The Forever Girl (20 page)

There was a burst of laughter from somewhere behind them; the party was getting going, but James seemed content to be talking just to them. He asked Clover about Strathearn and whether she liked it and whether there was anybody there he would know. Then Ted volunteered some information about the
boarding school he was at. “It calls itself progressive,” he said. “But none of us knows what progressive is meant to mean. Nor do the teachers. Nor do people’s parents. Nobody knows.”

“But it sounds good,” said James.

Ted laughed. “Yes, it always sounds good to be progressive.
I believe in progress
. Great, so you believe in progress. Who doesn’t?”

James looked thoughtful. “Some people,” he said. “Some people want things to go backwards – to go back to what they used to be.”

She asked why.

“Because they’re conservative,” suggested Ted. “Because they hate other people.”

James looked sideways at him. “Not all …”

“Yes,” said Ted. “All.”

“I don’t think conservatives hate people,” said James. “They’re just …”

“Uncool?” said Clover.

James shook his head. “Not necessarily. In fact, it’s quite cool to be conservative these days. Ride a bike and so on, but be conservative.”

“I’m not interested in politics,” said Ted. “It bores me. Yabber yabber yabber. Build a road. Don’t build a road. Build an airport. More taxes, no less taxes. Yabber yabber.”

James looked at him indulgently. “So what gets you, Ted?”

There was a moment in which it seemed to Clover that Ted was wrestling with a question he found awkward. Then he said, “The same as you, James. The same things as you.”

The answer came quickly. “I don’t know what I’m interested in. You tell me.”

“Things,” said Ted lamely.

James teased him. “Come on!”

“Okay, sex.”

She drew in her breath. Ted had looked away after he had said this, but James had looked briefly in her direction. He was embarrassed – she could tell that, and she decided to defuse the tension that had suddenly risen.

“What all boys think about all the time,” she said lightly. “Or so we’re told. Actually, I don’t think they do.”

“How do you know what boys think about?” challenged Ted.

“Boys tell me.” It was untrue, and she could see that neither Ted nor James believed her.

Ted scoffed at this. “No boy is going to tell you what’s in his head. He couldn’t!”

“Maybe not,” said James. “But the same applies to girls. Girls don’t tell us what they’re thinking. We have to try to work it out.”

“Clothes,” muttered Ted.

She rounded on him. “What did you say? Clothes? Is that what you think?”

Ted looked to James for support, but James put up a hand. “No. Don’t go there.”

“We do not think of clothes all the time,” said Clover sharply.

“Some of the time then,” said Ted.

They smiled at that, and were silent for a moment as the topic expired. Clover shivered. She wanted Ted to go away now, to leave her with James, but he showed no sign of moving. James looked over his shoulder towards the others, who were now standing around a pool table at the edge of the patio. Somebody had turned up the music, but nobody seemed to be paying much attention to it. “I have to go and talk to them,” he said. “I haven’t
spoken to them very much.”

He rose, leaving her sitting at the edge of the pool with Ted. He reached out and put a hand on her shoulder as he stood up. “I love your shoulders,” he said.

She looked up at him in surprise. “What?”

“Just your shoulders,” he said quickly. “They’re so convenient for leaning on.” Then he added, “Sis.”

He turned to Ted. “And you, bro.”

“Lean on me any time,” said Ted.

James shook his head. “No thanks. I can stand now.”

After he had gone, the two of them sat in silence. Ted moved forward and dipped his hand into the pool. His fingers made shadows in the water.

“Still like him?” he asked.

She nodded. “Yes.”

“He called you sis,” said Ted. “Nice.”

“Do you think so?”

“It means that he sees you as a sister.”

“And you as a brother.”

Ted shrugged. “Okay with me.” He hesitated. “But not with you?”

She stared up at the sky beyond the fronds of the palm trees that ringed the Collins’s garden. “I suppose I’ll have to settle for that. I can, I think. Maybe.”

“Why does he get under our skin?” asked Ted. “What’s it about him? What is it?”

She mentioned the first thing that came into her mind. “He’s kind.”

Ted looked doubtful. “Is that all?”

“That and other things.”

Ted dipped his hand back into the water. “You won’t tell anybody, will you?”

“Tell them what?”

“About me.”

“About what you told me?”

He nodded.

“Of course not. Being friends is about keeping the secrets you’ve shared.”

“Thanks. And I won’t tell anybody about you. You and him, that is.”

She thought there was nothing to tell, other than that she loved James and in return he regarded her as a sister.

Then Ted said, “You okay, my sister?” He had launched into a Caymanian accent – it was redolent of their shared childhood; the accent of the Caymanian children, the ones from West Bay, from the wrong side of the tracks, with whom they had played sporting fixtures at school, across such wide divides of wealth; of the Jamaican pool-man who scooped the leaves out of the water and cut the grass. It was comforting.

He touched her lightly on the arm. His hand was wet from the swimming pool. She liked him. She had always taken Ted for granted; she had never really seen him, in the way in which we see people we value.

She nodded. “Sort of, my brother.”

He became serious. “Don’t give up,” he whispered. “Just don’t.”

22

For the next two years, she did not see him, not by design, but because they were never on the island at the same time. James had slightly different school holidays, and often filled these with projects that took him elsewhere. There was a cricket tour of Australia, and a working trip to Malawi, where his school was renovating an orphanage. She heard about these things from Ted, whom she did see, and who sent her regular messages. She tried not to appear too interested – but in secret she was like an addict deprived, poring over each scrap of news Ted gave her about James as if it were a sacred text, an utterance to be dwelt upon, weighed for meaning.

“He doesn’t do e-mails,” Ted assured her. “It’s nothing personal.”

She was not convinced; Ted was trying to comfort her. “But you hear from him. He must e-mail you.”

Ted explained that he heard the news indirectly, from other friends. “It’s true, Clove. I swear. There are some people who just don’t e-mail. It seems odd, but they don’t.”

“How can they? Everything’s done by e-mail now. How can they do anything if they don’t use it?”

He shrugged. “They use it a little. Now and then.”

She shook her head. “They can’t. They have to.”

He did not want her in his life; that was clear to her. He was not hostile; he had been friendly, even encouraging, at that party, but it seemed to her that she was just part of his background – nothing more than that. Sensing this, she decided to fall in love with somebody else – she willed that to happen – but it did not. Unconscious, irresistible comparisons with James meant that other boys were found wanting. Nobody was as good-looking;
nobody made her laugh in quite the same way; nobody listened, as James did, was as sympathetic. In short, James had changed the world for her, had set a bar that others simply could not surmount.

Her education taught her self-awareness. Strathearn was a school that encouraged intellectual seriousness – it was what the parents who sent their children there paid for – and there was an English teacher, Miss Hardy, who opened eyes. Clover’s reading was guided by her and she expanded the horizons of everybody in that particular class. Clover thought a great deal – about people and their emotions, about how things were in the world. By the time she was due to leave school at eighteen, she had as mature an understanding of the world as many in their mid-twenties – perhaps even more mature.

“University is not a finishing school,” said Miss Hardy. “It is not a place to mark time for three or four years until you find yourself a job.”

The conversation arose in Miss Hardy’s study. Clover had called to say goodbye, and to thank the teacher. The following day, Commemoration Day, would be her last day at the school.

Miss Hardy closed the book that had been open on her desk before her. Clover squinted to read the title upside down:
Edward Thomas: A Life in Poetry
. She remembered that he was an enthusiasm of the teacher, and they had spent the best part of an hour talking about one of his poems about a train stopping at a station in the country, and steam escaping, and birds singing. She had wanted to cry, and almost did, because she knew the poet would be killed in the trenches of France.

“Edward Thomas,” said Miss Hardy.

“I remember. That poem about the train.”

Miss Hardy touched the cover of the book almost reverentially. “If you forget everything else I ever taught you, I suspect you’ll remember that poem.”

She assured her that she would not forget. “No, you’re wrong. I’ll remember a lot.”

“You’re kind … But, back to the topic of university. It’s your one chance, you know. Or for most people it’s their one chance.”

“Of what?”

“Of opening the mind.”

“Yes.”

“Education –
educere
, the Latin for
to lead out
. How many times has somebody explained that to you while you’ve been here?”

“One hundred.”

“Well, there you are. So choose carefully. And don’t throw it away.”

“Yes.”

Miss Hardy looked at her thoughtfully. “Your family lives overseas, don’t they?”

“In the Cayman Islands. My father’s an accountant.” Clover’s tone became apologetic. “He works there.”

The teacher smiled. “You don’t have to explain. You don’t have to justify it. At any rate, not to me.”

She felt she had to; people had their views on the Cayman Islands.

“I didn’t raise it for that reason,” said Miss Hardy. “I mention it because I suppose it affects your choices. You’re probably in a position to do what you want to do. Your choice need not be too vocational.”

“What you mean is that I can do something indulgent if I
want to. Shouldn’t you say what you mean? Haven’t you tried to teach us that?”

It was not impertinence, although it may have sounded like it. This sort of bantering exchange was allowed – even encouraged – with the students about to leave; the school believed in independence of thought and in the ability to hold one’s corner in debate. “Don’t be too ready to read things into what people say. But, broadly speaking, yes. You can study something that isn’t necessarily going to lead to something else. You’ll have plenty of opportunity to do that later.”

“Whereas most people can’t?”

“No, they can’t. A lot of people have debt to consider. They can’t afford to study expensive subjects that don’t lead to a paying career.”

She looked down at the floor. “Should I feel guilty? Should I feel bad about it?”

“No. Not at all.”

“Why?”

“Because sometimes in this life we’re given things that we don’t deserve – that we haven’t done anything to merit, so to speak. We don’t have to give those up if they come our way. And remember this: plenty of people are better off than you. Inequality is written into the way the world works, no matter how hard we try to correct it.” Miss Hardy paused. “You may be fortunate in one respect and less fortunate in another. Nobody’s guaranteed happiness across the board. Fate has her own ideas of equality.”

“Nemesis? Isn’t she the person you told us about?”

“Yes, Nemesis. She stalks us, we’re told. If we get above ourselves, she may take action to cut us down to size.”

“I’ll be careful.”

The teacher affected mock seriousness. “So you should be. But I suspect that you’ll do nothing much to risk corrective action by Nemesis or any of the other gods and goddesses.”

She laughed. “They were so nasty, weren’t they – the Greek gods?”

“Horrible. Full of mean tricks and petty jealousies. Worse than the girls in the third form, although not by much.”

“And punishing people too. Making them bear all sorts of things … Sisyphus.”

Miss Hardy was pleased that she had remembered. In class they had read Camus’s essay
The Myth of Sisyphus
. “Yes, Sisyphus – condemned to push a rock up a hill eternally. They certainly knew how to impose burdens.” She paused, but only briefly. “Of course, we’re quite good at imposing burdens on ourselves – without any assistance from Parnassus.”

“I suppose we are,” said Clover. “Unreturned love, for instance. That’s a burden, isn’t it?”

Miss Hardy looked at her with interest. She had not been able to make this girl out – not entirely. Other seventeen- or eighteen-year-olds were transparent – at least to those who spent their lives teaching them. Clover was more complex; there was something there that she could not quite put her finger on; some sorrow, perhaps, that was more specific, more focused than typical teenage angst. Now she had revealed it as clearly as if she had spelled it out in capital letters.