The Collected Stories

Martin ignored the question.

‘I think of you all the time, Jenny.’

‘Oh, Clive, don’t be silly.’ She felt silly herself, calling him by his proper name.

‘D’you like me, Jenny?’

‘Of course I like you.’ She smiled at him, trying to cover up the lie: she didn’t particularly like him, she didn’t particularly not. She just felt sorry for him, with his noticeable chin and the nickname it had given him. His father worked in the powdered-milk factory. He’d do the same: you could guess that all too easily.

‘Come for a ride with me, Jenny.’

‘No, honestly.’

‘Why not then?’

‘It’s better not to start anything, Clive. Look, don’t write me notes.’

‘Don’t you like my notes?’

‘I don’t want to start anything.’

‘There’s someone else is there, Jenny? Adam Swann? Rick Hayes?’

He sounded like a character in a television serial; he sounded sloppy and stupid.

‘If you knew how I feel about you,’ he said, lowering his voice even more. ‘I love you like anything. It’s the real thing.’

‘I like you too, Clive. Only not in that way,’ she hastily added.

‘Wouldn’t you ever? Wouldn’t you even try?’

‘I’ve told you.’

‘Rick Hayes’s only after sex.’

‘I don’t like Rick Hayes.’

‘Any girl with legs on her is all he wants.’

‘Yes, I know.’

‘I can’t concentrate on things, Jenny. I think of you the entire time.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘Oh God, Jenny.’

She turned into the Mace shop just to escape. She picked up a wire basket and pretended to be looking at tins of cat food. She heard the roar of the Yamaha as her admirer rode away, and it seemed all wrong that he should have gone like that, so noisily when he was so upset.

At home she thought about the incident. It didn’t in the least displease her that a boy had passionately proclaimed love for her. It even made her feel quite elated. She felt pleasantly warm when she thought about it, and the feeling bewildered her. That she, so much in love with someone else, should be moved in the very least by the immature protestations of a youth from 1B was a mystery. She even considered telling her mother about the incident, but in the end decided not to. ‘Quite sprightly, she seems,’ she heard her father murmuring.

‘In every line of that sonnet,’ Mr Tennyson said the following Monday afternoon, ‘there is evidence of the richness that makes Shakespeare not just our own greatest writer but the world’s as well.’

She listened, enthralled, physically pleasured by the utterance of each syllable. There was a tiredness about his boyish eyes, as if he hadn’t slept. His wife had probably been bothering him, wanting him to do jobs around the house when he should have been writing sonnets of his own. She imagined him unable to sleep, lying there worrying about things, about his life. She imagined his wife like a grampus beside him, her mouth open, her upper lip as coarse as a man’s.

‘When forty winters shall besiege thy brow,’ he said, ‘And dig deep trenches in thy beauty’s field.’

Dear Jenny, a note that morning from Chinny Martin had protested. I just want to be with you. I just want to talk to you. Please come out with me.

‘Jenny, stay a minute,’ Mr Tennyson said when the bell went. ‘Your essay.’

Immediately there was tension among the girls of 1A, as if the English master had caused threads all over the classroom to become taut. Unaware, the boys proceeded as they always did, throwing books into their briefcases and sauntering into the corridor. The girls lingered over anything they could think of. Jenny approached Mr Tennyson’s desk.

‘It’s very good,’ he said, opening her essay book. ‘But you’re getting too fond of using three little dots at the end of a sentence. The sentence should imply the dots. It’s like underlining to suggest emphasis, a bad habit also.’

One by one the girls dribbled from the classroom, leaving behind them the shreds of their reluctance. Out of all of them he had chosen her: was she to be another Sarah Spence, or just some kind of stop-gap, like other girls since Sarah Spence were rumoured to have been? But as he continued to talk about her essay – called ‘Belief in Ghosts’ – she wondered if she’d even be a stop-gap. His fingers didn’t once brush the back of her hand. His French boy’s eyes didn’t linger once on hers.

‘I’ve kept you late,’ he said in the end.

‘That’s all right, sir.’

‘You will try to keep your sentences short? Your descriptions have a way of becoming too complicated.’

‘I’ll try, sir.’