The Love of My Life (15 page)

As in all good tragedies, it is a fatal flaw in Emily’s character – her inability to act logically instead of impulsively – that leads to her own undoing. Without giving away the plot, it’s a well-known fact that, in summer, you’ll see queues of tourists waiting to have their picture taken at the place on the clifftop above Portiston town where, in the book, Emily threw herself to her death on page 414.

What I had never known, until I started transcribing the professor’s notes, was that in real life, from that point on the cliff, you can see into the back garden of Andrew Bird’s house. He was Marian Rutherford’s friend and publisher and the reason she came to Portiston in the first place.

The professor and I exchanged polite but brief pleasantries, but that was as far as our relationship went. I didn’t mind, because it was so peaceful being with him in the office, both of us sheltering under our separate umbrellas of anonymity, but I did want to talk to him about
Emily Campbell
. There were some loose ends in the plot that frustrated me, and I wasn’t sure if I was missing something. I decided I would find a moment, a coffee break when he wasn’t immersed in work, in which to broach the subject. In the meantime, in order to find out about the professor himself, I waited until the day when he told me he was going home to work and wouldn’t be back until midday, which also happened to be a day when Jenny had called in sick (‘Babe, I’m puking my guts up, been on the Bacardi all night, just tell him it’s women’s problems and he won’t ask any more questions’). Alone on the ground floor of the university history department, I took the opportunity to examine the contents of his desk.

twenty-three

By the autumn Anneli and Marc were an item of sorts. However, in my opinion, their relationship was moving exceptionally slowly. They had held hands and kissed (without tongues), but that was all. Marc hadn’t asked for any sexual favours whatsoever. In fact, Anneli reported, he was a perfect gentleman. That was how she liked it for, despite our predilection for dressing like temptresses, Anneli was at heart a traditional girl who had made her mind up that she wouldn’t go all the way with someone until she was certain that she’d found the right someone. She wasn’t sure Marc was that person.

She and Marc had been to the cinema, and they spent some time together at weekends, either listening to records in the bedroom Marc shared with Luca, or watching TV with Anneli’s parents round at her house. On the bus into town they sometimes, but not always, sat together and sometimes they would walk together, although Marc never put his arm around Anneli’s shoulder, which would have bothered me if I’d been her, but she didn’t seem to mind. She didn’t want me to feel left out so usually she walked with me anyway.

Anneli was a very good friend to me.

Once I asked her if she loved Marc and she said, ‘Oh Liv, I don’t know!’

‘How can you not know?’ I would persist. ‘Either you love him or you don’t; you must know.’

‘Well, do you love Georgie?’

‘It’s not that kind of relationship.’

‘Well, maybe ours isn’t either.’

I was, in my defence, only sixteen, and most of my education about life and sex came from teen magazines which were, in those days, still massively biased towards a romantic view of the world.

‘If you don’t know,’ I said, ‘then you can’t love him.’

‘Well, does it matter?’

‘Of course it does! If you’re going to spend the rest of your life with him . . .’

We had this sort of conversation many times. But the occasion I remember most clearly happened early the following year. It was the school holidays and Anneli and I had arranged to go swimming in Watersford Public Baths. Marc turned up with Luca, but no Nathalie.

At the time it never crossed my mind to wonder why Nathalie didn’t come; I was just glad she hadn’t and assumed she was working. It must have been a Saturday. Probably she just didn’t much like swimming. The public baths with their busy changing rooms and loud children wouldn’t have appealed to her. To be honest, she wouldn’t have looked great in a swimming costume either.

Away from Nathalie, Luca reverted to his normal, boisterous self, breaking just about every swimming-pool rule in the first five minutes as he hared out of the changing room, ran along the side of the pool yelling the
Dam Busters
theme and then dive-bombed Anneli and me at the deep end. We screamed and shrieked as our hair and make-up were drenched in the cold, chlorinated water while Luca resurfaced next to us, shaking his head like a dog, his long black hair spraying droplets of water all over us again. Marc returned to his traditional role as the quieter, more thoughtful twin. He stood at the side, his arms crossed over his chest, holding on to his shoulders and laughing. I noticed, I remember, how white his feet were, his slender ankles and his long, thin toes.

We swam and played for a while, annoying the other swimmers with our noise and our physicality. The boys swam beneath our legs and then stood up, lifting us on to their shoulders, and then we raced, all of us squealing and laughing. Sometimes they’d tip us into the water backwards, sometimes we would dive in forwards. Luca would ping the back of our costumes. He had a beautiful body, the wide-shouldered, slightly triangular upper-body shape of a male athlete – slim hips, slender, racehorse legs. Marc was attractive too but he was darker, sturdier and shorter. Our games involved a good deal of body contact. It was fun, it was exciting, and it wasn’t entirely innocent. I told myself it was just playing, but when I was sat on Luca’s bony shoulders, his wet black hair fanning out on my wet, white thighs, I would be lying if I said I did not enjoy the moment. I enjoyed being that close to Luca. I was very glad that Nathalie wasn’t there. She wouldn’t have joined in anyway.

Anneli and I got out first because we were cold. We changed in adjoining cubicles, stamping out of our wet costumes and pulling dry clothes awkwardly over our still-damp bodies. Teardrops of cold water followed one another from the rat’s tails of my hair down my chest. I only had one towel and it was too small and old to be of much comfort.

While we waited for the boys we sat in the little cafeteria which looked out over the pool, sipped hot chocolate out of the machine and shared a carton of chips which we dipped into a communal pool of ketchup.

‘I think Luca’s really nice,’ I confessed.

‘It’s a shame he’s taken,’ said Anneli.

‘Maybe Nathalie will cheat on him or move to Australia or die or something,’ I said hopefully.

‘I don’t think she’d be that obliging,’ said Anneli, twirling her chip round in the ketchup. ‘I think she really loves him.’

‘Why do you say that?’

‘It’s just the way she looks at him. When they’re together she’s always sort of next to him. She notices him all the time.’

‘It sounds a bit obsessive.’

‘It’s actually quite nice.’

I shrugged.

‘Nathalie’s all right when you get to know her, Liv.’

‘Yeah well, I don’t really care about Nathalie,’ I said. ‘What about you and Marc?’

Anneli gave a little sigh, and put down the chip she had just picked up.

‘I don’t think I love him and I don’t think he loves me.’

‘Are you sure?’

She nodded. ‘I can’t imagine going shopping with him or having children with him or having holidays with him, or growing old with him.’

I rolled my eyes. ‘That’s all boring, middle-aged stuff, Anneli! What about the wild passionate stuff?’

She shook her head. ‘Nope, I can’t imagine any of that either.’

‘Just because you can’t imagine it doesn’t mean it can’t happen.’

‘I know it’s not going to happen.’

I tipped the last dregs of chocolate into my mouth and licked my lips.

‘What are you going to do?’

‘I’m not going to do anything. I don’t have to do anything. We both know where we stand.’

Anneli was – is – a cleverer girl than me. If only I could have been more like her the next few months of my life would not have been such hell.

twenty-four

‘So what did you find?’

‘Huh?’

‘In the weird professor’s desk.’

‘He’s not weird, Marc, he’s just quiet.’

‘Always a bad sign.’

We were sitting in the café, eating teacakes. Outside was a thunderstorm. The sky was dark grey although it was only early afternoon and rain was streaking down like bullets, puncturing the puddles on the pavement and roads in a million different places. Every now and then lightning would jag across the sky and the café lights would flicker, and then there would be an aural torrent of thunder, like a reverse crescendo, which rattled the windows and my nerves.

‘I didn’t find anything much. Just a lot of clutter, lots of bits and pieces.’

‘Come on, Liv, there must have been something that gave you a clue about the man.’

I shook my head and licked butter from my fingers. I was ashamed of my prying and I didn’t want to exacerbate my disloyalty and my nosiness by sharing what I’d found with anyone, not even Marc. When I knew more about the professor, then maybe I would be able to explain why, in the right-hand-side drawer of his desk, hidden beneath a diary dating back to 1989, there was an empty scent bottle, a scuffed, pale blue leather baby shoe and a postcard with a picture of Madrid by night on the front, and nothing at all on the back.

‘There was just paperwork, exam guidelines, pens, stationery, stuff like that.’

‘No secret diary?’

‘No.’

‘No revolver?’

‘No.’

‘No stash of hash?’

I giggled. ‘No.’

‘No saucy letters from besotted students?’

‘Stop it now.’

‘No women’s underwear?’

‘Shut up, Marc.’

‘I’m just showing an interest in your career.’

‘Yeah, right.’

‘And did you know that what you just said is the only example in the English language of two positives being used to denote a negative? I heard it on Radio Four.’

This was something Luca did. All the time, he would hear something on the radio, or see something on TV, or read something, or somebody would tell him some quirky fact, and he would file it in his memory and regurgitate it at an appropriate moment. It amused me. I found it endearing.

There was a flash of lightning and Marc’s face gleamed electric-white for a tiny second. I felt the beginning of a headache in my temples. As if he sensed my discomfort, Marc leaned over the table and stroked the side of my face very gently with the backs of his fingers. I closed my eyes and leaned in to his touch.

He whispered something. I wasn’t sure what he said, but before I could ask, the café’s bodybuilder chef brought two mugs of tea to our table.

‘How’re you doing, baby?’ he asked. Over the past weeks we had become friends, this muscled, tattooed man, and I. He didn’t know the details, and was too sensitive to ask, but he knew I’d had some kind of a bad time. He gave Marc a sidelong glance as if to enquire if this man were the root of my troubles.

‘This is Marc, my brother-in-law,’ I said.

‘Pleased to meet you,’ said the chef, wiping his right hand on his apron and offering it to Marc.

‘Marc runs the restaurant in Portiston, Marinella’s,’ I ventured.

‘Oh yeah? I know it. On the seafront? Bet that’s a little goldmine,’ said the bodybuilder.

‘It’s not bad,’ said Marc.

‘Double negative denoting a positive,’ I pointed out.

Marc’s face relaxed into a smile and then he laughed, out loud. The chef looked perplexed.

‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘It’s just something we were talking about.’

‘Yeah, well, I’ll catch up with you guys later,’ he said.

We sat in silence, holding hands. Outside rain streamed down the window-glass; inside the panes were steamed up so it was hard to make out the details of the faces of the people who rushed by, chins down, hands in their pockets, hurrying for shelter. I licked the sugar from my lips, which were still a little swollen from our love-making earlier. I wonder if it showed. I wonder if the chef knew what was going on.

I saw Marc’s eyes flicker upwards to read the clock behind me. He would have to go soon, in order to fulfil whatever obligation he had used as his alibi for this afternoon. I tried to look as if I hadn’t noticed, but loneliness came at me in a rush. The tea had gone cool and anyway it was too milky and the storm which had previously been thrilling was now simply enervating.

‘God, I’m tired,’ I whispered, longing for my bed and the oblivion of sleep, and I remembered, with a rush of pleasure, that there was plenty of alcohol in the flat, a nice glass of red wine to start maybe and then gin and lemonade to send me to sleep, and I wondered if Sundays had always been like this and of course they hadn’t.

When Luca was alive, Sundays were our best days. Our lazy, lie-in-bed days, our coffee and chocolate-spread-on-toast days, our sleepy amble-round-a-market-or-a-park days, our hands-held days, our snoozing-in-front-of-the-TV days. Sometimes we talked of what it would have been like if we had had children. We imagined taking them to do entertaining but educational things, but probably we would have been useless parents. We were too disorganized, too selfish. In my heart I knew that no Sundays could be better than the ones we shared, just Luca and I. The only thing that spoiled them was the prospect of Monday on the horizon. Still, we drank wine on Sunday evenings, in celebration of the weekend and in preparation for the week that was to follow. Luca said it was a waste to have a hangover on a weekend; he said you might as well have it during working hours, not in your own time.

Luca worked in a restaurant in Covent Garden. He enjoyed the buzz and the business, and the banter with the clientele. There was none of the rigmarole associated with being part of the only restaurant in a small seaside town: none of the community politics, or having to remember everyone’s name and what was going on in their lives so that you could make polite, friendly chit-chat. Instead, Luca revelled in the anonymity of the big city, and the variety of people he met, and their different tastes and languages and manners. He got on well with the owner and knew how much the mark-up was on each dish, and his ambition was to open a place of his own. A café with food, not a restaurant, somewhere that did good-quality sandwiches, soups and salads at lunchtimes, and simple early suppers in the evenings to attract the working crowd, not the drinking crowd. He had his eye on a fish-and-chip shop that we knew was coming up for sale not far from where we lived, in Bow. What with the Olympics coming and everything, he thought it was the perfect venue for his enterprise. He was going to call it ‘Liv’s’.