The Forever Girl

by Alexander McCall Smith

  She left the kitchen and made her way towards the front door. This was the reason she had made this journey, and now those thousands of miles were culminating in a few short steps.

  He stood there, smiling at her, and then stepped forward to embrace her. She closed her eyes, and felt the dryness of his cheek against hers. She was suddenly afraid that she might cry; afraid that the pent-up emotion within her would break its bounds. But those bounds had been long in place, and well founded, as are the defences behind which any concealed love must shelter. Lifetimes might be spent in tending such ramparts; and have been.

  Later, she could not recall what he had said to her and she to him in those first few minutes. There had been an enquiry about her journey, and remarks about Melbourne. He had just seen something in the street outside, but she paid no attention to what he told her about it: a poster that amused him, or triggered some memory that he thought she might share. All that she was aware of was that she was in his presence; that he was real, he was there in the flesh, and that she had not been mistaken in her feelings about him.

  She introduced him to Frieda, who looked at him from under her eyelids, her head slightly lowered, in that rather unusual and disconcerting manner that she had noticed before. But if he was taken aback by this scrutiny, he did not show it, and the two of them moved immediately into the relaxed, good-natured banter that the Australians excel at; an assumption of good will, a default position based on the understanding that there was enough for everybody – enough of whatever it was that people needed: space, food, the chance to make something of life.

  She could tell that James liked Frieda, and for a moment she felt a twinge of jealousy as he quizzed her about her acting. He had seen her, he said, on television a few weeks ago in an episode of a serial to which his flatmate was addicted, and the recognition pleased her. It had been a small part, she said, but had paid well, as banal roles could do.

  “If you’re going to be boring,” she said, “you might as well be well paid for it.”

  James turned to Clover and asked her about her plans.

  “You should stay longer out here,” he said. “You’d like it.”

  “Yes,” said Frieda. “Stay longer.”

  Automatically – and foolishly, she later decided – Clover explained that it was a brief trip and that she had to get to the next stage in her journey. She said this as part of the pretence that she had not come to see James.

  “Where?” he asked.

  Again she spoke without thinking; her return journey would be through Singapore, but it was only for a change of plane.

  “Singapore,” she said.

  James looked puzzled. “Why there?”

  “There’s a friend,” she said. “I knew her in Cayman, ages ago; and in Edinburgh too. Judy. She has an apartment in Singapore and I thought I’d spend a bit of time with her. She said that she might be able to get me a job doing something or other. Just for a few months.”

  “Difficult,” said James. “You can’t just pick up a work permit there.”

  Clover was vague. “She didn’t say …”

  They were joined by Frieda’s two flatmates who had been invited to the dinner. Like Frieda, they were both actors, although one, Chris, was about to give up in despair after his last television role, his first for three months, had been as a parking attendant with one thing to say, which was thank you.

  “I did it so expressively,” he said. “I put my soul into it.”

  Frieda shrugged. “The theatre – what can one say?”

  Chris said, “Thank you – which is what I said.”

  The two flatmates did not stay beyond the end of the meal. Frieda cleared up. “So James,” she said as she took his empty plate. “You’re pleased to see your friend?”

  If he was surprised by the question, he did not reveal it. “Of course.”

  Clover squirmed.

  Frieda seemed impervious. “And you, Clover?”

  Her response was muttered. “Yes.”

  Frieda continued breezily. “You two go back a long way, don’t you?”

  Clover winced.

  “Well you do, don’t you?” persisted Frieda.

  “To six, or thereabouts,” said James. “Don’t we, Clove?”

  “Yes.”

  Frieda smiled. “Destiny,” she muttered. “Childhood sweethearts.”

  James laughed. “Not really. More like friends.”

  Frieda waved a hand in the air. “Friends make the best sweethearts.”

  Clover glared at her, but Frieda was looking at James. He seemed to hesitate, and then, looking at his watch, said that since he had to be at work early the next morning, he would have to think of getting home. “I’m going down to Adelaide for the next four weeks,” he said. “An audit. It’s really dull.” He looked at Clover apologetically. “It’s bad timing, I’m afraid. Next time, I hope I’ll be able to show you the town. And why not bring Padraig?”

  She felt empty.

  “Padraig’s in Italy,” she said. “And we …”

  She would have gone on to say that she was no longer seeing Padraig, but James had risen to his feet and had begun to thank Frieda for the meal. Then he bent and kissed Clover on the cheek.

  “Write to me,” he said. “I like getting e-mails from you.”

  Frieda saw him to the door and when she returned to the kitchen she found Clover in tears.

  “I did my best, Clover. But what more can I do? I gave you every chance in the book.”

  Clover looked away. “I don’t care. Just leave me alone please.”

  Frieda sought to defend herself. “You can hardly blame me. You should have told him about Padraig, and what did you say? Just something about Italy. How pathetic!” She shook her head. “I despair of you, you know. I completely despair. You say that you want him, but you know what I think? You don’t. Not really.”

  31

  She left the Old Fire Station two days later, in spite of Frieda’s apologies, that came the next day: I always, always, always put my feet in things; I’m really sorry, Clover; you have every right to be cross with me, my God, I know that. She made light of these, and told Frieda how grateful she was for giving her somewhere to stay, but she felt restless, and her restlessness was not helped by the irritation she felt over her older friend’s ways – her over-statements and her extravagant way of speaking. The cupboard itself seemed less attractive now, and following up an advertisement in a give-away newspaper she found a room in a flat that the other tenants were happy to let her take for a few weeks. With James away, she had no real reason to be in Melbourne, but she somehow lacked the will to do the obvious thing and leave for a backpacking trip. She found herself brooding over her evening with James and how, before it had begun to go wrong, it seemed to be going so well. He had looked at her with fondness in his eyes – she was sure of that – and her recollection of what he had said – in so far as it went – was encouraging. If only she had been by herself, without Frieda, and her obvious, ham-fisted hints, she might have been able to convey to him what she had so long wanted to tell him but had found impossible.

  There were moments of complete clarity when her situation presented itself to her realistically, just as she knew it to be. At such times – moments that came without warning when she was sitting in a coffee bar, browsing in a bookshop, or simply lying in bed looking at the ceiling – she understood exactly what she was: a young woman of twenty-two, who had been given every advantage, who had everything she needed in a material sense, who had parents who loved and supported her, who had never been obliged to struggle for anything or work against the odds. All of that she knew – and did not take for granted – but she was more than that young woman; she was also somebody who did not have the one thing she wanted in life and now, in such moments, understood and accepted that she might never get it.

  At such moments, along with this self-understanding, there came an awareness – and acceptance – of what she had to do next. She had
to wait out her remaining few days in Melbourne and then return to Scotland. She had to try to get her old job back – or something like it – and then in due course go off for the rest of her gap year. There was Nepal, and that school somewhere that she would help to build. Then she had to find a proper job, support herself, meet somebody else, and start leading the life that everybody else seemed to be prepared to lead without constantly hankering after something that was not to be. That was the plan, and as she marked time in Melbourne, it even began to have an aura of desirability about it. The rest of my life, she thought. The rest of my life.

  But then James came to her in her dreams – not once or even occasionally, but every night, or so it seemed. He was just there – entering a room in which she found herself – a room that was somewhere geographically vague: not quite in Scotland, nor in Cayman, but somewhere in between. One night, in that dream that precedes wakefulness – the one that remains, if only for a few seconds, in memory – she was in Australia, because that was how it felt, and she was with James outside a house with a silver tin roof, and there were swaying eucalyptus trees behind the house, and he gestured to her that they should go in. She took his hand, and he let her place it against her cheek, and she kissed it, and he said: Of course, Clover; of course, and then was suddenly not there any more and she felt a great sense of having seen something that she had never seen before, of having been vouchsafed a vision of sorts, as a religious person might see an angel in the garden, or a child an imaginary friend. The house with its silver roof, of course, was love; she had read enough pop psychology to understand that.

  She woke up and stared at the still darkened ceiling, and it seemed to her that James had really been in the room with her and had somehow sanctified it by his presence. Which is what he does, she thought. James makes everything whole for me. She thought that, and allowed the words to echo in her head, luxuriating in them; then she turned and closed her eyes for sleep again, if it would come, so that she might return to the dream in which he had been present. She hugged herself, imagining that her hands were his, but then let go, almost guiltily, struck by sheer embarrassment at the thought that she was one of those people who must rely on the embrace of an imaginary lover. She thought of Padraig, again with guilt, and asked herself whether he had meant anything to her. Had she treated him badly by allowing him to think that she loved him when all along she had only ever loved one person, and it was not him? Or had they both been a temporary solution for each other – an equal bargain between adults, a perfectly adequate way of filling an absence; in her case for the boy she remembered and in his case for the girl he hoped might one day come into his life. She had always known that he had such an idea; she had seen him glance on occasion at some girl and had said to herself, with the satisfaction of one who detects a clue to some mystery or conundrum, So that’s his type; so different from her – self-possessed types, with hair swept back, and the confident poise that went with their education at south of England boarding schools. Their cool Englishness was the polar opposite of Irishness, and yet he obviously liked them. Yes, for all his advice to her not to live in thrall to an impossible love, Padraig had been doing exactly the same thing himself.

  The thought occurred to her that perhaps most of us were like that; perhaps it was common to live with an image in our minds of what might be, of what we truly deserved if only the world were differently organised – in a way that gave proper recognition to our claims. So the lowest paid imagined the sumptuous life of the banker, the lame envisaged what it must be like to be athletic, the lonely closed their eyes and saw themselves surrounded by friends. We might all cope with a dissonance between real and unreal simply by making do, simply by admitting to ourselves that dreams are just that – dreams. Perhaps the real danger was to think that the thing you felt you deserved could really be achieved. And yet it was also possible that you could get what you really wanted, if you simply took it when it presented itself. She had come across a poem by Robert Graves that put it rather well; a poem called “A Pinch of Salt” about the bird of love, who came sudden and unbidden, who had to be clutched by the hand in which he landed, clutched and held tight lest he fly away. That had struck her as being true, and yet she had not done what the poet said you should do, and so the warning implicit in the poem, the warning of loss, applied to her.

  She got on well with her temporary flatmates whose uncomplicated ambition, as far as she could ascertain, was to have fun. They were two young women and one young man. One of the women was an architectural student, and the other was marking time before going off on a working holiday to London. The young man, Greg, who was loosely connected with one of the women in a way which Clover could not quite understand – he was an ex-boyfriend, she thought – worked as a copywriter in an advertising agency and had ambitions to be a novelist. The social life of these three consisted in endless outings to bars and restaurants, and they were happy for Clover to tag along with them. She did so, and met their friends, who were doing much the same thing as them, and accepted her with the same readiness that they seemed to accept everybody else. “Success,” pronounced one of these friends, “is being able to eat out every night. Every night. 7/7.” She thought he might believe it, even if he said it with a smile.

  Greg flirted with her – mildly and with a certain wry humour – and she responded. But when he came to her room one evening after they had been in a bar together and said pointedly how lonely he found Melbourne and the worst thing was loneliness at night, she could not bring herself to an involvement that she knew would be short-lived and mechanical.

  “I’m in love with somebody else, Greg,” she said. “It’s not that I don’t like you. I do. It’s just that I’ve loved somebody else for a long time and I can’t …”

  “It’s just sex,” he said. “That’s all.”

  She laughed at this, partly to defuse a potentially awkward situation, but also partly because what he had said struck her as being so completely wrong – not wrong in any moral sense, but in the sense of being psychologically reductive. Sex was not just sex; it was everything. It was … She faltered. It was James.

  “I’m sorry, Greg.”

  “No need to apologise. Should we watch a DVD instead?”

  “It’s just a movie,” she said. “That’s all.”

  He nodded his agreement. “DVDs are better than sex. Everybody knows that. Or at least everybody who’s not getting any sex.”

  They watched together, and at the end she took his hand in a friendly, unthreatening way, and patted it. He grinned at her. “I’m glad you said no,” he said. “I’m glad you’re faithful.”

  She smiled at his tribute. More faithful than you can imagine, she thought.

  “I’m going to miss you when you go next week,” he said. “I’ve enjoyed having you around.”

  “Would you mind if I stayed a bit longer?”

  She had not thought it through, but suddenly she did not want to go. James was in Melbourne – or would be – and she did not want to leave the place where he was; it was as simple as that.

  “No, of course we wouldn’t mind. Aly and Joy will be fine. They like having you here too.”

  Now the rest of her inchoate idea came to her. She would change her ticket for a later departure – her particular fare would allow for one change – and she would stay in Australia without telling James. She did not want him to know. She would allow herself a final … she struggled with the period, and decided it would be a month. She would have a final month and then she would begin to do what she knew she should have done all along: she would begin to forget. And in that final month she would allow herself just a few glimpses of him. That was all. She had his address now, and could see him on the street. She could watch him coming out of his flat. It would be saying goodbye from a distance, slowly, as goodbye used to be said when you could actually see people leaving; when they left by trains that moved slowly out of stations, or by ships that were nudged gently away from piers still l
inked by paper streamers; or when people simply walked away and you could see them going down paths until they were a dot in the distance before being swallowed up by a world that was then so much larger. It was only watching; that was all. It was definitely not stalking. Stalking was something quite different; that was watching somebody else with hostile intent or with an ulterior motive. She had no such thing; she loved James, and that was what made it different; she was not going to make any demands of him. How could she?

  James, of course, would think that she had gone on to Singapore to stay with Judy, and it would complicate matters to have him think differently; more than that, it would be impossible to explain what she was doing. She would write to him as if from Singapore, and in this way she could keep some contact; again, there was no harm done in writing to somebody. There was e-mail. You can’t tell where e-mails come from, she thought; in a sense they conferred a limitless freedom, for they came from somewhere that could just as easily be Singapore as it could be Melbourne.

  She told Greg. She had not planned to, but at the time it seemed right, and it helped her too. They were in the kitchen together and had shared half a bottle of wine. She felt mellow, and in a mood for confession. The disclosure made her feel less anxious, less burdened.

  Once she had stopped speaking he looked at her in astonishment, and she wondered whether she would regret what she had just said. Her story, she knew, must sound absurd to others, and it was absurd. But then we are absurd when you come to think of it, she thought; we are absurd, every one of us, with our hopes and struggles and our tiny human lives that we thought mattered so much but were of such little real consequence. Think of yourself in space, as a tiny dot of consciousness in the Milky Way, one of the teachers at Strathearn had said. It puts you in perspective, doesn’t it?

  Greg’s look of astonishment changed to one of puzzlement.