Helena (4 page)

For the vast
majority of time, I was happy with my relationship with Gregory; I
was more than happy, my mind brimmed with love for him as I
anticipated our future life together. When he moved to London and I
was stuck at university completing my final year, I longed for him
with such intensity that I swear my body ached. I counted down days
in my mind until the next time I would see him. Every day, no
matter how laborious my studies, I would write ten page letters,
and although never straying into the language of my felt sentiment,
the sheer prolificacy of my letter writing bespoke of my urgent
need of him.

However, as
happens, people do not always live up to expectation, and sometimes
when we met, I felt a certain bathetic disappointment. This was
less Gregory's fault than mine, having invested perhaps too much
hope, too much faith in a mere mortal. I had imagined him to be
wittier, to be kinder, to be better in bed than he was in reality.
How the keenness of my imagination has often let me down! Sitting
on trains, or when money was tight, hunched up on coaches, my heart
would race with anticipation, expectation, the hands on my watch
turning painfully slowly. I would be exasperated by a short hold up
on rail or road, and then as I entered the station, the excitement
of seeing him would almost overwhelm me, and then I would be there,
kissing him, hugging him, only for five minutes later to be
wondering why I had made such a fuss.

How can I
explain this? Gregory was not deficient; he would make the
necessary fuss over my presence, but he was, after all, only
Gregory, not the fantasy figure I had imbued with so many qualities
that he did not possess, or at least not possess in the abundance
that I had imagined. We fitted together, that was all. We were made
for each other; the man was my fate. I could get bored with Gregory
as I got bored with my own company. The hoped for ecstasy did not
happen, or after our initial embrace, did not last.

This is not so
unusual. As a species we are quick to disappointment, our dreams
can be crushed by the lightest contact. I do not wish to disparage
Gregory, and there was nothing too unusual, I think, about my
occasional disappointment, but I mention this in the light of my
only sexual experience outside our relationship, before that is,
Freddie, meeting you.

The weekend
before my finals, Gregory arrived. I hadn't seen him for two weeks,
and initially I hadn't discouraged him from coming to see me, but
once he was there, I realized what a mistake it had been for him to
come. Not only was he in my way, he also seemed to lack the
sensitivity to see it. I wondered whether it was because he
thought, subconsciously though it might have been, that my exams,
ergo my career and my ideas, where somehow less important than
his.

Over the two
days, my anger began to build up. I was annoyed with myself too for
having allowed him to come in the first place, and maybe I turned
that anger on him as well. It was, of course, impossible to study
with Gregory sitting there in my cramped student room; Gregory kept
on telling me that there was no point in cramming, that it was too
late to learn any more so I should relax, take a break, go out with
him instead. It incensed me, this attitude. When he had been
studying for his degree, I had sat patiently with him, asking him
random questions to aid his revision. He did not offer to do the
same with me.

And my exams
were so important to me. Without Gregory at college, I had put all
my effort into passing them. My head was full of English and
Religious Studies. I so desperately wanted a first. It seemed some
validation of my own intelligence, of my own self-belief.

I had
restrained my anger all during his visit, but then as he was about
to depart, he asked me if I was going to go down to visit him in
London the following week.

It all came
out. How could he be so inconsiderate, so selfish to ask such a
thing when he knew that I would be in the middle of my exams? What
did he think I was studying for?

He apologized
immediately, confessed to his tactlessness, but by then I was
uncharacteristically furious. Maybe it was that his apology seemed
a little too practiced. He always apologized if I was angry, even
if he had no reason to. Humility meant nothing to him, apart from a
functional way of him getting out of a domestic scrap.

My specific
annoyance at his insensitivity demonstrated at his having to come
to see me in the first place, led to a more general assault on his
character: a veritable assassination. I lambasted him for emotional
cowardice, for taking me for granted; for intellectual pomposity;
for not being a real man. I was terrible, lashing him with my
tongue, my frayed nerves flaying his. He cowered under my attack,
his eyes lowering, his shoulders shrugging with a kind of, 'if
that's the way you feel about it,' attitude.

He listened
and listened, making no attempt to interrupt me, let alone
contradict me. All that studying had caused me such stress, had
been in a way symptomatic of all those things I had held inside me
for too long, my social and sexual repression, my low self-esteem,
even my predictable future, all my interests and my desires
subsumed by Gregory's unchallengeable convictions. I was out of
control and I knew it. My bitter invective culminated in a slur on
his manhood, as I told him that he didn't even know how to make me
happy in bed.

Gregory's
train came before we had reached any resolution, before my anger
could subside into a desire for reconciliation. Why couldn't he
have stayed, taken a later train? I wondered. He didn't. He slumped
onto the carriage, relieved perhaps to be no longer under the lash
of my acid tongue. I watched as he took up his window seat, not
even looking at me as I glared at him, shouting my parting words,
"It's finished Gregory. It's all over."

The train
pulled away. I watched it recede into the distance, imagining it
was my future, prescribed since childhood, disappearing into the
spring night air.

It was as if I
had seen him for the first time, seen an old, tired young man, a
moral coward who hid his fear behind noble Christian platitudes.
The love he felt for god seemed overwhelming; the love he felt for
me seemed flimsy, half-hearted. I was suffused by a wonderful sense
of freedom and possibility. I was free and I could do anything that
I desired, no longer having to somehow fit in with what Gregory
wanted.

Of course, a
few hours later I was crying in my room. How could I have been so
callous, so stupid? I had thrown the one good thing in my life
away. And how unfairly! Gregory had come to see me because he cared
about me, because he loved me. How could I accuse him of being
half-hearted, of not really caring about me, if he had spent his
scarce money coming up to see me? And the things that I had said!
Had he really deserved such an onslaught? That first flirtation of
freedom seemed like an aberration once back ensconced with my dry
texts, my dull academic books.

But for all
that, I felt an incipient pride stirring in me, something holding
me back, something that remembered the sombre, tensed face in the
train window; and I felt that if he truly loved me he would call
me. I suppose that that is why I refused to ring him. I should have
done it that night when I knew that he was back in his college, but
I didn't; maybe also, I was ashamed of my behavior. Whatever, I
didn't ring him and he didn't ring me. I told myself that I
couldn't let my argument with Gregory ruin my chances. All my life
I had been encouraged to study, to read. I couldn't worry about
him, not now. I had to put all my efforts into passing my exams.
After that, I could sort things out with him, when I had calmed
down, when I had time to regain perspective.

Three days
later when he did call, I refused to answer, telling my flatmate to
inform him that I had gone out. It was hard not answering, but by
that stage, all my remorse had been turned to a kind of petrified
determination to succeed in my exams. There was an unmerited belief
that Gregory had provoked me, and that he couldn't really care that
much for me if it had taken him so long to contact me.

You can not,
you Freddie of all people, who breezed through every examination
you sat, who never worried unduly about success or failure, even
though success was always a closer friend, no, you can not
imagination the elation I felt once I had completed my exams,
knowing that I no longer had to read through those arid theological
tracts, or struggle with eighteenth century blank verse. I was
confident that I had done everything I possibly could to get my
first; it was now out of my hands. I could relax.

I was not the
only one to feel that way. That particular Friday night the college
bar thronged with relieved students, the cheap wine flowed freely,
as we celebrated our freedom from the relentless pursuit of
knowledge. Everybody was happy and magnanimous: all petty
antagonisms forgotten in our collective race towards oblivion.

I am not
excusing myself by saying that I was drunk. For one thing, even
though you know I have never been a great drinker, I wasn't;
affected yes, tipsy most definitely, but I still knew what I was
doing; and secondly, Freddie, I know that I don't have to excuse
anything I have done or do, to you.

So not drunk,
but most definitely reckless, I danced and danced that night,
finding a kind of mental release in physical exertion, liberation
in the wild, lewd gesturing of my body. I laughed manically at the
most trivial of things, I hugged students I had barely had a good
word to say about in three years, and I drank viscous, red
wine.

My flatmates
departed from the party early, looking both concerned and perplexed
at my refusal to leave with them. How would I get home? I didn't
know and I didn't care. What should they say if Gregory rings? Tell
him I'm dancing. So, I was left alone on the sweaty dance floor,
enjoying the feeling of exhilaration that swept through my body,
dancing to the loud pounding rhythms of the dance music.

At eleven, I
left the college bar. I'd been dancing and chatting with some
students from my English class. They had asked me to go on to a
party with them, but I had refused, thinking that really it was
time for me to get back. As they left together in a taxi, I felt an
immense sense of disappointment that I had not gone with them, and
instead was returning to my shared house. I felt angry with myself.
All the literature I loved had been about affirmation and
adventure, about accepting life in all its diversity, yet here I
was refusing every opportunity that came my way, too frightened to
even begin to live.

I ambled to a
taxi rank and waited in line for a cab. The queue was full of
Friday night revellers off to discos and nightclubs. It often
happened in such places that boys would try to pick up girls by
asking them where they were going, the more gallant willing to pay,
the less, with offers of splitting fares. The campus had been full
of horror stories about what had happened to those who had accepted
lifts, and I remember in my own house a rather smug discussion
where we had all agreed how mad girls had been to accept such
potentially dangerous proposals.

However, as I
waited in line that night, there as usual being a dearth of taxis
at the weekend, a man in front of me, who I hadn't been paying much
attention to, turned and asked me where I was going.

"Drysdale," I
said.

"Do you want a
lift with us, luv?" he asked, pointing to his two mates who stood
beside him.

I knew that
being a good little girl, I should have said no, but after so
annoyingly refusing to go to a party that I really had wanted to go
to, I boldly said yes.

I was
introduced to Phil and Bruce. Phil was about thirty, a strong man,
with slicked back hair and strongly defined features. He would have
been handsome if there wasn't something a little rough looking
about him, a drunken leer in his eyes, a self-regarding swagger
about the way he stood. A ragged scar arched a couple of inches
from the lobe of his ear to the centre of his cheekbone adding a
sense of danger to his general appearance. Bruce was much younger,
barely of a legal drinking age, fresh faced, a pair of pale blue
eyes under a short crop of wheat-coloured hair. Jack, my
interlocutor, was by far the most handsome of the three: his face
looked intelligent, spoke of an experiential knowledge that the
other two did not possess.

To the
generally middle class girls of the college these were
stereotypical "townies", boys out for the night looking for some
promiscuous encounter. They had the kind of rough, and, to me,
foreboding faces that I wasn't used to seeing in my rural
childhood, only maybe occasionally in a gardener or a farm boy. It
was always considered uncouth amongst my college friends, a kind of
unwritten rule, that you never dated such boys.

I have to say
that as I entered the taxi I did feel a certain sexual charge, my
erotic imagination still fully functional through the perceptible
befuddlement of my booze affected brain.

They let me
sit in the front, as they squashed in the back. They had been
drinking too, but it would be unfair to say that any of them were
drunk either. They laughed heartily in the back about some girls
they had come across in the pub. Phil said something about a blond
girl being 'a bit of a dog', but Jack shushed him up in deference
to my presence in the front of the taxi.

I didn't speak
to them much, but looking through the rear view mirror I could see
Bruce staring at me. I smiled, but in his embarrassment he turned
away. Jack started to make conversation:

"So, where are
you from, luv? You don't sound as if you're from around from
'ere!"