Revenge of the Middle-Aged Woman

Chapter Twelve

‘You don’t want to go there,’ said Ianthe, when I announced I was going to try for a place to read English at Oxford. Her lips pursed and her eyes grew cloudy with distress, as they frequently did the older and more independent I grew. She scented a dash for freedom. The Oxford idea presented a more serious, realizable threat than dreams of travelling through the Patagonian wilderness and deserts. ‘You don’t want to go there,’ she repeated. ‘Anyway, they don’t like girls, whatever Mr Rollinson tells you.’ She thought a bit further. ‘He shouldn’t put ideas into your head. They don’t take people like us.’

‘He’s giving me special classes. He thinks they’ll offer me a place.’

‘And what sort of job will you get at the end of it?’

At that moment I hated my mother, who was, as always, adept at slipping a knife under my shaky confidence and prising it loose. But I toughed it out. ‘Watch me,’ I said.

I was eighteen, so very nearly nineteen. On the first day of term, of my first year, Ianthe accompanied me on the coach, and we found ourselves by mistake outside Christ Church, not St Hilda’s. At the entrance, Ianthe took one look at the enfilade of courtyards and the confident architecture, and slapped down the cheap suitcase. ‘I’ll say goodbye here,’ she said. ‘You make your own way there. It’s best.’

As I kissed her, I tasted salt tears and caught the faint, elusive reminder of her lavender cologne. Ianthe grabbed me by the arm and, for a second or two longer, held me close. Then she pushed me away. ‘Go on,’ she said. ‘Enjoy your new life.’

What did my mother feel as she climbed back on to the coach and began the journey back to Pankhurst Parade, to issuing tickets and timetables in the travel agent’s? She left me with the burden of her apprehension and disapproval, but I often think about that neat, stubborn, retreating figure in the tweed coat. She might have believed that she had been shucked off like a nutshell. The womanly role finished. Or, maybe, she was free to retreat into her unhappiness, to explore it more fully.

‘My God,’ Hal Thorne was reported by Mazarine to have said when, a month later, he knocked me off my bicycle in the high street, ‘I’ve killed her.’

She also told me that Hal had behaved impeccably, placing me in the recovery position, summoning the police, detailing Mazarine, his passenger, to take the names of any witnesses. He was heroic in his actions and his guilt, she said, and knew it. The last was said with the light, glinting irony that Mazarine commanded.

Hal was a rotten driver, but not bad enough to kill me. I had not been aware of his white van snouting up behind me, and I did not hear the screech of the brakes, but even now I am plagued by a memory of throwing up my arms to defend myself before I plunged down.

There was another memory… of Hal sitting beside the gurney, rolling my tights into a ball, and of the low autumn sun, which shone through the window and invested him with a halo of light. Memory informs me that he placed the tights beside the neatly stacked pages of my essay on Donne and the bicycle lights, which had been retrieved from the accident.

Past and present swirled helplessly in my shocked, puzzled mind and I imagined I was back in the square at the via Elisabetta in Rome… for the strange, fair-haired man, so absorbed in tidying my possessions, seemed to my unreliable vision to possess the perfection of the stone youth who guarded the Barberini fountain.

I must have shifted, and my shocked bones cracked against each other. This made me groan and his head flicked up. ‘Hi.’ He leant over and took my hand gently, as if he knew how to handle people who were hurting. ‘I should be shot. It was my fault, and I’m afraid your bicycle is a write-off. You nearly were too.’

I registered that his accent was American and I made the mistake of frowning, which hurt. I whimpered, and he was quick with reassurance. ‘You have a cut on your head but it’s above the hairline, thank God, and you’re massively bruised. They’ve X-rayed you and nothing’s broken.’ His smile was clever, confident and enigmatic. ‘I haven’t destroyed your beauty, for which I would never have forgiven myself.’

Still only half conscious, I was bothered more by the idea of Death having brushed past me than any destruction of my possible beauty.

‘Are you an angel?’ It seemed sensible to check that I was not being addressed by one, preparatory to being ushered into a nether region.

‘If you want me to be one, I will be.’

‘Not yet, I hope.’

I fixed on the movement of his lips, the inclination of his head. Those figures in the fountains had brought with them the blare of tropical sun, the whiplash of polar cold, the rustle of savannah grasses and the silence of the desert – and one was here, holding my hand.

It began then.

Each day for a week, Hal visited me in hospital. A Rhodes scholar from the American Midwest studying archaeology and anthropology, he imported objects for me to look at as far removed from the trolleys and sluices of the Annie Brewer women’s ward as it was possible to be. A Tuareg blanket, a Naudet photograph of a nude woman as plump and pearly-skinned as a corn-fed chicken – all part of a strange convalescence.

On the last day I was in hospital, he arrived dressed in khaki fatigues with a red scarf wrapped round his neck and held up a piece of barbed wire. ‘An early example used by the American pioneers. It’s a collector’s item.’

My face was still bruised and swollen, and it hurt to talk. ‘People collect barbed wire?’

‘There’s a museum of it.’ He pressed it into my hands and the barbs, which had an unfamiliar configuration, bit into me. ‘The pioneers developed it to mark out the boundaries of the homesteads and farms.’

I imagined coils of barbed wire looping over the dry dust terrain. Inside the pale, there was a cackle of geese and hens, dogs, children, the smell of home baking, women in dusty pink prints and sun-bonnets, rough wooden furniture and a stoop of water. Outside in the wilderness were the watchful Red Indian, the buffalo, the slinking coyote and the prairie dog.

‘Don’t you mean defend? It’s an aggressive thing. That’s its point.’

‘Very funny,’ said Hal, and retrieved it. He paused. ‘Of course, property is theft.’

I lay back on the pillows. ‘You stole that line.’

With a swift movement, he bent down and smoothed the hot tangle of my hair. ‘Of course I did. We steal from each other all the time.’

Apparently Hal lived in a small, unheated house (the ferenghi ghetto), in the part of Oxford called Jericho, which he shared with two other Rhodes scholars and a couple of foreign-language students, one of whom was Mazarine. (Very chic, very BCBG,’ Hal said, in his amused way, ‘and I, on other the hand, am just a redneck hick.’ I had no idea what he was talking about, only that his knowledge and self-assurance were way beyond mine.)

The house was crowded, badly maintained by the landlord, uncomfortable – and magic. After the doctors released me from hospital, with the advice to keep out of the way of mad drivers, Hal collected me in the white van and we stopped there briefly before he took me out to dinner. ‘I want you to meet Mazarine, you will like her.’

How right he was. He had spotted that we were of a kind.

Hal kept a permanently packed rucksack in his room: water-bottle, day sack, all-seasons sleeping-bag, lightweight walking trousers and water-purifying tablets. He explained that it was ready to grab at a moment’s notice, when he could not bear being confined any longer. It was, he explained, necessary to him to have that readied rucksack.

He spoke rapidly, carelessly, with the confidence I craved for myself. Had he suckled it from his mother? ‘There, my golden-haired baby,’ she would have said, kissing him frantically, ‘no awkwardness for you. No doubts, no blunderings. Not if I can protect you.’ Or had Hal worked at it, chiselling away at the lumpen miseries of growing up?

Mazarine listened in to the rucksack explanation. Dressed in a black skirt and slenderly cut jumper, she was a great deal more knowing and sophisticated than any of the girls I had met in college. In heavily accented English, she said, ‘I should point out that he employs others to wash his socks… Don’t let him keep you up too late, you must be still weak.’

Hal bore me off to a Moroccan restaurant, which had recently opened on the outskirts of the city and, a novelty, was extremely popular. ‘It’s a very small way of saying sorry,’ he said, as he ushered me inside. It was crowded with students cherishing their drinks and rolling their own fags but, to my dazzled eyes, Hal stood out like a beacon.

He sat down opposite me, placed his hands on the Formica table top and studied me. ‘I could have done a lot worse. I like the blouse. Young ravishing beauty versus old clothes. Guess who comes off best in the contest. Even with bruises.’ He touched the one on my cheek.

I felt colour sneak into my face and fiddled with the lace on my cuff. Money was so short that I dressed more or less entirely in second-hand-shop pickings, and I was wearing a muslin blouse trimmed with lace. It was worn and soft, and held the faint suggestion of other lives. ‘If I had been an old lady, would I not have got dinner?’

‘Probably not. A nice bunch of carnations instead.’

‘I don’t like carnations.’

‘Pity. They have an interesting history. The name derives from the Arabic qaranful, a clove, by way of the Greek karpyhillon, the Latin caryophyllus, the Italian garofolo and the French giroflée but they are very English. You should like them.’

This was the first of many teases, but I was not going to let the point slide. I was still so unsure, so raw, so shakily unconfident, but I summoned my wits. ‘I wish to defend elderly ladies. You are discriminating on the grounds of age, which is no basis.’

The transformation from tease to steely seriousness was instant. ‘On the contrary. On the basis that anything, money, good luck, space on this planet, is finite you could argue that the old lady has had her share of fateful or important encounters and must not be greedy. On the other hand, by virtue of your age, you have not.’

Shocked I stared at him, only to be transfixed by the blue eyes. They reminded me of gentians in an alpine meadow, the rich blue of an Italian nobleman’s surcoat in a painting, the pure glassy resonance of a sapphire. ‘You don’t really believe that?’

‘What do you think?’

I swallowed. ‘I demand to be greedy’

‘Luckily it’s a long time, Rose, before you will be old. And me. But we must cultivate the right attitude to keep age at bay. Travel. Keep on the move.’

‘Poor old lady,’ I said, my heart as light and dancing as a feather. ‘Poor dinnerless old lady’

‘As it happens, she is done out of her dinner because you are here.’ Once again, that confident gentle hand traced the outline of my bruise. ‘Thank goodness.’

The helpless, unstoppable feelings that had been gathering inside me as I lay in hospital fused, ignited and burst into flame. Tentatively, I put up my hand. Our fingers met and the beat of my heart was as loud as a drum.

Hal dropped his and picked up the menu. ‘Chicken tagine?’ He made it sound impossibly exotic.

Half-way through the meal, he put down his knife and fork. ‘I’m falling in love with you, Rose. Isn’t that funny?’

I shivered.

Hal was often away on a dig and, with her firm intellectual grasp on life, Mazarine approved. ‘Pain is essential,’ she argued, ‘or how do we recognize the opposite?’

It was, I pointed out, a position argued from innocence, for at that point no pain had touched the clever and lovely Mazarine. Surely the validity of the argument rested in the experience of it. ‘Poof,’ she said.

Apart from a troubling stiffness in one hip, I recovered quickly from the accident. The addition of love and adrenaline to the blood coursing through the veins proved a great healer. In one respect, the stiff hip was a godsend, for I had plenty of time to work during the next two terms. ‘This is a student knocking at the door of a first,’ wrote my happy tutor at the end of the summer term. ‘Let us see if she can knock it down.’

Hal was so considerate about my injuries. He fussed over them, called taxis, kept me warm, and made me feel that no other woman existed on this earth. ‘I’ll will you better,’ he said. ‘Then we can concentrate on us.’

That was in character. He never asked questions – he was not interested in my past. Nor was he interested in telling me his. It doesn’t matter who or what we have been, he said, it’s the now that matters.

How true that was. The sun had never been so bright, the sky so blue. My body was weightless, throbbing, never satiated. I was filled with insane joy and thankfulness, touched with awe that this had happened to me.

He was the stranger who came from other lands; he was the other for whom I had been searching.

On the last day of the summer term, we walked by the river in the botanical gardens; its watery rush sounded above the traffic. The sky had thrown off a half-veil of cloud and the smell of earth after rain pricked sweetly at my nostrils. I pinched a stalk of lavender in the flowerbed between my fingers.

Hal grinned. ‘Lavandus,’ he said wickedly, ‘from the Latin, to be washed. The Romans washed in it.’

I seized his hand and plunged it into the purple-blue blooms, and the leaves released their fragrance. I pressed his fingers to my face and inhaled. ‘I am bathed in you.’

Abruptly, he pulled me to him and kissed me. ‘Lovely Rose,’ he murmured. ‘What would I do without you?’

The next day when I had packed and was ready to leave, I phoned the house. ‘Darling,’ Mazarine sounded concerned, ‘he’s left this morning, with the rucksack.’

I felt a chill go through me. ‘Is there any message?’

‘No. I thought you would know’

‘See?’ said Ianthe, when I arrived back at Pankhurst Parade, shaking and tearstained. ‘I told you that you would come to no good.’

Hal was gone for three weeks, during which I was driven to the edge, and went over and over what had gone wrong. Why? I questioned everything: my mind, my body, my sexual inexperience, which Hal had thought so touching. I tried to identify where I had failed him, where I had failed, where I had erred and why he would leave me without a word.

Three weeks later, I opened the front door and there was Hal. He looked tanned and fit, but in need of a shower and with every finger wrapped in Elastoplast. ‘Get your boots on, we’re off to Cornwall.’

Between speechlessness and laughter, I demanded, ‘Where’ve you been? I had no -’

He was genuinely surprised. ‘Didn’t I tell you? I was on a dig up north. Roman.’

I felt myself turning white with rage. ‘No, you did not. Why didn’t you tell me?’

‘I’m here now so it’s all right, isn’t it?’

‘Go away’

He inserted a foot into the door. ‘I’ve bought you a rucksack. A good one.’

Despite his winningly phrased plea that, as an ignorant American, he wanted to see as much as possible of this island and only Rose could show him, Ianthe disapproved of his carrying me off. Girls did not go jaunting around the countryside as if they were already married. But I was past caring, and I left her standing on the doorstep with a face like thunder.

When I returned, I had a pink glow in my cheeks, my feet had toughened, my hip had healed and I had grown used to the sound of the sea. I told Ianthe of Penzance, Marazion, Helston, St Mawes… of how we walked the coastal path, observing how the rockscape changed from granite to slate, and how, in the evenings, we sat in pubs, drank beer and cider and ate fish and chips. Of course I did not tell her of the nights, white and violet nights, when I unwrapped the Elastoplast from his battered fingers and, one by one, kissed the wounds made by the hammer and chisel. Or of how he turned me this way and that until I thought I would die, not of pleasure but of love.

It was not a light thing. I was not reinventing myself as the good-time liberated girl. I wanted to step into something serious. I did not want those extraordinary feelings to come and go, like birds wheeling and taking flight over a cornfield. I wanted Hal to imprint himself on me, and I on him. I wanted our affair to have weight and depth, and I wanted to move knowingly from a state of innocence into the unfamiliar abandon that surged through every nerve end, powered every heartbeat.

At Fowey, we had turned on to the Saint’s Way, which went up to Padstow, a cross-country route of thirty miles or so. ‘The route of the Bronze Age traders and missionaries from Wales and Ireland.’

We looked at the churches with their grey headstones, the epitaphs to drownings, plagues and early death, and I thought, We should not be deceived: the Celt still rules here and this is a country of fire and passion.

At Port Isaac, the route took us north and the terrain became more demanding. Every so often, Hal called a halt to rub my back where the straps bit into it, but we made good progress. At last, we rounded the corner and stopped.

The sea roared below us, and seagulls coasted on thermals. Before us rose monumental black cliffs and, high up on them, the remnants of salt-lashed walls. These were the ruins of Tintagel.

I slipped off my rucksack and sank down. The turf was hard and springy, my lips and skin were salty and I was tired. Hal hunkered down beside me. ‘This is the first of many journeys, I hope.’

‘So do I,’ I said.

Hal folded his arms around his bent knees and talked about climbing mountains, traversing deserts and finding the valley where hard apricots were harvested and soaked in spring water.

The sea ran up the beach, indifferent and careless. Suddenly I was cold. I thought of Ianthe’s scones on a blue and white plate and of a fire burning in a grate and how far they would be from the valley where the hard apricots grew

Later, huddled behind a rock on the beach, we ate our sandwiches and told stories about the castle.

Treading carefully over the slate and past the rock pools, the pregnant Queen Ygrayne would have wrapped her fur-lined cloak around her swollen body and entered Tintagel, the door clanging shut behind her. As she went upstairs and prepared to give birth to a son called Arthur, she would have given thanks for refuge from the violence that had killed her husband.

And here too, at another time, high up where the seagulls flew past the arched windows, King Mark installed his wife, Iseult, of the hand’s-span waist, to reign over the cliff and the sea. Here, too, a young knight halted to pay homage to the king. His name was Tristan.

‘These are not happy stories,’ I pointed out to Hal. ‘A mother left alone. A husband abandoned. Lovers who die.’

Hal’s arms tightened around me. Through his jacket, I could hear his heart beating.