The Love of My Life (8 page)

‘Shall I get rid of these?’ Luca asked. I nodded and he slotted the leaflets into the bin.

Instead of having a quiet evening discussing egg donors as the doctor had suggested, we went to Camden and found a bar and danced and drank into the early hours. I don’t remember how we made our way home, but I do remember we opened another bottle of wine and grieved a little for the children we would never have. The next morning we walked beside the canal and we were all right, I think, both of us. Luca knew that I wouldn’t want to talk about it any more. Luca was always good like that.

I walked away from the memory and up the steps of the beautiful building that housed the main university library. A group of students were sitting on the steps smoking. They looked ridiculously young, like they ought to still be in school. I wondered if they had any idea how lucky they were to be clever and free and alive, or if they were wasting their days by being full of angst and insecurity.

In the cool, dark hush of the library, a blue-haired receptionist directed me to the history department. It was just round the corner, a large Georgian building which must once have been home to a very wealthy merchant. I went inside and asked for an application form for the research post. The young girl behind the desk gave me a pen and invited me to fill it in there and then, so I sat down on a wooden chair and did just that. I was feeling slightly incredulous that everyone was treating me exactly the same as they had done before Luca’s death. I felt like a completely different person, but nobody seemed to notice anything strange about me.

‘Have you had a lot of applications?’ I asked the girl.

She shook her head. ‘It’s probably not my place to say it, but it’s a really boring job and the pay’s complete crap,’ she said. ‘You get more per hour podium-dancing in one of the clubs in town.’

‘I think they’d pay me
not
to get on the podium,’ I said.

She laughed. ‘You’d be surprised,’ she said. I wasn’t sure if that was a compliment or not.

‘So will you let me know? About the job?’

‘I expect the professor will be in touch directly if he’d like to see you.’

‘What’s he like?’

The girl shrugged again and pulled a face. ‘He’s OK. Old. A bit creepy.’

‘Oh. Right,’ I said.

On the way back, I was feeling so pleased with myself that I called Marc on his mobile. It was picked up almost at once.

‘Hello, it’s me,’ I said happily. ‘Guess where I am?’

‘Who is this?’

It wasn’t Marc. It was Nathalie.

He must have left his phone on the counter.

I cut the call off straight away and prayed to God that she hadn’t recognized my voice.

twelve

My mother, Lynnette and I used to live in one of those narrow, three-storey, stone-built terrace houses that are so prevalent in the north of England in general, and in Portiston in particular. It was, and still is, quite a grand house, although now it’s an investment property and, according to Lynnette, belongs to a gay man in London who has made £2 million from buying to let. My mother enjoyed the status endowed upon her by the house. As far as the neighbours and the likes of Angela Felicone were concerned, she had bought the house with money inherited from her late husband. Because it was such a grand house, the implication was that her husband must have been a successful man, an entrepreneur, even.

The house that had belonged to my mother’s aunt was well built but not very well insulated. It had largeish sash windows, a small garden at the front where my mother encouraged pot plants to brave the inconsistencies of the saline wind and the temperamental weather, and a long, narrow garden at the back with a washing line strung along it and two long, narrow strips of soil bordering the lawn which Mum referred to as her ‘flowerbeds’. She had difficulty persuading anything much to grow aside from a few tough, ornamental brackens and after a few years she gave up trying. The weeds didn’t bother to come back.

Lynnette and I had a small room each on the top floor, in the eaves of the roof. In between our two bedrooms was the family bathroom. On the first floor was Mum’s bedroom, and a large front room which she used as a living room and which we weren’t supposed to use at all. There was another small reception room downstairs, with a dining room behind and a narrow kitchen which stretched out into the back garden.

The house had been furnished by the deceased aunt, which meant we had the use of good, solid, Presbyterian, built-to-last furniture. My mother lived in constant fear of the furniture being damaged, though I can’t imagine who would have grumbled if any harm had come to it.

Normally we were only allowed to eat and drink at the table in the kitchen, and then only when it had its oilcloth cover on. On special occasions like Christmas we were promoted to the dining room, but generally Mum preferred to have the door shut to keep both dust and children out. Both Lynnette and I had to undergo the indignity of sleeping on mattresses sheathed in rubber until well into our teens following a night-time accident I had when I was six, which, according to my mortified mother, penetrated the mattress so deeply that the whiff of wee sometimes disturbed her sleep many years after the event.

Mum was also very hot on manners. Lynnette and I knew how to ask nicely for things and that it was polite to refuse a second helping of pudding even if we really wanted one. Lynnette would never have dreamed of answering back to an adult, or doing anything to draw attention to herself. I knew how I should behave, but I forgot the rules with a regularity that tested Mum’s patience to its very limits.

‘Lynnette’s such a lovely girl,’ Angela Felicone would say to my mother as she paid for our coffee and ice cream at the old-fashioned till on the shiny marble counter at Marinella’s. ‘I wish I had a daughter like her.’

Angela, glamorous, decorous Angela, would roll her eyes as her sons ran around behind her, shouting, threatening, laughing, making gun noises, pretend-dying, fighting and rolling around on the floor, getting under the feet of the waitresses. It seemed to me that her boys had a good deal more fun than we girls did.

‘I don’t understand why they don’t keep those boys on a tighter leash,’ my mother would say. ‘They’re going to end up in trouble, mark my words.’

But they didn’t, none of them. The only child in Portiston who went off the rails was me.

Lynnette was four years older than me. Like me she had dark hair, grey-green eyes, freckles on her face and arms and slightly uneven teeth. Unlike me, she didn’t lose things, or break things, or hurt things or spoil things. Lynnette never quarrelled or cried or was unkind. Without trying, she was always popular. She went around with a group of cheerful, sporty girls, did well at school and excelled at music. She was, and still is, kind and clever and beautiful and good.

I am certain she was Mum’s favourite. How could she not have been? I would have preferred her if I’d walked in my mother’s shoes. Anybody would.

By the time I followed Lynnette up to Watersford Girls’ Grammar School, she was already established as the star student. When she turned eighteen, three years later, Lynnette was elected head girl. She played in the school and the county orchestras and had been a runner-up in the regional final of the BBC Young Musician of the Year competition twice. She had unconditional offers from several universities, including Oxford, although she chose London.

Compared to Lynnette, I had little going for me.

Asthma precluded me from playing hockey or netball at any decent level, but I also had an aversion to organized sport. I was also absolutely no good at music. For a little while I had piano lessons, but was constantly being unfavourably compared with my talented sister. I was too lazy to practise the boring scales and exercises, longing for ‘Clair de Lune’ and ‘The Entertainer’ but never gaining the proficiency to play either.

Neither was I clever. Not like Lynnette. Although I had passed the 11-plus exam, I was always placed in the bottom third of the class when it came to results. I never won a prize for anything and my teachers made it clear to both me and Mum that they did not regard me as university material.

Yet by my early teens I knew I had something Lynnette didn’t have, something quite important. There was something about me that boys liked. They watched me. They jostled me. They pulled my hair and teased me and stole things from me so that I had to wrestle to get them back. I squealed and complained but I knew they were doing this because they liked me, and I enjoyed the attention, and the attention gave me status amongst the girls. As a result, I found subtle ways to encourage the attention. I turned over the waistband of my skirt to make it shorter. I rolled up my sleeves, I polished my lips with cherry lipgloss and thickened my eyelashes with mascara. I started answering back to authority figures. I chewed gum.

Mum knew what was going on. At first she said nothing directly, just watched and worried, but as the months went by she made it clear that she regarded the way I looked and the way I acted as unwholesome and undesirable. She said I was a disgrace, that if I didn’t moderate my behaviour I would bring shame on the family and end up alone and unloved. In my opinion it was my only strength, and a talent to be nurtured and developed. So that’s what I did.

By this time Mum had a gentleman friend. He was called Mr Hensley and we were encouraged to call him Uncle Colin even though he wasn’t a real uncle, as I was always at pains to point out. He was somebody Mum had met through the church and he was the dullest man on the planet. I found him so boring that I’m having trouble now recalling any details at all, save a narrow face, bad teeth, sandy receding hair, a general greyness, and the fact that he always made me feel uncomfortable. He didn’t seem to like me very much and the feeling was mutual.

The summer before Lynnette went to university I was fourteen and my best friend was Anneli Rose, who I’d known since the infants’ class in Portiston. We were very close, so close that we claimed always to know what the other was thinking. We could make one another laugh simply by exchanging glances and we drove our teachers and the more studious girls in our class mad with our whispering, giggling and exchanging of notes. God knows what we talked about – I can’t remember now – but we never ran out of conversation.

Anneli was as popular with the boys as I was. We egged one another on. We were a pubescent double-act of lips and hips and elbows. I was one of the first girls in my year to get a lovebite and I was always being asked out by different boys. I would go to the cinema or to the Wimpy with them. We would hold hands and sometimes I’d let them kiss me, but I never met anybody I really liked. Because I had so many boyfriends, I guess I probably achieved something of a reputation but I wasn’t promiscuous, not like the poor girls who traded sexual favours in return for attention from the boys and consequent status from the girls.

At the end-of-term disco, where the girls and boys of Watersford’s two grammar schools were finally allowed to mingle, neither Anneli nor I was left standing up against the wall for a moment. I danced with a lot of different boys. I slow-danced to Whitney Houston with a lad called Aiden Tracey. He was very drunk. His breath was hot in my ear and there was a rod in his trousers pressing hard against my belly. We had a kiss. He tasted of Camels and beer. He asked me to go outside with him but I declined.

Mum, egged on by Mr Hensley, disapproved of everything I said, everything I wore and everything I did. Soon, there were so many rules governing what I could and couldn’t do that I became an expert in subterfuge in order to get round them.

Forbidden from buying make-up at the chemist’s in Portiston, Anneli and I would steal it from the cosmetic shelves in Wasbrook’s department store in Watersford after school. (Security tags have made shoplifting so much more difficult for today’s teenagers, I sometimes wonder how they manage.) Anneli and I examined and delighted over our booty on the top deck of the bus on the way back to Portiston. When we had one or other house to ourselves, we would practise making ourselves up to look as old and as vampish as possible.

When Anneli’s father saw us he said sweetly, ‘But why do you put that muck on when you have such pretty faces anyway?’

Mr Felicone put it more poetically. Seeing us posing at a table by the window in Marinella’s, he brought over our peach Melbas as we were touching up our lipstick and said he saw no point in gilding the lily. We just sneered and giggled, as teenage girls do.

One day we slipped up. Mr Hensley caught us climbing off a bus wearing baggy but almost transparent cheesecloth shirts and jeans cut off so short that you could see the hems on the legs of our knickers. Our hair was up in high pony-tails and we’d both had our ears pierced after convincing the girl in the hairdresser’s that we were sixteen. In Waters-ford, some much older boys had taken us into a pub and bought us a cocktail that consisted of cider and Cherry B and which was quaintly called a ‘leg-over’. They had asked for our phone numbers. It was completely thrilling and we had been so high on our success that we’d forgotten to put our decoy long skirts on over our shorts when we got off the bus.

Mr Hensley was appalled. He made us get into the back seat of his custard-coloured Morris Minor and drove us back to my house, giving us a long lecture on the perils of our ‘loose’ behaviour, while we squirmed and giggled with fear and embarrassment and hoped that nobody we knew saw us.

Anneli’s parents were summoned and our behaviour was the subject of a long, intensely embarrassing discussion, and we were both grounded for the rest of the summer. We had to be indoors by eight every evening and we were not allowed out of Portiston unaccompanied.

Lynnette was unsympathetic when I raged about the unfairness of the punishment.

‘Look,’ she said, ‘you only have to live here a few more years. Just do what they say and have a quiet life and then once you’re eighteen you can wear what you want, go where you want to go, do what you want to do and stay out all night if you want.’