From The Moment I Saw Him ....

by MacDonald, Catherine

  “It is.”

  A tear escaped, and I brushed it away.

  “I’d been looking forward so much to seeing him, and now it’s going so fast,” I explained.

  “Well, perhaps you can visit him in New York before too long.”

  I don’t think Andrew knew what to say by way of consolation. Rosine reappeared, and I gave the baby back to her and went to find my absent boyfriend.

  Things didn’t improve much afterwards. There was a constant press of people wanting to see the returned traveller and hear about life in America; I felt it was hard to get his attention with everything else that was going on. We spent the nights together, and his lovemaking was as enthusiastic as ever, but I was very apprehensive about the long separation which I could see looming before us. He seemed reluctant to commit himself to definite plans for future visits, and I didn’t know why.

  Then, all too soon, it was Nick’s last day. Mrs DeLisle asked me politely if I wanted to accompany them to the airport after lunch, but I declined once again, fearing my inability to cope with the stress of saying goodbye.

  Nick asked me to go for a walk with him in the morning. It was a bright, crisp day, frost streaked the trees and pavements, and there was still a Christmassy feeling in the air. However, neither of us felt like any celebration. We walked slowly, arms entwined. I was very low due to our imminent parting.

  Nick stopped when we reached the bridge over the river. After recent rains, it was in spate, and dark, chilly waters swirled beneath the arches. He dropped my arm, and turned towards me with a serious face.

  “Eithne - we must have a little talk,” he said.

  My heart plummeted. I trembled where I stood, and he reached for my hand.

  “I’ve been thinking. It’s not fair of me to keep you waiting around like this.”

  His tone was gentle, and I read real concern in his brilliant, dark eyes.

  “The way things are, I can’t see me coming back to the UK for some considerable time - maybe never. I thought we could keep things going between us, but it’s getting to be too difficult. We’re leading separate lives now, I think the time has come to accept that we need to give one another the freedom to live those lives fully.”

  “In other words - you don’t want to be in a relationship with me any more,” I said quietly, as his words sank in.

  “I don’t think a relationship is possible in the circumstances. You know I care about you, but I don’t want you to waste your time waiting for me if - if ....”

  “If you don’t come back.”

  I finished the sentence for him.

  “Something like that.”

  He looked away from me, biting his lip. “This is hard for me, too. God knows, we may still end up together at some future time, but right now - I need not to have to worry about you.”

  His words sounded dully in my ears. I felt winded, wounded, but managed to keep my self-possession. In some ways, I recognised that none of this was a surprise. I had always been afraid it would come to this.

  “Well then Nick - have your freedom.”

  I stared at him, trying to ignore a voice which told me “this is the last time....”

  “If that’s what you want - okay. It’s over. Good luck for the future.”

  I turned to walk away, hoping he would not notice I was trembling all over. He caught at my arm.

  “Darling, don’t look at me like that. It’s not so much what I want, as what has to be in the circumstances. I just can’t see any other way.....”

  He folded his arms round me, and I sobbed into his chest. We stood like that for ages, until I surfaced, scrabbling for a tissue. My only consolation was that I understood it was hard for him too. This time, it wasn’t a boy wanting his freedom, but a young man taking a decision which might be the right one for both of us. It still hurt appallingly.

  “So this is how it ends - on a bridge, in winter, both of us in tears,” I said - I had seen him wiping his face surreptitiously. He tried to smile.

  “That’s a great line. I may just borrow it.”

  Then he glanced at his watch.

  “I’m terribly sorry, Eithne, but we’re going to have to get back. My plane .....“

  “Yes, I know.... the airport...”

  We walked back to his house in silence. There was nothing left to say. My legs felt heavy and unstable; I wondered how I was going to get home, feeling the way I did. But my father was waiting there when we arrived at the house.

  “I asked mum to ring him, I thought you’d need him to pick you up,” Nick murmured in my ear.

  We stood in the driveway, my father and the DeLisles in awkward conversation, Nick and I both with falsely bright faces. After a pause, I said,

  “Well - goodbye, Nick. Have a safe journey.”

  I leaned forward and kissed his cheek, then turned away to get in the car. He opened his mouth to speak, but nothing came out, and he stood head down, biting his lip.

  The assembled parents looked surprised. My father shook Nick’s hand.

  “‘Bye, Nick, work hard,” he said.

  He got in, and we drove away. I wanted to look back, but it was too difficult. I felt stunned, crushed by the prospect of having to begin my emotional life all over again, when my heart was still so full of love for Nick. Was this really the end for us?

  It was going to be a terrible New Year.

  My father drove in silence for a while, then he looked at my face, and sighed.

  “Why must that bloody boy always make you cry?” he asked despairingly.

  Chapter 17

  Now the blow had come, I tried not to be felled by it. My friends bore with my unhappiness for a while, but then they started to be tougher with me. It was what I needed.

  “Fine - we all knew that it wasn’t going to work,” exclaimed Jo. “Now you have to put it behind you and find someone else. Nick isn’t the only fish in the sea.”

  Euan and Steve were bracing in their approach.

  “It’s getting tedious, seeing you moping about with a face like a wet weekend,” said Euan one day in the pub. “You don’t suppose Nick’s sobbing all over New York, do you? We’ve all been very sorry for you, but you have to move on. The place is full of men who’d like to bring a smile to your face, so get out there and talk to them.”

  I did try. I went on a few dates, and found I was occasionally able to enjoy myself, but it was Oxford all over again - I wasn’t ready for much in the physical way of things.

  However, at the end of February, I got together with one of the other trainees, and we started to see each other on a regular basis. Mike was a brash Essex boy, despite his Cambridge education. He took nothing seriously, and he had the wonderful ability to make me laugh, which did me good. He was also more streetwise and able to help me deal with little problems which sometimes arose at work owing to my lack of experience and sheltered background. I didn’t think of him as a future life partner, but he was a welcome distraction, and I began to cheer up and get my head and my life back together. Part of me hoped that one day, the phone would ring and it would be Nick, saying that he had made a mistake, but I think I knew deep down that wasn’t going to happen.

  One afternoon in early March, I was trying to finish a particularly complicated set of minutes, when my phone buzzed with an internal call. It was Euan.

  “Eithne? Hi doll, can you pop up to our office for a wee minute?”

  He sounded distracted.

  “Is it urgent? I’m in the middle of something.”

  “Umm - I think you need to talk to us,” he said.

  Perhaps there was a problem with the layouts for the client meeting on Monday. Sighing, I put down my pen and headed upstairs to the Creative Floor. Euan and Steve both looked up as I entered their small, cluttered office, their faces were guarded and concerned. Steve got up and shut the door after me.

  “My God, what’s the matter?”

  I was alarmed by their unusual behaviour.

  Euan waved
a magazine at me. I realised it was the March edition of Sphere.

  “Sit down, hon. You need to read this,” he said.

  He handed me the magazine. It was open at a page headed “The Break Up”, and I saw Nick’s by-line. Then my mouth dropped open.

  He had written an article about our relationship, from its boy/girl beginnings at school until our Christmas parting. It was detailed and intimate and extremely personal.

  “Oh no!”

  I scanned the pages, with a mounting sense of horror. I was never mentioned by name, and the article was delicately written, but I was aghast at the very public revelation of something so private, even about the first time we had slept together. The article finished by describing the writer’s sorrow at realising the impossibility of continuing the relationship, and there was some philosophical stuff of a “too much too young, heart versus head, if only....” nature at the end.

  To say I was stunned was putting it mildly.

  “How could he?”

  My face was crimson with mortification. “What on earth possessed him?”

  Euan hung over me anxiously.

  “I know it’s awful for you, but he’s written it beautifully - and if anyone comes across as the baddie, it’s him. No one will know it’s about you,” he said.

  “What? Of course they will. Anyone who was at Oxford with him or who knew him in Beresford will know it’s me once they see who the author is. It’s unforgivable. Can I sue him or something?”

  “I don’t think so hon, it doesn’t say anything bad about you and there’s no name.”

  I re-read the last lines, all about him taking off into the night sky in London with a sense of loss in his heart, and was seized with fury. He had even used my words about ending things on a bridge, in winter, in tears.

  What about my sense of loss and grief?

  “I’d like to tell him what I think of him,” I hissed, throwing the magazine on the floor with a thud.

  “Well, why don’t you?”

  Steve retrieved the mag and turned to the listings on the front pages. Whistling under his breath he began to dial.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Calling Sphere. He probably won’t be there, but it’s mid-morning in New York, he might be in the office.”

  “You’re ringing America from here?” I asked stupidly.

  “Well, we do have an American associate agency, I could be calling them. No one will mind, don’t worry about it,” he said.

  I did not think for a moment that Nick would be there. I took deep breaths, and tried to collect my thoughts as Steve talked to someone on the other end of the line, and there was a long pause. To my surprise, I heard Steve say “Nick? Is that Nick DeLisle? I have a call for you from England,” and he handed me the receiver.

  I grabbed it from him.

  “Nick? It’s Eithne.”

  “Eithne?”

  His voice shot up in surprise, he sounded very far away. “My God, what’s happened, is anything wrong?”

  “I’ve just read your article in the March Sphere,” I said icily.

  “Oh God,” he said again. “I’m so sorry, perhaps I should have warned you, but I wasn’t sure if you’d see it, I didn’t think-”

  “No - you never do, do you Nick?”

  I was beside myself with rage.

  “How could you? How could you spell everything out like that for the whole world to read? Don’t you have any concept of privacy? You’ve made a real fool of me this time.”

  “I haven’t.”

  Now he sounded annoyed as well. “There’s nothing in the article to identify you.”

  “No, not by name, but anyone who knew you at Beresford or Oxford won’t have to work very hard to realise who the other person is. I feel utterly exposed. I can never, never forgive you!” I spat out.

  I heard Euan whisper “Attagirl.”

  There was silence down the line. I was almost panting with shame and vexation.

  “Eithne.... I wrote it on the plane coming back, I was very upset and I needed to put it into words.....” His voice tailed off.

  “You were upset? It was your decision to end things,” I retorted.

  “I know - and I still think it was the right one. But it doesn’t mean we won’t see each other in some future -”

  “Oh yes, it does. If you think I want anything more to do with you, Nick, you are very wrong. This time, you’ve blown it!” I shouted.

  There was another long silence. I was too furious even to cry. With a huge effort, I brought myself back under control.

  “You can just take your journalism and your bloody Sphere and fuck off - I never want to see you or talk to you ever again.”

  The receiver banged down, and I collapsed on to Euan’s sympathetic shoulder. I felt utterly drained.

  Later on, they took me off to the pub in the hope that a few drinks would cheer me up. Euan kept trying to look for the positives.

  “He must have loved you, Eithne, that’s apparent in every line,” he said. “It’s a good piece of writing, and you know how critical I am.”

  “Well if he felt so much, why did he behave the way he has done?”

  No one could offer me an explanation.

  “At least he’s done you one favour, Eithne” said sensible Steve. “As you say, he’s blown it now - you won’t want to wait in case he comes back.”

  “Yes, he’s freed you from that,” agreed Euan.

  It was an uncomfortable time for me over the next few weeks. My parents back in Beresford were mortified by the revelations, which caused more than a few raised eyebrows once people got to hear about the article. Luckily, not many other people in the agency had cause to read Sphere, or make the connection between us, but I received a few sympathetic calls and letters from old friends who had seen the piece. One of them was from Peter Leigh, Nick’s school friend. I had not heard anything from him for ages, and I wondered how he had obtained my address.

  “Don’t be too angry with Nick. I can understand that you might be upset about this, but it came from the heart,” he wrote, somewhat to my surprise. “You can take comfort from that. However, I do hope you can put your feelings for him aside now.”

  I hid a copy of the magazine in a drawer in my bedroom, and pretty soon, I knew every word of the article by heart. When viewed dispassionately, it was a very tender piece, although I regretted the personal nature of its content. I wondered why Nick had never been able to communicate his feelings to me when he could go into print with them without apparent difficulty.

  Anyway, as Steve had predicted, it had one positive result. I stopped believing that Nick and I might have any sort of future together, and made up my mind to look for love and happiness elsewhere.

  If I wasn’t exactly happy that spring, I worked hard at not being unhappy. A lot of my attention at work was focussed on the launch of “Brekkie Brownies”, a new cereal aimed at children. If it test marketed successfully in the south of England, it would be launched on a national basis, which meant potentially good money for Marsham and Hunter.

  I continued to see Mike, my fellow trainee. He was excellent company, and we were part of a small group who spent time together socially as well as at work. For the first time in ages, my weekends were almost as busy as my weekdays. London life began to take on a more positive colouring, and I found myself appreciating the stimulating environment of the city.

  I was fond of Mike, but I did not love him. Eventually, I gave in and went to bed with him, because it was easier to do so than keep finding excuses not to, and I wanted him to be happy, and also because Jo had a theory that if I slept with another man, it would help to break the spell that Nick had apparently cast over me.

  It was… okay. I did not feel I was being in any way traitorous to Nick, I was quite sure he was sleeping his way round North America. But physically, Mike and I did not seem to be in tune, and I didn’t get much pleasure from it.

  I was intensely irritated to discover in the
April edition of Sphere (I could not prevent myself from reading it avidly) that Nick’s article had generated a lot of reader response. There was even a small feature about him, where he answered questions about himself.

  “I cannot say any more about my girlfriend - she was not very pleased to discover I had written about our love affair,” he wrote, in answer to one correspondent. “But I know she has a new life in London, and I hope with all my heart that she is happy.”

  “He certainly is a looker,” Euan exclaimed, studying the photo which accompanied the feature. “And he can write. Shame he’s such a bastard.”

  My sentiments exactly.

  The months rolled by. “Brekkie Brownies” did well, and a further test market was scheduled for the autumn. I got to the stage where I could see a slim, dark man in the street without flinching, and in the summer, a group of us went to Italy on holiday, where I lapped up the sun together with some culture and hoped I was becoming cured of my obsession with Nick DeLisle. At work, I began to feel an old hand, and was delighted to be given more responsibility and a new account when I returned from Italy.

  When Christmas came, I wondered whether Nick would be back in Beresford again, and if so, whether I would see him. However, my parents had thoughtfully arranged for us to spend Christmas in Portsmouth with some old friends, so I was spared the possibility of a meeting, accidental or otherwise. I was secretly disappointed, but realised it was probably for the best. I had made progress in evicting him from my heart; it would be unwise to risk undoing the efforts of the previous year by encountering him again.

  The December edition of Sphere announced that Nick’s article on “The Break Up” had won some American prize for journalism. I ground my teeth, and hoped that was the last I’d have to hear about it.

  After Christmas, I began to feel unsettled. Euan and Steve were headhunted, and left to join a rival agency. I was very put out by this, as I had come to depend on their support and affection when I needed it.

  “We’ll still keep in touch, darling,” Euan told me at their leaving drinks party. “Anyway, you’re a big girl now, I think you’ll be able to cope without us.”