The Forever Girl

  “James.”

  “James. Predictable.”

  “Are you laughing at me?”

  “I’m not. I’m being unkind, and I’m sorry. I’m called Padraig myself, for heaven’s sake – how predictable is that, if you’re Irish, which I happen to be? There’s nothing wrong with being called James. But let’s not mention his name.” He made a slicing motion. “James is now an un-person. It’s official. James has been abolished.”

  He made her laugh. She liked that, and they had another drink. He said, “Feeling better?”

  She felt the effect of the alcohol. The cider had not been very strong, but it had been strong enough. “Yes, much better.”

  He reached for and pressed her hand. “Me too.”

  She let her hand linger in his; returned the pressure.

  That was the beginning of something that lasted for four years, throughout their university years in Edinburgh, until they both graduated. It was a friendship and a romance, but the emphasis was on the former rather than the latter. Each provided for the other what the other needed: Padraig was looking for something, for the perfect love, the head-over-heels affair that would bring him his life partner, but he knew that this would not be Clover. She had already found, she felt, exactly what she was looking for, and it was not Padraig – but it seemed that it was forever closed to her. Both settled for something less than they thought they might find; neither wished to hurt the other, and neither did. Clover, though, began to lead a secret life – out of desperation, out of disappointment, as most secret lives are led.

  25

  It was not until she had been with Padraig for a month or so that Clover first saw James. The beginning of the affair with Padraig had distracted her, and the upset that the news of James’s presence in Edinburgh had brought to her had largely abated. She had decided that she could live with the knowledge that he was in Edinburgh and had persuaded herself that it did not matter to her. Padraig had suggested that James be abolished; very well, he was. And it surprised her to find out that the act of consigning him to oblivion in this way seemed to help. She thought of him, but only occasionally, and without the desperate tug, the almost physical sensation of pain, that such thoughts had previously triggered. I cannot have James, she thought. He is not for me. It was a form of self-hypnosis – a mantra of the sort that smokers used to abandon cigarettes or alcoholics their alcohol: I do not need these things. I do not need these things.

  But if weaning from a dependence succeeds, it often does so intermittently, and there will be periods of back-sliding, of weakness, when the temptation to do the thing that you know you should not do is just too strong. For Clover that came shortly before her first sighting of James – a sighting that was not accidental in any way but was engineered by her in just such a moment of weakness.

  It happened one afternoon. She had just attended a tutorial and was making her way out into George Square when she passed a university noticeboard. For some reason she stopped and looked at the notices pinned on that particular board. They had nothing to do with her course but she read the largest of them and saw that it was a schedule of classes in economics, which was the subject that she had been told James was studying.

  The notice set out the names of those students in various tutorial groups and their time of meeting. Now she knew what she was doing, as her eye ran down the list. James Collins. She stopped at the words – words that were invested with such potent effect, as the name of someone we love always is. She thought, inconsequentially, absurdly: the person who typed them can’t have known what sort of person he was. There were five other names in the groups. Olivia somebody; Jenny somebody; Mark, Mustafa, Terry. They would know, of course; these were his companions. She looked at Olivia’s name and tried to picture her. She might even sit next to him, and if she did then she would be bound to want him – of course she would.

  She turned away. These were ridiculous, stupid thoughts. They were unhealthy. This way lay obsession.

  She turned back to look at the notice again. It gave the name of the building and the room number. It gave the time of the tutorial. She looked at her watch. James’s tutorial would have started ten minutes ago, and it would be taking place not more than a few hundred yards from where she was standing. She went to the doorway and looked out. There was the other building. Third floor – the notice had said it would be on the third floor. She looked at the windows along the third floor façade. Behind one of those, Olivia, Jenny, Mark, Mustafa, Terry and James would be discussing whatever it was they discussed in economics tutorials. Prices, perhaps. Markets. Commodities. Rational economic behaviour – an expression she had seen in a newspaper article. Rational economic behaviour was behaving sensibly in response to economic incentives or disincentives. Irrational economic behaviour, presumably, was doing the opposite. I, for instance, am now behaving irrationally …

  Why? Because a rational person does not stand and stare at a window because she thinks a boy she cannot get out of her mind is sitting with others behind that window. There was nothing rational in that.

  She lowered her gaze from the third floor to the ground floor. She imagined that there was more than one door into the building and more than one door out of it. The front door, though, seemed to be the main entrance and exit, as she noticed, even as she was staring at it, students walking in and out. So when you went to your economics tutorial on the third floor that must be where you went in and an hour, or maybe slightly less, later where you came out. She looked at her watch again. Forty-five minutes from then he would walk out of that door. Forty-five minutes from then she could happen to be passing – the building was on the way to the main university library and everybody walked that way. She could be walking past just as James was coming out of the building and she would say …

  “James! What are you …”

  And, when it happened, as she managed to ensure it did, just over fifty minutes later, he said: “I don’t believe it! I heard you were here and I was going to …”

  Then why had he not? She put the question out of her mind. “Me too.”

  His smile was unforced. Even if he had not been in touch, the chance encounter clearly pleased him.

  He had come out of the building with a girl and she was now standing next to him, smiling at Clover.

  “This is Olivia,” said James.

  She looked at the other girl. She was a recognisable type; one of those well-groomed, expensively educated girls who chose to go to university in Edinburgh because it was a good place to find a husband. It was a crude generalisation, and one that Clover would have previously mocked, but once she had arrived there she had realised that, like so many stereotypes, it was simply true.

  Olivia glanced from Clover to James.

  “An old friend,” he said. “We were at school together in Cayman back in the day.”

  Olivia smiled at her, and then glanced at her watch. “I have to meet Sue. I promised.”

  James nodded. “See you later.”

  “Yes.”

  Clover wondered what later meant. Later that day? Tomorrow?

  “Eight-ish,” said Olivia.

  James nodded absent-mindedly. He was still looking at Clover; he was still smiling.

  “We could get a coffee,” he said. “It would be nice to catch up.”

  She felt her heart hammering within her. “Yes, of course. Why not?”

  “There’s a place at the top of Middle Meadow Walk. You know it?”

  She did, and they walked there together, slowly.

  “I don’t even need to ask you what you’re doing,” he said. “Let me guess. History of Art?”

  “How did you know?”

  “Ted told me, actually,” he said. “But it suits you. I always thought you’d do something like that.”

  “Well, maybe that’s what people do. The things they’re interested in.”

  “Most of the time,” he said. “But not always. There was somebody in my year at school who’s just s
tarted medicine and has realised it’s a terrible mistake. He’s squeamish. He threw up in the anatomy lecture theatre.”

  “I couldn’t do it,” said Clover. “I don’t like the sight of blood.”

  “Blood doesn’t worry me,” said James. “It’s spit that I can’t stand. Mucus. That sort of thing.”

  “Well, you’re not studying medicine. There’s no mucus in economics.”

  “No,” he said, and laughed. “Just sweat.”

  “And tears.”

  “Something missing there. Blood, I thought.”

  She glanced at him discreetly as he spoke. He had not changed; some softness had gone, perhaps, but that was what you would expect. He had been a beautiful boy, she thought, and now he was a beautiful man.

  They sat down for coffee. Somewhere in the distance a bell chimed. He looked at her over the table.

  “I’m glad that we bumped into one another,” he said.

  “So am I.” She took a sip of her coffee. It was too hot, and she could feel it burn her lips. She wiped it away.

  “Olivia,” she said.

  “What about her?”

  “She doing economics with you?”

  He nodded. “She’s doing other subjects too. She wants to get a degree in economics and French.”

  The next question was blurted out unplanned. “Are you seeing her?”

  He toyed with his coffee cup. “Yes, I am.” He looked up. “And you? Are you seeing anyone?”

  Her voice sounded hollow. “Yes. There’s somebody on my course. He’s Irish.”

  He looked away. “So. Good. I wouldn’t like to think that you were seeing just anybody …”

  Her surprise at his remark made her laugh. “Why?”

  He reacted as if her question were an odd one. “Because … because we’ve known one another forever, more or less. Because you’re a sort of sister to me, I suppose.”

  It cost her an effort not to wince. He had meant it well, but it was not what she wanted to hear.

  “You don’t have to worry about me,” she said.

  “Good,” he said. “Well, what about … what about everything?”

  “Where do we start? Do you hear from Ted?”

  “All the time,” he said. “He sends me e-mails about all sorts of stuff. Music. Movies. The works. Ted has views on a lot of things.”

  “He always did.”

  They talked for fifteen minutes before he said that he had to get back to his flat.

  “I’ll phone you,” he said. “If you give me your mobile number.”

  She gave him the number. She watched him write it down on a scrap of paper; she watched his hands. They were brown because of the sun that had been on them and that now was so weak, so distant, so unconvincing. It was strange seeing him here in Scotland, detached from the setting in which they had both grown up. She feared for him, somehow; she feared that something would happen to him in this cold, northern country; that the light that was within him, that was nurtured by the Caribbean, would somehow weaken, would flicker and be extinguished in Scotland.

  She watched as he tucked the piece of paper with her number on it into his pocket. You lost pieces of paper like that. He would lose that, she was sure of it, and she would not hear from him. And she wanted, more than anything else, to feel that she was somehow part of his life – not of his past, but of the life he was leading now. But it was far more than that: she wanted to be able to see him, to be in his presence. It was a patently dangerous desire and she knew she had been foolish in courting it again, to allow it oxygen when she was only too aware that all that it would do would be to bring her unhappiness. It was what people did, though, she admitted to herself; they knew that something was wrong for them, and yet they did it. Women fell for the wrong men, time after time, and men did the same thing in falling for the wrong women. We repeated mistakes, and that was why our mistakes were often so recognisable to us – why we were able to admit to them, just as we self-deprecatingly admitted to weaknesses – an inability to resist chocolate, a streak of laziness, human failings like that; our mistakes were familiar because we made them again and again.

  She waited for him to call her. She said nothing about it to Padraig, because she had not mentioned to him that she had met James. It was surprisingly easy to keep a secret – one just said nothing, which was hardly difficult – although he noticed that she was anxious not to leave her phone behind when he came to collect her to take her to a concert. “Why take it?” he said. “You have to switch it off during the performance.”

  She said nothing, and then he asked her whether she was expecting a call. She shook her head.

  “Then why take it?”

  “Habit,” she said.

  She did not like to lie, but she could not bear the thought that James might call and the phone would ring unanswered. But he did not, neither that evening, nor the next. She tried to remember his exact words. He said he would phone, but did he say when? She could not remember. And was it significant, she wondered, that he had asked for her number and not volunteered his? People did that, of course; and they did it not because they did not want you to phone them, but because they intended to be the ones to call.

  After a week he called. It was in the early evening and she was alone in the flat. She thought it would be Padraig, who had taken to phoning her at that time, and almost said Hello, Padraig, but stopped herself in time.

  James hesitated at the other end of the line. “Clover?”

  “Yes. James?”

  He laughed. “Oh, sorry: I wasn’t expecting to get you.”

  She wondered whether it was a joke. “Well, it is my phone.”

  “Yes, of course. It’s just that I’ve dialled the wrong number. I wrote down somebody else’s number and I think I had yours on a piece of paper too. I’ve mixed the two up. I thought …” He uttered a stage groan. “This is getting complicated, isn’t it?”

  She struggled to sound unconcerned. “A bit.”

  “I thought I was phoning somebody else, you see, but I was dialling your number. A silly mistake.”

  “I see.”

  “Not that it isn’t nice to speak to you. How are things?”

  They spoke for a few minutes. She hoped that he was going to suggest a meeting, but he did not. Eventually he said that he would have to go as he had to make the call he had intended to make in the first place. He did not give the name of the person he was calling, and she did not ask. It could be anyone, of course; she understood that; it could be somebody from his course, or a male friend – he played squash, she remembered, and he might just be phoning to arrange a game. Or it could be that girl she had seen, or any one of the other girls who would be flocking round him.

  She sat down. She threw the phone onto her bed. It rolled off and landed on the floor, on the threadbare rug by her bedside, the rug she had bought, third-hand, for her room in the boarding house at Strathearn, loved in spite of its coffee stains, its bare patches, its tendency to crumple. She lowered her head into her hands. She would be seeing Padraig later. He had asked her to go with him to the pub. He would be witty – as he always was – he would make her laugh. He would whisper to her; he would share everything; he would invite her to be his co-conspirator in the word games he played with the world. He was honest and good – and she was keeping secrets from him. She should tell him that she could not love him entirely, that there would always be part of her that would be with James; she should say that that was the way it was no matter how hard she tried to make it otherwise. She should tell him the truth and then ask him to understand, to help her to get over this, as he had already tried, although in a jocular way, to help her to do. But she knew that she would not say any of this, because the whole point of the feeling that she had for James was that others, for all their sound advice, would be unable to understand how she felt.

  And of course she should have said something to James. She could have let him know how she felt for him – there were ways of doing that
short of the sort of declaration that could spoil everything; because that is what would happen, she knew it; James liked her, but he was not in love with her. James did not think about her as she thought about him; his day did not start, nor end, with thoughts of her. Kind and considerate though he was, he phoned her only by mistake. I am the sort of girl who gets called only by mistake … It was the sort of thing that Padraig would say, with his occasional flashes of Oscar Wilde wit, that came from being Irish and from having a father who was a director at the Abbey Theatre. Or it could equally well have been that woman her mother sometimes quoted, the one from New York who made witty remarks.

  She wondered where James would be. In his flat presumably, unless he had already gone out with … her, whoever she was. She tried to envisage him in the shared flat which would be a mess, like all those flats that boys lived in; dirty socks all over the place and unwashed plates festering in the kitchen sink, and a smell. She could see it, but there were details missing because she had no idea where it was. Flats on the south side of the town looked different from flats on the north side. You could always tell. She thought James might live in the New Town, in one of those Georgian streets, with the Firth of Forth visible through the window and the coast of Fife beyond it. He would be sharing with boys called Henry and Charlie and names like that, and they would spend half their time in the pub and going to parties. And they would be surrounded at weekends by girls like Olivia, who would laugh at their jokes and cook for them on the dirty cooker and then do the week’s washing-up without complaint. She tried to picture the place again, and failed. She should find out. There would be no harm in finding out where it was; there was no harm in just looking.

  26

  She sent an e-mail to Ted. “I saw James the other day. You’re still in touch with him, aren’t you? Have you got his address (not e-mail – I have that – but his snail-mail address)? I don’t seem to have it. We’re going to meet up some time soon.”

  She read and re-read the message. Was it a lie? No. She had seen James – that was quite true – and it was also the case that she did not have his address – she did not have to say that he had not given it to her. They were going to meet, too, as James had taken her number and you did not take a number unless you intended to do something about it. So there was no deception in this message, even if she had not disclosed why she wanted to know the address. But there was nothing to be ashamed of in that respect, she told herself. It was quite understandable, she thought, to want to know where your friends lived. That was normal curiosity. It was. It was.