PLAIN JANE
You know, when he first walked into our lives, I nearly forgot how to breathe—he was that breathtaking. I was fourteen, and my grandmother, then sixty-five, said the same thing—he was a god. I don’t know where my father met him, but he started coming around often. Sometimes he and Dad would copy music tapes or just sit with sandwiches and whisky, chatting and laughing. He wasn’t just beautiful; he had charm, too.
Whenever he visited, I’d cancel all my plans with friends. Who needed the cinema when he was right there in our house?
He was an RAF pilot. Once, he even came in uniform. That was a mistake—it was too much for a girl my age.
I started dreaming about him at night.
But it wasn’t even childish love. Love is for people, and he was something else entirely.
Then it happened—he invited my parents over. Whether I begged or they just took me, I can’t recall. Either way, I went, eager to meet his wife. What kind of beauty must she be, I wondered as we walked to his place, for a man like him to choose her?
I can’t describe what I felt when she opened the door. A sledgehammer to the skull would’ve been less crushing. She was plain. Completely. Not a speck of makeup, mousy-haired, colourless… a nobody.
I walked inside, my world upside down, a fourteen-year-old girl with shattered illusions. If injustice existed, it was standing right in front of me.
Then we sat down, and she began to speak.
She was a PhD in biology, sharp, fascinating. I hung on her every word, mouth half-open. Before long, I stopped noticing she wasn’t pretty.
Then I looked at him—really looked—and realised he wasn’t so flawless anymore. They matched. Made sense.
He visited a few more times before they moved away. RAF postings, I suppose.
Years later, I heard he’d had a stroke. Left him paralysed. His wife became his hands, his feet, his nurse, his world. She never left. Without her, he was nothing.
I don’t know what he—that devastating man I’ve never seen the equal of since—saw in that plain girl when he married her. Brains? Probably. Even before the PhD, she must’ve had them. Charisma? Maybe. She might’ve had that once, too.
But…
We never know why heaven sends us the partners it does, or why our eyes pick them from a crowd. What draws us together? A mystery.
Yet, whenever I think of him, I believe he saw something in that unremarkable girl—a strength, a refuge.
And he wasn’t wrong.