by Rosie Thomas
Thirteen
It was like running a race.
Helen felt like an athlete, pacing herself with miserly care for the bursts of intense effort. As each paper finished, she put it behind her and focused unwaveringly on the next. She was exhilarated, forging ahead on the adrenalin that pounded through her. And she barely dared to admit it to herself, but she was doing well. Each answer came to her out of the air, compact and satisfying. Her head danced with ideas and insights, long quotes which she had no idea she knew, as she ran down the long black and white tunnel of the week. It was a world of paper, the dry whisper of the question sheet and her own handwriting covering page after blank page. She came alive in the silence of the halls, deaf to the coughs and shuffles of concentration and the crisp instructions of the invigilators.
Between exams Helen slept, gratefully and dreamlessly, ate alone as far from other people as she could, and walked the river banks with her mind working at the next paper.
It was the longest and the shortest week that she had ever known. She felt that she had been living like this for half her life, and that it was finished before it had begun. It was the last day, and she was filing across the black and white tiles and down the long rows to her desk for the last time. She was vaguely surprised to see the grey, exhausted faces around her. Surely she couldn’t look like that herself. The familiar face-down oblong of question paper sat in front of her, and the empty answer book. Nearly there. It was nearly finished.
The black gown of the invigilator swished past and something made her look up. It was Stephen. The sight of him stirred submerged recollections of life a long way off and she forced them back again. Not yet. Finish this, first. ‘You may begin writing now.’
Stephen unhooked his thumbs from the bands of his gown and strolled to his desk on the raised dais. In his place he unfolded The Times and leisurely began on the crossword. Usually he enjoyed invigilating. The contrast between his own restful three hours and the feverish effort in front of him was amusing. But now the empty lights of the puzzle blurred and the monotonous refrain played in his head again.
Pansy, Pansy. Where was she? What was she doing? Pansy was slipping away from him and he was helpless and enraged. Stephen felt middle-aged, unwholesome, and chafed with the sourness of guilt. The counterpoint to the repetitive theme was Beatrice. Home, children, family. Then Pansy again, the silky feel of her and her small firm breasts and the taunt of sex in her eyes. Stephen hunched against the knife that twisted in him. His eyes travelled in search of distraction along the rows of bent heads. None as bright as Pansy’s. No-one with Pansy’s coltish elegance. He came to Helen, and watched her for a minute. She was writing, not scribbling furiously, but with smooth certainty. He could almost follow the measured length of her sentences. Too bloodlessly correct for his own tastes, Stephen thought, but a clever girl. An odd threesome that, at Follies. Pansy’s friends. Pansy.
It was a long three hours for Stephen.
At last, ‘Will you stop writing now.’
Helen came to the end of her last sentence and sat back. Suddenly her fingers, her arm and her whole body felt like lead. She groped to her feet and, robot-like, took her paper to the box on the invigilator’s desk. Only half recognising him, she saw Stephen watching her. There were creases in his face, and white specks of dandruff on the shoulders of his gown. Awareness began to creep around her again. Real people. Messy real life, she thought.
The surging crowd was carrying her out of the hall, down the corridors into the daylight. It was five o’clock on a late June afternoon. The sun was warm on her head, and everywhere people cheering, stumbling against each other and tipping green and gold champagne bottles to their mouths. Colour flooded back into Helen’s world as if she was living the end of an old, spellbinding black-and-white movie. She began to move, jerkily at first and then running down the steps. She was looking from side to side, knowing that she was searching for one face.
Tom caught her in his arms.
Tom, in jeans and a white shirt, tanned and smiling, waiting for her. She saw the buttons at his collar, the line of his jaw and his hand reaching out to her. He was undoing the black bow of ribbon at her throat, and he took her black academic cap out of her stiff fingers.
‘All over,’ he said gently. ‘Come with me, now.’
Without taking her eyes off him, as if afraid that he would disappear, Helen followed. His car was in the cobbled closeness of Merton Lane. Briefly they were driving through the stale streets, and then in the open country. Tom took them through green lanes where the hawthorn hedges seemed almost to meet overhead, and then up the slopes of a long hill. At last he stopped in a gateway at the end of a lane shadowed with elms. Tom unhooked the gate for her to walk through. Side by side they came out on to a wide, grassy hillside. Below them lay the Thames valley, moist greens and blues patched with squares of yellow, and the river threading through it like a dull silver ribbon. Oxford lay in the middle distance, a grey hump with a centre of improbable gold.
‘Does that put it in perspective?’ Tom asked, laughter in his voice.
Helen sighed with pleasure.
‘Perfectly. Very beautiful, and a long way off.’
Tom had brought a basket with him from the car. Now he unpacked it; champagne flutes laughably elegant in the rough grass, raspberries in a nest of leaves and a pot of thick yellow cream, and the champagne bottle itself misted with cold beads. When he poured it for her Helen saw that it was pink, and it tasted of flowers and fruit like the distilled essence of the afternoon itself.
‘Sustenance for the survivor,’ Tom said and they touched their glasses together. The back of his brown hand grazed hers and pink froth spilled over her fingers. Tom propped himself lazily on one elbow and smiled at her.
‘Do you know,’ he said, ‘when you came out of that fearful doorway, you looked as if you’d just won an Olympic gold. Quite intoxicated with your own prowess. Very immodest, with all those shell-shocked faces teeming around you.’
Helen put her head back and laughed, feeling the meadow grass tickling her face. Tom watched the line of her throat against the green.
‘I think I quite enjoyed it. What an admission. But I’m so, so glad it’s over now.’
‘And so am I. Look, eat some of these.’
Tom held a heaped spoonful of raspberries out to her and she lifted her head to reach it. She tasted the smooth bowl of the spoon and then sweetness filled her mouth. Scarlet juice spilled down her chin. With the tip of his finger, Tom dammed the trickle, then he put his finger to his mouth and licked it clean. Helen’s breath caught in her chest.
The simple intimacy of the gesture struck closer to her than any kiss had ever done.
She shivered, and her fingers twisted in the sappy stalks of grass. Silence seemed to spread outwards from their grassy hollow until the world hung poised in the buttery sunshine. When at last her eyes were drawn to him, Helen saw past the self-sure, handsome mould of his face, past the ironic detachment that he used as a cloak, to a real question. Plain hope quenched the mocking lift of his smile. His eyes were not just dark but velvety brown, faintly flecked with hazel, and his mouth was stained like hers with the abundant sweet red juice.
Helen knew that she had all the time in the world. Slowly, without taking his eyes from Tom’s, she lifted her glass to him and filled her mouth with the last of the prickling bubbles. She wanted to laugh, rejoicing, but she wanted something else first. She let her glass go and it rolled away among the buttercups. Then she reached out and touched the taut skin over his cheekbones, and moved to lock her hands behind his dark head. She lifted herself off the grass to reach up to him.
When their mouths met, they were very gentle. It was the sealing of a pact between them, and Helen felt again the sweetness of her Italian dream. But now when she opened her eyes, he was still there. He was very close, familiar to her but suddenly intensely exotic. She wanted to explore him, setting sail on an inner voyage from which she knew there wou
ld be no turning back. As they lay watching each other, Helen began to hear again, the hum of bees over the clumps of meadowsweet and the drone of a light aircraft invisible in the blue above. Around her head the grass was alive with minute rustlings of insects. The world seemed ordered, a rational progression of things large to small, and unbelievably beautiful.
Here and now, Helen thought. This is where I want to be.
But Tom moved back a little and she frowned to focus on his face again. He reached for it, caught her hand in his, and she felt the heavy stone on her finger digging into her flesh.
‘So you won’t do it?’
For a shaming moment Helen had to search her mind, and then remembered Darcy. They had planned that he would meet her from the last exam. He would have been there in the crowd at the foot of the steps too, craning to see her. But the face that she had lit on had been Tom’s, and she had gone with him without thinking.
Worse – she had gone eagerly. She had a sudden picture of Darcy waiting, seeing the last stragglers empty out of the halls and the tide of celebration ebbing away up the High to leave him stranded.
‘Do what?’ she echoed Tom’s question stupidly.
‘Helen,’ Tom said quietly. ‘You aren’t a fool.’
He would excuse her nothing, she saw. Tom wouldn’t make things easy for her, or let her hide from what she must do.
‘Won’t marry Darcy?’ His plain, good-natured face superimposed itself on Tom’s for an instant. She remembered the affection and the trust that linked them. Not love, she thought. Not love. ‘No,’ she answered herself, and looked up to meet Tom’s sombre stare. ‘I don’t think I can.’
Helen sat up and then buried her face against her drawn-up knees. The thought of what she must do repelled her, and in that moment she hated Tom irrationally for bringing her to it.
‘What can I do?’ Her heart failed her at the prospect.
‘You must tell him, of course. It would have had to come sometime. Better now. Better than in a year, or five years.’
Ruthless, Helen thought, but right. That sums you up, Tom Hart, doesn’t it? But I need you. Oh, I need you. I can’t think of going without you any more. Is this being in love, then? This paradoxical mix of urgency and anger and longing? Not the peace I knew with Darcy at all. Nothing like that.
Something blotted out the sun over her bent head. Tom leaned over her and forced her face up to meet his. This time his lips jarred against hers and his tongue forced her mouth open so that she sank back, and back into the grass where the waving stalks blurred against the sky. He rolled and the weight of him was heavy along her body, but she could have lifted him and carried them both away on the answering strength of her response.
She could do anything, so long as she had him here, like this.
But not now, yet. She hadn’t earned that, yet.
‘You see, don’t you?’ He was asking her if she felt it too, and she nodded her head just once.
It was hard to do, painfully hard, but she turned her head away from him and closed her hands on his arms to restrain him.
Tom groaned very softly, and then they were apart and looking away across the wide valley to Oxford and its crown of tiny spires.
‘My director’s instinct agrees that this isn’t the place or the time,’ he told her. His smile came back and he was smooth and certain once again. But he put one finger on the pulse at her wrist to still her for a second.
‘But it won’t be too long, will it? I’m not Darcy, Helen. I’m not at all a patient man.’
‘I noticed,’ she shot back at him. ‘I know what I have to do. I owe it to Darcy not to … deceive him. Enough?’
Tom understood that.
‘Come on then.’ He took her hands and pulled her to her feet. ‘There’s a stream down there. Nearest thing to the cold shower I’m in urgent need of. Run.’ Hand in hand they went flying down the hillside, slithering over the turf and leaping the hummocks with yells of warning and encouragement. Exuberance came back to Helen and she gave herself up completely to the rush of warm, scented air, the pounding of her feet and Tom, pulling her on and down the long slope. There was a wide expanse of lush meadow at the bottom and then a stream fringed with stumpy alders. The pitted marks of cattle hooves stood out in the sun-baked mud. The stream water was clear as glass over the smooth pebbles, and long green fronds of weed rippled like hair. Tom, in jeans and sneakers, didn’t even pause at the bank. He plunged straight into the water and spray sparkled up around him, catching the light in rainbow arcs. He bent to splash cold water over his face and hair and then straightened up, gasping and laughing.
‘Come on in. The water’s fine.’
More circumspect, Helen stopped on a flat stone at the edge. She peeled off her black subfusc stockings and Tom faltered at the pale flesh of smooth inner thigh that they revealed.
‘Don’t do that,’ he called out to her. ‘Or this cold shower will be wasted.’ Then Helen was wading in beside him, grinning in pleasure as the delicious cold water licked around her bare legs. In midstream the current pulled at her decorous black skirt and wrapped it limply against her.
‘Too bad if I have to resit the exams.’
‘Come here, naiad.’
She came and they stood together in the stream, arms wrapped around each other and their eyes closed against the light off the water.
It was right, Helen thought. She had been blind, and deaf, and hurtful to cling to a notion that a choice made was a choice for ever. Worse even than hurtful – proud. Too proud to admit her own mistake. But after so many mistakes, she knew that she was right now. As she realised it, the sun slid behind a long finger of cloud. She looked away up the slope. The water suddenly felt cold, and her bare legs were numbed by it.
‘I must go back to Oxford,’ she said quietly.
Shame pulled at her. It was unjust that she should be happy here in this summer landscape, while Darcy was waiting fruitlessly for her.
Without a word, Tom guided her across the smooth pebbles to the bank. They climbed the hill together, slowly, arms round each other’s waists.
At last, outside Follies House, he leaned across and kissed her, no more than a touch on the corner of her mouth.
‘Don’t be afraid.’
Helen looked levelly at him.
‘I’m not afraid. I’m ashamed, and I’m hurt at the thought of hurting him. But I’m not a coward.’
‘I know that.’
They were silent again, watching each other’s faces, learning the nuances of expression with greedy fascination.
Helen felt that she couldn’t bear to leave him, even for a few hours, and surprise shook her. She had never felt that about Darcy. He had slipped in and out of her days, compared with this, just like a pleasant shadow.
Lucky. She was so lucky now.
‘I don’t want to go,’ she said.
‘I don’t want you to. But you must.’ Tom was very gentle, different from the man she had known. Cynical, aloof and sophisticated Tom was looking at her with pride, and love. ‘Will you be at this Ball?’
Christ Church Commem Ball, tomorrow night. The year’s last fling. Darcy had bought their double ticket with a flourish, from Oliver. Oliver had made fun of his new sociability and Darcy had answered, ‘I can do all these things, now I’ve got Helen.’
‘Yes,’ she answered painfully. ‘I am – I was – going with Darcy.’
‘I’ll be there too.’ He slid the car into gear. He was moving away. She barely caught the words, but Tom said, ‘I love you.’
Helen climbed down the mossed steps. Her feet and legs were still bare, and her wet skirt clung to her. Darcy had said just the same words, in almost the same place. She had tried to run away then, but it hadn’t been nearly far enough. Helen felt pulled in half by the battle between love and sympathy within her. As she came into the hall the telephone was ringing. With vague irritation she went to answer it. It would be for Pansy, because it always was, and she hadn’t seen or though
t about Pansy for days.
‘Helen? Thank goodness. Are you very angry?’
It was Darcy.
‘What?’
‘With me, for not being there. It was a real crisis or I’d have come, you know that. I had to get Tim Oakshott out here to the sheep. It turned out not to be what we were afraid of, but I had to hang on until we were sure. Where have you been? I’ve been ringing and ringing. I was starting to worry.’
‘Oh. I just … went out.’
‘How did it go?’
‘What?’
‘Helen, your exams. The reason why I haven’t seen you for a week.’
Practical, prosaic Darcy, sounding just as he always did. A little bothered now because of his sheep, but unchanging. Helen looked at the grey box of the payphone, the dusty floor and the dim light filtering down from the gallery. She understood that he hadn’t missed her outside the Schools after all. He hadn’t even guessed at anything, yet. What could she say to him now, cold, on the telephone?
‘Helen, are you still there?’
‘Yes. The exams went fine.’
Couldn’t he hear the catch in her voice?
‘Will you mind very much if I don’t come today?’ Darcy was busy with his own anxiety. She pictured him in his office at Mere, frowning and staring out at the grey woolly masses of the sheep moving on the slope across the valley.
‘No, I won’t mind.’
‘Until tomorrow, then. Eight o’clock. We’ll go to dinner before the Ball. There’s a surprise.’ And Darcy rang off, chuckling.
‘Will the sheep be all right?’ she asked, too late, into the dead receiver. Dinner. She would tell him then, Helen thought. Over dinner, alone together. There would be no need to go through the travesty of partnering him to the Ball with this weight dragging at her.
Slowly Helen climbed the stairs to her room, thinking about the year and the changes and the mistakes. Follies, she said aloud, and smiled wistfully. But she had come to Tom at last, and that was all she wanted.
Helen’s room looked dusty and unlived in. She blinked at the piles of books and the notes drifting over her desk. The intense preoccupation of the long week had been obliterated by the happy poignancy of this afternoon. Tom’s arms around her and his face against hers were realer than all the three years that lay behind. She could only remember it dimly now, as an irrelevance. The books under her hand might have been in some unknown foreign language.
