the brave face, I could not find it.
The candle guttered, flamed up, resumed burning.
When it was half-way down, I got up, brushed at the damp on my mac and walked back along the aisle. As usual, the table was littered with the hymn books and pamphlets. I did not think anyone would mind if I tidied them up.
Chapter Twelve
‘You don’t want to go there,’ said Ianthe, when I announced I was going to try for a place to read English at Oxford. Her lips pursed and her eyes grew cloudy with distress, as they frequently did the older and more independent I grew. She scented a dash for freedom. The Oxford idea presented a more serious, realizable threat than dreams of travelling through the Patagonian wilderness and deserts. ‘You don’t want to go there,’ she repeated. ‘Anyway, they don’t like girls, whatever Mr Rollinson tells you.’ She thought a bit further. ‘He shouldn’t put ideas into your head. They don’t take people like us.’
‘He’s giving me special classes. He thinks they’ll offer me a place.’
‘And what sort of job will you get at the end of it?’
At that moment I hated my mother, who was, as always, adept at slipping a knife under my shaky confidence and prising it loose. But I toughed it out. ‘Watch me,’ I said.
I was eighteen, so very
As I kissed her, I tasted salt tears and caught the faint, elusive reminder of her lavender cologne. Ianthe grabbed me by the arm and, for a second or two longer, held me close. Then she pushed me away. ‘Go on,’ she said. ‘Enjoy your new life.’
What did my mother feel as she climbed back on to the coach and began the journey back to Pankhurst Parade, to issuing tickets and timetables in the travel agent’s? She left me with the burden of her apprehension and disapproval, but I often think about that neat, stubborn, retreating figure in the tweed coat. She might have believed that she had been shucked off like a nutshell. The womanly role finished. Or, maybe, she was free to retreat into her unhappiness, to explore it more fully.
‘My God,’ Hal Thorne was reported by Mazarine to have said when, a month later, he knocked me off my bicycle in the high street, ‘I’ve killed her.’
She also told me that Hal had behaved impeccably, placing me in the recovery position, summoning the police, detailing Mazarine, his passenger, to take the names of any witnesses. He was heroic in his actions and his guilt, she said, and knew it. The last was said with the light, glinting irony that Mazarine commanded.
Hal was a rotten driver, but not bad enough to kill me. I had not been aware of his white van snouting up behind me, and I did not hear the screech of the brakes, but even now I am plagued by a memory of throwing up my arms to defend myself before I plunged down.
There was another memory… of Hal sitting beside the gurney, rolling my tights into a ball, and of the low autumn sun, which shone through the window and invested him with a halo of light. Memory informs me that he placed the tights beside the neatly stacked pages of my essay on Donne and the bicycle lights, which had been retrieved from the accident.
Past and present swirled helplessly in my shocked, puzzled mind and I imagined I was back in the square at the via Elisabetta in Rome… for the strange, fair-haired man, so absorbed in tidying my possessions, seemed to my unreliable vision to possess the perfection of the stone youth who guarded the Barberini fountain.
I must have shifted, and my shocked bones cracked against each other. This made me groan and his head flicked up. ‘Hi.’ He leant over and took my hand gently, as if he knew how to handle people who were hurting. ‘I should be shot. It was my fault, and I’m afraid your bicycle is a write-off. You nearly were too.’
I registered that his accent was American and I made the mistake of frowning, which hurt. I whimpered, and he was quick with reassurance. ‘You have a cut on your head but it’s above the hairline, thank God, and you’re massively bruised. They’ve X-rayed you and nothing’s broken.’ His smile was clever, confident and enigmatic. ‘I haven’t destroyed your beauty, for which I would never have forgiven myself.’
Still only half conscious, I was bothered more by the idea of Death having brushed past me than any destruction of my possible beauty.
‘Are you an angel?’ It seemed sensible to check that I was not being addressed by one, preparatory to being ushered into a nether region.
‘If you want me to be one, I will be.’
‘Not yet, I hope.’
I fixed on the movement of his lips, the inclination of his head. Those figures in the fountains had brought with them the blare of tropical sun, the whiplash of polar cold, the rustle of savannah grasses and the silence of the desert – and one was here, holding my hand.
It began then.
Each day for a week, Hal visited me in hospital. A Rhodes scholar from the American Midwest studying archaeology and anthropology, he imported objects for me to look at as far removed from the trolleys and sluices of the Annie Brewer women’s ward as it was possible to be. A Tuareg blanket, a Naudet photograph of a nude woman as plump and pearly-skinned as a corn-fed chicken – all part of a strange convalescence.
On the last day I was in hospital, he arrived dressed in khaki fatigues with a red scarf wrapped round his neck and held up a piece of barbed wire. ‘An early example used by the American pioneers. It’s a collector’s item.’
My face was still bruised and swollen, and it hurt to talk. ‘People collect barbed wire?’
‘There’s a museum of it.’ He pressed it into my hands and the barbs, which had an unfamiliar configuration, bit into me. ‘The pioneers developed it to mark out the boundaries of the homesteads and farms.’
I imagined coils of barbed wire looping over the dry dust terrain. Inside the pale, there was a cackle of geese and hens, dogs, children, the smell of home baking, women in dusty pink prints and sun-bonnets, rough wooden furniture and a stoop of water. Outside in the wilderness were the watchful Red Indian, the buffalo, the slinking coyote and the prairie dog.
‘Don’t you mean defend? It’s an aggressive thing. That’s its point.’
‘Very funny,’ said Hal, and retrieved it. He paused. ‘Of course, property is theft.’
I lay back on the pillows. ‘You stole that line.’
With a swift movement, he bent down and smoothed the hot tangle of my hair. ‘Of course I did. We steal from each other all the time.’
Apparently Hal lived in a small, unheated house (the
The house was crowded, badly maintained by the landlord, uncomfortable – and magic. After the doctors released me from hospital, with the advice to keep out of the way of mad drivers, Hal collected me in the white van and we stopped there briefly before he took me out to dinner. ‘I want you to meet Mazarine, you will like her.’
How right he was. He had spotted that we were of a kind.
Hal kept a permanently packed rucksack in his room: water-bottle, day sack, all-seasons sleeping-bag, lightweight walking trousers and water-purifying tablets. He explained that it was ready to grab at a moment’s notice, when he could not bear being confined any longer. It was, he explained, necessary to him to have that readied rucksack.
He spoke rapidly, carelessly, with the confidence I craved for myself. Had he suckled it from his mother? ‘
