The Pillow Friend (29 page)

“We'll go back tomorrow when it is open. You made a note of the address?”

“I tried to, but I couldn't find the street name. It was a really short street, kind of curved, and, oh, yeah, it was cobbled!”

He shrugged. “Did you notice the names of streets nearby?”

“Yes, definitely, there was one. . . .” She frowned in annoyance. “Honestly, I kept saying it to myself until I had it memorized, and now I can't . . . it's just slipped my mind.”

“Maybe it'll come back to you.”

“It must. I can't believe I . . . it started with C, I think. I'm pretty sure.”

“What part of London?”

“About a ten-minute walk from Farringdon Station.”

“In which direction?”

“God, I don't know. I have no sense of direction!”

“Never mind. We'll find it.”

Her story had caught his attention. He was looking at her with a wondering warmth in his eyes, as if she had become someone new and very special. And as he looked at her in that way she felt a change in herself, a rekindling of her interest in him.

They became lovers that night, a new first time which almost wiped out their brief, shared past, offering them a chance of real intimacy.

The next morning as they were about to leave, the telephone rang and she stopped on her way to the door.

“What's the matter? Go on.”

“I thought you'd want to answer the phone.”

“No. We're going out.” He spoke with some tension.

“We're not in any hurry. It might be important.”

“It's not important. Nothing's as important as you—as us,” he said fiercely.

She wondered if it was his old girlfriend on the phone and how he knew.

“Come on, we're going to find your doll,” he said.

But although they spent a lot of time and effort searching, taking Farringdon Station as their center point and traveling out in different directions, they didn't find the shop again that day. Twice she thought she recognized the street, but both times she was wrong.

“I'm sorry,” he said, finally, when they'd agreed to give up and go for a meal. “But maybe you walked farther than you thought; maybe you really weren't that close to Farringdon.”

“Maybe the shop disappeared—it looked like the sort that might.” They were holding hands now, strolling along Holborn Viaduct.

“Then maybe it'll turn up some other day somewhere else entirely, and you'll have another chance to find your heart's desire.”

“Well, maybe. Only Myles isn't my heart's desire anymore.”

“No?” He stopped and gave her hand a tug so that she faced him. “What is?”

She looked through two pairs of glasses into blue eyes nearly level with her own, at his face, luminous with interest and affection, no longer ordinary. He was the young poet and he loved her. This was the magic city. She felt like someone in a novel. Here was everything she'd wished for, a dream to be lived in. She had only to accept.

It was suddenly hard to speak. Her voice was hoarse and the words “You are” came out a question, not the statement it should have been, but he kissed her just as she'd wanted him to.

“And you're mine—oh, yes, you are! I thought I'd lost you, I thought you'd never come back to me, but here you are.”

They began to walk again, briskly now, his arm around her. “Let's run away together.”

“What?”

“No, no, your line is, ‘Yes, why not?' We've nearly a month before term starts; we're not tied down. We should get right away, while we can. Wouldn't you like to see a bit more of the country? We'll go up to Scotland; you'll see the bothy. We'll be together, no distractions, nobody else to get in the way, nothing to come between us.”

It was a new start; that was what they had needed. Away from his house, things were easier between them. On the move, away from home, their personalities were less stable, they could be different people. There were fewer rules and fewer expectations, and they could enjoy what each day brought without worrying about whether it would last, or what the future would be.

He did all the driving and generally didn't even require her to navigate, so she could sit back, gaze at the scenery, and let her mind wander, or listen to the radio. She particularly loved the shipping forecasts, those mysterious chants, incomprehensible yet beautiful as they were read out in measured, dulcet tones. Fair Isle, Finisterre, Dogger, Rockall: forever after those names would have for her a romantic, melancholy magic.

Although they often stopped to sightsee or for meals or snacks, by the fourth morning they were crossing the border into Scotland.

She saw a sign with a place name she recalled from her reading. “Gretna. Is that like Gretna Green, where people used to go to get married?”

“People still do. Shall we?”

He had to be teasing. “Just like that?”

“You've changed your mind. You don't want me.”

The misery in his voice was so stark she had to reassure him, without even thinking about what she wanted herself—if she knew. “Oh, Gray, of course I do! But it can't be that easy, that quick—what about blood tests?”

“Blood tests?” He laughed. “What the hell are blood tests? Is that something to do with AIDS? You don't think I—”

“It doesn't have anything to do with AIDS. People have to have blood tests before they get married.”

“Maybe in Texas. Not here. Come on, let's go get married.”

She didn't know him well enough to marry him. She wasn't sure she wanted to be married, to anyone. But she wanted to make him as happy as he'd made her these past few days. She went with him into the registry office in Gretna, where they found it wasn't quite so easy to get married. First they would have to have their names and intention to marry posted on the door of the registry office for fourteen days. Then, if no objection was raised, they could be married on whatever date they decided.

“Can't we have a special license? In England you pay a little more for a special license and you're married the next day.”

“This isn't England,” said the registrar, an attractive middle-aged woman whose attitude slipped now from friendly to formal.

“It's a ridiculously antiquated law—posting the banns! Two weeks, two days, two months, it wouldn't make any difference, nobody knows us here, nobody's going to raise any objection to us getting married—there aren't any objections to be raised!”

“I'm sorry, but that is the law. I didn't make the law and I cannot change it.”

She could feel the irritation rising in him like water coming to the boil, and put a hand on his arm as if she could lower his temperature with the right touch. “We could come back here in two weeks, on our way home.”

“I don't want to come back in two weeks; I want us to be married
now
.” Then all at once the water stopped boiling and the steam vanished in a sound halfway to a laugh. “God, I'm being childish. How do you put up with me?” He squeezed her hand. His fingers were very cold. He spoke to the registrar. “You see, I'm afraid that if I give her two weeks to reconsider she'll recover her senses and head back to America without me! I'm sorry if I was rude; it's the excitement. I've never come this close to actually getting married before.”

The registrar smiled. “That's all right.”

“So, could we register our intention to marry, and have the first possible date?” He looked at her anxiously. “If you still want to?”

“Sure. If we can't wait two weeks, we probably shouldn't be getting married.” She giggled nervously. “God, I sound like somebody's mother.”

“Like everybody's mother. And like most motherly maxims it's sound advice. Two weeks won't make any difference to us.”

Yet even as she smiled back at him, and gave the clerk the few necessary personal details required, she felt, disquietingly, that their moment had passed. Oh, they could still get married, but it would not be the same, would not be what it should have been. And that marriage which might have been would haunt them forever.

Scotland was utterly different from England. England had been fascinating, changing in character every few miles, yet all, somehow, of a piece, recognizable from books she had read, novels, poems and histories, or from paintings. England was known and knowable, cozy; Scotland, by comparison, was grandly beautiful, a bit intimidating. There was so much open space and, after the crowds of England, it felt underpopulated. She realized only after they were in the country that she had no specific expectations of Scotland, no clear mental images of it as she did of the smaller country to the south.

Instead of heading west immediately they went north to the highlands. Scotland's bloody history unrolled before her as they traveled, as she browsed in her guidebooks and Gray told her about famous battles and betrayals and the Clearances.

She felt an urge to see all of Scotland, to encompass it somehow. To satisfy her, he took them to Dunnet Head, the northernmost point of mainland Britain, and then drove across almost to Cape Wrath before heading south down the west coast. She enjoyed looking at the map and seeing all the ground they had covered, ticking off the villages they had passed through in her guidebook. It gave her an obscure and, she knew, completely spurious sense of achievement, as if by merely covering ground in this way she were getting to know Scotland.

After more than a week they arrived at last in Knapdale, where Graham had spent all his childhood holidays. It was a windy, overcast, chilly day, more like autumn than late summer, but the beauty of the area was undeniable. The last five miles of their journey took them along a single-track road which followed the winding shoreline. Across an expanse of choppy, glittering silver-gray water, through the low cloud, she made out the heavy, uprising mass of mountainous islands, and the beauty of the sight was a pleasure almost sexual.

“What's that?”

“The Isle of Jura. The mountains are the Paps of Jura. It's even more beautiful when it's clear. You can't see much today.”

“I thought the island was a cloud, at first. I'd like to go there. Could we?”

“Sure. There's a ferry the other side of Tarbert. We'll see about it.”

They drove through forest and moorland, passed grazing sheep and a stag standing on a rocky uplift as if posing for his portrait. Then the road descended and twisted inland for a little way, and they passed through a tiny village.

“The nearest petrol pump,” Graham explained. “The nearest post office. Nearest place to buy milk, biscuits and a newspaper. It's walkable.”

According to him, the name of the settlement, Clachan, was the generic name for village in Scotland, a Gaelic word which meant “a place of stones”—or anywhere with buildings.

After it left Clachan the road sought the shore again, and soon brought them to the small, plain white house that was Graham's bothy. She was thrilled that the house faced Jura; that would be the view from the front windows, the view she already felt was the most beautiful she'd ever seen.

The front door was so low they had to duck their heads to enter. It led directly into the main living area. She saw a fireplace, bookshelves, a few pieces of unremarkable furniture, a curtain. Behind the curtain there was a poky scullery. A door at the far end of the living room revealed a narrow, winding staircase—“I never saw stairs in a closet before!”—which led to the bedrooms. Upstairs had presumably been one big room later divided into two small rooms now almost completely filled with beds and books. She went immediately to one of the windows to look out at her favorite view, and sighed with happiness. She turned around to smile at him. “Thank you for bringing me here.”

“You like it?”

“I love it. I don't understand why you don't live here instead of in Harrow.”

“Nor do I.” He wriggled his shoulders and rubbed his hands together. “I'm going to chop wood. You can start getting yourself settled in while I see to the fire. Maybe you could make us some coffee? There's a jar of instant in the survival kit.”

“Okay. Oh—where's the bathroom?”

“Isn't one. We wash in the kitchen sink—or in the loch if you're feeling really hardy!”

“We don't have to pee in the sink, do we?”

“Oh, it's a toilet you want, not a bath—why didn't you say so? That's outside. I'll show you.”

She feared the worst, but there was a flush toilet in a stone-built outhouse only a short distance from the back door—it was oddly cozy. She didn't mind the spiders in the corners, being a lifelong fan of
Charlotte's Web.
She could hear Gray somewhere nearby chopping wood.

When she came back in again she walked around the main room, liking it more and more. The house was probably about the same size as the one in Harrow and might have been the same age, but the two places could hardly be more different. It was quiet here, and airy, and simple. She had felt oppressed and excluded by the memories that clung to everything in the house in Harrow, and this house, too, contained memories that did not include her, but it was different. The memories here were holiday memories of long summer days and peace and quiet. The ghosts who inhabited these walls were kindly, and they would make room for her.

In the cupboard under the stairs she found a small electric heater and plugged it in before she went out to the car for their luggage. She took the provisions into the kitchen, filled the inevitable electric kettle at the sink, and plugged it in.