The Love of My Life (19 page)

Mrs Parker just shook her head sadly and blew her nose. My mother stretched out a hand and placed it gently on her forearm.

‘I’d heard rumours about you and that ferry boy. I heard you slept around, but I didn’t believe them,’ said Mrs Parker.

‘I haven’t slept around,’ I said miserably. ‘I haven’t slept with anyone.’

‘May God forgive you,’ said Mr Hensley.

‘I never will,’ said Mrs Parker.

‘Go to your room, Olivia,’ said Mum, her voice icy. ‘I don’t want to breathe the same air as you right now.’

My fate was sealed. And so was my reputation.

thirty-one

The plan was this. I was to make my own way to the airport. One of the family would be dropping Marc off. We would meet in Pret A Manger on Friday evening, and we would both catch the flight to Shannon. We would find a bed-and-breakfast and spend Friday night and most of Saturday together. On Saturday evening Marc would go to the stag night, as arranged. He had to go because Nathalie would be at the wedding and the event would almost certainly be discussed. He would ‘lose’ the rest of the party as soon as they were drunk enough not to notice his absence and come back to me. We would have all Sunday to ourselves until the flight back in the evening. I would have to hang around the luggage carousel until Marc had left the arrivals gate in case anybody was waiting to meet him off the plane. After a reasonable amount of time had elapsed, I too would be free to leave and find my own way back to the flat. The fact that there would be nobody to meet me was almost enough to stop me going in the first place. The thought of coming out of the gate on my own, walking past the expectant faces of the people waiting for their loved ones, and then working out which was the appropriate bus to catch, felt as desirable as the prospect of driving the Clio at 80 mph into a solid brick wall. A car crash of loneliness was how I imagined it.

But then, I reasoned, a weekend with Marc would fill me up with enough positive emotion to make the ending irrelevant. Like the poem that says that death is the price we all have to pay for the privilege of being alive. So all week I looked forward to Friday, sometimes forgetting to lose myself in the professor’s terrible, spidery handwriting, sometimes even missing a footnote or an amendment.

On Thursday the professor, who was nowhere near as self-absorbed as his reputation would have you believe, asked me if anything was wrong.

‘No,’ I said. ‘No, nothing’s wrong.’

‘Only you seem a little out of sorts.’ He turned to smile at me over the top of his glasses.

‘It’s just, I’m just – I’m going away for the weekend.’

‘Is that a bad thing?’

‘No, no. Only I’m, I mean we’re going to Ireland and I don’t like flying.’

‘Oh,’ said the professor. ‘I see.’

Two minutes later I knocked one of the files of loose notes off my desk. The sheets of paper fluttered and slid over one another until they settled on the dusty carpet like flat, dead fish on the seabed.

‘Oh God,’ I said. ‘I’m so sorry.’

‘Worse things happen at sea,’ said the professor.

I bent down and began to gather the paper together, tucking my hair behind my ears, conscious of the red rash of embarrassment that was creeping up my neck like a bloodstain.

‘I can’t believe I did that,’ I said.

‘It’s all right,’ he said. ‘It’s just paper.’

‘But it’s all in a mess.’

‘There’s no harm done,’ said the professor, who was crouching down to help me. ‘They weren’t in any particular order. It doesn’t matter how we pick them up, they won’t be any more random than they were before.’

‘I’m not usually that clumsy,’ I said. ‘I must be more nervous than I thought.’

‘That often happens before one does something one isn’t sure about,’ he said.

I glanced at him. He wasn’t looking at me.

‘After Elaine, my wife . . . after she was gone, I used to worry about things that never worried me before,’ he said.

I hoped he wasn’t going to become emotional and tell me everything. I was curious about his missing wife, but in a detached way. I did not want to become the professor’s confidante. Still he kept going.

‘It was completely unexpected, you know. She gave no indication that she was unhappy with me. I didn’t know, for some time, where she had gone. I didn’t know if she was alive or dead.’

‘How awful.’

‘I was so adrift. I wanted to drift away from everyone. But that was wrong. People need people, especially when their ties have been cut. It’s easy to feel that the pressure of their concern is unbearable when in fact it is the only thing holding you together.’

I nodded.

‘If you ever need anyone to talk to . . .’ he said.

‘Thanks, but I’m fine,’ I said.

The professor pushed his glasses back up his nose and there was an awkward silence.

Then he cleared his throat and passed me several pieces of paper, and our fingers touched. I didn’t mean to but I flinched. I pretended nothing had happened but sat back on my heels and turned my face away from him to gather the papers behind me.

The professor stood up and put his hands in his pockets, jingling his loose change.

‘Perhaps I’ll go and ask Jenny to put the kettle on,’ he said.

Oh God, I thought, I can’t go on like this.

It was all right though. He didn’t try to break through my defences again. By the time he returned with a lukewarm mug of tea for me that was so milky it was undrinkable, I had almost succeeded in losing myself in the life of Marian Rutherford, who on one sheet was a young woman exploring the town of Portiston and getting to know its inhabitants whose friendliness she found ‘intoxicating’ and on the next was in late middle age and working on her last book.

thirty-two

It didn’t take long for the story of my affair with the married Mr Parker to get round Portiston. It took a little longer for me to work out why conversations stopped when I walked into a shop and people suddenly became very interested in displays of envelopes or sink unblocker.

Mr Hensley told me, as we sat around the kitchen table eating our Sunday lunch in an atmosphere so strained and unhappy we could have been on Death Row, that prayers had been said for me at church. I was too humiliated to ask if I had been referred to by name. Even if the priest had been kind enough to spare me that particular punishment, everybody would have known whom he meant. Mum, who was building up to her own great confession, made it clear (although not in so many words) that she wished I’d never been born. My life was a straitjacket of shame and I could see no way out of it.

Then, to top things off, I had a letter from Georgie, who told me he was sorry but he wouldn’t be coming back to Portiston to work the ferry any more. He had been offered the role of bass guitarist with a promising new rock band. He wrote that he loved me and that he would never forget me and that one day he would write a song called ‘Ferry Girl’ in memory of the times we shared. I went down to the seafront and watched the ferry lights as it cut its course through the waves to the island and drank a bottle of sherry. Then I was sick on the pebbles with their tarry, seaweedy smell. I wondered why Georgie hadn’t asked me to join him; that would have solved all my problems. (It turned out that he was courting the band’s punky girl singer. They later married and lived happily ever after, which was nice for them but not so good for me at the time, given my situation.)

Some good things happened. I had a postcard from Lynnette which simply said:
Nothing matters very much and few things matter at all.

Anneli refused to bow to pressure from anyone to renounce me as a friend. I heard her hissing in the ear of one girl who had curled her lip at me, ‘You’re just jealous because no man will ever look at you.’ Anneli’s parents were nice too. Her dad gave me a (very paternal) hug and said, ‘Chin up, Liv, in a couple of weeks they’ll have somebody else to talk about. You’re just experiencing one of the downsides of living in a small, boring town.’

For some reason their forgiving kindness was harder to shoulder than other people’s cruelty.

In due course Mum received a letter from school. She and Mr Hensley made an appointment to see the head-teacher. I was spared the ordeal of being present at the interview, but had to wait on a seat in the corridor outside the head’s office. The head’s secretary was kind to me. She brought me out a glass of water and asked if I’d rather sit in her office than in the public corridor, beneath the smug boards listing the names of successful scholarship students. Lynnette’s name was on the boards in gilt letters twice, once for being Head Girl and once for winning a music prize. My name too had made it on to a school wall, only the wall was the lavatory wall and my name was written in permanent marker.

I declined the secretary’s offer. I thought it would be worse to be in her office, with her feeling sorry for me, than out in the corridor. The secretary’s eyes were so full of pity that I knew something serious was going to happen.

Little girls, eleven- and twelve-year-olds, filed past me in a navy-blue rush of giggles and whispers and scabby knees and sticky fingers and I tried to smile at them in a patronizing manner, like I was about to go in to the head’s office and get an award or something.

Eventually I was summoned. The office was huge. The mullioned window gave on to a rosebed outside and the smell of pig shit which the gardener had laid around the base of the plants hit me first. Light was streaming through the windows in oblongs and the air was cloudy with dust motes.

Mum had been crying. Her eyes and the rims of her nostrils were red. She was dabbing at her nose with a screwed-up handkerchief. Mr Hensley sat beside her, his face set like concrete, his stupid hairy ears sticking out of his stupid shiny head. On the other side of a great, old, wooden desk was the head. I’d hardly had any dealings with her close up, never having either excelled at anything or been particularly badly behaved in my time at Watersford Girls’ Grammar School. She was probably only in her fifties although, at the time, I regarded her as an old woman. The skin on her face and neck was soft and jowly. Her silver hair was set solid, like the hair of a woman in an oil painting. It moved as a unit, not as thousands of individuals. I can’t remember a word she said, but the long and short of it was that I was being expelled. Mr Parker, apparently, was close friends with the chairman of the governors. He had given a generous donation towards the construction of the new science block. My indiscretion was public knowledge and couldn’t be ignored, blah blah blah. Mum sniffed and swallowed bravely, Mr Hensley stared, the head asked me if I was ashamed of myself and I nodded.

I was only two terms away from the A levels that might have opened up some doors for me. The headmistress had indicated, kindly, that there might be a possibility of taking the exams as an external candidate if we could organize some private tuition, but I think we all knew that was not going to happen. My education was over.

On the drive back, while I sat hunched and tearful in the back of Mr Hensley’s beige Morris Minor (the scene of so much humiliation), Mum told me about Dad. She told me how his lasciviousness had destroyed her once and now I was following in his footsteps.

‘You mean my dad is still alive?’ I asked, shocked and incredulous.

‘I have no idea,’ she said. ‘And no wish to find out.’

‘You had no right to tell us he was dead!’

Mr Hensley turned round and said, ‘Don’t you speak to your mother in that tone of voice.’

Mum stared straight ahead. ‘I knew you were going to turn out bad right from the beginning,’ she said. ‘You were such a difficult baby, such a fractious child.’

I wasn’t listening any more. I leaned my head against the window and watched the leaves of the bushes go by and I swallowed all the questions that were bubbling up from my stomach and decided that I would go and live with Dad. There was absolutely no reason for me to stay in Portiston any longer. There was nothing to keep me.

I never heard from or saw any of the Parkers again. Somebody told me they went to live in Edinburgh.

thirty-three

I went to the café to wait for my taxi.

‘Going anywhere nice?’ asked the bodybuilder chef. I only had a small bag with me but I kept checking my handbag for the ticket receipt and my passport.

‘I’m going to Ireland for the weekend.’

He put my coffee down on the table and scratched behind his ear with his pencil.

‘A dirty weekend?’

I smiled. ‘No, nothing like that.’

‘But you’re going with the brother-in-law?’

I looked up at him. There was nothing judgemental in his expression, no malice. He was just asking what he thought was an obvious question. I looked away and stirred my coffee. It smelled divine.

‘None of my business,’ he said. ‘Just that you’re not the sort of woman who deserves to be waiting for a taxi on her own.’

‘It’s complicated,’ I said.

‘It always is.’

I concentrated on the consuming task of sugaring my coffee, and a few moments later the chef returned with a little slice of perfect treacle tart. He set it in front of me like a gift, together with a pastry fork and a napkin. I felt at home.

‘Can I sit down for a moment?’ he asked.

‘Of course.’

‘Mind if I smoke?’

‘No.’

He retrieved his roll-up from behind his ear and struggled to light it, his hands cupped round it, striking the flint of the disposable lighter again and again. When it caught, he inhaled gratefully and I inhaled the scent of the tobacco, as familiar to me as the smell of my own shampoo.

‘My husband used to smoke roll-ups,’ I said.

The chef raised an eyebrow. ‘Filthy bloody habit,’ he said.

‘He died,’ I said.

‘Of smoking?’

‘No, no. It was a motorway crash.’

‘Shit. I’m sorry. Life’s a bastard, isn’t it?’

‘Sometimes.’

‘So whereabouts in Ireland are you going?’