She was good on some things, Megan, like work and college gossip and sadness. When Eleanor had confided the fact of her mother’s death, she had simply crawled across the sofa and put her arms round her, not saying a word. Not even Nick had managed such a perfect response, reacting to the same news with an expression of pained compassion, but then gently changing the subject, like he was steering her away from harm. On other matters, however, such as relationships, Megan had proved less reliable. The yearning for Billy Stokes, for instance, hadn’t prevented her from having several one-night stands with fellow students, only to howl with self-recrimination afterwards. Yet when Eleanor had ventured a few confidences about Kat’s surly attitude and wildness with boys, Megan had offered the view, albeit in a tone of speculative apology, that Eleanor’s little sister sounded like a bit of a jealous slut.
‘I should go,’ Eleanor murmured, closing her eyes, enjoying the solidity of the floor under her spine too much to move. All her dates with Nick were floating through her head, a procession of details and pleasures. There had only been four kisses, five if she counted their first brief lip contact under a street lamp on the night of the film date to the Penultimate Picture Palace five weeks before. A mere brushing. Nick had pulled back so suddenly that Eleanor feared something last-minute might have put him off. Like bad breath, or the sight of her face close up, which, she knew, had manifold imperfections. Back in her room afterwards, she had scrutinised her reflection brutally in the small mirror above her washbasin, tugging at her skin, trying to see what Nick might have seen.
But then there had been the second kiss, ten days later. A proper one this time, as they strolled back to college after having a pizza. His tongue had found hers, gentle and exploratory, solicitous if such a thing were possible, Eleanor had wondered, reliving the experience again and again in her mind, comparing it cruelly to Charlie’s clumsy foraging. Nick had tasted faintly of cheese and mushroom and red wine and Eleanor had loved this too. She had fallen against him afterwards, dizzy and exhilarated, feeling like a film actress.
‘You have the nicest eyes,’ he had said gruffly. They had been in a side street near the college, half leaning against some railings. It was the most intimate thing he had ever said to her, but even as Eleanor luxuriated in it, his mood seemed to change, grow awkward. There was no more kissing, just the walk back to college, Nick keeping a pace ahead, doing his finger-clicking while casting out staccato comments about how much work he had and how he needed to get some sleep. When they reached the tangle of bikes in front of the porters’ lodge, he had said a breezy goodnight and cantered off up the steps, his long legs taking three at a time. Eleanor had trailed after him, bewildered. Catching a last glimpse as he ducked under the arched entrance to his staircase, he seemed to pause to wipe the back of his hand across his mouth. Like he was wiping away their kiss, Eleanor had thought wildly. She had slept fitfully, the pizza cheese heavy in her stomach, her heart veering between elation and the old fear of some part of her having been found repellent.
But a few days later he asked her out again. The third kiss had followed. A week later, the fourth. Each lasting longer. Each getting better. Kissing was something that could be learnt, Eleanor had realised. It made her feel sorry for girls like Kat and Megan with their promiscuity, always in a rush, questing after the next sexual experience the moment one was done. She and Nick were the opposite of being in a rush, Eleanor decided ecstatically. The slow, unhurried intimacy of the way his tongue touched hers still took her breath away. It stirred a new, animal part of her, something that felt like recognition as much as physical need, as if her body had been waiting just for him to come alive.
But then that morning had happened. She had been in the library in her usual place, pulling together her findings for her final essay, when Nick appeared in the doorway, miming an invitation to lunch. They had gone to what had become their usual café, where he had eaten at even greater speed than usual, casting pinched looks across the table, as if there were things he might say if his mouth wasn’t otherwise engaged. Eleanor had sensed something building – some declaration – and been foolish enough to feel excited. She even wondered if he was going to invite her back to his rooms there and then. Sex in the afternoon. She would need to pee first, she realised frantically, her bladder being full and the café not extending to the luxury of a loo. She had felt shy of that more than anything – confessing the need to stop in the icy toilet on his landing, the sound of her pee, the sound of the flush.
Her instincts had proved correct, but also misguided. Nick had indeed been steeling himself towards a declaration, just not the one she had expected.
‘Over?’
He had waited until they were back in the street. Eleanor was aware of her jaw hanging gormlessly open and the need to snap it shut. It had seemed important, facing this new crisis in her life, not to look gormless. She shifted her legs to a wider stance, needing physically to steady herself.
‘I am… committed elsewhere.’
Shoppers and tourists steered round them, giving them a pocket of space, as if they sensed the magnitude of the conversation.
‘Where?’ Eleanor found herself scanning the busy street, as if the person to whom he was referring might leap out and present herself. But it turned out the person wasn’t even in Oxford. She was called Tilly and was back home in Wiltshire, training to be a nursery nurse. Eleanor had managed not to gasp at this. Indeed, it gave her hope. Nick could not stay forever with someone called Tilly who was training to be a nursery nurse. It was ridiculous. Quite impossible, even if they had, as Nick explained, blurting and wretched, known each other since primary school and been going out since they were fifteen. For six years in other words. Six years. They were each other’s first and only love. While apart they wrote regularly and rang each other at prearranged times several nights a week. She kept a curl of his hair in a locket round her neck and he had a treasured picture of her face in his wallet. They were as good as engaged. He missed her like mad. She missed him so much, she often wept herself to sleep. He waggled the wallet picture at Eleanor as if it was the final proof she needed in order to accept his words.
‘Over?’ she repeated stupidly, her brain snagging on the thought that something could not be over when it had barely started. There was so much still to do. So much that she had wanted and imagined. Her future. Their future. He couldn’t just wave a photo and take it away. ‘Maybe…’ She stopped, astonished to see tears in his eyes. She had never seen a man cry. Even when her mother died, her father hadn’t cried. He had gone silent instead, ossified, as if to protect some deep unassailable part of himself.
‘I’m betraying her by seeing you,’ Nick growled, swiping at his face and rubbing his nose on the sleeve of that day’s baggy jumper. He had several: the grey cable, two blues and a bright green Fair Isle one that Eleanor had teased would be appropriate in a golf club. ‘I like you, Eleanor. I really like you. But this is wrong. Tilly and I… we have sworn… we are… we have always said…’
Watching his struggle, Eleanor experienced a sudden flooding calm. This man, whom she also liked, so very much, was trying to walk away from her and she had to find a way to stop him. And seeing him unhappy was unbearable too. It cleared her head, made her thoughts sharp.
‘But, Nick, we can be friends, surely?’ She put her hand on his arm. ‘You haven’t betrayed anybody. All you’ve done is kiss me. Four times. Five if you count when we left the PPP.’ She held his gaze, blazing a coolness she did not feel. She even smiled. ‘You’ve been amazing. The model of restraint. And I like you too. A lot. So let’s settle on being friends. Okay?’
‘Okay. Just friends. Great. Thanks, Eleanor.’ Relief gusted across his face, relaxing its handsome features. He pulled her to him and they hugged fiercely.
So this is love, Eleanor thought. This is love and it hurts.
16
2013
Subject: January
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Dear Kat,
We are now coming to England in the middle of January instead. I am telling you in the hope that you might change your mind about that cup of tea with Eleanor?
It would be fun, surely, to lay some old ghosts to rest. Who was it who said life was lived forwards but understood backwards…? Nietzsche, I think?
Look, just don’t rule it out, okay?
Nick x
Subject: Reply
From: [email protected]
Date: 24/9/13
To: [email protected]
I do rule it out.
It was Kierkegaarde.
Understood or not, the past is best left where it lies. I knew that once, but temporarily forgot it.
Now please forgive me for that by leaving me alone.
17
1992
Eleanor was the only one at the bus stop, a leaning pole on the main Broughton road, half a mile on from the vicarage turn-off. The New Year was four days old and had produced nothing but rain, churning the countryside to sludge. Eleanor stayed on the tarmac to protect her footwear – a pair of brown suede ankle boots purchased with Vincent’s Christmas cheque – hunching her shoulders inside her thin coat against the cold. The skies were leaden but sealed and smooth in a way that she hoped would last all day. Her hair, freshly washed, had looked nice enough in the mirror but could still turn into a black frizzy blanket at the first hint of drizzle. It was Pre-Raphaelite hair, Nick had remarked once, not in any overtly romantic way, just firing the comment across the table during one of their many shared meals the previous term, as a statement of fact.
A brief letter had arrived from him two days after Christmas, suggesting a date for a pub lunch and offering to pick her up from the vicarage if she gave instructions. Eleanor had written back at once to say she would take the bus and meet him at the railway station instead, because it was easier to find. Nick’s plans centred round an early January visit to a godfather who lived in Lewes. He was to spend one night there, he explained, and would have time to make a detour to visit her on the way back home to Salisbury the following day. He had added that he would be driving a black Volkswagen, a loved ancient family car with an engine so raucous she was likely to hear it long before she saw it. At the bottom of the letter there had been a small cross next to his name, the sight of which had caused a stab of hope and longing to shoot up through Eleanor’s groin and into her heart.
She had taken the letter upstairs to devour again, many times, in the privacy of her bedroom, picking the nuances out of it like meat scraps off a bone. The kiss meant there was still genuine hope, she decided, quite apart from the wonderful fact that he wanted to see her. Saying their farewells at the end of term, Nick had muttered something about getting together in the vac, but Eleanor hadn’t dared believe him. Even the gentle humour about the car had delighted her; of course Nick Wharton would drive a croaky old car. He was that sort of man – loyal to cars as he was to people – not flash. Not superficial. Which was why, for the time being, he was staying true to the girl called Tilly. A lesser person would never have shown such restraint, such integrity. In her reply, Eleanor had carefully signed off with a cross beside her own name, a bit bigger than Nick’s, but not too outrageously so. Before sealing the letter, she kissed it for real. A dozen times. Invisible kisses. Who was to say they didn’t have equal power?
With the lunch date to look forward to, the post-Christmas drear of the vicarage had dissolved round her like mist in sunshine. She stopped caring that her father’s terse enquiries about university life rarely incorporated the time to hear her answers, or that Kat, having initially greeted her like a dog starved of affection – yelping, kissing, jumping round her in the drive – had then, with almost comical speed, retreated back into her state of studied distracted indifference, as if her big sister was some dimly recalled, irksome acquaintance from a previous existence.
The prospect of seeing Nick burned inside her like a secret light. The days towards the date dragged, but in a way, Eleanor relished the anticipation. Nothing got her down during the course of them: not the murky blue walls of her bedroom, now sporting black cobwebs of mildew across the ceiling corners; not the creak of the floorboards in the small hours as Vincent did his customary pacing, muttering his lonely prayers; not even the rain-leaks landing in the new cluster of metal buckets outside her and Kat’s bathroom, loud enough to wake her every time the rain started. Love was armour against the world, that was the discovery.
Eleanor swung from the bus-stop pole to celebrate the fact, tipping her face to the stony sky. No wonder people died for it. No wonder doughty, plain little Jane Eyre had stumbled back across the wild, unforgiving moors for another chance at it with her beloved, blinded Rochester. Love was the gravity pull of one human being to another, as irrefutable as physics.
But it was one thing to read of a great truth and even more thrilling to experience it. Eleanor pirouetted out into the road. She was meeting Nick Wharton for lunch. She was meeting Nick Wharton for lunch. He could talk gibberish and she wouldn’t mind. Indeed, it would unman her, just as she had been unmanned when he had confessed, near weeping, to the existence of Tilly. She skipped another circle round the road, beating her arms to keep warm, chuckling at her own silliness and excitement.
A horn blasted and Eleanor hopped onto the safety of the boggy verge, her heart pumping. A sports car tore past, spattering her thin coat and adding to the mud now gluing itself to the edges of her precious suede boots. Eleanor stared down at the mess and then laughed loudly, scaring off a magpie which had landed to peck at a crushed snail in the middle of the road.
Her confidence didn’t falter until she actually saw the little black Beetle, parked neatly in the grid of white lines outside the station entrance. Having virtually run all the way from the bus stop, Eleanor came to a halt, the joints of her knees suddenly feeling too loose to rely on. But then the driver’s door swung open and Nick emerged, in stone-washed jeans and a dark blue duffel coat, his hair longer and thicker, his face pale but smiling. He came to greet her, kissing her lightly – easily – on the cheek, smelling of the stuff he liked to use that she didn’t know the name of.
‘How was the godfather?’
‘Great. Plied me with whisky. Told me funny stories.’ Nick held the passenger door open for her before settling himself back behind the wheel. ‘He’s got this brilliant dog, too – Dougal, an Irish wolfhound – we took it on a couple of long walks along the coast, one yesterday and another this morning… bloody early. He’s ex-army, unbelievably hearty. I’ve been up for hours. I’m starving. Have you thought where to go? I’m afraid I don’t know these parts at all. Got lost several times getting here. Hope you had a good Christmas, by the way.’
He was nervous, Eleanor realised, liking him all the more on account of it. ‘If you turn left out of the station, there’s a pub called The Green Man a couple of miles away which does decent food.’ She tried to sound casual, as if the option had occurred to her on the spot rather than being agonised over for days. She had even consulted Kat on the subject, braving the jeering glint in her sister’s eye both at the revelation of the lunch and so overt an acknowledgement of her superior local knowledge. ‘Wow. I see what you mean about the noise,’ Eleanor remarked as they set off, having to raise her voice over the throaty racket of the Volkswagen.
‘Careful. No insults.’ Nick patted the dashboard protectively. ‘She’s called Harriet and she’s very temperamental. Responds only to compliments. She once belonged to my Mum but is now for me and my sister to use when we’re home.’
‘In Salisbury.’
‘Yes, sunny Salisbury.’
‘And what’s your sister do?’ She wasn’t sure he had mentioned a sister before.
‘Medicine – what else?’ He pulled a face. ‘She’s six years older than me and much more committed. Went to Cambridge, then Tommy’s. Wants to get t
o the top, and I can tell you she will do just that. Neurology is her thing, which pleases the old man, of course.’
‘Shouldn’t that have taken the pressure off you then?’ ventured Eleanor. ‘About being a medic, I mean?’
Nick laughed with the trace of bitterness that always seemed to edge into any discussion about his chosen career, no matter whom it was with. ‘You do not know my dad. And anyway, I am going to be a good doctor, remember – we agreed.’
‘Yes, we agreed,’ Eleanor murmured, happy not only at his easy recall of their conversation the previous term but at the word ‘we’ tripping so effortlessly off his tongue. ‘Anyway,’ she rushed on breathlessly, wanting to say something she had been saving up. ‘Who says you have to be one thing? I mean, Keats was also a doctor, wasn’t he?’ This was a fact gleaned from her recent holiday reading, preparation for the following term’s studies. ‘He wrote in one of his letters that a poet was a physician for the soul… or something like that…’ She let the sentence hang, having forgotten to whom the letter had been written and why.
Nick was looking doubtful. ‘I don’t really know any Keats. Or much poetry for that matter. Apart from T. S. Eliot, I don’t mind him.’
‘Right… no, of course… I only meant… that is, I only mentioned it as an example of someone being medical and literary. Like you.’ Eleanor glared at the brown fields sliding past the window, cursing her ineptitude, but Nick was smiling and nodding.
‘Oh, I see. Well, thanks very much in that case. I shall bear it in mind. And, by the way, for what my opinion’s worth, you are a seriously bright girl and should never let any of those pompous idiots at Oxford allow you to think otherwise.’
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