Sunstroke and Other Stories (11 page)

She sat thinking now about the time when Keith was the most attractive man in the room, the man you couldn’t afford to turn your eyes away from, careless and dangerous with his young strength. It hadn’t been a good or tender thing exactly; it hadn’t had much joy in it for Caro. Nonetheless she quaked at the power of this enemy, stronger than either of them, who had slipped in under her roof and was stealing everything away.

When Keith had telephoned from France to say that he had to come over for a couple of days to talk to some people in Cardiff about a new film project, Caro had planned and shopped for an elaborate meal. She didn’t make anything heavy or indigestible, but unusual things that took careful preparation, little Russian cheese pastries for starters, then fillet of lamb with dried maraschino cherries and spinach, and for dessert gooseberry sorbet with home-made almond tuiles. Because she lived alone, she loved to cook when she was entertaining friends.

She had spent all day getting ready what they had eaten in an hour or so. And of course the food had taken second place to their talk, with so much to catch up on; although Keith had helped himself hungrily and appreciatively. In her thirties she had resented furiously this disproportion between the time spent cooking and eating; it had seemed to her characteristic of women’s work, exploitative and invisible and without lasting results. She had even given up cooking for a while. These days she felt about it differently. The disproportion seemed part of the right rhythm of all pleasure: a long, difficult and testing preparation for a few moments’ consummation.

Now she used her mother’s rolling pin to roll out her pastry; she kept Keith’s mother’s recipes for Welsh cakes and
bara brith. In her tasks around the flat – polishing furniture, bleaching dishcloths, vacuuming, taking cuttings from her geraniums, ironing towels and putting them away in the airing cupboard – she was aware that her mother and grandmother had done these same things before her, working alone in quiet rooms, or with the radio for company. In truth she had had a stormy relationship with her parents, and used to think of her mother’s domesticated life as thwarted and wasted. But she had learned to love the invisible work, the life that fell away and left no traces. This was how change happened, always obliquely to the plans you laid for it, leaving behind as dead husks all the preparations that you nonetheless had to make in order to bring it about.

WHEN I WAS
twenty, not all that long ago, I fell in love with one of my lecturers at college. I know this is a very ordinary thing to do. And I know now that the lecturers sigh and feel anxious at the news of yet another smitten girl-child traipsing round moonily after them. They feel anxious and all those other things you would expect, too: flattered and confirmed and a bit stimulated.

His name was Patrick Hammett, and he taught Shakespeare and seventeenth-century poetry and critical theory. I chose all his courses; I made him my interpreter of the whole world. Patrick was tall, with rather bowed shoulders; he was hollowly thin except for a small beer belly nestled in the stretched cloth of his T-shirt above his belt. He wore his thick black hair down to his shoulders, tucked behind his ears. He used gold-rimmed glasses to read but took them off when he was talking and swung them in his fingers, and sometimes dropped them; his eyes without the glasses were deep-set and squinted slightly. In a crowd, in a club, you wouldn’t have picked him out as particularly good-looking. But in the lecture room, sitting with us in the democratic circle of chairs that he insisted upon, his looks were a power, a force that I felt physically, like velvet against my skin. I loved the whitened pressure points that his glasses left on the bridge of his thin nose. I loved the big nervous hands he was always waving in the air, gesturing uncontrollably in accompaniment to his words.

Of course I didn’t have a chance with him. Who was I? I wasn’t anybody. I wasn’t even one of the cleverest in the classes. I wasn’t an absolutely average student either; I was aware that I had a quirky way of looking at things, which sometimes came out as insight and sometimes just left everyone looking blank. Patrick encouraged me. Once, he reminded all of them of something I’d said. —You remember the point that Carla made in last week’s seminar? Another time, after I’d made some remark about freedom of choice in
Much Ado About Nothing
, he said, —That’s very well expressed, Carla. I couldn’t have put that more eloquently myself. This made me very happy. But I didn’t delude myself. I wasn’t the kind of student who would get a first-class mark. When I tried to put my thoughts down in writing, the dart of intuition that was clear and sharp when it flew into my mind got tangled in something muffling and clumsy. And Patrick’s being surprised sometimes by my penetration didn’t really mean he had singled me out. I didn’t really exist for him, outside that circle of chairs in the lecture room.

In the seventeenth-century poetry seminar he read us ‘An Exequy’, by Henry King.

I can’t adequately express the effect this poem had on me then. I don’t remember now what season of the year it was, but I do remember that we had the strip lights on in the lecture room in the middle of the day because the sky was so dark outside, navy-blue clouds pressing close to the earth like an artificial ceiling. Little gouts of rain were spitting against the window, and in the gently sloping field outside (the campus was built up around an eighteenth-century house in the middle of an estate farmed by the Duchy of Cornwall) the bullocks, instead of lying down as they should have done with rain coming, were jostling uneasily and heaving up against the fence and clambering on to one another’s backs.

When I look at the poem now, I see that it is the lament of a much older man for a young wife snatched away by death, and that it depends upon a confidence in the resurrection of the body on Judgement Day. I don’t know anything about those things. But at the time I felt that the words of the poem were so immediate and relevant that they spoke to me not just through my mind but through my body. I could hear that Drum; its beating came right up out of the floor of the classroom and shook me through the soles of my feet. I made one of those remarks that didn’t come out well, and nobody took much notice of it. —He longs for her and she isn’t there, I said. It sounded too obvious to need stating. I’d wanted to use the word ‘sexual’ (we were trained to see sexual implications everywhere, and surely in this case I would have been right), but I couldn’t bring myself to be the first to say it. Patrick wanted us to talk about the metaphor of the beloved object as text (‘thou art the book, / The library whereon I look’). For me the
poem was Patrick. All its passion, its concentration, I attributed to him. The poem became my intimation of the pulse of his life, from which I was shut out.

He was only seven or eight years older than we were, but we thought his life must be made out of different stuff to the lives we knew. As far as we could tell he wasn’t married or living with anyone. Someone said he had once had a relationship with a student (although they’re not supposed to). That didn’t make me any more hopeful. She had probably been one of the clever ones who got firsts. She had probably been beautiful. I didn’t think I was. My looks (I’m small and blonde with eyes that used to make the kids at school call me frogface) were like the quirky things I said in class. Good on a good day.

I dreamed about him all the time. I don’t mean sleeping dreams, although sometimes he was in those as well. Too many of my waking hours were spent fantasising scenes in which Patrick and I somehow met outside the classroom and our relationship was changed out of distant acquaintance into passionate
amour.
I was very exacting as the author and director of these scenes in my mind. Nothing must happen in them that was absurdly improbable or out of character. Patrick wasn’t ever allowed, for example, to tell me that he had always loved me, that he had been fascinated by me from the moment I first walked into the lecture room. The scene could begin with no more than a friendly appreciation of an interested student, a teacherly investment in my intellectual development. He might at most be allowed a little stir of vanity at the depth and earnestness of my response to him.

Given these constraints, the journey from the plausible encounter to the moment when he reached out for me could still be travelled in a thousand different ways.(Even in my fantasies I didn’t dare reach out for him, in case he
turned me down.) He had to be surprised out of his position of friendly neutrality and into a dawning, uneasy recognition of his growing attraction to me, an attraction that he perhaps couldn’t quite rationally account for. The transformation could be precipitated in various ways; these were the only extravagance I allowed myself. Sometimes we would be accidentally stranded by a breakdown in the middle of nowhere, after he’d innocently offered me a lift home from college. Or we’d be caught by a freak storm when calling at a cottage belonging to friends of his to pick up some books he’d lent them. Or he would have to take refuge in my room one night after being beaten up by muggers and left bleeding in the road just as I was on my way home.

My favourite scene was acted out somewhere that I don’t think I’ve ever actually been. I imagined a path through a green meadow. I’m absolutely a city girl and don’t know much about the countryside but of course I’ve visited it. I needed to be clear in my mind exactly how we’d got there. Sometimes it was in the aftermath of some other encounter nearer home. (‘Why don’t you come out for a walk next weekend, and I’ll show you where Coleridge is supposed to have started writing “The Ancient Mariner”?’) Or a whole group of us were out on a college field trip and Patrick and I got separated from the others while we were talking. (Tricky, as the only trip he ever came on was to the theatre at Stratford.) Or he had employed me to do some research over the holidays and then on impulse said he’d like to buy me tea in the country as a reward.

We’d walk down this grassy path and reach a gate, which opened into a wood beyond. At the threshold of the wood the light changed from broad bright sunlight to a secretive and dappled shade. There were rustlings among the dead leaves that spread like a carpet under the trees. It was a place I’d invented for a transition, for the passage over from
my life into his, from his to mine. The gate was made of old grey wood washed silvery by the rain, it swung crookedly on rusting hinges. He held it open for me, or I climbed over and he helped me down. Something in the change of light stilled us, made us pause; the wood with its pillar-like tree trunks and its tracery of branches was a cathedral. He was still supporting my weight, or I was cast up against him in some way as I came through the gate or passed him on the narrow path. I could feel the heat of his body under the ragged grey wool of the sweater he really often wore.

I could only really sustain the stories up to this point. After that, his face came closer, he put his arms around me, there was kissing, there was pressing together, and the narrative failed; it lost its sequence. I could – and did – imagine plenty of what happened after, but not in a clear order. It came in a hallucinated muddle. I would try to disentangle it. I’d return again and again to the gate, the threshold, the movement with which he reached across the distance between us. I’d start again from there. But it was no good. The dream beyond that point was a stuck film repeating itself. Exhausting, after a while. Dispiriting. Because in truth it was nothing at all.

In my second year I was so short of money that I got a job working three evenings a week at a pub in town. It must have been an old pub once, with lots of twisty little rooms winding around the different levels, but it had been knocked through into one huge, cavernous space, low-ceilinged and gloomy. There were still confusing steps up and down in places, and the floor changed from flagstones to boards to carpets; drunks and women in heels sometimes tripped and spilled their beer. Games machines flashing ruby- and emerald-coloured lights stood against the walls. The place didn’t have much atmosphere. It was more fashionable to
go to one of the new bars with long pine tables and stainless-steel counters, where food was served; or to one of the old quaint pubs that had kept their little rooms and served real ale. Big parties came to my pub because there was usually room to seat them all. And men came in to watch the football on the TV screens; the kind of men who didn’t want roasted vegetables in pittas or real ale.

I’d worked in nicer pubs. When I lived at home I’d worked in our local, where the old-timers expected you to start pulling their pints the moment they pushed open the door. I didn’t mind the anonymity of this place. I was often on with temporary staff I didn’t know, and that meant I didn’t have to talk too much. If we weren’t busy, I just kept order behind the bar. I made sure that the glasses were clean, the lemons sliced, the drip trays emptied, the bottles in the optics replaced as soon as they ran out, the ice bucket filled.

While I was taking care of all this I forgot that I was a student. I rarely saw anyone from the college in there, students or staff. Then one night when I came back from asking the landlord to change a barrel, I thought for a moment that I saw Patrick. A man with the same long narrow build and thick shoulder-length hair was standing with his back to the bar, a pint of lager in one hand, looking up at the TV screen. Although this was exactly the sort of plausible scenario I was always dreaming up to bring us together, in reality I didn’t want it to be him. I panicked. I didn’t think I could cope with my two roles at once – competent barmaid and besotted student – and I had no idea how to respond when he turned round and recognised me. But the man, when he turned round, wasn’t Patrick, though he did look rather like him. Rather like him but quite different. He had the same crooked nose – more exaggerated, even – and the same close-together eyes that you saw when Patrick took his glasses off. But he didn’t
wear glasses. He didn’t have any of Patrick’s concentrated excitement.