The girls would like to do some dancing, and had started choosing disco records on the jukebox, as if to give those boys the hint. When they didn’t take it the girls would start to dance with each other anyway. Then, having drunk enough to take the edge off their inhibitions, the boys too would do some rhythmical shuffling about on the floor, making the minimal movements compatible with not losing the beat or their cool. The appropriate way to manage this was to be in the vicinity of a girl, so they would sort of pair off in such a fashion as not to let it be allowed to mean a thing.
That evening, though, the day before Christmas Eve, a little more drink in him than would seem for the best, he found himself doing the jerk, as it were, in her vicinity. It wasn’t entirely an accident, of course. She was the one he had always felt himself most inclined towards. She was small-featured and pretty; she was shy, with cheerfully modest, unselfconfident laughter … She could dance well too, so much more at ease in her movements than she seemed when sitting in the midst of their talk, to which she would rarely contribute.
The dance music came to an end and another song started, a little slower. He had stopped dancing; she was there in front of him. But he was in a dither about whether to go on or sit down. And so, it seemed, was she. They looked into each other’s faces as if to get some guidance as to what should happen next. That was when it happened, unplanned, unexpected, unexplained. They both moved towards each other and, the music being slower, both reached out their arms; but instead of doing some more smoochy dancing they took hold of each other and started to kiss – not a brief kiss, but a long passionate one, holding each other firmly in their arms. And it had that feeling of immense relief when something finally gets expressed, as if something that everyone knows has finally been said. Yet, at the same time, they were both taken wholly by surprise at what had happened, and so, as was clear when they stopped, were the friends of both sexes round about them.
That kiss had been such a definitive statement, like one of intent that had not been intended. When they stopped and looked into each other’s faces once again, it was as if they would now have to do that much harder thing. They would have to invent a way of being together, of talking to each other like a couple, to turn their evidently mutual attraction into voices sounding together, paying the peculiar attention to each other that boy- and girlfriends do. She had left a half-finished drink on one of the tables, so took him by the hand and led them back to where she’d been sitting with her friends …
Over the next six months or so, they would meet on their own or together with the others. Sunday afternoons would be spent in the room built out above her parents’ garage, putting the records on, speculating a bit about others’ intrigues, snuggling up on the sofa together. And just as in the comedies everyone’s seen, her mother would of course come in and find them rapidly disentangling themselves. They certainly saw a few romantic films together, ones she and her best friend had invited him along to, and, however little he wanted to see them, he’d gone to be with her and then found himself caught up in the tearful movies too.
Yet despite his aching affection for her, the warmth of her attraction, he still couldn’t help feeling guilty about those afternoons and evenings in the music room above their garage. He had wanted to touch and kiss every part of her, and tried his best to do just that. Being a teenage boy, and looking back on it, all he could sense was the years of frustration, the shame of declarations made to entirely uninterested girls, the embarrassments of wanting too much, too much or sometimes too little. The terrible silences walking out with girls you fancied, through cemeteries and down canal-bank walks, the sudden and wholly unexplained breakings off or harsh words said, they had all been so acutely painful. But the thought of how he had hurt other people was worse, and she was one of the ones he had hurt.
But most of all, eyes half-focused now on the rows of second-hand books, his mind went back to one strange day towards that summer’s end, the summer he worked as a night watchman in a dressmakers’ mannequin factory up on the estate … He would walk back from the lodge at its gates, down the empty dawn boulevard home, then tumble into bed for a night’s sleep in the daylight. It was a strange kind of half-life. He would wake in the late afternoon and have breakfast, watch the early evening news, get his sandwiches and reading matter ready, packing them into his faded canvas army surplus gas-mask bag, then head back up the road for another long nightshift.
But that day in late August all those years ago the gang had phoned after he’d only been asleep for two or three hours. He staggered downstairs at the sound of mother calling, picked up the great black Bakelite receiver, and listened to the voice at the end of the line. It came to him out of an interrupted dream. His friends were driving down the coast to their nearby seaside resort and would he like to come along too? He wondered had she suggested it? Yes, she was coming with some of her friends, and, despite the difficulty meeting as things stood, since they still were sort of together, maybe she had wanted him along. There was just enough time for him to throw on some clothes and shave before there they were, turning up at the door with a parent’s borrowed car to pick him up and go.
Thrown together by the centrifugal force of the swing-boat’s flying cars on that chilly summer’s day, they both took advantage of the fairground attraction’s usual excuses for clinging on to each other, clinging with all their might. And it came back to him there, as he picked out a green murder mystery, scanned the first few sentences and replaced it on the shelf, that this had been their moment of nearest intimacy, of their being wedged together, flying in a spaceship through the onshore breeze, nearer than ever they’d been on that sofa above the garage, with the distances reduced to a dream-like nothing in his sleep-deprived state, with his arm around her shoulder in all the exhilaration of that movement through the air, even though the forces were gathering already, the forces that would soon prise them apart.
Then there she was, suddenly, as if formed out of scraps in the crowd. There she was by the exit where he waited, another stranger but for the look of recognition, and her coming straight towards him with a smile on her much changed face. Time had, of course, wrought its changes on them both. They were more rounded than in youth, more firmly defined, whether from illness, parenthood, or the world of work. Yet there were her small feet and hands, her carefully picked-out clothes, and that certain recognition in the warmth of eyes and lips. And he was leaning forward to give her a peck on each cheek, European-fashion – not something he’d have dreamt of when they were young together.
A Friday it was, at the end of another working week, the bars around the station concourse filling up with people who were winding down and fuelling up. This wasn’t something he could do any more, time and illness leaving him with a far too fragile constitution for the exertions that those round them seemed intent on as they entered one of those vast drinking barns, the bare floorboards and tables constellated with ring-stains of glasses. They had found themselves an unoccupied table after buying a drink at the bar.
When he’d tried to get close to her, all those years before, she was very svelte, with a childlike simplicity of look, but an edge of perceptiveness about what was going on around her that could easily be missed in her modest, calm demeanour. They had both put on weight, his explanation being a changed metabolism and his sedentary trade, hers the having children, and an illness that had left her bedridden for some months, after which she’d not been able to recover her previous shape. Her face too had filled out, but it was soft still and largely unlined, entirely free of those marks of weakness and woe that can scour with the burden of the years.
They filled in their accounts of what had brought them by such circuitous routes to be living in the same town, after all the years of their separate wanderings. Her first marriage had failed, her second husband a victim of cancer, but now she was with the kindest man, had been with him for decades. It was with him that she had had her children. He, on the other hand, he had never settled, had
lived abroad for many years, had sacrificed his life to the career. No, he had never married.
She told him how she’d come to be working for an environmental agency simply because they were short-handed one week and, after helping them out, they had asked her to stay on. She explained this with the unembarrassed incredulity that anyone could ever find anything of value in her. No, not fishing for compliments, she didn’t seem to have a low opinion of herself, in the sense that her modesty didn’t seem a form of self-humiliation. Of course, he said how they wouldn’t have kept her on if they hadn’t seen her value to the operation; but she clearly didn’t need any reassurance either.
Then there were her children’s educations, and her other half’s problems in the current labour market. They skated over mortgages, shared fears of negative equity – the usual topics, in other words. She was expecting to sell their house when the time came to downsize, and to pay off their debts into the bargain. They had, she admitted, been living a little beyond their means.
‘But it’s only money,’ she said with a smile.
She had placed her mobile on the table beside her almost empty glass. It began to make one of those curious buzzing noises. This was her daughter phoning about some arrangements or other. So he tuned out of what she was saying into the mobile, letting the undifferentiated hubbub of the drinkers around them wash over his dreaming head.
‘They don’t seem to have any mystery in their lives,’ she said, putting the mobile back beside her glass.
‘I mean,’ she continued after he’d asked, ‘the way they put up what they’re feeling so directly on those social network sites … They don’t seem to allow even the slightest shred of mystery in their relationships any more. Everything’s so up front and out in the open. I mean the way people talk about their most intimate experiences walking through a shopping mall or in a crowded carriage … It’s not the privacy violated,’ she said, ‘but the loss of all the mystery in what others think or feel … which, I suppose,’ she continued, ‘is a kind of fear of others … but a good fear, like a kind of admiration,’ she said, and he couldn’t help agreeing, looking around at the people chatting, ones texting, calling orders, phoning others who would meet up with them later …
‘So do you think we had more, back then?’ he asked her.
‘I never knew what anyone was thinking,’ she said, ‘and especially you.’
He gave her what he hoped was a modestly incredulous look.
‘I mean, you were so musical and sensitive,’ she said. ‘I always felt in awe of you.’
‘Really,’ he said, ‘is that really what you thought?’
‘We all did.’ That’s what she said.
‘Well, I never knew,’ he said, and wondered what it meant.
Neither said anything more for a moment, but looked around that noisy bar again. And he couldn’t help noticing that they seemed the oldest people in the place. He was letting her words sink in, turning his head to catch a glimpse of the side of her face, she instantly meeting his eyes. For it seemed that not only did he not need to be forgiven, it seemed he had never done her any harm at all.
Astonishment, gratitude, relief appeared; and there was well-being in the autumn leaves as they walked out in the cooler air and parted at the station, she to catch her bus and he to take the canal-bank walk once more. She had left him with her parting embrace, her warmly unequivocal arms, her arms around him again after many, after so many years.
But as he passed by the weeping willow trees, their pendant fronds pointing back up at him from the sluggish, filmed water beyond that black wrought-iron bridge, he realized he’d not said how he felt about her. Now that he was walking back to the other part of town, his side of the cemetery, the amber lights beside the canal glowing in the multiple reflections, the dark, the surviving factory buildings, he couldn’t help reflecting on the changes all around. He had always liked this part of town, with its mossy lock gates and old gasometer, the waterside pubs, ducks, swans, and mooring posts. Anything like that could remind him of his childhood, his teenage entanglements, and, among them, the interrupted year that they had shared. And to think she hadn’t even needed to forgive him! No, he’d not been able to tell her how grateful he was; and she would have surely not envisaged him being so after all those years.
That corner of a person he had never been, the one who felt guilty about how he’d treated her, the one he had lived with all this time, she had abolished it with her generous words. It was like being given back a bit of your integrity, something he had lost, or had been taken from him, somewhere down the way. That was what other people could do; they could restore, could repair some things of you. It was what she had done, even if unawares.
Nor had it felt as if they were responding to each other as they had back then. How could they have done, two middle-aged people with their different lives, their different sets of fates? That was quite impossible. They were not the same as they had been, not the young people in the entrance to adulthood, experimenting with what might be felt and done. Of course they couldn’t be as they had been. Even a modicum of respect for the experiences each had undergone, and recognition of the relationships that these had given rise to, would have made them accept each other’s weight in the world. It was what they had acknowledged in effect as they talked and sipped their drinks for an hour or so of warmth on that unusually warm, that Indian summer’s day.
And she had been quite different, had not been at all how he remembered or imagined her. Oh but then she’d made him feel quite different too – and in that she was also still the same.
Two Rivers Press has been publishing in and about Reading since 1994. Founded by the artist Peter Hay (1951–2003), the press continues to delight readers, local and further afield, with its varied list of individually designed, thought-provoking books.
Foreigners, Drunks and Babies Page 17