by Paul Charles
‘No, it’s fine dear,’ Jean said, looking rather pleased with herself that it had all turned out as she’d so carefully planned, ‘we’ll go Dutch, won’t we David?’
‘Of course,’ I replied dutifully.
‘What? You mean you’ll each bring tulips?’ John wisecracked, breaking into an uncontrollable fit of laughter, but at the same time appearing very relieved that he wasn’t going to be asked to break into his wallet.
‘Yes quite… dear,’ Jean Simpson said, taking her turn to roll her eyes. ‘Now, I’m sure David has other things to do.’
She stared me directly in the eyes with a, ‘You have other things to do, don’t you?’ kind of stare.
‘I’ll get your telephone number from our Jean and give you a ring to fix up the details,’ she continued as she dismissed me.
Now the more astute of you will remember that she had already rung me on the day that man first landed on the Moon. Yes exactly, that’s what I’d been thinking as well. And at that moment she reminded me of the lady in Dylan’s ‘She Belongs to Me’: ‘She can take the dark out of the night-time and paint the daytime black.’
As I rose to leave, John Harrison handed me the sketch he’d been working on. It was of the two Jeans and me, and each of them was pulling one of my arms in the opposite direction.
Jean Kerr tut-tutted.
Jean Simpson had a puzzled look on her face.
John Harrison looked proud.
While each of them were preoccupied with their own thoughts, I quickly picked up and rolled the other three caricatures and quipped ‘You don’t mind if I take these as well?’
Before John had a chance to reply I’d carefully placed the drawings in my large inside pocket. As you might have already guessed, the reality was that I didn’t give a fig for any of the drawings excepting the one where Jean Simpson was wearing her miniskirt and showing off those prized legs. Yes, with the drawing in my pocked I felt I benefited from an inner glow on that cold, cold night. I reached the flat in record time and couldn’t wait to release the sketches from my inside pocket, and I positively drooled over Jean Simpson’s fine pins for the next hour or so.
Chapter Twelve.
The thing about Mary Skeffington was that for someone so heartbroken she was so intent on having a great time, a hoot. If she had married, she’d now be a merry widow. I wonder what the term is for someone who was engaged but then was dumped? Yes, I know they’ve just been jilted, but you couldn’t really say the merry jiltedee now, could you?
Yes, she was still passionately in love with John Harrison; yes, she was desperately scheming her way back into his affections, but she was not about to wrap herself in sackcloth and mark her face with ashes. Then again you’d also have to say that she was intelligent and the question had to be: How could such an intelligent woman not see and accept what the rest of the world knew; that it was over between her and John Harrison? John Harrison was betrothed to another. It was that simple.
Or was it?
Would John start to reconsider Mary Skeffington simply because, despite all he’d done to her by dumping her and humiliating her in public, she was still protesting her love for him? Would that make her more attractive in his eyes? She certainly couldn’t have looked more attractive in my eyes than she did on that Wednesday night.
Unlike the night of the party, Mary was wearing make-up on this cold, cold Saturday night. Cosmetically speaking, she fell right between the two Jeans. She didn’t shovel it on with a trowel like Jean Kerr, nor did she shyly add a hint here and there like Jean Simpson. She used some around her eyes, a bit on her cheeks to put a little colour into her natural whiteness and a strong, red lipstick. The thing that struck me though was how brilliantly clear her skin was – very white with not a blemish in sight.
Like the night of the party she kept brushing the hair from her eyes in a Cathy McGowan kind of way. It was funny seeing her dark, sharp eyebrows through her blonde fringe. She wasn’t scared of looking you in the eyes, or catching your stare and holding it, and she seemed to continuously search my face for telltale looks that may have contradicted the words I was speaking. I couldn’t work out if that was a by-product of her fall out with John or one of her natural qualities. Conversely, she wore her heart on her sleeve with her own facial expressions.
She was wearing a tight-fitting pair of Jackie Kennedy-type slacks which were tucked into a pair of brown, high-heeled, suede boots. Her top was a subtle red, sleeveless, high-necked jumper, which was perfectly set off with a well-worn and battle-scarred three-quarter length brown suede jacket. She refused to let the waiter take her jacket, insisting instead on letting it fall loosely over the back of her chair.
She spoke well, or proper as we used to say in Castlemartin. I know at the night of the party I’d said she’d a posh accent but on closer examination I found myself thinking she didn’t really have an accent at all, it was just that she knew how to pronounce all her words properly. I admired that; you’ll never know exactly how much I admired that. It seemed to me at that time in my life that everyone I spoke to seemed to start off every other sentence with, ‘Pardon?’
I could see from Mary’s eyes and the cute way she had of bobbing her nose around that she didn’t exactly have to send my lines to Bletchley Park for decryption, but my accent was causing a few problems for her in the translation department. Key troubling words like: films; ate; eight; ask; Wimbledon; chimney; architect and suchlike seemed to raise eyebrows and questions marks when delivered in my Ulster accent. I’d recently found myself subconsciously earmarking words to avoid and seeking out acceptable substitutes.
‘So David Buchanan,’ she began, before I’d a chance to deploy another of my tricks, i.e. asking lots of questions, ‘you know all about me and my love life, or lack of it, what about your romantic adventures? I think I got the gist about the mad Jean but what about others?’
We were sitting in Little Italy, which was just across the road from Wimbledon Theatre. It was cosy and as Val Doonican was currently entertaining the crowds across the road, we were sat at one of only three tables presently in use. (I’d already told her that I’d thought that the same Mr Doonican had released an album with one of the coolest, if somewhat inappropriate, titles, Val Doonican Rocks… But Gently.) The menu was very Italian and reasonably priced, and Mary made me promise that it would be her treat. She owed me a favour, she said, and she could afford it, she said.
‘My life, what can I tell you? It’s boring,’ I replied.
‘Now please, you know my comings and goings chapter and verse. In fact, everyone at that party seems to know the intimate details of my sex life. So cough up, David Buchanan, spill the beans.’
I wanted to say how much more interesting I felt it would be talking about her sex life instead, but I thought that might be better saved for later. Like five years later at this speed. So with the thought that the sooner I get on with it the sooner we can get round to her, I took a large breath and jumped right in.
‘I, agh, I’d a very friendly, easy, fun-packed childhood. I was happy. I didn’t really know what I wanted to do with my life and it didn’t seem important to me to make a decision. I do remember when I was about eight or nine harbouring this passionate ambition about wanting to be a member of the RCMP.’
‘Sorry, give me that again?’ she asked politely.
I loved the sound of her voice; I just wished I could get her to talk more.
‘The Royal Canadian Mounted Police.’
‘The Mounties?’ she gasped in disbelief. ‘You wanted to be a member of the Mounties?’
‘Yes, I was nine at the time and I loved their uniform, what with the hat and the red tunic, the white gloves with the wide-flared cuffs, and the riding britches with a wire clothes hanger down each leg. And I thought the fact that their motto was ‘The Mounties always get their man’ was far out.’
She took to a fit of the giggles. ‘Unbelievable, David Buchanan! So what happened to change that?’
&n
bsp; ‘The Beatles.’
‘What, The Beatles as in you wanted to join The Beatles? I can see the similarity, as in dressing up in uniforms, plus they always get what they want, which seems to be an endless stream of number one hits.’
‘No, not exactly, I mean I didn’t want to join them. The fact that I don’t have an ounce of musical talent in my body takes care of any ambitions in that direction! No, not at all in fact. But what they did was turn me on to music. Before that, music was always just a backdrop. The Beatles moved it into the main frame for me. Then I read that John Lennon and George Harrison were big fans of this American guy called Bob Dylan, so I bought one of his albums. I couldn’t believe how directly he connected with me and I went out and bought all of his albums and here I am.’
‘Sorry… you’re in London because you bought all the Bob Dylan albums? I think we might be missing something there, David,’ she said, before sipping on her wine while we waited for the meal to arrive.
She’d obviously done this so many times before that it was second nature to her. I was still, comparatively speaking, a novice. You see, back home in Castlemartin, people eat only in their houses. The only exception to that is a couple of fish and chip bars which had started to open in the few years just before I’d left. But basically food was a functional exercise back home, whereas in London it seemed to be more of a social adventure. So, what I’m saying is I was still at the follow-your-leader stage of dining, and in this case Mary Skeffington was my leader and I would gladly follow her wherever she wished to take me. Sadly, at this stage, she seemed intent on wanting to take me step-by-step and detail-by-detail through my past.
‘Well as I said I didn’t really have any ambitions…’
‘Apart from The Mounties,’ she said laughing.
‘Yeah, apart from the Mounties,’ I replied, too self-conscious to laugh at myself. ‘I didn’t really know what I wanted to do, but, I did know what I didn’t want to do. Which was to end up tied down to a job and living the rest of my life serving it. I thought a much better idea would be to find something I could do and hopefully that something would pay me enough money that I could live my life freely. I knew it would be pretty hard to do that in Castlemartin and, because of the lure of music and thanks to the NME, I realised London would probably be the best starting point for me.’
‘You found it easy to leave your family behind?’ she asked, as the food arrived. I had ordered the exact same as her, tagliatelle, whatever that was, it was served in a cream sauce, and I now mirrored her choice of cutlery.
‘I find it gets easier as time passes. It wasn’t very easy at the beginning though. I mean, it was fine with my sister – she’s about twelve years older than me and she’s been married since I was nine, so we were never really very close. I am very close to my parents though,’ I said, hearing my voice crack a little with emotion. I hoped it wasn’t noticeable.
‘Did your parents not mind you leaving?’
‘They were…’ I hesitated for a few beats, ‘they were pretty grown up about it.’
She laughed. I was happy at that; I didn’t want her to think I was making a cheap joke at my parent’s expense.
‘I mean, I think they both would’ve been happier if I’d stayed at home, but I think they felt that I’d make more of myself over here. It’s probably harder for them you know, I’ve left a large gap in their lives, and while now I’m lucky enough to be filling up my gap with a new group of people in London, at the beginning it was very difficult. I just hadn’t accounted for how hard the homesickness would hit me.’
‘Yeah, I suppose because I’ve been lucky enough to be able to nip home for a weekend when I was missing my mother I’ve never really suffered from homesickness,’ she offered quietly. ‘What about girlfriends; did you leave any tearful Colleens at the airport?’
‘At the docks, more like,’ I replied, remembering my first fatiguing journey to London, endurable only because I felt I was at the start of a great adventure. ‘I was seeing someone just before I left. Her name was Colette. Her name still is Colette, I’m sure.’
‘Had you been seeing her long?’
‘Probably a bit over a year,’ I replied. The tagliatelle, which turned out to be plain old flattened spaghetti, was delicious and I wasn’t making a dog’s dinner out of eating it, so my confidence was rising.
‘Goodness. That’s a long time to date someone when you’re a teenager. No plans for her to come over here?’
‘No. It was never a possibility. Perhaps if I’d stayed in Ireland we would have… you know…’
‘Settled down, got married, had kids?’
‘Possibly, something like that I suppose, but I doubt it. Although, that seems to happen a lot in small villages; pretty soon you know everyone and you have to make your choice from them.’
‘But isn’t that a bit unfair on Colette? You know, if you’d stayed in Ireland she was the best of who was available and you’d have gotten it together?’
‘No. No, it’s nothing like that at all. We’d already agreed that we weren’t really the ones for each other. She’d different goals. She was very happy to stay in Ireland. She’d no ambitions about travelling. She’s part of a very tightly knit, large family and she’s doing fine. Besides, she drops me a line now and then – she’s met someone, and she likes him a lot and thinks he likes her. It’s early days yet but she thinks it might work.’
‘Does that hurt you?’ Mary Skeffington asked. She seemed happy to have been distracted from her own disastrous love life for a time.
‘Not really, I mean, I was a bit sad when I received her letter, you know – we’d kissed and cuddled a little, but not a lot. We were more mates, truth be told. It was more of a coincidence that we were of the opposite sex.’
‘And that’s been the love of your life apart from Mad Jean?’ she continued, pausing only to use her napkin to dap the corners of her mouth. It was such a genteel gesture that I was convinced it showed her breeding. But she could’ve just as easily spotted someone doing it on the Forsythe Saga.
‘Well, let’s just say of the two I have fonder memories of Colette.’
‘There’s that gentleman slipping through again,’ Mary said, with a warm smile. She really did have such beautiful teeth.
Girls, why are they made so absolutely beautiful if we’re not meant to stare at them? I mean, I’m being pretty cool here telling you about this but… I couldn’t believe I was out on the town with one so beautiful. And that so far she’d managed to get me to do most of the talking. I was thinking it was a shame that due to the fact she was still so hung up on John, I was never going to be able to feast my eyes on the rest of her body.
‘I’m not sure about that,’ I said, giving voice to some of my thoughts. ‘But anyway, that’s pretty much me – what about you, why are you in London?’
Before dessert had arrived she’d told me that she’d moved to London because John Harrison had moved to London. In fact, pretty much everything she had ever done involved John Harrison. I hope that doesn’t make her sound like some feeble girl who did everything for her man. That, quite simply, wasn’t the case. She was very strong and ambitious; it just so happens that all her ambitions, until quite recently, were entwined with those of John Harrison. I think that was the thing that had shocked her the most. You know, the fact that as far as she was concerned they were a team. In a team you don’t make sacrifices for each other, you just get on with whatever is best for the team. Only now in hindsight was she realising that some of the things she’d done could most definitely be described as ‘sacrifices’. And when she really got down to it, she was slowly coming to the conclusion that every time one of them discussed giving way to the other, it was always she who stood back so that he could step forward.
‘I hadn’t seen it coming,’ she claimed. ‘In fact, I had absolutely no inkling. We met the two Jeans at another of Tiger’s parties. Neither of us paid much attention to them, apart from the fact that they appeared to be sis
ters, and maybe stronger than sisters at that because they were sisters in name and not in blood.’
‘At the night of the first party it was Jean Kerr who did all the talking, while the other Jean seemed a bit sheepish. I will say one thing though; since she’s started dating John, she’s come right out of her shell. No more riding on the other Jean’s very large coat-tails.’
I had to agree with Mary on that one.
‘It’s funny that,’ she said as desserts arrived, ‘how when you’re part of a couple for the first time, you seem to grow into it. You adopt the status of no longer being alone. I’ve been finding that now I’m alone, I’m feared. Maybe it’s just because I’m a single girl or they think I’m desperate for a boy now that John has gone. I’m beginning to sense a little bit of closing of the ranks when I’m around.’
She stopped and dug her spoon into her Lancaster Lemon Tart (I found it strange that such a dish should be on the sweets menu in an Italian restaurant; perhaps these particular Italians were northern ones – northern Italy that is, not northern English), and she poked around in her dessert as if she was searching for gold or something. Maybe she was searching for words.
‘David, I’m not the one who has done wrong,’ she said, as a large tear started rolling down her left cheek. ‘I’d never have looked at another man and here’s John off chasing the first Jean who bats her eyelashes, rolls her ‘a’s at him and he’s off. Dumped me and just because he’s now in a couple and I’m not, I’m the one who’s treated like a leper. As all his friends were our friends, now I’ve no friends.’
Her single teardrop was joined by another two and the trio were making their way slowly down her cheek.
‘Well I’m your friend.’
That seemed to be the signal for the rest of her tears to pour out from her reservoir. How many tears do we have? We’ve all heard about the girl in the song who cried me a river. I hope that girl’s boyfriend had a pair of wellies, but could you really ever reach a point when you’ve used up all your tears? Poor Mary Skeffington looked like she’d used up her entire reserve at this point. She wasn’t a cry-baby or anything like that; she was actually quite spunky in her own way. It’s just that, as near as I could figure, she’d given her all to someone, to something that she thought would last. Now that it hadn’t lasted, she obviously felt that she’d lost a part of herself. I felt she was grieving more over that loss than over the loss of John Harrison, and that was probably why she was hurting so much. And… all of the above was most likely the reason why she’d never, ever give herself completely to anyone again. She’d always hold something back. Even if it was just a wee bit, it was going to be enough to stop her from ever having a deep relationship again. I told her all of this.
