by Liz Byrski
I put down the tea and slid down under the bedclothes. Burying my face in the pillows I wept with hurt and with the outrage of insult until I had no energy left. I lay drained and numb for hours until the light faded and dusk began to take out the day.
As Big Ben chimed midnight and the announcer began to read the BBC news I finished my letter to you. In an agony of incomprehension and aching with sadness I sealed the envelope and propped it against the radio to post the following day. I don’t know what I wrote, only that I told you that I did not condone Doreen’s behaviour. And I told you of my sadness and of how much I loved you, I told you I did not understand how you could make such an assumption about me. But it never occurred to me to plead or argue with you. I was intimidated by the cold anger of your letter and I was too young and fearful to question your decision, too meek and submissive to recognise that I could put up a fight. In a few lines you had written off my hopes and dreams. I had grown up in a bizarre triangular situation with my parents performing the dance that held their sterile relationship together. You had shown me how it could be different. You had opened the door to a different world and let me look inside, and now you had slammed it shut and turned the key leaving me on the outside. I was not only excluded, I was being punished for something I hadn’t done—hadn’t even wanted to do.
***
The Secretaries looked at me long and hard.
‘Look,’ said Sally cautiously. ‘It’s probably all for the best. He was so much older than you and now you can see that it would have gone wrong anyway.’
I continued to open Dr Murray’s mail without looking up.
‘After all,’ she went on. ‘You’re so young, you haven’t any experience. He’d been married, he was very mature, it never would have worked. We all saw that straight away.’ The others nodded their heads and mumbled in agreement.
‘He was a foreigner too, German, one simply can’t trust the Germans,’ said Mrs Wilmot. ‘I know one must try not to hold grudges, but the war—well, you’re too young to remember of course, but those of us who do remember, well we know them better you see.’
I tossed the empty envelopes into the wastepaper basket, and began to stack the letters to take them up to Dr Murray’s office.
‘You haven’t really told us what happened,’ Sylvia ventured and the five pairs of eyes began to bum me.
‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘Nothing happened, he just ended it, that’s all.’
‘Well he must have had a reason,’ she went on. ‘Didn’t he say?’
Mrs Wilmot looked daggers at her. ‘Don’t pry Sylvia, it’s not polite.’ She walked over to my desk and stood in front of me. ‘You did rather throw yourself at him you know. Being so keen, seeing him every weekend. Nice men don’t like women who are cheap you know. They don’t marry girls who are easy. You’re very young, you’ve got a lot to learn about life. There will be others no doubt but I hope you’ll learn not to be so free and easy next time. It pays to keep them guessing.’
‘Look, Mrs Wilmot doesn’t mean to be unkind,’ said Sally who had followed me as I rushed weeping into the ladies toilet. ‘She’s really very fond of you, we all are. But we were all worried about it right from the start.’
‘But you encouraged me, you came to buy the blouse, told me about my hair—’
‘Oh well, it was all a bit of fun wasn’t it? We never thought you’d get serious about him. You should be going out with someone like Michael Westbury, someone your own age, English, someone—well—more suitable.’
‘You were very fast really,’ said Jackie. ‘I thought so when you wrote that letter. He just took advantage of you, you know what older men are like. Look at Derek in Sales, married all the time.’
‘No,’ I said. ‘I don’t know what older men are like but I know what Karl is like, and he didn’t take advantage of me, never. And he’s not a bit like Derek.’
‘Well I can’t think why you’re defending him, after he’s just left you in the lurch like this. He should have stayed here. If he really loved you he would have stayed in England till you could get married.’
‘I’m sorry about your romance, Miss Beard,’ said Dr Murray. ‘If you need a few more days off you must take them, stay home with your mother. There will be others you know, other fish in the sea.’
‘Try and pull yourself together dear,’ said Mrs Maxwell sitting down beside me. ‘Concentrate on your work, it’ll take your mind off him. You know,’ she said, lowering her voice to a hoarse whisper,’ a man like that, a professional man, who’s been married, well they need things you know.’
‘What do you mean?’ I asked, genuinely confused, as I dabbed at my eyes with a soaking handkerchief.
She looked around to ensure no one else could hear her. ‘Well, things you know—things—intimate things. They need a mature woman who knows how to give them what they want. You didn’t have any experience in that area, you couldn’t have given him what he wanted.’
I think you should write Karl a letter/my father said. ‘You need to tell him that you won’t go to America. So that there is no mistake about it, no misunderstanding.’
‘I’ve already written to him.’
‘But you need to make it clear—you wouldn’t have been happy there. It’s too far away.’
So they all knew, had always known.
Everyone had recognised the signals that foreshadowed disaster. Too old, too young, too German, too divorced, too experienced, too innocent, too fast, too far away. Perhaps it was all just a figment of my imagination and you had simply been enjoying yourself, the way that older men do with young girls. I still longed for you but the hurt began to turn me to ice. Whether you had found an old love or a new one, or just needed a way to end it, in my grief at losing you I was also deeply offended that you had done it by putting me in the wrong.
More than a week passed and I had become numb. My father answered the telephone and my mother came running to call me.
‘It’s Karl,’ she said. ‘He’s on the telephone.’
I stared at her.
‘You must tell him you can’t go to America,’ she said. ‘Then he won’t call again.’
I walked to the phone and my father put his hand over the mouthpiece.
‘Just tell him you won’t go,’ he said. ‘Then that’ll be that.’
I took the phone and stood in the tense space between my parents, as they waited in silence.
‘Come to America,’ you asked me, but you must have known they wouldn’t let me go.
‘Tell him,’ my mother whispered.
‘Please come back to England,’ I said in desperation. ‘I can’t go to America now.’
It was not what I felt. It was not what I wanted to say. I couldn’t tell you that I still loved you, that I wanted to run to you, that I still wanted to marry you. I said what I had to say, I said the least I could, I thought you might hear what I did not say. I thought you might come back to England and make it right. I felt you had robbed me and I wanted you to give me back what you had taken, but I lacked the courage or the confidence to tell you that.
I put down the phone and walked out of the house. I was a child and you were a man. I had been playing in the wrong league. How did you feel when you wrote that letter, as it left your hand and slipped into the post box on its way to me? How did you feel as you walked away from the telephone? Did you ache with grief as I did? Have you regretted it since?
I walked across the fields, through the woods to the lake and the waterfall and stood alone where we had stood together the day before you left. The passion of that day flooded back to me as I watched the water foaming over the rocks. I remembered the firm warmth of your body against me, the tightness of your jaw and the strength of your grip on my upper arms.
‘We’ll be together always,’ I heard you say again. ‘I love you as I’ve never loved before.’
“A pair of wild ducks swam circles around each other close to the bank. Round and round they went, the female small and d
un coloured, spinning and bobbing as the drake closed in on her and then circled away again. They neared the water’s edge and the duck flipped out of the water onto the muddy grass, turning to watch the drake. He circled a couple more times, swam right up to the grass and then in a flash turned and flapping his wings rose into the air. jade and magenta feathers on his neck and wing tips glowed jewel” like in the afternoon sunlight as he soared upwards and off across the length of the lake and away over the woods.
I was worried about you,’ my father said, pushing aside the bracken that stretched its fronds across the path. ‘You’ve been gone for ages.’ We walked home together in silence.
‘You should have let me go with him,’ I said as we reached the gate. ‘Then it would have been all right.’
‘This would still have happened,’ he said. ‘Karl is a good man, but he was always unsuitable for you, it was wrong from the start. You must write him a letter now, telling him again that you won’t go to America.’
‘You never wanted me to go. You don’t care that I love him.’
‘Your mother and I want what’s best for you, Bill. You’re too young to understand. Give it a few years and you’ll see it our way.’
But I never understood. If you were just opportunistic, an older man taking advantage of a teenager who was mad about him—why didn’t you really take advantage of me? From the start I believed that with you I could be better. I could be wiser, smarter, funnier, more beautiful, I could learn so much with and from you. With you I could grow in safety, explore the boundaries of love, of life, of creativity. But I had not been good enough for you, not worthy of you and so I had lost you. It was as simple as that. I stopped eating, and I largely stopped talking. I grew thin and pale and would not leave the house except to go to work.
I’ve got that book of sonnets for you,’ said the man in the bookshop. ‘Just rang to let you know it’s arrived, a very attractive volume and packaging.’
‘I’m sorry but I don’t need it any more,’ I said.
‘You need a change,’ my mother said. ‘We thought you might like to go away somewhere.’
‘When I wanted to go away you wouldn’t let me,’ I said.
‘Somewhere nearer,’ my father said. ‘Paris—your French is good. I’ve organised a job for you, and a family to stay with. A new place will make all the difference. You’ll meet new people. Your French will be fluent if you stay there for a few months.’
‘You’ll like it there,’ my mother said. ‘It’s such an exciting place and it’s not too far away.
The family has a married daughter and a son a couple of years older than you. There’s an American girl staying there too. I’m sure you’ll like it.’
I don’t care where I go,’ I said. ‘Nothing matters any more.’
The first weeks in Paris were an agony of isolation and loneliness. I was marooned in the centre of a large, aristocratic and increasingly impoverished family, in a huge apartment of decaying grandeur in the Boulevard Haussman. I couldn’t understand the job which was in the buying department of a major chain store; no one in the office spoke English and my French was not as good as my parents believed. I wandered the strange streets, or sat alone drinking coffee and battling my loneliness and confusion amid the artists and tourists in the Place du Tertre.
It was a mystery to me why being alone among strangers in Paris was supposed to be good for me, while California with you, whom I loved, had been so potentially dangerous that it was forbidden.
My loneliness gave me plenty of time for reflection. I began to understand that I had never been encouraged to look inward, only to see my life and myself in relation to the church, family and society. But you Karl, had enabled me to see a different part of myself, to recognise love, to ask myself what happiness meant for me. I think you may have started to show me the need for an inner, spiritual life but I had not yet developed it for myself. Now I was cast adrift with no lifebelt. You had taught me to believe in something different but I didn’t know how to live it without you.
The preceding year I had faced the death of my first set of aspirations for the future. At school and at home I had been praised and encouraged for my writing and acting, but when, at sixteen, I had expressed the desire to make a career as a writer or on the stage, it had been made clear that neither was suitable. Nice girls became teachers, nurses or secretaries until they settled down to get married. I was faced with the tedious reality of learning shorthand, typing and filing. Now my aspirations to live my life in a passionate and enriching marriage with you had also gone.
Faced with the void of my loneliness I resented the fact that you had other things to sustain you: your work—architecture was more than just a job to you—and your music. I remained still a girl, unskilled and unschooled in exercising choice, with no creative or spiritual life. I was still at the mercy of decisions made by others on my behalf or at my expense. I didn’t understand why everyone else seemed to know what was good for me, and everyone else got to take the decisions. I had no power over my own life.
Towards the end of October I returned from work one evening and, letting myself in to the apartment on the Boulevard Haussman, I saw a letter addressed to me, forwarded by my mother from Smugglers Cottage. The handwriting was unfamiliar but the sender’s name on the back of the envelope was Charles Russell, with an address in Chicago. Clutching the letter to my chest I raced down the passage to my room and threw myself on the bed, ripping open the envelope. Perhaps he had seen you. Perhaps he had news of you.
Dear Liz,
Do you remember me? I’m Karl’s friend from London. I’m wondering if you can help me with Karl’s address. Somehow we lost contact shortly after we parted company in Europe earlier in the year, and now I cant find the San Francisco address he gave me. I really want to get in touch with him so could you drop me a line with the address please?
I hope you’re well and that you are finding the time until you leave for California is passing quickly.
Looking forward to hearing from you
Best wishes,
Charles Russell
The taste of disappointment was bitter in my mouth. So you had disappeared from Charles’ life too, by design or by mistake? But as I thought about my reply I began to wonder whether perhaps you were in touch with Charles, and perhaps this was a ploy, a way of sounding me out on your behalf. Even if the request was genuine it was possible that my reply might get back to you through Charles.
The next day I wrote a careful reply telling him that you had ended our relationship more than three months earlier.
‘I haven’t heard from Karl since then, Charles,’ I wrote. ‘To use a hackneyed phrase—it broke my heart.’ I enclosed the last postal address I had for you and wished him luck in his efforts to contact you. Perhaps my words would find their way back to you and in a few more weeks a letter from you would be lying waiting for me on the hall table.
But the weeks and the months passed and there was no news of you. You didn’t write, you didn’t come back and I knew that if there had been a second chance it had been that final telephone call and I had let it go. That if you had regrets, that if by any chance you did still love me then surely that last letter, that my parents made me write following your call, had finished it forever. And so from being an innocent victim of something I didn’t understand I had become the perpetrator of the final crime. I had listened to other voices and been deaf to my heart. Instead of trusting what I knew of you, I had trusted the people who thought they knew what was best for me, I had not been true to myself or to you. I had hammered the final nail into the coffin.
I saw you walking down that steep street in San Francisco away from me, as you had in my daydreams. But this time you did not stop and look back when I called. Now you walked on to stop for another girl who ran to you and took your hand and you walked on together, laughing and talking in the California sunshine. And slowly the tears froze to a solid block of ice and at some time I stopped waiting for yo
u to come back for me, and I knew it was really over. First love, lost love, sunk without trace somewhere across the miles.
***
So that is my story. A love story that began on a winter afternoon in north London and ended on a wet July morning in Sussex as commuters fumed in the endless stream of early traffic. It is a story that haunts me still. For as the decades passed I grew once again to believe that it was as I first thought. That from that first glance in Northumberland Crescent we had found something rare and precious, we had seen ourselves in each other. Older now and wiser, I no longer believe the things I was told. I believe in what we were and what we had. I will never know what went wrong and I lack the fortitude to try to find out.
I stored your letters and photographs in a box tied, of course, with blue ribbon. They were with me for almost twenty years, through two marriages and when they were lost in a tea chest that disappeared on the way to Australia your memory stayed sealed in my heart. You are always in the music you loved and the songs you played to me. You are in fragments of poetry and in the jewels of memory, in snatches of the past as clear as if they were yesterday. So often I’ve spotted you in someone else, a smile, a movement, an accent, a laugh, the turn of a head, a voice that pricks my ears, yours is the name that I whisper to myself. In a hundred thousand ways you have always been with me; you have dwelt always—a million unshed tears—in the ice block of my heart.
This is my story Karl. These are my questions. If we found ourselves alongside each other on that flight, as announcements were made and meals were served around us, as the plane climbed above the clouds, would you move your hand from the arm of the seat between us, would you take my hand in yours, lift it to your lips and kiss it once again?
Part Two