Encounters

by Barbara Erskine

  ‘Are you going out to Lady Bird later?’ I asked casually as a new round of drinks arrived.

  Gill nodded.

  ‘Oh God,’ I said.

  Alec looked at me. ‘Are you OK?’ he asked.

  I smiled. ‘Too much to drink,’ I said and I ran for the door.

  He caught me up in the churchyard. I wasn’t being sick. I was trying to break into the church.

  In the end I had to confess. He laughed and kissed me. ‘Pat never liked it here; and I haven’t seen her for weeks,’ he lied, but nicely. ‘You know, Zoë, I was missing you. I’m glad you thought I was worth fighting for.’

  He helped me hump the bag back to the quay. The tide had dropped and he had to kneel to reach their dinghy. As he was lowering the heavy bag the rope that held it must have slipped. It fell gently into the dark water, floated for a second and then disappeared.

  Harry must have been close behind us and he must have wondered what we were up to as we struggled, horrified, to our feet, but he just grinned. ‘We’re off now,’ he said, helping Gill into the dinghy. Then he piled their luggage in around her. They seemed to have rather a lot.

  Alec and I stood speechless, watching. Then as Harry reached for the oars Gill turned and smiled at Alec.

  ‘By the way,’ she called, ‘that charming friend of yours, Patricia, has been here all week waiting for you. She couldn’t get into your boat, so we said she could stay in Lady Bird as we weren’t there. I hope she’s left it tidy,’ and she raised her hand as they rowed away.

  Milestones

  It was a stupid place to meet. Why had they chosen it? The enormous soft sofa so discreetly placed beneath walls hung with dark damasks was too deep for her; she knew it before she sat down. Either she would have to perch on the edge, nervily uncomfortable, or she would have to sit so far back that her legs would stick out in front like a child’s. She stifled a nervous giggle and glanced around. On the far side of the hotel lounge, acres of ankle deep pile away, another woman had solved the problem by reclining elegantly sideways. In her hand she held a martini, her glossy fingernails displayed talon-like round the glass.

  With a slight shock Elizabeth realized the waiter was now standing, obsequiously patient, in front of her, the white napkin as stiff on his arm as his paper shirt front. His face was carefully bland, though she was sure he had noticed her suppressed hilarity. She was going to order, automatically, a pot of tea. Then she checked herself.

  ‘Champagne cocktail,’ she commanded and defiantly she sat down, drew up her legs and crossed her ankles on the cushions.

  ‘Very well, madam.’ He bowed and amazingly he disappeared registering neither amazement nor disapproval. Perhaps respectable middle aged females put their feet up on his sofas at teatime every day and ordered champagne.

  Then she saw him. He was standing on the far side of the room. Only just in time she prevented herself from jumping to her feet. She pretended not to notice him, reaching for a copy of Vogue from the glass-topped table in front of her, opening it nonchalantly, glancing at the glossy improbable women who prowled across its pages.

  The waiter arrived with her drink and she brought it behind the magazine with her. Why wasn’t he coming over? Had he changed his mind? Could it be that he didn’t recognize her? Covertly she glanced round a double page spread of exotically languorous net clad legs and watched him.

  He was undoubtedly the handsomest man she had ever seen. Tall, tanned; middle-aged undeniably, but without an ounce of surplus weight on his frame; green eyed, fair-haired – not enough white yet to touch the gold – with the bearing of a soldier as he stood there, his hands clasped behind him, scanning the room. Unbelievably he hadn’t seen her. She saw his gaze flicker over the martini drinker, halt and return taking in, Elizabeth saw, those bloody talons and also undoubtedly the plunging breast-line of her dress. After a moment the woman was dismissed and his gaze began methodically to travel once again. Slowly it was coming towards her.

  With an unexpected, almost fearful tremor of excitement somewhere just below her diaphragm Elizabeth slowly lowered her magazine and waited.

  She had been a girl of seventeen, small, slim, a little too leggy perhaps to be pretty but with a mass of untameable auburn hair which carried only reluctantly and for the shortest time her studied attempts at the styles of the latest film stars, and she had been brown, brown from the sun and wiry with the farm work at which she was as good any day as the two land girls she worked beside; better, grandfather often said. And sometimes she had been glad to get away from the girls and from her grandparents and from the farm, up to the north woods on her own, watching the sunlight dapple through the leaves onto the soft beech mast and there she would retreat into a world which school had so recently opened to her and which the sudden irrevocable necessity of leaving had so abruptly closed. Sometimes it was Wordsworth or Byron, but most often it was Keats she had carried in the pocket of her dungarees, the flimsy edition in the cardboard leather covers which she had sneaked from the bookcase in the cold locked dining room. She would sit, leaning against the five hundred-year-old oak by Hereward’s Pond, and recite the lines to herself slowly, fixing them in her mind. Sometimes the words had come aloud and the trees had mocked her embarrassment and dared her to repeat them more loudly still until in the end she had done so, proud of her gentle expressive voice in the echo of the deserted forests all around her.

  He had been sitting on the other side of the water, his khaki uniform a perfect camouflage in the duns and shadows of the clearing and she would never have known he was there.

  I cannot see what flowers are at my feet

  Nor what soft incense hangs upon the boughs …

  she had intoned slowly to the trees, her eyes filling with tears as she felt the beauty of the words and quietly, across the pond another voice had taken up the verse:

  White hawthorn and the pastoral eglantine

  Fast fading violets covered up in leaves …

  And the coming musk rose full of dewy wine …

  She sat up, scarlet-faced and saw a young man climb reluctantly from the shelter of the trees, brushing the dried leaves from his uniform. He walked towards her round the pond, stopping only when they were close enough to see one another’s faces.

  ‘We learned that one at school; I think I got it right,’ he had said, and then, awkwardly, ‘sorry, I shouldn’t have intruded.’

  She blinked away her tears and smiled. ‘It doesn’t matter.’

  ‘It does. You were crying.’ Closer now, she saw how young he was. Not much older than she, but still old enough to be in and to have lieutenant’s pips on his arm. And because he was there and because he had caught her crying, she had told him everything. How her father had died at Comines just before Dunkirk and how her mother was a VAD in London and how she ached sometimes with the unhappiness and the unbearable beauty of life, and he had understood. And he had walked her slowly back to the farm at last as the time for milking drew near and by then she was laughing. At the gate she turned and looked up at his face. ‘You didn’t tell me your name,’ she said quietly.

  ‘Hugh,’ he said. Touching her hand lightly with his own, there on the top of the sun-warmed five barred gate, he winked and turned away.

  She watched him until he was out of sight in the lane and then she walked slowly to the farmhouse door.

  She went on going to Hereward’s Pond but she never saw him there again and slowly hope of doing so died. Perhaps he had been a dryad of the woods himself, conjured out of her imagination. Then, one day walking round the market, her grandmother’s basket on her arm, she heard her name called and it was he. His face now was more tanned than ever hers had been and his blond hair was bleached almost white. His grin was the same though, warm and infectious.

  She did not ask him where he had been or how long a leave he had this time. She lived for the moment, savouring his company. Ten days later he was gone again.

  Everyone assumed they would marry. She assumed
it herself, clinging in his arms below the stars, feeling the warmth of his skin through his shirt. She did not know why he did not ask her and it was not a subject she could raise herself. Nor did she let her grandfather or grandmother mention the matter on the rare occasions he sat down at their long table under the blackened farmhouse beams.

  The last time she saw him was on a beautiful autumn evening in 1943 when he gave her, for no reason that she understood then, a bracelet, a gold charm bracelet, clipping the links around her wrist himself, raising her hand and kissing her palm and then for a moment holding her hand tightly in his. Only when he had gone did she have the chance to examine the charms. There were four: a silver threepenny bit, set in gold; a St Christopher; a tiny cat and a fish made from little links so that it lay, limply realistic, across her finger, its scales glinting like frost-touched leaves in the sunlight. When she looked up again her eyes were full of tears.

  Two years later she married and moved away from the farm. Her husband was an architect and when he joined a partnership in London they moved to Holland Park.

  In her heart she had never believed that Hugh was dead and yet she knew that had he lived he would have come back to her; two years was a long time to wait to a girl who had been barely nineteen when they had kissed goodbye that last lingering time; a lifetime to wait and a lifetime to mourn.

  Gareth was a strange choice; a prickly difficult man who felt the world against him and the war a personal affront to his plans. But he loved her and she, receptive, lonely and romantic, saw him as some sort of crippled god who with her care and adoration would rise again to Olympian heights. Holland Park was the first step on that ladder.

  Fourteen months after the marriage Michael was born and Gareth brought her a tiny golden cherub to go on her bracelet. She had, after they were married, told him a little about Hugh, partly because she needed still to say his name out loud to ease the pain of his going, partly because there had been so little there to make Gareth jealous; just a romantic dream and a bracelet with all the links, but four, empty. It touched her that Gareth was sensitive enough never to try to buy charms for the bracelet in his own name, only in those of her children who were part of herself and through her of Hugh.

  Michael was followed a year later by the twins Margaret and Alexandra and two years after that by Colin; Colin, the only one to take after Gareth in every way – a haunted, unhappy child, sensitive to every nuance of life, suspecting always its worst conspiracy against him, clinging to his mother, jealous of his brother, resentful of his sisters but not, as his father was, clever enough to temper his torments with the fulfilment of a creative drive.

  And yet strangely Elizabeth saw in him the reflection of herself and recalled through him, after years of forgetfulness, the agonies and beauties of growing up to feel in the very core of one’s being the anguish of the world’s pain.

  She had never been unhappy with Gareth. Perplexed, often; numbed a little more each day by the repeated need to extinguish herself in the need to tend constantly the fire of his demands; tired, frustrated; but she had learned too, not because she wanted it that way, but because that was the way it happened, to live vicariously through her children.

  Their careers were predictable. Michael did well at school and went on to university, a stable, handsome, charming boy. The girls both went horse mad and Mags, who cared little for learning, left school early and became a lad at a racing stable, while Sandy, who though not as clever as her brother was something of a plodder, vowed at the age of five to become a vet and twenty years later was in her final year at veterinary college, having looked neither to the right nor to the left of her chosen career.

  Colin had followed his father and elder brother to Harrow. Two years later he ran away. Two more schools followed in quick succession. From the first he fled; from the second he was expelled for smoking cannabis and it was then that Gareth, taut, neurotic, consuming forty cigarettes a day, announced that his patience was at last at an end and withdrew all financial support.

  Colin, and through him Elizabeth, reeled under the blow, unable to understand either his crime or the withdrawal, as he saw it, of love, and Elizabeth was powerless to help him. She had no money of her own to give. Her intercessionary powers with Gareth had grown fewer as his inner tensions had increased and the other three children closed ranks as siblings do against the outcast, sensing in him perhaps the cuckoo who given any chance at all would a long time ago have humped each of them over the rim of the nest.

  And so he had drifted away. Elizabeth saw him sometimes and he rang her from time to time when he knew she would be alone – which was often now. Once or twice she dreamed about him; hard, unpleasant dreams which frightened her and left her in the morning with a splitting headache and a sense of doom not-quite-perceived around the corner of her consciousness, but there was no way of checking that he was all right and slowly she would forget the dream. Even when she had neither seen nor heard of him for several weeks, long schooled to silent waiting by his scorn when quite young when she had rung, worried, around his friends, she would resist now the urge to flap. They would, Gareth callously assured her, hear soon enough if anything happened to the boy. Colin was not one to submerge himself in anonymity should extremis come upon him. Elizabeth’s worries about drugs she kept to herself. She knew Gareth’s views and she had no wish to hear them attached to their son.

  Time passed. Slowly the other children grew away. Sandy qualified and went to join a practice in Herefordshire, Michael married and Mags moved slowly from stud farm to stud farm around Newmarket, coming home once every month or so with enough dirty washing to fill her mother’s washing machine four times over and Elizabeth resigned herself to becoming an observer viewing life, or so it seemed to her, through a sterile bubble through which once in a while she was allowed to push her hands. Gareth smiled at her now and then and swore when she forgot to get his new bottle of Maalox and resigned from several of his committees and became, much against his will, something of a TV pundit, discoursing on the architecture of modern Europe and flying off to Paris and Bonn.

  And Colin it appeared still read the papers, for scarcely had his father’s jet climbed out of the cloud-hazed spirals above Heathrow bound for a much heralded conference in Vienna, than he was tiptoeing across the lawn of the house, their third, still in Holland Park, and knocking urgently at the french windows.

  Elizabeth let him in, guiltily glad to see him, hugging him to her for a moment as though she could give him by transfusion of will power alone a little of her strength.

  Colin returned the hug and each for a moment was struck by the other’s thinness.

  ‘Hi, Liz, how are you?’

  ‘Better for seeing you, Col.’ She forced herself to release his hand, to walk away from him, wondering at this urge to cradle him which, even though he was a man, her youngest son stirred within her. Instead of looking at him she stared down at the Afghan rug, rippled a little by their feet, its lineny fringe tangled and flaccid, its colours warm only where the watery sun slanting through the front window touched it. She longed to pour herself a gin. ‘Where’ve you been lately?’ She tried to sound casual.

  He had thrown himself down on the leather Chesterfield, all knees and elbows, and glancing cautiously at him she saw his shirt had lost a button and there was a dull shine of grease around the inside of his collar.

  ‘Here and there.’ He grinned wearily and sat forward, his fists locked, swinging down between his shins above the carpet. ‘I need some bread, Liz.’

  She sighed, hearing Gareth’s voice echoing in her head: ‘Not another penny until you get a fucking job,’ and knowing she would not refuse walked, an automaton, programmed by mother love, to where her handbag lay on an armchair. She knew there was about forty or so pounds in it and she knew she would give him everything, even the loose change in her purse.

  She knew he would be grateful; would return warmth for warmth and stay with her perhaps for a while. If she could get him
to eat a few square meals while his father was away, that too would comfort her. She smiled down at him as he looked at the wad of notes in his hand, counting them between finger and thumb like a teller at the bank. Then he tucked them away into the top pocket of his shirt and buttoned the flap. His eyes, so like Gareth’s were a brilliant cornflower blue. ‘I need a hell of a lot more than that, Liz.’ There was no smile on his face, only the hard, weary lines of a man twice as old as he.

  Drugs? Gambling? Crime? The possibilities flashed through her mind as she faced him, not believing the hard shine of the eyes, the new cynical twist to his lips as he waited.

  ‘Oh come on, Liz, don’t tell me you haven’t been salting away the housekeeping all these years. You must have thousands stashed somewhere.’

  He didn’t believe her. He didn’t believe she had no private account, no hoard waiting to be spent gluttonously alone when his father was gone or divorced or dead, and there was no warm sympathy when, worn out at last by his browbeating she broke down and sobbed, only a calculating silence as he stared at her, knowing he must believe her.

  But still he had not relinquished hope. He cast around the room, eyeing porcelain, the carriage clock on the mantelpiece, the rug itself and rejecting them in the knowledge that his father would miss them instantly.

  ‘Your jewellery! There must be some jewellery you could sell.’

  ‘No Colin, no …’ Her voice came from a thousand miles outside her head, distanced by fear and disbelief. But already he was bounding up the long curving flight of stairs, his hand skimming the banister, and bursting into the bedroom.

  Her jewel box lay on her dressing table, unhidden in spite of Gareth’s oft repeated warnings about burglars, each piece inside warm from her skin, loved. She had never accepted much from him in the way of gifts but with each piece there was a memory, or an agony of its own.