The Banker's Niece 5: I wish we could run away

Spring 1978

‘I wish we could run away and get married on our own,’ burst out Jane, taking her eyes off the book of literary criticism on the desk in front of her. She’d been reading the same paragraph for the last half an hour without taking anything in.

    ‘I know what you mean,’ said Rick, putting a finger on his place in the electronics magazine he was reading and looking up from the mattress on the floor where he sprawled. ‘It’s nothing to do with anyone else. And we don’t want a big wedding.’

    ‘God no,’ said Jane.

    The thought of all those relatives eyeing up the two of them and all the arrangements involved in a big wedding, filled her with horror. Her mother would no doubt organise everything and it wouldn’t be Jane’s wedding any more.

    Even supposing she and Rick got that far. Her parents hadn’t met him yet.

    It was Monday evening. They were in Jane’s room at her student house in Exeter. It was a small room with only two pieces of furniture – a wardrobe and a desk. Rick’s clothes spilled from a built-in cupboard next to the fireplace and his bits and pieces (belt-purse, keys, unpaid bills, electronic components) shared the mantelpiece with Jane’s hairbrush and moisturisers. Their new double mattress filled most of the unused floor space.

    Actually it wasn’t new - Rick found it in a skip - but it was new to Jane’s room. He’d appeared with it balanced on the roof of the Mini (Clubman) one evening the week before.

   ‘I’m not squashing in your single bed any longer,’ he said.

   Luckily he didn’t tell her where he’d got the mattress until she’d been sleeping on it for a few nights and by then she was past worrying. She was still alive, wasn't she? And Rick was right about it being more comfortable. Both of them were big people, Rick being three inches taller than her, and she hadn’t slept much in the single bed once Rick arrived to share it.

    Back in January when they first got together they’d spent the nights at the country cottage Rick rented where there was plenty of space, but one Saturday in February it snowed and snowed and Rick was marooned at Jane’s house in Exeter for a whole week. Somehow, after that, he never left.

    Anyway, the mattress was the least of her worries. As well as the prospect of telling her parents about Rick, there was the problem of her housemates.

    Her best friend Heather, the only other girl in the house, wasn't talking to her any more because Jane wouldn't tell her about Rick. It wasn't that Jane didn't want to to ell her. She couldn't. She couldn't explain to herself what was happening, so how could she explain to anyone else? Heather obviously didn't understand that and had taken Jane's reticence personally.

    Then there was Gordon, who still behaved oddly around Rick even though she finished with Gordon on her very first day back at university after Christmas which was nearly a week before she and Rick became serious.

    He’d unfortunately appeared at the top of the stairs as Jane and Rick were dragging the mattress up. He’d given a sickly grin and squashed himself against the wall pretending to get out of their way.

    Her whole stomach tightened. She’d never meant to hurt him and once upon a time he’d been a friend too.

    She was now waiting for her other housemates, Mike and Pete, to complain about Rick’s hi-fi and records (thankfully only a selection of both) which had landed in the sitting-room.

    ‘Can’t I put them in the bedroom?’ Rick had said.

    ‘Whereabouts in the bedroom?’ Jane had asked.

    Rick didn’t have an answer to that.

She tried to study again but, after ten minutes of getting nowhere, gave up.

    ‘But we do want to get married,’ she said.

    ‘We have to,’ said Rick, keeping his eyes on the magazine. ‘We’ll never survive otherwise.’

    ‘Survive as people, and survive as a couple,’ said Jane.

    ‘Indeed,’ said Rick.

    It was a conversation they’d had several times before but each time it gave her a wave of relief.

    It was extraordinary. On the surface they were different in every possible way but deep down they were the same. They spoke the same language.

    Marriage was something else that came between them and their friends. None of them was married themselves or even contemplating it. 'Marriage is a way of enslaving women,' they said. 'It's an institution and who wants to live in an institution?'

    She and Rick didn’t see it that way.

    ‘But do we have to tell our parents?’ she asked, coming back to where she started.

    It was dark outside, time to close the curtains, but she didn’t want to stand up and interrupt the conversation.

    ‘I’d like to tell Ma,’ said Rick, still reading.

    Rick’s parents lived in Devon. Jane hadn’t met them yet but she and Rick were having lunch with them at the weekend. Jane was looking forward to it. They sounded normal.

    Unlike her own.

    ‘So I suppose it’s only fair I tell mine then,’ she said. ‘I suppose I owe it to them.’

    ‘You must do exactly what you want,’ said Rick.

    ‘If only it were that easy,’ she cried.

    ‘It is,’ he said.

    She tried once again to return to her book. She had a third worry, her finals in May, and worry was turning to panic. Normally this close to exams she’d be following a revision timetable drawn up months earlier. She’d be working through old exam papers, preparing answers and storing them in note form on index cards. This year she’d done nothing. Rick had overturned everything.

    It had been a struggle getting to university at twenty without the backing of school but she’d done it to get away from London, because she thought a degree might help her to satisfying work and because she enjoyed academic study. Or always had done.

    Recently however her brain had refused to cooperate. She couldn’t get into the right frame of mind. Studying felt harmful somehow, as if she were going in the wrong direction.

    She looked down at Rick. She suspected he was reading the ‘small ads’ as he called them, lists of parts with minute differences between them and names she’d never heard before like ‘capacitor’ and ‘resistor’. He read everything and anything, even dictionaries and circuit diagrams.

    No one could be less academic than Rick and yet what he was doing now was a form of studying. But it was on his terms and certainly not any form that her parents would appreciate.

    ‘They can’t be that bad,’ said Rick, nose still in the magazine.

    She laughed. He’d read her mind.

    They were and she’d tried to explain them to Rick but she didn’t think he understood, not because he was unsympathetic but because he’d never met people like them before.

She shook herself. Why should she be the one to bring such trouble into his life? She wanted to make him happy not unhappy. She wasn’t going to harp on about her parents any more. The question of what she told them was one she would have to answer for herself.

    He started to sing.

            We grew up together living separate lives.

            Now we need each other.

            What a big surprise.

She wanted to cry. She loved this song.* It had been reverberating around the house last weekend while Rick installed his hi-fi.

    She abandoned her books and crept on to the mattress to join him.

*'I was made to love you’ from Dreamweaver by Gary Wright

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