‘What does it matter when you’ve got
me
?’ was what he really meant, and it made me see red.
‘Of course it matters! I’m looking forward to the course.’
Well, I had been until then.
Fergal had just finished his MA in Fine Art at the RCA, and the plan was that he should make a name for himself with his painting while I got my degree, so that one day we could live in the country together. He would paint and I would write poetry …
Daydreams – but anything seemed possible when I was with Fergal. And of course I hadn’t then realised that although I was a poet, I was not a
good
poet.
The fine distinction between turning out reams of seamless drivel like a miniature stream-of-consciousness novel and writing real poetry is sometimes hard for a teenager to grasp. My literary skills, I later discovered, lay elsewhere.
But at the time I was all set to study Modern English Literature in pursuit of this, and I thought he should understand, since he seemed just as dedicated to painting until Goneril started to take off.
‘Well – have a year out, then,’ he suggested impatiently. ‘Isn’t it about time you left home and experienced some real life?’
That would look good on my gap-year CV: ‘What did you do in your gap year, Miss Norwood?’ ‘Oh, I just screwed my rock-singer boyfriend over an entire continent. Nothing interesting.’ ‘And was that with the VSO, Miss Norwood?’ etc.
As to experiencing real life, I’d packed more of that into that year with Fergal than I had in all the previous seventeen.
I looked at him in exasperation … and my heart softened a bit. He was absolutely gorgeous, and I loved him so much. But when I remembered how casually he’d assumed I’d just follow him like a little dog at the asking – or the telling – I got angry all over again.
‘Look, Fergal, I’ll be waiting here for you when you come back: it’s not even as if I’m going
away
to college.’ (And that was solely to be near him. Otherwise I would have applied for something as far away from Mother as possible – the University of Outer Mongolia Scholarship in Non-Rhyming Glottal Stops, say.)
He held me at arm’s length from him, his fingers biting into me. ‘Come with me or that’s it – finish!’
His eyes were as hard and cold as emeralds in his dark face.
Then I lost my temper and in a state of hurt fury said a few cutting things about how easy he’d found it to abandon his art for Filthy Lucre (well, I was only eighteen and a bit idealistic) and then we had our worst row ever. It wasn’t followed by the sort of making-up that healed such spats either, since he took me straight home and dropped me at the gate without another word.
Even then I didn’t think he meant it – he was inclined to say that sort of thing in the heat of the moment – but by next day, when he hadn’t phoned to apologise, I started to get worried and even seriously contemplated abandoning my pride and ambitions and going with him after all. So maybe it wouldn’t last for ever, but wouldn’t it be better to have loved and lost than not to have loved at all?
Who knows what might have happened if poor Grandpa hadn’t had his heart attack that day, so that instead of chewing my fingernails by the telephone I was travelling to Granny’s?
In the end I was there for the whole summer: through the struggle that Grandpa fought and lost, and that of my down-to-earth and stoical grandmother to come to terms with her bereavement.
Mother was entirely useless, of course. She produced one excuse after another as to why she couldn’t come up to lend her support, and then crowned it all by being ‘too prostrate with grief’ to attend the funeral.
‘The woman’s got the backbone of a wet lettuce,’ commented Granny when I told her, and I was glad to see some slight return of her spirits.
Although Mother always disliked Fergal I
had
extracted a promise from her before I left to tell him where I was if he should ring, and to send on all my mail. But, as she almost gleefully reported, there was nothing to send on: he never contacted me again.
He’d meant what he said after all.
The
coup de grâce
was a picture cut from a gossip magazine and helpfully forwarded by Mother showing Fergal coming out of some American nightclub with a well-known and beautiful model draped all over him like clingfilm.
I was so devastated I prayed nightly that she would stab him to death in bed with her hipbones, but nothing happened, except that Mother kept sending me cuttings about all the scandalous things Fergal and the rest of the group got up to, until I told her that I didn’t want to know. I didn’t even want the
name
Fergal mentioned ever again. I hadn’t got time to have a broken heart that summer.
I’d adored Grandpa, and he and Granny had been a mismatched but devoted pair, so I threw myself into helping her in any way I could.
But somehow all the colour seemed to have bled away from my surroundings; having your first close experience of death and your heart broken simultaneously does that, I find. So when Granny decided, in an old-fashioned sackcloth-and-ashes way, to dye every garment she possessed (plus the inside of the washing machine) black, I put all the clothes I had with me in too.
I’d found this dyeing of the clothes a very dramatic gesture – the Dying of the Light, as it were – and I wore nothing but black for years. After all, it stopped all that bother about wondering what to wear, and matching things up, which I really didn’t care about any more. There is only one drawback I discovered with black – you can never see whether it is spotlessly clean or not. Wearing black became a habit, one I only really started to break when Mother pointed out that you can’t get wedding dresses in that colour.
When I finally went home from Granny’s I didn’t dye anything else black, just cut all the rest of my clothes up into little pieces – six-inch, three-inch and one-inch, so as not to waste any – and began on my hobby of patchwork.
But my experience with Fickle Fergal at least made me appreciate James’s steadier, mature qualities when I met him, so I’ve no regrets now over what happened so long ago.
And, look on the bright side, at least I didn’t wake up after this dream feeling guilty: just angry and tear-stained.
I gave James a poke in the ribs with my elbow, handed him a cup of coffee-bag coffee from the Teasmade, and informed him that it was time to get up.
Isn’t it strange that I should hate tea when I adore autumn leaves? But I find I don’t wish to drink dead leaf dust.
‘Day off,’ James grunted, trying to put his head under the duvet.
‘Day off to house-hunt, and I’ve got a feeling we’ll find the country cottage of our dreams today – we’ve just been looking too near London and in the wrong direction. Besides, a day in the country will do us both good. All the leaves have turned gold now, and—’
‘You’ve got enough leaves,’ he said hastily, re-emerging.
I don’t know why he disapproves of my harmless little hobbies. My patchwork brightens the whole flat up; it’s amazing just how much you can make from a wardrobe of old clothes. I’m still at it after all this time, and I’m sure the acreage is more than the sum of the original. Can this be possible? Algebra was never my strong point. Or do my clothes have a Tardis-like quality?
And my leaf collection: James had never minded going for walks in the park or the country while I collected them when we first started going out together, though it transpired that he thought I was going to press them. (And put them in an album perhaps? I know he’s quite a bit older than me, but that’s
Victorian
!)
‘Oh, no,’ I’d told him at the time, surprised. ‘I like them all curled and natural as they fall. I spread them out to dry, then give them a light coat of acrylic varnish.’
‘Varnish?’
‘They get dusty. This way I can rinse them off.’
‘Oh,’ he’d said, obviously struggling with this concept. Tentatively he’d enquired, ‘Then I suppose you make arrangements or pictures or something with them?’
‘No, I usually just pile them up in baskets and along the window ledges in my room. I like the whispering sound they make when I go in and out.’
He’d given me an affectionate squeeze and said fondly, ‘What funny ideas you have, darling – it must be living alone for so long.’
‘Oh, no, I’ve always had them,’ I’d assured him, only until then I hadn’t thought my little ways were funny.
Still, you can see how harmless my hobbies are, really.
‘I need some more oak leaves, James,’ I told him now. ‘I never seem to find enough of those, and I’d like a whole basketful.’ (I’m a basket person but not, I hope, a basket case, whatever James might imply.)
‘You know, I can’t think why everyone doesn’t collect them – they’re free, in beautiful colours and shapes, and perfectly hygienic if you varnish them.’ (I only collect clean-looking ones anyway, but you can always wipe them over with Dettox.) ‘Isn’t it strange we don’t value them? We could use them as money instead of a lot of germy bits of paper, or—’
There was a gusty sigh from under the bed, which heaved two or three times as if in a heavy swell and I broke off to exclaim indignantly, ‘You let that stupid dog in again last night, didn’t you? You know I don’t like breathing the same air in and out all night, it isn’t healthy. Or hygienic. You’d better get up and take her out so we can get off early.’
‘Plenty of time,’ he muttered, but determinedly I prised him out, assisted by the lure of stopping off for a fat-and-cholesterol-rich breakfast en route.
Fergal: 1998
‘DOES BRITAIN’S SEXIEST ROCKER HAVE A SAD PAST?’
Trendsetter
magazine
Past is the operative word. And while I don’t think I could forget Tish if I tried, I don’t try, just go on rubbing salt into the old wound so that it never entirely heals.
Angst is so good for an artist …
My immaculate, fiery angel is the muse I still draw on for inspiration for both songs and paintings alike.
But that’s the Tish I remember. She’s probably Mrs Suburban Housewife now, her dreams stuffed into a drawer to moulder. (Or
smoulder
– she had a way with words.)
What has become of her now I neither need – nor want – to know.
‘This is it,’ I said, with conviction. ‘This is
my
cottage!’
‘What?’ muttered James absently, peering through a grubby windowpane at the small, blonde and bubbly estate agent, who was hovering tactfully outside despite the arctic November wind. Her legs below the short skirt were an interesting shade of blue.
He always gets a bit silly over that type, which makes you wonder why he married me: tall, reserved, and as effervescent as flat Guinness.
Come to that, why didn’t he just marry my mother, who is small, determinedly blonde and, if not precisely bubbly, sparkles a bit after the second Martini?
I gave him a nudge with my elbow. ‘Concentrate on the house, James. The estate agent is only being charming to you because she hopes to make a sale.’
He looked hurt. ‘Don’t be silly, darling – I was just thinking about the case I’ve got on. I really shouldn’t have taken a day off to look at houses, and I think I’d better pop into the office for an hour or two after I’ve dropped you at your mother’s.’
The mystery of why he’d chosen to wear one of his natty dark suits to go house-hunting was now clear. (Though admittedly they do set off his sandy-haired rugged-Highlander good looks a treat, a fact he knows very well.)
‘I’m sure Drew, Drune and Tibbs can solicit away without you for one day, James. Especially when it means we’ve at last found the right cottage.’
‘What? You don’t mean this one do you, Tish?’ His bright blue eyes widened in astonishment. ‘I can’t imagine why you wanted to view it in the first place – it’s too small, and it isn’t even detached.’
‘It’s twice as big as the flat: all these chairs make it look smaller. There are thirty-two.’
‘Thirty-two what?’
‘Chairs.’
‘What’s that got to do with anything? Look at the garden – it’s a wilderness.’
‘A
big
wilderness. There’s some sort of shed out there, too, and plenty of room for a garage at the side of the house.’
‘But the house is old, dark and probably unsanitary,’ he suggested cunningly. ‘It belonged to an old man who didn’t do anything to it for years, and probably died in it.’
‘From an overdose of chairs, perhaps?’ I suggested. ‘People have died in most old houses. Of course I’d have to scrub it from top to bottom before we brought any of our things in, and all the walls and ceilings need painting, and perhaps the floors sanding down and sealing if they’re good enough. Roses round the door … pretty curtains … And just look at the situation! Only one neighbour – and the agent says that’s a sweet little old lady – and the back garden overlooks the parkland of the local big house, so it’ll be very peaceful …’
I tailed off. James was looking stubborn and sulky, one of his limited repertoire of expressions. (And now I come to think of it, ‘indulgent affection’ hasn’t made many appearances lately, or ‘extreme solicitousness denoting a single-minded determination to have sex’.)
‘You know, Tish, I’ve been thinking lately that perhaps we should just look for a small weekend place near the sea instead. Jack’s promised to teach us to sail and—’
‘No. Absolutely not,’ I interrupted firmly. ‘My idea of a fun weekend does not entail sitting with my bottom in icy water, while being alternately hit over the head with a piece of wood and slapped by a bit of wet canvas. Besides,’ I added, hurt, ‘didn’t we always plan to move to the country once we could afford it?’
‘Well … yes, but—’
‘And then I can give up working in the library for
peanuts – which really makes no sense when you think that I could earn just as much from writing, if I had more
time – and we can start a family, and you could commute to work, and get lots of fresh air and exercise in the garden growing our own fruit and vegetables. Isn’t that what we’ve both dreamed of?’
He closed his mouth and said hastily, ‘Yes, darling, of course it is. That is, it sounds wonderful, but perhaps we ought to wait for something detached to come up and—’