Authors: Jim Powell
‘Three As.’
‘Why aren’t you going to Oxford?’ I ask. ‘Or to Cambridge?’
Anna smiles, a little sadly. ‘I wanted to go to Oxford,’ she says.
‘And?’
‘And I didn’t get in.’
‘I would have got in with those results. Why didn’t you?’
‘How thick are you? It’s not so easy for girls.’
‘Oh,’ I say. Such an obvious answer to my question, and it has not occurred to me. With Anna, of all people. And the audition seems to have been going so well until now.
Anna reaches out a hand and rubs my arm. ‘Sorry,’ she says. ‘If people like you don’t get it, what hope is there?’
‘I’m sorry too.’
‘Don’t be. You’ll learn. It’s the way things are. Until we get round to changing them. My mother thinks the same way as you, if that’s any comfort.’
‘Not much. What does she think?’
‘The same as they all think round here. I hate everything about the place, all the comfortable middle-class assumptions, all the predictable expectations. That’s why I like coming
here. My mother’s done nothing with her life except have children and watch them grow up. And now we have grown up, or nearly, she raises shrubs instead.’
‘What sort of shrubs?’
‘Azaleas mostly. And don’t be facetious. She thinks it’s a waste of time for me to go to university. She thinks I should be finding some nice young man and producing
babies.’
‘I’m a nice young man.’
‘No you’re not. If you were, I wouldn’t have brought you here.’
She changes position, rests her head on my tummy, lets me stroke her hair.
‘What are you going to do after university?’ she asks.
‘I don’t know. I only know the things I’m not going to do.’
‘Which are?’
‘I’m never going to work in an office. I’m never going to wear a suit and tie.’
‘You will,’ says Anna. ‘Everybody does.’
‘I shall be different.’
‘We’ll all be different. And we shall all be the same.’
‘Don’t talk in riddles.’
‘Life’s a riddle. Life is based on paradox. Haven’t you discovered that?’
‘Not yet.’
‘Everything becomes its opposite,’ says Anna. ‘So the more we try and change the world, the more it will become what we don’t want it to become. It’s
inevitable.’
She adjusts her position again, slightly brushing against my crotch as she sits up. She must have realized. I wonder whether she has done it on purpose.
‘Can I tell you something?’ I ask.
‘I’d rather you didn’t.’
‘You don’t know what I want to tell you.’
‘Yes I do. It’s what everyone wants to tell me. Please don’t, Matthew.’
‘Don’t you want to be in love?’
Anna smiles. ‘Later, perhaps. Maybe love will come later. And babies. I’m only just nineteen, for goodness’ sake.’
‘Me too.’
‘When was your birthday?’
‘Mid-May.’
‘Bad luck,’ says Anna.
‘Why?’
‘If you’d held on another few days, you’d have been a Gemini.’
‘Is that good?’
‘I’d say so. I may be biased.’
‘What am I?’
‘Taurus. The bull.’
‘What are they like?’
‘Boring. Plodding. Monosyllabic.’
‘Thanks.’
‘Stubborn. Direct. Stuck in the mud.’
‘Sounds like me. What are Geminis like?’
‘Bright, clever, creative, charming, witty, original, modest.’
‘You could have fooled me.’
‘And completely unreliable,’ says Anna.
‘Really?’
‘You’ll discover.’
We are half sitting up now, resting on our elbows, looking at each other. I move my head slowly towards her, my lips slowly towards hers. Anna puts up a hand, ruffles my hair, stops my head from
moving any further.
‘Not now,’ she says.
‘Why not?’
‘Because.’
‘When?’
She takes the flower from an oxeye daisy, picks off its petals in slow motion.
‘Sometime, it would appear.’ She has also removed two petals at once, and that may have been deliberate too.
We turn and rest on our backs again. I wonder if it’s time to go. A wood pigeon presses across an infinite blueness, wings creaking, on an urgent mission. Wood pigeons always have an
urgent mission. In another corner of the sky, two crows flap lazily. I think I’d rather be a crow. Anna is in no hurry to leave, and I could stay for ever. I light two cigarettes and pass her
one.
‘Do you really like France?’ she asks.
‘I love it.’
‘How well do you know it?’
‘I’ve been there a few times,’ I say. ‘With my parents. To Paris, a couple of times. And driving down small country roads. I don’t know. I can’t really
explain it. I feel completely at home there.’
‘So do I. I should have been born there.’
‘Me too.’
‘What do you most like about it?’ asks Anna.
‘Frogs’ legs and snails.’
‘I like the war graves. And Père Lachaise. And seats on the Metro reserved for
les mutilés de guerre
.’
Anna’s thoughts seem to turn naturally to war and death. A stunning beauty, a lively mind, a dry humour. And always the melancholy. I wonder if it is part of what attracts me to her, if
it’s something I have already sensed in the distance at the dance. If what I want is not only to have the chance of loving her, but the chance of taking her sadness away.
‘I’d like to be in France right now,’ I say. ‘With you,’ I add, in case I am misunderstood.
‘I’m going next week,’ says Anna. ‘On Friday.
Le quatorze juillet
. Appropriate, don’t you think?’
‘On your own?’
‘No, with a friend.’ My face must have betrayed my thoughts. It always does. ‘A girl friend,’ says Anna. She smiles.
‘Where are you going?’
‘I don’t know. We’re starting off in Paris. Sally’s never been. I expect we’ll do the Eiffel Tower and the Louvre. All the usual things. After that, I don’t
know. We’re going by train. Sally’s idea is to get off at every place that begins with a P and see what happens.’
‘So she’s mad too.’
‘As a hatter. That’s why we’re friends.’
‘It could be a long holiday.’
‘Six weeks,’ says Anna. ‘We’ll probably end up on the Riviera. Monte Carlo perhaps.’
‘That doesn’t begin with a P.’
‘Pedant does. Perhaps we’ll find ourselves a couple of millionaires. I wouldn’t mind a sugar daddy.’
‘Why? Apart from the obvious reason?’
‘Virginia Woolf reached the conclusion that an independent woman needed an annual income of five hundred and a room of her own. That was in 1929. It’s gone up quite a lot since
then.’
‘Are you planning to write?’
‘Not especially. But I am planning to be independent. Any job I’m likely to want after university won’t pay much more than five hundred a year. So I’m considering other
options.’
‘Like being a kept woman.’
‘There’s a lot to be said for it. For prostitution too.’
‘Anna!’
She expands on her theme. I don’t know whether she is being serious. I think she enjoys developing an intellectual argument for its own sake, the more shocking the better. Distasteful
though it is, I can nearly imagine her as a prostitute, or a courtesan perhaps. Maybe it’s the detachment again. I’ve heard it said that men can naturally separate sex from love, that
women can’t. In our case, the generalization doesn’t seem to apply. I think that Anna can probably separate the two quite easily. I haven’t yet discovered that I can.
‘You’ll need a pimp,’ I say.
‘Are you volunteering?’
‘For a percentage I might.’
‘Of my earnings? Or of me?’
‘Of you, of course.’
‘It’s nice to meet a real romantic. I’m surrounded by mercenaries.’
‘What are you really going to do?’
‘Oh, publishing, I expect. I’m already a slave to the written word. Might as well go on being one.’
‘I like writing,’ I say. ‘I write poems.’
‘What about?’
All sorts of things. Life. I might write a poem about you.’
‘Don’t,’ says Anna. ‘Wait a bit.’
‘Why?’
‘Wait a bit.’
We don’t say anything for a while. A money spider is inching down my arm. We both watch it crawl.
‘Anna, where do you think you’ll be in fifty years’ time?’
She pauses to think, is then quite definite. ‘I will be living in a small rented cottage in Dorset, drawing my pension, digging my vegetable patch, keeping chickens, and writing to the
newspapers about the decline of the modern novel. What will you be doing?’
‘Coming to visit you,’ I say. ‘And suggesting it’s about time we had an affair, before we’re both too senile.’
‘I might say yes.’
‘You mean I’ve got to wait that long?’
‘At least. Of course, you could always come with me to France next week.’
‘What’s on offer?’
‘Scintillating company.’
‘What else?’
‘Isn’t that enough?’
‘I can’t,’ I say. ‘I’d love to, but I can’t.’
‘Why not?’
‘No money.’
‘That’s a poor excuse. Don’t be so unimaginative. Come to France. You’ll regret it if you don’t.’
I wonder if I will regret it and decide I won’t. It’s not as if I’ll never see Anna again. Whatever is meant to happen between us will happen in its own time. It’s true
that I don’t have any money. It’s also true that I don’t want to be sharing Anna with anyone, even a girl friend. I calculate my chances of persuading Anna to ditch Sally and
conclude that they are zero.
‘I’m really sorry. I just can’t do it.’
‘If anything is ever going to happen between us,’ says Anna, ‘it will need to be spontaneous. It won’t happen any other way.’
‘I’ll work on my spontaneity,’ I say. ‘When do you get back?’
‘End of August.’
‘Shall I call you then?’
‘I’ll expect nothing less.’ She gives me her number, and her address for good measure.
We get to our feet, pause for a moment, hug for a long time, serenaded by Procul Harum and ‘A Whiter Shade of Pale’. Another snapshot in the album of memory. When I drive back to
London that evening, I am in tears.
I telephone Anna, as arranged, after she has returned from her holiday, and I speak to her mother. She goes to fetch Anna, returns to say that Anna must have gone out. I say I will call back
later. I call a few days later, and again speak to Anna’s mother. Anna is not very well at the moment. I leave my number for Anna to call me, if she feels like it, and hear nothing.
In early October, I speak to her. She answers the telephone herself, so there is no avoiding me. She can’t talk for long, she says, because she is off to Exeter the next day. Yes, she is
better now, thank you. She sounds like a stranger. My suggestion that we might meet up in the Christmas holidays is met with indifference. The unmistakeable message, whatever lies behind it, is
that Anna Purdue has no interest in seeing me again.
That autumn, I write a poem that I like and I send it to her. It isn’t anything as obvious as a love poem. I hope I’ve learned something.
I hear nothing back.
I looked again at Anna’s note, and decided not to go into her cottage, at least for the moment. I knew I might not be able to resist, but the thought troubled me.
Instead, I beat the bounds of her small estate.
What must have been a modest garden originally had been extended into the corner of a neighbouring field. Apart from a small bed near the house, and roses growing up the walls, there were no
flowers. This was a vegetable kingdom. Beds hemmed by ware boards marched in precise formation over the ground, rows of vegetables drilled with precision into the soil. Behind a tall hedge, the
hens were scratching away in an enclosure reminiscent of Stalag Luft III. There were seventeen of them the first time I counted. After that, it varied.
What brings us to where we are? What had taken me from a semi-detached in Lewisham, to the students’ bar at Southampton University, to living in a posh house in Barnet, to being a sharp
suit in the City? What had taken me from being a sharp suit in the City to standing outside an empty cottage in the fields of Somerset, an exhausted wreck? And what had brought Anna here? What had
taken her from the comfort of the Home Counties, from her books and a university degree, from sociability and love, to this degree of isolation? Where would life now take either of us? This seemed
so solid, as solid as my job had once seemed. But it was as provisional as everything else, dust to dust and ashes to ashes, a smear of permanence across a window pane that looked out on
nothing.
In the cottage might lie some clues as to Anna’s journey. Yet I felt that I would be searching for them under false pretences. I had spent hours, and not only recently, wondering what had
become of her, where life had taken her, whether she was married and had children, whether she was happy, as happy as she would have been with me. Trustingly, she had left her door open to
strangers, and to this stranger. But I was not a stranger, and the life I would be exploring within would not be the life of another stranger. Would Anna have left the door unlocked if she had
known that? Would she have invited me in? Would she have asked me here at all? The speculation was pointless. Nothing would prevent me from entering the cottage now. I had been issued with an
invitation and I would accept.
I had expected her home to reflect its agrarian surroundings. It looked tiny from the outside, perhaps with no more than a single bedroom. I thought it would be rough and primitive, with
smoke-stained recesses and dark walls, a womb of a dwelling. I was wrong about that. Outside was Somerset. Inside was Camden Town, a small pied-à-terre in Camden Town circa 1980. The parlour
and kitchen had been knocked through, so that one large space consumed the ground floor. The walls were white; the floorboards sanded and bleached, with pale rugs lying across them. A small
wood-burning stove stood where a larger fireplace had once been. The walls were covered with bookshelves, each bookshelf filled with paperbacks. Old paperbacks, mostly. Old novels with orange
Penguin spines. On a separate shelf, as if not to contaminate the rest, was a selection of more recent novels. Enough to support a letter to the
Guardian
on the decline of the modern
novel.