Free My Year Off by Robert McCrum

limitations of such an institution, and of such relationships. After a decade of personal irresponsibility I was looking for a change. But that realization did not stop me from relishing one more throw of the dice in the casino of singlehood.
    That night in Frankfurt, I arrived late at the rendezvous. Morgan was already in place, enjoying his role as Mein Host; clearly unattached, he was already attended by two or three very attractive blonde women from the Calvinist parts of northern Europe. I was wondering if I should make my excuses and leave when he took me aside and explained that he’d also invited a journalist from the
New York Times
, who was covering the book fair for her newspaper, one Sarah Lyall. He suggested vaguely that it might do me some good, as a writer, to have a friend on the
Times.
Well, I’d met a few American journalists in my time, and I remember thinking, Somechance. Anyway, I decided to stay. A moment or two later, this slight blonde figure came shyly into the bar, and we were introduced. I don’t remember much about our first conversation (Sarah claims now that I simply bragged about having filed my copy with the
Guardian
) but I do remember feeling tremendously excited and stimulated by her presence, her company, her conversation … Unlike some Americans of my acquaintance, she seemed to have a highly developed sense of humour (I still remember the thrill of finding someone with whom to share a joke about that staple of British journalistic practice, ‘the fact too good to check’), an acute appreciation of irony and a way with words that was, to me, perfectly delightful. We fell into a conversation that seemed to go on all evening, first at dinner and then, because we were all going back to the Frankfurterhof Hotel for post-prandial drinks, during what would have been otherwise an interminable walk through the rainy, confusing streets of Frankfurt. It was then that I asked her why she’d become a journalist and she replied, very frankly, and rather to my surprise, that it was probably fear. (At that moment, she seemed to me the least fearful person I’d met in ages.) When she’d graduated from college, she told me, she’d felt strangely nervous about looking for a job; nervous about dealing with people in authority; nervous about finding her way around the world. So her decision to become a reporter was counter-intuitive, as she put it, ‘like an arachnophobe choosing a career handling spiders’. I liked the fact that Sarah looked to journalism to up-end cosy assumptions (as the Chicago night-editor’s dictum has it, ‘If your mother says she loves you - check it out’). It was during this perambulation through the freezing night that she asked me how old I was. I’d already cunninglyestablished that she was twenty-nine, going on thirty, though in truth she looked barely twenty-one. It was then that I caught myself lying about my age. How old was I? ‘Thirty-nine,’ I snapped - supposing that forty would have seemed impossibly antique. I heard the lie with a flutter of surprise. I must be interested.
    I was more than interested. I was in love; indeed, we both were. When I try to recall that time now, after the dramas of my year off, what sticks in my mind is the moment when Sarah said that, no, she was not free for dinner on Sunday night, but that she probably could manage Monday, or Tuesday, or Wednesday, or Thursday … or Friday.
    The next few weeks flashed by. London. New York. London again. And then I was preparing to go away once more. Here my old nomadic life was in conflict with my new relationship, though it seemed that I’d met someone who was almost equally peripatetic. Indeed, it was not until I found myself
in extremis
that I discovered the extraordinary reserves of courage and resilience in Sarah’s nature.
    Although I was excited about the possibilities that Sarah seemed to offer, I was committed to a potentiall dangerous journalistic trip to the Far East, to