Mazarine listened in to the rucksack explanation. Dressed in a black skirt and slenderly cut jumper, she was a great deal more knowing and sophisticated than any of the girls I had met in college. In heavily accented English, she said, ‘I should point out that he employs others to wash his socks… Don’t let him keep you up too late, you must be still weak.’
Hal bore me off to a Moroccan restaurant, which had recently opened on the outskirts of the city and, a novelty, was extremely popular. ‘It’s a very small way of saying sorry,’ he said, as he ushered me inside. It was crowded with students cherishing their drinks and rolling their own fags but, to my dazzled eyes, Hal stood out like a beacon.
He sat down opposite me, placed his hands on the Formica table top and studied me. ‘I could have done a lot worse. I like the blouse. Young ravishing beauty versus old clothes. Guess who comes off best in the contest. Even with bruises.’ He touched the one on my cheek.
I felt colour sneak into my face and fiddled with the lace on my cuff. Money was so short that I dressed more or less entirely in second-hand-shop pickings, and I was wearing a muslin blouse trimmed with lace. It was worn and soft, and held the faint suggestion of other lives. ‘If I had been an old lady, would I not have got dinner?’
‘Probably not. A nice bunch of carnations instead.’
‘I don’t like carnations.’
‘Pity. They have an interesting history. The name derives from the Arabic
This was the first of many teases, but I was not going to let the point slide. I was still so unsure, so raw, so shakily unconfident, but I summoned my wits. ‘I wish to defend elderly ladies. You are discriminating on the grounds of age, which is no basis.’
The transformation from tease to steely seriousness was instant. ‘On the contrary. On the basis that anything, money, good luck, space on this planet, is finite you could argue that the old lady has had her share of fateful or important encounters and must not be greedy. On the other hand, by virtue of your age, you have not.’
Shocked I stared at him, only to be transfixed by the blue eyes. They reminded me of gentians in an alpine meadow, the rich blue of an Italian nobleman’s surcoat in a painting, the pure glassy resonance of a sapphire. ‘You don’t really believe that?’
‘What do you think?’
I swallowed. ‘I demand to be greedy’
‘Luckily it’s a long time, Rose, before you will be old. And me. But we must cultivate the right attitude to keep age at bay. Travel. Keep on the move.’
‘Poor old lady,’ I said, my heart as light and dancing as a feather. ‘Poor dinnerless old lady’
‘As it happens, she is done out of her dinner because you are here.’ Once again, that confident gentle hand traced the outline of my bruise. ‘Thank goodness.’
The helpless, unstoppable feelings that had been gathering inside me as I lay in hospital fused, ignited and burst into flame. Tentatively, I put up my hand. Our fingers met and the beat of my heart was as loud as a drum.
Hal dropped his and picked up the menu. ‘Chicken tagine?’ He made it sound impossibly exotic.
Half-way through the meal, he put down his knife and fork. ‘I’m falling in love with you, Rose. Isn’t that funny?’
I shivered.
Hal was often away on a dig and, with her firm intellectual grasp on life, Mazarine approved. ‘Pain is essential,’ she argued, ‘or how do we recognize the opposite?’
It was, I pointed out, a position argued from innocence, for at that point no pain had touched the clever and lovely Mazarine. Surely the validity of the argument rested in the experience of it. ‘Poof,’ she said.
Apart from a troubling stiffness in one hip, I recovered quickly from the accident. The addition of love and adrenaline to the blood coursing through the veins proved a great healer. In one respect, the stiff hip was a godsend, for I had plenty of time to work during the next two terms. ‘This is a student knocking at the door of a first,’ wrote my happy tutor at the end of the summer term. ‘Let us see if she can knock it down.’
Hal was so considerate about my injuries. He fussed over them, called taxis, kept me warm, and made me feel that no other woman existed on this earth. ‘I’ll will you better,’ he said. ‘Then we can concentrate on us.’
That was in character. He never asked questions – he was not interested in my past. Nor was he interested in telling me his. It doesn’t matter who or what we have been, he said, it’s the now that matters.
How true that was. The sun had never been so bright, the sky so blue. My body was weightless, throbbing, never satiated. I was filled with insane joy and thankfulness, touched with awe that this had happened to me.
He was the stranger who came from other lands; he was the other for whom I had been searching.
On the last day of the summer term, we walked by the river in the botanical gardens; its watery rush sounded above the traffic. The sky had thrown off a half-veil of cloud and the smell of earth after rain pricked sweetly at my nostrils. I pinched a stalk of lavender in the flowerbed between my fingers.
Hal grinned. ‘
I seized his hand and plunged it into the purple-blue blooms, and the leaves released their fragrance. I pressed his fingers to my face and inhaled. ‘I am bathed in you.’
Abruptly, he pulled me to him and kissed me. ‘Lovely Rose,’ he murmured. ‘What would I do without you?’
The next day when I had packed and was ready to leave, I phoned the house. ‘Darling,’ Mazarine sounded concerned, ‘he’s left this morning, with the rucksack.’
I felt a chill go through me. ‘Is there any message?’
‘No. I thought you would know’
‘See?’ said Ianthe, when I arrived back at Pankhurst Parade, shaking and tearstained. ‘I told you that you would come to no good.’
Hal was gone for three weeks, during which I was driven to the edge, and went over and over what had gone wrong. Why? I questioned everything: my mind, my body, my sexual inexperience, which Hal had thought so touching. I tried to identify where I had failed him,
Three weeks later, I opened the front door and there was Hal. He looked tanned and fit, but in need of a shower and with every finger wrapped in Elastoplast. ‘Get your boots on, we’re off to Cornwall.’
Between speechlessness and laughter, I demanded, ‘Where’ve you been? I had no -’
He was genuinely surprised. ‘Didn’t I tell you? I was on a dig up north. Roman.’
I felt myself turning white with rage. ‘No, you did not. Why didn’t you tell me?’
‘I’m here now so it’s all right, isn’t it?’
‘Go away’
He inserted a foot into the door. ‘I’ve bought you a rucksack. A good one.’
Despite his winningly phrased plea that, as an ignorant American, he wanted to see as much as possible of this island and only Rose could show him, Ianthe disapproved of his carrying me off. Girls did not go jaunting around the countryside as if they were already married. But I was past caring, and I left her standing on the doorstep with a face like thunder.
When I returned, I had a pink glow in my cheeks, my feet had toughened, my hip had healed and I had grown used to the sound of the sea. I told Ianthe of Penzance, Marazion, Helston, St Mawes… of how we walked the coastal path, observing how the rockscape changed from granite to slate, and how, in the evenings, we sat in pubs, drank beer and cider and ate fish and chips. Of course I did not tell her of the nights, white and violet nights, when I unwrapped the Elastoplast from his battered fingers and, one by one, kissed the wounds made by the hammer and chisel. Or of how he turned me this way and that until I thought I would die, not of pleasure but of love.
It was not a light thing. I was not reinventing myself as the good-time liberated girl. I wanted to step into something serious. I did not want those extraordinary feelings to come and go, like birds wheeling and taking flight over a cornfield. I wanted Hal to imprint himself on me, and I on him. I wanted our affair to have weight and depth, and I wanted to move knowingly from a state of innocence into the unfamiliar abandon that surged through every nerve end, powered every heartbeat.
