by James Runcie
I could hear my mother’s voice in my head, the sound of her singing.
Star light, star bright
First light I see tonight
I wish I may, I wish I might,
Have the wish I wish tonight …
I wondered if I loved Linda as much as my mother and if this love between us was more important than anything else in the world. Was it a betrayal and a forgetting, or the finding of a new life? What did it mean to love like this?
Linda came back and dried herself, her leg supported on a rock, unembarrassed by her nakedness.
She smiled. ‘All right then?’
‘More than all right.’
Perhaps this was what ‘good luck’ meant. Perhaps Linda was my reward for everything bad that had happened in my life.
In our togetherness we had separated from the world. I couldn’t work out what the feeling meant, of being happy and yet somehow trapped at the same time, in a place that was ours alone. I couldn’t even work out whether I liked the feeling or not but I knew I didn’t want it ever to stop.
Linda
I don’t suppose any family’s normal but Martin’s thought the way they did things was right enough. Funny that, because his dad was a moody old bugger, his aunt was a snobby cow and his uncle was stark raving bonkers.
But I stuck with him because he was quiet and serious and I felt safe. Besides, he always encouraged my painting. Everyone else thought it made me a bit weird. They couldn’t understand why I didn’t want to get a job as a secretary and get married but I’d seen what that had done to my mother and I didn’t want history repeating itself in my own family: married at sixteen, a mother at seventeen, abandoned at twenty with no money and hardly any prospects. I wasn’t going to be mucked around like that so I went to Southend College of Art where I was free to be whatever I wanted to be.
I don’t think anyone at my art school was sane. They were a mixture of neurotics, misfits and exhibitionists, putting on events with situationists and surrealist musicians, making giant sculptures out of crashed metal and loops of string or creating the kind of performance art which almost always involved one of the girls taking her clothes off. Even the act of going for a walk could be considered a work of art if it was done in the right way, but it couldn’t be any old walk, you had to ‘dérive’, which meant getting a map of Paris and following it strictly even though you were actually walking in Southend.
I found myself working with painters who thought they were already part of the St Ives School and film-makers who wanted to be Truffaut or Antonioni. They introduced Martin and me to foreign movies – Le Soupirant, La Jetée, L’Avventura, anything with ‘le’ in the title and a whole load of voiceover – and we all took dope and drank Noilly Prat and couldn’t imagine we’d ever get to thirty.
I started to mix flowers and wildlife into the paint and play around with the texture of the surface of the canvas, adding in plaster of Paris to bulk up the whites, blowtorching areas of darkness to create deep blacks. I showed Martin paintings by Joan Eardley, telling him I wanted to be able to paint like her, and we travelled up and down the coast so that he could look at the patterns of erosion as I tried to capture the light.
‘One thing. I’m never going to do a job where I have to clock on or off,’ I told him. ‘This is my clock, the moon and the stars, what else do I need? I can tell the time by the way the sun falls and the moon rises.’
In the past, every time I looked at the sea I felt that anything was possible; there would always be a tide to take me away somewhere else, where life could be different and begin again. But now I wanted life to slow down, even stop, because I could be with Martin and we were easy with each other. I didn’t have to worry about anything any more. I was loved.
Martin was still working in the machine shop, welding and cutting, preparing for university. One night he even took me round the factory and we did it with rolls of sheet metal around us. It was unusual rather than romantic but that was Martin all over. Always wanting to do daft things like kiss my knees or hold my hair up to the light or drink from the same drink with it in both our mouths at the same time.
‘Why are you like this?’ I asked.
‘Like what?’
‘Even when you’re happy you look like you can’t quite trust it.’
‘Do I?’
‘How often do you think about your mother?’
‘Not so much as I did.’
‘And why is that?’
‘You know why,’ he said.
‘One day,’ I said, ‘you’ll tire of me.’
‘Never. I’ll always love you. You know that.’
‘That’s what people say when they’re getting rid of someone. “I’ll always love you.” It means you’re dumped.’
‘But I mean it. Nothing matters except this.’
‘You have a life to lead, Martin. Don’t ruin everything by making this count for too much too soon. It frightens me.’
‘And what are you frightened of?’
‘Of loving you too much. Of loving you so much that I can’t get back.’
‘You won’t ever need to get back, Linda …’
‘I need to protect myself.’
‘Don’t you trust me?’ he asked.
‘Of course I do,’ I said. ‘I just don’t trust myself.’
Martin
When I wasn’t at the machine shop I read everything I could about the threat of the sea. I learnt to read its lessons, studying the changes in texture of pebble, shingle, sand and rock. I looked at washed stone, studied watermarks over the grain of driftwood and the wet backs of pebbles scaled by time. I wanted to be like those smugglers who could always tell where they were by scooping up a handful of pebbles, knowing by size and feel from which beach they came.
I played with them like cherry stones:
Army, Navy
Medicine, Law
Church, Nobility,
Nothing at all.
Linda picked me up from home and together we rode round the island on her Lambretta, the smell of Manhattan perfume blowing back in my face, sweet and fresh, not cloying like Vi’s or powdery like my mother’s.
Like my mother’s … The smell of Linda was my first infidelity to her; now I preferred the scent of my girlfriend to anything else. My girlfriend. I had never been able to imagine using such a word.
That summer she swam far out to sea; so far that I could hardly see her and I tried not to panic or show my fear that she might drown. I saw other people walking their dogs, or children running into the waves, unaware of the power of the tide. Sometimes I wanted to stop them all, or call out, ‘Come back, come back!’ but I knew my fear would frighten them.
And then, as Linda painted, I studied the currents and read about the moon, torn away from the outer crust of the earth billions of years ago like an orphaned child unable to return to its parent, longing to come home. Together, I decided, we would be sea people, Martin and Linda, water-creatures of the night. She told me how, in some societies, food was laid out to absorb the rays of the moon so that it would have the power to cure disease and prolong life.
‘Scoop up the water,’ she would say, ‘the moon is in your hands.’
Together we tried to imagine what it might be like to emerge from the shadow of the world, to travel through the belt of film surrounding the earth’s sphere, to see what there was beneath the clouds of Venus and walk on the moon’s surface. We would wander through the desolation of buried worlds and future planets.
When we sat by the water she would recite bits of poetry that she had learnt by heart.
Flood-Tide below me! I see you face to face;
Clouds of the west – sun there half an hour high – I see you also face to face.
I told Linda I had thought of becoming an oceanographer, recording light penetration, pressure, salinity and temperature; registering the slow changes in deep waters, dropping a sounding line a thousand fathoms to find the starfish clinging to it. I would measure
the flow of currents and the height of waves out at sea from trough to crest. I would work out the length of fetch, the distance the waves had run under the drive of a wind blowing in a constant direction without obstruction. The greater the fetch, the higher the waves. I knew that the fetch the night my mother died could have been as long as six hundred miles.
I didn’t know if Linda would ever understand how much it haunted me. No matter how close we were, even then, when our love was at its height, I was afraid that there would always be something unspoken, a gap that could never be closed.
I could not believe how elated Linda made me and yet, at the same time, I was frightened of becoming so used to the feeling that I would not be able to live if it was ever taken away. It would be like losing my mother all over again.
Perhaps Linda was right not to trust the intensity of it all. For I knew that, however good it was, this was a love that didn’t belong to everyday life. And then I realised that when I went to university I would be unable to live either with or without Linda. If we were still together, loving as we did, then I wouldn’t be able to concentrate on anything else, everything would be her, and when she was away from me and I was supposed to be studying, I would be afraid of something terrible happening to her: illness, accident, even death.
I would spend all my hours fearing the loss of love, the return of absence.
Linda
I knew it couldn’t last but I kept hoping I was wrong. I couldn’t accept that if Martin left for university then he might also be leaving me.
First he began to dream and be moody. Then he started to criticise me. Little things at first, like the fact that I hardly ate anything and that, when I did so, I did it too slowly. He thought the way I arranged my body when I sat on a settee showed too much of my legs, that I said too little, and that my paintings were just a bit too weird. It got to the stage where nothing I could do was ever quite right. I even wondered whether he was being irritating and critical deliberately, like he was trying to put me off him, so that I might be the first to end it all and he wouldn’t have to do it himself.
The night before he left we were walking on the beach and Martin stopped to pick up a pebble and throw it into the sea. I thought at first he was nervous about leaving home and that he’d be all right once we were in the Monico. Dave’s band was playing, after all. But Martin said he wanted to talk. Then I could tell it was bad because he started to speak slowly and he couldn’t look at me.
‘I have to leave,’ he said. ‘I have to do more than this.’
‘I know.’
‘And I’ll need to concentrate. I might not be able to see you as often as you want.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I have to understand: the sea, floods, water …’
‘Stopping it, I know. But it doesn’t mean you can’t come home, though, does it?’
‘No. It doesn’t,’ he said. ‘But I have to work.’
‘Yes, but you can’t work all the time. When you’re not so busy then we can be together.’
The mist was rising. I wanted Martin to put his jacket over me like he always did when he knew I was cold, but now he was staring at the ground. ‘I don’t know. Sometimes I’m not sure that I’m right for you. Perhaps you deserve someone better.’
‘What are you talking about? I don’t want anyone else. I love you.’
‘And I love you. But it’s so hard to live with it all.’
‘No, it’s not,’ I said. ‘It’s lovely. It’s the only thing that matters. You said that once. Don’t you remember?’
‘But I’m afraid of it.’
I tried to make him look at me but he couldn’t. ‘Stay,’ I said. ‘Please. Stay here with me.’
‘Do you mean I shouldn’t go to university at all?’
‘Sometimes I think that, yes.’
‘But what would I do if I gave it up?’
He stopped and began to kick at the broken shells under his feet, scraping them from right to left and back again, first with one foot, then with the other. Among them was a piece of sea glass. We were the last people left on the beach.
‘I’ll come back. It’s only three years.’
‘You’ll change,’ I said.
‘I won’t.’
‘You will. You’ll get bored with me. You already have.’ I could tell, even then, that I was making it worse.
‘I won’t get bored, Linda. I’ll only get bored if you go on like this.’
‘Well, what am I supposed to say?’ I asked.
‘You’re the clever one.’
‘You’re clever too.’
‘Yeah. But perhaps I’m just not clever enough,’ I said.
We walked across sands and shoals of rock; the memory of waves along the strandline. I had such an ache.
Martin
Dad came with Vi to wave me off. They stood on the pavement stamping the October cold away. Vi put her blue leather glove to my cheek. ‘God bless, Martin. We’re so proud of you. You’d best get on the bus or I’ll start crying.’
She leant forward and I kissed her.
My father handed me fifty pounds. ‘I’d like to give you more, son, but it’s all I can spare.’
‘You don’t have to give me anything.’
‘I wanted to see you right. Have a drink on us. Remember your old dad.’
‘And me,’ said Vi. ‘Don’t forget your auntie.’
I climbed on to the coach, went past the driver and found a seat halfway down. Dad and Vi waved quickly, their hands close to their bodies, and I wondered what they would talk about when I had gone. The coach passed George’s nursing home, Ivy’s old shop, the school and the playing fields; all the brief certainties of my former life.
As we drove down the high street, I saw Linda. She had stopped by the side of the road. She gave me a silent stare and I remembered how when she was angry her face reddened slightly, all except for the dent in her forehead where her brother had thrown the toy truck at her when they were small. The scar remained white.
She looked at me without waving or smiling, and it seemed that she was already a stranger. I couldn’t understand how quickly I could feel so detached from my own past.
Linda
I didn’t give up, of course. I borrowed my mother’s Ford Prefect and drove up to Cambridge to talk to him. It took me an hour and a half and we sat in a pub, the Baron of Beef I think it was called, and I listened to students talking about their holidays in France and their second homes in Switzerland. They either had Christian names like Crispin and Jasper or nicknames like Rodders and Pimple. Martin told me he had joined the Backwards Club and that once a term they ran a whole day the wrong way round. They started with a brandy and soda and worked their way back to a boiled egg and soldiers last thing at night. It was such a good laugh, apparently.
He said I couldn’t stay in his rooms. It wasn’t allowed and he didn’t want the gyp to find out.
‘What’s a gyp?’
‘He’s a servant; a type of cleaner. It’s what we have here.’
‘I thought a gyp was a bit of trouble: like my mum and her varicose veins. Her legs giving her “gyp”, that kind of thing.’
‘He also comes in to check I haven’t topped myself.’
‘I don’t believe you.’
‘It’s true. Someone did it last year.’
‘I’m not surprised in a place like this,’ I said. ‘It’s a wonder more people don’t do it.’
Martin couldn’t get me out fast enough. I suppose he didn’t want his posh new friends to see me, even though I was at art school and he should have been proud to have such a groovy girlfriend, for God’s sake. We went off to Aldeburgh for the weekend instead. I could tell that he wasn’t that interested in me apart from the sex and even that had a ‘for old times’ sake’ ring to it.
We pretended to be married – Martin and Linda Turner, we certainly looked sulky enough – and we booked a guest house where the landlady asked questions that we couldn’t answer a
nd expected us to be ‘up and out’ by half past eight.
There were sheep walks covered with grass, fern and brake furze, and Martin wanted to see how the wind affected each piece of vegetation and how much each could protect the land behind. He pointed out that the trees had been blown back; lilac, privet, sycamore and chestnut were listing badly, the salt of the winds wearing away their easterly sides. Then, when we got to the beach, he kept stopping to find places where he could test the sand, telling me about infiltration and hydraulic conductivity like I really wanted to know. He’d only allowed me to come if I didn’t get in the way of his experiments into what he called ‘swash flow’ and ‘sediment transport’. I had to hold a cylinder that he was going to insert into the sand to see how quickly the tide drained away.
‘What about us?’ I wanted to say. ‘Why don’t you give this much attention to us?’
He connected six tubes to the cylinder, pushed it into the sand and asked me to fill it up with water. He got out his watch and we measured how long it took for the water to drain away. Whenever it fell an inch Martin recorded the time taken in his notebook.
‘I want to see how compact the beach is, and how quickly contaminants can infiltrate the coastline.’
Nearby a man was lying down while his wife sat up to look out to sea. She had a pair of binoculars. Although the man’s eyes were closed his hand rested on her lower back, checking that she was still there.
The clouds over the sky were suspended like a child’s mobile, with low streaks of grey and darkening. Martin told me that if I was bored I could search the beach for other places where the sand varied in texture. He told me he wanted to see how the size of the particles and their compressibility might affect the speed at which the sea was absorbed.
I looked at his notebook and his instructions: