The Last Weekend (17 page)

‘Ignore it. I’m a cynic.’

‘Come on, Ian, spit it out.’

‘When people are nice, I always wonder how deep it goes.’

‘He seems honest enough.’

‘Yes. Apart from that dodgy call.’

‘Was there a dodgy call?’

‘At 5—4, remember. You had match point. And he called your shot out.’

‘I thought it was out.’

‘I thought it clipped the line. If it had been me, I’d have given you the point or played it again.’

‘Doesn’t matter — we had a good knock.’

‘Of course. And I dare say he genuinely thought it long even if it wasn’t. Let’s give him the benefit of the doubt.’

I was on the brink of changing tack, the words ready in my head:
You have to tell Daisy about the tumour.
But then Bethany and Natalie ran past in their pyjamas, and the moment was gone. Milo soon caught them, and carried them in, one under each arm, their squeals of protest and pleasure piercing the dusk. But he didn’t succeed in removing them upstairs. I could hear them in the kitchen, demanding that Milo make them a snack, though they’d been fed only an hour ago. Some snack: butterfly pasta, garlic-free bolognese sauce, grated mild Cheddar, longways-sliced cucumber and organic baby plum tomatoes with two-thirds diluted apple juice to drink — nothing less specific would do, though most of the meal was left untouched, needless to say. Then they claimed they’d been promised a game before bed, and having quickly tired of playing tennis with each other (using two ancient wooden rackets they’d found in the barn), they rowdily played snap
with Milo and Em. Finally, under duress, they went upstairs. That might have been the moment to tackle Ollie but the noise from above — the trampolining on mattresses and squabbling over who had which bed — was too distracting. I blame Milo as much as the girls: he’d shown what a soft touch he was earlier, on the tennis court with Archie, and the girls exploited it to the full. But Em also played a part in hyping them up. Why they needed to come down again to have stories read to them, and why she succumbed to this demand, I couldn’t see. ‘Time for sleepies,’ Milo said at last and, after gentle persuasion failed to work, carried them screaming to bed. Naturally they demanded another story, as a penalty. And naturally they crept downstairs again when Milo attempted to rejoin us.
Whenever
he attempted to rejoin us, that is, since they crept down several more times, giggling at first but later complaining that they found their bedroom ‘scary'. Finally Em offered to go up and sit with them. Some half an hour later,
she
came down, and peace prevailed above. It was ten o’clock by then, and we were all starving.

Boys are more of a handful than girls, people say (I’ve said it myself), and a screaming baby is harder to deal with than a screaming toddler. But I can’t imagine being more irritated than Natalie and Bethany made me that evening. If I’d not been so anaesthetised by drink, I would have slapped them.

My memory’s pretty good on the whole. My first polio injection, Uncle Jimmy’s brown-stained fingers, the fish on its side in the canal, the rickety school desk with my initials (carved by penknife) on its lid, black ants gutting a pop-eyed frog, the yellow stain on page 412 of the library copy of
Sons and Lovers,
the rib of beef we ate for Sunday dinner the week my dad won two hundred quid on the pools: it’s all there, indelibly. And yet Badingley, which ought to be etched on my soul, slips
away at times — or refuses to come into focus, like something wrapped in tissue and shut away in a drawer. Did Ollie really say this or Daisy that? I remember a mass of things but nothing distinctly.

Still, I don’t forget the source of my being there at all — a certain day at university.

Late October in my second year, and I’m walking to the library one morning when I see a girl coming towards me, with a beret at a jaunty angle, and a denim skirt, a waist-hugging jacket and brown knee-length boots. Though on the small side, she’s otherwise so perfect that I do what I always do at the approach of a beautiful woman, avert my eyes in case the sight of me should cause her to frown, weep, vomit or in some other way express revulsion and thereby (because of me) make herself look less lovely than she is. But I also sneak a look as we pass each other, and this time, instead of discovering a contemptuous stare or a silent mocking laugh or a scornful toss of the hair, I see the girl is smiling at me. I hesitate, thinking she wants to speak, but she’s already walking away, hair falling down her back and a bell going off (a fire alarm in the Science Block) where her voice might have been.

I tell myself she mistook me for someone else, yet I’m so uplifted by the experience that after leaving the library that evening I return to the student bar for the first time since Ollie cold-shouldered me there with his rugby team, and who do I see the moment I walk in? It seems such an unlikely coincidence that I look away, fearing a mirage, but when I turn back she is still there, in a red dress this time, and strappy shoes, and with a black-bead necklace, but unmistakably the same person with the same long hair and, incredibly, smiling at me again.

Daisy. Though I don’t know that yet.

She is sitting with another girl. Lacking the bottle to go
over to them, I stand at the bar, knocking pints back and nerving myself to make a move. I dare say I would still have been there past closing time had she not come up to the bar.

‘Hey there …’

‘Hey.’

‘Can I squeeze through?’

‘No problem,’ I say, and prepare to step aside, but then add, in the voice of someone more confident than I am: ‘Better still, let me buy you a drink.’

Daisy has always denied that she noticed me that morning or recognised me that night. She says she was simply going to the bar and that I happened to be standing in her way. (I don’t believe her: I think women like Daisy hate to acknowledge taking the initiative.) She also claims that when I offered to buy her a drink, she refused, pointing out that she had a friend with her, but that I wouldn’t take no for an answer. All I remember is walking back to the table, sitting down and trying to make conversation, notionally with both of them but really with Daisy. Which may be why, after ten minutes or so, the friend got up, apologising for being a party-pooper, and said goodnight. ‘She was bored,’ Daisy said later, ‘and you’d been drinking a lot.’ That may be true but it doesn’t explain why Daisy failed to leave with her. ('You insisted on buying me a last drink,’ she claims, but that doesn’t quite hang together, either: she could have said no.) Whatever the case, the fact is that she let me walk her home to her hall of residence. She didn’t ask me in. Nor did I have the gall to attempt to kiss her goodnight. ('Liar,’ she said later, ‘you lunged at me but I pushed you away.') But I asked if I could see her again, and she said yes, and that’s something even she doesn’t now dispute.

(When I say now, I don’t mean ten o’clock on a late-August night in Badingley but the last time we talked about
this. I can’t remember when exactly that was. But over the years a received — or disputed — version of events has evolved between us.)

So, to recap: on a late-October night in my second year at uni I meet Daisy and ask her out. But she’s probably right about me being slightly tipsy on that occasion because I fail to write down her telephone or room number and realise that I don’t know her surname. And it takes a week of increasingly desperate hanging about in the vicinity of her hall before I ‘accidentally’ bump into her one morning as she is leaving for a lecture — an art history lecture in the Humanities Block, which I pretend is en route to my own destination, the Law Block, despite them lying on opposite sides of the campus (a fact she would know if she weren’t a fresher in her first weeks).

‘So are you doing anything tomorrow night?’ I ask.

‘Mmm, not sure yet.’

‘How about a film?
Platoon
is on.’

‘I don’t like violence.’

‘The Pogues are playing in town.’

‘It’s sold out.’

‘Or we could go for a Chinese.’

‘I hate Chinese.’

‘Or Indian. Or Thai. Or Greek. Or …’

A clock is striking the hour behind us.

‘I’m late,’ she says, looking flustered under her beret. ('I’m late,’ she would say, for different reasons, six months later.)

‘Pick you up at eight?’ I say, in a last-ditch move.

‘OK,’ she says, rushing off with a bag over her right shoulder and her left hand holding the beret on as she runs.

('You were like a terrier with a stoat,’ she said later. ‘And I was afraid of being locked out of the lecture. So I said yes.')

I buy a denim shirt for the occasion, and some deodorant,
and (just in case, though I’ve never used one before and know there’s no chance really) a packet of condoms.

The meal is an Italian: she has gnocchi with salad and me pizza and chips. Conversation is awkward — until the Chianti kicks in and we find some common ground. She’s Leeds and I’m Manchester. Different cities, true, but we’re both from working-class families, we’re both only children, and we’ve both come straight to uni from inner-city comprehensives. Daisy confesses she feels ill at ease among the other first years in her hall, with their tales of backpacking in South-East Asia. I reciprocate with a parody of these Vietnam vets — middle-class kids who parade their gap years like battle scars. Daisy laughs. We talk about our parents, and how narrow their lives seem, and Daisy says that her parents’ marriage is so grim that she knows she’ll never marry, and I’m already so infatuated that hearing her say it comes as a disappointment. We describe our bedrooms at home, and name the books we’ve read and the bands we’ve seen, and recall the teachers who wrote us off as university material because of where we came from. A sense of alienation draws us together. We are a pair of ducks among geese.

('Excuse me. I’m no duck. All you’re saying is we found a couple of things we had in common.')

This time, back at her hall, Daisy does ask me up (not up, strictly speaking, but inside and along, since her room lies on the ground floor). She goes off to make coffee in the communal kitchen, while I dither in her room between the only two places to sit, the plastic chair under her built-in desk or the edge of the bed. I’m worried the former position will look wimpish and the latter presumptuous, but finally settle on the bed — if I just perch on the edge she won’t take offence, I decide. And really the bed is
all
edge: its narrowness prohibits more than one (slender) person
from lying on it at one time. It’s the right choice: when she returns carrying two mugs with lurid pink elephants on them, she plonks herself down next to me, and we chat while drinking the coffee until, mug drained, she switches position, sitting with her knees bent and her back against the bedhead, a switch that leaves her left foot close to my left hand, and though my first touch is involuntary (as I twist round to talk to her my index finger brushes her red-painted big toe) she doesn’t take fright, and presently I touch her again, resting my hand casually on her left arch, and then stroking it, and then, less surreptitiously, running the hand from her toes to her ankle, in a gentle massage which she seems to like and which gives me the courage, when she closes her eyes, to stretch across (no easy manoeuvre, so contorted is my posture) and kiss her on the lips.

She kisses me back. ('No, I didn’t. I just let you kiss me.’ ‘Rubbish, you were enjoying it.’ ‘I’m not saying I didn’t enjoy it but I stayed passive.’ ‘Not the next time you didn’t.')

The next time is a week later, after the cinema (not
Platoon
but
Manon des Sources),
and the venue is her room again, and this time we succeed — God knows how — in lying alongside each other, hip to hip, or rather (since she’s so small) hip to stomach, in which position our mouths are level and our lips can’t help but meet. Far from not kissing me, she puts her tongue in my mouth, which no girl has ever done to me before, apart from Tracey Shindler, as an experiment, when we were thirteen.

Kissing and being kissed by Daisy is amazing. We’re in love. ('You were in love. I was weak.')

Love demands that I see her every day but she says she wants to take things slowly. I don’t doubt her sincerity but I know that taking things slowly will work against me — that as time passes, and the disorientation and loneliness of being a fresher
pass with it, she may decide our relationship is a mistake, just as joining the Archaeology Society and the Mountaineering Club were mistakes, and that if she’s going to make the most of university, and meet new people, she needs to drop me, like a dog dropping a slobbery old tennis ball, and instead, as Ollie would put it, play the field. I also know she has underestimated her attractiveness — I’ve seen other men looking at her when we go out, and though I’ve tried to stop
her
seeing
them
the day will come when I’m not there and someone moves in on her. And since that somebody will be richer and better-looking than I am, odds are she will welcome his attentions. If she were committed to me, such problems wouldn’t arise. But she refuses to accept me as her ‘boyfriend', though I describe myself as such to anyone who asks and several who don’t.

('You were so possessive. It got on my tits.’ ‘Whereas I got nowhere near your tits.’ ‘Come on, you’re exaggerating — I wasn’t
that
mean.')