THE STORY CONTINUES. 7 February

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

Click here for the first instalment.

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

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 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.
 
At last, 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 . . .