From The Moment I Saw Him .... (5 page)

Next day, I waited for the telephone to ring.  I
didn’t know it then, but this was to become a familiar scenario over the next
few months.  I was scratchy with apprehension and impatient for reassurance
that nothing had changed between us.

He finally called about five o‘clock.

“Hi, E.  Sorry - it was a late one and we didn’t
surface until after lunch.”

It took all my willpower not to ask who “we” were. 
I hoped he meant the other boys.

“Can you come round?”

“Nah, I’ve got an essay to finish.  But I’ll pick
you up after school on Tuesday as usual, okay?”

I told my mother that my red eyes were due to the
beginnings of a cold.

But on Tuesday he was there, smiling, affectionate,
and my spirits soared.  Back at his house, I needed little persuasion to fall
into bed with him, and we passed a blissful hour as if nothing had occurred to
upset our intimacy.  I wished we did not have to get up and dress so hastily
afterwards, but even the insouciant Nick did not want his mother to discover
just how far our relationship had progressed. 

I sat, drinking my tea at the same kitchen table
where I had wept on Saturday morning, and vowed to cultivate a more adult
attitude to things.  After all, I was properly grown up now, and I would gain
nothing by being miserable every time something went counter to my wishes.  If
there was a forced gaiety in my chatter, Nick didn’t seem to notice it.  He
seemed relieved that I had gone back to being the reasonably cheerful person I
had been before.

The truth was - I was now completely in thrall to
him.  I dimly recognised that there was a fatal imbalance between the love
smitten schoolgirl and the handsome boy who was used to getting his own way,
but at the same time, I was too green to see where this would inevitably lead. 

The weeks passed, and we continued to pursue our
stealthy but satisfying sex life.  Now I had taken the plunge, I found myself wanting
to sleep with him all the time, not just because I adored the physical pleasure
we shared, but because it was a way of asserting my possession.  I could not
get enough of his lithe, lean body, I loved the taste and smell of him.  I
wanted to sink my teeth into his flesh and mark him as my own.

 Sometimes after making love, I would catch a
reflective, speculative expression in his dark eyes, as if he was perplexed by
the transformation from shy girl to enthusiastic lover.  He didn’t appear to
object. 

Summer came, and with it, A levels.  Although
neither of us needed to achieve specific grades to take up our Oxford places,
the pressure was on to turn our attention to academic matters.

This began to affect our weekends together.  We
still met several times after school on weekdays, but I spent a few Saturdays
on my own, while Nick acceded to his parents’ demands that he stay in and
study.

I found this surprising, as Nick had never shown
much regard for his parents’ wishes in the past.  Perhaps
he
was now
growing up a bit.

One Sunday morning, Eva called.

“Are you okay?  I didn’t see you at Bobby’s party
last night.”

“I didn’t know he was having one.”

My heart sank.  I knew what that meant.  “Was Nick
there then?”

“Well - yes, I did see him.  Sorry, Eithne, I
shouldn’t have said -”

“No, I’m glad you did.”

Pride stopped me from asking whether he had been
with anybody.  I was surprised, annoyed, and hurt.

 He had asked me to tea that afternoon (his parents
would be there, which rather restricted our preferred activities), and I could
not decide whether or not to tell him what I had discovered.  I wasn’t sure I
wanted to find out too much more.

It was a hot day, and we sprawled in garden chairs
under the big cedar tree in the DeLisles’ back garden.  The place was
immaculate - striped lawn, blazing flower beds, cascading tubs of scarlet
geraniums - surface perfection, rather like the DeLisles themselves, no doubt
achieved by someone else’s hard graft, I thought cynically.  I was fidgety with
apprehension, and Nick noticed immediately.

“What’s up, E?”

I disliked him shortening my name.  He’d been doing
it a lot recently.

“Please stop calling me E.  I don’t like you
reducing me to a letter,” I said sharply.

“Just an affectionate nickname, babe.” 

He reached out a languid hand and stroked my arm,
looking a little surprised at my tone of voice.

“I hear you had a good time at Bobby’s last night.”

It was out of my mouth before I could stop it.  He
was silent for a moment, the hand dropped.

“Ah - Eva, I suppose.” 

He paused.  “Yes, I did look in for a bit.  So
what?”

A fly buzzed around his head.  He lifted an arm to
swat it away, and his collar fell open revealing the side of his throat.

“You’ve got a love bite
on your neck!”

My voice cracked on a high note of accusation.  Nick
sat up quickly.

“Look here, Eithne.  So I went to a party, I had a
few drinks, I snogged someone.  It’s no big deal.” 

  His jaw took on a tight look I had never seen
before.  “We’re eighteen for Christ’s sake - we’re not tied to each other.”  He
swatted angrily at another insect.

I felt my mouth trembling, I had thought that we
were.

“Oh God.  Don’t turn on the waterworks.”

He got up and knelt by my chair, sighing a little as
he did so.  “What am I going to do with you?”  he asked softly.  “I can’t look
at another girl without you going off the deep end.  You’ve got to chill out.  It’s
too hard otherwise......”

He tugged gently at my hair.  “Don’t you know I’ve
been going out with you for longer than anyone else before?”

His face seemed to register surprise as he said it. 
I felt somewhat abashed and silly. 

“No, I didn’t know,” I murmured.

“Well, I fancied someone for a whole year once in
Primary School, but I suppose it’s not quite the same thing.”

We looked at each other for a long moment.  There
was an undercurrent of tension which I couldn’t quite account for.

“The fact is, we’ve been seeing an awful lot of each
other,” he continued, looking away from me into the distance and twiddling with
the grass.  “Now the exams are looming, we ought to concentrate on those for a
bit.  Afterwards, things will be easier again.”

“Are you breaking up with me?”

 I tried to keep my voice level, it was an effort.

“No - no, don’t be silly.  Just explaining why we
need to cool things for a week or two.  You’ll be grateful when you get your
exam results.”

His mother called from the back of the house, and he
got up to fetch a tray with the tea things.  Somewhat to my surprise and
irritation - I really wanted to have it out with Nick about the party and the need
for “cooling” things - she accompanied him back to our spot under the tree.  I
would have to play the polite guest rather than the aggrieved girlfriend.

Although I had met Mrs DeLisle many times, I had
never really got to know her.  There was something of a smooth carapace about
the DeLisles as a family which was impossible to crack.  They were always
charming and capable, just as Martin had warned me all those months ago, but
one felt it was impossible to get under the surface.  However, I liked Nick’s
way with his mother - fond, teasing, gentle- the way I would have liked him to
be with me, I suppose.

I complimented her on the garden.

“Ah yes - Brown does a good job.”

 She looked around vaguely, as if she expected
nothing less.  We talked about our exams.  She said Nick was working hard and she
was sure I was too.  It would be fun when we were both at Oxford together.

Then she said something which was a surprise.

“I expect Nick’s told you about our French trip.”

I looked over at Nick.  His expression was smooth
and guileless, which immediately roused my suspicions.

“Not much,” I said cautiously, not wanting to give
away the fact that I knew nothing about it at all.

“Yes - after A levels are over, we’re taking him out
of school for the rest of term and going to visit our French relations in
Cannes.  I am half French, I expect Nick’s told you.”  (He hadn’t.)  “It will
be nice for him to spend some time with his French cousins and their friends,”
she continued, passing him the plate of little cakes.

I gazed at him, sprawled elegantly in his chair,
dark hair over one eye as usual.  I thought of sunny Mediterranean beaches, of
tanned and topless French girls, splashing in the clear water, youthful body
close to youthful body as they stretched out on the hot sand.  No wonder he
hadn’t told me.

 Now I was angry, and strangely, this helped me to
keep calm.

“It sounds wonderful,” I said politely, taking a
cake myself.  “It will be very good for his French as well.”

His eyes glittered at me in the bright sunshine -
don’t get worked up, don’t over-react, they said.

“And what about you, dear?  What are your holiday
plans?”

“Well, I’m not quite sure.  We’re probably going to
visit relations in North Berwick at the end of July.”

Another picture came into my head - me, stomping
along the rocky beach, well wrapped up against an easterly wind blowing in from
wild waves, deafened by the grating shrieks of swooping seabirds, cold, damp
and miserable.  The contrast was almost too much for me, it wasn’t fair.

Mrs DeLisle looked puzzled.

“North Berwick - where exactly is that?”

“It’s just east of Edinburgh, on the coast,” I
murmured.

“Ah, you’ll know Edinburgh then?”

We talked for a while about the Scottish capital.  Her
firm were opening a branch there in the autumn.  Nick was very quiet.  I
chatted with a grim brightness which grated on my ear but seemed to deceive the
other two.

Eventually she said,

“Well, I must attend to a few chores.  Don’t keep
Eithne too long darling, I expect she has revision to do.”

I watched her elegant form drifting over the grass
to the house.  There was an awkward silence which I was determined not to be
the first to break.  My throat felt constricted with the effort of sounding
normal.

“I expect there’ll be lots of beefy Scottish boys
for you to flirt with,” Nick observed, after a while.  He grinned, but his eyes
were wary.  “You can find out what they wear under those kilts.”

“Oh piss off, Nick!”

I sat up.  I thought “He’ll expect me to make a
scene because I didn’t know about France. I won’t do it.”

Instead, I said, “Well, perhaps I had better be
getting back.  Are you okay to give me a lift home?”

“Yeah, sure.”

He stood up, looking relieved, and extended a hand
to help me from the chair, then pulled me into his arms.

“I was going to tell you,” he muttered into my
hair.  “I don’t particularly want to go, it isn’t up to me.”

“I’m sure you’ll cope.”

The air was thick with unsaid words.  I wanted to
berate him, not just for Saturday night, but for concealing the fact that after
the exams, we would not be spending more time together, we would be parted for
ages. 

Perhaps he wanted a break.  Perhaps I had tried to
keep him too much to myself and this was the result.  Despite our physical
intimacy, I recognised with a sudden shock that I did not know at all what went
on in his head.  Any assumptions I had made about our relationship came
tumbling down like autumn leaves in a gale.

I was very sad - too sad to think any more, too sad
to summon tears, far too sad to cause a row.

 Although he was passionate in the bedroom, Nick was
not a particularly demonstrative person in the ordinary way of things.  He kept
holding me in a tight hug, which was unusual.

“Can you come round on Tuesday afternoon?  Mum will
be at work,” he murmured.

We were both on study leave outside school for the
duration.

“I thought you needed time to yourself,” I said.

He nuzzled my neck, and I closed my eyes as I
breathed in his warm, familiar smell.  I couldn’t bear to contemplate weeks of
being without him.

“I need you, too, funny face.  I want you, you know
that.  All this other stuff doesn’t matter.”

He kissed me, and I let myself believe him.  I knew
that whatever he did, I would not be the one to break away.  The trouble was -
he knew it too.

Somehow, I got through the tedium of A levels.  Nick
and I saw each other from time to time and we seemed to be back on the old
footing - it was hard to tell really, as his parents whisked him away
immediately after his last exam. 

The final few days of school were strange,
surprisingly nostalgic and sentimental.  It seemed unbelievable to think that
our daily companions of the last six years were dispersing and we were all
going our separate ways.  Never again would we be terrified into good behaviour
by a twitch of Miss Hayman’s eyebrows.

“At least we can get out of this ghastly uniform,”
Eva chortled.  It was customary for departing sixth formers to make a bonfire
of their loathed school hats, and we were admiring the blaze. 

“Yes - we’re all grown up now,” I said lightly.

“Well, you certainly are.”

 She sent me a sideways look.  Eva had resisted
sleeping with Teddy.  Much as she had fancied him, she had begun to find him a
bit dull.  “He has hidden shallows” she stated, and their relationship was in
gentle decline. 

She could never quite decide whether she was envious
of the fact that I was one step ahead of her in our experience with the
opposite sex.

I had a postcard from Nick.  “Great weather here, be
good up north” it read.  We went away, and I spent a lot of time walking on the
beach, waiting for my real life to begin again.  I missed Nick terribly,
physically as well as emotionally, and I was determined there would be no
scenes in future, whatever happened.  There would be less of the insecure
schoolgirl girlfriend, more of the confident young woman I hoped to be. 

I never did get round to having my ears pierced.

I rang his house when I got home and left a message
on the answering service to say I was back.  Nothing happened, and I thought he
must still be away - I knew that his parents’ plans were flexible.  However,
after ten days went by and he had not called me, I began to feel restless.

I was due to meet Eva in town for coffee and a
gossip, and as it was a lovely day, we wandered into the park afterwards and
lounged on the scrubby grass, enjoying the sunshine.

“Gosh - this takes me back to the first time I ever
spoke to Nick,” I said dreamily.  “It seems like another lifetime away now.  I
can’t wait for him to get back from France.”

Eva looked surprised.

  “Nick?  But he’s been back for ages.  Haven’t you
seen him yet?”

  A cold hand gripped my heart, and my stomach
turned over.

 “No.  I left a telephone message for him.  I don’t
think he can believe I’m still away,” I said doubtfully.

There was silence for a moment.  A little breeze
ruffled the corporation bedding plants standing in their uniform rows beside
us.  I stared at their cheerful brightness, I didn’t know what to think.

“Well, why don’t you ring him again?” Eva suggested.

“No, I can’t - you know I can’t.”

There was an unwritten code which dictated you could
never call a boy twice if he had not responded to your first attempt.  It was a
real taboo.  Only the very desperate would have such low self-esteem that they
would break it. 

“But if he wanted to finish things, surely he’d tell
me?”  I was stupefied by the turn of events.  “Eva, can you try and find out
from Teddy what’s going on?”

“Well, I don’t see so much of him these days, but
I’ll ask around.  I can’t think why Nick hasn’t contacted you.  Bastard!” she
added.

I lay on my back and stared up at the sky.  Tears
were beginning to trickle down my cheeks, and I wiped them away with an angry
hand.

“Don’t cry, Eithne.”

 Eva gazed at me with concern.  “He’s not worth it. 
I wish you’d never got involved with him, we’ve all been worried about you.”

“Who’s we?”

 My voice was anguished.  “You mean - everyone’s
been saying poor old Eithne, another one of Nick’s conquests?” 

The thought was appalling.

“No - no.  Belinda and one or two of the girls who
care about you.  You’ve been so wrapped up in him all this summer.  And I think
some of his friends have felt you were bound to get hurt.  They were all amazed
that you were a twosome for so long - Nick isn’t known for his fidelity,” she
added.

I didn’t know whether that made it worse or better. 
I sat up.

“And at least you can all say that you warned me,” I
said bitterly. 

“He is really attractive, Eithne, it’s not your
fault.  I can see that once you’d started, it would be difficult to stop.”

We were silent for a while.  I think I was feeling
faint, blood seemed to sing in my ears.

“I got addicted to him,” I said.  “I still am. Now
I’ll have to go through cold turkey or whatever it’s called.”

Eva gripped my hand with a sympathetic squeeze.

“You don’t know yet, there might be some perfectly
good explanation for all this.”

“I think I’ll go home now,” I said, voice wobbling. 
I felt the need to return to my lair, like a wounded animal.

Then the crying began.  After a few more days without
any contact, and confirmation via Eva that Nick was indeed back home and
conducting an active social life, I began to realise that everything was over
between us.  I didn’t know what had precipitated the break, or what had caused
his silence, nor could anyone else tell me.  Pride would not let me speak to
him.  It was the only thing I had left.

I cried in the mornings, I cried in the afternoons,
bedtimes were awash with floods as I pictured Nick in the arms of another
girl.  I was doubled up with the sheer physical pain of wanting him so badly.

Of course, my parents knew about the split by now,
and it was terrible for my mother.  I think she had worshipped Nick almost as
much as I had.

“I’ve a good mind to go round there and give that
boy a piece of my mind,” she cried, as I lay, wrapped in misery, on the sofa.

“No!” I almost screamed.  I wanted to hang on to the
few shreds of dignity I still possessed.

My father began to wear a grim face as he
contemplated the wreck that was his daughter.  I didn’t think about it at the
time, but they were both suffering with me, and were powerless to help.  It
must have been awful for them.  With the self-centredness of youth, I could
only think about myself and the anguish I was enduring.

I felt suffocated, trapped inside the house, because
I was terrified of seeing him in town, perhaps hand in hand with another girl,
or carefree, with his mates.  I could not have borne to visit the store where
his mother worked, the prospect of hearing her cool, polite voice was too awful
to contemplate.

“Do you think she’ll be better by the time she goes
to Oxford?” I heard my father say in wretched tones one day. 

“I do hope so.  I’m going to take her to the doctor
if she goes on like this.”

“What good will that do?”  I asked myself.  Only one
doctor could effect a cure for my ailment, and he was no longer practising.

Towards the end of September, as a “treat” for me,
and, doubtless, to give themselves a break from my unremitting misery, my
parents sent me to London for a long weekend with my godmother.

“Aunt” Deidre was a very old friend of my mother’s
family.  She was quite unlike my parents, having a senior job in personnel with
a petroleum company, and living a reputedly glamorous life in her tiny Fulham
flat.  She was single, and I had once heard my mother hint almost
disapprovingly at some longstanding relationship with a married man, but I
never knew much about it.

Deidre took one look at me, and dispensed worldly
wisdom, two new outfits, and a visit to her hairdresser in Chelsea.

She took me out for dinner to an Italian bistro
round the corner from her flat on the first night of my stay.  I hadn’t had any
appetite for weeks, but a glass of wine and bowl of savoury pasta in cheerful
surroundings were too good to resist.

My mother had given her the basic facts regarding
the disastrous affair, but Deidre asked me to give her my version as we ate. 
When I had finished, with a few gulps along the way, she paused, and lit a
cigarette.

“Oh darling - what a classic tale,” she said,
blowing smoke down her nose.  “I’m surprised that Alison” (my mother) “let you
anywhere near him.”

“But she adored Nick, she’s as upset as I am.”

Deidre regarded me across the wine glasses with
appraising eyes.  She said,

“I suppose you were sleeping with him?”

I flushed, and looked away. 

“Please don’t tell mum, she doesn’t know.”

“I wouldn’t bet on that.”

She smoked on for a bit.  “Of course, I’ve seen it
happen lots of times before.  I expect you got too intense for him and
frightened him away.”

 “I loved him.  I thought he loved me.”

 The omnipresent tears rolled down my cheeks, and I
dabbed at them hastily with my napkin.  People from the neighbouring table
glanced over at us with ill-concealed curiosity, and I felt wretched again.

“Oh, Eithne......”

Deidre stretched across the table and grasped my
other hand.  “I promise you that he is only the first boy you’ll love, or be
loved by.  Think how young you are. Your entire life is ahead of you, don’t let
yourself get dragged down by one mistake.”

“Nick wasn’t a mistake.”

“Well, learn from it, then.”  She summoned the
waiter with a wave of her cigarette.  “Above all, do try harder to be cheerful
for your parents’ sake, they are beside themselves with worry, you know.  Now -
you’ve got far too thin, you must have some of Franco’s delicious zuppa
inglese.”

“I don’t think I could possibly eat - whatever you
said just then.”

 But in the end, I did.  It was a rich kind of
trifle, and I enjoyed it.

 “I still don’t know why he just dumped me like he
did, no explanations, nothing,” I said over the coffee cups.

“No, that was cruel.  But tell me this, Eithne - if
you could go back and change things - do you wish it had never happened at all,
or can you end up taking something - anything of value from this experience?”

I thought painfully of my first encounter with the
dark boy with the heart stopping smile.

“I was sunk from the moment I saw him,” I said at
last.  “He was - he is - so beautiful, Deidre. You can’t imagine.......” 

My voice trembled.  I remembered his lithe, lean
body and the intense physical pleasure we had shared.  “I can’t wish it never
happened, but I think I’ll mourn him for ever.”

“Mourn him then - but move on afterwards.  I know
you can do it.  You have to do it. Thank goodness you’ve got a whole new
chapter opening for you.”  (She meant Oxford.)  “Now - tomorrow - some
shopping, I think.  You’ll find that’s very good glue for broken hearts.”

She was very patient and generous towards me. 
Waving my objections to one side, she bought me a trendy new coat and dress
from Miss Selfridge, and then proposed a visit to Sandro, “to sort out your
hair, darling.”

I had paid very little attention to my long tresses
in recent weeks, and my hair looked weedy and tired.  Sandro weighed it in both
hands, decreed that the “hippy” look was too old and boring for me, and layered
it back to shoulder length, where the hair, relieved of the extra weight,
sprang into becoming tendrils.  It looked fabulous and much more grown up, and
the weight of misery lifted a little from my shoulders as Deidre had promised.

“Now, remember darling - happy face,” Deidre chided,
as she put me on the train back home on Sunday night.  “You have a whole new
life to look forward to.”

The visit was salutary.  I did begin to make an
effort to live a normal life again, or at least stop crying so much, and we all
felt happier as a result.

  Two things occurred in the week before I went up
to Oxford.  One was nice, the other - interesting.

Nick’s friend Peter telephoned me out of the blue,
and he suggested with a slight diffidence that we should meet for a drink at
the Crown, an old pub down by the river.  Sitting at a table in the pub garden
with a boy and a drink made me feel a little less desolate, a little more of a
real person again.  Peter told me how much he admired my new hairstyle.

“Of course, I really fancied you, you know,” he
said, with a rueful laugh.  “That time at the Christmas dance - but I realised
that once Nick had got his hooks into you .....” he tailed off, flushing. 
“Sorry Eithne, that was tactless of me.”

“It’s okay.”

 I gave him a wry smile.  Studying Peter across the
table, he seemed much more mature somehow, talking enthusiastically about the
engineering course he was about to begin at Leeds, and the girlfriend from St Faith’s
who would also be at the same university.  I was pleased for him.  Of course, I
longed to ask something, anything, about Nick, but I think we both felt the
topic was better avoided.