The Forever Girl (21 page)

She would be gentle. She wanted to say:
don’t worry
. Unrequited love was painful to begin with, but the passage of time dulled the pain – it always did. “The Greek legends have a fair dose of that.”

Clover’s voice was even. “Unrequited love?”

“Yes. Greek mythology may be full of instances of the revenge
and pettiness we were talking about, but it also involved profound insights into the human condition – of which unrequited love is just one feature. Echo and Narcissus – remember?”

“Vaguely. She fell in love with him and he …”

“He was too preoccupied with himself to return her love. He gazed at his reflection constantly and eventually wasted away. As did she. All that was left of him was a flower by the water’s edge, and of her a sound. That was it.”

Clover was silent for a while. In their art class they had looked at a Pre-Raphaelite picture of Echo and Narcissus, with Echo watching Narcissus crouching by his pool, gazing at his reflection. It was a perfect depiction of what it was to be cut out of somebody’s life.

Miss Hardy was smiling. “Would you mind if I said something critical of your generation?”

“Why should we mind criticism? We criticise people who are older than us. All the time …” She grinned.

“Oh, we know that,” said Miss Hardy. “Any teacher who isn’t aware of what is said about us must have her ears closed.”

Clover waited.

“This is nothing personal,” said Miss Hardy. “I’m not talking about the boys in this school.”

“Of course not.”

“It’s a difficult thing to explain, but there are those who say that young men these days have been encouraged into narcissism. They’ve been presented with images of themselves that are essentially narcissistic. All those brooding pictures of members of boy bands sucking in their cheeks to make themselves look more intense. What’s the message there? Be cool. Don’t express your feelings. Gaze at yourself and your image … The problem
is that this doesn’t leave them much time – or emotional energy – for other people.”

“Maybe …”

“Of course I overstate it a bit, but then you have to overstate some things if you’re to see them in the first place. But there’s a rather odd consequence to all this, I think.”

“Which is?”

“It can leave the girls out of it. You end up with a lot of self-obsessed young men, all trying to fulfil the cultural expectation of the detached, moody young hero, and lo and behold, these young men don’t have much time for the girls.”

“But they do!”

Miss Hardy conceded. “For some things, yes. Disengaged sex, maybe. But not for others.” She hesitated before continuing. “I think that’s probably enough of that. You can make too much of a theory.”

“It’s an interesting one.”

“You think so?”

“Yes, I do.”

The teacher considered this. Then she said, “I suppose we can speak pretty frankly. You’re about to leave this place, to go out into the world, and I don’t have to treat you as a child any more. May I ask you one further thing?”

She waited for Clover to nod before she continued. “I get the strong impression that you’ve already been in love with somebody and that it hasn’t worked out. I don’t want to pry, and you don’t have to speak about it if you don’t want to.”

Clover looked past Miss Hardy, out through the window behind the teacher’s desk. The hills – gentle in that part of Perthshire – rose off towards the north; an attenuated blue now
in the warmth of summer. She felt, more sharply now, the pang of regret that had first touched her a few weeks ago when she realised that she was shortly to leave a place where she had been happy. “I don’t mind speaking about it. It’s all right now.”

“You’re getting over it?”

“Yes, I think so. I’m forgetting him. That’s what you have to do, isn’t it?”

Miss Hardy sighed. “That’s the conventional wisdom. And I suppose there’s some truth in the conventional wisdom – there usually is. But it’s not always entirely true. I’m not sure that you should forget entirely, because what you’re forgetting may be something really rather important to you. Something precious.”

It occurred to Clover that the teacher was talking about herself. “You didn’t get married, did you?”

“I did.”

“But your name … Miss …”

The teacher shook her head. “Don’t go by names. I was married for three years. Just for three years – my fault as much as his, but I didn’t want it to end. When it came apart, I went back to my own name. I’d been Miss Hardy, and I went back to that. My
nom de guerre
, so to speak – not that the classroom is a battleground.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Divorce happens. I hope it doesn’t happen to you, but it happens.”

“You said that we shouldn’t forget.”

“No, I didn’t say that. I think that we need to forget a certain amount – just to be able to keep going – but we shouldn’t forget everything. I suppose it’s a question of forgetting to the extent that you don’t think about it too much. But keep some of the
memory, because it’s part of what … of what you’ve had.”

Clover’s gaze returned from the window. “But if you keep thinking about …”

Miss Hardy interrupted her. “You don’t have to keep thinking about him. You change the way you think about him – that way he won’t dominate your life. What do they call it now? Moving on. I’ve always thought that a resounding cliché, but I suppose it has its uses, like any resounding cliché. Move on.”

“I have. Or at least I think I have.”

Miss Hardy looked relieved. “It’s not easy to forget something, is it? But let’s talk about university now. Where are you going?”

“Edinburgh. History of Art.”

“Good. Where I was.” She paused, and then added, with contrived wistfulness, “That’s where I met him.”

They both smiled.

23

“Colours,” she said to a friend, much later. “That’s how I remember the stages of my life – by the colours.”

She had to explain. “I began in the Cayman Islands. The colours there were Caribbean – very intense.”

“Blue?”

“Yes, of course. That was the sea. Blue or turquoise, depending on the depth. Deep sea was deep blue, like that intense blue ink. You don’t find it elsewhere, I think. Or if you do, I’ve never seen it. But it wasn’t just that blue. There was another blue that people liked – a much lighter shade that they used to paint houses. That and pink. They loved pink too. They were pastel shades, I suppose.”

“I can see them. Houses with blue window-frames and doors.”

“Exactly. Those were the colours I grew up with. And then suddenly I was in Scotland and …”

“The colours were very different.”

“Yes. Everything was gentler. There were no bright colours – just those soft greens and purples and, yes, white. There are lots of whites in Scotland. White in the sky and in the rain. Sometimes even the water seems white, you know. You look at a loch and the surface of the water seems white. White or silver, like a mirror.”

“And grey.”

“Yes, there is plenty of grey in Scotland. The buildings are made of grey stone – granite and so on – and they’re grey. Hard and grey, though some of them are made of a different sort of stone. It’s the colour of honey, actually; sometimes even almost red.”

Honey-coloured … She looked up at the building that was to be her home during the university terms. The stone used for the four-floored tenement building was of just that stone. It was far softer than granite and had weathered here and there, softened at the edges, where the action of rain and wind had made its impression. The flat was on the top floor, tucked under the slate roof, reached by a shared stone stairway with a curving, ornate ironwork banister. The overall impression was one of nineteenth-century confidence and solidity. Stone was the right medium for that; stone was the expression of the values that lay behind these buildings; solid; designed to last for hundreds of years; crafted so as to allow the living out of whole lives within thick walls.

The flat belonged to a friend from school, Ella, who was starting at Edinburgh at the same time as Clover was. Or rather, it belonged to Ella’s parents, who had bought it a few years earlier for their son, who had studied engineering at Edinburgh. The son had graduated and left for a job in Bristol, but the flat had been kept on for his sister. Ella had offered Clover a room, and had then let another by placing an advertisement in the student paper.

“I have no idea what she’s like,” she said to Clover. “I tactfully asked for a photograph, but she ignored my request.”

“Why would one want a flatmate’s photograph?” asked Clover.

Ella had looked embarrassed. “You never know.”

“You mean that you want to make sure that you’re not taking on a serial killer?”

Ella nodded. “Something like that. Don’t you think that you can tell what somebody’s like from their photograph?”

Clover was not sure. “Maybe. Maybe not. Some people look unpleasant but aren’t really – not when you meet them.”

“It depends on what you mean by unpleasant. I think I’d pay attention to what her hair looked like. And her make-up.”

“Really?”

“If she was caked in make-up – you know, bags of mascara, and so on, then you’d think: this one’s not going to be easy to live with.”

“Why would you think that?”

Ella hesitated. “She’d hog the bathroom. We wouldn’t get near a mirror.”

They had laughed. And when Karen, the other flatmate, arrived – after Clover had moved into her room – they had been relieved to see that she was, outwardly at least, quite normal.

“You didn’t send a photograph,” said Ella. “But I assume it’s you.”

Karen looked blank. “Photograph?”

“I suggested that you should send a photograph – when you got in touch first. Remember?”

“No. I don’t. I can give you one now, if you like.”

“No, now we can see you. We don’t need a photograph.”

Karen later said to Clover: “Why did she want a photograph? Did you send her one before you got the room?”

“I didn’t need to. We’ve known one another for ages. I was at school with her, you see.”

“But why did she want one of me?”

“To check up.”

“Why? What can you tell from a photograph?”

“Lots of things – or that’s what Ella thinks.”

The photograph was forgotten about; they liked Karen, who came from Glasgow and brought an entirely different perspective with her. “Glasgow,” said Ella, “could be on the moon, you know.
It’s that different.”

Karen had the room at the front – a room that looked out onto the street four floors below – while Ella and Clover each had a room overlooking the drying green behind the building. This was effectively a great courtyard serving the line of buildings on every side and divided, like a medieval field, into small sections, each allocated to a different flat. In places the boundaries between these postage stamps of garden were marked with low fences, barely knee-height; elsewhere the owners had long since abandoned any attempt to distinguish their property from that of their neighbours and grass – and weeds – ran riot across human divisions. Cats, too, observed their territorial arrangements across the face of the map of human ownership, moving around any contested space on top of such stone walls as could be found, or surveying the green from windowsills or doorways.

It was Clover’s first room. She did not count her room at home – mothers or younger brothers can enter your room at home with impunity – nor did she count the single room that she had eventually been given at school; that had been meant to be private, but never really was. Now she had somewhere that was at her complete disposal. She was paying rent for this and it was hers.

She stood in front of her window and looked down onto the green below. A woman in blue slacks, presumably one of the neighbours, was tending a small bed of discouraged-looking flowers; a pigeon, alighted on a branch of the single tree in the corner, was puffing up its breast in a display of bravado; the sky, a patch of blue above the surrounding rooftops, was enjoying one of its rare cloud-free moments. Greys. Greens. Light, almost
whitened blue.

She thought about her mother. She would take a photograph and send it to her; she had asked for that. She looked at her watch; her mother would be up by now and might be having her morning swim in the pool. Or she might already have started a game of tennis at the club. She would not change places with her. Cayman, for all its colours, was boring, she thought. Money, money, money. Tennis. Parties. Gossip. And after that there was nothing, but the same all over again.

She smiled to herself, savouring the sheer joy of freedom. For the first time in her life – the very first – there was nobody to tell her what to do. If she wished, she could stay in this room all day. She could lie on her bed and page through magazines. She could drink as many cups of coffee as she liked. The course was due to start the following day with both morning and afternoon being given over to orientation. It was an odd word to use, she thought, and she imagined for a moment a group of confused and uncertain students standing in a room and being gently turned by assistants so that they faced north or south or whatever direction the authorities thought best. She smiled again.

Then lectures were to start the day after that, after everybody had recovered from the orientation party that she had already seen advertised.
Half-price drinks
, announced a poster, and underneath, somebody, presumably with experience of student parties, had written
Full-price hangover
.

She had already investigated the departmental offices in a restored Georgian house on one side of a square of such houses and had found out where the first lecture would be held. That first lecture would be at ten, she had been told, and since a large crowd was expected she should get there early.

“Some people sit on the steps,” said one of the secretaries disapprovingly. “We don’t encourage it, but if there are no seats, then there really is no alternative.”

She went to the orientation party, which was solely for those enrolled on the art history course – almost three hundred and twenty students. The secretary who had advised her about sitting on the steps was there, standing at the entrance, at the same time giving the impression of being both disapproving and hesitant, as if undecided as to whether to join the party. “There are far too many people for this room,” she said to Clover as she arrived. “I tell them every year to get a bigger room, but they ignore me. They just ignore me.”