The Forever Girl

She tried to be insouciant. “Oh, so many occasions then …”

  “The Grand Old House. You went there with somebody – I don’t know who it was – but you didn’t tell me. You gave an account of your evening that very specifically omitted to say anything about your being there. But you were, weren’t you?”

  She faltered. “The Grand Old House …”

  “I didn’t see you myself, but one of the girls from the office said you were there. She told me. She said: I saw your wife. I saw her yesterday. I wanted to say ‘hi’ to her, but she was with a man I didn’t know.”

  “Your spies are everywhere, I see.”

  “Don’t make light of it,” he hissed. “It was another lie. It can’t have been John you were with. But John’s involved in some way, though I don’t know how.”

  She felt a growing sense of desperation at being accused of doing something of which she was innocent. And yet she could assert that innocence only by confessing to something else – something that would implicate George, who was also every bit as innocent as she was. But then she thought: am I completely innocent? I entertained the possibility of an affair; I sought out George’s company; I went some way down the road before I turned back.

  When she spoke now, there was irritation in her voice. “I am not seeing John. If you can’t understand that, then you can’t understand anything.”

  He appeared to think for a while before responding to this. “I don’t understand why you should tell me lies unless you have something to hide. And if I conclude it’s an affair, then, forgive me, but what else am I expected to think?”

  “But you yourself think he’s gay.”

  He became animated. “Yes, I did think that. Not any more. I don’t think he is. I asked him, you see.”

  She was incredulous. “And he discussed it with you?”

  “John is impotent. That’s the issue with him.”

  She was at a loss for anything to say.

  David watched her. “Yes. That’s quite the disclosure, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, I suppose it is.”

  “He gets fed up with people thinking that he’s gay. He says that it’s nothing to do with being anti-gay – which he isn’t – it’s to do with people making an assumption. He says that he understands how gay people might resent others treating them differently. Patronising them, maybe; pitying them. They put up with a lot.”

  “So he opened up to you about this to stop you reaching the wrong conclusion.”

  “So it would seem.”

  Of course it added up; it might explain the sense of disappointment that she felt somehow hung about him. But was that its effect? Did men in that position mourn for something, in the same way that a childless woman might mourn for the child she never had? Was it that important – that simple, biological matter: could it really count for so much?

  David continued. “He told me when we were in New York. He became very upset when he talked about it. He said that it’s been with him all his life, and it has spoiled everything – his confidence in particular. He’s never had a girlfriend – never.”

  She had not expected that, but it made sense of the conversation she had had with him. He had said something about confidence; she tried to remember what it was, but could not.

  She considered telling him the real truth now. She could do that, of course, but the problem was that the truth would sound implausible and he would be unlikely to believe it. And why should he believe her anyway, in the light of her lies? So she said, instead: “Don’t you think I’m entitled to a private life?”

  The question surprised him. “You mean …” He struggled to find the words. “Are you talking about an open marriage?”

  The term sounded strangely old-fashioned. She had not meant that, but now she grasped at the idea. “Yes.”

  He shook his head in disbelief. “Are you serious?”

  “Never more.” She was not; she had not thought about it until a few seconds ago.

  He put down the half-empty bottle of beer. “Listen,” he said. “We’ve fallen out of love. We both know that, don’t we?”

  She met his gaze now. Anger and resentment had turned to acceptance; to a form of sorrow that she was sure they now both felt.

  She fought back tears. She had not cried yet for her failing marriage, and now the realisation came that she would have to do this sooner or later. “I’m so sorry, David. I didn’t think this would happen, but it has.”

  He spoke calmly. “I’m sorry too. I don’t want this to be messy.”

  “Of course not. Think of the children.”

  He picked up the bottle of beer and took a sip. “I’ve thought about them all the time. I’m sure you have too.”

  “So what shall we do?” She marvelled at the speed with which everything had been acknowledged.

  They were standing outside on the patio. He looked up. Evening had descended swiftly, as it does at that latitude; an erratic flight of fruit bats dipped and swooped across the sky. “Can we stay together for the children’s sake?” he asked. “Or at least keep some semblance of being together?”

  “Of course. They’re the main consideration.” She was thinking quickly. Now that they had started to discuss their situation, the whole thing was falling into place with extraordinary rapidity. And the suggestion that came next, newly minted though it was, bore the hallmarks of something that had been worked out well in advance. “If they’re going to school in Scotland, I could live there. I’ll live in Edinburgh. Then we could all come out here to see you in their school holidays.”

  He weighed this. He had thought that she might mention the possibility of returning to the United States, which is what he did not want; he would lose the children then; lose them into the embrace of a vast country he did not understand. “I’d stay in the house here?”

  “Why not? It’s yours, after all.”

  He seemed reassured. “I’d still meet all expenses.”

  That was one thing he had never cavilled at; he had been financially generous to her – very financially generous – and she thanked him for it. “You’ve been so good about money.”

  He laughed. “It’s what I do, after all.”

  “But you could have been grudging, or tight. You weren’t – ever.”

  He said nothing about the compliment, but he reached out to touch her gently. “Friends?”

  She took his hand. “Yes.” She paused. “About John …”

  “You don’t have to.”

  “John saw me, seeing George. I was worried that he would misinterpret what was going on. And he did.”

  He caught his breath. “George Collins?”

  “Yes. It didn’t mean anything – or maybe it did. But we were never lovers. I enjoyed his company and … Why can’t a married person have friends? Why not?”

  “Don’t tell me,” he said quietly. “I don’t want to know.”

  “It’s not what you think.” But then she said, “I feel something for George. I just do. I can’t help it.”

  “What everyone says.”

  She felt that she did not have to explain. He was the cold one; he was the one who had chilled their marriage. “You’re to blame too,” she said. “You lost interest in me. All you ever thought about was your work, and that’s still the case, I think.”

  “I don’t think that’s fair. Don’t try to transfer blame. The fact remains – we’re out of love.”

  “Which is exactly the position of an awful lot of married couples. They just exist together. Just exist.” She looked at him. “Is that really what you want, David?”

  He turned away. “No,” he said. “And now that we’ve made a plan, let’s not unstitch it.”

  “You don’t plan your life just like that, without thinking a bit more about it.”

  “Don’t you? Some people do. They make decisions on the spur of the moment. Big decisions.”

  There was one outstanding matter, she thought, and now she raised it. “And we each have our freedom?”
br />   “In that sense?”

  “Yes. We can fall in love with somebody else, if we want to.”

  He shrugged. “That’s generally what happens, isn’t it? People fall in love again.”

  It sounded so simple. But what was the point of being in love with somebody who was not free to be in love with you?

  He said, “I must go and get changed.”

  She nodded absent-mindedly. Marriage involved little statements like that – I’m doing this; I’m doing that – little explanations to one’s spouse, a running commentary on the mundane details of a life. She was free of that now; she would no longer have to explain. But still she said, “I’m going inside,” and went in. She stood quite motionless in the kitchen, like somebody in a state of shock, which in a way she was. She crossed the room to the telephone. She knew George’s number without looking it up, as she had made an attempt to remember it and it had lodged there, along with birthdays and key dates. The mnemonic of childhood returned: In fourteen hundred and ninety-two, Columbus sailed the ocean blue. Those were the last four digits of his number: 1492. It would be so easy to dial them.

  16

  “All right. I’ve told you all about me. Now it’s your turn. Tell me all about yourself. Everything. I want to hear everything. Don’t leave anything out.”

  There were just the two girls in the room, which was a small study, plainly furnished with two desks above each of which a bookcase had been attached to the wall. These bookcases had been filled with textbooks – an introduction to mathematics, physics, a French grammar – and a few personal items – a framed photograph of a dog, a lustrous conch shell; mementoes of home.

  It was Katie who spoke, and she waited now for Clover’s answer.

  “It’d be boring to tell you everything.”

  ‘No,” said Katie. “It wouldn’t. I want to know. Everything. If we’re sharing, I have to know. I just have to.”

  “I come from the Cayman Islands. Well, that’s where my parents went to work and I have lived there all my life. It’s home, although my mother’s moving to Edinburgh now and my father is going to stay out there – for his job.

  “I have one brother, Billy. He’s all right, I suppose. You said you have a younger brother, so you know what I mean. He’s going to school in Edinburgh and will be living with my mum. That’s why she’s moved, you see – to be there for Billy while he’s at school.

  “There was somebody back in Cayman who helped look after us. She’s called Margaret. She’s a brilliant cook, but she’s got this husband who’s really thin – you should see him – you wouldn’t think he was married to somebody who was such a great cook. She’s from Jamaica. Those people put a lot of hot spices in their cookery and they have this pepper that they call Scotch Bonnet. You can’t actually eat it or it would burn your mouth off. You put it in a stew and then you take it out – it leaves some of the hotness behind it.”

  She made a gesture of completeness. “That’s all.”

  “Come on!”

  “There really isn’t much more.”

  “What about friends? Who are your friends?”

  She told her about friends at school.

  “And any boys?”

  She did not answer at first, and Katie had to prompt her. “I told you about Andy. You have to tell me.”

  “There’s a boy called James.”

  “I love that name.” Katie rolled her eyes in mock bliss. “I wish I knew somebody called James. Is he nice?”

  Clover nodded. “He’s the nicest boy I’ve ever met. You know how boys are – how they always show off? He’s not like that. He’s the opposite.”

  “He’s kind?”

  “Yes. He listens to you. He’s easy to speak to.”

  “I love him already,” said Katie. “Have you been out with him?”

  “We went to a movie once – with some other people.”

  “That doesn’t count. Not if there were other people. That’s not a proper date.”

  “You didn’t go out with Andy.”

  “I never said I did. I said I wanted to, but he never asked me.”

  “Well, James asked me to go to that movie. And he’s been to my house loads of times.”

  Katie took time to ponder this. “He must like you.”

  She hesitated, and Katie seized on the hesitation. “He doesn’t? That’s really bad luck, Clovie. Really bad luck.”

  “I didn’t say he didn’t like me. He’s just not ready. Boys are a couple of years behind us. You know that.”

  The conversation switched to mothers. “Mine won’t leave me alone,” said Katie. “She wants to interfere with everything I do – everything.”

  “Maybe she’s unhappy,” said Clover.

  It had never occurred to Katie that her mother, a socialite, could be anything but in the mood for a party. “She’s never unhappy,” she said. “But that doesn’t stop her trying to ruin my happiness.”

  “Poor you,” said Clover.

  She thought of Amanda in her flat in Edinburgh, which seemed so diminished after the house in the Caymans. The whole world here seemed diminished, in fact; the horizons closer, the sky lower, the narrow streets affording so little elbow room; the sea, which they could just make out in the distance from the windows of the flat, was so unlike the Caribbean that it could be a different thing altogether. Instead of being a brilliant blue, as the sea should be, it was a steely grey, cold and uninviting.

  The move made it seem to Clover that their whole world had been suddenly and inexplicably turned upside down. The decision had been presented to her as a slight change of plan – “just for the time being” – but she knew that it was more than that. No modern child can be unaware of divorce or of the fact that parents suddenly may decide to live apart; Clover knew this happened because there were friends at school for whom it had been the pattern of life: adults moved in with one another, moved out again, and took up with somebody else. It was what adults did. But this was something that happened to other people – like being struck by lightning or being eaten by a shark – it never happened to oneself.

  The move may have been precipitate, but the truth was revealed slowly. “Daddy and I are happier, you know, if we’re doing separate things. You’ll understand that because you know how friends often want to do something different from what you yourself want to do. It’s just the way it is.”

  “Yes, I suppose so.”

  “And if you’re living with somebody you can sometimes want to have a bit more time to yourself. You must feel that sometimes – when Billy’s being a nuisance. It doesn’t mean that you don’t like the other person any more – it’s just that you feel a bit happier if you have more time to yourself.”

  “Maybe. But if you love the other person, won’t you miss him?”

  That had been more difficult for Amanda to answer. “Love changes, darling. At the beginning it’s like a rocket or one of those big fireworks – you know the sort – that sends all sorts of stars shooting up all over the place, and then it dies down a bit. That happens with love. You don’t necessarily stop loving somebody, but you might just decide to live in separate places so that you can have that time to yourself. That’s the way it works.”

  She thought about this. Lying in bed on that first night in Edinburgh, a few days before she was due to be taken up to Strathearn to begin her first term at boarding school, she thought about what her mother had said about love. It dies down. That was what she had said: it dies down. Love was very important; it was something that people talked about a lot. They also sang about it – just about every song she heard was about being in love. And some of these songs, she had noticed, were unhappy. People sang because they were in love with somebody who did not notice them nor love them back. This saddened them, and they sang songs to express the sadness.

  She lay in her bed looking up at the darkened ceiling. Am I in love? It was a question she had never thought she would ask herself because love, she had felt, belonged to some unsp
ecified future part of her life; it was not a question to be asked, or answered, at this stage, when she was just embarking on life.

  But there was only one person she really wanted to see. It was such an unusual, unsettling feeling that she wished that she could talk to somebody about it. She was close to her mother, and they had had that earlier conversation about James, but she now felt that she could not say anything more because her mother would discourage her. There was something awkward in her parents’ relations with James’s mother and father – something that she could not quite put her finger on. They did not like one another, she felt, but she was not sure why this should be so.

  On the day before she left for Strathearn, she sent an e-mail to Ted and asked him to pass on a message to James. She had an address for Ted, but not for James, to whom she had not had a chance to say a proper goodbye. “Please pass on this message to James – I think you have his address. Tell him to send me his e-mail address so that I can write to him. I know he’s going to be starting school in England soon, but he must have an address. So please ask him to send it to me, just so that we can chat.”

  Ted wrote back almost immediately. “I asked James and he said that he doesn’t like getting lots of e-mails as he doesn’t have the time to answer them all. He says sorry, and he hopes you don’t mind. He says that he’ll see you in the school holidays in Cayman. Maybe.”

  She re-read this message several times. It occurred to her that Ted might not have spoken to James at all – Ted was quite capable of telling lies, as everybody seemed to be. He had never wanted to share James as a friend, and this was his way of thwarting her. On the other hand, he might be telling the truth. It might be that James did not like dealing with e-mail – some boys were like that – and the important thing then was that he had said that he would see her in the school holidays. That meant that he wanted to see her, and that gave her comfort.

  But when the much anticipated school holidays came round for the first time, the Christmas holiday, her mother told her that they would not be returning to Cayman but would spend the time in Edinburgh. “Daddy will come. He has to be in London for a meeting, and so you’ll see him here. We’ll all be together as a family.”