I Thought I Knew You

by Penny Hancock

  For Anna D’Andrea

  Contents

  1. HOLLY

  2. JULES

  3. HOLLY

  4. JULES

  5. HOLLY

  6. JULES

  7. HOLLY

  8. JULES

  9. HOLLY

  10. JULES

  11. HOLLY

  12. JULES

  13. HOLLY

  14. JULES

  15. HOLLY

  16. JULES

  17. HOLLY

  18. JULES

  19. HOLLY

  20. JULES

  21. HOLLY

  22. JULES

  23. HOLLY

  24. JULES

  25. HOLLY

  Epilogue: HOLLY

  Acknowledgements

  Reading Group Questions

  1

  HOLLY

  He’s alone again. Head bowed. Cumbersome bag hanging from bony shoulders. Trousers flapping around clownish shoes at the end of lanky legs. He’s at that age where nothing’s in proportion. Elongated but not filled out. A curtain of straight dark hair swings across his face, hiding the angry smattering of acne on his cheeks.

  Saul finds himself a space on the green and stares at a patch of ground where the grass has been trodden bald by decades of school shoes. A girl approaches from the far side. One of Saffie’s friends, but more bookish-looking. Less confident. Go to him. Talk to him, I urge her. Please. He’s nice. He’s gentle and sweet. She gives my son a wide berth and makes a direct line to the popular crowd.

  I wish he didn’t have to go to school. I wish he didn’t have to mix in the world. Nothing about him fits.

  More gaggles of girls appear, laughing, skirts short, shiny hair bouncing, hands clutching their mobiles. Then a group of handsome almost-men. Glowing skin, sharp haircuts, perky quiffs. They gleam with good health. These groups of children have been passing my front window for the last half-hour, gathering for the bus that will carry them off to secondary school before the village falls silent again.

  ‘You’re too attached,’ Pete says, coming up behind me, surprising me. ‘You have separation anxiety.’ Pete’s a psychotherapist. Attaching labels to feelings is what he does.

  ‘I have not got separation anxiety,’ I say, my breath misting the window. ‘I’m simply a mother worrying for her son. Who still doesn’t have friends.’

  ‘Come here.’

  Pete’s arms slip round my waist. He lifts my hair, kisses me on the neck. I lean back into him.

  ‘Saul’s fine, Holly. He’s sixteen. Searching for an identity. You need to let him be. Believe me, I see enough kids with problems. Saul’s quiet, and sensitive, and he lost his father six years ago. But he’s not displaying behaviour I’d consider a reason for concern. It’s you who needs to back off a little, if I may say so.’

  I rub a circle of condensation from the glass. Saul remains alone on the green.

  ‘It’s hard. After everything he’s been through.’ I turn and kiss Pete on the cheek. ‘I need to go.’

  Money, mobile, make-up. The mantra Jules and I use to check we don’t forget anything in the morning. All ready in my bag. The pizza dough’s in the fridge, waiting to bake when I get home.

  ‘Wish I was in tonight,’ Pete says. ‘I’ll get back as soon as I can tomorrow. D’you want a lift to the station?’

  ‘I’ll walk,’ I say. ‘Thanks, Pete. It’s the wrong direction for you.’

  ‘See you tomorrow, then,’ he says, and his lips on mine send a fizz through my whole body. An unexpected bonus of my two-year-old relationship: Pete and I married soon after we met. A brisk ceremony at Cambridge Registry Office. That’s how certain we were about each other.

  Once I’m at work, I won’t think about Saul. Not until tonight when we begin the argument about homework. The nagging that masks my worry about how unhappy he seems since I moved him from his London school for a fresh start in the Fens.

  My mobile vibrates as I set off along the side of the green, head bowed against fine rain. The school bus draws up and swallows the teenagers.

  ‘Where are you?’ Jules asks.

  ‘On my way to the station. I haven’t got any tutorials until eleven, so I’m getting the eight thirty-five. It’s horrible out here. Peeing down. Pete’s taken the car.’

  ‘You should have said.’

  ‘It’s fine. Good exercise.’

  ‘You haven’t forgotten about tonight? Tess’s birthday drinks at that new gastropub in Fen Ditton. Girls’ night out.’

  ‘Oh, of course. Yes. That’s something to look forward to.’

  ‘Come round to mine first? Rowan’s away. We can have pre-drinks, then get a cab together.’

  ‘Sounds good. You OK?’

  ‘Apart from dealing with the mood swings of a thirteen-year-old,’ she says, ‘fine. You?’

  ‘Better for hearing you. We’ll talk later.’

  When she’s gone, I tuck my mobile into the pocket of my parka and pull up the hood. It will be good to get out after a day dealing with students and their stresses and their heartbreaks. I haven’t had a chance to get to know the local women, never made those school-gate friendships you form when you have primary-age kids. Saul was already fourteen when we moved here two years ago. I envisage sharing my concerns about him tonight; there’s always another mother worrying about her own child who’ll help put things in perspective.

  The fields either side of me as I leave the village are striated with puddles of water shimmering to a black fuzz of trees on the horizon. Brown, muddy fens and high, colourless clouds. It’s hard to say which seems longer, this narrow road leading beyond the level crossing to a vanishing point where the land meets the sky or the ribbons of ditch water fading to nothing where they merge with clouds. Squeeze your eyes half shut and everything blots into a watery murk.

  Soon after we moved here, I thought I’d made a terrible mistake. The land seemed a place with the life – along with the floodwaters – drained out of it. Not a tree or a flower or an animal to draw the eye. Industrial storage units built from concrete breezeblocks and corrugated iron the only features on the vast flat fields. The sky so huge you could turn in a circle and only see one continuous line of horizon. I didn’t belong here. It wasn’t my home. I knew no one but Jules, and found it hard to make inroads into the tight-knit community. I’d had to do something, though, despite the fact it meant leaving the place where Saul was born and where Archie had died. Saul was miserable at his London secondary school. And the mortgage repayments on our Hackney house were crippling us.

  ‘Move up here,’ Jules had suggested. She’d moved out of London herself four years earlier, when Saffie was going into Key Stage Two. It was Rowan’s home village. ‘There’s a really supportive community. And all this space. You’ll love it.’

  She swiped through property sites on her iPad. ‘Look at this. Two-bed terraced house with garden. In this village. For half of what you’ll get for your Hackney house. You could probably buy it outright.’

  ‘I’d feel I was betraying Archie,’ I said. ‘If we moved.’

  ‘Holly, it’s been four years. You have to let him go. And so does Saul.’

  Jules was right. In the four years since Archie died, Saul had grown from a ten-year-old primary-school child to a towering teenager. We both needed a fresh start. I was clinging on to an old plan, an old dream.

  ‘What about work?’ I’d asked Jules. ‘I’ll never find another creative writing lectureship. They’re in high demand.’

  ‘Commute, like everyone else.’

  ‘You think?’

  ‘It’s only an hour to King’s Cross. It could take you as long on a bus from Hackney. Look, no one can afford to live in London anymore. This village is deserted b
y day, but in the evenings, barbecue smoke fills the air and everyone’s popping corks and levering tops off beer bottles.’

  ‘Very poetic!’

  ‘Every night’s a party night. And there’s loads for kids to do. Rowing, tennis, riding. Much more wholesome than London. Saul will love it.’

  In the end, I put an offer on the little house Jules had spotted, got it for just under the asking price. Unheard of in the South-East. Perhaps it said something about the village. Perhaps I should have taken it as a warning.

  Saul wasn’t keen on the idea. But what teenager wants to be shifted sixty miles from his birth home to a village where he knows virtually no one? I persuaded him he’d grow to like it. The school would be an easy bus ride, unlike the two long Tube journeys he took to his London one, where, anyway, he wasn’t happy. And so two years ago, when he was fourteen, we moved into our small terraced house, just off the green. Two years. And even though I have Pete, I still feel an outsider here.

  *

  The train this morning is full of kids travelling to the private schools and colleges in Cambridge. They fill the space by the doors, laughing, showing each other their phones, talking about their latest Instagram posts and WhatsApp groups. I try to spot whether there are other loners, like Saul, but fail. The high-spirited youngsters get off at Cambridge Station and I manage to find a seat. The train passes between flat ploughed fields, flooded in places, glassy water throwing back reflections of trees turning red at the tips. Then the land begins to roll, green slopes dotted with redbrick villages, station signs – Hitchin, Stevenage, Welwyn Garden City. Within an hour we’re among the first trailing suburbs of North London. My mobile pings as we pass the Emirates Stadium. I hesitate, then check it anyway. As I feared, it’s a tweet from ‘the Stag’.

  @Hollyseymore says yes, but who’d fuck her anyway? #sex #consent #feminazi

  A troll, responding to the freshers’ workshops at my university on sexual consent. The students’ union set them up to tackle the increasing problem of ‘lad culture’ in the university. As one of the longer-standing members of staff, I’d been asked to help advise on the issues they wanted to address. The students had also discovered (thanks to Google) that I had volunteered for Rape Crisis many years ago as an ardent young student myself. In those days, I’d been unable to resist a cause or a protest, an opportunity to ‘reclaim the night’, or to argue for a ‘woman’s right to choose’.

  The workshops, however, had raised heated debate. Some students questioned whether a half-hour discussion was the best way to teach young men that the absence of a ‘no’ does not equal consent. The students who most needed to think about it, the ‘lads’, probably wouldn’t attend the discussions anyway. Others were furious we considered workshops like this necessary. They found it patronizing. I wrote a piece for one of the broadsheets suggesting better sex education at school, particularly for boys, might be more effective than non-statutory meetings for students, but that given the status quo, consent workshops were the only way of tackling sexual harassment and the escalating problem of campus rape. I had been trolled on and off ever since.

  The tweet leaves me shaken. The hatred in it. It’s just words, I tell myself. Ignore it. Which is ironic when words are my stock-in-trade.

  *

  When I emerge at King’s Cross, the rain’s stopped and London’s shining, wet pavements, glistening windows. I’m in good time, so I walk to the university, taking the streets of early Victorian terraces leading south from Euston Road, then right through an alley and past a block of 1950s council flats. This area of the city is quiet, just an old Bangladeshi man sweeping the pavement in front of his general store and a few people drinking coffee behind the steamed-up windows of one of those small independent Italian cafes that still exist away from the busier thoroughfares.

  On the other side of Woburn Place, in Gordon Square, trees cast shifting shadows on the gravel paths that wind between the now ragged flowerbeds. The shrubs are laden with bright berries, the tall grasses are turning gold.

  The surrounding townhouses have a proliferation of literary blue plaques. Christina Rossetti, Virginia Woolf, Vanessa Bell all lived here. Emmeline Pankhurst lived on the site of the Principal Hotel. I feel as if the square contains the spirits of those writers and feminist trailblazers. Archie used to tease, ‘You believe you’ll imbibe their talent by osmosis!’ He didn’t understand – how could he? – that it wasn’t as simple as that. I felt, still do, a connection with those women who loved the city the way I do.

  Our plan back then was that he and I would take it in turns – Archie would earn the money as a lawyer so I could write in the gaps when Saul was at school. (‘One day, there’ll be a blue plaque outside your office,’ he joked. ‘Holly Seymore got the idea for A Stitch in Time as she drank her latte in this very building!’) Then, when I’d finished my PhD, which consisted partly of the novel I was working on, I would return to work as a course leader, on a better salary, so he could write his book.

  Instead, abruptly widowed, I’d had to take a basic lecturer’s job, teaching undergraduates creative writing. It wasn’t quite the literary career I’d had in mind. But I still love working here, within sight of the British Museum and among the Georgian terraces, with their white stucco facades and black railings. And Archie was right: part of me did – still does – feel only good can come of working in the geographical slipstream of so much feminist thought and literary talent.

  I cross Montague Street to the forecourt of the university, unlock my office. On my laptop, I click on the file marked, ‘Novel – A Stitch in Time.’ I had some idea, and it seemed so bright and alive at the time, of writing about two women, one in this area of London – Bloomsbury – in the interwar period, one now, linked by a single object – an inkwell – the contemporary one finds in her attic. After Archie died, however, the idea deflated like a balloon. I could no longer believe in it. I’ve barely looked at it since. Fifty thousand words gone to waste. Once I was bereaved, I lost the plot. Literally. I ought to bin it.

  *

  ‘How do I get it published?’

  Jerome, my first student of the morning, has written an experimental novel that omits the letter ‘e’. He is a blue-eyed hipster with a red beard and a flesh hole in his ear. His face is full of naive optimism. I hand the work I’ve marked back to him, and we talk about whether these kinds of constraints – lipograms, made popular by the Oulipo group – paradoxically give writers more freedom to be creative. I suppress the urge to tell him to write something a little more mainstream if he wants to sell his work. He has impressive self-confidence, arguing his case when I suggest that constraints like these shouldn’t be at the expense of story. He leaves full of the self-belief that will propel him through life even if his writing doesn’t.

  Mei Lui’s a quiet, wan-looking second year whose skin I’ve always thought belies a poor diet or too many late nights. She’s written 60,000 words of a novel in which she describes a Vietnamese girl’s experiences working as an escort to pay for her degree in England. We discuss point of view and agree that the confessional tone lends itself to rewriting in the first person. As she leaves, she turns.

  ‘It is . . . semi-autobiographical,’ she says.

  ‘Ah. D’you want to talk about it?’

  She shakes her head, embarrassed, and hurries away down the corridor. I’m about to call her back when Luma, our head of department, appears.

  ‘Holly. Hanya says she’ll chair the consent workshop scheduled for next Friday but she’d like you to check what she’s prepared.’

  ‘That’s fine. She could pop in at lunchtime.’

  ‘You been getting any more tweets?’

  ‘One or two,’ I say. ‘I’m ignoring them. It’s just some guy with a chip on his shoulder.’

  ‘Nasty, though. And I’m sorry they’ve targeted you.’

  ‘Better me than one of the students.’

  ‘You think so?’

  ‘There’s something parti
cularly unpleasant about the anonymity of a Twitter troll. I’d hate to see students become victims. But I’ve a duty to help publicise their workshops. I’m not letting the Stag have his way!’

  Luma steps into my office and closes the door behind her.

  ‘I’ve just had Giovanna in. She’s that first year – the talented one. Italian? Long dark hair? She spent the tutorial in tears. Turns out her boyfriend’s threatened to dump her if she won’t sleep with him. I suggested she attend one of Hanya’s sessions. She’s afraid he’s going to leave her. Which would be a blessing IMHO. She says she loves him. That he’s a genius. He’s writing something based on an idea of the Oulipo group, but he’s made her feel her writing’s rubbish.’

  ‘Not called Jerome, is he?’

  ‘How did you know?’

  ‘One of mine. Rather too confident if you ask me.’ We exchange a smile. ‘It’s he who should attend the session, not just Giovanna, but I can guarantee that won’t happen.’

  ‘I still wonder what makes these kids take writing degrees,’ she sighs. ‘What comment by some English teacher set them down a track that probably won’t go anywhere. So many of them are too young to take the knocks on the way.’

  ‘Dreams?’ I suggest. ‘The desire to make sense of a world that makes very little sense otherwise?’

  The trouble with having lectured for so long in the same institution is we’ve seen it all before. The ones who are too young to cope, the mature men who believe they’re imbued with comedic genius, the experimental ones like Jerome who might or might not have the commitment to see it through. More often, sadly, not. Our students come with their writing but also a litany of other concerns. Almost all suffer from anxiety. Several have money worries. A few are struggling with gender identity. At times I feel treacherous that I’m earning a salary on the back of the belief that our students can and will make a living from writing, when I know how much they’re up against. And when I’ve failed to do so myself.

  *

  After a chat with Hanya about her screening for the next consent workshop, and delivering an afternoon lecture on Pillman’s ‘Lean and Mean’ theory (‘Pare your writing back until you can pare no further,’ I tell my earnest sea of young faces, wondering if I’m helping or hindering their creative flow), I walk back to King’s Cross. There’s the smell of crisp leaves, a sweeter tinge of smoking chestnuts, and the shops are filling with pumpkins. Autumn’s arrived. I pass the Friend at Hand, a pub Archie and I frequented, opposite the Horse Hospital. (Once used to stable sick horses, it’s now an arts venue.) The pub’s filling with post-work crowds; a glimpse through the doorway reveals pints on tables, candles guttering. I have a fleeting nostalgia for the days when I would have stepped inside, sat at one of those scrubbed wooden tables, drinking and chatting until late. As it is, however, I pick up balls of fresh mozzarella for Saul’s pizza and a jar of artichoke hearts from Carlo’s Italian deli, tucked away in a corner behind Marchmont Street, and walk on towards King’s Cross.