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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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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THE STORY CONTINUES. 3 The Party

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

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Some time during the evening, I left the night club’s dance floor and sat down for a rest at an empty table. I should have known better. John appeared, and leant over me.

    Why was it that I attracted nutters? There’d been a poet in the village where I’d been brought up who always managed to accost me when I was walking to the bus stop or the train station. He’d had a mane of bushy black hair as well.

    And I tried so hard to be normal.

    ‘What star sign are you?’ he asked.

    That was unexpected. I wondered if he was quite right in the head.

    ‘Taurus,’ I said.

    ‘Oh,’ he frowned. ‘The astrologer-lady said I was going to meet a Libran woman.’

    There was no answer to that, so I kept quiet, hoping he’d go away.

    But he didn’t.

    Suddenly, I felt sorry for him. I reached into my bag and found the batch of invitations I carried with me so that I could pass them on to likely people as I went about my daily rounds. I took one out and gave it to him.

    ‘This is to an end-of-term party at the house where I live,’ I said. ‘Come if you like.’

    John took the invitation and scrutinised it, his hair falling over his face.
    ‘Thank you,’ he said, stuffing the piece of paper into a back pocket.
    I didn’t exactly hope that he’d lose it, but I thought he probably would.
 
John arrived at the house in a flurry and flung his cloak – black this time - over the bottom of the banisters. I couldn’t help noticing his tight red trousers, and the wide brown leather belt that held them up.
    ‘Drinks that way,’ I said, waving my arm in the direction of the kitchen. ‘Dancing that way.’
    I pointed to the dining-room and sitting-room behind me which we’d turned into one by pulling back the sliding doors that separated them.
    Then I left him and tried to disappear into the throng.
    But whenever I turned round during the next couple of hours, as I danced, chatted and quaffed wine, he was standing in the shadows in his red trousers watching me like Banquo’s ghost.
    Eventually I gave up and went over to talk to him.
    We stood in the hall and he kept his eyes on me as I found myself pouring out details of my life. I’d probably had quite a bit of wine by then, which was part of the reason for my volubility, but there was something about his gaze that was so understanding, and he didn’t interrupt, and he looked as if he might actually be interested in what I was saying.
    I just knew that he lived in the same world as me, and I’d never before come across anybody who’s world even approached mine. It wasn’t a world I visited often if I could help it. It was dark and dangerous and filled with monsters. I kept it in a cupboard at the back of my mind.
 
In the early hours of the morning, as we housemates wandered about in a desultory way wondering if we ought to clear up now or whether we could simply go to bed, I found him standing all by himself in the middle of the dance room, as if waiting for something.
    Without thinking, I reached up and kissed him on the cheek.
    ‘I’ll find you some blankets,’ I said.
 
By next morning I’d forgotten all about him but when I went down to the kitchen he was still there, standing against a wall in his red trousers, while the others went about their breakfasts in silence, ignoring him.
    I made him a cup of tea and hoped that would send him on his way, but as people started to perk up and talk about continuing the party at a pub, he showed no signs of leaving, so I gave in and asked him if he’d like to come too.
    ‘Would you like a lift?’ he asked me, whisking out of the front door and speeding down the road with his black cloak flapping behind him, looking like Count Dracula.
    He stopped next to a Mini. I was impressed. No one I knew had a car. Perhaps he wasn’t such an idiot as he appeared.
    There were more surprises in the car.
    ‘Could you reach my hairbrush,’ he asked, as he manoeuvred at speed through the roads of the city. Luckily with it being Sunday everything except pubs was closed and there were few other cars about. ‘It’s in that pile of washing on the back seat.’
    It was, and the washing was clean and folded.
 
At the pub he didn’t stop talking – goodness knows what about. I cringed with embarrassment for inflicting him on my housemates.
 
When I got back to the house, alone at last, housemate Dave who hadn’t made it to the pub said that someone had left a message for me and he’d put it in my room.
    I found the message – a scrap of paper with some pencilling on it – on my pillow.
    ‘Thank you for the party. Thank you for the floor. And thank you for being you.’

    Oh no, I thought. Oh no. What had I started?

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THE STORY CONTINUES. 2 The Disco

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

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

Click here for the very first instalment

I’d not done much the first year at ‘uni’, as I now called it Aussie style, except study. For one thing, I was nervous about picking up academic work again after four years. Could I still do it? And on top of that I’d had two years to do in one.

    So it hadn’t mattered that I was a few years older than most of the undergraduates. In any case, I wasn’t at uni for the social life this time round. I was there to get a qualification.
    Now, in my final year, I had the spectre of exams in eight months’ time. Another reason to keep my head down.
 
The carefree days of Australia already seemed a long time ago. The memory lodged inside me like a golden egg and sometimes I wondered if I’d ever feel like that again.
  

Alison had been my neighbour in a block of university flats during my first year.

    As we shared our new house together I grew to know her a little better, but whenever I told her bits and pieces from my past she was shocked and said she didn’t want to know.

    She was ‘saving’ herself for her husband, when she found him. She believed in true love.

    Oh well. She made me feel a little grubby but all the more reason to keep myself to myself.

 

Graham, one of the men in the house, was a postgraduate, studying for a doctorate in the physics department of the university. He was therefore older and I felt a kinship with him that I didn’t feel with other students. Experience perhaps.

    He asked me to accompany him to a physics department ‘disco’ and, in spite of my priorities and a reluctance to give him the wrong idea about our relationship, something made me say yes.

The disco, a get-together for staff and students, was held in one of the nightclubs on Exeter’s Quay. Graham and I arrived early.

    The DJ wasn’t in his booth yet and a music tape played softly over an empty dance floor. A mirror ball revolved above it sprinkling snowflakes of light.

    The rest of the place however, without the usual press of people to disguise it, was far from salubrious: threadbare velvet upholstery, mirror-shiny tables and a stench of cigarettes, sweat and beer.

    I excused myself and went to the Ladies. I wanted to establish my independence. I wasn’t Graham’s girlfriend and I didn’t want to be.

    In any case, I was having my usual wardrobe crisis. With my fluctuating weight there was no point buying clothes and today I was wearing an ancient summer skirt, held up with safety pins which were digging into me. I needed to make some adjustments.    

    When I emerged I could see Graham standing next to the dance floor talking to someone who was waving his arms about in agitated fashion. He had a mane of dark wavy hair reaching to below his shoulders, and a bushy black beard. As I drew closer I could see that he was wearing a faded blue and white tie-dyed shirt, so threadbare it was almost transparent.

    ‘They made me leave my cloak in the cloakroom,’ I could hear him gabbling. ‘It’s my cloak. I can’t be separated from it. They made me leave my cloak in the cloakroom. They don’t understand. They made me leave my cloak in the cloakroom.’

    Graham and I exchanged a look. I wondered how long the man had been going on for.

    And then I realised who it was. It was the man in the red cloak whom I’d seen in Cornwall House the other night. It had to be. Who else would wear a cloak?

    Perhaps I could break his flow. Someone had to bring order to the proceedings.

    ‘But why do you wear it anyway?’ I interjected, remembering the dichotomy I’d noticed in his behaviour. ‘Is it that you want people to look at you or is it that you don’t?’

    The man stopped dead and stared at me. For a moment, he appeared almost normal. And then he spoke, in an almost normal voice, but slowly and carefully as if he was only then learning how to speak.

    ‘That . . .depends . . . on who it is.’

    His eyes were fixed on mine and now it was my turn to stop dead.

    I knew this man. I knew everything about him. I’d met him before in a previous life, in previous lives. They stretched out behind me in an echoing corridor.

    It was like falling off a precipice. I couldn’t breathe.

    I grabbed Graham’s arm. ‘I need a drink.’   

‘Who was that,’ I asked as I dragged Graham away.
    ‘Him?’ he said. ‘Oh, that’s John. He works in the department. Bit of an idiot.’

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THE STORY CONTINUES. 1 Cloak-man

By popular demand, I continue here the autobiographical story started in my recent ‘Australia 1975’ series of posts.

If you haven’t read that yet, you'll find the first instalment here.

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 Autumn 1977
 

The first time I saw him was in the bar of Cornwall House where I was sipping warm white wine with my friend and housemate Alison.
 
I’d met up with my parents in Sydney and trailed round after them through a succession of lunches and teas with posh Australians who could have been English. They looked and sounded just the same.
    Why my parents wanted me there with them, I couldn’t imagine, as I didn’t contribute anything to the proceedings, feeling as alien as I always had both in England and with those sort of people. I didn’t condemn the people. I blamed myself. My head started to ache.
    I went with my parents to the airport to see them off and as we approached the departure gate both my mother and I started to cry. My father hovered awkwardly. He was obviously upset too but he was old-fashioned. It was women’s job to cry and men’s job to look after them.
    I returned to Hampo and Charles’s house where I was staying and spent a week or so writing off for work – probably being an awful nuisance to the family, but they never made me feel that way. But my heart wasn’t in it. Something had changed. Australia had lost its magic.

    Was it that I didn't feel safe any more, that even though Australia was the far side of the world I could still be found?

    Was it duty that called, pity for my parents?

    Or did I feel deep down that my time in Australia had come to an end, and that for some reason it was time to go back?

    Whatever the reason, I didn't think too much about it. I acted on instinct and followed my parents home.

 
England seemed very small and cramped after Australia – small houses, small people, small landscapes. Having been wearing sarongs and flip-flops for six months, I couldn’t get used to wearing proper clothes and shoes. It was so formal. So stiff. My real self began to retreat again.
    I did some temporary secretarial work, bicycling from my parents' house in Kent near London every day, and then got a summer job living in and working at a pub on the Norfolk coast in the east of England.

    After egalitarian Australia, the conditions were a shock. We were treated like serfs and not fed properly. My eating returned to being erratic, I filled up on bread and chips, and I started to put back on all the weight I'd lost in Australia.

Before I went to Norfolk, I tackled the load of stuff I’d brought back from London the year before and just dumped in my bedroom at my parents’. Everything, including a tottering pile of papers, was in a terrible muddle.

    As I went through the papers I came across a letter that one of my first-year university tutors had written to me after I'd dropped out.

    ‘We’re sorry to see you go, but if you ever change your mind, do get in touch.’
    Yes! I thought. What a nice letter. That’s what I can do – finish my degree.

Except when I was in Australia, I hadn’t stopped feeling bad for leaving ‘uni’, as I now called it Aussie-style. I'd seen it as a failure, even though with distance I could see some of the reasons.

    In any case, I'd realised that I had to have a degree if I wasn’t to carry on doing menial work for the rest of my life. Not that I'd minded menial work in Australia, but it wasn't the same back in England.

    I certainly didn't want to go back to London and I couldn't stay living at home. It was boring to the extreme.

    Perhaps I was stronger now. Perhaps I could redeem that chapter.

    

The university welcomed me back. I was to repeat year one and at the same time proceed with year two.
 
I was now at the start of my final degree year at Exeter university, living in a city house with four other students - Alison and three males.

    It was a rowdy night at Cornwall House, the university’s new social centre. Sound bounced off the high brick walls and the floor-to-ceiling windows. It was hard to talk.

    Alison and I sipped our wine in silence and watched the goings-on.

    At a nearby table a group of males – rugby types – were taking off their trousers and showing their behinds. They thought it was hilarious. But nobody else did. They ignored them.

    People hurried past to and from the library or their university accommodation, banging their way into and out of the cloakrooms and launderette next to us.

    ‘Anoraks’ (male science students with few social skills) and ‘wellies’ (rich students with cars who lived outside the city in country cottages). Denim and beige. Loud voices. Hellos and goodbyes.

    All the usual.

The man swooshed into a chair at an empty table opposite Alison and me. He was wearing a red-velvet floor-length cloak with a hood. He flung the folds of the voluminous garment around him and peeped mischievously out from under the hood, as if daring people to engage with him but keeping his options open by wrapping himself up. A few straggles of long hair escaped from the hood. He was on his own.

    Exeter was a small university at the time with probably only a few thousand students. Almost everything took place on the campus so you got to know most faces. I hadn’t come across this man before.
    And I hoped not to come across him again. A nutter, I decided. Best avoided.
    And that was that.
    Or so I thought.

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