The Love of My Life

by Louise Douglas

  In the end Anneli wore a cute little pair of cut-off jeans with a tight black shirt and I went for a leather-look skirt worn with a black halterneck shirt and a very old, lacy cardigan. The effect was designed to be soft punk. We covered ourselves in perfume – I can’t remember the brand but it had a lovely sherbetty smell, like the taste of Love Hearts. We both looked and smelled pretty good.

  ‘Liv, can I tell you something?’ asked Anneli as she ironed my hair. I was in an uncomfortable position, my head on a towel on her pink carpet, the rest of me curled in a foetal position so that she could have the best access to my hair.

  ‘You do fancy Marc!’

  ‘Oh all right, I do.’

  ‘I knew you did, I knew it I knew it I knew it!’

  ‘Nobody likes a bighead, Liv.’

  ‘Yes, but I knew, didn’t I! It’s perfect, you two will be perfect together!’

  ‘So what should I do?’

  ‘You should tell him, of course.’

  ‘What, really?’

  The iron was uncomfortably close to my ear as Anneli hovered above me to look at my face to see if I was serious.

  ‘I think he likes you too,’ I said. ‘I’ve seen him looking over when he didn’t think anyone was looking.’

  ‘Are you serious? Really? What, really looking at me?’

  ‘Anneli, you’re burning my cheek.’

  ‘Oh, I wish you hadn’t told me. I won’t know what to say.’

  The room was beginning to smell of singed hair. Anneli smoothed her hand over her work. ‘Your hair looks lovely, Liv. It’s perfect.’

  I looked at myself in the mirror above Anneli’s white and gold dressing table. My hair did look good. I gave my friend a quick hug and we swapped positions so that I could iron hers.

  It was impossible to escape the house without saying goodbye to Anneli’s parents, who were watching The Generation Game on TV. Anneli’s mum gave us a half-hearted smile and told us to have a nice time and make sure we were back before midnight. Her dad looked at me and said, ‘Is that a skirt, Olivia, or a pelmet?’

  ‘Oh ha ha, Dad, you’re so funny,’ said Anneli, leaning over to kiss his cheek. She was positively glowing with anticipation. ‘See you later!’

  The party was already in full swing at Marinella’s. Karaoke hadn’t yet arrived in Portiston, yet the spirit of karaoke was born there. Maurizio was on the ‘stage’ at the fireplace end of the restaurant with a microphone, singing along with Gene Pitney at the top of his voice and telling the story in hand gestures too. He waved when he saw us and we waved back as we headed for the bar.

  The room was full. There were some young people, like us, who worked in Marinella’s or were family friends, but most of the guests were older. Whiskery brewery representatives rubbed shoulders with clean-shaven bank staff. The fish lady was dancing with the sanitary-ware man. Everyone was having a great time.

  Luca and Nathalie were sitting together stiffly at one of the tables, like a couple posing for an old-fashioned photograph. Luca looked strangely tidy. I actually didn’t recognize him at first. He was wearing a pair of dark trousers and a pressed shirt that was open at the collar where his Adam’s apple bulged. His hair had been combed and flattened, somehow. He looked rather like his brother Carlo – a sort of Stepford son. Nathalie was, for once, wearing something feminine. It was far too old for her, a sort of floaty two-piece in green and black. On her feet were long black shoes with a pointed toe and a squat heel. They weren’t talking to one another. They just sat, and watched the party.

  Marc was having fun. He was dancing with Fabio and a couple of children who belonged to the newsagent up the road, doing the same exaggerated actions as his father and miming along to the words.

  Annoyingly, Angela was standing at the bar, dashing any hopes we had of being served anything alcoholic. Luckily Marc had planned for this contingency.

  After he’d finished his dance he came over to us, out of breath and laughing, and we talked for a while about this and that and he topped up our glasses of fruit punch with something or other he’d stolen from the cellar, which made our heads buzz. And then Maurizio called all the males in the house to the centre of the dance floor, where he told them to take off their socks and shoes and roll up their trousers to the knees. Anneli and I were helpless with giggles as the businessmen of Portiston, as well as the Felicone boys, did exactly that. Then Maurizio told them there’d be a prize for the best surfer, and played ‘Surfing USA’. All the shopkeepers and suppliers, the accountant, the solicitor, even the vicar was there, their hairy, bony, white male legs bare beneath their trousers, swaying and balancing like they were real surfers. It was so funny we were nearly crying. I happened to glance over at Nathalie; she wasn’t even watching, but was deep in conversation with Angela.

  When it was over Maurizio asked the assembled womenfolk who should win the prize and Anneli and I jumped up and down and shouted, ‘Marc! Marc!’

  ‘Hey, what about me?’ asked Luca, bounding up to us, his shirt all out of his trousers, his tie askew and his hair back to its normal dishevelled state.

  ‘Sorry,’ I said with a tiny sneer. ‘But your brother was better.’

  Luca gave us an Italian double-raised-palm gesture of confusion and disbelief and hopped off back to Nathalie, shoes in hand. Marc showed us his prize, a bottle of Aloha sun cream.

  ‘Thanks for your support!’ he said, looking vaguely embarrassed.

  Anneli looked at her feet and twisted a strand of hair round her finger.

  I must have been a little drunk. ‘Why don’t you ask Anneli to dance?’ I said.

  ‘Liv!’

  ‘Go on,’ I said. ‘She’ll say yes.’

  Marc blushed and shuffled his feet back into his shoes. But he did ask her and she did say yes and they went, hand in hand, to the dance floor. And that was how Anneli and Marc started going out with one another.

  I looked across to Luca. He was sitting between Nathalie and Angela, drinking from the rim of a bottle of beer. I caught his eye but he looked away.

  I was bored by the party. I found my coat and slipped away and met Georgie off the late ferry. We sat in the dark on the pebbles. He rolled a joint and held it to my lips and I breathed in and burned the back of my throat, and then he lay back and sang ‘Stairway to Heaven’ while I gave him a blow-job and marvelled at the twinkling of the lights in my inky black mind.

  twenty-two

  Every day I learned a little more about Marian Rutherford and nothing at all about the professor. I liked being in the large office with him, though. It was quiet but it was companionable. The only sound, generally, would be that of my fingers on the keyboard and him turning the pages of whatever document or book he was reading. We were comfortable with one another, like an old married couple who had run out of things to talk about years before. Some mornings he would come in to unlock the door and then go straight off to lectures or seminars with his students. Other days, if he didn’t have to see anybody, he would let me in and then disappear to work from home. He said it was easier to concentrate there. I imagined a big old house, semi-derelict, with wall-to-ceiling books, a couple of mangy cats sleeping on the windowledges, and the professor scribbling away at a desk like a character from Dickens.

  Working gave my days a purpose, and because picking apart the professor’s writing was so difficult, I had to concentrate and that meant there was no room in my mind for other thoughts. I approached my job rather as I would have approached evening classes in my previous life – as a welcome distraction from reality and as a means of relaxation. I am a fast typist but it was taking for ever to work through the notes. The professor never asked how I was progressing, or looked over my shoulder. I was certain he didn’t check the computer when I wasn’t there. I was glad that he trusted me.

  When he wasn’t around, Jenny often came in to chat with me. She’d curl her knees beneath her on the leather settee and tell me about Yusuf and the noodle bar and her kleptomaniac flatmate. She wa
s very entertaining and I enjoyed her company. Best of all, she wasn’t the slightest bit interested in me. If anyone had asked her, I doubt she’d have been able to tell them anything about me, except perhaps my Christian name.

  There were dozens of different editions of Marian Rutherford’s books on the shelves in the office, but I didn’t dare touch them. Instead, I went to the Central Library and ordered them, one at a time, to read in the flat. I started with Emily Campbell, which I’d read at school (or not read most of it, if I’m honest) and then again some years back after I’d found a copy on the second-hand bookstall at the market near our London home. The story is set in Portiston, with no attempt to disguise the town or any of its landmarks. Its heroine, Emily Campbell, was a daughter of the town, a charming, headstrong and selfish girl torn between her longing to escape what she regarded as the suffocating constraints of her life, and the desire to live and die amongst the people she knew and loved. This conflict is epitomized in the characters of the two men who love her, the handsome, faithful but unambitious Jude McCallistair and the driven but slightly dangerous John Perriman.

  As in all good tragedies, it is a fatal flaw in Emily’s character – her inability to act logically instead of impulsively – that leads to her own undoing. Without giving away the plot, it’s a well-known fact that, in summer, you’ll see queues of tourists waiting to have their picture taken at the place on the clifftop above Portiston town where, in the book, Emily threw herself to her death on page 414.

  What I had never known, until I started transcribing the professor’s notes, was that in real life, from that point on the cliff, you can see into the back garden of Andrew Bird’s house. He was Marian Rutherford’s friend and publisher and the reason she came to Portiston in the first place.

  The professor and I exchanged polite but brief pleasantries, but that was as far as our relationship went. I didn’t mind, because it was so peaceful being with him in the office, both of us sheltering under our separate umbrellas of anonymity, but I did want to talk to him about Emily Campbell. There were some loose ends in the plot that frustrated me, and I wasn’t sure if I was missing something. I decided I would find a moment, a coffee break when he wasn’t immersed in work, in which to broach the subject. In the meantime, in order to find out about the professor himself, I waited until the day when he told me he was going home to work and wouldn’t be back until midday, which also happened to be a day when Jenny had called in sick (‘Babe, I’m puking my guts up, been on the Bacardi all night, just tell him it’s women’s problems and he won’t ask any more questions’). Alone on the ground floor of the university history department, I took the opportunity to examine the contents of his desk.

  twenty-three

  By the autumn Anneli and Marc were an item of sorts. However, in my opinion, their relationship was moving exceptionally slowly. They had held hands and kissed (without tongues), but that was all. Marc hadn’t asked for any sexual favours whatsoever. In fact, Anneli reported, he was a perfect gentleman. That was how she liked it for, despite our predilection for dressing like temptresses, Anneli was at heart a traditional girl who had made her mind up that she wouldn’t go all the way with someone until she was certain that she’d found the right someone. She wasn’t sure Marc was that person.

  She and Marc had been to the cinema, and they spent some time together at weekends, either listening to records in the bedroom Marc shared with Luca, or watching TV with Anneli’s parents round at her house. On the bus into town they sometimes, but not always, sat together and sometimes they would walk together, although Marc never put his arm around Anneli’s shoulder, which would have bothered me if I’d been her, but she didn’t seem to mind. She didn’t want me to feel left out so usually she walked with me anyway.

  Anneli was a very good friend to me.

  Once I asked her if she loved Marc and she said, ‘Oh Liv, I don’t know!’

  ‘How can you not know?’ I would persist. ‘Either you love him or you don’t; you must know.’

  ‘Well, do you love Georgie?’

  ‘It’s not that kind of relationship.’

  ‘Well, maybe ours isn’t either.’

  I was, in my defence, only sixteen, and most of my education about life and sex came from teen magazines which were, in those days, still massively biased towards a romantic view of the world.

  ‘If you don’t know,’ I said, ‘then you can’t love him.’

  ‘Well, does it matter?’

  ‘Of course it does! If you’re going to spend the rest of your life with him …’

  We had this sort of conversation many times. But the occasion I remember most clearly happened early the following year. It was the school holidays and Anneli and I had arranged to go swimming in Watersford Public Baths. Marc turned up with Luca, but no Nathalie.

  At the time it never crossed my mind to wonder why Nathalie didn’t come; I was just glad she hadn’t and assumed she was working. It must have been a Saturday. Probably she just didn’t much like swimming. The public baths with their busy changing rooms and loud children wouldn’t have appealed to her. To be honest, she wouldn’t have looked great in a swimming costume either.

  Away from Nathalie, Luca reverted to his normal, boisterous self, breaking just about every swimming-pool rule in the first five minutes as he hared out of the changing room, ran along the side of the pool yelling the Dam Busters theme and then dive-bombed Anneli and me at the deep end. We screamed and shrieked as our hair and make-up were drenched in the cold, chlorinated water while Luca resurfaced next to us, shaking his head like a dog, his long black hair spraying droplets of water all over us again. Marc returned to his traditional role as the quieter, more thoughtful twin. He stood at the side, his arms crossed over his chest, holding on to his shoulders and laughing. I noticed, I remember, how white his feet were, his slender ankles and his long, thin toes.

  We swam and played for a while, annoying the other swimmers with our noise and our physicality. The boys swam beneath our legs and then stood up, lifting us on to their shoulders, and then we raced, all of us squealing and laughing. Sometimes they’d tip us into the water backwards, sometimes we would dive in forwards. Luca would ping the back of our costumes. He had a beautiful body, the wide-shouldered, slightly triangular upper-body shape of a male athlete – slim hips, slender, racehorse legs. Marc was attractive too but he was darker, sturdier and shorter. Our games involved a good deal of body contact. It was fun, it was exciting, and it wasn’t entirely innocent. I told myself it was just playing, but when I was sat on Luca’s bony shoulders, his wet black hair fanning out on my wet, white thighs, I would be lying if I said I did not enjoy the moment. I enjoyed being that close to Luca. I was very glad that Nathalie wasn’t there. She wouldn’t have joined in anyway.

  Anneli and I got out first because we were cold. We changed in adjoining cubicles, stamping out of our wet costumes and pulling dry clothes awkwardly over our still-damp bodies. Teardrops of cold water followed one another from the rat’s tails of my hair down my chest. I only had one towel and it was too small and old to be of much comfort.

  While we waited for the boys we sat in the little cafeteria which looked out over the pool, sipped hot chocolate out of the machine and shared a carton of chips which we dipped into a communal pool of ketchup.

  ‘I think Luca’s really nice,’ I confessed.

  ‘It’s a shame he’s taken,’ said Anneli.

  ‘Maybe Nathalie will cheat on him or move to Australia or die or something,’ I said hopefully.

  ‘I don’t think she’d be that obliging,’ said Anneli, twirling her chip round in the ketchup. ‘I think she really loves him.’

  ‘Why do you say that?’

  ‘It’s just the way she looks at him. When they’re together she’s always sort of next to him. She notices him all the time.’

  ‘It sounds a bit obsessive.’

  ‘It’s actually quite nice.’

  I shrugged.

  ‘Natha
lie’s all right when you get to know her, Liv.’

  ‘Yeah well, I don’t really care about Nathalie,’ I said. ‘What about you and Marc?’

  Anneli gave a little sigh, and put down the chip she had just picked up.

  ‘I don’t think I love him and I don’t think he loves me.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  She nodded. ‘I can’t imagine going shopping with him or having children with him or having holidays with him, or growing old with him.’

  I rolled my eyes. ‘That’s all boring, middle-aged stuff, Anneli! What about the wild passionate stuff?’

  She shook her head. ‘Nope, I can’t imagine any of that either.’

  ‘Just because you can’t imagine it doesn’t mean it can’t happen.’

  ‘I know it’s not going to happen.’

  I tipped the last dregs of chocolate into my mouth and licked my lips.

  ‘What are you going to do?’

  ‘I’m not going to do anything. I don’t have to do anything. We both know where we stand.’

  Anneli was – is – a cleverer girl than me. If only I could have been more like her the next few months of my life would not have been such hell.

  twenty-four

  ‘So what did you find?’

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘In the weird professor’s desk.’

  ‘He’s not weird, Marc, he’s just quiet.’

  ‘Always a bad sign.’

  We were sitting in the café, eating teacakes. Outside was a thunderstorm. The sky was dark grey although it was only early afternoon and rain was streaking down like bullets, puncturing the puddles on the pavement and roads in a million different places. Every now and then lightning would jag across the sky and the café lights would flicker, and then there would be an aural torrent of thunder, like a reverse crescendo, which rattled the windows and my nerves.

  ‘I didn’t find anything much. Just a lot of clutter, lots of bits and pieces.’

  ‘Come on, Liv, there must have been something that gave you a clue about the man.’

  I shook my head and licked butter from my fingers. I was ashamed of my prying and I didn’t want to exacerbate my disloyalty and my nosiness by sharing what I’d found with anyone, not even Marc. When I knew more about the professor, then maybe I would be able to explain why, in the right-hand-side drawer of his desk, hidden beneath a diary dating back to 1989, there was an empty scent bottle, a scuffed, pale blue leather baby shoe and a postcard with a picture of Madrid by night on the front, and nothing at all on the back.