The Banker's Niece 41: Unsuitable

January 1978

‘I spent all Christmas looking through the University List for you,’ said Rick.

    ‘Whatever for?’ asked Jane.

    ‘I wanted to send you a Christmas card,’ said Rick.

    ‘But I didn’t get one from you,’ she exclaimed.

    ‘I couldn’t find you,’ said Rick mournfully. ‘I only know your first name.’

    Jane thought of her own Christmas holiday. In spite of its confusion, Rick had never entered her head.

    They were lying on cushions in the bay window of the sitting-room of Jane’s house. Bernard, her tutor, had gone home, and Mike and Heather up to bed - both of them giving Jane and Rick funny looks before departing. It was one o’clock in the morning.

    She didn’t dare touch Rick. She thought she might explode if she did. And he didn’t touch her either. There was so much tension around, the air crackled.

    A thick mist, light blue and sparkling, filtered into the room from the corner by the door. It formed itself into a cloud and floated across to hover over the pair of them.

    ‘What is it?’ whispered Jane.

    She wasn’t frightened – there were so many other supernormal things going on – but she wasn’t altogether sure either. There was something slightly malevolent about the sparkling cloud.

    Rick shook his head. ‘Buggered if I know.’

    So he saw it too.

    ‘I must go home,’ he said at last. ‘I’ve a cat to feed.’

    ‘OK,’ said Jane.

    ‘I’ll come over tomorrow,’ he said.

She spent the next day, Sunday, pacing the house. He hadn’t said when he was coming. She couldn’t rest until he arrived.

    ‘What’s going on?’ asked Heather. ‘You’re very . . . something.’

    ‘I’ve no idea,’ said Jane.

    She didn’t and even if she had she wouldn’t have wanted to tell Heather.

    Heather sniffed and went upstairs.

    Jane made a cake – a fruit cake from another recipe of her mother’s. Rick had liked her banana and lemon cake. She hoped he would like this one too. She left the cake cooling on a wire rack in the kitchen and every time her peregrinations took her to the kitchen she cut and ate a small slice.

    At three in the afternoon she discovered that there was no cake left.

Rick burst through the front door at six-thirty in the evening.

    ‘I think we ought to get married,’ he blurted out.

    ‘I agree,’ wailed Jane, clutching her head, ‘but you’re so unsuitable.’

    It wasn’t a ‘no’. She understood that, and she knew Rick understood it too, but she wasn’t sure she could manage to be married to Rick.

    Marrying Rick would mean being a real person, not a cipher or a daughter or a wife. Rick wouldn't want anything less; he wanted an equal. But did she have it in her to be a real person? Nothing in her upbringing had prepared her for it. She had no skills for achieving it.

    She was one self with her parents and another with Rick and, though she had no doubt that the self she was with Rick was bigger and more honest than the self she was with her parents, she was terrified of revealing that self to her parents. She feared that they would trample all over it, that they might destroy it. She’d always feared that. That was why she’d always kept it secret.

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

    He had a blue wood-trimmed Mini parked outside the house. Folded clothes filled the back seat.

    ‘Clean washing,’ said Rick, without explaining what it was doing in the car.

    He drove at 60 miles an hour through narrow hedged lanes, crouched in his seat so as not to bang his head on the roof, talking all the while. Jane hung on to the door-handle as Rick told her the story of his life. He was twenty-three, a year older than her. He came from Devon. He lived in a farm cottage that had once contained four other people – Stick, Big John, Ratty and Helen – but they’d all gone now and he rented it on his own. Helen had been his girlfriend since he was nineteen, but last September she’d gone off with Ratty. (That explained a lot.)

    He skidded to a halt in front of a long stone building. They climbed wide steps to a heavy door. The interior smelt of polish. Dim wall lights revealed shiny wooden surfaces and gleaming brass.
    'Alex,' said Rick, pushing her forward. 'This is Jane.'

    ‘And what do you do?’ said the man behind the bar. He had a neat moustache and clear blue eyes.

    Jane faltered. For a moment she didn’t know what he meant. Everything was happening so fast. Nothing was the same as it had been. Her mind swirled like an agitated snow globe.

    ‘Er, I’m a student,’ she stammered.

    ‘I know that,’ said the man. ‘I mean, what subjects?’

    It took her a second or two to remember.

    ‘Er, French and Spanish,’ she said.

    He nodded and moved to the other end of the bar to serve someone else.
    'He likes you,' said Rick.

    

They climbed into the car again and set off down a lane that became narrower and narrower and more and more bumpy. When Jane got out of the car her feet sank into mud.

    She followed Rick into a hallway lit by one bare bulb. Underfoot was a patch of lino, frayed at the edges. Through a door to the right, she saw a dark room piled like a junk shop with furniture and clothes. A cooker and fridge sat under the stairs ahead. On shelves sat quantities of jam-jars labelled ‘Mushroom ketchup 1976’.

    ‘Helen,’ said Rick. ‘It was a good year for mushrooms.’

    Upstairs she shuffled after him along a passage strewn with more clothes. Whose were they? What were they doing there? It was so cold she could see her breath. The floor undulated like the lanes they’d been travelling.

    He led her into a room at the end of the passage. A paraffin heater rose like a lighthouse from a sea of clutter. A tortoiseshell cat, its fur tousled as if it had just woken, glared at Jane from the centre of a mattress pushed against one wall.

    ‘That’s Cat,’ said Rick. ‘She likes marzipan.’

    Cat jumped off the bed and stalked out.

    Jane sat on the edge of the mattress. Rick reached into a wall-rack crammed with records, selected one and put it on a player on the floor. A man’s voice rang out, pure and strong.

Today you’ll make me say that I somehow have changed

Today you’ll look into my eyes, I’m just not the same

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

Today, everything you want I swear it all will come true

Today, I realize how much I’m in love with you*

She was going mad. The singer was communicating directly with her through the ether. The song had been written especially for her and Rick.

    The tidal wave that had been rising inside her ever since yesterday was about to crash. She too was about to burst apart.

*From 'Today' by Jefferson Airplane

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