If Only

by Kate Eberlen

  On Saturdays, the library opened at ten instead of nine, so Letty took her break at midday instead of eleven. She caught sight of him just before he spotted her, but it was only a second or two, not enough time for her to do an about turn and find safety behind the security gate that barred access to non-students. She could feel her heart beating against her ribs.

  ‘Long time, no see,’ said Spencer.

  She’d dreaded a moment like this, but when weeks had turned to months without him appearing, she’d grown complacent, persuading herself that he had got what he wanted and forgotten all about her. A man like him wouldn’t have any problem finding a willing partner for lavish mini-breaks. Problem was, she realized now, she’d never really known what sort of a man he actually was.

  ‘Coffee?’ he said.

  ‘No thanks.’

  Why hadn’t she rehearsed a plan of action? Something to say to him, at least?

  ‘Lunch, then?’

  She could turn round and go back up to the reading room, she thought. But he might wait, and by the time the library closed it would be getting dark and there would be fewer people around.

  Better to get it over with.

  ‘I’m not hungry,’ Letty told him. ‘But a quick coffee . . .’

  ‘How about the King’s Arms? I could murder a pie.’

  It was early enough for them to find a table, although the only one left was very near the fruit machine, which kept playing short bursts of electronic tunes, its icons randomly flashing potential money prizes.

  While he was at the food counter, she found herself thinking it was odd that he knew the name of the pub, the type of food it served and where you ordered it. Had he been there before? Had he come up to look for her before the beginning of term? It was a pub, she told herself. Pubs usually served pies. Perhaps he’d noticed the name on his way to the library. Had she ever told him she worked in the Bodleian? It would be easy enough to find out the principal Classics library, but the idea that he might have done research troubled her.

  They would have a conversation, she tried to reassure herself, then it would be over. She stared at the clock. Ten past twelve. By one o’clock she would be free. She took a sip of her coffee, glad that he wasn’t there to see her hand shaking so much she had to put the cup back in a puddle of liquid.

  ‘How’s Gran?’ he said, returning to the table.

  She’d always hated it when he referred to Marina like that.

  ‘She’s dead,’ she said.

  ‘Oh. Sorry to hear that.’

  She said nothing.

  ‘Had a good summer? No, obviously. Sorry,’ he said. ‘Anyway . . .’ He raised the pint of beer he’d brought back from the bar. ‘Here’s to happier times.’

  Letty stared towards the door, not wanting to make eye contact with him.

  ‘So, any other places you’d like to visit?’ he asked.

  Was he actually thinking she would say yes, or was it a wind-up?

  ‘I think we want different things.’ She finally found some inadequate words.

  ‘Really? What sort of things do you want?’ he asked.

  She had to be brave enough, Letty told herself. Be like Frances, not like Ivo. Sometimes confrontation was necessary.

  ‘I don’t want to see you any more,’ she said, feeling a moment of triumph that she’d finally got it out.

  ‘God, you’re such a cock-tease,’ he said, putting his hand on her knee under the table where no one else could see.

  She shifted her chair sharply backwards, almost knocking over a man carrying three pints.

  ‘I’m not. I really don’t want to see you again. I don’t even like you.’

  Too far.

  ‘You don’t have to like me,’ he said. ‘I pay for your services, remember?’

  ‘I didn’t ask you to.’ Letty could hear how weak those words sounded, how his response was there, unspoken but understood. But you accepted it.

  She tried another tactic. ‘You could have any woman you wanted.’

  ‘But sometimes I only want you. It’s like I can go for months without a curry, and then I just fancy one and nothing else will satisfy.’

  ‘Surely not if I don’t want you?’

  He answered her question with a horrible smile.

  It suddenly occurred to her that she didn’t have to sit there with him if she didn’t want to. She stood up. ‘Goodbye.’

  She stopped outside the pub, trying to decide whether to go back to the library or head to her room, or perhaps seek sanctuary in one of the colleges, where he wouldn’t be allowed. In the second of deliberation, he had come out after her.

  ‘We have fun,’ he said, trying to catch her hand. ‘So what’s the problem?’

  ‘The problem is that I don’t like you,’ she said, stepping away, wondering why the cruel words seemed to bounce right off him.

  ‘You think you’re better than me,’ he said. ‘But you’re just a slut.’

  That word, Josh’s word, the cool girls’ word, as degrading as a slap across her cheek, the word that had pursued her relentlessly until she found herself behind the locked doors of a psychiatric hospital.

  How could she still be a slut, Letty wondered, when she was saying she didn’t want sex?

  ‘Please leave me alone,’ she said, her voice rising to indicate that she was prepared to shout it if necessary. Surely somebody would help her if she screamed?

  ‘I’m not going anywhere,’ he said.

  ‘I’ll call the police!’

  He laughed.

  ‘I don’t think the police would be interested if they knew about our arrangement, do you?’

  ‘We don’t have an arrangement.’

  ‘So you say . . .’

  He took out his phone, scrolling through his photos and stopping on the one of them he had taken on the Staten Island Ferry, then the one of them in Burano with the pink and blue houses behind them.

  And then, suddenly, like an alarm going off, his phone rang as Letty was staring at the screen, and there was a green band displaying the name of the caller. Gina.

  Spencer snatched the phone back and swiped the screen, turning away from Letty.

  ‘They didn’t?’ he said.

  Letty could hear a woman crying at the other end.

  ‘Don’t worry, I’ll sort it out. Hey, calm down, princess. I’m on my way . . .’

  When he turned back to Letty, she could see he was rattled.

  ‘Got to run,’ he said.

  Was Gina his wife? Another girlfriend? Someone at work? It didn’t sound like someone at work.

  ‘I’ll be back,’ he said, before turning and walking away.

  I’ll be back. It was a line from a movie. Terminator. He was always referencing movies.

  Letty returned to the library, but couldn’t concentrate for the rest of the afternoon.

  She took a different route back to North Oxford, looking over her shoulder every couple of seconds. Approaching the junction with her street, she walked straight past, doubling back further up the road when there were no other pedestrians in sight.

  Upstairs in her room, as the light faded, leaving her in total darkness, she struggled to think of a plan. Then, after preparing a script in her head, she called her uncle Rollo. She was phoning on behalf of a friend, she would say, to ask his advice.

  ‘It’s very honourable of you to ring, Letty,’ Rollo began. ‘But I’ve come to a settled view, I’m afraid. And I don’t think your pleading, understandable though it is, will change the verdict.’

  ‘I’m really not calling about the house,’ Letty tried to interrupt. But Rollo was used to arguing his case.

  ‘I’m well aware that prima facie, it seems unfair. But I don’t really see why I should simply agree to Frances’s demands . . .’

  Letty almost felt like shouting ‘Objection!’ as they did in American crime series, to shut him up.

  ‘I have made my best efforts to be reasonable,’ Rollo continued. ‘Believe me, I am symp
athetic to the situation Frances finds herself in. Especially now she’s been made redundant.’

  ‘Redundant?’ Letty repeated.

  Why hadn’t Frances told her? Why did everyone in her family always think that she needed to be protected from bad news? Why didn’t anyone treat her as a grown-up? What was she supposed to do now? Ring home innocently and try to get Frances to tell her? Pretend that they’d never had this conversation? But what if it then emerged that Rollo had told her and Letty had just carried on regardless?

  Why didn’t families ever just tell each other the truth, instead of creating whole ecosystems of deception from the tiniest seed of a secret?

  ‘Was there something else?’ Rollo asked.

  ‘It’s not really that important,’ Letty said, ringing off quickly.

  Rollo would probably think that she – or the ‘friend’ she was intending to ask on behalf of – was overreacting. Spencer had said, ‘I’ll be back!’ but he’d made no physical threat. He’d been distracted by a phone call and he’d left. Of course the police wouldn’t be interested.

  But as she lay in bed that night, Letty didn’t feel safe.

  31

  November

  ALF

  The worst time was when the school was deciding what would happen. Alf got a job labouring on a building site because he couldn’t face serving people he knew in a restaurant. It was cold brutal work, starting and finishing in the dark as the nights drew in. It exhausted him physically, but he welcomed the exercise because he didn’t even get two hours’ dancing a week now that he and his mum weren’t speaking. He developed muscles he’d never had before, which impressed Gina, who spent her mornings at the gym. In the afternoons all she seemed to do was internet shopping, and he didn’t feel he could criticize, because it was her money and she didn’t have a lot else to do.

  Donna had gone up to the school to see Mr Marriot as soon as Terry reported seeing Alf and his new girlfriend. Ironically, it was the pink Cinquecento parked outside the flat rather than Terry’s description that had given her away. When they returned from Lanzarote, the Head had ordered Gina not to come to work until a review had been carried out. With Alf now living with her, it was pretty clear what had been going on, but the mitigating factors were that, apart from a couple of cover lessons, Gina hadn’t actually taught him; and Alf had been eighteen, and not an immature or inexperienced eighteen-year-old either. In the absence of any evidence or a formal complaint, nobody wanted to bring the police in. Not even Donna, who was furious but not vindictive.

  ‘Just stick to denying that anything of a sexual nature happened until you’d finished school and you should be fine,’ was the advice Gina’s father obtained from a lawyer in London.

  As it was, nobody asked him, so Alf didn’t have to lie.

  The week before half term, it was mutually agreed that Gina would leave the school voluntarily. The Head suggested that a different career might suit her better. Gina railed at the injustice of his decision, almost as if she’d come to believe that because no evidence had been produced, she’d done nothing wrong. But Alf thought she’d probably been lucky. And Stuart clearly felt the same.

  ‘It’s all about moving on now, princess. Chalk it up to experience.’

  Stuart was amazing. He negotiated a deal with a local estate agent to let the flat out. It wasn’t a good time to sell, but the rent would give Gina a bit of an income cushion until she got herself sorted out. He said they could stay as long as they liked with him in London.

  Gina decided that she didn’t want to rush into a new job. It had all been so stressful, she thought they deserved a break. Her best friend Sally had been in touch and suggested visiting her and her boyfriend in Rome. Alf had always wanted to travel, so why not start there?

  Alf didn’t have any better suggestions. He had a couple of thousand pounds saved from working. Lots of people his age took time off. So why not? He couldn’t see a future for himself in Blackpool either.

  Gina had so much stuff to drive down to London that there wasn’t room in the car for him and his backpack, so he offered to get the train. It suited him to spend a few hours on his own. There were goodbyes he wanted to say, although he didn’t tell Gina that.

  His mum wasn’t at the dance hall, and she wasn’t at home either. His bedroom hadn’t been touched since he left it, although the bed had been made up with clean sheets. His schoolwork folders were stacked as he’d left them on the desk. In the cupboard, his dance clothes were still hanging in their plastic coverings. On the windowsill, his football trophies had gathered a layer of dust. With its single bed, football wallpaper and team photo of the Tangerines during their brief time in the Premiership, it was like looking at a snapshot of his childhood with nostalgia for something that was lost. But the child’s bedroom didn’t quite tell the whole truth about his life, he thought; a bit like the photo in the dance hall cabinet of him when he was a little boy and his mum dancing ring o’roses on the beach, laughing into each other’s faces like they hadn’t a care in the world.

  ‘She’s changed you,’ his mum had said the last time he saw her, when he’d gone around to plead with her not to make a formal complaint against Gina.

  Was that it? Or was the truth that he’d grown up, and neither of them had handled it that well? All squashed together in Gary’s house, little issues became a big deal. They should probably have sat down and talked it all through, but they didn’t know how to do that, so they both pushed each other away instead. He closed his bedroom door. Too late now.

  Sometimes he wondered whether if he’d passed his English A level, he and Gina would even have continued, with him down in London and her up here working. Now that it wasn’t secret, the sex didn’t have the same incredible sinful urgency. But it was still great. And the controversy had forged a kind of bond between them, like it was them against the world. They’d both given up so much they had to stick together now, otherwise it would have been a waste.

  Cheryl’s dogs were pleased to see him, at least. They jumped up and down around his legs, and his gran’s face lit up when she saw him standing alone in the porch. But her face set back into a pursed grimace as soon as he told her he’d come to say goodbye.

  ‘You’d better come in,’ she said, but she didn’t show him into the living room, or offer him tea in the kitchen as she always used to.

  ‘Do you know where Mum is?’

  ‘I do, but I won’t tell you if she hasn’t,’ Cheryl said cryptically.

  ‘There’s nothing wrong, is there?’

  ‘There’s nothing wrong.’

  The words ‘apart from you’ seemed to hang in the cold hallway air.

  ‘I didn’t want to leave without saying goodbye,’ he said.

  ‘For whose benefit?’

  ‘Does it matter? Mine, probably. You’re the one who says not to let the sun go down on a row.’

  ‘It wasn’t a row, Alf. We all believed in you, supported you, trusted you. We never thought you’d lie to us.’

  ‘I know,’ he began. ‘And I am truly sorry. I mucked up.’

  ‘But you’re still going with that woman who’s ruined your chances.’

  He’d come in peace. He didn’t want to go through it all again.

  ‘It’s my life,’ he said quietly.

  ‘And we have our lives too, don’t we?’

  ‘Fair enough,’ he said.

  If Gina were there, she’d say that it proved her point about the women in his family bearing grudges. He didn’t accept that from her, but he couldn’t accept what they said about Gina either, when they didn’t even know her.

  ‘Can you tell Mum that I came?’ he said, seeing as they weren’t getting anywhere.

  ‘I’ll tell her that.’

  He wanted to say, ‘And tell her that I love her too. And I love you.’ But he knew he wouldn’t be able to say it without crying, and he wasn’t going to cry. Everyone left home, didn’t they? It wasn’t such a big deal.

  His gran kep
t a perfectly straight back as he hugged her.

  ‘All the best,’ she said.

  He could hear the dogs still barking as he walked down the street and Cheryl ordering, ‘Back to your basket!’

  There was a bitterly cold wind blowing in off the Irish Sea as Alf wandered one last time along the promenade. The illuminations went up every year in a brave attempt to extend the summer season till November, but once they’d gone dark, it always felt to him like the town had admitted defeat to the elements for another year.

  Cal had got himself an apprenticeship as a trainee manager in a hotel on the front. When Alf walked into the lobby, he was planning the entertainment schedule for their ‘Tinsel and Turkey’ weekends in the run-up to Christmas.

  ‘I can only give you five minutes,’ he said, self-important in his three-piece suit and hotel-branded tie.

  ‘Only came to say goodbye,’ Alf told him.

  ‘Where are you off to, then?’ Cal asked.

  ‘London first, then Italy – Rome.’

  ‘Jammy bastard,’ said Cal, dropping the hotel-manager language.

  Their friendship had taken a knock, but it had only needed a gesture for it to be back on track again. Why couldn’t families be this uncomplicated? Alf wondered.

  ‘You and Kelly?’

  ‘Engaged, mate.’

  ‘Bloody hell!’

  ‘Stop her going on about it – for a while, anyway. I reckon I’ve got at least four years before we can afford the sort of do she’s after.’

  Alf laughed.

  ‘What about you and Miss . . . Gina?’

  ‘Miss Gina’s all right!’

  They both laughed.

  ‘Jammy bastard!’ Cal muttered again.

  ‘Maybe you’ll come visit?’

  ‘Maybe,’ said Cal.

  Both of them knew that was never going to happen.

  They shook hands, and Cal helped him lift his backpack.

  ‘Bloody hell, you’ve got your whole life in there!’ he said. Then, as Alf was going out through the revolving door, he heard Cal calling, ‘Great news about your mum, mate!’

  The last person Alf would have chosen to run into at the station was Sadie. To his relief, she was on her way down to Liverpool, where she was doing a degree in Musical Theatre at LMA, so they were getting different trains.