Walking Alone

by Carolyn McCrae

  Finally, as I approached the final walk up the sandstone rocks to the road, I worried about Holly and how she would cope with her marriage. I already knew it was a disaster, and, perhaps, my fault. I should have had the courage to have spoken to Max when we could have changed things. I would have had to own up to eavesdropping on his conversation with Matt but we could have intervened, by not telling him immediately, I knew I had acknowledged in some way that I was in the wrong.

  The need to keep Monica safe from her memories had seemed the most important thing. Then.

  Now, as I tried not to think what Holly would be going through, I wasn’t so sure.

  I had so many thoughts as I walked home that day I really wished I had a friend, someone to talk them over with.

  I wanted to call Linda, talk to her.

  Chapter Seventeen

  The first term of Linda and Holly’s final year at Leicester passed in a haze of studying and trying to avoid talking about anything that really mattered.

  They still shared the flat but they spent very little time together. Linda always went home or to Oxford at the weekends when Graham came to visit. He seemed to have given up on the racing, perhaps there was no longer any need to appear interesting.

  He would arrive every Friday evening and Linda would pack a bag and leave without comment. She was annoyed at always having to get out of their way but anything was preferable to sharing the small flat with Holly and Graham.

  She had done it only once. The first weekend Graham had appeared she had stayed, determined that she would not be forced out of her flat just because Holly had got married. But he had criticised everything from the stocks of food in the cupboard to the state of the bathroom.

  “It’s not your bloody flat and I’m not your bloody slave!” She shouted at him after he had told her that she should go out to get some fresh milk. “We’re quite happy when you’re not here.”

  “Well fuck off then bitch.”

  So she did and whenever there was the prospect of Graham visiting she would leave. She asked Holly once why she didn’t go back to her own home at weekends. ‘He wants to come here.’ Linda soon realised that Holly had no influence over Graham and had no way of influencing what he did, she also realised that his coming to Leicester was his way of making that power show. If Holly had gone home each weekend no one would have known how far Graham called the shots.

  When Linda and Holly did talk they spoke about their coursework, they discussed the answers to clues in their crosswords and who was going to do the shopping. They argued about the housework and the rent. They commented on the war in the Middle East, Watergate and the impeachment of Richard Nixon, the wave of strikes, the royal wedding, the three day week and how they would manage living by candlelight when they came back after Christmas.

  But they never spoke about anything that really mattered.

  They travelled together back to Cheshire for the Christmas vacation but they said goodbye when Holly got off the train one stop earlier.

  On Holly’s 21st birthday, she got a birthday card from Graham and wondered blankly whether he had destroyed any others. Even though she knew her father wouldn’t have bothered she was sure Linda and the boys would have sent one, and perhaps even her grandparents. But she got only the one, from Graham. She cooked a Christmas meal that they ate when he got back from the pub just after two o’clock. They watched the television and then they went to bed.

  It was not the celebration she would have had had her Mother been alive, had she been at home.

  Had she had a home.

  When she met up again with Linda to travel back to Leicester she said nothing about her birthday. “We called you know. Crispin insisted we call but you didn’t answer.”

  “I didn’t want to speak to anyone.”

  “Are you OK?”

  “Fine.”

  So they didn’t talk any more about her 21st birthday or her holiday.

  At Easter Linda stayed in Leicester to finish her dissertation while Holly went home. When she got back to Leicester two weeks later she looked tired and depressed.

  “Have a good holiday?” Linda asked.

  “Shit.”

  “Wanna talk about it?”

  “No.”

  So they didn’t.

  Even as they packed up the flat that had been their home for three years and where they had, at least for some of the time, been friends, they divided up the contents of the house as if they were a couple getting divorced. Perhaps, in some ways, it was like the end of a relationship. They were scrupulously polite as they avoided any emotion and emptied the flat that had been their home for three years.

  “That picture. Do you want it?”

  “Keep it.”

  “These mugs?”

  “You have them.”

  “I think they’re yours.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Positive.”

  Graham pushed Holly’s bags and boxes, rolled-up posters and clothes on hangers into the back of his car whilst Linda finished the clearing up.

  They didn’t hug each other as they said goodbye. Their lives had been so different for so long.

  “Seeya. Good Luck.” Linda said as Holly took the final armful of plastic bags out of the door.

  “Seeya.” Holly replied, trying desperately not to cry.

  When she got her results Linda hadn’t got the First she had wanted and believed she deserved, she had got a 2.1 but the family gathered to celebrate nonetheless.

  “It’s rubbish! I’ve let everyone down. Everyone in the family gets a first. I’m a complete waste of space. I’ve let everyone down!”

  “Of course you haven’t darling,” Pat hugged her as she poured some more champagne into her daughter’s glass “You’ve had a difficult time of it. It was a lot easier for the boys.”

  “We know you did the very best you could.”

  “Under the circumstances.” Linda concluded gloomily. “It’s all Graham’s fault. I was doing fine until he pushed his way into our lives.”

  “You stuck by Holly though, that was brilliant.” Crispin was supportive.

  “It cost me.” Linda was resentful.

  All of them were thinking of the very different celebration three years earlier, when they had partied joyfully after the A level results.

  It had all seemed so simple then.

  “What are you going to do?” Jeff was being practical.

  “I haven’t a clue.”

  “We told you not to do Sociology. What the bloody hell does that prepare you for?”

  “Sod all.” Crispin responded to his brother’s question flippantly but Linda gave a more thoughtful answer.

  “Holly said she’s doing a teacher’s training course at Liverpool. I haven’t the first clue what I want to do. I suppose it’s not too late to do the same. I could keep an eye on her. It’s probably better than nothing, it’ll fill a year and I don’t have to teach at the end of it.”

  “Those who can, do; those who can’t, teach!” Oliver teased his sister.

  She aimed a cushion at him.

  “And those who can’t teach, teach teachers!” Crispin lightened the moment by grinning broadly at his Mother who did just that.

  Chapter Eighteen

  I was surprised when Linda phoned me in the early summer of 1975 to ask if I’d like to spend a couple of weeks with her and her brothers in Oxford.

  We had bumped into each other a few times in the two years since Holly’s wedding and had had relaxed conversations about nothing in particular. I always enquired about Holly and so we could spend the time agreeing about our mutual dislike of Graham. It meant that whenever we met we were never short of a topic of conversation.

  Linda admitted that the invitation wasn’t her idea. Crispin and Oliver, with a little bit of prompting from their Mother, had decided that I should be invited to Oxford that summer. She said they had liked me when they had met me at Holly’s wedding, they both thought how like Carl I was and
had come to the conclusion that it was their job to get the two of us together. They thought it unfair to both of us that we were missing out on the relationship with a brother who would be close and supportive.

  I wondered whether it could possibly work. I had kept in contact with Carl in an every-now-and-again sort of way, but whenever he called I felt he was contacting me, not for my own sake, but to find out how Susannah was.

  “You know they’ve got an ulterior motive don’t you? They think it’s time their little sister found a boyfriend, and you seem relatively eligible, at least you’re respectable and above board which, they seem to think, is more than could be said for some of the boys they know I’ve been out with. You can drive me down.”

  She spoke quickly with a confidence I envied. And I had no chance to argue, even had I wanted to.

  As we drove south a week later Linda talked about herself without self-consciousness, perhaps aware that I was actually very interested. She talked of how she had given up on the teacher’s training course after only a few weeks despite realising that she would now have no reason to see Holly and no way of checking she was OK. She had decided teaching really wasn’t for her and, after a great argument with her parents, had taken a job in the office of a Chartered Surveyor in Birkenhead. “Doing filing, a bit of typing, a bit of this and that; general dogsbody really.”

  I decided not to use the motorways, it was a lovely day and I wanted to enjoy the drive with the top down as she talked on. “They’ve got a new machine, a memory typewriter, I’m learning to use, it’s like a typewriter but when you type it doesn’t only go onto paper it stores a sentence so you can play it back; saves typing anything twice and a helluva lot of correcting fluid. I’ve just trained two of the partners on it. Not so that they could use it, just so they could know what they could ask other people to do. I’m in charge of the department, we don’t call it a pool, which is expanding to four machines, never call them typewriters, and the girls who she had trained to operate them. I’m really enjoying it.”

  I half listened as I drove. She was happy to chat on, requiring very little in response from me so I’m sure I missed much of what she was saying. Much of the time I was just aware of her enthusiasm as she talked about her job. When I managed to get a word in edgewise to ask whether she regretted not teaching her answer was an emphatic ‘Not effing likely’. She then spent about 30 miles explaining how different offices would be in the future, how the relationship between bosses and their secretaries would be different. “Bosses will do all their own typing. They won’t dictate to some tarty over made-up female. Women will be bosses too.”

  “I can type.” I managed to say in a break in her monologue. I was quite proud to be able to say that, it was the first time I had felt it was a skill worth mentioning. I had started the courses for all the wrong reasons but I had found I enjoyed the ability to transfer thought to sensible, readable text. My handwriting had always been awful and it was so much easier and quicker to produce my articles now I could type them. So I wasn’t just being polite when I said I agreed with everything she was saying.

  “Really?” Linda had sounded sceptical.

  “Absolutely, I’ve got my Pitmans Advanced First Class.”

  “I’m impressed.” She actually sounded it. “I really ought to learn to type properly even though the machines do make it all so much easier. I tried a few times but it was bloody difficult. I couldn’t take my eyes off the keyboard. It’s a lot easier then!”

  “I’ll teach you if you like, it’s a lot quicker to touch type. You might even enjoy it.”

  “You’re quite an unusual bloke aren’t you?” She looked sideways at me.

  “I hope so.”

  I had a quick thought of Dani and wondered how she was doing, whether she had started the business and achieved what she had wanted to do. It seemed I was doing most of the things I had set out to do when I had left her in Cornwall and was sorry that I couldn’t tell her. We had lost touch after writing shorter and shorter notes for a few months and just about exchanged cards at Christmas.

  The morning after Linda and I first slept together we had both been embarrassed that her brothers would know what had happened. “But nothing did happen.” Linda argued gently, “OK we slept in the same bed but we didn’t sleep together.”

  “No problem even if you did, you’re a big girl now.” Oliver said as they were all clustered in the kitchen grabbing coffee.

  “Well we didn’t.”

  “Why didn’t you? Isn’t our little sister good enough for you?” Crispin continued in a light-hearted tone.

  She threw the paper at him.

  I had never been in this situation before. When I had been with Dani in Polperro we had never shared a bed. In the past year I had taken one or two of the girls out for a meal and been invited up for coffee afterwards, but I had never stayed long. That morning, not only had I spent the night in someone else’s bed, but her brothers were there for breakfast the next morning. I wasn’t sure at all about the etiquette of the situation, so I kept quiet, listening to the to-ing and fro-ing of easy conversation.

  It seemed to me a completely different world from the one I had inhabited for so many years, and I liked it.

  The fortnight went past very quickly. We spent most of the time doing very little, except read and talk and sit in pub gardens watching the world going by.

  I started to teach Linda to type properly ……………….

  We would go with the boys to their workshop and watch as they took what looked like perfectly good cars apart and put them together again…………………

  The highlights were the evenings Carl came down from Cambridge and we all sat round the table together eating spaghetti bolognaise and drinking good red wine. Crispin and Oliver knew how far apart we had been for so many years and were quietly pleased with their role in bringing us together.

  At first we had been distantly civilised, but we had so much in common that by Carl’s third visit we were spending much of the evening talking to each other about our work and our plans for the future.

  Although we still could not talk easily about Susannah I think I realised something of his feelings for her. He said he didn’t want to hurt her more than she had already been hurt; he didn’t want to make her life more miserable than it had been.

  It was my first inkling that perhaps Carl was as insecure as I was.

  By the end of the fortnight any romance I may have had with Linda was over, but we were firm friends. “Just a bit of fun” she said to Oliver, “nothing serious and we’ll be better friends for it now we’ve got it out of our systems. No harm done.”

  “You realise we’re really quite fond of each other don’t you?” I explained to Oliver, “I wasn’t just fooling around. I’ll always be there as a friend for her, and all of you.”

  “Well that all worked well didn’t it?” Crispin had his arms around the shoulders of Oliver and Carl as they said goodbye at the end of our visit. “Our little sister has a friend for life which is far more useful that a ‘might be husband’ and our adopted brother has made friends with his real one. A pretty successful summer I’d say!”

  It was a conversation I had had with Linda and Oliver during that holiday in Oxford that had first given me the idea.

  I had been wondering what to do, I needed a project, and talking to Oliver and Crispin I was carried away by their enthusiasm for their work. “Work for yourself old chap. Only thing to do.” Oliver had said “We were pretty unemployable really.” Crispin had added rather sheepishly. “If we didn’t work for ourselves we’d be on the dole, no one in their right minds would want to give us a job with any responsibility.”

  We had listened while they spoke of visits to the bank manager, start up loans, equipment leases and marketing plans. “It’s the only way to make any money you know. We work bloody hard but it’s all for us. No lining other people’s pockets.”

  That night as we lay in bed Linda had explained how unusual t
his enthusiastic approach to hard work was for her brothers and how there really must be something in the idea of having your own business if it gave them so much energy.

  I had taken the idea away with me and had thought about it, seriously, but I couldn’t think of what business to run. When I returned from Oxford I read the ‘business for sale’ sections in the newspapers but could come up with nothing remotely interesting. I talked to Max who liked the general idea and suggested a bookshop, but after some detailed discussion I rejected the idea as I couldn’t see myself sitting inside all day dusting books and waiting for the occasional customer.

  The Sunday after we returned from Oxford I invited Linda and her parents to lunch at Sandhey. I thought it would be useful to have Ted’s ideas as well. He had known me longer than anyone and would have a good idea what would work and what wouldn’t. The fact that he knew Linda and her family through having kept an eye on Carl all those years helped.

  Since it was ‘my’ meal we ate informally on the terrace during which conversation didn’t flag for a moment and a wide range of topics was covered. I could see Ted watching Linda and I, he seemed hopeful that our friendship would become something more than that.

  I finally raised the subject of starting a business.

  “I need your help. Crispin and Oliver have given me the overall idea but I just don’t seem to have any idea of detail. I’m not very good at anything really and there’s no way of having a business related to birds so… any ideas? “

  “Yes you are,” said Linda, “You are good at something other than birds. You can type.” She turned to the others continuing “He’s very proud of his typing you know. He’s a far better typist than I am.”

  “That would hardly be difficult” Jeff commented drily.

  “She doesn’t need to touch type, she’s got a machine to do all the work for her.” I came to Linda’s defence, possibly a little too quickly, so I explained “She’s told me all about her new fangled machines that are going to make typewriters redundant.”