White Lies

by Rudolph Bader

  Ned seemed to notice her hesitation. He took it for shyness and withdrew his hands, only to try again a little later. This time she let him enjoy himself but decided to draw a line here. She wanted to clear up her doubts about their relationship before she would let things go any further. Eventually, he stopped his caresses, they both straightened their clothes and sighed.

  “Let’s go for a cup of tea somewhere,” she suggested.

  They went to a small café in Grey Street, not far down from the Theatre Royal. Nora got herself a cup of tea, while Ned chose a milky coffee. They sat down at a table near the door and spent a while stirring their cups and just looking into the middle distance. She tried to catch his eyes, but he avoided hers, sensing that something was amiss.

  “Do you still love me?” she asked.

  “Well, I mean, we’ve been together for quite a while now. We wouldn’t have stayed together if we hadn’t been in love, now would we?”

  “That’s not enough,” she managed to breathe.

  “Yes, me too, I’d like to have more. Why can’t we try to find a place where we can do more? You know, enjoy more of each other...”

  “I don’t mean it like that.”

  “Oh yes, I have been feeling that you don’t really seem to love me anymore. Whenever I want to touch you, you hold back, you just don’t seem to enjoy being with me anymore.”

  “I don’t want more in that way. I’d like to have more commitment from you.”

  “I don’t understand you,” he moaned, looking at her with dog’s eyes.

  “That’s exactly the problem. We have moved apart. We’re no longer the eager lovers we were a few months ago. Things have just cooled down between us. You must have felt it, too, if you’re honest.”

  He was going to contradict her, but he hesitated. “I don’t know what to say.”

  “Let’s just give us some time. Let’s be good friends and find out where we stand over the next few weeks. We are still so young.”

  “If you think that’s a good idea...”

  They were silent for a while, before Nora decided to clear up the gloomy atmosphere which had descended on them. So she changed the subject. “Have you put your name down for the school trip in June?”

  “I haven’t, but I’m going to,” he answered, relieved.

  They continued talking about school work, about their common friends and - to please him - about the latest game of Newcastle United, a topic she hated, but she wanted to show him she didn’t bear him any grudge.

  After this, they didn’t meet just between the two of them for several weeks. They only got together in groups of friends and in class. To Nora’s relief, they managed to remain good friends without rekindling the former fire. In a way, she was quite happy about this state of things, but as time went by she began to miss being with a boyfriend. She realized she had tasted from the sweet tree of love. Not only her heart but also her body craved for a new chapter in this department.

  The issues with her girlfriends were of a different nature. They had some silly dispute over one of the boys at their school, Jeff Benson, who was a tall sixth-form pupil with long dark hair. Christine and Sophie considered him the most beautiful boy they’d ever seen. While Christine thought he looked like Alain Delon, Sophie said he looked more like Alan Bates in Far from the Madding Crowd, only taller. Debbie and Janet didn’t agree with this assessment of Jeff’s looks at all. They agreed that he looked much more like Richard Chamberlain but wasn’t really worth looking at because he preferred the Rolling Stones to the Beatles, which proved he must have lost his mind completely. The disagreement escalated, and the girls began to shout and scream at each other. When the yelling got too loud, Nora just walked away from her friends because she thought it childish to get excited over such a trifle. Also, she didn’t think Jeff was all that good-looking, and she couldn’t care less about the looks of film-stars or the superior quality of some rock-band over another. She never listened to such music anyway. She only heard it, but without liking it, when she couldn’t escape it; for example, in certain shops or at certain events, where both the bands under discussion couldn’t be shut out. So she made it clear to her friends that she wasn’t going to take sides.

  “Oh, how typical of you!” they shouted. “You with your nose up in the air. You’re too posh to have an opinion on such primitive matters that interest lower-class girls like us.”

  “I’m not posh. How can you say that I’ve got something like social arrogance?”

  “Just listen to her,” they shouted to the world at large, “our teachers’ darling with her airs and graces, her Latin and her clever questions in the history classes...”

  Then there was only yelling and screaming, and the arguments got lost in the general frustrated atmosphere. It got too much for Nora. So she just walked away, giving her friends the finger and accelerating her steps in the direction of the school’s main entrance, her eyes streaming with tears.

  How could her friends be like that? How could they think of her like that? And how could they get so worked up over such stupid issues? She knew you could never argue about matters of opinion or taste, because every individual had different opinions and different tastes on most things. Even your best friends didn’t have to agree with you on everything under the sun. De gustibus non est disputandum, she remembered her father’s dictum. But the worst thing was the seriousness and energy behind their weak arguments.

  In bed at night, she spent a long time thinking about what had happened. She tried to understand the psychological workings behind the quarrel. But she got lost in the maze of her own thoughts and eventually fell asleep.

  In the middle of the night she awoke from her troubled dreams, and a possible explanation suddenly flashed through her mind. Could it be that people lost their intellectual reasoning in a debate when the position they were defending was based merely on emotions and not on facts, but they weren’t aware of this and felt frustrated over their own inability to find a better reason - in fact no intellectual argument at all - to give more weight to their position? If the position you argue from is really untenable but you’re not aware of this, you are bound to get frustrated and your emotions will play havoc with you.

  That had to be the case with her friends. Nora was relieved to have found some sort of explanation. Nevertheless, she blamed herself for failing to see that from the outset and for getting involved where she shouldn’t have got involved.

  Both problem areas - the boyfriend question and the appropriate proximity or distance between herself and her girlfriends - remained with Nora throughout the following months. However, as the days became shorter and the wet November days of Newcastle turned the atmosphere into a depressing bleakness, she thought she had found a well-balanced attitude in both departments.

  Even though she still admired good-looking boys - without comparing them with film-stars, of course - she had come to the conclusion that she didn’t have to press things, she didn’t have to get herself a new boyfriend as soon as possible. Things would eventually fall into place. As long as she remained herself and looked at the whole question from her higher vantage point with a relaxed attitude, there would be another boyfriend in good time. Thinking of herself with the best critical distance she could muster, she admitted to herself that she wasn’t ready for more daring sexual activities as yet. She first wanted to become a more mature person, whatever that involved. But at the same time, she enjoyed observing boys and sometimes, when she couldn’t sleep at night, imagining some sort of satisfying love-making. She still couldn’t conceive how to bridge the emotional distance between enjoying a cuddly kiss and going the whole hog. What she knew from her reading and from some films she’d seen on TV, couples just started going to bed with each other and having real adult sex at a certain point, but the emotional side of that great step was never convincingly explained. People just did i
t. As for her, she needed the confidence that her physical activities would be in full agreement with her emotional needs. So there was no hurry. Her days would come.

  With her girlfriends she felt more and more relaxed, too. They all resumed their easy-going relationship and often went to town as a group. They were six young girls who were exploring the world together. On the bus between Gosforth and Newcastle’s Civic Centre, they sometimes had such a good time that they kept laughing so loud as a closed circle that other bus passengers tut-tutted and shook their heads. “Well well, today’s young girls! They don’t know any shame!” was sometimes uttered by elderly ladies with bitter faces, but only heard by other passengers, never by the girls concerned. When other passengers nodded, the elderly ladies felt confirmed in their view, while the girls continued in their exuberant mood and kept up their noisy chatter.

  The group gave Nora more self-confidence, as time went on. Despite the unfriendly cold weather, she felt warm enough when she was with her friends. But of all the girls in the group, it was Debbie who was her very best friend. Perhaps it was because they had so many interests in common, perhaps it was because she lived so close-by. Debbie was often at Nora’s house and vice versa. As the year drew towards its end, their mothers knew them as an inseparable pair. Nora’s mother would normally ask on a Friday evening, “Will you be at Debbie’s tomorrow, or is she coming here?” and then, later, “What about Sunday? Is Debbie going to be with us for our Sunday roast?”

  It occurred to Nora that Margaret might be jealous of her good friend Debbie. Margaret not only stayed away from boys, she also never came home with a girl. One evening, Nora thought she just had to know, so she asked her sister if she had a girlfriend.

  “Why do you want to know?” was Margaret’s reply.

  “I just wondered why you never bring any of your friends home. You know how often Debbie comes here.”

  “So you thought because I don’t bring anyone here I can’t have a friend? Well, if you must know the truth, I do have a very good friend. Her name’s Helen, and she’s very nice.”

  “Oh, I’m glad for you,” Nora said, relieved. “Why don’t you introduce her to your family?”

  “Because I don’t believe in such things. My family, I mean Mum and Dad and you, well, you are one part of my life. And Helen is another part. I don’t want to mix these two parts.”

  “But that’s very odd. I enjoy the way Debbie is received in our family, as I am in hers. Like this, it’s all in the open. Mum never worries when I’m out because she knows I’m with Debbie, or with Debbie and other friends.”

  “That’s different. You’re too young to understand my situation. You see, Helen isn’t just a friend, she’s a lot more. We’re very close.”

  “I still don’t understand,” Nora begged.

  “Well, that’s what I just said: you don’t understand. But you will one day.”

  After this final dismissal, the topic was no longer mentioned between the two sisters for a long time.

  * * *

  After New Year, the weather turned milder. It was certainly a lot milder than a year earlier. When Nora and Debbie were sitting in Janet’s room in her big house in Osborne Road one late afternoon in February; the three girls remembered how they had been freezing at that time.

  “Do you remember how we were waiting for the power to come back, freezing in our winter coats, sitting in front of our cold electric fires?” Janet asked.

  “Of course. It was an exciting time,” Nora answered.

  “But my parents were furious,” Janet said. “They said the miners ought to be punished. It’s all those strikes that are ruining the country. My daddy said if it wasn’t for all those strikes, our economy would be in a better state than it is. For example, he said our car industry is suffering so terribly because of the strikes. They affect the quality of our cars, so nobody is going to buy British cars in a few years.”

  “That’s exaggerated,” Debbie replied. “Our industry is still one of the best in the world, my parents say.”

  Nora wondered if she should step into this topic, too, but hesitated because she knew she didn’t know half enough about it. She only remembered her father making similar comments as Janet’s. So she decided to contribute some general remark to the conversation. “I think it all depends on the type of industry. My dad works for the chemical industry, and he says we can easily compete with Continental companies, even with the Germans. Actually, he mentioned a possible business trip to Germany later this year.”

  The other girls were impressed with her comment. Then their discussions turned to different topics. Naturally, they soon landed in the question of boys, boys and girls, boyfriends and new discoveries among their friends.

  Janet fetched some more bottles of Coke and a few packets of potato crisps from the kitchen. When she returned to her room, Debbie teased her with an unexpected statement: “Christine says she’s seen you together with Jeff Benson. You were holding hands.”

  Both Nora and Debbie looked at Janet, who was still standing in the middle of the room with three bottles of Coke in her hands. The packets of crisps lay on the carpet. For a moment she froze, obviously racing through her brain for what to say. But she quickly regained her composure.

  “She can’t have seen us.”

  “Well, she must have. Come on, tell us more about it. Are you two together?”

  “It’s still early days. I can’t tell you more. But please, don’t tell anyone.”

  Debbie and Nora knew Janet well enough to know there wouldn’t be any more information forthcoming. So they swallowed their disappointment and promised not to tell anyone.

  “But you also promise to tell us more when things move on, won’t you?”

  Janet promised her part of the deal. Then Nora mentioned their homework for the next day, which changed the atmosphere and took them away from their more private interests. They discussed the essay they had to write and exchanged some good ideas. And soon it was time to go home. Walking through the park on their way back to Gosforth, Debbie and Nora returned to the topic of Jeff Benson.

  “What a sly one she is,” Debbie began. “Who would have thought she could get him. He’s the one. All the girls want him.”

  “I, for one, don’t want him,” Nora said casually.

  “You must be the only one, then.”

  Back at home, Nora went up to her room, sat down at her small desk and began to work on her essay. When she reached a point where she wasn’t quite sure about how to continue with her argumentation, her mind drifted off. She wondered how it could be that so many girls seemed to admire one and the same boy. Jeff certainly wasn’t good-looking. He seemed boring to her. After a while, she dismissed the topic and returned to the matter at hand in her essay.

  In the evening, she found herself alone with her father in his study while her mother was busy with household chores elsewhere in their big house. It wasn’t the first time. Such meetings between father and daughter seemed to happen just like that, and they gradually established a new sense of trust and intimacy between them. So it became quite natural for them to approach certain topics that they would never mention with other members of the family present.

  “Isn’t it strange how so many of my friends seem to be after the same boy?” Nora asked.

  “It often happens. Probably the boy just represents the type of young male that conforms to the current taste and fashion,” was her father’s explanation.

  “I would never run after a boy that all my friends go on about all the time.”

  “Well, when it happens to you, you just can’t help it, can you?”

  “Perhaps if I was the first girl to get him, before anyone else became aware of his charms,” she laughed.

  “Don’t laugh. That’s exactly what happened to me when I was your age. Well, maybe a bit older t
han you are now, but that’s beside the point.”

  “Oh, do tell me about it, Dad,” Nora begged.

  “Let me fetch my glass of wine first,” her father said and rose to go to the kitchen. She was afraid the spell of the moment might be broken, so she returned to her question immediately when he sat down again with the glass in his hands.

  “Was she beautiful?”

  “She was the most beautiful girl I’d ever known,” he sighed, taking a sip from his wine and looking into the middle distance.

  “What was she like?”

  “She was very slim, with long blonde hair with a touch of ginger. Her hair took on a magic colour in the late afternoon sunlight, and her blue eyes were such a deep blue it felt like drowning when you looked into them.”

  “Well, Dad,–” she was going to say something but realized it wouldn’t be such a good idea. He might change his mind and stop.

  “Her name was Anna,” he continued. “She had a very charming smile, and her laugh was ever so bubbly, so heart-refreshing. She was my first and only girlfriend before I met your mother. I never heard from her again after–”

  “Why did you break up?”

  “Oh, Nora, my girl, you don’t know. Those were such troubled times,” he sighed heavily, bent over and buried his face in his hands.

  “But there must have been a reason?”

  “We were so young, and we were so much in love... then the War came, things became difficult.”