Homesick (12 page)

She stepped out into the hallway, listening still. Below her, she could hear her parents snoring in unison. She was comforted by their noises, which she often relied upon when she came in late, or wanted to steal downstairs to drink a nip of gin from one of the bottles in the kitchen. She heard the singsong of Bill’s voice again: he said, “Yes, yes, faster, no faster—Oh God, you’re gorgeous,” and she moved closer to Rohan’s door, spied through a gap, and saw them fucking. Her brother stood behind Bill, his arse naked and shadowed, and Bill’s back lay forward in front of him, a glance of moon lighting him as he writhed. Rohan’s head fell back, his face creased in what looked like tears, and she wondered: should I stop them? Should I go to him, because he looks like he is in pain? But she knew he was all right, and she stepped back into her room, shaking.

In the morning, when she came down to breakfast, Bill and Rohan sat silent on opposite sides of the table, and Ammi put fried eggs, bacon, and fried bread in front of them both.

“Ah! What time did you get home, madam?” Ammi asked.

“She was home by midnight, Ammi,” Rohan said quietly.

“Bike didn’t turn into a pumpkin, then?” Nandini said. Bill laughed. She could not look at them. “You want tea,
darling?” Nandini asked, putting her arm around Preethi’s shoulders.

“Where’s Gehan?”

“Gone already. He had cricket practice,” Nandini said.

“Where’s Papa?”

“He went to the early service. Are you coming to church? Where is your bike, by the way?”

They agreed that Ammi would give her a lift to Dulwich to pick up the bike, and she would miss church just this time and take a slow ride home to clear her head. Rohan was going to accompany Bill to Euston, where he would put him on a train to Leeds. Preethi did not say goodbye to them. Bill caught her mother around the waist and told her he would never forget her, then kissed her. Where Preethi had been sitting, he put a page of NUM stickers. When she returned home to an empty house later, she found them, and instead of throwing them away as she wanted to, she stuck them into her diary, and on her bike and onto her schoolbag, as if their topicality and reactionary quality were in some way a payment for his presence. And on Monday when her friends asked where the stickers came from, she said casually, “Oh, my brother brought a miner home from the march on Saturday,” knowing that this statement alone would render her worthy, extreme, likeable.

•

She saw what Ammi thought of Cassie’s house.

“Is she a nice girl?” she asked.

“Nice? Yes, I suppose so.” She jumped out of the car and waved goodbye before her mother could ask more. She decided it would be better to ring the doorbell and let them know she was taking the bike. It was, after all, sitting
against a bush on their front lawn. But when she rang, nobody came. She thought of walking around the side, to look through the kitchen window, but as she started down the side path she caught a glimpse of their garden, an expanse of lawn and the wisteria in full bloom climbing high up the white walls. In the daylight it looked shiny, like the park of a museum, and she felt as if she were preying on it all, as if the museum were closed and she was breaking in. She could see the swing bench in the corner of the garden, and she stood for a moment, looking at Ollie and herself kissing.

“Hello!” a voice said from above.

“Hello?” she said, craning her neck back and squinting into the sun. Ollie. He stood on the steps by the front door.

“How odd. I was just thinking about you.”

This made her hot, made her lose her words.

“I was just thinking … well, never mind. What are you doing here? I left my jumper here, I think. It’s my last one, and I’m leaving soon: I doubt my mother will buy another and …” He stopped. She looked at him hopelessly as he stopped at the bottom step. Extraordinarily, he leaned toward her and kissed her gently on the mouth. “You look lost,” he said quietly. At the kiss, her heart leapt, not for the kiss itself but for its intimations: its acknowledgement of the potential she had been thinking about. And yet, as he kissed her, she thought of Rohan and Bill, washed with moonlight. She hated herself, but it disgusted her, the passion her brother and his lover had felt.

She still had to say something, anything. She smiled at him, then touched her lips.

“I’m sorry,” he said, looking grim.

“No. Don’t be. It’s fine. I mean, it’s fine.” She tried to be jolly, but could not. She pointed toward her bike and
walked unsteadily across the lawn, not sure if she were allowed to walk on its pristine surface.

“I was wondering what you were doing back here. I knew you hadn’t stayed the night, and anyway, all the girls who did are in the park having a picnic breakfast.” He raised his eyebrows.

“Oh.”

“Do you want to join them? I’m walking up that way.…”

“D’you mind if we don’t? I had a horrible night, and I’d just like to calm down a little,” she said, and without it meaning to, the secret came tumbling out. What made it worse was Ollie whistling a little and shaking his head.

“Rohan was a prefect when I was in the lower sixth,” he said, and she saw he was adding things up, remembering her brother differently.

“No, look, no. He’s
not
like that,” she said, but he gave her a knowing smile. “Look, can you just forget about it? Can we talk about something else?” she asked desperately.

“Of course. Where are you going now?”

“I don’t know. Where are you going?” She felt that she was wrong, for telling and for telling Ollie, someone she hardly knew; but now that she had, she felt a relief, she felt a change in herself. And here was Ollie, standing with her, kissing her, talking to her. “Shall we go up to the woods?”

They walked up past the college, past the playing fields and the boardinghouses. She left her bike chained to the gate to the woods, and they walked in, and when she slipped, he reached out and rather matter-of-factly held her hand. It was dreamlike and steady, this walking upward, this heartbeat pace. And once into the wood, they stopped talking and he kissed her again. They sat against a fallen tree and kissed and kissed, and when he broke off and
pulled a cigarette packet out, he did not ask but lit two. She lay down in front of him, her hair splayed about her head, and he leant down and kissed her again, and even later when she was married with children, she remembered this moment, when she was seventeen, smoking the second cigarette of her life. She remembered his hand, a square-fingered, heavy hand, reaching across her body, stroking down from her neck to her shoulders, across her breasts, resting gently on her stomach, and to her pubic bone, where it seemed it dare not go farther. His eyes did not leave her face, and when she raised her eyes to his, he looked at her, not through her, simply at her.

When they finished their cigarettes, she sat up, sat next to him again.

“So, what are we going to do?” she asked. Her bustle and efficiency broke the mood. He lit another cigarette for himself only.

“Nothing. We’ll do nothing.”

“Why?” She was horrified: she was sure it was the story about Rohan. She would say she made it up, as a silly joke. She would say—look, how ridiculous it is, the idea of a
miner
coming to stay.

“Freddie. I can’t take the girl he idolises from under his nose.”

“Freddie?” She laughed, incredulous. Freddie, the ugly idiot savant, who told the best jokes and looked at her across rooms as if she were a saint. Freddie, who in his last letter compared her bitterness about the unfairnesses of the world to Anthony—to him she was not Cleopatra but Anthony! She had forgotten Freddie, she had forgotten his straight-backed, righteous love for her, which she had never implied she would return.

They parted at the gate to the wood. This time, she
leaned to Ollie and kissed him, not tenderly but with a hard, grazing intensity, so that for the rest of his days he would miss her. But as he walked away she saw his step was not sad or low. His head was jaunty in the midday sunshine, and around him the day haloed.

•

It turned out there was another reason for Ollie to turn away. He had asked Cassie out on Saturday, and the sixth-form common room was awash with hormonal screams and mutterings. Preethi kept her meeting with Ollie to herself. It belonged to her, she decided, and one day they were destined to be together. Besides which, he was going travelling with Freddie soon.

She had life to get on with, friends whose groups she needed to become part of again, essays to labour over, an A4 diary to catch up with, in detail, to describe the kiss, the hand stretched over her body. Soon, on Monday, she was absorbed in
Howards End
and Forster’s abyss, and as she read of Leonard Bast’s walk, which the Schlegel girls found so enlightening, it suddenly came to her: the overwhelming guilt and loss, a feeling that hollowed her out like a pain of three-day hunger, and it was Freddie she thought of, Freddie whose ugly face ricocheted around her head until she lay her face on her arms in the library and cried.

She wrote him a letter, about selfishness and the guilt she felt, and at lunch went to post it. On the way back, she saw him in the distance, and Ollie was next to him, walking through the village. She thought to cross the road or hide behind a tree. He had seen her, though. She smiled, he waved, but when they came close, she saw Ollie’s face, his eyes, and how beautiful he was, and how his lips were still hers.

Freddie said, “I was just thinking of you,” and she smiled up at him. Ollie walked away, and they went into the park.

“I just sent you a letter.”

“I’ll look forward to it.” Freddie’s face was bitter.

“I wanted to say I’m … sorry,” she started, knowing how useless it sounded.

“Yes. What have you been doing?”

“Exam practice: an essay on
Howards End
.”

He groaned. “I hate Leonard Bast. I hate the Schlegel women. So affected … stupid.”

“Oh, stop,” she said, relieved that they were reverting to who they had been before. “I see them all around me: the Schlegels and the Wilcoxes. Dulwich is full of them: my year is full of them! Girls who think they are original and exciting, and
understand life:
as if you
can
understand life.”

“And Bast? Bast—who is he in your picture of the world?” She smiled and shrugged, but he knew already, she had cast him as that outsider, and cast herself as Margaret, who understood
love
, at least, where he only stumbled about trying to save himself from the abyss. He stood suddenly and started to walk away.

“What are you doing?” she shouted after him lamely.

“Going home,” he said over his shoulder.

“I’m sorry!” she shouted. And she went back to school and wrote an essay that garnered an A.

•

“Preethi!” she heard her father call. “Phone for you!” She shot from her room. Perhaps it was Freddie, perhaps he was phoning from far away and the seconds ticking between her getting from her room to the telephone in the cold hallway would cost too much and he would be cut off.

“Who is it?” she shouted as she slid and ran down the three flights of stairs. Her father had already disappeared to the kitchen.

“Hello?” she said, panting, almost scared. What would she say to him? But he must be missing her as much as she missed him.

“Well, there’s no need to get excited, it’s only
me
.” Her heart fell. Clare, boring, stupid Classical Civilization Clare.

“Oh, hi,” she said breezily. Her father came out of the kitchen and pointed at a mug. He was making tea. She shook her head.

“Look, it’s your turn to go through
Antigone
, and I wondered if you’d done the notes yet?” Preethi closed her eyes in frustration. She had been so busy writing notes on Forster.

“No, I haven’t. But I’ll do them tonight.”

“Well. OK. I was going to offer,” Clare said.

“No, Clare. I said I’d do them.” She had been tricked like this before: Kate called it passive-aggressive, whatever
that
meant. Something to do with Clare always doing the work, then telling everyone—including the teachers—about it. “Was that it? Thanks for reminding me.” Clare was quiet at the end of the line. “OK. See you tomorrow,” Preethi added.

“Look, someone has to tell you, Preethi. I heard some major bitching in the common room.”

“Oh.”

“Cassie knows about you and Ollie at the party.”

“Oh.” Her mouth was dry. “But … technically, that was before they were going out, wasn’t it?”

“Well, the thing is, she and Ollie have been on and off for months, and she’s just been waiting for the exams to be over. I don’t really care, myself, but you’re both my friends, and well, I hate to hear people calling each other names.”

“What did she call me?”

“Well, a whore, for starters.” Preethi sat down on the leather pouffe by the telephone table.

“Right. I see. Well, thanks for telling me, Clare. See you tomorrow.” She couldn’t talk about it anymore. Freddie and Ollie were gone, and she was left to face the pack of wolves in the common room. And still a week until the end of term.

“Wait! Preethi? Are you still there?”

“Yes.”

“There’s something else she said, and that’s why I phoned.”

“What?” She was annoyed now. She rifled through the letters on the table and saw a small white, handwritten envelope, postmarked North Yorks. Bill.

“Cassie said something about your brother. It wasn’t nice.”

She did not go to school the next day, a Thursday, or on Friday. She pretended to, getting on her bike with her schoolbag in her wicker basket and blowing everyone a kiss as they got into the car. Then she rode down to the shops, bought cigarettes, a newspaper, and chocolate, and went to Hornimans Gardens. She sat by the petting zoo, feeding chocolate to the goats, reading about Princess Diana and Prince Charles and the baby due in September, and smoking a cigarette to the middle, until she needed to throw up. She walked unsteadily to the toilets, vomited her breakfast and the chocolate, and went home to bed.

Later she went out again, as far as Lordship Lane, and when she saw the first school coaches making their way up the hill, she turned her bike around and cycled home. In her room she read
Antigone
and tried to make notes but fell asleep twice. She need not have bothered to go through
the charade of returning: no one was in when she arrived. It made her feel better. When her mother returned, Preethi made her tea, started chopping onions for supper, then went back to her room.