A Bit of Earth (12 page)

And then they talked, and then he went back home with her. It had seemed really cool, as though he really liked her.

In the morning she'd got up early, before he was awake, and had a shower. Then she made these blueberry muffins that she often made on Sundays (all the girls in the house really loved them). They were just so easy.

She'd taken in a plate of them with some coffee.

He'd woken up and said, ‘Oh God, what is this? Fucking fairy cakes for breakfast.'

She'd seen him looking around, at her room and all her things. And then he'd gone, and that had been that. She hadn't said a word.

She was left there in her lilac pyjamas with the Scottie dogs on, holding the plate of muffins, still warm in their silver paper cases. She remembered a time when she was sixteen and getting ready to go out, and her sister Steph, who was eighteen and was going to be a surveyor, and was totally unfrivolous, totally pared down, said to her, ‘Don't you worry about wearing those earrings? What if something really bad happened to you? Or you were having a row about something really important with someone? What if you were in an accident? You'd be so aware that you were wearing those stupid earrings. And whoever you were with
would be thinking, “What does she think she looks like in those earrings? Why did she think she ought to hang those ridiculous objects on her ears?” And they might say it, too. If they didn't say it, they'd be thinking it …'

Madeleine sat on her bed and ate one of the muffins. She put the rest of them in the kitchen for the others to eat. It was Saturday morning and nobody else was up yet. They wouldn't know if he had stayed the whole night or not, or what might or might not have happened. She went back to bed and cried silently for a very long time because she felt so stupid. She wished she could go round to his room and sneer at all his stuff. And she had an essay to write for the tutorial on Monday. The group that he was bloody in. He had hardly even talked to her before last night. She supposed that he would pretend that nothing had happened. Well, so would she.

That night when the other girls went out she said she had a stomach ache, and she had to do that essay. She made some chocolate brownies for no reason at all and left them out for the girls to eat when they got back. She didn't have any, not even one, she wasn't at all hungry. She sat in her room and finished the essay. Then she began to take things down; first the photos in the furry frames. (Why have them up when she could see her friends grinning at her every day, and she could remember what the people from home all looked like?) Down came the fairy lights from around the mirror. They were stupid if it wasn't Christmas, and even if it was. The disco ball could go to a charity shop. The Beanie Babies wouldn't fit in the only envelope she had. She raided Kath's room. She had some giant jiffy bags, Madeleine knew. Kath's mum was always sending her books. She stuffed
all the Beanie Babies in to be posted home. (To be
really
pared down she should have chucked them out, but somehow …)

Then away went anything cutesy, anything sparkly, anything unnecessary. The next day she went into town and bought a white quilt cover. She decided to keep her curtains. They were red and white spotted, with tie-backs, and she had made them as part of her Textiles coursework when she was sixteen. She had got an A star. Nothing would stop her liking them even if they
were
a bit, well, toadstool house-ish. But all the other decorations could go. Goodbye hearts, pinkness, bead curtains, wind chimes, dream catchers, funny pictures, animals, fairy things. Goodbye all accessories.

Almost all her clothes seemed stupid too. The same rules applied. She took as much as she could to the Oxfam shop on her way to the tutorial. She supposed that some people might just see it as an excuse to get some new clothes. She would have the bare minimum. Everything simple, plain and not ridiculous ever again. This was nothing to do with Thom. It really wasn't because she cared at all about what he thought, she just wanted to clear things out, to have less stuff around her. It was nothing to do with him at all.

Professor Judy Lovage was in her office, staring out of the window and remembering something that had happened over thirty years ago.

‘Judy,' he had said, ‘I have looked you up. It says that you are a native perennial of the rocky places near the sea. You were eaten by the Scots to prevent scurvy. You are often found on the coasts of Scotland and Ireland but are not elsewhere. I think I shall go to Scotland and Ireland. Perhaps we shall go together.'

‘Lovage is just a herb,' she had said. ‘Quite common. It grows in lots of gardens. But I would love to go to Scotland or Ireland with you. We could go in the next vacation.'

He had smiled and kissed her. And she had never found out if he had really meant that they might go.

If I had my time again, she thought, would I do things differently? Would I try to pin him down, to discover if his intentions were honourable? She couldn't imagine many of her students putting up with any vague suggestions of promises of a possible future. They would be emailing lists of ground rules to be agreed. Or perhaps they would just
take it all in their very long strides. Such big girls, such Amazons she had in her classes nowadays. She hadn't used to be so small. And the schoolgirls she saw on the bus, they were huge, like great, grown women. Phoebe, she thought, Phoebe Enright who was due for her tutorial in five minutes' time, would Phoebe put up with any nonsense?

Professor Lovage thought that Phoebe was astonishingly beautiful. Phoebe had cropped auburn hair and eyes the colour of sea-washed agates. Professor Lovage even excused Phoebe when she wore little tops that exposed her midriff. Phoebe was this year's secretary of the students' DramaSoc, and was still high on her success as St Joan.

Phoebe thought that her eyes were nondescript. She had yet to be told that they looked like agates. Phoebe was on track, Professor Lovage thought, for a First, or at least a very high 2:1.

Three sharp knocks on the door ended Professor Lovage's contemplation of Phoebe's eyes. The students had arrived with their neatly printed-out essays. Here was Thom (as he styled himself), indolent, confident, planning a career in journalism. Professor Lovage thought that his sideburns made him look like an extra from
Planet of the Apes.
She imagined that he thought her to be a spinsterish bluestocking; but what cared she for his opinion of her? In came Max, puffing a little after the three flights of stairs to her office, clutching, she noted with distaste, a bottle of Coke. It billed itself as ‘share-size'. Really, she thought, share-size! There would be no sharing of fizzy drinks in her tutorials.

‘Here, Max,' she said, ‘you can put your pop on this.' She passed him a glass coaster with a sprig of rosemary trapped
inside it. A present from one of her many nieces. He looked bewildered. ‘Or you could ask the staff in the department office to put it in the fridge for you.' She knew jolly well that nobody called it ‘pop' any more. It hadn't even been called ‘pop' when she was young.

Here was Phoebe with a pink rucksack printed with roses on camouflage. And finally Madeleine, looking rather wild-eyed, with her poker-straight beige hair flopping everywhere. Her nose looked rather too pink. The child has been crying, thought Professor Lovage. She would ask her to read last, if at all.

‘Well,' said Professor Lovage, once they had all sat down and rummaged in their bags for pens. ‘Plant Forms in the Gothic Cathedral. Phoebe, perhaps you would like to read first.'

She was aware that Thom rolled his eyes, clearly jealous. She would ask him the first question, and make it particularly challenging.

Later, as Max read his somewhat plodding essay, Judy found her thoughts drifting back to the weekend. She had visited Winchester Cathedral with Jemima, one of her favourite nieces. Jemima was an art student and, to Judy's delight, brought her sketch book. It meant that they could spend many hours in the Cathedral. Judy was constantly astonished at how quickly other people could visit a place. She would see them with their heavy steps in sensible walking shoes, laden down with umbrellas and cool boxes, guide books and money belts (perhaps they feared medieval cut-purses lurking in the Cathedral Close) pausing only for a few moments in front of each object of interest. But there was the gift shop to do, and they must make sure that they
had time for that. Slow down, she felt like crying, look up! Jemima had kindly given her some of the sketches she had made of a Green Man, and these were in a folder on her desk. She would put them up on her pinboard. She had longed to hold the Green Man's face in her hands. She imagined that it would feel smooth and warm, as though it were alive, or might crease into life. Perhaps, she thought, perhaps. She had smiled as she traced the outlines of the monkeys and plants carved in the wood of a choir stall.

So many years had passed since she'd last held the face of a man in her hands. Eduardo Ricallef. His olive skin had felt thick and strong, his hair not green leaves, but short tangled curls. Truly black. And his eyes, a surprising dark Pacific blue-green. A cold ocean. She thought she could still recall exactly the pressure of his mouth on hers. Eduardo Ricallef. Chilean poet, visiting lecturer, returned to Chile just before the coup. Never heard from again. What had they done to that long smooth back? To those square hands that she had once said were the hands of a fisherman or a labourer, not a poet? Those eyes. She had to blink away the thoughts, the unforgettable images and words from too many Amnesty campaigns and newspaper ads. He had, or was, as the phrase went, disappeared.

She dragged her thoughts back to the business of Max's essay.

Judy had been named for Judy Garland. It had seemed to her mother to be a pretty and no-nonsense name. In her mother's mind, Judy was destined for white bobby socks and blue gingham. Judy had thought herself destined for
ruby slippers. Now here she was in a pair of dark brown Clarks Springers. Not like spaniels, she thought, these shoes had only the shortest fur, closer to that of a smooth-haired dachshund than a silky spaniel; but they did indeed enhance her already springy gait. Judy Lovage, now in her mid-fifties, was as fit as a flea. She swam almost daily and cut quite a dash in her red and blue stripy boy-legged swimsuit. Tuesday evening was Pilates, Friday lunchtime was yoga. She looked on her once smooth and muscly thighs only with affection as their slow transformation into skinny shanks was completed. I had better keep clear of donkey sanctuaries, she told herself, or I may find myself being rescued.

It was easy to feel fond of one's legs when one saw some of those on display at the swimming pool. There was one man that Judy could not bear to look at. He seemed to take some sort of obscure pleasure from unnecessary walks up and down the side of the pool. She also saw him cycling and marching around in shorts. Quite unnecessary. He had a terrible varicose vein running the length of his left thigh. It looked exactly like a Celtic serpent or a symbol on a Viking rune. At first she had wondered if it might have been a tattoo, or some sort of African or Maori thing, even though he was white and middle-aged. Once seen, it was never forgotten. Why on earth did he want people to know of its existence? Judy would have had it removed, whatever the cost, or at least kept it well under wraps. Even if one kept it hidden, she mused, one would still have to live with the knowledge that in the event of one's death it would be seen by the undertakers and any medical personnel involved. She would have been unable to die in peace, let alone expose it daily at the swimming pool and whenever the weather was
anything approaching warm enough for shorts. Not that she had worn shorts in public for a very long time.

Though perhaps, she mused, there was something equally dreadful about herself, and nobody was telling her. Perhaps people said, ‘There goes that woman with the teeth arms/feet/hair/hands/nails …' It could have been anything and she might never know. This was one of the perils of living alone. But then the man with the serpent on his leg might well be married. Perhaps his wife said, ‘Don't be silly. Nobody notices things like that.' Judy suspected that this was not the case. To go striding round like that, the gratuitous wearing of shorts … he must either be unaware of the effect that his legs had on other people, or actually enjoy it.

Sometimes Judy found that being alone made everything seem unutterably pointless. It highlighted the futility of all of one's actions. Sometimes everything she did seemed silly. Why cook? Why garden? But generally work did not make her feel like this.

Ah, ‘work and love, love and work,' she thought, looking down at her Strawberry Thief PVC-coated tote bag (another gift from another niece). Well, at least she had the work part of the equation. Loneliness was not a feeling she allowed herself. She went to the theatre and to concerts with friends. She visited her sisters and her nephews and nieces. But it could only be a matter of time before somebody gave her a herb-filled tea cosy in a William Morris print.

She remembered the first time she'd seen Eduardo. He was a large, easy, confident man, some ten years her senior. Her immediate thought was that he looked too happy to be a poet. He was sitting in what was then called the Refectory
with a group of post-grads and fellow lecturers. It seemed that he had already made friends. He had his arms along the backs of the chairs next to him. Everybody was laughing. She had felt shy and superfluous, and had immediately planned to take her lunch and hide behind a pillar, but Stanley, the then ‘heir apparent' of the department had spotted her and called her over. They had all already eaten. How desperately she had regretted choosing an egg salad. She also had a knickerbockerglory glass of fruit salad on her tray, the squirt of artificial cream already melting into a chemical coating for the slices of apple and orange.

Oh, the food we used to eat! thought Judy. Egg salad was available all year. It never varied. You got two very hard-boiled eggs, veined with blue; a few leaves of round lettuce; some bendy cucumber; a quartered tomato that might be mushy or bouncy, but would always be completely tasteless; maybe a radish, and a large pile of cress. The catering became more daring over the next few years, and raw mushrooms, heaps of coleslaw and iceberg lettuce were introduced.