his sport with Portia.
Poo. And more poo.
Anyway, at least they know now. Have you told your parents? I suppose they’ll hit the roof as well. Their beloved son ensnared by the daughter of Jewish left- wing intellectuals. If you can call a part-time history lecturer at North East London Polytechnic an intellectual, which in my book you can’t.
It wouldn’t be love without opposition, would it? I mean, if Juliet’s dad had fallen on Romeo’s neck and said, ‘I’m not losing a daughter, I’m gaining a son, and Romeo’s mum had beamed ‘Welcome to the Montague family, Juliet my precious,’ it would be a pretty short play.
Anyway, a couple of hours after this ‘distressing scene, Pete knocked on my door with a cup of tea. Precision, Portia, precision – he knocked on my door with his knuckles, but you know what I mean. I thought he was going to give me grief, but in fact – well no in fact he did give me grief. That is exactly and literally what he gave me. He had just had a phone call from America. Apparently Pete’s brother, my Uncle Leo, had a heart attack in New York last night and was dead by the time an ambulance arrived. Too grim. Uncle Leo’s wife Rose died of ovarian cancer in January and now he’s gone too. He was forty-eight. Forty-eight and dead from a heart attack. So my poor cousin Gordon is coming over to England to stay with us. He was the one who had to call the ambulance and everything. Imagine seeing your own father die in front of you. He’s the only child too. He must be in a terrible state, poor thing. I hope he’ll like it with us. I think he was brought up quite orthodox so what he’ll make of family life here, I can’t imagine. Our idea of kosher is a bacon bagel. I’ve never met him. I’ve always pictured him as having a black beard, which is insane of course, since he’s about our age. Seventeen going on eighteen, that kind of thing.
The result of the day is that peace has broken out in the Fendeman home and next week I shall have a brother to talk to. I’ll be able to talk about you.
Which, 0 Neddy mine, is more than you ever do. ‘Won a match. Played pretty well I think. Revising hard. Thinking about you a great deal.’ I quote the interesting bits.
I know you’re busy with exams, but then so am I. Don’t worry. Any letter that comes from you gives me a fever. I look at the writing and imagine your hand moving over the paper which is enough to make me wriggle like a love-sick eel. I picture your hair flopping down as you write, which is enough to make me writhe and froth like a … like a … er, I’ll come back to you on that one. I think of your legs under the table and a million trillion cells sparkle and fizz inside me. The way you cross a ‘t’ makes me breathless. I hold the back of my envelope to my lips and think of you licking it and my head swims. I’m a dotty dippy dozy dreadful delirious romantic and I love you to heaven.
But I wish wish wish you weren’t going back to your school next term. Leave and be free like the rest of us. You don’t have to go to Oxford, do you? I wouldn’t go to any university that made me stay on through the winter term after I’d already done all my A levels and all my friends had left, just to sit some special entrance paper. How pompous can you get?
Why can’t they behave like a normal university? Come with me to Bristol. We’ll have a much better time.
I shan’t bully you about it though. You must do whatever you want to do.
I love you, I love you, I love you.
I’ve just had a thought. Suppose your History of Art teacher hadn’t taken your class on a trip to the Royal Academy that Saturday? Suppose he had taken you to the Tate or the National Gallery instead? You wouldn’t have been in Piccadilly and you wouldn’t have gone to the Hard Rock Café for lunch and I wouldn’t be the luckiest, happiest, most dementedly in-love girl in the world.
The world is very… um… (consults the Thomas Hardy text-book that she’s supposed to be studying) … the world is very contingent.
So there.
I’m kissing the air around me.
Love and love and love and love and love
Your Portia X
Only one X, because a quintillion wouldn’t be anything like enough.
7th June 1980
My darling Portia
Thank you for a wonderful letter. After your (completely justified) criticism of my terrible style of letter-writing, this is going to be completely tricky. It just seems to gush out of you like a geezer (spelling?) and I’m not too hot at that kind of thing. Also your handwriting is completely perfect (like everything else about you of course) and mine is completely illegible. I thought of responding to your little extra (which was fantastic, by the way) by spraying this envelope with eau de cologne or aftershave, but I haven’t got any. I don’t suppose the linseed oil I use for my cricket bat would entice you? Thought not.
I’m so sorry you had a row with your family. Would it help at all if you were to tell Peter (there, I said it!) that I am completely poor? We never go abroad for holidays, it’s all my father can do to send me here and I know that it doesn’t sound very left wing or anything but he spends all the rest on travelling between London and his constituency and trying to stop our house from falling down. If I had any brothers or sisters, I’d probably (by the way, where on earth did you get ‘prolly’ from?) have to wear their hand-me-downs, as it is, I wear his. I’m the only boy in the school who goes around in cavalry twills and old hacking jackets on days when we don’t have to wear uniform. I even wear his old boater, which is almost orange with age, and the edge of the brim is chipped. When my mum was alive she genuinely used to darn socks for me, like some old Victorian. So my father may be a fascist (which I honestly don’t think he is) but he’s a completely poor one. Also, I told him that I met a girl in London and he was very pleased. He didn’t hit the roof at all when I said you had a Saturday job from school working as a waitress at a hamburger restaurant. In fact he said it sounded like you had some initiative. And as for the Jewish thing – he was very interested and wondered if your family were refugees from Hitler. He had something to do with the War Crimes in Nuremburg (berg?) and … oh, anyway I’m not trying to say my father is better than yours – I thought your parents were really nice actually – it’s just that you don’t have to worry about him disapproving or anything. He can’t wait to meet you, and I can’t wait for you to meet him. Most people assume he’s my grandfather, because he’s older than most parents, if you know what I mean. He is a very good man I think, but I know I’m completely biased. Anyway, he’s all I have. My mother died when I was born. Didn’t I tell you before? My fault really. I was her first one and she was nearly fifty.
What terrible news about your uncle in America. I’m so sorry. I hope Gordon turns out to be a nice bloke. It’ll be great for you to have a brother at last. All my cousins are completely scary.
I just cannot wait for term to end. Thank God the last exam is over. I’ve been revising so hard that my head is bleeding, but I still don’t think I’ve done as well as I need to.
Boring school gossip, Number One: I’ve been made Head Boy.
Ta-ra!
We call it ‘Captain of School’ actually. Just for next term but I’ll be too busy revising for Oxford entrance for it to mean much. (More on that subject in a bit.) Anyway, by the time you get to my age all the glamour goes out of authority. It just becomes hard work and endless meetings with the headmaster and school monitors – we call prefects Monitors here, don’t ask me why.
Number Two: the Sailing Club is going to the west coast of Scotland this August. The master in charge has invited me along. For two weeks: the very same two weeks you and your family are going to Italy, so it’s the same two weeks we would have been away from each other anyway. For the rest of the time I’ll be staying in my father’s flat in Victoria and you’ll be there with me as much as possible I hope! Are you going to get a job at the Hard Rock again?
Anyway. Oxford. I can’t bear either that I’ve got to come back here in September while you’ll be as free as a bird. For two pins I’d forget the whole thing and apply to Bristol and be with you. It’s not that I’m really so stuck on Oxford, it’s just that I know it would break my father’s heart if I didn’t go. His great-great-grandfather was at St Mark’s and every Maddstone since. There’s even a quad named after us. You might think that would make it easier for me to get in, but actually it doesn’t work like that any more. I’ll actually have to do better in my entrance exam than virtually anyone, just to prove that I’ve got in on merit not on family name and connections. It would mean so much to him. I hope that doesn’t sound chronically pathetic. I’m his only son and I just know how much he’d love coming to visit me and walking round the colleges and pointing out his old haunts and so on.
I wish you could come and visit me here. Suppose next term I smuggle you in as a new boy? All you’ve got to do is squeak and look pretty, and you’re very good at that. No, not pretty – you re beautiful of course. The most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen or ever will see. (You are very good at squeaking though.)
I love your letters. I still can’t believe all this is true. Has it really happened to us? Other boys here have girlfriends too but I’m certain it’s not the same for them. They show their letters around and make a great show of drooling publicly over them. That must be a sign that it’s really no more than a joke to them.
And it isn’t a joke for us, is it?
You mention that strange thing about Fate and how it was that our school group was at the Royal Academy and how, if we hadn’t been, we probably wouldn’t have gone into the Hard Rock Café. That is such a completely weird thought. But then, when you came up to our table there were I think seven of us and why was it you looked twice at me? Apart from the fact that I’m such a moron that I was standing up.
I really hate to disillusion you on that, by the way, but it wasn’t politeness that made me stand up. I saw you and I stood up. It was like a sort of instinct. This must sound completely crazy – it was as if I had known you for ever. What’s more, if I think about it, I could swear that I knew you were going to come out of that swing door. I had been feeling funny all day. Feeling different if you know what I mean, and by the time we got into the restaurant after sweating around the gallery for two hours and walking half a mile down Piccadilly I just knew something was going to happen to me. And when you started coming towards us (you patted the front of your apron and checked your ear for a pencil in the funniest way – I can remember every detail of it) I just leapt to my feet. I nearly shouted out, ‘At last!’ and then you looked up into my eyes and we smiled at each other and that was it.
But you must have noticed the other boys there. Most of them surely taller and better looking than me? Ashley Barson-Garland was there, who’s twenty times funnier and twenty times brainier.
That reminds me … I did something completely awful this morning, in Biology. It’s a bit complicated to describe and I feel awful about it. It’s not something for you to worry about, but it was odd. I read Barson-Garland’s diary. Part of it. I’ve never done anything like that before and I just don’t know what came over me. I’ll tell you all about it when we meet.
When we meet.
