by Helen Kitson
How idiotic I was back then. At nineteen I thought I was old, that it was too late to change direction. I could have applied to a university – what did it matter if I didn’t begin studying for my degree until I was twenty, or twenty-one? For some reason – for no good reason – I’d decided that avenue was closed to me; that I must make the best of, quite literally, a bad job.
‘Don’t envy me,’ she said when I failed to respond to her question. ‘Chances are I’ll still end up in some badly-paid godawful job when I get my degree.’
‘You’ll only start at the bottom, though. I’m stuck there.’
She sighed, and I knew my pig-headed refusal to consider other options irritated her.
‘It’s not just the job,’ I said. ‘No one really kept in touch with me after school. They’ve all moved on. Either they’re at uni or they’ve got steady boyfriends and aren’t interested in hanging out with me.’
The other women in the office where I worked were married, settled, both of them “trying for a baby”, not interested in pubs or clubs. Not that I was, particularly, but where else did one go to meet people?
‘Well, I’m here now. We’ll see lots of each other when you’re not at work.’
So I became her holiday challenge. She introduced me to people she knew, picked up leaflets from the library about local groups of potential interest, even accompanied me to a meeting of the nearest writers’ group. I promised her I’d keep attending, but I dropped out as soon as she went back to uni. They were a decent enough bunch, but there was something musty and fossilised about even the youngest members. I would have felt less desperate trying to pick someone up in a bar.
I did, however, sign up for evening classes to study for a GCSE in maths, and there I met Tim. I often think I went out with him mainly so I’d have something to talk about in my letters to Madeleine. Even so, I struggled to dredge up any enthusiasm when trying to describe him to her.
She read easily between my unenthusiastic lines.
Don’t settle for second best, she wrote. Better to spend the rest of your life alone than with someone who doesn’t make you happy. It was the sort of cod philosophy my mother might have uttered. Did Madeleine think I was too stupid to understand why I pursued my relationship with Tim? If he didn’t make me happy, neither did he make me miserable. At thirty he was significantly older than I. Steady, reliable, unadventurous. I told myself he was what I needed, that he’d help me to adjust to the humdrum nature of my life.
I told him about Madeleine, showed him photos, boasted about her academic prowess.
‘Almost sounds like you’re in love with her,’ he joked.
We usually met at his place, since he had his own flat – tidy, neutral, a bit bleak. He was the sort of person who framed and hung up his certificates, and in the living room, not the bathroom.
‘I suppose men don’t have best friends in the same way women do.’
‘We don’t talk about our feelings all the time, if that’s what you mean.’
‘I’m not sure it is. Anyway, sometimes I hate her.’
He raised his eyebrows. He liked to introduce me to people as his bookish girlfriend, but when I said things like this he seemed almost disapproving. In his world, things were clear-cut. A simple man, he called himself, with a measure of pride.
‘It’s not a straightforward relationship,’ I told him.
‘What does she want to do after she gets her degree?’
‘I don’t know. She could do anything she wanted.’
‘Not likely she’ll come back to live round here, is it?’
Stupidly, this had never crossed my mind. I realised I’d been assuming she’d come home and our friendship would return to the way it had been in the old days. I now saw how improbable that was. Wasn’t it likely she’d want to find work somewhere more vibrant than Shropshire? London, even. She’d never talked about her plans for the future and I wondered now if this was a deliberate policy to spare my feelings rather than an indication that her plans really were vague.
I must have turned pale, because Tim asked if I were all right.
‘I never thought, that’s all – about Madeleine moving away.’
He shrugged. He was shuffling through his CDs and the noise was grating on my nerves.
‘People move away and drift apart all the time.’
‘But we can’t!’
He turned to me and grinned, a CD hanging loosely from his hand. ‘We don’t need to, do we? Nothing to keep us apart.’
Did he really think I was referring to him and me? And I wonder what he’d have thought if he’d found out that right there, at that moment, I was visited with the realisation that my relationship with him was all wrong; dead in the water, unfixable.
Somehow I got through the rest of the evening without giving any sign that something was amiss. I’d never had to end a relationship before. How did one do it without seeming like the bad guy? I could give him no reason for not wanting to see him any more. None, at any rate, that would have made sense. “Because you’re not Madeleine” came closest to explaining my feelings, but he would misinterpret, believe my feelings towards Madeleine were sexual. Not that I cared if he thought that, but it wasn’t true. Perhaps it might have been kinder, though: he could have hated me cleanly instead of not understanding. So I took the coward’s way out, telling him I wasn’t sure where our relationship was going and I needed a break to think things through.
He responded coldly, albeit politely, and I sensed he knew my rejection had something to do with Madeleine.
‘Call me when you’re ready,’ he said.
I nodded, promised I would, but we both knew it was over. I told him he was welcome to see other girls in the meantime. That, too, was cowardly.
On paper I poured out my feelings to Madeleine. She responded with a few scribbled lines on the back of a postcard: So glad – never thought he was right for you! Will write more when I’ve got time. Mad xx
But I didn’t hear from her again until Christmas when she came home for the holidays. She phoned from her parents’ house, said she had a bitch of a cold and hadn’t been to lectures for a fortnight.
‘Honestly,’ she said, ‘I don’t even know if I want to do this any more.’
A crisis of this nature was the last thing I’d expected.
‘I need to see you, Gabs. I’ve got to get out of here, my parents are driving me insane. Can you meet me down the pub in half an hour or so?’
Don’t be late, she’d said, but I still had to wait fifteen minutes for her to turn up.
‘God, I hate this place,’ she said when she finally arrived. It was an ordinary country pub, a bit gloomy, heavy on the horse brasses and sepia photos of rural activities, but no worse than that.
‘Not trendy enough for you, is that it?’
‘That’s not what I meant,’ she snapped.
I’d have to tread carefully. She was clearly in a foul mood, worse than having a head cold warranted. Her hair was tangled and dull, her make-up badly applied, or she’d been wearing it too long.
A couple of drinks later, she softened enough to smile and apologise for being such a grouch.
‘I know this isn’t a great pub.’
‘It’s not that.’ She pressed the palm of a hand against her forehead. Was she in pain, and was that pain literal or metaphorical?
There was no point pestering her with questions. She’d tell me in her own time or not at all. Instead, I told her about my break-up with Tim and the Christmas card he’d sent me, with the message Love (????) from Tim.
She smiled wanly. ‘That’s a bit childish. Aren’t you glad you got rid of him?’
‘Mostly.’
‘I’ve been a cow to you, haven’t I?’ she said. ‘I keep meaning to write to you – to explain everything properly – but I can never find the words, so I end up sending those stupid postcards.’
I gave her a weak smile. I had quite a collection of her cards, most of them National Gallery one
s, lots of Cézannes and Picassos.
She placed her hands palms down on the table, her nails bitten and without their usual glaze of pale pink varnish.
‘I’m sick of studying,’ she said, gazing at the table. ‘Sick of books! Sick of the books I’m meant to be studying, anyway. It’s not true that you get to think for yourself at university. They tell you that, but in the next breath they tell you what you’re supposed to think, and you’d better not veer too far from that.’
‘Can’t you put up with it for just a while longer? You’re halfway through, practically.’
She looked up, her eyes swimmy with tears. When she shook her head, two teardrops fell neatly down her cheeks on to the table.
‘Maybe I could, if it was only that. But there’s something else.’
For one horrible moment I thought she was going to tell me she was pregnant, which would surely have been the end of university for her. I waited.
‘I’ve been seeing someone,’ she said. ‘It’s been going on since the beginning of term – since October. It’s not long, is it, but it feels like for ever.’
A doomed love affair? Clearly it wasn’t making her happy.
‘He’s a lecturer,’ she said. ‘I know it’s not the same as a secondary school teacher and a pupil, but it’s frowned upon. And he’s married.’ She gulped, or sobbed, I wasn’t sure which. ‘I love him. And I can’t help thinking about the Christmas he must be having with his wife. They don’t even have kids. Why can’t he leave her if he really loves me?’
Odd, how disappointed I felt. Of course men would fall in love with her, that was inevitable, but thus far she’d never allowed one to overwhelm her. “Love” was a word she’d never used about any man. But now, seated before me, was every love-struck teenager; every damp-eyed, doe-eyed cliché. She had wept over boys before, but in an indulgent, almost luxurious way, accepting the brief pain as an inescapable, even necessary, rite of passage.
‘You disapprove, don’t you?’ she said. ‘I knew you would. And I don’t blame you.’
‘I can’t bear to see you so unhappy, that’s all.’ There was nothing I could say to make her feel better, so I didn’t try.
When we’d finished our drinks, we wandered aimlessly around the village, speaking only to comment on the coldness of the weather.
‘I hope it snows,’ she said. ‘But it won’t, will it?’
That year we didn’t even exchange presents. I’d bought her a charm bracelet to replace the one she’d broken a year or so earlier, but she made it clear Christmas was something to be endured, not celebrated. She wanted only to get back to uni to speak to her tutor about switching courses and to see her lover. I kept the bracelet for myself, but I never enjoyed wearing it. It was hers, chosen for her, and whenever I put it around my wrist I remembered the desolation I’d felt at tearing off the wrapping paper.
Between New Year and Easter I received occasional postcards (Bronzino, Titian, Rembrandt’s self-portrait with his Saskia), but she gave no hint of unhappiness until May, shortly before she was due to sit her second-year exams. The letter she sent ran to three pages, the writing tiny rather than her usual scrawl. It was mostly incoherent and I was worried enough to speak to her parents. They were aware she was, as her mother expressed it, “having a bit of a crisis”, but they put it down to the pressure of studying for exams, Madeleine’s highly-strung nature (their words, not mine), and her own ridiculously high expectations.
I couldn’t think of anything more I could do and should perhaps have been less relieved than I was when I received a postcard from Madeleine saying she’d been in a bad place when she’d written the letter and that I should ignore it, ending with a quotation she attributed to Byron: Adversity is the first path to truth. I had no idea what to make of this, deciding it was prudent to wait until her exams were over before pressing the point.
Could I have done more to help her? Should I have persisted, pestered? I chose to follow her parents’ line of reasoning. What could I have done, anyway? Her doomed love affair had to be allowed to play itself out in its own time. Didn’t I always provide the shoulder for her to cry on, the tissues to mop up her tears? She knew I was there, waiting. I always was.
Chapter Nine
Another phone call from Russell.
‘You’ve got to stop pestering me like this,’ I said. Only now did it occur to me that, in choosing him for a lover in the first place, I had been subconsciously emulating Madeleine. But surely that couldn’t have been possible? Our relationship began with him offering me lifts home on days when it rained, since I only bothered taking my car in the winter when I didn’t fancy the otherwise pleasant half-hour walk home.
I thought it kind of him to offer, and eventually, on one damp day when my car was in for servicing, I accepted.
‘I was starting to wonder if I had a BO problem,’ he said. ‘I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve asked if you wanted a lift.’
‘It was nothing personal. I like to walk when the weather’s fine. My car’s off the road today.’
‘Seems daft us both taking cars in when we live so close to each other.’
‘How do you know where I live?’
‘I’ve seen you. At least, I assume that sweet little cottage is yours?’
‘Yes, it’s mine.’ I’d lived with my parents until they divorced, and then with my mother until she’d died, when I was thirty-four. I told neighbours and acquaintances that I sold the family home because it was too large for me, but the fact was I couldn’t bear the prospect of living there alone. Not that my mother and I had been particularly close, but her death raised ghosts and memories I needed to shake off.
We car-shared regularly that winter, Russell and I, although usually in his car. He said he was a nervous passenger, which I took to be a euphemism for disliking women drivers. On the short journey to and from work we chatted about the school where we worked, the weather, but rarely about ourselves. There must, I suppose, have been some gradual exchange of personal information that led to our affair, but it’s difficult to pinpoint when a casual friendship between two colleagues became something warmer, and finally sexual.
I do remember that the first time he kissed me, he’d stopped the car outside my cottage, lingering for a while to finish some anecdote he’d been telling me. Curious and flattered rather than overwhelmed with passion, even then I seem to recall reflecting on Madeleine’s affair with her lecturer, wondering if it had begun in the same casual fashion. Knowing Madeleine, it had probably been intense from the start.
‘You know I’m married.’
‘I could hardly fail to know.’
Madeleine had loved her lecturer. I never loved Russell. But he started it…
‘I’ll never leave her.’
Oh, yes; he made that clear from the start.
‘I’d never ask you to.’ Easy to say…
I soon wearied of being his bit on the side; of knowing that whenever he was with me he’d had to invent some small lie to placate his wife; of knowing that I could never phone him at home, no matter what; of knowing, most of all, that – whatever her faults – his wife would always come first. One accepts these things in theory without realising how sordid and cheap they make one feel in practice.
Sometimes, when he was away with his wife for the weekend, he’d nip out to a phone box and call me. ‘Just because I needed to hear your voice,’ he’d say, but I pictured him glancing round, worried in case he was spotted, a clever lie neatly lined up to be unwrapped if the need arose. We could do nothing spontaneous together, could never be seen in public as a couple. What a life!
Glad I’d left all that behind, I slammed the phone down. Immediately I felt relieved, even euphoric. Then I started to tremble. I didn’t imagine he was a mad stalker or anything like that. I shook with anger, not fear, my head swimming with images of the presents he’d given me during our affair; my lukewarm reception of them; his disappointment, his inability ever to understand what it was like f
or me.
‘But I have more to lose,’ he’d said.
‘But I have already lost,’ I’d replied.
If he was now paying the price for his indiscretion, his lapse in concentration, he was going to make damn sure I paid with him. That hardly seemed fair.
Simon stood in the doorway. ‘What was all that about?’
I rolled my shoulders. ‘You heard?’
‘I heard you shout at someone. I heard you slam the phone down. You didn’t break it, did you?’
‘No, I didn’t break it. Oh, God,’ I groaned, ‘I’m going to have to change my number if this carries on.’
‘Russell again? Got a nerve, hasn’t he?’
‘You could say that. In any case, I don’t see what good it would do him if we met. I can’t repair his marriage; I can’t even sympathise with him particularly. I wasn’t his first extra-marital fling.’
‘Really?’ Simon sat on the sofa, one leg tucked under him. ‘Can I see a photo of him?’
I had only one picture, taken at my work leaving do, a non-event lunchtime thing notable only for some very pretty cupcakes baked by the school secretary. I found the correct album and passed it to Simon.
‘He’s the one on the far left with the cheesy grin.’
‘You don’t look happy.’
‘I wasn’t. Whenever a teacher left, they’d have a big after-school piss-up. I got a lousy ten minutes in the staff room at lunchtime, everyone checking their watches, and a lot of people didn’t bother turning up at all. Stupid to care about such things, I know.’
‘It’s the same in any big organisation. Maybe that’s partly why I want to be a writer. I know you have to please your agent and your publisher, but it’s not the same as having a boss and having to go to an office every day.’
‘No, it’s not. Maybe that’s why I like working for the vicar so much.’
Simon wandered off to the kitchen to make coffee. When he came back, he asked why I’d quit my job at the school.
‘I was only a temp. I stayed longer than I intended. I’m not rich, but I’ve got a bit of money my mother left me and I can manage with part-time work. I used to tell myself I’d use the rest of the time for writing, but that never happened.’