If you are a twenty-year-old virgin bookworm at Oxford University, you are more likely to meet someone in a library than outside it. And if you meet someone in a library at the age of twenty, he is more likely to have a bespectacled, rather nervous, laconic, slightly clumsy sort of presence than that of a broad-shouldered, handsome stud whose main interests are surfing and skiing.
So it’s no surprise that the fucked-up paramedic ends up giving you a sexually transmitted disease and a black eye. Or that the man whose marriage you have broken up later has an affair with your best friend. Or that the self-conscious bookworm, whose sex life has been confined to the four walls of his imagination, turns out to be tremendously gentle and patient in bed.
It was on the night of my twenty-first birthday that I finally lost my virginity. By then Eddie and I had spent endless hours together, feeling our way towards some kind of space that was comfortable for both of us. He was shy in public, but quirky in private, and I warmed to his gentle wit and his cautious interest in me. I began, oh-so slowly, to talk about myself. I told him about Jenny. I told him that she was prettier than me and vivacious and wacky and incapable of sitting still.
‘No, she isn’t,’ he said to me after he met her for the first time.
‘Isn’t what?’
‘Prettier than you.’
I looked up at him. My eyes met his through the safety of two layers of glass and didn’t flinch.
Jenny was brittle at first and Eddie was careful not to say what he thought; that she was jealous, that this was probably the first time that anyone else had challenged her dominance in my life.
We read poems and discussed the echoes of books in our own young lives over languid summer afternoons in long riverside grass. I relaxed gently into sustained eye contact and a warm emotion that I had only read about. Our words were safe, our revelations partial and non-threatening. He never asked why I had lost my virginity so late or if I had had boyfriends before, and I never thought to ask him the same questions. Dear Eddie. I wonder where he is now? We drifted apart slowly in the same way that we had drifted together, with the inevitability and calmness of a tide.
Chapter 43
In the end, the friendships that lasted longest were the London ones, not the Oxford ones. That was the way we referred to them. Do you remember the London crowd? Janet and her ability to put her foot into everything she encountered; Jamie and his ambition to become a rock star – or a politician; Will and his closet gay mannerisms that fooled no one; Sarah and her maternal urge to save anything, from whales to the man next door. What sound bites would they have chosen for us? Jenny and her lust for life and limb, Pippa and her . . .?
Spain was a long chapter. We were reunited in Granada for our ‘year abroad’. We rented a tiny third-floor flat, attended the university intermittently and basked in the luxury of our college grants.
There were flashpoints. I lashed out at Jenny in a way that surprised both of us. She grew impatient with my continued commitment to reading and what she called my ‘lack of adventure’. Her own enthusiasm for adventure resulted in a near-death collision on the back of a moped at five in the morning on a winding mountain road, clinging onto a drunken shepherd she had picked up in a village disco.
‘What the fuck were you playing at?’ I asked once relief had subsided.
‘What the fuck would you know?’ She knew exactly where to hurt. Later, she cried in my arms. ‘I’m sorry, Pips, you know I don’t mean it.’
We invented a game called Life on the Back of a Cigarette Packet. You played it in restaurants or bars, in the Alhambra or on the beach – anywhere with lots of people. When it was your turn you chose a person or a couple, without saying who they were, and you described their lives or their characters. The other person had to guess who you were talking about.
It was my turn. ‘He and his wife are divorced and this is his weekend with the children. He always takes them out, because it’s easier if they’re outside. He can’t help thinking about the fact that they know the man who took his wife away better than their father. It kills him. It makes him awkward in their presence. After he has returned them, he goes out and gets drunk. He might even sleep with a prostitute, and then he’ll feel really bad, because that was what started it all; that was when she left him. What he doesn’t know is that one of the kids isn’t his anyway. The little girl that reminds him of himself when he was little isn’t his child. Only his ex-wife knows that.’
Jenny was laughing. ‘I thought I was the one with the morbid imagination! Those three, eating ice-creams and hardly speaking!’
‘Yep. Go on then, your turn.’
‘She is with her best friend. She feels as if she has known her forever and she would do anything for her.’
I glanced around the gardens, which were swarming with people, looking in vain for the giveaway clue of two girls together. I looked at Jenny’s face. She seemed to be looking nowhere.
‘But sometimes she feels that there is something eating her insides, something dark and dangerous, something she can’t understand, doesn’t want to understand, like that feeling you get when you’re somewhere very high, the temptation to jump, as if something is pulling at you.’
I looked into Jenny’s face, but she seemed to see straight through me.
‘It doesn’t last long, but it comes back again and again, like an ulcer.’
I scanned the faces around us. I felt something like panic inside me. Then I saw them. Two girls, in their late twenties, one wearing dungarees and bright red lipstick with her hair tied up in a red ribbon, round and jolly, the other with her arm hooked through her friend’s, black shorts and T-shirt, black rings around her eyes.
Today, I wonder if Jenny was trying to tell me something. Today, I believe in coincidence.
Chapter 44
There is a photo in the last Oxford chapter of Eddie and me. We stand in a sea of black gowns and mortarboards, looking like two awkward extras on a film set. Everyone is laughing, and bottles of champagne or cheap sparkling wine are fizzing all around like fireworks. There is a girl being transported on a hospital bed, covered in red roses and baked beans, and laughing uncontrollably. It is the last day of finals and the street is awash with the longed-for significance of this precious moment in the young, privileged lives of Oxford’s students.
Eddie and I reach for each other and hug with awkward warmth. We have stopped sleeping together, but there is a tenderness still and an absence of anyone else. We are carried along by the crowd and join shyly in the night’s festivities. I think of Jenny and shudder slightly to imagine the abandon with which she will surely celebrate the end of her finals next week. I am glad she is not here.
Eddie and I will not see each other again, though he will remain on my Christmas card list for years. He asks me what I am going to do. He knows that I have avoided the milk round of City interviews that even he has succumbed to. I don’t know. Life stretches out in front of me like sand dunes rippling into the distance, and I wonder if I will have the energy to climb them. I feel hot and uncomfortable and trapped in the image that I have chosen. If I lie down maybe I will slowly burn into the sand.
* * *
Jenny would know what to do. I expected, relied on, her decisiveness, yet I was surprised by her single-mindedness when it came. She had it all worked out. She was going to do a PGCE and become a drama teacher. She needed something that would give her time to travel, but she didn’t want the kind of suited travel that a job in the City might mean, and anyway she wouldn’t be able to stand the crap that went with it. As simple as that. How I envied her certainty. How it fooled me for a while.
We moved into a flat in Brixton and my own lack of certainty filled shelf after shelf with second-hand books. I buried myself in the sand of the lives I read about and put my glasses on for the all-night parties that were an inevitable part of sharing a flat with Jenny. There was something slightly schizophrenic about it: days which made me feel real within the fingered pages of i
maginary lives and nights where I blushed from the sidelines of Jenny’s existence.
Once, I got up in the middle of the night for an Aspirin and found her in the kitchen with her shirt open and her legs on a man’s lap, while another man was stroking her hair.
‘Hey, sis come and join us.’ One of the men was chopping up lines of cocaine on an old record sleeve.
I blushed and wished I had my glasses. Jenny looked at me like a dog, pleading. My heart went out to her suddenly and something in me longed to say yes, for her sake. I remembered her words at the Alhambra, but there was a knot inside me that resisted and silence swallowed my resolve.
* * *
A coincidence rescued me from the pressure building around the lack of work and direction in my life. The owner of the second-hand bookshop where I whiled away so many hours announced that he was setting up another branch in north London and needed someone to stay on and run the Brixton shop. He shocked me by asking if I would like the job.
‘But I don’t know anything about selling books.’
‘You know more about buying books than anyone who walks in here, and your enthusiasm is infectious. You’ll be good at selling them.’
My enthusiasm? It came as a shock to realise that we had established a kind of friendship and that I was sufficiently at ease in his company to discuss the books I read. Enthusiasm. I played proudly with the concept in my head and nodded my acceptance. Jenny was sensitive enough to congratulate me. I knew that something in her must have rebelled at the notion of such work, such tedium, such lack of adventure, but I rejoiced in what I had stumbled upon. And in the weeks and months to come, a kind of confidence swelled, slowly and long overdue, inside me.
The clink of the bell as the door opened to let in a customer sparked a momentary flutter of trepidation, which turned quickly to eager curiosity. I would watch as people lingered in different parts of the shop and I played mental guessing games. This one will go to the gardening section, that one will look for himself in the biography of an Antarctic explorer, she is investigating the birth of feminism.
‘Can I help? Do you know what you are looking for?’ I would ask softly.
‘I’m not really sure . . .’ This one was a woman who would have looked less out of place rock-climbing in the Lake District than she did here. I shared a spontaneous and imaginary CV with Jenny in my head. She’s in her thirties, loves dogs and has just been abandoned by her husband.
‘Are you looking for something for yourself or a present for someone else?’ My question was safe.
‘For me, actually. The thing is I’m not a great reader, but I’m going away for a bit, to East Africa, and I wanted to take something relevant.’ Bloody hell, I was right, I thought! She needed change – and inspiration. I warmed to the shyness in her.
‘Have you read any of Hemingway’s novels?’
‘Well, yes, I’ve read The Green Hills of Africa, but I was looking for something a bit more, I don’t know . . .’
‘Modern? Or personal?’ I offered tentatively.
‘It doesn’t have to be modern, but, I don’t know, something . . .’
‘I tell you what,’ I offered, ‘how about West with the Night? Have you heard of Beryl Markham?’ And when I saw her hesitate, I jumped in before she needed to answer. ‘She was a fascinating woman, brought up in the Highlands of Kenya in the early 1900s. She flouted convention wherever she went and competed in a man’s world as a horse trainer. Then she trained as a pilot and became the first woman to make a solo flight across the Atlantic from London to America. And then she wrote her autobiography. It’s a wonderful book; intense and strangely uplifting. Not really very personal in the conventional sense, but I loved it.’ I could see that she was hooked. ‘And she was always surrounded by controversy. There was even a scandal about whether it was really her who wrote the book or her third husband!’
‘That sounds perfect, thank you.’
‘Do come back and tell me if you liked it!’
I always invited people back to give their reactions to the books I recommended, and I was always happily surprised whenever they did. The shy rock-climbing lady came back three months later. She had enjoyed the book so much she wanted to read the biographies of Beryl Markham. On her third visit to the bookshop, her first words were, ‘Gosh, she really was a bit of a bitch, wasn’t she?’ And so, slowly, I began to form friendships that Jenny did not understand.
Chapter 45
‘I’ve done it!’
‘Done what?’
We were sipping citron pressé and dry white wine in Café Rouge. Jenny was flushed and brimming with tales of her recent trip to Sri Lanka. She had asked me to go with her, but I had declined, partly through a genuine lack of available holiday and partly, guiltily, through weariness, the weariness of bearing witness to Jenny’s excesses.
‘You should do a trip you know, Pips. I mean a trip on your own. It’s so fulfilling. I was scared shitless at first –’
‘You were?’ I laughed.
‘Yes, actually, I was, but then you discover things about yourself that you had no idea were even there. I can’t explain it really, there is something – I don’t know – invigorating about being self-sufficient and making your own choices. Even the most trivial of choices – what to eat for breakfast, where to go, who to speak to. What are you laughing at?’
‘You! It’s so good to see you. I missed you!’ We were both laughing, reunited.
‘So,’ I remembered, ‘what is it you’ve done? You haven’t told me yet.’
She stubbed out her cigarette, leant across the table and said in a mock stage whisper.
‘I’ve joined the Mile-High Club!’
‘Jenny, you didn’t!’ We were like thirteen-year-olds, giggling because we’d seen the shape of an erection in a boy’s trousers. ‘Who with? How? Did you –’
‘Yes, of course I used a condom, Pips!’
‘Well?’
‘Well what?’
‘Well tell me about it then!’
And she poured out the details, like an open book.
I was only vaguely aware of movement in the toing-and-froing of people around us, a warm backdrop of jazz-softened voices as we filled in the spaces that absence had created between us.
‘So how are things, Pips? News on the Michael front?’ Michael was a rather untypically good-looking book collector and there was the faintest hint of mutual interest, which Jenny had latched on to.
‘You know there is something of the book collector’s mind in you, Jenny,’ I teased her.
‘Fuck off!’
‘No, really, your obsessiveness is like a collector’s – or a trainspotter’s!’
‘Fuck off, Pips. Let’s get another bottle of wine. Anyway, you’re the one who’s OCD. You treat your books like pet Labradors!’
We could never get away from the comparisons. We were like mirrors facing each other, our identities reflected again and again in images of images, disappearing into infinity. There was a remoteness in both of us, a distance from the world. For all the carnal ferocity of her attempts to devour experience, Jenny remained somehow untouched. She had her own metaphorical glasses. Sometimes I think her frustration with me was to do with her own refusal to deal in the abstract. In her mind, my books were a symbol of denial, a denial of the here and now, which lay at the core of her being. We shared a love of fantasy, yet we responded differently to it.
Jenny drifted in and out of the places she visited without any real awareness or interest in the political circumstances or history of the country. She reacted to people, not to facts, and what she brought back from her travels was something intensely personal. I seemed apolitical, she was apolitical. My own apparent reticence had more to do with my distrust of sound bites than a lack of interest in the state of the world. Maybe Jenny was right. Maybe I had my books to blame for that. I couldn’t deal in the black and white of most current affairs conversations, but Jenny was the only other person I knew who couldn’t read
a newspaper.
Jenny returned from the loo and prodded me out of my reverie. ‘Hey, Pips, wake up, you’re drifting off. Time to go. I’ve already paid the bill.’
I was dizzy with the pale blush of white wine. I am dizzy now with memory.
Chapter 46
I turn a page in my mind to a time that is bittersweet. We are sitting on sequined cushions on the floor, around a table laden with pita bread and Moroccan dips, struggling to stay comfortable, but enjoying the novelty of the restaurant. I am nervous, next to Michael’s brother (nothing happened with Michael, but by chance Johnny knows his brother), and Jenny is sitting opposite, next to Johnny. There are two more people, friends of Johnny’s. I see the way that Johnny is looking at Jenny and I feel sad for him, protective almost, wanting to warn him. Johnny does not deserve to join the queue of men to pay the price for Jenny’s past.
I divide Jenny’s men into two types. There is the caricature, the macho who peacocks his charm and seduces, and who is unknowingly seduced. He brings out the sadist in Jenny, sets in motion a gentle tug of war, which she slices into before he gets around to losing interest in her. And there is the earnest type, who wants to prove that he is different. His lesson will be hardest; he will be hurt as well as humiliated.
‘So are you permanently based in London now, Johnny?’ This is one of his friends speaking. ‘No more tin mines?’ A brief aside for my benefit, ‘You know that Johnny is a geologist – bit of a weirdo – used to spend weeks at a time in total isolation on rock faces or something in Bolivia.’
Twin Truths Page 11
