The Forever Girl

by Alexander McCall Smith

  “Good,” he had said. “That’s exactly the sort of thing you should be doing – something useful.”

  She had heard from James, who had called her unannounced shortly before her graduation and told her that he might be coming to Edinburgh a few days later and suggesting that they should see one another. She had agreed, and they had met in the same pub where they had met after the rugby match. This time it was worse. She had gone into the pub, looked around, and seen him sitting at a table with a girl. She had stopped and had been on the point of retreating when he saw her and waved. It was too late then, and she had to join them.

  The girl was from Glasgow, and had accompanied him to Edinburgh. Clover had been able to tell immediately that the meeting in the pub had not been the main aim of the trip, and James confirmed this.

  “We’ve got some friends over here,” he said. “They’ve bought a flat and are having a flat-warming party.”

  Her heart sank at the word we, the most devastating word for the lonely. “I see.”

  “Yes. I thought it would be good to take the chance to catch up with you. I realised that I hadn’t seen you for ages.”

  He was being his usual friendly self, she thought. He has always been nice to me – always.

  James turned to the girl beside him. “Clover and I go back a long time. One of my first friends, aren’t you, Clove?”

  The girl looked at her and smiled. But the smile, Clover could tell, was forced.

  “There’s nothing like old friends,” James continued. “There was Clover, me, and a guy called Ted.” He paused. “Ted says he’s going to France.”

  She nodded. “Yes. To teach English.”

  “Everybody does that,” said James. “Except me, I suppose. You know I’m going to Australia in two weeks’ time. Did I tell you?”

  Clover absorbed the news in silence. She felt quite empty within. There was nothing.

  “My folks are in a place called Ballarat – I think I mentioned that to you.”

  She nodded.

  “Anyway, I’ve decided that since I can get a work permit because my mother’s Australian and I’m going to be eligible for an Australian passport, I might as well do my training out there. I was going to one of the large international accountancy firms anyway, and they said they had no objection to my transferring my training contract to Australia. They have a branch in Melbourne. That’s where I’m going to do it.”

  Clover glanced at the girl. “What are you doing?”

  The girl shifted in her seat. “I’ve got a job in Glasgow. I work for the Clydesdale Bank.”

  “Shelley’s doing a banking traineeship,” said James.

  “So you’re not going to Australia,” said Clover.

  The question seemed to annoy Shelley. “No,” she said tersely. “I’ll go to visit James, though, won’t I, James?”

  It sounded to Clover like a territorial claim. “That’ll be nice,” she said.

  “Yes,” said James. “And you should come and see me there sometime too, Clover.”

  Shelley looked at her, and then looked quickly away.

  “Maybe I will,” said Clover.

  “I mean it,” said James. “You’ve got my e-mail address. Just let me know.”

  Shelley glanced at her watch. Clover noticed; she herself did not want to stay now.

  “I have to go soon,” she said.

  James seemed disappointed. “But you’ve just arrived.”

  “We have to keep an eye on the time too,” interjected Shelley. “Maddy and Steve said …”

  “Of course,” said James. He turned to Clover and smiled. “I wish we’d seen more of each other. I suppose that my being in Glasgow and you being here – well, somehow I hardly ever seemed to get that train.”

  She felt a wrench at her heart. It had been a mistake to see him, she felt. And now she was to say goodbye, which would be for the last time, she thought, as Australia was a long way away. She said to herself: I am about to say goodbye to the person I have loved all my life. I shall never see him again.

  She stood up.

  “Don’t go,” he said.

  “I have to,” she said. “Sorry.”

  She felt the tears well in her eyes; she did not want them to see – neither of them. She turned away. James stood up. “Clover …”

  She reached the door without turning back, and only gave a glance then, and a quick one. Shelley was saying something to James, and then she looked at her. Their eyes met across the floor of the pub, across the void.

  Her job became busier as the city filled with festival visitors. The streets around the delicatessen were lined with Victorian tenements, many of which during university term-time were occupied by students. During the summer months the tenants covered their rent by sub-letting to the waves of hopeful performers who came to Edinburgh for the Fringe, the rambunctious addon to the official festival, bringing with them shows that for the most part would be lost in the programme of several thousand events. Optimism sustained them; the hope of a review, of being spotted by somebody who counted, of being heard in the cacophony of a festival that opened its doors without audition and sent nobody away unheard – even if it was by audiences that sometimes numbered no more than one.

  She noticed the groups of Fringe performers drifting into the delicatessen, and spoke to some of those who chose to stay for coffee. The cast of a student Midsummer Night’s Dream, brought from a college in Indiana, came in each morning shortly before their ten o’clock rehearsals, to rub shoulders with a group of a capella singers from Iceland and a dance ensemble from Nicaragua. Their regular customers, those whose normal lives continued over the festival month, were accustomed to the annual invasion, and calmly purchased their cheese and cold meats against this polyglot backdrop. For Clover it meant long hours, but it was what she wanted. Ella was still in the flat, and so she had some company to go back to, but she now found herself slightly irritated by her flatmate’s laziness and failure to do her fair share of cleaning. For the first time since she had moved into the flat, she found herself wanting to move out, to get on with the next stage of her life.

  With most of her university friends away, she struggled with loneliness. She missed Padraig more than she imagined she would, and she wondered whether he would be feeling the same. Probably not, she decided. He had now taken up his scholarship and was in Florence. He sent her a photograph of himself standing beside the Arno – Me by the Arno, he wrote – and he sent her a copy of a piece he had written for the Irish Times on a minor Italian artist of the nineteen-twenties who had met James Joyce in Paris and disappeared the next day. “Some people get depressed by contact with greatness,” he wrote to Clover. “Some people get disheartened.”

  She was not sure whether the reference to being disheartened was personal. She did not think that he would miss her; not, she thought, when one could go and stand by the Arno. She toyed with the idea of writing to him and confessing that she missed him and wondered whether they had done the right thing in splitting up, but she decided that she would not. That would be going backwards, trying to prolong something that had come to a natural and not-too-upsetting end. She would meet somebody else, she decided. It was time. There were plenty of young men in Edinburgh; the Fringe seemed to bring them in their hundreds and surely one of them would be looking for somebody like her.

  “How do you get a new man?” she asked Ella one evening when she was cleaning up the breakfast plates that Ella had left unwashed.

  Ella laughed. “You joking?”

  “No, I’m not.”

  Ella shrugged. “How did you meet the last one?”

  “He came up to me and told me his name,” she said. “It was at a party.”

  “There you are. Parties.”

  “If you get invited to them. What if you don’t?”

  “Internet dating,” said Ella. “Haven’t you seen the figures? Apparently that’s where everybody meets these days. You go on an internet dating site and you say somethin
g such as ‘likes eating out’ or ‘into jazz’ or whatever, and then you get your replies. You take it from there.”

  Clover frowned. “I couldn’t. I just couldn’t.”

  “Then you’ll have to go to a pub or a coffee bar and sit around. Somebody will come and talk to you if you’re there long enough. It’s easy. All you have to do is look as if you’re looking for a man. Then they come to you. That’s the way it works.”

  “I couldn’t.”

  “Then you’re not going to get a new man, Clover.” She paused. “Do you really think you need one? Men can be overrated, you know. Okay, they may be useful for one or two things – sometimes – but not for the whole weekend.”

  They both laughed. Then Ella said, “But isn’t there one in the background? I thought there was some guy somewhere you were keen on. Didn’t you tell me once?”

  “There was,” said Clover. “Not any more.”

  “Is he with somebody else?”

  “Probably. Yes, I think he is.”

  Ella looked up at the ceiling. “Frankly I don’t think that’s always an obstacle – know what I mean?”

  “You mean: detach him?”

  “Exactly. Prise him away. Steal him.”

  “I couldn’t,” said Clover.

  “Then you’re never going to get a man, Clover. We’ll be old maids together. How about it? We can stay here until we’re fifty, bickering. We can go to the cinema and pilates classes together. We can talk about the men we knew a long time ago and about what happened to them.”

  “No thanks.”

  “Then you’re going to have to be more proactive. Steal him – the one you always liked.” She grinned. “Trap him. Or …”

  “Or what?”

  “Or spend the rest of your life regretting what you didn’t do. That’s how life is for lots of people, you know – it’s made up of things they failed to do because they were too …” And here she gave Clover a searching look. “They were too timid.”

  “Is that my problem?”

  “Could be. I’m going to say it once more: steal him, this … what’s his name?”

  “James.”

  “Sounds sexy,” said Ella. “Steal him.”

  She wrote to her father: “I know that you said I could use the money for anything – and I really appreciate that. But I thought I’d just check up with you, in case you thought that I was throwing your money around. Everything is sorted out for Nepal, but it’s not going to happen for a while yet – not until February, which still seems like a long way away – I’m counting the days. I’ve been working, as you know, in a delicatessen. It’s been quite busy recently but I’m enjoying it. They’re paying me just above minimum wage, which is not meanness on their part but because they’ve just started the business and they don’t have much money themselves. I don’t mind. What I earn there more than covers the rent for my room in the flat.

  “What I wanted to tell you is that I want to spend some of the money on a ticket to Australia. I want to go to Melbourne for a few weeks – maybe three, I think. I’ve met a girl here who’s with a drama company doing something on the Fringe – it seems like the whole world is here at the moment. She’s a member of a group called Two-Handed Theatre and they’re putting on a couple of plays at the Fringe. She’s invited me to come to see her in Melbourne when they go back there in a couple of weeks and I thought: I don’t get many invitations to Australia. So I thought I’d go. I can get a ticket through Singapore for under a thousand, and since you’ve been so generous I can afford it. But I didn’t want you to think I was being … what’s the word – profligate? Yes, profligate. Is that okay with you?”

  It was. David wrote back: “The whole point of a gap year is that you can do things you can’t do at any other stage in your life. Of course you should go to Australia. Going there has been on my list for years but I’ve never done it. And that’s another point to a gap year – it gives you the chance to do things that your parents would have liked to do but have never had the time to fit in. Like visiting Australia. Or Nepal. Or anywhere, really.”

  The invitation from Frieda, the Australian actress, had been repeated more than once and so Clover knew that it was not one of those casual “you must come and see me” invitations that nobody really intends to be taken seriously. Frieda had been coming in for morning coffee since Two-Handed Theatre had first arrived for their run on the Fringe, and Clover had engaged her in conversation. Frieda was seven or eight years older than she was, but she liked the Australian’s easy manner and enthusiasm; Edinburgh, said Frieda, was a box of chocolates that she intended to consume entirely before returning to Melbourne. Her attitude to her show also intrigued Clover; while most Fringe performers had about them an earnest intensity, founded, perhaps, on their conviction that their contribution to the Fringe was on the cusp of artistic greatness, Frieda was realistic. “We’re enjoying ourselves,” she said. “I’m not sure if the audience is, but we are.” And on her own ability: “I can’t really act, you know. I sort of play myself all the time but since the audience has never met me before they think I’m acting. It seems to work.”

  After the second invitation, Clover said, “I could come to Melbourne, you know.”

  “Great. Come.”

  “For a few weeks? If I came for a few weeks? Just to see the place.”

  This would have been the time for Frieda to claim to be too busy, to say that she was going to be elsewhere, but she did not. Instead, she suggested that Clover could stay in the converted fire station that she shared with five of her friends. “Contribute something to the rent, and you’re in. You get one shelf in a fridge. Not to sleep in, you know; you get a sort of cupboard for that, but it’s not bad. It’s quite a big cupboard. You don’t exactly get a bed – you get what used to be a bed and is now a sort of mattress on the floor of the cupboard. But as fire stations go, it’s not all that uncomfortable.”

  “It sounds irresistible. I’ll come.”

  Frieda seemed genuinely pleased. “I’ll show you round Melbourne. We may have a show on – you can help with front of house if you like.” She paused, looking around the delicatessen. “What about this job? Will they hold it for you?”

  Clover explained that it was not an issue, as she thought that the owners could manage without her or could easily enough find somebody else. And that proved to be the case.

  “It’s a relief,” the husband said.

  “It’s not that we don’t appreciate what you do,” the wife explained. “We do, but paying you is difficult. We just can’t manage any more. We’ll get somebody more part time.”

  She confirmed the ticket with the travel agent, arranging to arrive a couple of days after Frieda would have returned home.

  “One thing interests me,” said Frieda. “Why are you coming? Sorry to sound rude – and I’m really pleased that you’re doing it – it’s just that I wondered why.” She gestured to the street outside. “This place is so exciting. It’s like living on an opera set. Why Melbourne?”

  Clover hesitated. She had not admitted it to herself yet, and now she was being asked directly. If she found it easy enough to deceive herself, it was not so easy to deceive this new friend of hers, with her trusting openness.

  “There’s somebody I’d like to see there. I suppose that’s why.”

  Frieda smiled. “A boy?”

  Clover nodded.

  “I guessed as much,” said Frieda. “I thought there was something.”

  “But people can want to go to Melbourne for plenty of reasons.”

  “Oh yes,” said Frieda. “That’s true enough. But it wasn’t just the fact that you wanted to go to Melbourne. It’s something about you. There was something in your manner that made me think …”

  Clover waited for her to complete her sentence. She found the observation rather unsettling.

  “A certain – how shall I put it? Sadness. Yes, I think that’s it. You know, when I saw you first – here in this place, operating that cof
fee thing over there with all that steam and hissing and so on, I thought: that girl’s sad about something.”

  Clover looked away.

  “I’m sorry if this embarrasses you,” said Frieda. “I’ll shut up, if you like. We don’t like to hear about ourselves. Or at least most of us don’t. It disturbs our self-image because how other people see us is often wildly different from how we see ourselves.” She shuddered. “The truth can be a bit creepy, I think.”

  “I don’t know …”

  “Oh yes, it can be. Most of us have a persona we project to the outside world – it’s the part of us they see. And then there’s the bit behind that, which is the bit that remains with us when we turn the lights out. You know what it is? It’s what people used to call the soul. But now, we’re not meant to have souls.” She smiled. “It’s really old-fashioned to have a soul, Clover. But there’s this … this thing inside us that’s the core of what we are – what we are individually, that is. And in your case …”

  Clover waited. “In my case …”

  “In your case, that bit is sad. It’s sad because it’s incomplete. It’s seen something that it wants more than anything else in the world, and it can’t get it.” She paused. “Okay, I sound like a New Age freak going on about auras and so on. But it is there, you know. That sadness. I’m sorry, but it’s there.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Good. You’re admitting it. Plenty of people won’t.”

  “I don’t want to conceal anything from you.”

  “That’s good to hear. But listen Clover – this boy, tell me about him.”

  The owners were looking at her. Conversations with the customers were not discouraged, but there was work to be done.

  “I can’t now,” said Clover. “But there’s this boy I loved, you see. I’ve loved him ever since I was six, I think – or thereabouts.”

  Frieda beamed. “That’s really romantic. I just love that sort of story. Eternal love. Enduring love. It’s great. We need more of that. Roll it on. Roll it on.” Her smile faded. “But he …”