Meeting Lydia

by Linda MacDonald

  It is probable that these were the happiest days she had at Brocklebank. She had friends to talk to in between lessons and no longer whiled away the minutes anxiously watching everyone else and wishing for the teacher to arrive.

  And as well as Abi and Susannah, the fourth form brought someone else who was to have a significant impact on her Brocklebank life and even the life beyond.

  He arrived with the Indian summer weather as the most beautiful vision of boyhood the girls had ever seen. He had thick straight flaxen hair the colour of the mane of the perfect palomino, worn in Beatles’ style and daringly long compared to everyone else. As a dayboy he could get away with this. No doubt the boarders were regularly subjected to a visit from the most ruthless of barbers! He possessed all the self-assured confidence of one who has been told from a very young age that he would break many hearts, and he strutted and preened and entertained in the most beguiling manner. The girls were smitten. Marianne hadn’t known what smitten was until Sam Rycroft appeared on the scene. His very presence made her heart skip and her stomach turn over although at the age of ten, she didn’t really know why it did this. She looked forward to going to school in a way that she never had before.

  Of course Sam Rycroft pretended not to notice the glances of adoration. Sam was nearly twelve. The girls weren’t in his league in the pecking order of significance, and although he occasionally passed a joke or two with Susannah, it was purely platonic. His romantic inclinations were exercised publicly as he flirted with Penelope Castle, the temporary geography teacher who was only about eighteen and wore very short skirts with opaque black tights and black polo neck jumpers. She had kohl-rimmed eyes and a thrusting chest. Sometimes Sam managed to make her blush and become flustered, but it was all good humoured and you could tell she thought he was adorable too.

  Throughout the winter it became the thing for the girls to watch the school football matches even in the most inclement of weather conditions. They stood by the touchline, wrapped in woolly scarves, shouting for their hero Sam who was every bit as charismatic as David Beckham, and with a talent that was streets ahead of the average eleven-or twelve-year-old playing prep school football in west Cumbria.

  He wore the shortest shorts of anyone on the field – his red shirt almost hiding them from view, like Georgie Best. And he knew how to play the crowd; knew all eyes were on him as he scored the goal that took the team to victory. How he was cheered in the fading wintry light, as the teams were clapped off the pitch.

  Dear Edward was forgotten.

  Some four years later, Sam was to reappear in Marianne’s life when he turned up at the local grammar school, two years ahead of her, still having the same impact on the female population. Now the flirtations were of an altogether more serious nature. He and his friends would stand on one side of the playground and Marianne and hers on the other. It was like a giant aquarium with side-viewing access. When anyone dared to walk across the yard all eyes were on them, taking them apart, making comparisons. Marianne and her fellow third formers watched the fifth and sixth formers with awe, wondering if they would ever be so old and sophisticated; wondering if they would get away with wearing a skirt so short with legs like theirs.

  When they were about fifteen and began going to parties of a more adult nature, they watched the procession up and down the stairs to the bedrooms with some curiosity and just a little trepidation. The unspoken question was what exactly was going on up there among the maxi coats and the Afghans piled on the beds? Suspecting the worst and labelling as ‘loose’ the predictable group of girls who always partnered one or other of the ‘key’ blokes, they wondered whether there would come a time when they would take the plunge and be revered by the younger girls.

  ‘Was Sam with anyone?’ This was the question often asked the day after such events. Sam Rycroft could have had any girl he wanted and often emerged from a darkened room, adjusting his t-shirt, then running his hand through his thick, long, but now darkening flaxen hair. Just sometimes, he would date the chosen one for a few times afterwards. But not for long. Playing the field was a phrase well used when referring to Sam Rycroft!

  By now Marianne’s hormones were running rampant and her crush of Brocklebank days had taken on a whole new dimension. Of course she knew he would never look at her. In any case she was far too immature at that time to compete with the willing throng of party groupies, and even had she been old enough, she wasn’t that type of girl. But that didn’t stop her fantasising. Sometimes he would nod at her when he passed her at school; an unspoken acknowledgement that they had both been to Brocklebank. It gained her a kind of kudos with her friends: the fact that she knew heart-throb Sam Rycroft.

  Time raced on as it does through the teenage years, and Marianne and her friends began to understand the complex rituals of courtship. When they entered the fifth form and Sam the upper sixth, Marianne noticed him looking their way quite often as they sat on one of the wooden seats in the playground. But it was not at her he looked, but at her pretty friend Sasha. At first the notion that he might fancy Sasha hit Marianne like a slap across the face. In the evenings when her girls’ gang had taken to stalking his gang in the park, sometimes they would all get talking and it was because of Sasha, pouting and sultry Sasha who had a touch of the Bardot about her and who had looked good in hot pants even at the age of twelve, that they were tolerated by such notables.

  They all talked of progressive rock music and the latest albums in the fading light, trying to say the right thing and using words like ‘epic’ as often as they could. ‘Epic’ was the Cumbrian ‘cool’ of the late 1970s. Marianne remembered once enjoying herself so much that she lost track of time and ‘forgot’ to go home by the ridiculously early curfew imposed by her parents.

  “There’s Daddy, Marianne!” said Sam in mocking tones, and she turned to see her father with the dog and had to take her leave feeling about as embarrassed as any teenage girl possibly could. What would they think of her? No wonder she stood no chance with them. She was just a kid by comparison. A kid who in addition to not being sexy and beautiful, wasn’t allowed out past eight o’clock without a major incident occurring.

  Her parents thought it was common to hang around the park. It probably was, but there was nowhere else to go and if her friends were going to hang there, then she was going to hang there too. Parents never seem to understand the importance of fitting in, and to Marianne – who had only discovered the capacity for such in recent years, it was torture to be made to feel like an outsider all over again.

  It would be only a matter of time before Sam asked Sasha out and Marianne would have to pretend not to care, say that she didn’t mind because she didn’t have a chance anyway.

  It happened one afternoon break in the spring term when Marianne was in their fifth form room extracting the enormous physics book from her locker by the open window. Sam ambled across the playground in a nonchalant kind of way and leaned on the window frame, smoothing his long hair, probably fully aware that there were many eyes watching him both from the playground and from inside the room.

  “Hiya Marianne. Sasha about?”

  Marianne knew this was the moment she had been dreading. She called to Sasha who was sitting by the blackboard deep in conversation with the boy they called Charles Bannerman. His real name was Andy Endercott, but he looked like a student called Charles Bannerman who had been on University Challenge the previous year.

  Sasha was the epitome of cool and was already familiar with the concept of dating. Although she had a fair idea of what Sam was going to ask her, she kept him waiting for a couple of minutes while she finished her conversation with Charles Bannerman. Meanwhile Marianne talked to Sam about some youth club that had opened in town, trying to appear bright and cheerful when inside a gloom was descending. When Sasha joined them, she tactfully left them to converse alone.

  Sam asked if Sasha would go out with him that weekend. Later that night Marianne wrestled with her loyalties and shed a tear or
two and wished and wished that she had been pretty enough to attract his attentions.

  But she and Sasha were good friends and she was not going to let this come between them. She would be pleased for them; she would cease to think of Sam in that kind of way. In any case, she was at this time in the middle of her long-distance romance with Nick from Newcastle. And Nick thought she was wonderful. Just that week he had sent her a card of the Waterhouse painting: The Lady of Shallot. On the back he had written, ‘This reminds me of you!’ The only problem with Nick was that he lived so far away. Their fortnightly letters and occasional meetings did not qualify him for the role of day to day fantasy object.

  For this she transferred her affections to Sam’s friend, Johnny, who was equally out of her league but seemed to like her. He lived in a road near her street and once when he was walking home from school on his own, he caught up with her and they talked until they reached her house. He offered to tape Pink Floyd’s Obscured by Clouds for her later that evening, and it was with heady, dizzy, crazy teenage feelings that she took her tape recorder round to his place, and then sat in his bedroom showing him how to work the machine.

  “Say something please,” she said, thrusting the microphone in his direction, and gazing adoringly at his long brown hair.

  “Such as,” he said. “Such as, such as, such as, such as.”

  She flipped the tape over for the recording to be made, and later, when she had both machine and recorded tape safely back in her possession, she searched for his voice on the other side of the tape and played it again and again and again, often blushing even though she was alone. Johnny Ingleton had the sexiest voice in the world!

  After that evening he always acknowledged her when they passed at school. And he had the sweetest smile …

  She even managed to secure his old geography textbook and changed the way she wrote number sevens to continental style. Even her ‘I’s became loopy because of Johnny Ingleton. There is nothing like the obsession of a teenage girl!

  But he was two years older and just as beyond reach as Sam. Once she was talking to him at a party; trying to cheer him up after he’d had a row with Cassie, his glamorous girlfriend. Cassie saw them chatting on the patio; saw Marianne putting her hippy-headband on his head and saw him smiling and flirting back. Cassie flounced off. The following week at school, Marianne and her friends were sitting at the same dinner table as Cassie when she said to her friend in a deliberately sarcastic and loud voice: “Did you see that kid with Johnny on Saturday night? God, with competition like that around, I don’t really stand much chance.” And Marianne flushed with embarrassment and hid her gaze, little realising that in the past few months she had begun to lose the gawkiness of her youth and had acquired some curves. She was beginning to look a little like her French grandmother and when heads turned towards her, it was no longer to jeer, but to appreciate.

  But Marianne still felt insignificant and young and didn’t wait to find out if Johnny might really be interested in her.

  It was some seven years later that she met him again in London at one of Sasha’s parties.

  “There’s something crawling up your leg,” he said to attract her attention. She was wearing seamed stockings – an attempt at eighties sophistication.

  She laughed. Still the same old Johnny.

  He was really pleased to see her and they chatted for an hour about everything and nothing, oblivious to all others. When he kissed her with some tenderness, she began to believe that there might be something more than friendship going on. Things had changed. They were equal now.

  And two years after that they were married and all the mystery of the unattainable had gone. And now? Now he drinks too much and for several months they have inhabited that world of middle-aged relationship angst.

  11

  Johnny

  Johnny’s sweetest smile had not been much in evidence recently and the angst had only occurred since she came on the scene.

  It was ten past midnight when Marianne heard the front door slam and the grinding squeak of the bolt. She wondered what state he would be in this time. She didn’t want a row. Perhaps she would pretend to be asleep. She listened for the footfall on the stairs, but instead she heard him open the living room door.

  Soon there was a blast of music from the TV. It sounded like some late night show with Jools Holland. She hoped it wouldn’t wake Holly. Ten minutes later and he was making noisy progress up the stairs, fumbling with the door handle then collapsing fully clothed on the bed. He didn’t even speak to her, or try to see if she was still awake. In seconds he seemed to be asleep on his back, a throaty rattle punctuating his exhalations. There was the smell of beer and sweat and smoke and Marianne felt sick.

  She turned her back, eyes wide, hot and restless, staring into the gloom.

  Johnny Ingleton had been christened John by his parents and had acquired the Johnny tag from his football team mates soon after starting junior school. At secondary school they called him Jing and at college he reverted to Johnny. Only a few months earlier when he was forty-seven, did he announce to Marianne that he wanted to be called John again.

  “I’m damned if I’ll ever call you John! I’ve never known you as John,” Marianne had protested. “John is too sensible and conservative for you.”

  “Perhaps it’s time I became more sensible and conservative.”

  So Marianne had tried it for a while to show willing, but John didn’t sit comfortably in her mouth and after a week or two she gave up and reverted to Johnny.

  It hadn’t always been difficult between them. They had been the envy of their friends for many a year. When the women got together to have a moan about their spouses, Marianne was the one to sit in an almost embarrassed silence, once again an outcast; not ‘one of the club’. There wasn’t much gossip mileage in a husband who was sexy and charming and made her laugh every day. And Johnny often used to tell her that when his mates started talking in disparaging tones about ‘her at home’, he would shrug and nod sympathetically and be glad that his wife wasn’t nagging, hypercritical and unadventurous in the bedroom.

  It helped that they talked. At least Johnny talked and Marianne willingly listened. She knew what was beating in his soul because he externalised his thoughts, hoping she would miraculously solve his problems with suggestions or solutions.

  “Wait twenty-four hours,” she would often say. “In twenty-four hours you will feel differently. What seems big now will be small in twenty-four hours. You will be rational. You will make the right decision.”

  She was calm and measured; a counterweight to his hotheadedness. She knew he loved her for it.

  He was the ideal husband and father while Holly was growing up. He cooked and cleaned without being asked. And as well as flowers, he would buy other little gifts and sometimes hide them around the house for Marianne to find whenever. He wrote her poetry, played his guitar and sang to her, took time when making love and phoned her often to say he was thinking about her.

  Time and again he told her he thought she was beautiful and Marianne would smile, but never believe it. Inside she was still the scrawny kid that boys made fun of, but if it didn’t matter to Johnny, then she was happy enough.

  Of course the intensity of the early years subsided as it always does, but even after Holly was born, they managed to keep a glittering thread of romance running through their relationship.

  When he wasn’t being domesticated, or working, or having cosy chats in front of the fire, he was out in the wild outdoors, on mountain slopes, surveying panoramic vistas of rugged outcrops, lakes and forests, or walking the coast. He often disappeared alone for a day in the country where he would trek for miles until he was exhausted, eventually returning home late in the evening to a hot bath, supper and languid sex with Marianne.

  As Holly grew more self-sufficient, some of the habits of their early years together began to creep back into their routines: candles and incense, aromatherapy oils and relaxing massage. While
Johnny was out, Marianne enjoyed preparing for his return, soaking in a bath of scented bubbles and taking time to do all the personal maintenance things that benefited from privacy and time.

  Where had it all gone? Now when she looked at him, the once open book was closed and her measured calm was lost. Since January, the glittering thread had snagged and seemed to be unravelling, and the candles, the oils and the incense had remained in their box.

  Marianne remembered to the day, when the boat began to rock, coming back from work to find this vision of feminine loveliness sitting in the kitchen having a cup of tea with Johnny; sitting on the stool by the table, mug between both hands, legs crossed, short skirt riding up above her knees and with an air of someone who did this every day.

  “Oh!” Marianne had said, surprised to the point of forgetting her manners and standing gawping, conscious of how dishevelled she was by comparison.

  “This is Charmaine, love,” said Johnny without concern. “She’s covering Rosie’s maternity leave.”

  Johnny was Head of Geography and Geology at Cedarwood Secondary School. Although not far from where they lived, this was the first time he had brought anyone home unexpectedly.

  Marianne had tried to smile, but her head was spinning and her stomach churned as if possessed by snakes.

  Charmaine was just the sort of woman you didn’t want to find your husband alone with – even if all they were having was a cup of tea. She was about thirty, blonde and curvaceous and heavily made up. Marianne was thinking tarty cow, which was a trifle unfair, but she knew that this was just the look that men couldn’t help acting on. It was the look that turned their heads and had them driving into lampposts. No wedding ring either, and this woman was going to be working with her husband for six months!

  Johnny was still a very attractive man. He was lean and rangy and hadn’t acquired the almost requisite beer-gut of the over forties. He kept in shape with his walking and weekly games of badminton and although he never made a show about being interested in clothes, he was always well-pressed and coordinated. He had a certain je ne sais quoi together with a sense of humour that made women flock to be in his company. His hair was slightly less luxuriant than it had been, but it was still charmingly longer than the current popular style, and gave him a continental, cavalier air that made him stand out in a crowd. More than this, his intense blue eyes and captivating smile still shone just as they had done when he was at school. Marianne believed there was no question that Ms Rosie-Replacement would be impressed and in seconds the bindweed of jealousy began to twist and wind around her heart.