THE STORY CONTINUES. 8 March

 This is part of an autobiographical series that starts in Australia.

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I was beginning to panic.

    My final exams were due to start in May, only two months away, and usually by now I would have a revision timetable drawn up. I would have acquired old exam papers so that I could work on the different questions I might be asked, and have a stack of index cards so that I could write down salient details for each possible topic. I had done none of that this time.

    Everything depended on the results of my final exams. There was no continuous assessment and my exams at the end of the previous year had been simply to test that I could continue to this year.

    At school I’d loved exams. I’d enjoyed the challenge. This time they were giving me nightmares.

    It was so hard to concentrate, sitting at my table in my room while John lay on the mattress and laughed over some book he was reading. It was horrible sitting on my own in the library staring at a blank wall.

    In some of deep part of me I wondered if this was really the direction I should be taking. Might not all this brainwork be damaging? Studying was part of my old life, the old me. Should I not be throwing myself wholeheartedly into my new life with John?

    While we had our deep connection, in every way on the surface we were opposites.  Could I not be learning from that and enjoying it, instead of trying to stuff my poor brain with the words of other people?

    But I had to get my degree. I couldn’t bear the thought of failing twice.

 

Then there was our marriage to think of.

    Did we run away and get married in secret on our own? That tempted me, but my experience so far had shown me that running away was a bad option.

    I’d run away from university first time round, and look how badly that had turned out. I’d run away from all the disasters of London and, while Australia had been the best thing that had ever happened to me, I’d come back. And I’d come back determined to fit in this time, to engage with ‘real life’, whatever that was, to live like a normal person.

    But John wasn’t normal. Or at least not by the standards with which I'd been brought up.

‘I’d like to tell Ma,’ said John. ‘I’d like her to come to our wedding.’

    I knew, from what he’d said, that he was close to his mother. His father wasn’t kind to her, and John had supported her in many ways. I wanted to meet her.

    ‘OK,’ I said. ‘I suppose that means I ought to tell my parents too.’

Easter was early that year, at the end of the month. We decided to head east then, staying with John’s parents first – the easy bit – and then going on to mine.

    The prospect of telling my parents about John was even worse than the prospect of my finals. 

To be continued . . .  

THE STORY CONTINUES. 7 February

 This is part of an autobiographical series that starts in Australia.

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January morphed into February. We divided our time between John’s cottage out in the wilds and my house in Exeter. Our sex life had at last begun but it wasn’t what I had been led to believe sex would be like when you met the right person. We explained that away as ‘teething problems’ and tried not to worry.
    One Saturday as John and I sat in my kitchen it started to snow. Fat fluffy flakes piled up at the bottom of the window. It was beautiful, as was the dark-red rosebud that appeared above John’s head.
    Unusually, we’d had a small smoke of cannabis.
    John had been smoking a lot of cannabis when I first met him – and that too explained much – but as soon as I told him that I didn’t like it, he started to cut down. It wasn’t that I disapproved of the drug – far from it – but I didn’t like the fuzzy idiot he turned into under its influence.  I preferred his straight self. Or perhaps I should say that I felt safer with his straight self. The fuzzy idiot frightened me.
    Cannabis frightened me too, took me to some scary places, which was why I’d never smoked it much.
    ‘I ought to go home,’ he said, ‘while I still can. I’ll be back this evening.’
 
It was his birthday the next day so I made him a fruit cake. Or, rather, two fruit cakes. It was another recipe of my mother’s and she catered in bulk. Not only did I have four siblings, but a nanny had lived with us when we were younger, as well as a sister of my mother’s, so it had been a big household.
    The snow continued and John didn’t reappear. At last, at about eight o’clock he rang.
    ‘I can’t get to you,’ he wailed. ‘I’m in the pub. Richard’s letting me use the pub’s phone. I’m behind the bar. I had to walk here. I’ve abandoned the Mini in a hedge somewhere. I’ll have to try and get to you tomorrow.’
    We hadn’t spent a night apart since the day after the supper party over a month earlier. I tried to be brave.
   
The next morning I looked out of the window and the city had turned white. A deep layer of soft snow covered everything. Nothing moved.
    I had no way of contacting John or finding out how he was. Had he made it home, walking through the snow in the dark? Or was he lying in a hedge somewhere dying of cold?
    I felt trapped in the house, unable to help him. I couldn’t even study - which was not like me at all.
     I had no one to talk to.
    Alison had cut me off because I hadn’t told her what was going on with John. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to, I just couldn’t. I didn’t know myself what was happening. Sometimes I wondered if I was going mad.
    Graham kept his distance, pursuing his studies in the department and only coming back to the house to sleep.
    I sliced into one of the cakes and treated myself to a piece of it.
    And every time I passed the cake, I had another piece.
    By the early afternoon the first cake was finished. I was shocked. How had I done that? I wrapped the other cake up tightly and put it away in the back of a cupboard.
 
Late in the afternoon, there was a hammering on the door. A tramp-like figure stood on the step. He wore a tweed coat that reached to his ankles, a baggy knitted hat that fell over his eyes and a grubby pale-pink scarf that wound round and round his neck and trailed to the ground alongside the coat.
    This wasn’t the hero I’d been imagining and pining for.
    ‘What on earth are you wearing?’ I exclaimed. I sounded like my mother.
    ‘Oh these,’ John said looking down. ‘I found them on the floor. I wanted to make sure I was warm enough.’
    ‘I walked in,’ he continued, excitedly. ‘I walked all the way here on the tops of the hedges. Well, a bloke at Stoke Canon stopped and gave me a lift. He had snow chains on his tyres. But otherwise I walked.’
   
The next morning we trudged together through the snow, across the city to the campus. Everyone else was on foot as well, in an assortment of colourful clothes that looked as if they too had been dragged from obscurity. It was like a scene from a Dickens novel.
    We didn't want to risk being separated again and so after the snow John moved in with me, gradually bringing different bits and pieces. First the hi-fi and some records which he installed in the sitting-room, and then a selection of clothes which he crammed into a small cupboard in my small room.

    Luckily one of the men who’d previously lived in the cottage had returned before the snow so Kitten had been and was being looked after.

Kitten

One Saturday John arrived with a large mattress strapped to the roof of the Mini.

    ‘I’m fed up with sleeping on your single mattress,’ he said. ‘So I’ve brought mine from the cottage.’

    We slid it off the car and struggled with it into the house. Then John tugged it up the stairs by its handles while I stood at the other end trying to stop it sliding back down again. Unfortunately Graham appeared at the top of the stairs. He gave a sickly smile.

    ‘Sorry, sorry,’ I said to Graham, while he waited for us.

    ‘Look,’ I said to John, ‘why don’t we take it back down again, and let Graham get through.’

    ‘No, no,’ said John. ‘Keep going.’

    My single mattress went in the sitting-room’s bay window as additional seating and every time I saw it I cringed.

    My heart and my soul were John’s, but my head was somewhere else.

To be continued . . . 

THE STORY CONTINUES. 6 The Confession

 This is part of an autobiographical series that starts in Australia.

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The full list of instalments is in the sidebar to the right.

Note

Please check that you’ve read the current version of  instalment 5 before you read this instalment.

(I say this because I have posted and reposted several different versions of instalment 5 and probably confused everybody. Many apologies. I'm hoping that the current version is the definitive one. )

  

So I did what I always did in such circumstances. I switched my feelings off and my brain on. The relief. The world was normal once again. And if it was a bit mundane, that was a small price to pay.
    John was sitting on the other side of the mattress, looking at me. He seemed at a loss, or waiting for me, or something. So I moved towards him. Sex was obviously the answer. That was what people normally did in these circumstances, wasn’t it?
    The trouble was, John and I seemed to have started at the wrong end. We’d started with our souls and left out all the rest of us. How did we catch up?
    And I didn’t even have a teenage romance in my past, a gentle love affair where I could have learnt about sex slowly. I’d been nabbed a few times at teenage parties but the results had disgusted me. I couldn’t even talk about them. And then, of course, there was B in London.
    I moved closer to John and touched him, but he reared back against the wall.
    ‘No, no,’ he cried out. ‘Something’s wrong.’
    I started to cry. It was the best thing he could have done. The only thing.
    Men had been pursuing me, grabbing me, following me since my teens. It was exhausting, frightening, destructive. I never had a chance to feel my own feelings. I was overwhelmed by other people’s lust. And here was someone, the first ever, refusing me for some reason.
    What a gentleman.
    And once I started to cry, I couldn’t stop. I found myself pouring out the whole story of B and London. I soaked a pillow with my tears.
    As before, at the party, John listened without comment. I knew that this was partly because he didn’t know what to say, but perhaps that again was the right way to be. I didn’t want advice or comfort. I just wanted truth.
    I must have fallen asleep as the next thing I remember is waking up, my head on a damp pillow, and the door opening.
 
Kitten sashayed in, followed by John wrapped in a torn green coat and carrying a bowl and a mug.
    ‘I didn’t know whether you took sugar in your tea,’ he said, ‘but I put some in anyway.’
    Kitten did a flying leap and landed dead centre on the mattress. She’d obviously done the manoeuvre before. I shuffled away from her to give her space. She struck me as the sort of cat you wouldn’t want to get on the wrong side of.
    As I ate my bowl of muesli, John and I looked at each other and smiled. Again, we didn’t know what to say to each other. We’d gone beyond small talk. Or skipped it.
 
‘I’ve got to go to work soon,’ said John. ‘Shall I give you a lift to the campus or back to your house – wherever you want to go?’
    I retrieved my clothes from the piles on the floor, relieved to find them. Some time during the night I must have removed them but I didn’t remember doing so.
 
On the way in to Exeter, John played a cassette of Fleetwood Mac’s ‘Rumours’, drumming along on the steering wheel.
 
    Did she make you cry
    Make you break down
    Shatter your illusions of love?
 
    Is it over now
    Do you know how
    To pick up the pieces and go home?
 
He was happy, and if he was happy so was I. That was enough for the moment.

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THE STORY CONTINUES. 5 The Cottage

This is part of an autobiographical series that starts in Australia.

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John didn’t react to my answer even though it was probably the most honest thing I’d said to him up until then, apart from my gabbling at the party. But I couldn’t remember any of what I'd said then. So whether or not he’d understood what I meant, I didn’t know. And right at that moment, I didn’t care. I shelved the problem as I always had.    

    ‘I thought I might take you to my local pub,’ he said.

As on the morning after the party, he drove at speed, but this time it wasn't through familiar city streets, but through tiny twisty lanes with high hedges. I wondered how he found his way as it all looked the same. I had no idea where we were.

    Alison had borrowed her mother’s car once or twice and we’d explored a little of Devon – like Dartmoor and the coast – but I’d not been in this sort of terrain before. Ever.

    John didn't stop talking.

    I hung on to the door while facts flashed past.

    He was 25, a year older than me. He worked at the university as an electronics technician. He came from Bedfordshire – a ‘home’ county (close to London) like Kent where I was brought up - but had moved down here with his girlfriend.

   She’d been a student at the university and they’d lived together in a country cottage with a floating population of other males.

    At the end of her studies she’d left John and gone off with one of the other men in the house. That had been in September of the previous year, shortly before I first came across him - which explained a lot.

    He still lived in the cottage but he was on his own there now.

We arrived in a village - civilisation at last - and pulled up outside a thatched building. Up some stone steps and through a studded door and we were in a long room with a wood fire at one end that scented the air. Small tables dotted the room and behind a counter with shiny brass handles stood a man with a beard and blue eyes that bored into me.

    ‘Richard,’ said John, pushing me forward. ‘This is Belinda.’

    'And what do you do?' demanded Richard.

    What did I do? My life had turned upside down in the space of twenty-four hours and I struggled to remember anything.

    ‘I . . . I’m a student,’ I stuttered.

    ‘I know that,’ said Richard with irritation, as if students were ten a penny. ‘I meant, what subjects do you do?’

    I answered automatically. ‘French and Spanish.’

    Richard nodded and went to serve another customer.

    Somehow, I’d passed a test. I was proud. I liked the man.

I’m not sure we even stopped for a drink as soon we were back in the Mini.

    We left the village behind and traversed more lanes that became smaller and smaller before coming to a dead end. We climbed out and my feet squelched in mud. John led me over broken flagstones to a door.

    Inside, a single lightbulb illuminated a hallway, its floor patched with frayed lino.

    To the right I could see a large room crammed with stuff. It looked like a junk shop. 

    To the left, was another large room with a bath in the centre of it. Ropes of grey washing hung from the ceiling above the bath. I wondered how long the washing had been there and whose it was. I knew it wasn't John's as I'd seen his in the back of the car and it had been clean and folded and certainly not grey.

    Ahead were the stairs, under which stood a fridge and a cooker but no other signs of a kitchen.

   The air was so cold I could see my breath.

Upstairs we made our way along a passage, kicking aside clothes as we went.

    ‘Sorry about the mess,’ said John. ‘It’s not mine. It’s what everybody left behind.’
    At the end of a passage he opened a door to a sea of more clothes, a single paraffin heater and a mattress against one wall, on which sat a tortoiseshell cat who was looking at me with deep suspicion.

    ‘That’s Kitten,’ said John. ‘She likes marzipan.’

    Kitten leapt off the bed and stalked out of the room, tail held high.

    I lowered myself on to the edge of the mattress.

Against the wall on the opposite side of the mattress was a record-player and racks of long-playing records, the only organised things I’d seen so far.

    John flicked through the LPs before finding one and putting it on the turntable. A man’s voice rang out, strong and clear.

    To be any more
    Than all I am
    Would be a lie.

    I’m so full of love
    I could burst apart
    And start to cry.

The man was singing directly to us, for us, for me.

    Everything in my past - all the emotions I'd suppressed, all the problems I'd shelved  - was racing to the surface like vomit.

    I was a volcano, about to erupt.

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THE STORY CONTINUES. 4 The Supper

This is part of an autobiographical series that starts in Australia.

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The full list of instalments is in the sidebar to the right.

I didn’t give John a thought over the Christmas holidays.

    I stayed with my parents in Kent in the house where I’d been brought up and still called home. I spent my time at parties with the offspring of friends of my parents where I stood against walls and thought, I’m too old for this. I’d been going to similar parties since my teens and they hadn’t got any better. I was simply incapable of playing the right game.

As soon as I walked through the door of the Exeter house in the New Year at the start of the second term, I knew I had to finish with Graham. I’d been leading him on for no reason other than the fact that he was there. I didn’t feel anything for him other than friendship. I just hoped Alison didn’t know what we’d been up to.
    Graham didn’t understand the problem. He was hurt and I felt dreadful about it.

The next day I sat in the university coffee bar, nursing my cappuccino in its Pyrex cup and saucer and shrinking against the window, hoping to be invisible.
    The wellies were out in force, standing in large groups in everyone’s way and encouraging their friends to jump the queue and join them. They’d claimed me as one of their own during my first year – which was one of the reasons I’d left – and I didn’t want them to do so again.
    The swing doors behind me whooshed open then banged shut and a figure raced past me, before wheeling round and falling to a crouch in front of me.
    ‘Neep,’ it said.
    I hardly recognised him. Gone was the cloak. Instead he was wearing a brown corduroy jacket with brown corduroy trousers, a black polo-necked jumper and black boots. Stylish. Gone was the beard and some of the hair. He had a dimpled chin, I noticed, and serious green eyes. Almost, well yes, almost handsome.
    ‘You look . . . different,’ I stammered.
    ‘I went to my parents’ for Christmas,’ he explained. ‘My mother re-equipped my wardrobe.’
    I nodded. I didn’t know what to say. We seemed to have gone beyond small talk.
    ‘The Albion Band are playing in the Great Hall tomorrow night,’ he said. ‘D’you want to come?’
    ‘Oh no, I couldn’t,’ I blurted out. He’d caught me unawares. I didn’t know how to respond. ‘I’ve got far too much work to do.’

A few days later Alison and I were in Cornwall House again, relaxing over our usual glass of wine, when I saw John on the other side of the room. He had his trousers tucked into his boots like a Cossack. He was racing over to talk to some woman – small, round, dark curly hair, pretty. She was smiling at him.
    I leaped to my feet and placed myself between him and her.
    ‘We’re giving a supper party in the house next week. D’you want to come?’

Even though we had no specific plans, Alison and I had been thinking about doing something like a supper and she agreed to help even though she was horrified when I explained whom I’d invited.
    She made the main course – something with mince and tinned tomatoes – and I made a banana and lemon cake for pudding from a recipe of my mother’s. We invited a few other people.
    John wore what looked like a new sage-green shirt. He had two helpings of my cake. After supper, when we all retired to the sitting-room and played records, he parked himself on the floor.
    I looked at him and the clouds in my head rolled back. A voice, as if from a clear blue sky, spoke out. ‘This man will interest me for the rest of my life. I’m going to marry him.’
    It wasn’t a declaration of intent. It was a vision of the future.

When everyone else had gone to bed, John and I lay together on cushions in the sitting-room’s bay window.

    The air crackled. We didn’t touch each other. The feeling was too intense. What sort of a conflagration would we create if we did?

    A sparkling blue mist seeped at speed into the corner of the room and formed into a cloud which crossed the room to hover above us.
    ‘What is it?’ I whispered.
    ‘I don’t know,’ said John.
    So he saw it too.
    It was if the power of our feelings had caused something from another world to enter this one. Even though it was beautiful, it was almost malevolent.
    Or perhaps it was our fear that made it that way.
    At last John sat up. ‘I must go home,’ he said. ‘I’ve got a cat to feed. I’ll be back tomorrow.’

The next day I paced the house. I made a cauliflower cheese in case John was hungry when he arrived, if he arrived.
    As it grew dark, he appeared.
    We hurried up to my room and as soon as we were inside it, before I’d even had time to close the door, he said. ‘We have to get married.’
    Gone was the fool, gone was the nutter. He looked serious and worried, like a grown-up. But then I felt the same.
    I put my hands over my face. ‘I know,' I cried. 'But you’re so unsuitable.’

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