Canvey Island (12 page)

He didn't say much at first but I could tell he was a bit different. He wasn't one of those men who try to make an impression and only say things hoping it might lead to a knickers-off situation. I talked to him about my childhood and my parents, of family holidays camping in church grounds throughout Europe and my mother's relentless baking and charity work. I joked about my father's homemade wine (carrot and blackberry, raspberry and juniper) and how he made so many speeches that he was known throughout the village as ‘the pop-up toaster'.

I told him of the pressure I felt in being the eldest child with a musical talent everyone kept telling me not to waste. There wasn't much chance of that given the fact that I played in two orchestras and we put on a charity concert at home every summer. Dad played the cello and my mother the viola so I think one of their chief aims in having children was to produce a string quintet rather than a family.

I couldn't help noticing how intrigued Martin was by my upbringing. As soon as I talked about my brother or my twin sisters he stopped and asked more questions. I think he couldn't imagine what living with siblings could ever be like.

He spoke about his mother and his earliest memories: of her stooping down to kiss him goodnight or turning in the light of the doorway. He told me how she would open her handbag at the door and give him a penny for the church collection, money that he always resented giving away because he could have spent it on sweets. He had to make up for it by gathering up lemonade bottles left by day-trippers on the beach and collecting the deposits from the store at the corner.

He remembered his father getting ready to go to the football or going out for a pint in the evenings, putting on his coat and hat, checking for his keys and mumbling that in the past he had never had to lock a door. Sometimes, he said, he felt his father had lived for ever and his mother never at all.

He confessed, after teasing, that he had had a girlfriend but that it was over. I don't think it was that serious. Then he said he didn't like to talk about Linda too much and that, besides, we shouldn't let the past ruin the future.

Martin wasn't conventionally good-looking and, as I say, I never
meant to fall in love with him. My mother had always insisted that the chief purpose of my time at Cambridge was to get me to respond to the charms of a lawyer or a doctor, someone with prospects so that I'd be set up with a clever man and a good income for life. I think she didn't want me to end up with a clergyman as she had done.

‘I'm not saying you should marry for money,' she argued, ‘but it can't do any harm if you go where the rich go and fall in love.'

Of course there were plenty of public-school lawyers and doctors to choose from, and I had my fair share of admirers, but I preferred Martin's shyness and his quiet certainties. As we spoke I felt I had met someone who understood that one could be ethically as well as professionally ambitious, that life wasn't only about earning a living and going to parties. When we walked side by side on the march I didn't need to make the effort that I did with other people. I didn't have to present myself as an attractive and amusing girl who was clever without being intimidating, or eccentric without being loopy. It was safe to be myself and that, at the time, was the closest thing I knew to love.

Despite the spring sunlight, magnolia trees blooming all over suburbia and the first daffodils in the parks, it was far colder on the march than I had expected. I was wearing a brown suede fringed jacket, a yellow tie-dyed T-shirt and a dark-orange mini skirt that I'd made from material I'd picked up at the market for four and six. But as soon as we were out of the sunlight and into the shade I started to shiver and wished I had brought something warmer. Already I could hear my mother's voice chastening me: ‘Is that all you're wearing?'

We had tea with Quakers and slept on vicarage floors with people my father had known at theological college. There were protesters from India, Cyprus, Sweden, but the people shouting at us in the streets thought we all came from the same place.

‘Piss off back to Russia. Go on. Piss off.'

My mother had written me a serious letter, saying that although she approved of peace I should be concentrating on my studies rather than walking halfway across England in a blouse that was far too thin. She also worried that I might take my violin on the march (it had belonged to my grandfather) and that it might be damaged.
Didn't I know how much her father had loved that instrument? She was anxious that I was not working for my exams. She was concerned that I was getting what she called ‘too emotional'. And she fretted about where I was going to sleep. I had to be careful of men, she wrote, especially musicians and men with beards. She said they were both oversexed. I replied that we were going to be too tired for any of that and in any case we spent most of our time rubbing methylated spirits into our feet to stop them getting sore.

I think my parents resented the freedom and the independence of youth without war. Every time I told them about CND or student politics, and how we were campaigning for an optimistic and peaceful future, they would smile sadly, hoping I might be right, and that a better world, a second Eden, could be created if only people had the will to make sacrifices for it. And yet the look in their eyes as they smiled at me showed that they never quite believed it to be possible. They had seen too much of human nature, too much suffering, disappointment and violence.

But I still kept on at them, convinced they had given up too soon, and still they smiled indulgently, furrowing their brows in the way mothers and fathers do when they look at their children, with love and sadness, hoping we might be able to correct the errors that they made when they were young themselves; so that they could live on through their offspring rather than the memory of their own past.

I told them how my generation believed we could change the world, rebuilding its virtues and its decency after so much bloodshed; and if we could not do so then, at the very least, we would make a difference.

Martin and I would not be like them. We would leave an imprint of goodness.

Whereas Linda's clothes were always tight to her body Claire's seemed to float and unfurl around her. She had shoulder-length auburn hair and when it had been newly washed it was allowed to fall freely back over scarves, cardigans, blouses and jewellery. She told me that it had once fallen as far as her thighs and her mother had never forgiven her for cutting it. Everything about her was in movement, not only her hair but also her clothes, in layers of deep russet, burnt orange and dark ochre, stretching down to the knee-high boots she always wore for cycling through Cambridge.

Claire wouldn't eat meat, she gave money away, and she appeared to know instinctively what was right and what was not. That was why I fell in love with her, I suppose: her energy and her confident optimism, her determined attack on life, her refusal ever to accept the word no.

She shared a house with three other girls in Portugal Place and her room was a mass of books, music and manuscript paper. There were shawls and tie-dyed drapes over the chairs; there was a sewing machine and material from the market to make new clothes; and her jewellery was arranged like a series of still lifes. Necklaces dangled from picture hooks; one of miniature mussels and pearls, another threaded squares of orange and brown plastic in differing sizes, a third consisting of scallops of burgundy glass.

A wide-brimmed black felt hat hung on the music stand. On the walls were photographs of her family on a corkboard, and posters
that had come from Italy: a Botticelli, a Raphael and a Masaccio. Studded around them were CND badges, postcards from friends, the timetable of her lectures and tutorials.

Each morning she made a careful selection of jewellery to match the colour and fall of her clothes: ethnic wooden bangles, beads and a bracelet made out of dried flowers and melon pips.

At the weekends we went for long walks over Coe Fen past the old Sheep's Green bathing sheds and out towards Grantchester. Claire told me of family holidays in France by the sea and the remembered sounds of late summer; the returning tide, a child practising the piano, the shouts of her brother and sisters as they pulled canoes ashore with their father.

We liked to get out of Cambridge and find ourselves out in the flat lands under immense skies, by river and fen, amidst the frosts and snows of winter. We walked past isolated windmills into the emptiness of old tracks and forgotten streams: Fleam Dyke and Fen Ditton, Upware and Wicken Lode. I told her about the land of my childhood and the way the landscape had been formed: reclaimed, unstable, and yet prepared, at any moment, for the waters to return. Claire said that she had been in Florence just after the floods of sixty-six and it had been the first time she had realised that water could be as dangerous as fire.

I persuaded Claire to play the violin: airs, jigs and English folk songs, pieces of Bach and Haydn. She told me that she didn't like me listening; she preferred to play on her own. It was a kind of prayer, she said. The music had a completeness that made her feel restored, as if there was one part of her life, however small, that could always be healed.

We were careful with each other and we didn't force things because we didn't want to endanger what we already had. Claire never came to Canvey and I never went to her home in Oxfordshire. I think we were frightened of what our friends might think. I certainly couldn't see her going down the pub with Ade or Dave, sitting in the Labworth Café or spending a Saturday night down at the Monico.

But as graduation approached we knew that if we were going to continue we should at least look for jobs in the same part of the country. We should also meet each other's families, however
alarming that might sound. I told Claire that as long as she was with me I wouldn't be frightened at all.

‘In that case,' she replied, ‘we'll start with my parents …'

‘When I said I wasn't frightened …'

‘My father's a vicar, for God's sake. He's not going to bite.'

‘But what if he disapproves?'

‘He can't. I won't let him. Besides, it's my mother you want to worry about …'

The family home was an extended Georgian rectory by a tributary of the Thames near Farringdon. An English sheepdog was asleep by the back door but sprung to life as soon as we arrived. Across the drive Claire's father was tinkering with his motorbike.

‘Ah, here you both are. “Do the elm clumps greatly stand, still guardians of that holy land?” '

‘Daddy.'

‘Rupert Brooke. Lovely to see you with your golden hair down, my darling.' He turned to me. ‘Don't you think she looks like a Burne-Jones? Or possibly a Rossetti? You must be …'

‘I'm Martin.'

‘Ah yes, Martin. Am I allowed to use the word “boyfriend”? Good to meet you. I would shake hands but, as you can see …' He waved an oily hand at his motorbike. ‘Bonnie's been overheating. My wife's in the kitchen. Perhaps you'd like to go for a spin when it's fixed?'

‘I'd be honoured.'

‘Honoured, eh? You have been brought up well.'

The house smelt of baking and old dog, of sherry, furniture polish and fading freesias. There were photographs in silver frames, oil paintings with their own overhead lights, and copies of
Country Life
mingling with the
Church Times
. Claire's mother was baking scones for tea. The heat of the day made her appear flushed and it was clear that we had arrived sooner than she had anticipated.

‘I thought I said supper?'

‘Do you want us to go away again, Mummy?'

‘No, of course not. I just haven't got enough hands.'

She told us that the twins were playing tennis with friends down the road and that ‘Jonno' was at a cricket match. I was shown to my
room, which was located as far from Claire's as possible, and told I might want to ‘wash and brush up'.

‘Well, he looks all right,' I heard Mrs Southey pronounce. ‘Quite presentable. Although his voice is a bit quiet …'

‘He's nervous …'

‘He's not fussy, is he? He's not going to want roast beef and Yorkshire pudding?'

‘No, Mummy, Martin's lovely. You'll see.'

‘I think I'll be the judge of that.'

My room was painted Wedgwood blue, with prints of Cambridge on the walls and a standard lamp that had been made from an old rowing oar. I opened the window and looked out over the garden with its smooth lawn, its separate areas for roses, vegetables, herbs and even a netted section for fruit in the fullness of summer.

When I came downstairs I was offered elderflower cordial and we sat in the garden where Claire's parents asked me polite questions about my prospects. They weren't particularly interested in any of my answers until her father discovered that I was reading engineering. He asked me if I knew anything about mechanics because his motorbike was still playing up and he thought it needed a new rocker arm.

‘It's a twin-cylinder sixty-horsepower screamer, Martin. Goes like the wind. Terrifies the parishioners.'

Claire's mother lit a cigarette. ‘Sometimes my husband thinks he's Lawrence of Arabia. I only hope he doesn't come to the same end.'

We were interrupted by the girls coming back from their tennis. They were laughing about their partners, and as soon as they started on the news of the day it became clear that the family felt most at home when speaking to each other in some kind of code. At times it consisted entirely of acronyms and Claire had to provide a whispered running commentary. Amanda said that Victoria's partner was NSIT (‘not safe in taxis') but at least he was RGL (‘reasonably good-looking') whereas her current admirer was simply NPA (‘not physically attractive') and it would have to be a PBJ (‘paper-bag job') if there was going to be any progress.