One of the first things that happened was in her new Latin A level class, teaching the poet Catullus. They were studying his second and third poems, about his adored mistress Lesbia and her beloved sparrow.
‘What are those three lines on the end of the second one?’ someone asked. ‘They haven’t got anything to do with it.’
It was Friday, and it was a long day. Tess was tired; she hadn’t slept the previous night. She looked down, reading the words out.
‘Tam gratum est…’
Tam gratum est mihi quam ferunt puellae pernici aureolum fuisse malum quod zonam soluit diu ligatam
Tess stared down at the paper. ‘Tam gratum est mihi quam—but I’m grateful that…’ She looked at them again, remembering now the layout in the book of poetry Adam had given her. She could see the page. Throughout, Leonora had doodled, drawn lines, but this poem, or just these three lines, were furiously underlined, with stars around them.
‘That’s really weird.’
‘What is?’ asked Sandy from Esher, who was in the front row.
‘This poem,’ Tess said without thinking. ‘It’s in a book I’ve got. Someone underlined it. Many times. It obviously meant something to them.’
‘Whose book was it?’
‘A lady. She died. It’s a bit of a mystery.’
‘Wow!’ Sandy said, holding her pen ready. The class looked expectantly at Tess,—this was exciting! Much more so than Catullus and his girlfriend Lesbia, which was a weird name to give a girlfriend anyway.
‘Is it like a treasure hunt?’ asked Lynda, Sandy’s best friend.
‘No, listen to her, it’s a mystery! Like—oh, do you like Cadfael?’ Sandy said. ‘Because they had a manuscript that some monk had been murdered over, with poisoned illuminated parchment, and—’
Tess held up her hand. ‘Er, not so much like that, I think. More—’ she lowered her voice—‘more like an insight into their state of mind.’
‘Oh,’ said Lynda. ‘That’s not very interesting, is it?’ She rolled her pencils and pens, which were lying perfectly straight together on the wooden desk, over the knotted surface with her immaculate pearlescent nails.
Tess sighed. ‘Perhaps it’s not,’ she said.
Suddenly a voice at the back spoke up. ‘Isn’t it about marriage?’ said Tom, the librettist. Tess looked with delight at her favourite pupil, as Tom, still waggling his hand to be noticed, went on. ‘I always thought it was about Atalanta, wasn’t she an Amazon?’
‘Yes, it’s about Atalanta, but she wasn’t an Amazon,’ said Tess, though she was impressed. ‘She could have been, though. She had many suitors, and she was extremely beautiful, but she just didn’t want to get married. She didn’t see the point of men.’
‘Oh,’ said Tom, quashed.
‘Ha,’ said Sandy, who was recently divorced. ‘I can see her point.’
Jemima, the competitive mother who had recently moved to town, looked slightly embarrassed for Sandy.
‘Atalanta was a great hunter,’ said Tess, settling on the edge of the desk. ‘I always liked the sound of her, I must say. She helped catch a boar that had been terrorizing the local countryside.’ She crossed her arms and looked down at all of them. ‘She roamed around, doing what she wanted. Not constrained by anyone. And then, she decided to get married.’
‘Why?’ said Sandy, disappointed.
‘Don’t know why,’ said Tess. ‘Because she wanted to, not because she was told to. I think that’s the point. Anyway, to find the best suitor, she decided to race against them all, to see who was the fastest. She was very fast.’ She looked down at the book. ‘Puellae pernici—it means fleet-footed, swift girl. She raced them all and one of them—Hippomenes was his name, I think—he dropped three golden apples, one by one, and Atalanta stopped to pick them up and so he beat her, and she married him.’
‘So—women are easily distracted by golden baubles,’ said Lynda, disappointed. ‘Even a woman who’s renounced men and gone off and become a hunter in the forest will still run after some twinkling gold. Pathetic.’
‘I can testify to that,’ said Gerald, the ex-managing director (whether retired or fired, Tess couldn’t tell), who was extremely rubicund and jolly, but who referred to his wife as ‘the little lady’, making Tess want to punch him. ‘Hah! Hah!’
‘I don’t think that’s the moral of the story,’ Tess said slowly. ‘I think the point is, she had rejected marriage too strongly, for the wrong reasons. Run away from it. And the golden apples were the symbol, the distraction—after all, if Usain Bolt was running round a stadium and someone chucked some golden apples in his way, he’d be distracted, wouldn’t he?’
‘Well, he wears golden shoes anyway,’ said Sherry from Thornham. ‘So probably not. He wouldn’t notice them.’
‘Look,’ said Tess hurriedly, ‘the point is, the speaker is glad—in this case Catullus, talking about his girlfriend, I suppose,although it’s a tiny fragment so we’re not really sure—that the golden apples loosened her girdle. I.e., took her virginity. Because it had been too long.’
‘What’s the translation then?’ said Jemima the competitive mother. She was an ex-marketing director who had just moved to Langford with her husband and two children, and was extremely literal. ‘What does it mean?’
‘Um—well, it’s…’ Tess paused. It was cryptic, in the extreme. Jemima tapped her pencil impatiently. Tess wrinkled her nose, was silent for a minute. ‘OK,’ she said eventually. ‘Here’s a rough stab, I suppose it would be something like, “But it’s pleasing to me, as they say, that the swift-footed girl had the golden apple, and it now loosened her girdle, which had been tightly tied for too long.”
‘The girdle as in her virginity. Picking up the apple meant she would lose her virginity, that’s signified by the girdle. She was going to be a wife and mother. A proper woman, they would say. And the speaker of the poem is pleased about this.’
There was a silence as some people digested this, and others merely looked bored. And then Sandy, watching her with interest, said, ‘So, dear. Does it explain something to you, then?’
‘Yes,’ said Tess, smiling up at her. ‘I think it does.’
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
Tess ran home from class that day, barely even stopping to say goodbye to Beth and the other teachers. She flung open the door and threw her bags on the floor. There was a note on the floor too. She picked it up.
Tess! Hi! I’ll be round at about six, hope that’s OK! I can’t wait!
Tess read it swiftly, distracted. She went over to the bureau which stood by the window, her shaking fingers pulling papers and books out of the shelf, and she translated the poem again, looking the words up in her old battered leather-bound Latin dictionary, which she had had since she was a teenager. Perhaps the words meant nothing but she knew, suddenly, that they did. They meant something to Leonora, no one else.
Finally, things were starting to change. She had a new flatmate moving in that evening, and she was fairly sure she wouldn’t stand for Francesca-like levels of untidiness. Tess got up to make herself some tea, and looked down at the open bureau where, in one corner, her computer sat unopened. She ought to see if Peter had emailed her, but somehow she couldn’t face it. The previous night, she had woken in a cold sweat, clutching the duvet with her fingers aching from the tension, from a dream where she had gone back to Rome for Christmas. But as she walked through the Piazza Farnese, to Peter’s flat, people were walking past her, saying hello and she stared at them in panic as they streamed past. She couldn’t remember what he looked like; couldn’t at all. She had no photos of him; his face, when they talked on Skype, was bleached out by the camera, indistinct, his voice high-pitched and full of static. That wasn’t the Peter who had ridden with her on his moped, drunk Prosecco with her, kissed her in front of the Trevi Fountain, no—no. She just had to find him again, both in Rome at Christmas and in her head, fall back in love with him again. But it seemed so far away! Like a dream, as strange as the
dream she’d had the previous night.
Funny, Tess thought, as she headed into the kitchen. She had fallen in love with him so easily the first time—surely it should be enough, the second time, too?
She looked around the kitchen, at the curling notice stuck on the pinboard about the Harvest Festival; the postcard from Francesca, a cut-out photo of the London Eye; another postcard, from her parents on their holiday in October and the notice of the rubbish collection dates over Christmas and the New Year. There was a letter, too, from the letting agency, reminding her politely that they were still waiting to hear if she would be renewing the lease on the cottage for another six months. Tess had opened it but put it back in its envelope and it stared up at her, the light catching the sheen of the cellophane so it seemed to wink at her. Would she be here for another six months? Or should she just be impulsive, and go to Rome?
What would Rome in January be like? Rainy, grey—just like here, but Rome. Rome, with Peter. Wine, food, Italy, scooters, classical ruins, speaking Italian, her new flat-heeled patent-leather boots, walking everywhere in the greatest city in the world…
It was raining outside and it was already dark. Tess stared out into nothing, her mind racing over everything. The poem today, Atalanta and how she refused to get married. How she was tricked into loosening her girdle—how must she have felt? The book of poems…she stared down, they were still in her hand.
Once again, Tess felt that strange connection to Leonora Mortmain that she had felt before and which she couldn’t explain. She was pretty sure the old woman had devised the gloomiest, most hellfire and brimstone service there was, so that absolutely no one enjoyed themselves. And all that stuff about for as in Adam all die—it was vindictive and spiteful. No wonder her only living family member had cleared out of the country for—how long was it now? Nearly three months. The order of service from the funeral was tucked inside the book of poetry. Tess flicked idly through it, her eye falling on the penultimate page of the service, the final reading.
Philip saith unto him, Lord, shew us the Father, and it sufficeth us. Jesus saith unto him, Have I been so long a time with you, and yet hast thou not known me, Philip?
What Philip had to do with it, she had no idea. Who was Philip, anyway?
The front door opened, and a head peeked around it. ‘Hello,’ it called. ‘It’s open, are you decent?’
Had she been sitting there thinking for that long? Tess jumped up guiltily. ‘Hi, Liz!’ she said. ‘Welcome to your new home! I’m so sorry about the mess.’
‘No worries,’ Liz said, untangling her scarf. ‘It’s raining out there. Horrible evening. I meant to come over earlier, but Jen insisted on doing a stock check again. So annoying.’ She rubbed her hands and looked around her. ‘I’ve got all my stuff in the car, shall I unload it and then park it round the back?’
‘Absolutely,’ said Tess. ‘I’ll give you a hand. Kettle’s just boiled—do you want a cup of tea first?’
‘Only if you’ve made a pot,’ said Liz simply, and Tess loved the idea that she would have steaming pots of tea waiting around for people, rather than the depressing single soggy teabag in the sink that tea usually meant in this house. She had to remind herself to be nice. That Liz was lovely, not the girl whose Dealbreaker with Adam was that she cried during sex. At the thought of Adam telling her this, in horrified ghoulish tones, Tess smiled with a half-sigh, and rubbed her shoulder.
‘I’ll wait if not,’ Liz was saying. ‘This is lovely! Tess, thank you so much for letting me move in. Jen’s was nice, but living above the shop…’ Her face clouded over. ‘Well, it’s not ideal. You know. So—to have a proper home!’
‘Ah,’ said Tess, feeling guilty. ‘Bless you.’ She patted her arm. ‘Let’s get your bags inside.’
Liz had packed neatly, economically and sensibly. Even her boxes had easy-to-carry handles on them, and she had marked everything. ‘Books’. ‘Bathroom’. ‘Kitchen utensils (small)’. ‘Toiletries’. In less than ten minutes they were back inside with the boxes correctly placed in each section of the small house, and the kettle was on again.
Liz came into the kitchen, her long thin face red and slightly wet from the rain. ‘Hey, I got some of those Swedish ginger thins you like, by the way, as a moving-in present! They came in this afternoon.’ She put them down on the counter as Tess poured the water into the teapot. Liz watched her.
‘This is bloody great,’ she said. ‘When I think about a year ago, how miserable I was.’
‘Really?’
‘Oh, yeah,’ Liz said, matter-of-factly. ‘Working in that awful agency. Squeezing onto a smelly bus every day, sweaty all the time, in winter and in summer.’ She breathed in. ‘It’s funny, there have been some good times and some not-so-good times since I moved to Langford. But I’ve never doubted it was the right decision.’ She smiled at her. ‘You must know what I mean. After all, you grew up here.’
‘Here you go,’ said Tess, handing her a cup of tea.
‘Thanks,’ said Liz. ‘Ooh, this is nice. This is just what I need.’
‘Good-o,’ said Tess. ‘Have a ginger thin.’
Liz took one, smiling. ‘You know, Tess, I can’t thank you enough. You’ve no idea what a difference it makes.’
‘What?’ Tess said, taking a biscuit for herself.
‘Having a proper place to live. It’s just lovely. I’ve only been here half an hour, and it’s lovely.’ She smiled, and took another sip of her tea. ‘Aren’t you having any?’
Tess leaned against the counter. ‘I might in a bit.’
‘What are you looking at?’ Liz asked, noticing the order of service on the surface.
‘Oh, just something from class today,’ Tess said, handing her the biscuits again. ‘Reminded me of the funeral. These are absolutely lovely. Thanks.’
Liz bent over the order of service. ‘Gosh, what a gloomy business that was,’ she said, nodding. She looked down at the open page. ‘“Hast—hast thou not known me, Philip”—and what was that about? Some kind of message from beyond the grave?’
‘What?’ Tess said. She put down the teapot.
‘Well, I mean, because wasn’t Adam’s mother called Philippa?’ Liz blushed slightly, as she always did when talking about Adam, as if she were embarrassed to have this knowledge. ‘What—?’ She stared at her flatmate, who was gripping her wrist. ‘Ow.’
‘Yes,’ said Tess. ‘Yes! She was. I’m so stupid, Liz.’
‘Who’s Philip?’
‘I don’t know.’ Tess opened the fridge. ‘I don’t know, perhaps we’ll never know, but she wanted someone to find out, that’s the point, Liz. I’m having a glass of wine, I’m afraid. Will you join me?’
‘Oh, I’ll join you,’ said Liz happily. ‘Only one though, I’ve got yoga tomorrow. Wow,’ she said, taking a wine glass. ‘First night in the house, and it’s like Rome all over again. Wine, women and song—all on a Tuesday evening. Who knows what’ll happen next!’
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
‘But you said you’d book your flight right away,’ Peter said. ‘I don’t get it. They’ll be kinda expensive if you wait, Tess. Don’t you want to come?’
‘It’s not that—’ Tess cradled the phone under her ear, and took another bite of the ginger thins. At the moment Tess was going through a box every couple of days. She swallowed hastily, the biscuit scratching her throat. ‘Arrh.’ She coughed.
‘You OK?’
‘I’m fine,’ Tess said. ‘Sorry.’ She rubbed her eyes; she was tired. She felt tired, and fat, and lonely; these conversations with Peter, which had once been such a source of joy to her, now sat uneasily with her. The time difference was severe, which made it hard to find a time to talk. And there was so much to ask him, she felt she could never really know where he was. Just as he didn’t know where she was.
‘I’m sorry. It’s just I feel like you’re slipping away from me, sometimes,’ he said, after a pause.
‘Don’t say that,’ Tess told him. ‘It’s
just—I feel like a fraud. I don’t feel like I’m—’
She glanced up at the picture of Jane Austen, which hung in silent splendour by the door, and caught sight of herself in the mirror, which made her stop in her tracks, biscuit dangling from her fingers, halfway to her mouth. Dress it up however you like, it was the plain truth that Peter would not love her were he to see her now. Her hair needed washing, and was kept in place with a kirby grip and a scruffy ponytail. She was wearing an old, scraggy pair of jeans and an outsized and unloveable but very warm navy cardigan that she had found in the cupboard underneath the stairs when she moved in. Her pale face was free of any make-up, her eyes had dark circles underneath them. Her nails were bitten and uneven.
She wanted to explain, to tell him she wasn’t the girl he had known over the summer. She couldn’t remember that girl, the one who danced through cobbled piazzas in the moonlight and lay on sunny floorboards while someone kissed her hair, stroked her breasts, her soft, sunkissed skin. Who on earth was that girl, and where had she gone? She stared at her reflection, horror creeping across her face.
‘You’re still the same to me,’ Peter said, a note of impatience detectable in his tone, even through the echo on the line all the way from California. ‘Still the same beautiful girl…’ He trailed off. ‘I kinda really miss you,’ he said.
Tess could feel herself melting. ‘Really?’ she said, pleasure creeping into her voice.
‘Yes, of course,’ he said.
‘You’re in San Francisco!’ she said. ‘You’re having a whale of a time. I don’t believe you.’
‘That’s not true,’ he said, laughing. ‘I call you in the morning, I work all goddamn day, I walk back to the apartment, and I email you.’
‘So you’re not enjoying it at all?’ she said sceptically. ‘You didn’t like the day in the vineyard last week? Or the weekend in Big Sur? How strange, because I don’t believe you.’
‘Well…’ She could hear a smile in his voice. ‘I just wish you were here with me, that’s all.’
I Remember You Page 37
