by A. N. Wilson
The phrase ‘coming out’ implied that one had ever been ‘in’. Nellie looked back on her schooldays and her crush on Miss Firebrace. That had been a love which was deep, painful, intense, and it had lasted two years. After this, however, there had been no recurrence of a word beginning with an L – until Doug. And the word which she dreaded, as she knew now, was not Lesbian, but Love. Maybe if Doug had not been such a Pill, the feeling of being ‘in love’ with him would have lasted? And she would have ‘made a go of it’ if he and she had made babies . . . It was too late to ask questions such as that. Whatever it was she had felt for her husband had evaporated, and changed to contempt.
Perhaps, though, and this was what she only confronted after her final encounter with him at the funeral (and it was a final encounter – she never set eyes on him again in her life), perhaps she had not been equipped to love anyone at that point. And that was because she had been a divided nature who did not love herself?
Ingrid wasn’t little, she was almost as tall as Nellie, but Nellie found herself patronizingly saying, inside her head, that ‘clever little Ingrid’ had identified the divided self. But it was that dangerous L. stuff which enabled her to see this. Nellie felt scorched by Ingrid’s Love. After she had walked, by the light of dawn, to Harrow and shoved the note through the door of Ingrid and her mum’s house – Saying goodbye to you will be the hardest thing I do this week – she realized that she had written a love letter – the first love letter she had ever written in her life. Torrents of fear possessed her. Control, control, that was what had shaped her life hitherto, and Ingrid of the long hair, Ingrid Ashe of the surprisingly fleshy face but nice smile, was going to remove that control and replace it with emotional anarchy. Without control, how could Nellie live? It was control which had won her the Gaisford Greek Verse Prize, control which she found in the confines of the Prayer Book, and the novels of Jane Austen, and the wisdom of Dr Johnson and the music of Four Quartets. Take but degree away, untune that string,/And, hark, what discord follows . . . People said they wanted love, but did they want a consuming fire? Didn’t they really just want companionship? She did not like the phrase ‘fuck buddy’, it was not her style, but were not young people who sought such a companion perfectly sensible? Were not most married couples fuck buddies? And would you not rather have a nice friendly fuck buddy than be locked in the madness of Tristan and Isolde, Ferdinand and Isabella? And it was the madness of True Love which Ingrid held out. What made the consuming fire so dangerous was that she felt the same about the Girl.
She had to run away from that. If she ran, surely, she would ‘get over it’? If she could just ‘knock it on the head’? She tried to humiliate the glorious, swirling sensation which it made in her, simply to think of Ingrid Ashe, by slapping it down with commonplace clichés. As soon as she got home, having posted the fateful letter, the emails had begun to stream her way, begging to meet again, explaining that she would never have written that note, still less posted it by hand, if she had not felt the same way, imploring her not to break two hearts quite needlessly, telling her that Aberdeen needed her to save the Cathedral from Dionne and Wong’s ravages, praising the Tragedy seminars and beseeching her not to make a tragedy of both their lives. Hundreds of words, thousands, were frenziedly sent from the tear-sploshed iPhone and laptop. Not one of them was answered.
Nellie knew that if she answered by so much as a syllable, it would give encouragement, not simply to the Girl – as she now tried to name her, fearing the three syllables Ingrid Ashe, as if, somehow by using them, she would be empowering them, like some arcane spell or incantation – but to her own anarchic feelings of . . . the unnamed L. thing. The How d’you call which dared not speak its whatsit.
When the first thirty or forty emails teemed into her inbox, she had read them with some fascination. They had such a powerful effect, however, actually making her gasp, lose her breath, choke with emotion, that she grasped, in gestures which recalled her attempts to reach out to the yellow-helmeted fireman-angel in the tower, towards Control. She now deleted the messages unread. Had been doing so for over a week.
They must stop. One day, the Girl would stop writing in this way, stop suffering. She was a frisky, young, impulsive, darling thing. She was a woman of the theatre. She would fall in love with someone else. Begin to play in another drama.
Hours and hours, in her dad’s flat, were spent Not Thinking About the Girl, banishing the ‘nice smile’ from her head, trying not to remember what it was like, during rehearsals, when Nellie had gone among the Trojan Women and repositioned them, as they stood in their statuesque circle. When she slept, the ‘rather fleshy’ face was next to hers, covering her with kisses.
—Ingrid, if you, perhaps move downstage about . . . now nearer Hecuba! That’s lovely.
To make this point, Nellie had put both her hands on those shoulders, and the Girl had reached up with her right hand, and touched the hand which held her. It was as if there were electricity in the touch. They had begun light kissing of one another’s cheeks when they met, and when intimacy grew, and Nellie called more frequently at the house in Harrow, she gave smacking great kisses on both cheeks to Cavan Cliffe. But now, she held back, even from a light peck on the Girl’s cheek, because to touch her with lips would be to suffer a scalding. It would not be possible to touch her, even lightly, without wanting – EVERYTHING. Once, the Girl had told Nellie how much she liked ‘The Laughter of Stafford Girls’ High’, a sort of short verse novel by Carol Ann Duffy, and Nellie had gone into the reopened bookshop in Howley Street and furtively read it. She liked it a lot, and its overall subject matter, the irrepressible giggles which overcome adolescent girls, had certainly been part of her own experience at grammar schools in the fogbound. But it was for Miss Batt and Miss Fife that she read the poem. Their quiet evenings together ‘seemed enough’ at first, and before the tale is done, they are in bed together, and in love. Nellie had put the book down. Though the volume’s title was one which might have been appropriate reading for the clergy – Feminine Gospels – it made her tremble. Later she went back to the shop and bought several of Duffy’s books, and read them on the aeroplane back to England.
Already she had developed a Winchester routine, waiting in the flat until eight or so in the evening, and walking as the sun went down. Through the Close, past the old school, and out into the water meadows. The same old thoughts churned. Sometimes her head was filled with the theological preoccupations which had dominated the lunch with old Lesley, sometimes with the poignancy of her father’s diaries; but in both cases, they were really only ways of feeling, not thinking, the aftershock of the Girl.
Not long after nine, as she came back across the meadows, there was an atmosphere of dusk, and as she followed the long, crumbling stone of the medieval college walls, the street lamps twinkled into light. Somewhere, a great clock, either in the squat Cathedral tower, or in the college, reverberated through the dusky summer air. And suddenly there she was, with her mousey mane frizzed against the mousey-coloured Winchester stone, and the nice smile frozen with anxiety, and the brown eyes bright with hope.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
That funny little flat! And that funny little bed! Where you had been having such unfunny thoughts. And there we were. I said earlier on somewhere in this book that those conversations you have, when you are both lying there with no clothes on and you have just made love, aren’t such a good idea. Because you say too much, and then the other person, next time they are lying with no clothes on, only with someone else, tends to repeat them. But that’s not going to happen, my darling, because there can’t be another person, my east and west, my only love. Not ever. So, eight years ago, we lay there until I don’t know when, talking and talking, and not eating, for hours, telling our stories, and doing what we had both dreamed of doing all our lives and never quite had done before – making love.
—You’re laughing.
—I’m not laughing. I’m just – oh, I don’t know.
<
br /> —I do. There you go again. What? What’s funny?
—Doug used to say he didn’t know who he was in bed with – Eleanor the Priest or Digby the Greek.
—I know who I’m in bed with.
—Who, Ingrid? Who?
—With Nellie.
—Come here, you.
FINIS
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I have not added acknowledgements to any of my previous novels, but in this case thanks are very much due to Clare Alexander, Karen Duffy, Will Atkinson, Margaret Stead and Frances Wilson, who helped this short book on its way, and to Tamsin Shelton, the copy-editor.
COPYRIGHT INFORMATION
‘Aubade’, from The Complete Poems (1977), by Larkin, Philip.
Reproduced by permission of Faber & Faber Ltd.
Four Quartets (1943), by Eliot, T.S..
Reproduced by permission of Faber & Faber Ltd.
Excerpts from ‘Trojan Women’ by Euripides,
translated by Emily Wilson, from The Greek Plays (2016)
edited by Mary Lefkowitz and James Romm.
Reproduced by permission of The Modern Library,
a division of Penguin Random House LLC.
‘The Laughter of Stafford Girls’ High’ excerpt from
Feminine Gospels, by Carol Anne Duffy (2002).
Reproduced by permission of Picador,
Macmillan Publishers Ltd.
Approximately sixteen (16) words from The Bacchae
and Other Plays by Euripides, translated by
Philip Vellacott (Penguin 1954, Revised 1972).
Copyright © Philip Vellacott, 1954, 1972.