“I was going to tell you,” he muttered into my hair. “I don’t particularly want to go, it isn’t up to me.”
“I’m sure you’ll cope.”
The air was thick with unsaid words. I wanted to berate him, not just for Saturday night, but for concealing the fact that after the exams, we would not be spending more time together, we would be parted for ages.
Perhaps he wanted a break. Perhaps I had tried to keep him too much to myself and this was the result. Despite our physical intimacy, I recognised with a sudden shock that I did not know at all what went on in his head. Any assumptions I had made about our relationship came tumbling down like autumn leaves in a gale.
I was very sad - too sad to think any more, too sad to summon tears, far too sad to cause a row.
Although he was passionate in the bedroom, Nick was not a particularly demonstrative person in the ordinary way of things. He kept holding me in a tight hug, which was unusual.
“Can you come round on Tuesday afternoon? Mum will be at work,” he murmured.
We were both on study leave outside school for the duration.
“I thought you needed time to yourself,” I said.
He nuzzled my neck, and I closed my eyes as I breathed in his warm, familiar smell. I couldn’t bear to contemplate weeks of being without him.
“I need you, too, funny face. I want you, you know that. All this other stuff doesn’t matter.”
He kissed me, and I let myself believe him. I knew that whatever he did, I would not be the one to break away. The trouble was - he knew it too.
Chapter 7
Somehow, I got through the tedium of A levels. Nick and I saw each other from time to time and we seemed to be back on the old footing - it was hard to tell really, as his parents whisked him away immediately after his last exam.
The final few days of school were strange, surprisingly nostalgic and sentimental. It seemed unbelievable to think that our daily companions of the last six years were dispersing and we were all going our separate ways. Never again would we be terrified into good behaviour by a twitch of Miss Hayman’s eyebrows.
“At least we can get out of this ghastly uniform,” Eva chortled. It was customary for departing sixth formers to make a bonfire of their loathed school hats, and we were admiring the blaze.
“Yes - we’re all grown up now,” I said lightly.
“Well, you certainly are.”
She sent me a sideways look. Eva had resisted sleeping with Teddy. Much as she had fancied him, she had begun to find him a bit dull. “He has hidden shallows” she stated, and their relationship was in gentle decline.
She could never quite decide whether she was envious of the fact that I was one step ahead of her in our experience with the opposite sex.
I had a postcard from Nick. “Great weather here, be good up north” it read. We went away, and I spent a lot of time walking on the beach, waiting for my real life to begin again. I missed Nick terribly, physically as well as emotionally, and I was determined there would be no scenes in future, whatever happened. There would be less of the insecure schoolgirl girlfriend, more of the confident young woman I hoped to be.
I never did get round to having my ears pierced.
I rang his house when I got home and left a message on the answering service to say I was back. Nothing happened, and I thought he must still be away - I knew that his parents’ plans were flexible. However, after ten days went by and he had not called me, I began to feel restless.
I was due to meet Eva in town for coffee and a gossip, and as it was a lovely day, we wandered into the park afterwards and lounged on the scrubby grass, enjoying the sunshine.
“Gosh - this takes me back to the first time I ever spoke to Nick,” I said dreamily. “It seems like another lifetime away now. I can’t wait for him to get back from France.”
Eva looked surprised.
“Nick? But he’s been back for ages. Haven’t you seen him yet?”
A cold hand gripped my heart, and my stomach turned over.
“No. I left a telephone message for him. I don’t think he can believe I’m still away,” I said doubtfully.
There was silence for a moment. A little breeze ruffled the corporation bedding plants standing in their uniform rows beside us. I stared at their cheerful brightness, I didn’t know what to think.
“Well, why don’t you ring him again?” Eva suggested.
“No, I can’t - you know I can’t.”
There was an unwritten code which dictated you could never call a boy twice if he had not responded to your first attempt. It was a real taboo. Only the very desperate would have such low self-esteem that they would break it.
“But if he wanted to finish things, surely he’d tell me?” I was stupefied by the turn of events. “Eva, can you try and find out from Teddy what’s going on?”
“Well, I don’t see so much of him these days, but I’ll ask around. I can’t think why Nick hasn’t contacted you. Bastard!” she added.
I lay on my back and stared up at the sky. Tears were beginning to trickle down my cheeks, and I wiped them away with an angry hand.
“Don’t cry, Eithne.”
Eva gazed at me with concern. “He’s not worth it. I wish you’d never got involved with him, we’ve all been worried about you.”
“Who’s we?”
My voice was anguished. “You mean - everyone’s been saying poor old Eithne, another one of Nick’s conquests?”
The thought was appalling.
“No - no. Belinda and one or two of the girls who care about you. You’ve been so wrapped up in him all this summer. And I think some of his friends have felt you were bound to get hurt. They were all amazed that you were a twosome for so long - Nick isn’t known for his fidelity,” she added.
I didn’t know whether that made it worse or better. I sat up.
“And at least you can all say that you warned me,” I said bitterly.
“He is really attractive, Eithne, it’s not your fault. I can see that once you’d started, it would be difficult to stop.”
We were silent for a while. I think I was feeling faint, blood seemed to sing in my ears.
“I got addicted to him,” I said. “I still am. Now I’ll have to go through cold turkey or whatever it’s called.”
Eva gripped my hand with a sympathetic squeeze.
“You don’t know yet, there might be some perfectly good explanation for all this.”
“I think I’ll go home now,” I said, voice wobbling. I felt the need to return to my lair, like a wounded animal.
Then the crying began. After a few more days without any contact, and confirmation via Eva that Nick was indeed back home and conducting an active social life, I began to realise that everything was over between us. I didn’t know what had precipitated the break, or what had caused his silence, nor could anyone else tell me. Pride would not let me speak to him. It was the only thing I had left.
I cried in the mornings, I cried in the afternoons, bedtimes were awash with floods as I pictured Nick in the arms of another girl. I was doubled up with the sheer physical pain of wanting him so badly.
Of course, my parents knew about the split by now, and it was terrible for my mother. I think she had worshipped Nick almost as much as I had.
“I’ve a good mind to go round there and give that boy a piece of my mind,” she cried, as I lay, wrapped in misery, on the sofa.
“No!” I almost screamed. I wanted to hang on to the few shreds of dignity I still possessed.
My father began to wear a grim face as he contemplated the wreck that was his daughter. I didn’t think about it at the time, but they were both suffering with me, and were powerless to help. It must have been awful for them. With the self-centredness of youth, I could only think about myself and the anguish I was enduring.
I felt suffocated, trapped inside the house, because I was terrified of seeing him in town, perhaps hand in hand with another girl, or carefree, with his
mates. I could not have borne to visit the store where his mother worked, the prospect of hearing her cool, polite voice was too awful to contemplate.
“Do you think she’ll be better by the time she goes to Oxford?” I heard my father say in wretched tones one day.
“I do hope so. I’m going to take her to the doctor if she goes on like this.”
“What good will that do?” I asked myself. Only one doctor could effect a cure for my ailment, and he was no longer practising.
Towards the end of September, as a “treat” for me, and, doubtless, to give themselves a break from my unremitting misery, my parents sent me to London for a long weekend with my godmother.
“Aunt” Deidre was a very old friend of my mother’s family. She was quite unlike my parents, having a senior job in personnel with a petroleum company, and living a reputedly glamorous life in her tiny Fulham flat. She was single, and I had once heard my mother hint almost disapprovingly at some longstanding relationship with a married man, but I never knew much about it.
Deidre took one look at me, and dispensed worldly wisdom, two new outfits, and a visit to her hairdresser in Chelsea.
She took me out for dinner to an Italian bistro round the corner from her flat on the first night of my stay. I hadn’t had any appetite for weeks, but a glass of wine and bowl of savoury pasta in cheerful surroundings were too good to resist.
My mother had given her the basic facts regarding the disastrous affair, but Deidre asked me to give her my version as we ate. When I had finished, with a few gulps along the way, she paused, and lit a cigarette.
“Oh darling - what a classic tale,” she said, blowing smoke down her nose. “I’m surprised that Alison” (my mother) “let you anywhere near him.”
“But she adored Nick, she’s as upset as I am.”
Deidre regarded me across the wine glasses with appraising eyes. She said,
“I suppose you were sleeping with him?”
I flushed, and looked away.
“Please don’t tell mum, she doesn’t know.”
“I wouldn’t bet on that.”
She smoked on for a bit. “Of course, I’ve seen it happen lots of times before. I expect you got too intense for him and frightened him away.”
“I loved him. I thought he loved me.”
The omnipresent tears rolled down my cheeks, and I dabbed at them hastily with my napkin. People from the neighbouring table glanced over at us with ill-concealed curiosity, and I felt wretched again.
“Oh, Eithne......”
Deidre stretched across the table and grasped my other hand. “I promise you that he is only the first boy you’ll love, or be loved by. Think how young you are. Your entire life is ahead of you, don’t let yourself get dragged down by one mistake.”
“Nick wasn’t a mistake.”
“Well, learn from it, then.” She summoned the waiter with a wave of her cigarette. “Above all, do try harder to be cheerful for your parents’ sake, they are beside themselves with worry, you know. Now - you’ve got far too thin, you must have some of Franco’s delicious zuppa inglese.”
“I don’t think I could possibly eat - whatever you said just then.”
But in the end, I did. It was a rich kind of trifle, and I enjoyed it.
“I still don’t know why he just dumped me like he did, no explanations, nothing,” I said over the coffee cups.
“No, that was cruel. But tell me this, Eithne - if you could go back and change things - do you wish it had never happened at all, or can you end up taking something - anything of value from this experience?”
I thought painfully of my first encounter with the dark boy with the heart stopping smile.
“I was sunk from the moment I saw him,” I said at last. “He was - he is - so beautiful, Deidre. You can’t imagine.......”
My voice trembled. I remembered his lithe, lean body and the intense physical pleasure we had shared. “I can’t wish it never happened, but I think I’ll mourn him for ever.”
“Mourn him then - but move on afterwards. I know you can do it. You have to do it. Thank goodness you’ve got a whole new chapter opening for you.” (She meant Oxford.) “Now - tomorrow - some shopping, I think. You’ll find that’s very good glue for broken hearts.”
She was very patient and generous towards me. Waving my objections to one side, she bought me a trendy new coat and dress from Miss Selfridge, and then proposed a visit to Sandro, “to sort out your hair, darling.”
I had paid very little attention to my long tresses in recent weeks, and my hair looked weedy and tired. Sandro weighed it in both hands, decreed that the “hippy” look was too old and boring for me, and layered it back to shoulder length, where the hair, relieved of the extra weight, sprang into becoming tendrils. It looked fabulous and much more grown up, and the weight of misery lifted a little from my shoulders as Deidre had promised.
“Now, remember darling - happy face,” Deidre chided, as she put me on the train back home on Sunday night. “You have a whole new life to look forward to.”
The visit was salutary. I did begin to make an effort to live a normal life again, or at least stop crying so much, and we all felt happier as a result.
Two things occurred in the week before I went up to Oxford. One was nice, the other - interesting.
Nick’s friend Peter telephoned me out of the blue, and he suggested with a slight diffidence that we should meet for a drink at the Crown, an old pub down by the river. Sitting at a table in the pub garden with a boy and a drink made me feel a little less desolate, a little more of a real person again. Peter told me how much he admired my new hairstyle.
“Of course, I really fancied you, you know,” he said, with a rueful laugh. “That time at the Christmas dance - but I realised that once Nick had got his hooks into you .....” he tailed off, flushing. “Sorry Eithne, that was tactless of me.”
“It’s okay.”
I gave him a wry smile. Studying Peter across the table, he seemed much more mature somehow, talking enthusiastically about the engineering course he was about to begin at Leeds, and the girlfriend from St Faith’s who would also be at the same university. I was pleased for him. Of course, I longed to ask something, anything, about Nick, but I think we both felt the topic was better avoided.
I couldn’t avoid it entirely, though. We were speaking about Oxford, and I found myself blurting out
“I’m terrified of bumping into Nick when I’m there.”
Peter took a swig of his shandy.
“It’s a big place, you’re studying different subjects. I think it’s more likely you’ll never see him - unless you want to.”
“I do hope you’re right.”
I thought suddenly of the “barracks up the Banbury Road”. Distance from the rest of the university was now something to be pleased and relieved about.
“I suppose it’s been a difficult year for you, Eithne. I’m sorry about that,” Peter said, a little shyly.
“Well - some parts of it were rather wonderful.”
I stared at the river, populated with raucous ducks, very different to the grim lake waters of my first “date” with Nick. Perhaps it was a good omen.
“But it’s all gone haywire, somehow. At least I know a lot more about boys and relationships than I did before, I’ll be better prepared for the next one.”
The landlord was calling “time”. I think we were both sorry to leave, there had been a sense of tying up loose ends, an end-of-an-era feeling about our meeting.
“Let’s keep in touch. I’ll write to you at St Hugh’s when I’ve got my hall place settled,” Peter said, as we stood on the pavement.
“Yes, that would be good.”
He suddenly bent forwards, and kissed me on the cheek.
“For what it’s worth, Eithne - I don’t think Nick’s been very happy since he stopped seeing you,” he said.
My heart broke all over again.
“Oh Peter - don’t!” I gulped. I stood on tiptoe
(he was miles taller than Nick), returned his kiss, and rushed off before the tears flowed. I should have been pleased, but I wasn’t.
The second incident was equally unexpected, if not so pleasant.
The weekend before I went up to Oxford, my cousin Sandy came to stay for a night, before beginning his third year as a medic in Cambridge. He needed some shopping, and for once, I felt brave enough to go into town with him.
As we approached the old market square, I saw him - Nick - sitting on a wall, talking to Dave Jackson. I wondered for a split second whether to make a quick detour, then thought of Deidre, and decided I needed to get it over with.
Nick recognised me as we got closer. I saw him do a quick double take - he hadn’t seen me with my new haircut before - and he glanced at Sandy, appraising the situation, was this a new boyfriend? I was glad that Sandy was tall and nice looking. Dave turned his head, saw me, and fell silent.
I felt completely in control.
“Hullo Nick, hullo Dave,” I said clearly and coolly as I drew level with them.
Nick’s bright, dark eyes couldn’t conceal his surprise, and I thought how seldom I had seen that expression in them before.
“Uh - hullo Eithne. How are you?” Nick said, always polite.
For a long moment, Nick and I exchanged glances. I twisted my mouth into a tight smile, my eyes were saying “you bastard!” I wanted to read remorse in his. But to my surprise, his gaze was tender, amused, complicit, almost as if we were still together and nothing had happened. I gave myself a mental shake.
“I’m fine. Bye, then.”
I took Sandy’s arm, and strutted off, tossing the tendrils of my hair, not waiting to hear if he responded.
Sandy and I walked on. I felt breathless. I couldn’t decide whether I wanted to run back and hit Nick, or run back and fall into his arms. With a supreme effort of will, I managed to stop myself from doing either.
After we had gone a hundred yards or so, Sandy suddenly stopped.
“I’ve just realised - that was the famous Nick, wasn’t it?”
“Yes.”
I was feeling tearful now. It had been both horrible and wonderful to see him. Sandy swore under his breath.
From The Moment I Saw Him .... Page 5
