by Marie Joseph
And he took off his horn-rimmed spectacles and rubbed his eyes, and all my anger evaporated. He was the brother I so adored. I went and sat beside him, and went on speaking in that calm voice that was a complete contradiction to the churning, heaving mass of emotion inside me.
‘We’ll go, but we won’t tell them. Not yet. There must be a way out. There’s got to be a way. Two lives can’t be ruined because of one mistake.’
‘I’ve got to try to find Jan,’ Roger said, stubbornly, ‘and how can we just announce we’re off like that? Tell me. How can we?’
I went over to my dressing table and stared at myself in the mirror. I looked hideous. My eyes were ringed with shadows, and the blackness of my sweater accentuated the pallor of my skin.
‘We’ll tell them Jamus is in some kind of trouble,’ I said. ‘Mother will be quite able to accept that.’
I turned round to face Roger. ‘But we’re not telling the truth. Not yet.’
‘What difference will it make?’ Roger asked wearily. ‘Tell them now or tell them the day after? Oh God, I never dreamed, I never thought . . .’
‘Listen, Roger, why can’t we just walk downstairs and announce we’re going away for a few days? Other people do. Why do we have to account for every single movement?’
‘Don’t be silly,’ said Roger, and now our positions were inexplicably reversed. He was the strong one, the one who knew what we must do. ‘They trust us, and we’ve never behaved like that, that’s why.’
Slowly, we went downstairs.
When we said we were going to see Jamus, that we had to see Jamus, but we’d ring them or come back the very next day, I thought Mother was going to have a fit.
‘What is it? The police? Or worse?’ she asked Roger anxiously.
Father patted her shoulder and said he knew that Roger and I had more sense than to get mixed up in anything unsavoury, and if a friend was in trouble, then of course we must go. He trusted us, and anyway we’d be together, and there was a whole week before Roger went up to university and I went to college.
I hugged Dad so hard that he nearly fell over, and Roger and I raced upstairs and threw a few things into a duffle bag. Mother relented a bit, and even started on her eternal theme of people who don’t have children not knowing the worry they’re missing. Father ran us to the station and gave Roger a £5 note, in case we ran short of money.
The minute Dad’s car was out of sight, we made our way to the main road and hitched a lift into town. Money was too precious to waste on train fares, and although Jan always seemed to have enough to get by on, Jamus was perpetually broke.
The man who stopped for us was a travelling salesman, and I sat on the back seat amongst samples of what looked like office files and big stapled binders.
Roger sat in front, and the man told us that he’d only stopped because he’d driven all the way down the Ml and had scared himself stiff by nearly failing asleep at the wheel, and because we looked a decent couple of kids.
We went straight to Jamus’s pad, as he called it, a one-roomed basement hovel for which he paid £4 a week. He wasn’t at home but we found the key behind the loose brick in the wall, and let ourselves in.
‘Now what?’ Roger asked, and I said that a cup of coffee would be a good idea, and went out into the musty-smelling passage. I boiled some water in a pan that looked as if it hadn’t been properly cleaned for months.
‘There’s no milk,’ I called out to Roger, and he said that he’d have black.
‘Why didn’t Jan tell me?’ Roger asked when I handed him the cup of steaming liquid. ‘What kind of a bloke did she think I was?’
‘She knew you’d marry her and give up university.’
‘So what?’ he demanded.
‘She didn’t want you to give up all you’ve worked for, and besides, she doesn’t love you. I doubt whether Jan has it in her to love anybody.’
‘I don’t love her,’ said Roger, ‘that’s the bloody awful part.’
‘Don’t swear,’ I said automatically, ‘and try explaining that to them.’
‘I don’t think I could,’ he admitted.
It was quite dark, but we didn’t bother to put on the light.
‘To me, sex and love are synonymous,’ I said, and Roger made a noise that could have passed for a laugh.
‘That’s because you’re a girl. Biological differences, that’s what.’
‘But you must have felt something for her,’ I persisted.
‘A bloke can stand so much teasing, then wham! That’s it . . .’ Roger said, shrugging his shoulders.
‘Mother tried to tell me something like that once,’ I said into the gathering gloom. ‘Seems she was right about a lot of things.’
‘Now you’re being stupid!’ Roger snapped.
And suddenly, I was back on the beach the night we’d slept in a decorous row on the pebbles, the four of us, and I remembered the salt-fresh taste of Jamus’s lips, and the way his face had looked in the moonlight, and I wondered what might have happened if we’d been alone . . .
‘Sorry,’ I told Roger.
Just then we heard footsteps outside and Jamus came in, switching on the light. We blinked at him, and he looked as if he’d aged ten years since I’d seen him last.
‘Jan?’ we both said together, and he shifted a pile of books from a chair and sat down heavily.
‘Yes, I found her. In hospital. I’ve just come back from there . . .’ He held up his hand as both Roger and I tried to speak together. ‘She’ll be all right. Seems she was trying to get away from me, and ran across the road, right underneath a taxi.’
‘She didn’t –’ Roger began.
Jamus sighed. ‘We’ll never know. I hared off in the opposite direction and missed it all, then after I’d rung you, I rang the police and they told me she’d been taken to Charing Cross Hospital.’
He smiled at Roger. ‘You can relax. There’s no baby, not any more. She’s broken an arm and got a deep gash on her forehead, but they’ve operated and her mother’s there, sitting by her bedside, weeping motherly tears over her erring daughter.’
‘I’ll go,’ Roger said. ‘I’ll go now and talk to her. I’m responsible. You don’t think she was trying to . . . ? If I thought she was trying to . . .’
‘Sit down, Roger,’ Jamus said. ‘You’re the last one Jan wants to see right now. Go in the morning if you must, but right now I vote we all get some sleep.’
And from a corner of the awful room he unearthed the familiar sleeping bag and began to unroll it.
‘You can have the bed, Ginny,’ he said briskly, ‘and for you, Roger, that leaves the floor.’
There was no talk. All the talking had been done. But there was no sleep either. Roger rolled himself in the blanket I gave him from the narrow bed, and I could hear him twisting, turning and sighing, and once he even moaned aloud.
I thought about Jan lying there, and wondered if she’d really tried to kill herself? Not Jan, the Jan I knew, who didn’t care about anything. And I thought about my brother Roger, his gentleness, brilliance, and how because of one single, unpremeditated moment he’d nearly wrecked so many lives. I hoped that some day he’d forget, but deep down I knew he never would.
‘Jamus?’ I called out softly.
‘Go to sleep,’ he said.
But there was no sleep, no sleep for any of us that night, and I knew that this summer, this long hot summer, the summer that we finally grew up, was one we’d never, ever forget . . .
Birds of a Feather
HAVE YOU EVER seen the film Gigi? If you have, you’ll know exactly what I mean when I say that I was just waiting for Paul Reynolds to look at me with incredulous amazement, realising that I’d been growing away there, right before his eyes, and discovering he was madly in love with me. I’d loved him all my life – well, for four years anyway, since my sixteenth birthday – but he treated me exactly as if I were the girl next door, which incidentally is just what I was.
So when he told
me, over our adjoining privet hedge, about this marvellous girl he’d met, how gorgeous she was, and that he was taking her to Norfolk the coming weekend on one of his bird-watching expeditions, I felt a pang of jealousy so acute it was almost a physical pain.
‘Joanna’s a model, a photographer’s model,’ he said proudly, ‘and her hair is the colour of Danish butter, and her figure . . .’ He made curving motions with his hands, and I stood there listening, smiling and saying how glad I was for him, and found myself suggesting that we made a foursome of it at the weekend. Paul and Joanna, and me and Alec Blane.
‘Who’s Alec Blane?’ Paul said, obviously not all that interested, and I tried to look mysterious, which is difficult when your hair is limp and your nose turns up at the end and is freckled.
‘Just a friend of mine,’ I said. ‘What do you think? It might be fun.’
Paul appeared to be thinking it over. Then, rather to my surprise, he agreed.
‘Is this bloke of yours interested in bird-watching?’ he asked, and I nodded, adding underneath my breath: ‘but not the kind you have in mind.’
I’d met Alec Blane at a party the previous week, and already, after our second date, he’d made it quite clear that his intentions were far from honourable. When I’d told him that my parents were away visiting relatives in Torquay, he’d suggested that he should move in with me, and I’d decided not to see him again.
So when I rang him and told him about the weekend in Norfolk, there was a slight pause, and I could imagine him at the other end of the line stroking his chin and thinking his luck was in.
‘Bird-watching? You have to be joking, love,’ he said, and I told him it was a fascinating occupation, and that if we were lucky we might even see the red-billed oystercatcher nesting on the shingle.
‘I can’t wait,’ said Alec. ‘If there’s one sight calculated to send me berserk, it’s the sight of the red-billed whatsit nesting on the shingle.’
I laughed dutifully and went outside to tell Paul that it was all fixed.
‘Does Joanna like bird-watching?’ I asked, and he rubbed the side of his nose, the way he does when something puzzles or worries him.
‘She thinks it’s all a joke,’ he said sadly, ‘but that’s because she doesn’t understand. Poor kid, she’s lived in Chelsea all her life, and her idea of a weekend away from it all is a trip to Paris, or possibly Rome.’
‘Poor girl,’ I said, and when Paul left me to make a slight adjustment to his binoculars, I stayed where I was for a while, thinking about him, and wondering just what it was about him that made me love him so much.
It certainly wasn’t his looks. He was much too thin for his height, was always forgetting to have his hair trimmed, and he wore jackets that were far too big for him. And it certainly wasn’t his endearing ways that made me love him either.
Paul was an absolute fanatic where his hobby was concerned. I’d tramped by his side for miles, then lain prone in damp fields or behind bleak windswept sand dunes, hardly daring to breathe in case we disturbed a black-headed gull sitting on her nest. I knew that part of Norfolk and loved it, because it was there that I’d discovered just how much I loved him, crouched by his side in a pool of mud, with him shushing me into silence one winter’s night, with the moon gleaming on the channel where the widgeon and brent geese feed.
Paul had arranged that we would leave town early that coming Saturday morning. We were to pick up Joanna and Alec on the way, and although it was early September, it was as misty and cold as if it were the middle of an icy November.
Being an old hand at the game, I was wearing my anorak, and my wellingtons nestled in the bottom of my suitcase. Paul wore an old battledress top and a pair of slacks encrusted with mud from his last expedition.
‘Joanna didn’t mind when you told her that Alec and I were coming along?’ I asked, and taking one hand from the wheel, Paul rubbed the side of his nose.
‘She was surprised,’ he said carefully. ‘How about Alec?’
‘Surprised,’ I said, and we laughed, and it was like old times. I switched on the radio, and there was an announcer telling us that there was a deep depression spreading south, and that gale-force winds were expected in the east.
‘Charming,’ said Paul, ‘but let’s not worry about it,’ and he drew up in front of a twee little house with window boxes painted in yellow and a nude-lady brass knocker on the door.
Humbly I got out of the passenger seat and climbed into the back, then waited a good ten minutes until Paul appeared with the gorgeous Joanna in tow.
She was stunningly beautiful, and she wore a linen safari suit the colour of Danish butter to tone with her hair, and a pair of platform-soled shoes that made her look every bit as tall as Paul. The cream case Paul carried didn’t look as if it contained anything remotely resembling a pair of wellingtons, and I tried not to feel too glad.
Introductions were made, and outside his block of flats Alec was already waiting for us, wearing a natty blazer, plus mauve shirt with toning tie. I greeted him with pretended rapture.
‘Isn’t this fun?’ I said gaily, and Paul turned round and stared at me just in time to see Alec’s hand clasp my right knee.
‘My flatmate nearly died laughing when I told him what I’d let myself in for this weekend,’ Alec said, and Joanna flashed a smile at him over her shoulder.
‘I must admit the whole thing’s a bit hilarious,’ she said, and the back of Paul’s neck, the bit of it I could see underneath the untidy wisps of hair, looked hurt.
‘If we’re going to the Point, we must catch the morning tide,’ he said, and Joanna gave a small scream of alarm.
‘You didn’t tell me we were going out in a boat,’ she said, and Paul said it was only a small boat and that the sail took barely twenty minutes.
‘I was once sick in a rowing boat on the Serpentine. It’s the feeling of nothing underneath,’ Joanna explained.
‘But you don’t mind flying,’ Paul said, skirting a roundabout with less than his usual precision, and she said that was different, and surely he could see that, and I removed Alec’s hand from my knee for the tenth time and tried not to look too smug at the way things were going.
The tiny fishing village sported two hotels. One the four-star variety, which Joanna gazed at wistfully as we drove straight past it, and the other one the family-type inn, complete with coat stand and folding pram in the hall, and a smiling Jim, the proprietor, who came to meet us, hands outstretched in welcome, wearing a striped pinny over his ample middle.
Alec’s expression was one of stunned disbelief when he found that he was to share a room with Paul while I doubled up with Joanna. After coffee, served to us with a jug of frothy hot milk, Paul gave us five minutes to get ready for our sail out to the Point. The addition of my wellingtons and an extra dab of lipstick and I was ready, and I watched as Joanna added a fluffy white coat to her ensemble and wound up her butter-coloured hair in an emerald scarf.
The men were waiting for us down in the hall. Paul in his anorak, the twin to mine, and Alec in his blazer plus a smart blue peaked cap.
We drove down to the quay and were helped aboard by a husky sailor with a face as lined as a contour map. As the boat followed the winding mud banks of the creek out towards the harbour, we saw a flight of sea swallows hovering with rapid wing-beats over the banks.
Paul stood up and took out his camera, and Joanna leaned back and crossed her legs, switching on her stunning smile, only to switch it off in disgust when she found that it was the sea birds Paul was interested in photographing.
‘There’s a curlew! See its long curved beak,’ Paul shouted, and Alec said something unrepeatable underneath his breath, and pushed back the hood of my anorak from my head, the better to nibble hungrily at my left ear lobe.
We landed at the creek, and the sailor lowered a kind of roughshod gangplank and reminded us to be sure to be back at noon to catch the tide.
Paul had already forgotten our existence. There is noth
ing quite as dedicated as a dedicated bird-watcher, and he strode along, leading the way through the shrubby bushes towards the warden’s house with its look-out post.
By now the clouds were hanging low, grey and all-enveloping, and Joanna pulled the collar up of her white coat and shivered as Paul led the way to the ternery, the bird sanctuary.
‘Terns are very touchy birds,’ he explained to a totally disinterested Alec, ‘so we must keep very quiet. Do you know that in a good year, over a thousand pairs will nest here?’
‘Is that so?’ said Alec, his voice heavy with sarcasm. Quite oblivious, Paul went on to describe the method of courtship and told us, among other things, that the tern faces many hardships, from waves breaking over the nesting beaches, drowning hundreds, to summer rain, which causes the tiny chicks to develop congestion of the lungs, which often proves fatal.
‘My heart bleeds,’ said Alec, moving away from me to where Joanna stood, her chiselled features turning blue with cold and her expensive shoes sinking almost ankle-deep in Norfolk mud.
‘How about a coffee back in the warden’s whatsit?’ he suggested, and Joanna flashed him a grateful smile. Paul had spotted a roseate tern, a beautiful bird with a rosy belly and long tail streamers, and didn’t even see them go.
I moved closer to him.
‘I don’t think our friends are all that interested in ornithology,’ I whispered, and as an Arctic tern floated down, uttering its high whistling call, Paul shushed me into a familiar, companionable silence as we crouched together.
He was behaving badly. Faced with his beloved birds, he was fanatical in his single-mindedness. He was selfish, inconsiderate, and I loved him.
I knew if that was what he wanted, I was prepared to stand by his side for ever if needs be, gloating over a nest of ring-necked plover’s eggs; but I had to face the fact that my presence made no difference. I was merely the girl next door, a good old sport who happened to share his overpowering love of birds.