Free My Year Off by Robert McCrum Page B

remembered Father De Souza’s mission and found myself weeping inconsolably.
    After waiting for hours in the tropical darkness, I finally met a guerrilla I’ll call Joaquim Guterres, who described the activities of the freedom-fighters. Some time after midnight he handed over messages for fellow resistance workers who had somehow managed to flee abroad, and then he disappeared silently into the dark.
    Next day, we bade farewell to Father De Souza and took the bus back to Dili. We were tailed and spied on to the last. At Dili airport, officers of military intelligence were on hand to arrest and then interrogate us with futile, and quite alarming, belligerence, but for some reason that still baffles me, neither my notes nor Julio’s film were confiscated. Within hours, we were back in a world that remains largely indifferent to the terrible plight of East Timor. I filed my copy, and took the first plane to New York. It was nearly Christmas time and the city seemed more than usually magical. It was then one evening, over dinner, that Sarah and I began to speak - in a hypothetical way, I insisted, and with the immature person’s fear of commitment - about getting married. Looking back, I suppose I was vaguely conscious of being no longer a very young man, and of knowing that Sarah was the person with whom I wanted to spend the rest of my life, in the state of matrimony - a state any amount as risky as Indonesia.
    After East Timor I needed no encouragement to devote my time to her. Her conversation was always so delightfully whimsical, variously flippant, ironical and charming. Our first year, from Christmas 1993 to Christmas 1994, was much about looking forward to the time we’d spend together. We made a point of visiting each other, either in London or New York, at least once a month, and the year flashed by in a whirl of bargain-basement transatlantic flights. Less than twelve monthsafter we’d first met we were engaged to be married and the date for the wedding set: 13 May 1995. I was, in the words of romantic fiction, ‘the happiest man alive’.
    I used to save up books to read on my red-eye trips from New York to London. One of these, devoured in a single flight, was Sherwin Nuland’s compulsive bestseller
How We Die.
I returned to it when I began to write this book, and found the following passage marked in the margin: ‘In previous centuries, men believed in the concept of
ars moriendi
, the art of dying.’
    On All Saints Day, 1 November 1994, Sarah came to live in London. I decided that this was a momentous transition for me and I decided to attempt a diary (soon discarded, however). My first entry ran: ‘Our first day together passed like a dream. S. slept all day, and five enormous suitcase now fill the downstairs living room. This, apparently, is just the hors d’oeuvre to the main course. Watching Channel Four News, we discussed the difference between “yob” and “hooligan”.’ Sarah now says that I had also to explain to her the meaning of ‘toff’.
    We were married outside Philadelphia on a glorious day in spring. In my speech I said that, like the defeated British troops at Yorktown, I’d had my world turned upside-down by an American. I’d certainly never expected to return to Pennsylvania in such idyllic circumstances. Sarah was, I said, ‘my American Revolution, my Declaration of Independence, my first and only Amendment, my Supreme Court and my Boston Tea Party’, deeply felt sentiments that were greeted with drunken whoops of joyous acclaim by family and friends. Our honeymoon was spent in Morocco. When we came back to London, Sarah found an assignment waiting for her from
Vanity Fair.
Would she go to San Francisco tointerview the novelist Amy Tan? So at lunchtime on Saturday 22 July I took her to Heathrow for the flight. As I accelerated the car away from the unloading bay, I remember watching her diminutive figure on the kerb in the rearview mirror …

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‘Robert McCrum Is