The Forever Girl (17 page)

He looked unbelieving. “Don’t you? You don’t have to pretend with me, Clove. Remember, we’ve known one another since we were six, or whatever.”

She looked at her watch. “I have to go.” But then she added, “Who is she anyway – this girlfriend?” She stumbled on the word
girlfriend
, and had to repeat it. Ted noticed; she could tell by the way he looked away in embarrassment.

“She’s called Laura,” he said. He turned back to face her. “I can’t stand her myself. He’s only known her since the summer.”

“You don’t like her?”

“Of course not …” He checked himself, but she wondered why he had said
of course
.

“Why not? Why don’t you like her, Ted?”

He shrugged. “You can’t like everybody. You like some people, and you don’t like others. It’s a matter of …”

“Chemistry?”

“Yeah, sure. Chemistry comes into it.” He played with the handle of his coffee cup. “Chemistry’s important, but there are other things. The things people say, for instance. Their attitude. She’s keen on him – you can tell.”

She tried to keep her voice level. “How?”

“She’s all over him – know what I mean? She looks at him in a really intense way. Like this.” He glared at Clover. “See? What do you call that?”

“I don’t know.”

“It’s
the
look. That’s what they call it.
The
look. You can always tell.”

There was a straw to be clutched at. She heard her friend at school:
if you’re keen on a boy, never show it – it’s the quickest way of scaring them
. “That sort of look can put people off. Maybe he doesn’t like it. She could be much keener on him than he is on her.”

Ted was doubtful. “I think he likes her – at least that’s the impression I got when he spoke to me. And when I’ve seen them together.” He seemed to consider something. “But then you know how kind he is – he’s always kind to people, isn’t he?”

Yes, it was why she liked him; or one of the reasons for the way she felt: his kindness.

“So maybe he’s just being kind to her?” But then Ted seemed to reject his own suggestion. “No, I don’t think so. I think she’s managed to get him to like her. And then there’s the way she is. She’s really hot. You can tell. I think he likes all that.”

She stared at him. She hated hearing that, and something
made her feel that Ted did not like it either, although he was the one who said it.

“Why’s she here?” she asked. People came and went in Cayman; perhaps she would not last.

“Her folks. Her dad has a job here. He’s with one of the American banks, but they’re Canadians themselves. She’s at school in Vancouver. They have different holidays from British schools, but the summer holidays are more or less the same.”

She listened to this carefully, trying to envisage Laura. “Are you sure? How do you know she’s his actual girlfriend?”

“Because he told me.”

“He said he was seeing her?”

Ted smirked. “More than that. He said …”

She cut him short by standing up. “I have to get back.”

“Me too. But what about the party? You can come with me if you like.”

She almost said that she had no interest in going to the party – that she didn’t care about James. But those were not the words that came. Instead, she nodded, and said: “All right.”

They walked back to the supermarket, to meet their mothers. She separated from him at the entrance, saying goodbye without letting him see how upset she was. She felt that he probably knew, anyway, but somehow she wanted to salvage her dignity by not revealing the despair that now engulfed her like a sea-fog, as cold, as dispiriting. He could not have a girlfriend because he belonged to her. She should be his girlfriend, not some girl from Vancouver who had only just met him.

When Amanda saw her, she could tell that something was amiss. “Is it Ted?” she asked. “Did Ted do something to upset you?”

She shook her head. “He didn’t.”

“You look as if you’re about to cry.”

She turned away. “I’m not. Don’t be ridiculous.”

“And you should stop being so moody.”

She said nothing. Her mother could not possibly understand. She was an ice maiden when it came to these things; she had no idea, none at all, about how it felt when the only boy you could ever love was seeing some Canadian girl and telling Ted about it. They were standing at the supermarket check-out now, and the woman behind the till was looking expectantly at her mother, waiting for her to unload the cart. The woman had a dull, passive look to her, and behind her, ready to pack the purchases, stood a boy with a scowl. Clover looked through the plate-glass window behind them, out into the supermarket car park; a large white vehicle, a luxury SUV, was pulling up at the kerb. She watched as a young couple got out, and said something to one another, laughed briefly, and then went back to looking bored. That’s the trouble, she thought: everybody here is bored. She did not want that. She wanted something different, and that, she knew, was James. I want him more than anything I’ve ever wanted. I want to be with him. I want to feel him beside me. I want to be far away from everybody else, just with him. I want him to whisper to me and kiss me and tell me all his secrets and that he thinks of me all the time. That’s what I want, and that’s what’s going to happen – it really is. It will happen if I want it hard enough.

19

“There,” said Billy, pointing to a spot where the land jutted out into the sea. “That’s the place. You can put everything down there and then we can swim.”

Amanda had suggested a picnic, and they had agreed – Billy more enthusiastically than his sister. She had said initially that she wanted to stay at home, having things to do. Amanda had said, “To mope?”

“No. Things to do.”

“Then do them after our picnic – there’ll be plenty of time.”

It was a place they had often visited – a place where the mangrove met a cluster of sea-grape trees and where there was enough sand to make for a small swimming beach. The beach gave way to rock formations on either side through which the sea was making slow ingress, wearing away at the basalt to produce strange indentations and incipient caves. When an onshore wind whipped up waves, the movement of the sea, though dissipated here by the protective ring of reef a mile or so further out, was sufficient to produce the occasional plume of spray from a blowhole, shooting up like a displaced ornamental fountain. As a young girl, Clover had been fascinated by this, and had been prepared to sit for hours on end, under Margaret’s watching eye, waiting for the sudden eruption of white.

“Don’t dive,” warned Amanda, as Billy rushed to the edge of the water. “Remember what happened to that boy …”

Billy stopped in his tracks. “Timmy …”

“Yes, Timmy. He was lucky not to have been much more badly hurt.”

Billy stared at the water. “He was knocked out, wasn’t he?”

“Concussed – not quite knocked out. But it could have been much worse.”

Clover joined in: “You shouldn’t dive into water if you don’t know exactly how deep it is.”

“Your sister’s right,” said Amanda. “Listen to her.”

“He never does,” said Clover.

While the boy waded into the water, Clover and her mother unpacked the bag of picnic provisions they had brought with them. There was a flask of iced juice, and Amanda poured some for her daughter. Clover took it, drained the glass, and then lay back on the picnic rug and looked up at the sky.

“Happy to be here?” asked Amanda.

“Yes.”

Amanda lay back too. “I love looking at this sky. You can’t lie back in Scotland and stare at the sky.”

“It would rain on you.”

“Yes.”

Flat out on the sand, Amanda turned her head to look at her daughter. She was an attractive girl – still obviously a teenager, but getting to the point where the adult butterfly finally emerged, where all vestiges of the vulnerability and softness of the child gave way to the grown young woman. “Happy?” she asked.

“I’ve already told you. Yes.”

Amanda persisted. “Not just to be here, but happy in … in general. With life?”

“Yes. Of course.”

“I wanted to talk to you.”

Clover was still staring at the sky. “Well, we’re talking, aren’t we?”

“About me and Daddy.”

This was greeted with silence. Above them, a high-flying jet
curved a line of white across the sky.

“You see,” said Amanda, “I have some rather good news for you. Or I think you’ll find it good news.”

There was little reaction.

“You’re listening to me, I hope. You aren’t going to sleep, are you?”

This brought a muttered response. “No, I’m not.”

“Daddy and I are going to live together again. We’ve talked it through. We’re getting on better and we … well, both of us have been lonely. You understand that, don’t you?”

She saw her daughter stiffen. She continued to lie still, but the effect had been immediate.

“Yes, I understand. I’m a bit surprised, though.”

“It’s a surprise for me, too. So I’ll go back to Scotland, but only to close up the flat. Then I’ll come back home. Billy will go back to the Prep.” She was aware of the fact that she said
home
. There had been a change, as slow, in human terms, as the erosive action of the sea on the rock: home was no longer New York, or America; it had become this place in the middle of nowhere, under a familiar, but still alien flag.

“So everything will go back to how it used to be.” She paused, and reached to the flask to pour more juice. “I hope you’re pleased.”

Clover had raised herself onto an elbow and was looking at her mother. She was smiling. “I’m really pleased, Mum. I’m really pleased.”

“Good. Then give me a kiss.”

Clover leaned forward and kissed her mother on the cheek. She wanted to cry, and the tears now came, sobs, almost painful in their intensity.

“Darling, you mustn’t cry …”

She struggled with the words. “It’s because … because I’m so pleased.”

“I’m glad.”

Clover wiped at her eyes. “And Billy? Does he know?”

“I’ll tell him later – after his swim. Both of us – we can both tell him. Not that he’ll pay much attention.”

Clover shook her head in disagreement. “He misses Dad. Surely you’ve noticed that.”

It was a reproach, and Amanda tried to explain herself. “Yes, you’re right. I suppose I was just thinking how boys don’t feel so intensely about these things.”

This caught Clover’s attention. “They don’t?”

“Well, it’s a bit of a generalisation, of course, but these generalisations are often true. Or at least, I think they are. Boys – men too – are more interested in the outside world than the inside world.”

“The inside world?”

“How we feel. Of course there are plenty of men who feel these things, but generally speaking they’re too busy
doing
things to ask themselves how they feel about them. That’s why it sometimes seems to us that they don’t care about people’s emotions.”

“Because they’re selfish?”

“Not selfish – it’s more a question of indifference.”

“What exactly is indifference?”

Amanda glanced across the beach to where Billy was examining something washed up by the waves – a cuttlefish, she thought. “Indifference is not worrying about others. And that may be because you don’t know what they’re thinking, or because you know and don’t care.”

“Indifference,” muttered Clover, as if savouring the new word, like a new taste, experienced for the first time.

Amanda glanced at her. We let our children grow up under our noses without talking to them about these things; now she was. “Which is one of the worst things you can experience.”

Clover frowned. “Why?”

“Because when we want somebody to notice us and they don’t, there’s a particular sort of pain involved.” She paused. Billy had picked up something else – an abandoned sandal – and was waving his discovery at them. “Put it down, Billy.”

“He picks everything up,” said Clover. “The other day I saw him pick up a handkerchief somebody had dropped. Think of the germs.”

“We need a certain number of germs – just to keep our immune systems in trim.”

Clover was not convinced. “Yuck.” She was looking up at the sky again; but it was indifference that was on her mind. “You were saying …”

Amanda hesitated. She knew what her daughter was going through, and this discussion of indifference went to the heart of it. “We all want to be loved, you know. We want that rather badly.”

Clover said nothing.

“And so,” Amanda continued, “that’s why indifference can be so painful. We may decide that we want to be loved by a particular person – and we can’t really control who that will be – and if they don’t love us, if they take no notice of us, we hurt. It’s the way we’re made, I suppose. It just is.”

Clover propped herself up on an arm and stared at her mother. “Why are you saying all this?”

Amanda took a deep breath. “I’m saying it, darling, because I think that’s what you may be feeling. I think you’re very keen on a boy whom you haven’t seen for the last three years and who is probably rather different from when you saw him last.”

“He isn’t,” muttered Clover.

“Have you seen him? You haven’t, have you?”

“I saw Ted. He told me.”

Amanda smiled. “Maybe. Maybe. But the point is that you don’t really know whether you’re going to be able to resume the friendship you had. And you don’t really know how James feels, do you?” She reached out and took Clover’s hand. She felt the sand upon it; the fine white grains that would cling to your skin, like face-powder, long after you had left the beach. “I think you may be in love with an idea of a boy, rather than with an actual boy.”

She did not take her hand away, allowing it to remain in her mother’s clasp. “I don’t think I am.”

“But you don’t know yet whether James sees you in the same way that you see him. That’s the problem. And it might not be a good idea to allow yourself to love somebody you don’t see very much and who may not feel the way you feel. It’s just likely to make you miserable, I’d have thought.”

Amanda pressed Clover’s hand. She had never spoken to her with this degree of intimacy, and it felt to her as if she had been admitted to a whole new dimension of her daughter’s life. It was like coming across one’s child in some private moment and seeing the child, perhaps for the first time, as a person who was quite distinct from you, with a moral life of his or her own. Perhaps that was a transition that every parent experienced as a son or daughter moved from being an extension of the parent to
having a life led separately from the parent, with its own tides of feeling, its own plans.