir

I am fifty-six, and until two years ago I did not think I would sign my name next to anyone else's again. My first husband died when I was fifty-one, and for a long stretch I moved through the house as if I were dusting around a person who had stepped out. Then I went back to the community choir on a Tuesday night because a friend more or less pushed me through the door, and there was Gordon, second row of the basses, holding his folder too high and singing slightly flat and utterly unbothered about it. His wife had been gone four years by then. We did not fall into anything. We stood next to the tea urn at the interval for about eight weeks before he asked if I would like to have soup somewhere that was not a church hall.

We married in a small room with his daughter, my son, and two friends as witnesses. No speeches. I wore a blue dress I already owned. Afterwards someone said, so where are you going for the honeymoon, and Gordon and I looked at each other like two people who had been asked to solve a sum in front of the class. Honeymoon. At our age. It felt both ridiculous and like the exact right word.

Deciding on dust first, then water

We are not adventurous people, which is a thing I want to be honest about. Gordon retiled his own bathroom rather than pay a man. I reuse teabags. But we both, separately, before we ever met, had kept a private idea of Africa. His late wife had wanted to see elephants and never got the chance, and he said that to me quietly one evening and then apologised for bringing her up, and I told him he never has to apologise for that, not ever, that she comes with him the way my Peter comes with me, and that is simply the arithmetic of marrying at our stage.

So we chose two halves. A few nights on a Botswana safari to be still and watch things that do not care whether we are newlyweds, and then a stretch on the coast of Mozambique to lie down and let the sun undo the knots. Bush first, so the water would feel like a reward. I planned very little beyond that. I did not want an itinerary with our new marriage in it. I wanted feeling, not a schedule.

Learning to share a small tent

Here is the awkward part, and I will not pretend it away. When you have been married before, and then widowed, and then you marry again, you already know how to be a couple, and that is precisely the problem, because you know how to be a couple with someone who is no longer here. Gordon and I arrived at the camp knowing all the choreography and none of the steps for each other. He sleeps on the left. Peter slept on the left. That first night I lay awake working out whether I minded, and decided the correct and adult thing was to say nothing and simply let a new left and right assemble itself.

The tent was canvas with a proper bed and a zip that Gordon fussed over like a man checking the stove three times. We whispered, though there was no one to disturb, because the dark was so complete and so loud with insects that whispering felt like manners. He reached for my hand across the gap between us and missed and caught my wrist instead, and we both laughed, and that was the moment, honestly, that I felt married to him rather than married again.

Being still enough for the elephants

In the mornings we were woken while it was still cold and blue, and we drove out with a flask and blankets over our knees like two people at a Sunday cricket match. I had expected to be thrilled. What I had not expected was how much of it is waiting. You sit. The engine goes quiet. You learn to want nothing for whole minutes at a time.

On the third morning a herd of elephants came through, close, unbothered, a very small one tucked under the belly of a larger one, and the whole group moved with that slow rocking gait that makes no sound you can name. Gordon did not take a photograph. I looked over and he had his hand pressed flat against his own chest and tears were just sitting on his lower lids, not falling, and I knew he was thinking of her, and I put my hand over his hand on his chest and we watched them go. It was the least jealous I have ever felt of a dead woman. There was room for all of us in that silence. Later, back at the Botswana safari lodge, we sat on the deck not talking, and the staff brought tea, and a hornbill landed on the rail and looked at my biscuit with real intent, and Gordon said, well, that is one for the choir to not believe.

The salt and the heat

Then the coast, and everything changed register. The bush had been about holding still. Mozambique was about coming loose. We flew and then drove and then the air went thick and wet and smelled of salt and diesel and frangipani all at once, and I felt my shoulders drop an inch. Our room at one of the Mozambique beach resorts opened almost straight onto sand, and the first thing Gordon did was take off his shoes and stand in the shallows in his travel trousers, rolled up, pale legs, grinning like a boy who has got away with something.

I am shy about my body now in a way I was not at thirty. Marrying a man who knew me only from the shoulders up in a choir robe meant the beach was its own small crossing. But there is a great mercy in heat. It makes you careless in the good sense. We swam, badly, we ate fish with our fingers, we argued mildly about whether to nap, we napped. On our last evening the tide went a long way out and left the sand ridged and shining, and we walked on it slowly, two people in their fifties, salt drying tight on our skin, holding hands properly now with no missing and no laughing. Neither of us said anything grand. He just squeezed once, and I squeezed back, and that was the whole of it, and it was plenty.

We came home browner and quieter and married in a way we had not quite been when we left. Not a fresh start, because you cannot un-live a life. Something better. A continuation with company in it.