The mysteries of love are less vital than a catflap

I am translated. The house opposite the Poet's is mine. Love has triumphed over estate agents, mortgage companies, surveyors, combative solicitors and my own hard-won insistence on a solitary existence.

Nothing more than a narrow tarmacadamed road separates me from having to admit that I am living with someone. London is my past, Cambridge is my present. The future has been repeatedly defined by the builders and decorators I've contacted as 'not before Christmas', and even that's further than I care to see right now.

Anxious metropolitan friends phone and ask about the state of my spirit/soul/psyche/brain chemistry (depending on their specialisms). I shriek with laughter from the floor of what will be my workroom, what is my workroom as I write this, deskless, chairless, empty of everything but a cushion (squirrelled from the Poet's sofa), a laptop and a phone.

The state of my inner life is for some later, barely imaginable time when I am not finding and negotiating with and co-ordinating plasterers, joiners, carpet fitters, kitchen installers, bathroom renovators, painters and removal vans. There is no time for wondering if I have just made the worst mistake of my life in leaving the only place I've ever known, or if just the one Prozac a day will keep the lurking palpitations at bay.

The mysteries of love pale into insignificance beside decisions about exactly what kind of off-white the walls should be, and whether or not I want to have a wok burner on my new oven (I do, I really do, it turns out). So far the catflap has been fitted - the first priority - a teapot and kettle bought, my floor-level work place set up, and the whereabouts of John Lewis (alias Robert Sayle in these parts) established. I can stroke my traumatised cats, drink gallons of tea, get on screen the book I'm supposed to be working on and then turn it off, and madly order household items I will regret when they are delivered.

All life's other necessities go on across the road in the Poet's kitchen, bathroom, TV room and bedroom. But as to what all this means in any meaningful way, I cannot say. Ask me the drop required for the blinds in the living-room, and I will give you them to the nearest centimetre. Wonder about the relative virtue of twist pile or velvet carpeting and I will provide you with an elegant thesis on the subject. Query the optimum wattage for a fast-flowing shower and I will clear the matter up for you in a trice.

But ask me how I feel about having moved in order to be with a particular person, ask me about love, ask me about the nature of relationships and you might as well be speaking to me in Old Norse. This may be a kind of shell-shock, a deep traumatic reaction, but I've lost all language for things which are not practical and palpable.

There is a kind of reduced dialogue of emotions between the Poet and myself. We sit together, and after a period of silence, one of us will say: 'Are you OK?' The other tenses slightly before offering a clipped: 'Fine. You?' 'Mmm, fine.' This delicate investigation into each other's interior well-being is supplemented sometimes in the middle of the night, when one of us wakes up, nudges the other, and asks: 'Is everything all right?' 'Mmm, fine. Everything all right with you?' 'I'm fine.' So, everything's fine.

Love notwithstanding, we are living or partly living in a hiatus between normalities. At some point, the painters, plumbers and plasterers having left, there will no choice but to acknowledge that real life has started once again. Right now, life is an ongoing emergency, a waiting time, a series of appointments to be kept, deliveries to be made, when no one can tell what they feel about the way things are, because nothing has finished and nothing has started.

As with the improbability of late love having descended so gratuitously, the Poet and I should be thankful for the experience of turmoil at a time when most people are beginning to go into mourning for the loss of the chance of further turmoil in their lives.

But perhaps what causes our monosyllabic reaction to our new condition is not the chaos of the present, but fear of the return to the regular. What if contentment turns out to be the last thing we want? It's never been a state I've much admired, mostly because I don't think I have come across it much in others (ever, I might almost say), but also because I've always doubted that contentment is very good for people. It is no surprise to me that the fairy stories end with living happily ever after while refusing to give the slightest clue as to what that might be like. What would you think if when you asked someone how they were, they replied 'Happy'? Probably that they needed counselling.

What if, once the carpets are down and there are sofas to sit on, happily ever after awaits the Poet and me? Just as with death, sentimentalists and moralists have concocted fantasies about what happiness might be like, but no one I've heard of has ever returned from that place to confirm or deny the speculations. Well, we'll just have to wait and see. Maybe, in time to come, as your intrepid reporter of the ancient heart, I'll be in a position to report back on the matter one way or another.

• Margaret Cook returns next week