The Forever Girl (28 page)

He was solicitous – he always was – but she turned down his offer to accompany her home and left by herself. The street outside was filled with rugby supporters. Some of the Scottish fans, draped in tartan, were singing a song about ancient wrongs; she avoided them and went down a quieter side street. She stopped and looked in a shop window – the first shop window she came to. There was camping gear on display, and outdoor clothing too. There was a large picture of a young man and woman standing on top of a Scottish mountain, a cairn of stones by their side. She looked at them, and at their smiles. She turned away and began to walk down the street again. She felt the tears in her eyes, and within her a bleak emptiness – a feeling of utter, inconsolable sorrow over what she did not have. For all the time that had passed – for all her efforts – he could still do that to her. It was her sentence, she decided, and it seemed that it was for life.

When the time came for her to graduate, Padraig, who was about to embark on a master’s course, was awarded a six-month travelling scholarship. He chose to spend his time in Florence and Paris, with three months in each city. He told her of the award and shyly, and rather hesitantly, invited her to come with him. She sensed, though, that the invitation was less than wholehearted, an impression strengthened by the fact that he seemed relieved when she said that she had other plans. These plans were barely laid – her parents had offered her a gap year, which she had decided to take, but beyond that she was uncertain as to what to do. She had thought of going to Nepal with a friend who
had taken a job as a teacher of English, but nothing definite had been arranged.

“I think we need to split up,” she said. “I don’t think you really want me to come to Italy and France with you.”

“But I do,” he protested. “I wouldn’t have asked you if I didn’t.”

“I’ll just get in your way.”

He seemed hurt. “What do you mean by that?”

She spoke gently. “Things come to a natural end, Padraig. It’s nothing to get upset about. We’ve had three years – more actually – and now …”

He looked resigned. “Your problem, Clover, is that all the time you’ve been with me, you’ve been in love with somebody else.”

She was unable to answer him. Had it been that obvious?

They sat and stared at one another in silence. She felt empty, but she could not rekindle something that she knew now, just as he did, had run its course.

Eventually Padraig spoke. “I suppose you can’t help it. I don’t hold it against you for exactly that reason. It’s your … how should I put it? It’s your burden. But I must admit I feel sorry for you. You’re in love with somebody who isn’t there. He just isn’t in your life. I’m sorry, Clover, but I think that’s really … really pathetic. Sad.”

His words struck home.
He just isn’t in your life
. But he was. He had been a friend to her over all these years. She rarely saw him – that was true – but he was always so nice to her when she did see him. He smiled at her. He clearly liked her. He was kind and showed an interest in what she said to him. He was in her life. He was. And as for Padraig’s pity – she did not want to be pitied, and told him so.

“All right, I’m sure you don’t – and I’ll try not to. But for
God’s sake, don’t let it completely ruin your life. You only have one life, you know. One. And you shouldn’t try to live it around somebody who isn’t living his life around yours. Do you see that? Do you get that?”

She wept, and he comforted her. They would always be friends, he said, and she nodded her assent.

“Don’t wreck your gap year, Clovie,” he whispered. He rarely called her that; only in moments of tenderness. “People fritter them away. Do something with it. Promise?”

She promised.

“And don’t spend it thinking about him. Promise?”

She promised that too, and he kissed her, gently, and with fondness, in spite of what he had said – and what he had thought – setting in this way, with dignity, the seal on an ended relationship.

29

Nepal proved easy to arrange, being simply a question of money, which her father, having agreed to fund a gap year, provided without demur. The organisers of
Constructive Year Abroad
, though, were unable to fit her in to their programme until six months after her graduation. They had other suggestions to fill the time – a three-month engagement as an assistant (unpaid) in a Bulgarian orphanage? She would be working for part of the time in an orphanage in Nepal – the rest of her time would be on a school building programme – and she was not sure whether she wanted to spend too much time on that. They understood, of course, and suggested a conservation programme in Indonesia. That, though, was unduly costly and she decided to save her father the expense. To stay in Edinburgh until she left for Nepal would be cheaper, she felt, and she could get a casual job for a few months to cover her expenses.

She wrote to Ted, who had arranged to spend a year teaching English in Lyons: “I feel vaguely guilty about the whole thing. The Nepal thing costs serious money and surely it would be better if we were simply to give them the money to do whatever it is I’m meant to be doing there. I can’t get it out of my mind that this is all about people whose families have got money – you and me, Ted, let’s be honest – pretending to do something useful but really having an extended holiday. A year off; just
off
. That’s what it is, isn’t it?”

He wrote back: “Yes, of course. They don’t really need you in Nepal. But, okay, you won’t be doing any actual harm, will you? I suppose if they sent gap year people to build schools that actually
fell down
then there’d be a case for not doing it at all,
but you’re not going to do that, I take it. There’ll be people –
real people –
out there who will make sure that whatever you build is going to be done properly, or at least not dangerously. So don’t feel guilty. Sure, don’t feel heroic, either, but not guilty. And as for having money, well, we don’t really have it, do we? Our folks are admittedly not on the breadline, and they do happen to live in a tax haven, but they’re not going to support us forever and we’re going to have to earn our living. On which subject, any suggestions? You know what I’m thinking of being after I finish teaching English to the French? A marketing trainee. There’s a firm near Cambridge that has actually offered me a job one year from now, unless the economy takes a nose-dive. How about that for glamour? Would you like to join me? We could do marketing together; just think of it.”

The job she got in Edinburgh was at a delicatessen that also served coffee. She was to be in charge of the coffee, which she found that she enjoyed doing. The owners, a middle-aged couple who had taken on the business only a few months previously, were still learning and were good-natured. She was happy in her work and made a number of new friends. She had remained in Ella’s flat, which was not far from the delicatessen, and it occurred to her that it would be simpler not to go to Nepal at all. But if she felt guilt about her expensive gap year, how much more guilty, she decided, would she feel if she did nothing with the year. She remembered Padraig’s advice – his exhortation – that she should not fritter the year away. Padraig had approved of Nepal when she had told him about it.

“Good,” he had said. “That’s exactly the sort of thing you should be doing – something useful.”

She had heard from James, who had called her unannounced
shortly before her graduation and told her that he might be coming to Edinburgh a few days later and suggesting that they should see one another. She had agreed, and they had met in the same pub where they had met after the rugby match. This time it was worse. She had gone into the pub, looked around, and seen him sitting at a table with a girl. She had stopped and had been on the point of retreating when he saw her and waved. It was too late then, and she had to join them.

The girl was from Glasgow, and had accompanied him to Edinburgh. Clover had been able to tell immediately that the meeting in the pub had not been the main aim of the trip, and James confirmed this.

“We’ve got some friends over here,” he said. “They’ve bought a flat and are having a flat-warming party.”

Her heart sank at the word
we
, the most devastating word for the lonely. “I see.”

“Yes. I thought it would be good to take the chance to catch up with you. I realised that I hadn’t seen you for ages.”

He was being his usual friendly self, she thought. He has always been nice to me – always.

James turned to the girl beside him. “Clover and I go back a long time. One of my first friends, aren’t you, Clove?”

The girl looked at her and smiled. But the smile, Clover could tell, was forced.

“There’s nothing like old friends,” James continued. “There was Clover, me, and a guy called Ted.” He paused. “Ted says he’s going to France.”

She nodded. “Yes. To teach English.”

“Everybody does that,” said James. “Except me, I suppose. You know I’m going to Australia in two weeks’ time. Did I tell you?”

Clover absorbed the news in silence. She felt quite empty within. There was nothing.

“My folks are in a place called Ballarat – I think I mentioned that to you.”

She nodded.

“Anyway, I’ve decided that since I can get a work permit because my mother’s Australian and I’m going to be eligible for an Australian passport, I might as well do my training out there. I was going to one of the large international accountancy firms anyway, and they said they had no objection to my transferring my training contract to Australia. They have a branch in Melbourne. That’s where I’m going to do it.”

Clover glanced at the girl. “What are you doing?”

The girl shifted in her seat. “I’ve got a job in Glasgow. I work for the Clydesdale Bank.”

“Shelley’s doing a banking traineeship,” said James.

“So you’re not going to Australia,” said Clover.

The question seemed to annoy Shelley. “No,” she said tersely. “I’ll go to visit James, though, won’t I, James?”

It sounded to Clover like a territorial claim. “That’ll be nice,” she said.

“Yes,” said James. “And you should come and see me there sometime too, Clover.”

Shelley looked at her, and then looked quickly away.

“Maybe I will,” said Clover.

“I mean it,” said James. “You’ve got my e-mail address. Just let me know.”

Shelley glanced at her watch. Clover noticed; she herself did not want to stay now.

“I have to go soon,” she said.

James seemed disappointed. “But you’ve just arrived.”

“We have to keep an eye on the time too,” interjected Shelley. “Maddy and Steve said …”

“Of course,” said James. He turned to Clover and smiled. “I wish we’d seen more of each other. I suppose that my being in Glasgow and you being here – well, somehow I hardly ever seemed to get that train.”

She felt a wrench at her heart. It had been a mistake to see him, she felt. And now she was to say goodbye, which would be for the last time, she thought, as Australia was a long way away. She said to herself: I am about to say goodbye to the person I have loved all my life. I shall never see him again.

She stood up.

“Don’t go,” he said.

“I have to,” she said. “Sorry.”

She felt the tears well in her eyes; she did not want them to see – neither of them. She turned away. James stood up. “Clover …”

She reached the door without turning back, and only gave a glance then, and a quick one. Shelley was saying something to James, and then she looked at her. Their eyes met across the floor of the pub, across the void.

Her job became busier as the city filled with festival visitors. The streets around the delicatessen were lined with Victorian tenements, many of which during university term-time were occupied by students. During the summer months the tenants covered their rent by sub-letting to the waves of hopeful performers who came to Edinburgh for the Fringe, the rambunctious addon to the official festival, bringing with them shows that for the most part would be lost in the programme of several thousand
events. Optimism sustained them; the hope of a review, of being spotted by somebody who counted, of being heard in the cacophony of a festival that opened its doors without audition and sent nobody away unheard – even if it was by audiences that sometimes numbered no more than one.

She noticed the groups of Fringe performers drifting into the delicatessen, and spoke to some of those who chose to stay for coffee. The cast of a student
Midsummer Night’s Dream
, brought from a college in Indiana, came in each morning shortly before their ten o’clock rehearsals, to rub shoulders with a group of
a capella
singers from Iceland and a dance ensemble from Nicaragua. Their regular customers, those whose normal lives continued over the festival month, were accustomed to the annual invasion, and calmly purchased their cheese and cold meats against this polyglot backdrop. For Clover it meant long hours, but it was what she wanted. Ella was still in the flat, and so she had some company to go back to, but she now found herself slightly irritated by her flatmate’s laziness and failure to do her fair share of cleaning. For the first time since she had moved into the flat, she found herself wanting to move out, to get on with the next stage of her life.

With most of her university friends away, she struggled with loneliness. She missed Padraig more than she imagined she would, and she wondered whether he would be feeling the same. Probably not, she decided. He had now taken up his scholarship and was in Florence. He sent her a photograph of himself standing beside the Arno –
Me by the Arno
, he wrote – and he sent her a copy of a piece he had written for the
Irish Times
on a minor Italian artist of the nineteen-twenties who had met James Joyce in Paris and disappeared the next day. “Some people get
depressed by contact with greatness,” he wrote to Clover. “Some people get disheartened.”

She was not sure whether the reference to being disheartened was personal. She did not think that he would miss her; not, she thought, when one could go and stand by the Arno. She toyed with the idea of writing to him and confessing that she missed him and wondered whether they had done the right thing in splitting up, but she decided that she would not. That would be going backwards, trying to prolong something that had come to a natural and not-too-upsetting end. She would meet somebody else, she decided. It was time. There were plenty of young men in Edinburgh; the Fringe seemed to bring them in their hundreds and surely one of them would be looking for somebody like her.