The Forever Girl

16



“All right. I’ve told you all about me. Now it’s your turn. Tell me all about yourself. Everything. I want to hear everything. Don’t leave anything out.”

There were just the two girls in the room, which was a small study, plainly furnished with two desks above each of which a bookcase had been attached to the wall. These bookcases had been filled with textbooks – an introduction to mathematics, physics, a French grammar – and a few personal items – a framed photograph of a dog, a lustrous conch shell; mementoes of home.

It was Katie who spoke, and she waited now for Clover’s answer.

“It’d be boring to tell you everything.”

‘No,” said Katie. “It wouldn’t. I want to know. Everything. If we’re sharing, I have to know. I just have to.”

“I come from the Cayman Islands. Well, that’s where my parents went to work and I have lived there all my life. It’s home, although my mother’s moving to Edinburgh now and my father is going to stay out there – for his job.

“I have one brother, Billy. He’s all right, I suppose. You said you have a younger brother, so you know what I mean. He’s going to school in Edinburgh and will be living with my mum. That’s why she’s moved, you see – to be there for Billy while he’s at school.

“There was somebody back in Cayman who helped look after us. She’s called Margaret. She’s a brilliant cook, but she’s got this husband who’s really thin – you should see him – you wouldn’t think he was married to somebody who was such a great cook. She’s from Jamaica. Those people put a lot of hot spices in their cookery and they have this pepper that they call Scotch Bonnet. You can’t actually eat it or it would burn your mouth off. You put it in a stew and then you take it out – it leaves some of the hotness behind it.”

She made a gesture of completeness. “That’s all.”

“Come on!”

“There really isn’t much more.”

“What about friends? Who are your friends?”

She told her about friends at school.

“And any boys?”

She did not answer at first, and Katie had to prompt her. “I told you about Andy. You have to tell me.”

“There’s a boy called James.”

“I love that name.” Katie rolled her eyes in mock bliss. “I wish I knew somebody called James. Is he nice?”

Clover nodded. “He’s the nicest boy I’ve ever met. You know how boys are – how they always show off? He’s not like that. He’s the opposite.”

“He’s kind?”

“Yes. He listens to you. He’s easy to speak to.”

“I love him already,” said Katie. “Have you been out with him?”

“We went to a movie once – with some other people.”

“That doesn’t count. Not if there were other people. That’s not a proper date.”

“You didn’t go out with Andy.”

“I never said I did. I said I wanted to, but he never asked me.”

“Well, James asked me to go to that movie. And he’s been to my house loads of times.”

Katie took time to ponder this. “He must like you.”

She hesitated, and Katie seized on the hesitation. “He doesn’t? That’s really bad luck, Clovie. Really bad luck.”

“I didn’t say he didn’t like me. He’s just not ready. Boys are a couple of years behind us. You know that.”

The conversation switched to mothers. “Mine won’t leave me alone,” said Katie. “She wants to interfere with everything I do – everything.”

“Maybe she’s unhappy,” said Clover.

It had never occurred to Katie that her mother, a socialite, could be anything but in the mood for a party. “She’s never unhappy,” she said. “But that doesn’t stop her trying to ruin my happiness.”

“Poor you,” said Clover.

She thought of Amanda in her flat in Edinburgh, which seemed so diminished after the house in the Caymans. The whole world here seemed diminished, in fact; the horizons closer, the sky lower, the narrow streets affording so little elbow room; the sea, which they could just make out in the distance from the windows of the flat, was so unlike the Caribbean that it could be a different thing altogether. Instead of being a brilliant blue, as the sea should be, it was a steely grey, cold and uninviting.

The move made it seem to Clover that their whole world had been suddenly and inexplicably turned upside down. The decision had been presented to her as a slight change of plan – “just for the time being” – but she knew that it was more than that. No modern child can be unaware of divorce or of the fact that parents suddenly may decide to live apart; Clover knew this happened because there were friends at school for whom it had been the pattern of life: adults moved in with one another, moved out again, and took up with somebody else. It was what adults did. But this was something that happened to other people – like being struck by lightning or being eaten by a shark – it never happened to oneself.

The move may have been precipitate, but the truth was revealed slowly. “Daddy and I are happier, you know, if we’re doing separate things. You’ll understand that because you know how friends often want to do something different from what you yourself want to do. It’s just the way it is.”

“Yes, I suppose so.”

“And if you’re living with somebody you can sometimes want to have a bit more time to yourself. You must feel that sometimes – when Billy’s being a nuisance. It doesn’t mean that you don’t like the other person any more – it’s just that you feel a bit happier if you have more time to yourself.”

“Maybe. But if you love the other person, won’t you miss him?”

That had been more difficult for Amanda to answer. “Love changes, darling. At the beginning it’s like a rocket or one of those big fireworks – you know the sort – that sends all sorts of stars shooting up all over the place, and then it dies down a bit. That happens with love. You don’t necessarily stop loving somebody, but you might just decide to live in separate places so that you can have that time to yourself. That’s the way it works.”

She thought about this. Lying in bed on that first night in Edinburgh, a few days before she was due to be taken up to Strathearn to begin her first term at boarding school, she thought about what her mother had said about love. It dies down. That was what she had said: it dies down. Love was very important; it was something that people talked about a lot. They also sang about it – just about every song she heard was about being in love. And some of these songs, she had noticed, were unhappy. People sang because they were in love with somebody who did not notice them nor love them back. This saddened them, and they sang songs to express the sadness.

She lay in her bed looking up at the darkened ceiling. Am I in love? It was a question she had never thought she would ask herself because love, she had felt, belonged to some unspecified future part of her life; it was not a question to be asked, or answered, at this stage, when she was just embarking on life.

But there was only one person she really wanted to see. It was such an unusual, unsettling feeling that she wished that she could talk to somebody about it. She was close to her mother, and they had had that earlier conversation about James, but she now felt that she could not say anything more because her mother would discourage her. There was something awkward in her parents’ relations with James’s mother and father – something that she could not quite put her finger on. They did not like one another, she felt, but she was not sure why this should be so.


On the day before she left for Strathearn, she sent an e-mail to Ted and asked him to pass on a message to James. She had an address for Ted, but not for James, to whom she had not had a chance to say a proper goodbye. “Please pass on this message to James – I think you have his address. Tell him to send me his e-mail address so that I can write to him. I know he’s going to be starting school in England soon, but he must have an address. So please ask him to send it to me, just so that we can chat.”

Ted wrote back almost immediately. “I asked James and he said that he doesn’t like getting lots of e-mails as he doesn’t have the time to answer them all. He says sorry, and he hopes you don’t mind. He says that he’ll see you in the school holidays in Cayman. Maybe.”

She re-read this message several times. It occurred to her that Ted might not have spoken to James at all – Ted was quite capable of telling lies, as everybody seemed to be. He had never wanted to share James as a friend, and this was his way of thwarting her. On the other hand, he might be telling the truth. It might be that James did not like dealing with e-mail – some boys were like that – and the important thing then was that he had said that he would see her in the school holidays. That meant that he wanted to see her, and that gave her comfort.

But when the much anticipated school holidays came round for the first time, the Christmas holiday, her mother told her that they would not be returning to Cayman but would spend the time in Edinburgh. “Daddy will come. He has to be in London for a meeting, and so you’ll see him here. We’ll all be together as a family.”

She could not hide her disappointment. “But it’s so nice in Cayman at Christmas. It’s the nicest time of the year.”

“I know, darling. I know the weather’s gorgeous …”

“Which it isn’t here – not at Christmas. It’ll be cold.”

“Of course it’ll be cold. It might even snow. Imagine that – a Christmas with snow lying about. Imagine how you’ll like that.”

There was no persuading her mother, who eventually revealed that the decision had been taken by David. “Your father wanted it this way. I suggested that it would be good for us all to get a bit of sun, but he wouldn’t shift. I’m sorry, darling, but that’s the way it’s going to have to be.”

For the first few days, having her father in the house seemed to her to be almost like having a guest, an ill-at-ease stranger. He spent more time with Billy than with her, taking him out on expeditions that ended with the boy being spoiled with the purchase of yet another expensive present.

“He likes Billy more than he likes me,” she said to her mother.

“That isn’t true. You mustn’t think that, darling. Daddy likes you both exactly the same. And the same goes for me. You’re both the most precious things we have in this world.”

“Really?”

“Yes, of course.”

“Then why don’t we go back to the way it was before? Why don’t we go home?”

“To Cayman?”

“Yes, that’s home, isn’t it? That’s where we grew up.”

Amanda tried to explain. “But remember that you’re not Caymanian. You’re half Scottish and half American. That makes you different from real Caymanians. They don’t have somewhere else to go back to.”

“They aren’t any different from me. Just because their parents …”

“That’s exactly what makes the difference, darling. Parents. You get to be something because your parents are something. That’s the way the world works.”

“So I have to live somewhere I don’t want to be just because you come from somewhere else?”

This was answered with a nod: the injustices of the world – the rules and red tape – could be difficult to explain to a child.

“And James?” she asked.

Her mother made a gesture of acceptance. “It’s different for him, I think. His father has Caymanian status and I believe that James has that too. It’s because his father is a doctor. You know all about that, don’t you? The right to stay there? He can live there for the rest of his life if he wants.”

“That’s unfair.”

“Yes, it is. You’re right – it’s very unfair.” Amanda paused. “Have you heard from him? I wonder how he’s getting on at his new school.”

“I haven’t heard.”

“You could write to him. Send him an e-mail.”

She looked away. “I tried to. I sent my address to Ted and asked him to pass it on to James. But then Ted said that James didn’t want to write to me.”

Amanda glanced at her daughter; the pain of love at that age was so intense – one might easily forget just how bad it could be. It would be transient, of course, but children did not know that; what they felt, she had heard, they thought they would feel forever. “Darling, that can happen. People can make new friends. They don’t mean to upset us when they do that – it’s just the way that things work out.”

“I’d never say I wouldn’t write to a friend,” said Clover.

“I’m sure you wouldn’t.”

“I hate him.”

That meant, Amanda knew, that she loved him. She had hated somebody once because she loved him; she remembered. Yet there would have to be a parental reproach. “No, you don’t hate him. You mustn’t hate somebody else because they drift away from you. That’s very unkind.”

Clover went to her room. She lay down on the bed and stared out of the window at the December sky. It was getting dark already, and it was only three in the afternoon. Everything had changed. She had been happy at home with the light and the sun, and now suddenly she had been taken to a world of muted shades and misty light and silences. She thought of James. If only she could see him, then all this would be bearable; he would be like the sun, his presence dispelling the cold, the damp air, the pervading grey.

She took a piece of paper and wrote on it. I love James. I love James. I said that I hated him, but that’s not true. I said I hated him because I love him so much. I love him and have always loved him. Always. The writing of these words gave her a curious feeling of relief. It was as if she had made a confession to herself – admitting something that she had been afraid to admit but that, now acknowledged, was made much easier to bear, as a secret when shared with another is deprived of its power to trouble or to shame.