What was in the girl’s mind, that she could see the picture so differently? Thinking about it, Sarah could find only a single piece of common ground between them. It wasn’t even properly real, based neither on a process of deduction or indeed of observation. It was an instinct that Sandra Pond, unlike Elizabeth or Anne, wouldn’t marry. And for some reason Sarah sensed that Sandra Pond wouldn’t be difficult, as the girl she’d tried to share the flat with after Elizabeth’s departure had been. Her mind rebelliously wandered, throwing up flights of fancy that she considered silly almost as soon as they came to her, flights of fancy in which she educated Sandra Pond and discovered in her an intelligence that was on a par with her own, in which slowly a real friendship developed, and why should it not? Clearly there was a lot that Sandra Pond didn’t know. Sarah doubted that the girl had ever been inside a theatre in her life, except maybe to see something like the Black and White Minstrel Show or a Christmas pantomime. She wondered if she ever opened a book or listened to music or went to an art gallery.
For a week, at odd moments of the day, or at night, Sarah wondered about Sandra Pond. She half expected that she might hear from her, that the slack accents would drift over her telephone, suggesting a drink. But she didn’t. Instead, with the flights of fancy that she considered silly, she saw herself persevering in her patience and finally rewarded as Sandra Pond, calling on a sensitivity that had remained unaired till now, responded. Something assured Sarah that such a sensitivity was there: increasingly unable to prevent herself, she went over the course of their conversation in search of signs of it. And then, as if rejecting the extravagances of a dream in the first moments of consciousness, she would reject the fantasies that had not required a surrender to sleep. But all of them returned.
Sarah spent Christmas that year with Elizabeth and her family in Cricklewood. She relaxed with gin and tonic, listened to Elizabeth’s husband complaining about his sister, from whom he had just bought a faulty car. She received presents and gave them, she helped to cook the Christmas dinner. Preparing stuffing for the turkey, she heard herself saying:
‘It’s the only thing that worries me, being alone when I’m old.’
Elizabeth, plumper than ever this Christmas, expressed surprise by wrinkling her nose, which was a habit with her.
‘Oh, but you manage so well.’
‘Actually the future looks a little bleak.’
‘Oh, Sarah, what nonsense!’
It was, and Sarah knew it was: she had learnt how to live alone. There was nothing nicer than coming back to the flat and putting a record on, pouring herself a drink and just sitting there listening to Mozart. There was nothing nicer than not having to consider someone else. She’d only shared the flat with Elizabeth in the first place because it had been necessary financially. That period was past.
‘It’s just that whatever shall I do when I finish at Pollock-Brown?’
‘But that’s years away.’
‘Not really. Thirteen years. When I’m sixty.’
‘They’ll keep you on, surely? If you want to stay?’
‘Mr Everend will be gone. I don’t think I’d want to work for anyone else. No, I’ll retire at sixty. According to the book.’
‘But, my dear, you’ll be perfectly all right.’
‘I keep thinking of the flat, alone in it.’
‘You’ve been alone in it for years.’
‘I know.’
She placed more stuffing in the turkey and pressed it down with a wooden spoon. Sandra Pond would be forty-three when she was sixty. She’d probably look much the same, a little grey in her hair perhaps; she’d never run to fat.
‘How are things going?’ Elizabeth’s husband demanded, coming into the kitchen in a breezy mood. ‘Drink for Sarah?’
She smiled at him as he took tonic bottles from the fridge. ‘I think she’s got the change,’ she heard Elizabeth saying to him later. ‘Poor thing’s gone all jittery.’
Sarah didn’t mention the subject of her flat again that Christmas.
Sarah tried not to think about the letter, which both upset and shocked her. She tried to forget the whole thing, the meeting with Sandra Pond and how she’d felt herself drawn towards having a friendship with the girl. It made her shiver when she thought about all that the letter suggested, it even made her feel a little sick.
Such relationships between women had been talked about at school and often occurred in newspaper reports and in books, on the television even. Sarah had occasionally wondered if this woman or that might possibly possess lesbian tendencies, but she had done so without much real interest and had certainly never wondered about such tendencies in relation to herself. But now, just as she had been unable to prevent her mind from engaging in flights of fancy after her meeting with Sandra Pond, she was unable to prevent it from straying about in directions that were inspired by the girl’s letter. The man called George, who over the years had become the root of many fantasies, lost his identity to that of Sandra Pond. Yet it was all different because revulsion, not present before, seemed everywhere now. Was it curiosity of a kind, Sarah wondered, that drove her on, enslaving her to fancies she did not care for? No longer did she think of them as silly; malicious rather, certainly malign, like the stuff of nightmares. Grimly she watched while Sandra Pond crossed the floor of a room, coming closer to her, smiling at her. As the man called George had, the hands of the girl undid the buttons of her dress, and then it seemed that fear was added to revulsion. ‘I really do love you, Sarah,’ the slack voice said, as it had said in the letter, as no other voice had ever said. The passion had a cloying kind of headiness about it, like drunkenness. It was adoration, the girl said, whispering now: it was adoration for every inch of skin and every single hair that grew from Sarah’s body and every light in her eyes, and the beauty of her plainness. The pouting lips came closer to her own, the dimples danced. And Sarah, then, would find herself weeping.
She never knew why she wept and assumed it was simply an extension of her revulsion. She felt no desire to have this kind of relationship with a person of her own sex. She didn’t want a girl’s lips leaving lipstick on her own, she didn’t want to experience their softness or the softness of the body that went with them. She didn’t want to experience a smell of scent, or painted fingernails.
