Dear Fatty (27 page)

Anyway, anyway anyway, on the day that all three were at my house, they were discussing their teenage daughters and I was fascinated to listen in because I too have a daughter of the teenage persuasion as you well know, and I thought I might pick up some tips on how to do it right. My brunette friend said that she had been in her teenage daughter’s bedroom, cleaning up. I
don’t
do that any more because it’s too dangerous. Some of the stuff on the floor in my kid’s bedroom is now moving of its own accord. Some of it has just turned to mulch and silage, and we are thinking of selling it to the local farmer to spread on the fields. Anyway, anyway, anyway, I would
NOT
enter her bedroom to clear it up, especially not without protective gloves, but my brunette friend was doing exactly that, when she found a bottle of vodka under her daughter’s bed. She was gutted because, as she said, ‘I didn’t know my daughter drank.’ My redhead friend then piped up that it was an amazing coincidence because she had also been in
her
daughter’s bedroom cleaning up. What’s wrong with these women? Have they no health-and-safety survival instincts at all? Anyway anyway, anyway, turns out she came across a packet of cigarettes and was so very upset because, as she said, ‘I didn’t know my daughter smoked.’ Unbelievably, my blonde friend then admitted that she, too, had been clearing out
her
daughter’s bedroom and had been utterly shocked and dismayed to discover a packet of condoms because, as she said, ‘I didn’t know my daughter had a cock …’ Can you believe that?

MY LAST YEAR
at Central was a bit crazy. I was aware that David and I were growing apart but I wasn’t ready to face it full on because I still loved him very much. Isn’t it mad the way we postpone the most important stuff? I was living a liberated life in London, free of the immediate restraints of a big relationship because my chap was thousands of miles away. I missed him a lot, and I was always utterly faithful to him, but I was also having a great time discovering who I really was, which turned out to be
not
somebody who should marry David, or who David should marry. As you know, David was quite a forceful personality and liked to be in charge. Surprise, surprise, that’s who I was becoming too, someone quite assertive who knows their own mind. At the time I still slightly reverted back into a somewhat meeker role when I was with him because that’s how it had always been. Old dynamics die hard. Plus, to be honest, there’s a big part of me, like a lot of people, that loves to be looked after, protected and sheltered inside a partner’s love. I didn’t realise then, as I so clearly do now, that it was all possible on a much more equal footing. On reflection, all the signs were there but I was blind. And reluctant to let go. In fact, I took the polar opposite action and charged ahead with arrangements for the wedding. Fatty was to be a bridesmaid, the Blue Monkey church was booked and we were investigating various venues for the reception. Oh what a circus, oh what a show.

It was the Easter holiday 1980 and the last time I would visit David before we were to be married. It was an important trip because I was going to stay in the house where we would live together afterwards, the marital home. By now he had moved from Calcutta and was living in Colombo, Sri Lanka. I had visited him several times in the previous two years when he lived in Calcutta, and I found my trips there most odd. I loved India – the colours, the sounds, the smells, the incredible, mystical difference of it all – but I didn’t really warm to ex-pat life. The exclusive clubs and the drinking and the non-working wives and the separateness from local life. Most of all, I found it difficult to stay at his flat surrounded by servants. SERVANTS! I was a 20-year-old student in dungarees and Kickers, what was this all about? I would take off my old second-hand Camden Market T-shirts, and before I could blink they’d be back on the bed washed, ironed and folded. I was expected to organise the household arrangements, order the shopping and oversee the menus. Life there was caught in amber, somewhere in the 1940s. I was addressed as Memsahib and bowed to. It was too strange. Outside, it was even stranger. Parts of Calcutta were beautiful, with a faded grandeur, but the poverty was horrific, and I was constantly confronted with situations and sights direct from a Bruegel nightmare. Half-bodied people scooting along next to me on little carts, women with dead babies in their arms, pleading for money, other beggars with alarming facial disfiguring, lepers with gnarly stumps and famished, emaciated children, all tugging at me, wanting a few paise. Here I was, a fat young white woman, shopping for fruit and beads in the market while all around me was despair. The clash was revolting. I started by giving money to
everyone
, but of course that caused further begging, more insistent and louder, until I was forced to retreat inside in utter shock.

Meanwhile, David and I would be invited to posh dinners inside lavish homes with dozens of servants providing for our every need. Or there would be more bloody balls – Caledonian balls with only white people there, and again I never quite looked or felt or
was
the part. The part of a company wife, quietly supporting her upwardly mobile company man of a husband. Who was I? Who was he? Where was the spirited young Irish lad I had known? He was certainly highly prized by the company and I was often told by his colleagues that he was tipped for great things. I was proud of him,
for
him, but Dad, I didn’t belong. So, this final unmarried visit to Sri Lanka mattered. We would arrange the teaching job I was going to take, we would hire staff together, we would hang out with all the people who would be our friends for the next couple of years. I would be a tea-taster’s wife.

As always, I was very excited on the plane, I couldn’t wait to see him. We were good together physically and I always looked forward to that part of each reunion the most, to genuinely reconnecting in the most basic primal sense. Sorry, Dad, too much information. But honestly, each time we were apart, the lust grew stronger, it was our shared mutual need, and a big priority. When the plane landed, all the passengers headed into the airport, and as soon as I’d gone through passport control I saw him, on the other side of the glass, waving at me, while I waited for my luggage. There he was, my handsome fiancé whom I missed so much – there – at last – he was. So why was I feeling nothing? Why was my heart not pounding out of my chest as it usually
did
? Come on, heart, wake up! There he is, smiling and waving, we’ve waited for this – come on! I did the waving-back thing but something was wrong, Dad, terribly wrong.

We reached the house; it was beautiful and colourful and hot. We drank tea, amazing, well-chosen, well-mixed, top-quality tea, we chattered, and we went to bed. I felt totally numb. Nothing was right, it was all very, very wrong. Something was missing. Everything was missing. What had happened? We slept, uneasily. We went to his club the next day. He introduced me to his new buddies. Other tea men, businessmen, nurses, wives, my future friends. I felt as if I was drowning.

That evening, with two more weeks of the holiday to go, we finally talked the way we should have talked for the past year. We spoke about so much, about how different our lives now were, how we had grown apart and changed into people neither of us really recognised, how we were political polar opposites, how much he loved the ex-pat life and how little I did, how much I disliked our his ’n’ hers scuba-diving kit, how it made me feel ‘owned’. All this was reasonable and understandable. Then, and only then, after all that, he told me he was sleeping with a nurse he’d met there. A nurse? One of the nurses he’d introduced me to at the club yesterday? Yes, he said. So, you’re shagging someone else and she’s allowed to inspect me? I asked if anyone else knew about it. Yes, he finally admitted. It seemed everyone knew. So he had taken me to meet a group of people who all knew my fate? It was just me, miles from home, miles from my friends, who
didn’t
know? Why didn’t he tell me before, stop me from coming? Was
that
what I was feeling at the airport? Did I sense then
that
it was over? And if so, was I just sensing that it was over for me, or for us? Did I subconsciously suspect? Or was the love just … gone? On both sides? I had no answers to any of this but I knew I had to get away.

I was back at the airport the very next day, and after a tearful farewell and a weepy flight home, I ran into the arms of a love I could depend upon, my brother, who took me back to his flat in London and listened to me blub on about the injustice of it all for days until he gently reminded me, mid-rant, that I had already known it wasn’t going to work out. I had known, really, but refused to face it. It was better for everyone that it ended now,
before
the wedding. He was right of course. I called Fatty and she came. She was the only other one I talked to at that point, until I could work my way through it and steel myself to call the various parents to explain what had happened.

David and I met again briefly a few months later, when I returned the ring, and a few bits ’n’ bobs of his old kit. I was afraid that when I opened the door to greet him I might be revisited by a rush of the familiar old love and realise we had made a huge mistake, but no. There was, instead, a rush of nostalgia, a tender remembrance of the younger, happier times, but we both knew it was right to have ended it.

So. That was over. I had been at college for three years, turning away from every possible opportunity of big sex fun with a bucketful of delish fellow students. Now I had a single term to catch up. Wahey!

OTHER THAN MY
friend Scottie, no one on the acting course at Central spoke to me, or to any of us teachers. They refused to make eye contact, let alone converse. I think they believed they might catch something off us. And indeed they might have. Manners for instance.

Annoyingly, their iciness made them all the more enigmatic, and there was a definite elite of blessed, golden, chosen ones. They were, on the whole, good-looking, usually blond and quite fit. Thoroughbreds really. We used to refer to them as the shampoo brigade, because their hair was always so perfect. There was one in particular who I thought was divine – I used to see him skulking about being moody and interesting. The foyer of the college was the actors’ main posing arena – it was directly outside the cafeteria, thus commanding a captive audience – they would throw interesting shapes against the wall while perusing their timetables and various notices concerning chlamydia check-ups and student-union functions. My particular darling, whom I shall refer to as the ‘Golden One’, was quite brooding and James Dean-ish. He was a good actor, I saw him in various plays at the Embassy, the theatre at the centre of the college, a beautiful but wounded old place. For some preposterous reason, we, the teachers, were not allowed into the theatre at any time except to watch the actors performing their plays, when they actively encouraged us in because they needed an audience. All of our
productions
took place in the studio spaces, which were fab but just not as exciting as the proper proscenium-arch grandness of the Embassy, the forbidden Embassy. The most memorable play that I saw the Golden One in was Bill Morrison’s
Flying Blind
, where he spent a deal of time naked. Yep, I saw that play several times, each night occupying a seat in the auditorium closer and closer to the front … I wanted to get a really good look at the … play.

One day, I was having coffee in Marianne’s little cafeteria where I could see the goings-on in the foyer. The Golden One was there doing expert leaning against the noticeboards. He was alone. The rest of the shampoo herd were obviously grazing elsewhere. This was unusual, he was unguarded and vulnerable, so I decided to seize the moment, to pick him off. We had been attending the same college for nearly three years and as yet he hadn’t even cast a glance in my direction. If I didn’t take action now, college would be over and all hope gone. Plus, I was newly single and misguidedly emboldened. I wasn’t entirely stupid, however; I knew I couldn’t compete with the beauty of the girls at the vanguard of the shampoo brigade, but I had something else to offer. My sparkling wit, surely? In that instant, I decided to embark on Operation Flirt by winning him over with a flurry of hilarity – the romance would surely follow later. I stood up and crossed the foyer. He foolishly had his back to me, so he had no time to see me approach and consequently attempt a speedy escape. He was caught unawares. I advanced upon him in all my beige corduroy splendour, deciding that my opening gambit would be, ‘Hi. Hello there. Yes it’s me, I’m talking to you at last after three years. I bet you can’t believe your luck,
eh
? You must be so frustrated that you know nothing about me. Well, that agony stops right here, right now, and you, mister, are gonna know everything you’ve ever wanted to know and more about me, Dawn Roma French … Right, I’m going to start at the very beginning, stop me when you’re in love …’ By this time, my plan, if I had one, was that he would at least be smiling if not downright chuckling but … nope … nothing. He looked genuinely afraid and was backing up towards the wall, which meant I had to continue with the gag until he
got it
. He will get it eventually … won’t he? So I valiantly soldiered on. ‘So, um, right, I was born in Holyhead in 1957, and luckily for my mother, I was a baby …’ Nope, nothing. Carry on. ‘I was a chunky child, bold in nature, a real rusk-taker …’ He’s right up against the wall now and looks like he’s got a bad smell in his nostrils. Don’t give up, keep going. ‘You will probably be keen to know exactly what inoculations I’ve had, well …’ And on. And on. Still no response except clearly utter revulsion, and the unmistakable squeaking of leather belt on wall as he tried to slide away. I
had
to persevere – you know me, Dad, I’m nothing if not tenacious! I think after about six minutes of solid talking, and a tiny bit of physical restraint, I had reached as far as infants school, and was about to launch in to the junior-school years and regale him with many hilarious anecdotes about that, when suddenly the bell rang indicating the start of the next class. I was momentarily startled and the Golden One grabbed the opportunity to run, run like a hunted fox, for his life, off up the corridor to his Tumbling class and out of my life for ever.