"It's okay. I'd no plans."
She invited me to sit down while she made tea and as I waited it began to dawn that she might have dressed up for me. Perhaps it was a sad indication of the level of my self-worth that I should have been so astonished anyone should take the trouble. One seems to reach a point in life when people take you for granted and vice versa. There are no surprises any more. Perhaps that was another item I could add to the long list of reasons for why Annie had chosen to brighten up her life with the wide arsed Alistair.
Yes, I'd taken her for granted - I could see that now - rarely thinking to impress her, to show her how much I still cared, nor even to ask her how she was feeling, and likewise she had seemed to lose interest in me. Since the children had come along it had been all we could manage to simply cope with them and we'd each taken it on trust that the other was all right.
"Your mother said you were interested in a reunion."
"My mother? Oh, yes. Eleanor. She's my step mother, actually - well sort of. Sure, it was just an idea. I went to the school and that's how I got your name. Then I remembered seeing you at the bank."
"At the bank?"
"You served me once or twice."
"Did I? I don't remember. Did we ever speak?"
"Well, you always seemed so busy."
She settled down, opposite. "I organised a reunion years ago," she said. "But there wasn't much interest to be honest. I'd imagined holding it in the school hall, but in the end there were only a handful of us and we sat around a couple of tables at the King's Head."
I didn't remember getting an invitation, but then I'd never really belonged to Carol's clique, nor their friends, nor their cliques. It wasn't that I would have gone anyway - in the eighties I'd always seemed too busy to indulge myself with matters of the past - unlike now when the past was about the only thing that mattered.
She leaned over and picked up a photograph from the coffee table. It was an accident, but I was left in no doubt that she wasn't wearing a bra and for the first time in years, I felt the warm flush of sexual arousal. It was an exquisite sensation, more perhaps than just sex - a hint of lust, a feeling of absolute naughtiness that a stagnating marriage had led me to believe I'd outgrown. It was very pleasing to discover I had not.
For one crazy moment, I imagined Carol lying on the carpet. I felt my hand running up her thigh beneath her frock while she plunged her hand into my pocket and squeezed me in places that hadn't been squeezed in decades.
"You haven't changed," she said.
"I'm sorry?"
She was looking at the picture. It was a copy of the same form photograph I had at home. She was lying, being nice. I'd changed beyond recognition.
"I'd a bit more hair in those days."
"Oh but I remember you, Tom Norton. My friend had a terrible crush on you."
"What?" I tried to think who'd she'd hung out with in those days. Could it have been Rachel? But so far as I remembered, Rachel had belonged to a different clique, a slightly less regal strata of school society, as indeed I had.
"I'm not telling you who," she said. "She'd kill me."
I laughed. Then I wondered if this person was still haunted by memories of me, Tom Norton who didn't know she existed.
"If you see her," I said, "tell her I'm sorry. I know that sort of thing can hurt. A mate of mine had a crush on a girl too. Remember Rachel Standish? He really had it bad for her - and she never knew."
Carol thought for a while, her finger running lightly over the faces in the photograph. "Ah, Rachel." She pulled a face. "I didn't really like her much."
I was hurt, though I tried not to show it. "How come?"
"I thought she was a bit of a,… well, a bit of a tart to be honest."
I felt hot. "Oh? She always seemed quite a nice girl,… from what I can remember. "
"Well, she slept with two boys that I know of in our last year."
The floor swayed and a bead of sweat broke out on my forehead. "Never,… who?"
"Didn't you go on that skiing trip to France?"
"No."
Carol was amused by the memory. "I was twenty three before I first had sex," she said. "Rachel Standish! Ooh, she was a one all right. I wonder what she's doing now? The last time I saw her must have been the year after we'd left school. She was working at a supermarket in Leyland,… married John Ogilvy,… remember him? Nice lad, John, though I always thought he could have done better. I quite fancied him myself. He made it to Cambridge, you know? He was the only one in our year who did. I think he got a job down there and they both moved away."
I was taking it all in, storing up the information for later: Ogilvy, Cambridge, but I was aware of staring blankly at Carol in a sort of dazed silence. Rachel had always seemed pure and heavenly to me. In all my memories of her, not once had I wondered what it would be like to run my hand up her thigh or to peel open her blouse. Strange as it might seem, that had not been part of the fantasy at all and the reason was simple: I hadn't really known what sex was. I'd been no more than a boy. But Rachel? This revelation shocked me to the core and I had to take a deep breath before I could ease the tremor in my voice.
"John Ogilvy?"
"Yes. I wonder if they're still together? Anyway what about you? What are you up to these days? You married?"
"Sort of," I said. "We're not together now. Split recently. And you?"
"Same," she said. "Do you work?"
"Engineer. I work at Derby's on Bridgeman street." I tried to sound chatty, but I could feel myself drying up.
"I heard it was shutting down," she said.
"That's right - restructuring."
"Ah,… restructuring. I've been restructured as well, you know?"
"I heard."
"I was an area supervisor - went around half a dozen branches in the district - but there's only a few branches left these days. They didn't need me any more."
"Redundancy?"
"Well, down-sizing they call it, don't they? Good name that. It sums up how it makes you feel. Cut down to size, reduced in stature and spirit. Sure, they down-sized me all right."
"What will you do?"
"Not sure yet, but I'll have to find something soon, if only to pay the mortgage on the flat. They were advertising at the supermarket, working on the tills in fact - Christmas coming up and everything. There doesn't seem to be much else going for a woman in her forties."
I realised then that Carol was still hurting, perhaps fishing for sympathy, for company. "You're bound to find something," I said.
"I know. I just imagined working for the bank for ever. I really liked it, you know. And you? What will you do?"
"I haven't thought about it much. There was talk of some of us being offered jobs in France. We merged with a French company some years ago, so in theory we've got factories over there that are part of the same group. They'll most likely be taking on what bit of work we've got left, and I suppose they'd like some engineers who know the job to move with it."
"That's great."
"Well,… I don't know. Maybe I've got a bad attitude or something. I enjoy what I do, but I only ever wanted to work so I could live, you know? I want to go home every night and do whatever I want to do - browse the Internet, tinker with the car, read books, visit friends,… " I had been about to add that playing with the children was high among those pastimes, but I dared not hope I'd ever do that again.
"But now," I went on. "Everyone seems to expect you to live to work - fourteen hour days and weekends too. I'm not saying it would be like that in France, but I'd still feel I was on the job all the time, away from home, away from where I wanted to be."
"Unless you made your home there."
She had a point. My horizons hadn't expanded much beyond the small northern town I'd been born in. They'd never needed to before. Home to me had always been an executive brick-box at Parbold with Annie and the kids. I'd driven the ten miles into Middleton every day, then home. It had been simple, familiar. But Paris did
n't sound like me at all,… didn't sound so,… simple.
Carol seemed a pleasant, bubbly sort of woman and we were getting on well. I took a deep breath. "Look. I don't want you to get the wrong idea or anything, but can I take you out for some supper?"
I'm not sure why I asked and after I'd said it, it struck me as a reckless thing to have done, not being separated even for a month yet.
"All right," she said.
We went in her car. I didn't trust mine until I could make a better job of fixing the throttle linkage. She drove a bright little Fiat and she handled it with such careless abandon, I had to grip the edge of my seat.
"Where do you fancy then?" she asked.
"I don't know. The Blue Parrot used to be okay."
She laughed. "Where've you been? They pulled that down years ago - there's a car showroom there now."
"There is? What about the Loose Goose, then?"
"Loose Goose? Tom really!"
"What? They've pulled that down too?"
"No, it's called the Virgo now."
"Any good?"
"Well, it's,… it's where ladies of a certain persuasion hang out. You'd look a bit daft in there."
"You're right," I said, still not having caught on. "Full of teenagers is it?"
She shook her head. "You don't get out much do you?"
We had a tour of the town, passing the old places where we'd each gone as youngsters to show to the world how grown up we were. I had not seen Middleton at night for decades. Living at Parbold, I'd been drawn to other towns for shopping and entertainment. Names had changed and some of the old haunts, the clubs and pubs, had gone to be replaced by cheap offices and dingy drop-in centres. Also the faces hanging around the doors seemed to be always so very young.
"They're just children!" I said.
"Feeling it are you?"
I smiled. "Sorry. I know it's a cliché, but inside I don't feel any older than I did at sixteen."
"But everything's more intense at that age isn't it? " she said. "Life dulls you down a bit. It's meant to be that way."
"You think so?"
"Sure. At sixteen, the right boy only has to look at a girl and she can't eat for a week - the right boy, mind. So imagine having to cope with marriage and kids and divorce,… . at sixteen?"
"You mean we couldn't cope?"
"I don't think we could handle the emotion. We'd explode,… "
I remembered the intensity of which she spoke, going home of an evening and lying down on my bed after another day of not hearing Rachel say she wanted to be with me, feeling too sad, too sorry for myself to cope with anything.
Suddenly Carol turned up the radio. "Remember this?" she said. It was ABBA: belting out Dancing Queen." I remember going to the school disco and dancing to this. We'd never heard anything like it before."
I listened to the words, the sounds, the soaring mood of the music. It seemed to open a vein and the memories flooded out. It was the very peak of my affair with Rachel. "Nineteen seventy six," I said. "There was another, later on that year: Fernando. I remember tuning in to radio Luxembourg and hearing it for the first time drifting in through the static. Scary isn't it?"
"Scary?"
"Nostalgia,… that sudden surge of feeling, the memory, the sense of an atmosphere so fresh you could almost touch it, except it was twenty five years ago and gone for ever."
"You've really got it bad. I don't think this reunion thing's such a good idea. You need to cut loose. Go to France. Put it all behind you - reinvent yourself. Find yourself a nice French girl."
"You're right. It was a bad idea."
And besides I already had what I'd come for, another lead, another signpost along the way back to Rachel and the source of all this glorious emotion.
We'd left the town by now and found the dark country lanes which ran up into the West Pennines.
"I used to go snogging up here," I said, by now completely unguarded with her.
"Back seat of a Cortina eh?"
"Front mostly. I never had the nerve to suggest the back."
"Tom, you old romantic."
We found a restaurant. It was quiet but at least the clientele were of a similar age to ourselves. So we settled in and ate French food, drank half a bottle of potent red wine and listened to Mozart being murdered by some po-faced geezer on a cello.
"So, you really don't fancy going to France, then?"
"I'm not sure. I've been over a couple of times - the office is on the outskirts of Paris. It's okay, but it's still a city and as you've probably figured out by now I'm barely street wise enough to survive in Preston, let alone Paris."
"Well, I'd love to go," she said. "Parlez vous, Francais?"
"Un Peu," I said. "Tres Peu."
She giggled. "Spoken like a native. You'd be right at home."
After we'd eaten, she pushed the cork back into the half empty bottle. "This stuff's lethal. We'd better have the rest at the flat."
So that was where I finished the evening, drunk on wine and memories of my early teens and with ABBA playing loud on her stereo. Neither of us were particularly used to copious quantities of red wine and it had loosened us up in a dangerously delightful way. We sat side by side on the sofa, close, but without actually touching while we gulped down the remains of the bottle, plus another she'd been keeping to one side for 'a special occasion'.
She'd been married for twenty years. There were no children because her husband hadn't wanted any.
"I don't blame him," I joked, then regretted it because it didn't raise much of a laugh and I began to get an idea of the tension overshadowing her marriage. A successful marriage, they say, is based on compromise, but that's nonsense because there are certain fundamental issues you simply can't compromise on, and children are one of them.
"Too late for me now," she said. "And would you believe it - he ran off with a young girl from the beauty counter at Boots and the next thing you know she's pregnant!"
"You're joking!"
"Seriously! Ooh,… Tom! I can't feel my legs."
"Me neither."
"You can't possibly drive home,… "
Now, I know what you're thinking, and I agree, it would have been very easy to fall into bed with Carol that evening. She was warm and welcoming, perhaps a little lonely and the wine had lowered both our defences, but I still felt married. Savouring the scent of a good looking woman was one thing, having sex with her was, for me at that time, quite another.
"I'll tell you what," I said after she'd brought me a couple of pillows and her spare duvet.
"What's that then?"
"If I get the job in Paris, we'll do the town over there and you can sleep on my sofa."
"You're drunk. Night-night."
"See you."
I slept a little, but the sofa was too short and the duvet seemed to wrap me in her scent all night. I was up at six thirty and tapping on her bedroom door.
"Brought you coffee? Sorry if I woke you."
"You didn't. God my head!"
"In know. Me too."
"You're dressed! What time is it?"
"Early. I've to be at work by eight and I need to call home first and change my shirt."
"And here I was thinking you wanted to snuggle in here with me."
"Don't tempt me."
Was that a come on, I wondered? It was a long time since I'd played this game, a long time since I'd snuggled up against a woman - I mean just curled into her heat and drifted off. Annie hadn't been able to tolerate anyone encroaching on her body space for long - even in bed, except for the brief moments of our marital relations, as she'd called them.
So why, just sitting there, did I feel so guilty? Why, by just looking at this woman's sweet face, did I feel I was letting people down? If not Annie, then my children. My children! They'd be waking now, filling the house with life - too soon, always too soon, and how I missed it now.
"Carol?"
"Oh,… " she moaned.
"What is it?"
"No."
"No?"
"I was going to say, I came here last night, not really knowing what I was doing. I was trying to connect with something in the past, something I didn't really expect to be there any more - I didn't think for a minute I'd have fun as well."
"It was fun, wasn't it. You're a nice bloke, Tom."
Nice bloke? Story of my life. "Thanks,… you're quite nice yourself."
"Does that mean we're on for Paris, then?"
"Paris? Oh, sure. But that may not happen and anyway it could be a year and I was hoping,… well I'm not sure what I was hoping."
She laughed and shook her head, then punched me playfully in the arm and told me to get out. "But call me," she said.
Outside, the air was cold and the sky was clear. I fired up the Midget and sat there a while. For all its years, its aged quirks and my father's derision, I liked the feel of it. In a sense it was nostalgia, like last night, filling my head with the sights and the sounds and the smells of the past, all of these things acting like triggers, releasing the thoughts and the feelings of an earlier me. None of this was futile, for sometimes only by courting the past can we measure and understand where we are now. I think that was the essence of what I was trying to do.
I glanced up at the window of her flat and was glad because she was there, looking down, her magnificent bush of hair wild and ruffled. Her face seemed sad though, a little anxious, her own reality perhaps settling back upon her, but then she brightened when she saw me looking,… and she waved.
I had gone looking for a way back into the past and found it, a tenuous lead, but enough to work with. I'd also come away having had a glimpse into the future. The pleasing sight of Carol's carelessly unguarded bosom had been enough to assure me there was little chance of my becoming a hermit, so somewhere along the way there would be another night like last night, there would be soft lights, there would be wine,… . a woman,… and a kiss.
But how much time would we have? How long before the warm duvet turned cold and I came home to find an Alistair sitting on her sofa? It was irrational of course - my mind racing on, for there was nothing to suggest any of this would ever happen, and yet it troubled me. If I was lucky, I might have one last chance at happiness with someone, but I could not see myself ever being in love. Throughout my entire life, and my one shot at marriage, it seemed I had only ever loved one person. And that was Rachel.
The Road From Langholm Avenue Page 8