The Banker's Niece 28: Puddleglum

Summer 1978

‘I blame myself,’ cried Jane, massaging her forehead.

    ‘Why?’ said three voices at once.

    Jane was sitting at the kitchen table in Wendy's cottage with Rick, Wendy and Van. The back door was open and the sounds of an August evening floated in – chatter from the pub garden, lawnmowers, a dog barking in the distance.

    Van had arrived earlier with two bottles of cheap white wine and somehow the four of them had ended up drinking it together and chatting and Jane had brought down the letters from her parents and Wendy and Van had read them.

    Jane took a deep breath. ‘Well, when I first wrote and told my parents about Rick, I said, “he’s asked me to marry him and I told him he was unsuitable”.’

    ‘Why on earth did you say that?’ asked Van.

    Van was long and droopy and Jane kept wanting to call him Puddleglum*.

    ‘Because it was what happened,’ she said.

    ‘Sort of,’ said Rick.

    ‘It was a lament,’ she continued. ‘What I meant was, “Of course we have to marry, but I wish you weren’t so unsuitable – by my family’s standards”.’

    ‘You foresaw trouble,’ said Van/Puddleglum.

    ‘Oh yes,’ said Jane.

    ‘But why did you tell your parents that?’ asked Wendy.

    Jane sighed. ‘I wanted to warn them and I thought I’d make the problem into a bit of a joke.’

    ‘How so?’ asked Van.

    ‘I put an exclamation mark at the end of the sentence in my letter.’

    The other three laughed and Jane ran her fingers through her hair. ‘And I suppose also I was unsure myself and I wanted their reassurance.’

    ‘Fatal mistake,’ said Van. ‘You admitted weakness.’

    ‘I see that now,’ she said.

    ‘You got everybody off on the wrong foot, Rick included,’ said Wendy severely.

    She had long hair hennaed orange. It glowed like fire in the evening light.

    ‘Yeah,’ said Jane, wanting to cry.

    ‘No she didn’t,’ said Rick. ‘I would have hated them anyway.’

    Wendy gave a snort of laughter.

    ‘And your father would still have been a pompous prick and your mother a snob,’ said Van.

    Just like Puddleglum. Underneath that lugubrious exterior, a heart of gold.

    ‘But what do we do now?’ wailed Jane.

    ‘Do?’ exclaimed Puddleglum. ‘You carry on of course.’

‘D’you think your father’s read your mother’s letters?’ asked Rick later in the evening as they lay on their mattress sweating in the heat.

    The boxroom had one tiny casement window which they’d pushed open as far as it would go but there was no through-draught as they had to keep the door shut for privacy. Their clothes were piled on the landing outside but they dressed in the morning dancing around on the mattress. It was like living on a small boat.

    ‘I shouldn’t think so. I can’t see him approving of them,’ said Jane. ‘Why d’you ask?’

    ‘I just thought that, if he had, he might understand a bit better why I haven’t made more of an effort to get to know them.’

    ‘It’s not your fault,’ she said.

    ‘No, I s’pose not,’ he said. ‘The whole basis of the visit was wrong.’

    ‘Anyway,’ said Jane, ‘his letters are just as horrible as hers but in a different way.’

    ‘Yeah,’ he yawned. ‘Shall we go somewhere nice tomorrow, seeing as we’ve both got the day off?’ he said.

    ‘That would be lovely,’ she said, nestling against him.

    If she pretended to be OK, maybe she’d be OK.

  

‘Two more billets-doux have arrived,’ said Rick next morning, dropping the envelopes on to the sheet and climbing over Jane with two mugs of tea. ‘Shall we burn them?’

    ‘What if they say they’re coming to the wedding?’ said Jane.

    ‘Good point,’ said Rick. ‘We might want to write back and tell them they’re not welcome.’

    Jane gave a half-hearted laugh.

    ‘Who’s going to read them first?’ asked Rick.

    ‘One each?’ said Jane.

    ‘OK,’ said Rick

    She grabbed the blue one. Her mother’s letters hurt most at the time but they were easier to ignore than her father’s.

My dear Jane

I shan’t come to the wedding. It does not mean that I shan’t be thinking of you – just that I would not be able to bear to be there. There is no point being a skeleton at the feast.

    What worries me most about your marriage is the general lowering of all your standards. I don’t mean material things – they don’t matter so much when you are young. It’s the mental attitude, the way of thinking and talking and behaving. Rick has such a naïve, prejudiced, cliché-ridden approach to life, so uneducated in every sense. I can’t believe that this will satisfy you for long. At the least, when he is your husband, perhaps you can teach him some manners. They may not seem very important, but they do make for a more pleasant existence. And the way you behave is how other people see you.

    I’m writing to you now, but I shall hide my feelings in the future and all will be sweetness and light! You need not be afraid to come to see us. It would be very sad if we lost touch – families are important. As you get older you will realise this.

    I’m not sending you conventional phrases of good wishes. They would stick in my throat.

    Love Mummy

She was almost immune by now. Almost, but not quite.

    ‘Hmm,’ said Rick, perusing her father’s letter. ‘Tricky.’

    They swapped sheets of paper.

    Jane hardly recognised her father’s handwriting. Instead of sloping forwards as it usually did it sloped backwards. It was much bigger than usual. It was written in heavy pen.

My dear daughter

You have told me your decision and I am, of course, very sad. It is so far from the happy family occasion it should be but the abruptness of your actions have obviously made that inevitable.

    What is a major worry is the thought that you may be turning your back or opting out of many of the standards to which we did our best to bring you up. I don’t think we are old-fashioned. That is an accusation that the younger generation always make to the older when they want to do something without approval.

    If friendships wither it is not always the friend’s fault. It is even odds that it is caused by oneself. It is not clever nor tolerant not to respect and consider other people’s point of view. It is even odds that they are more right than you.

    Nor is it hypocrisy to observe the usual courtesies and respect the social graces and behaviour of the company you are in at any time. It is kindness and thoughtfulness. Many of the most courteous and well-mannered people are some of the poorest and their company some of the most delightful.

    Bigotry is the belief that you are always right. Honesty is to say what you think even if you accept that you may be wrong.

    Selfishness and intolerance are the bane of the world. Kindness and good manners the blessings.

    Sorry to be a pompous bore.

    With love Daddy

‘Cliché-ridden,’ exclaimed Rick, putting down her mother’s letter.

    ‘I don’t understand,’ said Jane, staring at her father’s letter. ‘Is he talking about us?’

    Her head whirled. She felt sick. Her father sounded broken. She’d never heard him speak like that before. Every word was a knife to her breast.

    How did she manage to be such a disappointment to her parents? She’d always tried so hard to please them. What had she done wrong?

    Every letter from them tore her apart. Each time it was harder to put herself back together. This time she didn’t know if she could manage it.

    She didn’t know what the truth was any more. She didn’t know who she was. She didn’t know who was right, her or her parents.

    She didn’t even know if she still loved Rick. If she really loved him, why did she keep freezing? Why did she keep seeing him through her parents’ eyes?

    What was love anyway but a bottomless black hole?

    She had to end this pain now. She couldn’t bear it any longer.

    ‘I can’t go on,’ she said.

* A character in The Silver Chair by C S Lewis

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The Banker's Niece 27: The little house in the woods

Summer 1978

Jane hopped off the bus and wandered up the dirt track which led to Wendy’s cottage where she and Rick had been staying since the end of June. 

    As she left behind the Five Bells, the pub at the intersection of the track and the main road where she and Rick had spent many a happy evening, the throat-catching stench of deep-fat frying changed to the fragrance of the multitude of wildflowers that spilled out of the hedgerow like the froth on Rick’s lager. The buzz of bees replaced the roar of the traffic.
    The cottage may have been cramped, with her and Rick sleeping in a box-room the size of their mattress, and the atmosphere may have been strained given that Rick and Wendy had shared a one-night stand shortly after the sudden departure of Rick’s long-time girlfriend nearly a year ago now, but in Jane’s opinion its location on the edge of the city could not be faulted. It was a little piece of forgotten countryside. A little piece of paradise.

    Soon Wendy’s tiny thatched cottage appeared round a corner, peeping out of the trees like something from a fairy tale, and in spite of her aching legs Jane sped up.

The other advantage of Wendy’s cottage thought Jane as she settled on a blanket under an ancient apple tree, was its vast back garden now so overgrown that it was like a hayfield. She felt like a child again, hiding in the undergrowth.

    Thank goodness Wendy was out somewhere and she had the place to herself. She had tried to make friends with her, really she had, but so far without success.

    Take last week, for instance. Because Wendy was a student at the Art College and her clothes always looked right – unlike Jane’s which always looked wrong – Jane thought she might be interested to see the Laura Ashley wedding dress, so she’d put it on and gone downstairs to the kitchen to ask Wendy’s opinion. Wendy was boiling a tinned meat-pie for one in a saucepan, and she didn’t even look up.

    Luckily she’d recently acquired a boyfriend, Ivan, or Van as he liked to be known, so maybe the atmosphere would improve. They certainly seemed to be getting on well. Jane and Rick sometimes heard them at night through the walls of the cottage.

    She gulped from the pint glass of water and bit a chunk out of the cheese sandwich she’d brought out with her. A cloud of flies arrived to join her and she swatted them away. She stuck her legs out so that they could catch some sun.

    In some ways, this had been one of the best summers she’d ever had. After her finals, there was the wonderful thought that she didn’t ever need to attend an educational establishment again or sit through any more exams. Because she worked shifts at her waitressing job, she had time to be outside in the day. Sometimes she and Rick could even take days off from work and go to the sea together. And then of course, there was their wedding to look forward to, only two weeks away.

    Occasionally, now she had time to think, she remembered London and everything that had happened there but it all seemed a long way away, both in time and space, and she quickly forgot again. It didn’t do to dwell on it because it came between her and Rick. It made her freeze up and sometimes that could last for several days. Thankfully Rick was pretty patient.

    Another boon was Rick’s lovely parents, especially Peggy. Whenever Jane was at their house, she felt happy. She could be herself, whatever that was. Something inside her glowed, as it had when they went to see the vicar.

    As for her parents, it was over four months since she and Rick had visited them and they’d written such horrible letters, and they’d not said anything else whatsoever on the subject of her and Rick marrying, so maybe they were having a change of heart. In any case, now that she’d given them the good news about her finals (as well as the news about the wedding, of course), they had to be pleased. (They hadn't replied to that letter yet.)

    She hadn’t told them of her move however. That was another good thing about the summer.

    She polished off the sandwich and started attacking some plums. With her other hand she sorted through the post she’d found on the doormat when she arrived back.

    Two envelopes leapt out, a square blue one and a long brown one, both forwarded from her old house.

    For a second she couldn’t breathe. A bit of plum stuck in her throat. 

    Then she told herself not to be so silly. They were probably congratulating her on her results.

    But her hands were shaking as she ripped open the envelopes.

    First the blue one.

My dear Jane

Thank you for your letter. It was very depressing to hear that you are going to marry Rick in August but so be it. I think you are putting us all in rather an invidious position. Why this unseemly haste? Either you should have got married quietly without telling anyone beforehand or you should give everyone due warning. Don’t forget that we are all very fond of you and it is a big day. Have you considered all the rest of the family? I think this hole and corner business is most unsavoury. Unless you are pregnant, why do you have to rush it so?

    Apart from anything else it is a little unfair to Daddy who has already made all his travelling arrangements for the business trip which you should have known about.

    You are our oldest and first born and of course we want to be at your wedding, whoever you marry. We may not like Rick, but you have rather taken it for granted that we wouldn't - you said so before we even met him - and we’ve never had a chance to get to know him better and change our minds.

    Anyway this is my immediate reaction and I won’t write any more at the moment. If you feel like it, ring up and reverse the charges.
    Love

    Mummy
PS Ollie was thinking of coming to stay with you. I hope you're not going to let him down as well.

Then the brown one.

My dear Jane

As you have never said anything before I did not realise that you and Rick were thinking of marriage in August. If you had only asked for a talk we could easily have found time.  As it was I thought there was nothing precipitate, and am upset that Mummy should have been faced with this by herself and without warning last weekend when I was away.

    There is of course nothing we can do if you decide to go against our wishes except to convey our real sorrow at such estrangement. But if you are looking for our approval then I feel bound to say that, at this stage, I am unable to give you away. We hardly know Rick although we are aware that you come from different backgrounds. I do find him very difficult to talk to and while that is partly my fault he does not seem to be forthcoming in general conversation. Of course he is nervous but we cannot make a real judgement if he will not talk. About his home and family, interests, sport, holidays he’s had, school, training – in fact anything. He doesn’t necessarily have to talk to me but some initiative is essential if we are to get to know him.
    I don’t want to repeat all I’ve said in my previous letter but I do think that you yourself will not know your own mind if you stay at Exeter where obviously you will see Rick all the time and think of little else. If you get a job well away from Exeter, you and he would be welcome to see each other at weekends and hopefully here at home as often as you like. If you do this, and if your mind remains unchanged and we know more about Rick, we shall feel properly placed to be fair and reasonable. You must know our only concern is your long-term happiness. I also trust that Rick will appreciate all this, that he will be fair to you and not wish for hasty and irreversible action.

    With much love

    Daddy

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The Banker's Niece 26: The banker's niece

1974

Everything about London was grey, thought Jane as she walked to the underground station on a Monday morning - the people, the streets, the houses, the sky. She couldn’t remember when she last saw the sun, or a piece of greenery, or someone dressed in a bright colour. She’d hated that about London when she first arrived to work here, and she hated it now, two years later.

    No wonder she escaped most weekends and visited her parents in the country, even if she then had to endure her mother’s recital of everything that was wrong with Jane. Her hair was ‘unflattering’, ‘greasy, ‘straggly’. Her skin was ‘pasty’ or ‘spotty’. Her clothes were ‘ghastly’.

    This time she’d brought Jane’s father into it too. Apparently he ‘thought she was much too fat’. Jane was surprised he’d even noticed her but it made her sad that he was against her too. Even though he never said anything, she’d always imagined that he was on her side.

       

As usual, Kelvin and Alan were talking about sex when she arrived at the bank. The focus of their attention today was the Sex Maniac’s Diary that sat across the join between their two desks. Jane had never looked at it herself, not even in secret, but she thought it contained humorous cartoons of different sexual positions, and today’s was obviously a good one.

    She ignored the men – which was difficult as her desk butted on to the ends of theirs - and concentrated instead on putting her bag in the bottom drawer of her desk

    ‘Good weekend?’ asked Kelvin.

    ‘So-so,’ said Jane. ‘Went to see my parents. You?’

    Kelvin chortled and made a face at Alan, who gave one of his sardonic smiles in reply. Jane knew what that meant. Kelvin had been off with one of his girlfriends. As he’d explained to Jane, he and Sylvia had married young because their daughter was on the way and now they had to ‘make up for lost time’.

    ‘Sylvia as well?’ Jane had asked.

    ‘Oh yes,’ he’d replied.

    Alan was no better, although more reticent. It was Kelvin who’d told Jane that when Alan’s wife went away he made a point of sleeping with as many different women as possible. Jane wondered if Alan’s wife knew.

‘I might wander down to Companies House this morning and do some research,’ she announced at coffee time. (Thank goodness it wasn’t her job any more to make the coffee and take it round. It had been nerve-racking entering the dealing room and having thirty or so young men swivelling from their screens to look at her, not to mention the wolf-whistles and the ribald banter.) ‘Anything I can do for you two?’

    ‘Ooh yes,’ they said, scrabbling through mounds of papers.

    She’d commented once on the state of their desks and they’d roared with laughter.

    ‘We’re the creatives,’ said Kelvin. ‘We’re allowed –’

    ‘Supposed,’ interjected Alan.

    ‘- supposed to leave our desks untidy.’

    They did make a good double act, not least because of their appearance, Kelvin being short with long blond hair and Alan tall with short dark hair. Once she’d thought they were fun.

    Writing reports on businesses didn’t seem that creative to her but perhaps it was so in comparison to the rest of the jobs at the bank. And what did she know? She couldn’t even read a balance sheet. She disappeared to Companies House as often as possible simply so that she didn’t have to sit at her desk pretending to work. She might have been a Trainee Research Analyst, but no one was training her. Sometimes she even regretted not being a secretary any more. At least she was good (goodish) at that.

    She was almost certain that Kelvin had wangled her the job but, if so, why wasn’t he helping her more? Even if he’d done it in order to keep her near rather than to help her in her career, he was still going a strange way about it.

    ‘Cellars at lunchtime?’ called Kelvin as she left.

    ‘OK,’ she said.

    She didn’t know why he bothered to ask as they hardly ever didn’t go to the wine bar. Alan used to come too but he stopped a few months ago. He was obviously more sensitive than she gave him credit for.

   

It started one day when she was standing at the photocopier and Kelvin slid up behind her and put his arm round her waist.

    ‘When are you coming to Paris with me?’ he asked.

    ‘Who’s paying?’ she said, trying to give a jokey answer to what she thought was run-of-the-mill flirting. God knows, she had enough of it to deal with. It wasn’t a very good joke but it was the best she could do at short notice.

    ‘Me of course,’ said Kelvin.

    And then she knew he was serious.

    Kelvin soon guessed she’d never slept with anyone before. He called her ‘vierge’, which sounded a lot less embarrassing than the English equivalent. And he never pushed her, unlike most men. But perhaps he didn’t need to, what with all his other opportunities.

    They had nice times together. They went to plays and concerts and exhibitions. They discussed books and films. He really cared about art, like she did, and like most of her family and other friends didn’t. For them it was entertainment, it was Culture. They consumed it because it was fashionable.

    The fact that he was nine years older than her gave him a certain glamour. He knew things she didn’t. He was worldly.

    And something happened to her when he touched her.

    But she couldn’t forget that he was married and that what she was doing was sinful. And sometimes she noticed cruel lines running from his nose down either side of his mouth.

At the Cellars she knocked her glass and spilt some wine over Kelvin's trousers.
    He leapt up, brushing the liquid off.
    'You stupid cow,' he shouted. 'Now I'll have to get these cleaned.'
    It was the first time she'd ever heard a man speak to a woman like that.

‘D’you know what we three have in common?’ said Kelvin mid-afternoon, looking up from his reference books.

    ‘Do we have anything in common?’ said Alan.

    ‘We’re all class rebels,’ announced Kelvin.

    That was a new idea.

    The two men seldom talked about their families. All she knew was that Kelvin came from near Newcastle and Alan from Leeds and that both had been to university. They hadn’t said which ones but Alan had let slip once that when he was a student he was a communist. She presumed he wasn’t one now. How could he be and still work at the bank?

    By contrast, Kelvin wanted to know everything about Jane’s background and was always offering to accompany her to the parties of rich friends and relatives. She didn’t often let him – there was something about his eagerness she didn’t like - but whenever he did he took great delight afterwards in unpicking the hosts’ taste or lack of.

    Were they rebels, or simply ambitious?

    Was she a rebel, or simply a misfit?

    She went back to her reading. She was trawling through the satirical magazine Private Eye for gossip related to their work. It was the only part of the job she could do.

    ‘Hey,’ she said, as a name jumped out. ‘That’s my uncle.’

    She showed Kelvin and Alan the article. Her uncle was making lots of money ‘asset-stripping’, which as far as she could gather meant buying up ailing companies and selling off the profitable bits. Private Eye was saying something rude about him.

    As one, Kelvin and Alan burst out singing.

    Bankers’ nieces seek perfection

    Expecting all the gifts that wise men bring.

She recognised the lines as coming from a song by Bob Dylan, one of Kelvin’s favourite musicians. She liked Dylan too, but not this in relation to her. The backgrounds of Kelvin and Alan didn’t matter to her so why should hers matter to them? She was Jane, not some ‘banker’s niece’. She was hurt. She’d thought they were friends and equals.

    Or perhaps she was suffering from a deficit of humour.

Nor did she ever feel safe, she realised, as she walked back from the Underground in the evening, remembering the man standing next to her on the train who’d pressed himself against her slightly too much, and thinking of the men who tailed her at night and all the flashers and gropers she’d had to contend with over the months. She now understood Mr Turner's poem.
    Every day she wanted to leave, but she didn’t know where to go, what to do instead. She felt as if she’d exhausted all possibilities. She’d failed at everything: her education, her career, her looks, her relationships.

    Sometimes she was tempted to run to the other side of the world, and join Fee in New Zealand.

     

Kelvin called it love and wrote her poetry. To her it was more like being lost in a mire with every step taking her deeper into danger.
    On his twenty-eighth birthday Kelvin took her to a new Thai restaurant, the first in London. They sat alone in the stark red and black interior.

    ‘You’ll never sleep with me, will you,’ he said.

    It sounded like a challenge – or an ultimatum – and she realised that she just wanted it all to be over.

    Back at her house – so empty now without Fee – they lay on her bed as they had so many times before, but this time she let herself go.

    She understood straight away that she knew nothing. She hadn’t expected it to hurt so much, and she couldn’t believe that someone would make so much effort just for her. She wondered where the pleasure came in.

    Afterwards he looked down at her with a smirk and said, ‘How does it feel to join the ranks of the great unwashed?’ 

    A black shutter slammed down on her life. She’d been conned. This was her latest and worst mistake. It was something she could never undo.

    He leapt off the bed and started dressing.

    ‘Where are you going?’ she asked.

    ‘Home, of course,’ he said.

    When he was gone she sat in the bath watching her blood seep into the water.

    Back in her room she played over and over the Nina Simone record that Fee had left behind for her. ‘Ne me quitte pas, ne me quitte pas, ne me quitte pas.’ She was hurtling down a bottomless black hole and only the music stopped her disappearing for ever.

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A floater, flashes and a magical wood

On Saturday a large spider-like floater appeared in my right eye. It was accompanied by disconcerting lightning-like flashes in the corner of the eye. On Monday both symptoms were still there so I rang the opticians and they advised me to come in for a check since – at worst – they can be signs of a ‘detached retina’, which sounds terrifying.

    Part of the check involved putting drops into the eye to dilate the pupil so that the optician can see through it to the retina behind. I was pronounced OK, and told that such symptoms are more likely as you get older (oh dear, something else) and if you’re short-sighted (which I am). Frog then had to drive me home as the vision is disturbed by the dilated pupils, and the effects take four hours to wear off. And I couldn’t read my computer screen either for the rest of the day.

    So that was Monday.

    On Tuesday I went back to the opticians to order some computer glasses as recommended by the optician on Monday. Computers cause a lot of eyestrain because of the glare and because they sit at an awkward place between reading distance (when I don’t wear glasses) and the far distance (when I do). This strain can cause migraines, she said. Special glasses worth a try, I thought.

    So that was Tuesday.

    I brought forward my contact lens check to this Friday as my eyes are very dry and I wanted to be sure this wasn’t contributing to the above symptoms.

    So that will be Friday.

    Today (Thursday) I have two pre-arranged appointments (which I should now be preparing for) so it looks like that’ll be today gone.

    Which is all preliminary to letting you know that I may not be posting another chapter of the novel this week. I do have half a chapter done (yesterday) and, if I find some time in which to finish it, I will. But it doesn’t look likely.

    In the meantime, here are some pictures from a small nearby wood which is totally magical at the moment.

Only a neighbour and I visit the wood and she goes to a different bit from me, so I can be pretty sure of having it to myself.

Just me and the bluebells

As the wood grows around a valley cut by a small stream

This tunnel for the stream is one of the few signs of human interference in the wood

lots of it is too steep for me

A near-vertical bank down to the stream

but Ellie leaps around all over the place like a mountain goat.

Spot the dog

I spend most of my time just sitting on the ground among the bluebells, feeling happy, and sometimes Ellie joins me.

Ellie looking wistful. ‘Why can’t we do something? Why do we have to just sit here?’

There hasn’t been much sun during the wood’s bluebell season so far this year, but here is the wood at the same time last year in sun, looking equally magical.

The wood in sun this time last year

As I sit, the birds and butterflies return to going go about their business, ignoring me, and I start to see strange things – a dormouse looking at me from a branch, a hairy-legged satyr striding along the edge of the wood, a little man in brown trousers standing watching me. When I look again, I realise they are illusions created by the tangle of fallen trees and ivy (but I haven’t photographed them because it seems intrusive) . . .

The Banker's Niece 25: The interim

Summer 1978

‘Look after each other,’ said Reverend Watson, the vicar of Black Dog, as he said goodbye to Jane and Rick on his doorstep.

    Of course, thought Jane. That’s what marriage is all about. How simple.

    She and Rick had spent the last half hour with the vicar in his book-lined study, talking about marriage and making arrangements with him for their own.

    After her parents’ reaction and that of her housemates to the relationship between her and Rick, she’d been astonished to find that the vicar supported them in their plans. She and Rick had touched on the fact that neither of them wanted children, as well as the disapproval, not to say hostility, of Jane’s parents, but he had been unphased. And though he was obviously well educated, probably at private school and Oxbridge to judge by his accent, and a good thirty years older than her and Rick, so of her parents’ class and generation, he took them seriously and didn’t appear even to notice the disparity in their backgrounds.

    Jane left his house glowing. Was this how you told good people from bad ones, she wondered: people who made you feel better were good, and people who made you feel worse were bad.
    In that case, what were her parents?

    Although neither Jane nor Rick was particularly religious, certainly not the organised kind anyway, they both wanted to marry in church rather than a register office as it would give their promises more depth. And their meeting with the reverend more than confirmed that decision.

    They’d discovered their attitudes to children by accident.

    ‘Did you mean what you said to your father about not wanting children?’ asked Rick in a neutral tone the evening of the day her father’s letter arrived.

    ‘I did mean it, yes,’ said Jane warily.

    However vague her visions for the future, they had never included children, and just the thought of having children made her weary. Charlie her housemate was the only other man to whom she’d confided this and he had accused her of being unnatural.

    ‘That’s lucky,’ said Rick, ‘because I don’t want children either.’

    They’d laughed and kissed. It was another sign that they were meant to be together. While on the outside they were different in every possible way, deep down they were the same.

    As they walked hand in hand back through the village to Rick’s parents’ house where they were invited to lunch, it was a perfect June morning. Flowers of every colour spilled from the front gardens of thatched cottages. At the end of the street vibrant green hills touched a deep blue sky. Jane’s toes were warm for the first time in months. She’d almost stopped feeling afraid.

In April she and her mother had gone back to exchanging letters full of news that didn’t matter, neither of them mentioning Rick again. With any luck her parents thought that the subject was now closed.

    She'd read in newspapers about ‘poor bereaved’ parents who paid to have their children snatched from ‘cults’ in which they’d been caught up, and then had them ‘reverse brainwashed’. She wondered how she’d cope if her parents did the same to her, and wasn’t her father’s suggestion that she and Rick should separate in order to ‘commend’ to him ‘as to the seriousness’ of their intentions the same sort of thing in disguise?
    Thank goodness she was over twenty-one and hadn’t been born a hundred years earlier and that the law was now on her side rather than that of her parents, or at least she thought it was, and even more so she hoped when she was married.
    She still kept looking over her shoulder though whenever she was out and about on her own.

    At the end of term the lease on her Exeter house would expire and next week she and Rick were moving. It occurred to her that she didn’t have to give her parents her new address. She could instead arrange for the Post Office to forward their letters (or not).

By some miracle, she’d survived her finals.

    Normally she enjoyed exams. She liked drawing up revision timetables with their neat boxes and the subjects evenly distributed around the days and the hours. She liked working through old exam papers and listing the answering points on index cards and then committing the shapes of the lists to her photographic memory. She liked the sense of control the preparations gave her and the sense of achievement when all that work came together in the exams themselves.

    This year however, with all the interruptions and the way her mind kept slewing back to her parents’ letters, she’d had to make do with scraps of paper and scribbled notes, subjects revised as and when – usually the night before their exams. Nightmares and tears.

    She would never have abandoned her degree as that would have wasted the last two and a half years and she knew too well from her time in London what the alternative was. But the last few weeks had felt harmful, as if she were squeezing herself into something that didn’t fit any more.

    She didn’t think she’d actually fail since she’d usually found something to say, but she certainly wouldn’t have done as well as she was expected to. After all, at the beginning of her course one of her tutors on reading an essay of hers had told her to expect a first.

    So what. She didn’t care any more what grade she got so long as she passed. She was simply relieved that it was all over and that she could now concentrate on what really mattered – her life with Rick.

She found a job waitressing at a café in the city. It was a relief to do something practical for a change, to connect with people rather than books, and to be able to leave work at the end of the day and forget about it.

Late in June she treated herself to a train trip to London and visited Laura Ashley.

    It was hard to pick a wedding outfit from the packed rows of gorgeous romantic clothes but eventually she settled on a pink-and-white striped dress with a high frilled collar and long gathered sleeves. Fitted over the bust and then floating out like maypole ribbons, it would she hoped accommodate her whatever her size at the time. Her eating habits had calmed down a lot since Rick had started living with her but she still didn’t trust them.

    As she came home on the train later in the day nursing the bag on her lap, she hoped that Rick would approve of her choice.

    Peggy went into Dingles department store in Exeter and bought herself a pale-green suit. She modelled it for Jane one Sunday when she and Rick went over for tea.

    ‘You look beautiful,’ said Jane, hugging her. ‘It matches your eyes perfectly.’

    The next Saturday Peggy dragged Rick into Austin Reed and bought him a navy-blue suit.

    ‘It’s a waste of money,’ he protested. ‘I’ll never wear it again.’

    Jane wasn’t at all sure herself about seeing Rick in a suit but what else would he wear to the wedding – the hooded black cloak with the red-silk lining which had been his garment of choice when she first met him back in November the year before?

    Rick’s brother Martin had promised to come down from London for the occasion and Rick’s parents had written to the last-known address of Rick’s sister Sheila. Where her tepee was pitched, or even if she still lived in Wales, no one knew, but they hoped the letter would reach her somehow.

    What must it be like to disappear like that, Jane wondered. She envied her.

    Rick was in discussion with a silversmith they’d met at a craft market on Exeter’s Cathedral Green, planning a ring for each of them.

    Dougie, an old schoolfriend of Rick's whom Jane hadn't yet met as he was away working in Bristol, was coming back to act as best man. Whether it was essential for Jane to be ‘given away’ by some man, she had yet to find out, but anyone would do if it was.

    After the wedding, which was at eleven, they were all going to Black Dog’s Agricultural Inn for lunch.

At the beginning of July, Jane celebrated her twenty-third birthday, and at the end Rick his twenty-fourth. They were getting on.

   

Also in July, she received her exam results. Not only had she passed but she’d been awarded an ‘upper second’, not a bad mark at all. She couldn’t believe it. She didn’t feel she deserved it. She decided the examiners must have been kind to her because of her work earlier in the course. She decided to write to her parents to tell them the good news.

    ‘I could tell them about the wedding at the same time,’ she said to Rick.

    ‘I wouldn’t,’ he said.

    She thought about it. She so wanted to give them one last chance. Surely they could understand. They were the same flesh and blood as her. They had been young once. They had married in their mid-twenties, like her and Rick, and as far as she knew having met less than a year earlier, again like her and Rick, and she, Jane, had been born barely nine months later. So they too obviously didn’t want to wait.

    If she didn’t tell them she might have to lie to them for the rest of her life, or cut herself off from them completely and she didn’t think she could bear that. It would be like deliberately hacking off one of her own legs.

    ‘I’ve passed my finals,’ she wrote, ‘and Rick and I are getting married in Devon on Saturday the 19th of August.’

    She didn’t invite them to the wedding, but she didn’t say they couldn’t attend either, as she couldn’t work out which scenario was least bad.

    As she dropped the envelope into the letterbox the sky gave a rumble of thunder.

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