The Forever Girl

17



A pattern became established. Although there was talk of their making trips to Cayman, a reason was always found as to why it would not work. David would be away on business, or there were workmen renovating the house, or there had been an invitation to spend a few weeks in France and they could not turn this down without giving offence.

“We’re never going to go back, are we?” Clover said to her mother. “And you don’t want to, do you?”

“I’d love to, darling. And we will – some day. It’s just that there’s so much going on here, and Daddy is in the UK so often that it makes more sense for us all to be together in Scotland, or even in France. It really does.”

“I want to go back to George Town. It’s not the same here or in France. I want to see our house again. I want to swim at Smith’s Cove. I want to do the things we used to do.”


“All in good time. We’ll go some day.”

“Billy’s even forgetting what it was like. He thinks he’s Scottish now.”

“Well he is, in a way. As are you. Half of you.”

But in the year she turned sixteen, they went to Cayman for a month, a week being added to the three-week break the school allowed over Christmas. Amanda told Clover of the trip at the beginning of October, and the intervening months were spent in a state of eager anticipation. Three years had elapsed since they had left George Town, during which time she had settled into and accepted her new existence. There was no shortage of new friends – Strathearn was a friendly school and strong bonds were formed with her new classmates. There were boys she liked, one in particular – a studious boy from Glasgow whose passion was ornithology. He painted birds and had a collection of feathers and bird eggs. He seemed a lonely boy, and they slipped into a comfortable friendship that was, from her point of view, a long way off romance. He sent her a Valentine card one year, slipped unseen into her French dictionary, and although it was anonymous she could tell it was from him because it had a picture of a bird perching on a red heart, and he was the only boy in the school who would have chosen a card like that. She was flattered, but these cards were not something to become excited about. There was only one Valentine card that she really wanted to receive and of course it never came.

David sent her a message. “I can’t wait to have you all back home,” he wrote. “You and Billy and Mummy; we’ll have a great time together. And you’ll be able to catch up with all your old friends, which I expect you’re really looking forward to. Counting the days now!”

She wrote back to him: “I know that it’s soon now because the dreams I’m having are all back in Cayman – it’s as if I was already there. I think this is a sign, don’t you?”

He replied: “Of course it is.”

The days before they left passed slowly. She made a list of things she would need to take – swimming costume, sunblock, clothes for parties. They were going to what had remained a family home in spite of her parents’ separation, but she knew that everything that she had left there would be the possessions of childhood and nothing would fit her any more.

“Your room’s still here,” her father had written. “And it’s exactly the same as it always was.”

Yes, she thought; but I’m not the same. And that led her to wonder whether James would have changed. She had looked at his Facebook page, cautiously, as if trespassing, but he did not seem to bother very much with it and there were only a few out-of-date photographs. She wondered what he would look like now; it was only three years and people did not change all that much in three years; or did they? He had still been a boy when she had seen him last, and now, at sixteen, he could look quite different. Boys changed; they became thicker and coarser. The fact that they had to shave changed everything about their faces, it seemed to her; or so it seemed with the boys at school. Some of them did not use electric razors and came to class in the morning with cuts on their chin or on their neck; she shivered at that; she hated to think of how people dragged razors across their skin that could so easily slip and slice into it and … It did not bear thinking about.

She could not imagine James doing that. His skin was smooth, and like the colour of light honey, as he tanned so easily; that was how she remembered him, anyway. She was careful about the sun because with her colouring her skin could turn red and itch. She closed her eyes. In a day or two she would be seeing him, talking to him, and everything would go back to the way it was when it had just been the two of them; before Ted started to get him involved in things that excluded her; before something happened between her mother and his and he started talking about seeing her less. They would go back to that time. That would happen; she was sure of it.

They caught a plane from Edinburgh to London, and then boarded the flight to Grand Cayman via Nassau. On the ground in the Bahamas, when all the Cayman passengers had to stay on board, she looked out of the window into the Caribbean glare, watching a man driving a small airport truck, a shepherd of great jets, fussing about on some errand opaque to others. The cleaners came on in a bustle of energy, removing the detritus left by the passengers who had disembarked in Nassau; she heard the patois of their conversation and found that she understood; she had not heard it for a long time, but she understood it, and realised that this was the language of home. She wanted to join in, but did not, as the cleaners looked straight through the passengers, who were simply not there for them; they were too rich, too alien. She wanted to say something that would tell them that this did not apply to her; that she was Caymanian and she knew what it was like. But she did not.

She turned to her mother in the seat beside her.

“Are you looking forward to getting there?”

Amanda smiled. “Of course.”

“To seeing Daddy?”

“What?”

“Looking forward to seeing Daddy?”

“Of course I am.”

She was silent. “Can’t you get together again?”

Amanda reached out and took her hand. “Sometimes these things happen. People find it easier to live apart.”

“Because they don’t like each other any more?”

Amanda hesitated. “Sometimes it’s like that. But that’s not really what it’s like between Daddy and me. Not really.”

Clover took her hand away. “I wish you would. I just wish you would.”

Amanda’s gaze moved to the window. A young man was driving away a refuelling truck, describing an arc across the shimmering concrete; another, wearing earmuffs against the whine of the engines, was signalling to their pilot, looking up at the cockpit as he did so. The cleaners had vanished as quickly as they came, dragging behind them the bags of litter like sacks of loot.

“Would you like me to try?”

Amanda was not sure why she said this; it had not occurred to her that the subject would come up, and she had not intended to raise it, but now she had asked her daughter whether she would like her to mend her relationship with David and Clover was going to say yes.

“Please try.”

“I will.” Again the words had come out without being planned, like an off-hand agreement to do something minor. But this was not minor.

“Good.”

Beside Clover, Billy struggled with sleep; he had stayed awake the entire previous night – out of excitement – and now it was catching up with him. Clover tucked him up in his airline blanket; the plane’s ventilation system breathed cool air upon her; she felt a welling of joy: they were going home; her mother and father would be together again, which is what she had always wanted; things lost were to be returned to her, made safe, secured.


Amanda could tell that David was nervous. He had a way of speaking when he was unsure of himself – a clipped, guarded form of speech that she had noticed before and that she had put down to the tightening of muscles that went with insecurity. It was the vocal equivalent, she thought, of sweaty palms or a thumping heart.

They had seen him on the observation terrace – standing slightly apart from a family group of Jamaicans excited at an imminent reunion  . The Jamaicans waved madly, flourishing tiny Jamaican national flags, the children issuing whoops of delight; David stood stiffly, but waved enthusiastically to the children when he saw them.


“There he is!” shouted Billy. “See him, Ma? See him?”

She raised her eyes against the glare. It was early evening and the light was gentler, but it was so much brighter than in Scotland. She had forgotten just how strong it could be, this Caribbean light; how it could penetrate. Scotland, with its attenuated light, soft at the edges, allowed one to hide; to conceal, if one wanted to do so; to live in ambiguity.

She felt the warm air on her skin, and shivered. The touch of the air was what had struck her most forcibly all those years ago when she had first come here. She used to go out at night, out from the air-conditioned cocoon of their bedroom, and stand in the darkness with the night air about her like a mantle. The air clothed you here. It was like swimming. It was like that.

They moved through immigration quickly. In the baggage hall, the luggage carousel seemed tiny – a toy so small that it could have been operated by clockwork. It was silent when they went through, but about ten minutes later burst into life and started to bring suitcases. Theirs were out early, and placed on a cart that Billy had retrieved. She led them through the customs area and into the hall where David, having come down from the observation deck, was now standing. Billy ran forward and embraced his father, who lifted him up briefly before turning to Clover and kissing her on both cheeks. Then he turned to his wife.

The nervous voice: “You made it.”

She nodded. “Yes. Here we are.”

He took a hesitant step towards her. “Thanks. Thank you so much.”

She was not sure what she had expected, but somehow she had not imagined that he would thank her.

“Margaret wanted to come,” he continued. “But she couldn’t.”

“Something on at the church?”

He laughed, but his voice still sounded strained. “How did you guess?”

“Things don’t change,” she said. And she thought: but they do.

In the car he seemed to relax. Billy, delighted to discover that he recognised everything, revelled in pointing out landmarks. “There’s that tower – that radio thing. See, I remember. And there’s that place that sells fishing stuff. Remember that? Remember, we went there once?”

David said, “Of course I remember.” Then he added, “You’re talking like a Scotsman, Billy.”

“I’m not. I talk the same as everybody else.”

“And everybody else around you is Scottish these days.”

“Maybe.”

And from Clover: “He talks too much, don’t you, Billy?”

They swerved to avoid a car that had failed to signal.

“Home,” Amanda muttered.


Clover would have stayed up, but she too was tired and was in bed by half past eight. Billy had managed a swim before he had fallen asleep at the table, and was helped to bed by his father. David had been tactful and had asked Margaret to prepare a separate room for Amanda at the back of the house. “You’ll be all right there?” he had asked. “Margaret went out of her way to make things comfortable.”

In the Caribbean winter, air conditioning was unnecessary, but Margaret had left it on at high pitch, making the room feel like a walk-in fridge. David had gestured to the thermostat and rolled his eyes. She said: “Yes. Down. If you’ve lived without it for years …”

“In Scotland? I suppose so.”

She shook her head. “No, that’s not what I meant. I meant Margaret. In Jamaica they wouldn’t have had it – not at home. It would have been an impossible luxury – something dreamed of.”

“And then you get it …”

“And you think you’ve arrived in heaven.”

He smiled at her. “It’s the same with food. I was reading somewhere or other …”

“The Economist.”

He laughed. “I do read other things. Occasionally.”

She bit her tongue. She did not want to start off on the wrong foot. “Of course. Sorry. I didn’t mean it like that.”

He had not taken offence. “It probably was in The Economist. Anyway, it was about average weight in Germany. It goes up and down, apparently – just like everywhere else. But what they were saying was that in the post-war years, once their economic miracle got going, they became heavier and heavier, because they remembered when they did not have enough to eat and made up for it.”

“Pigging out. Insecurity does that.”

“Yes.” He paused. “I’ve prepared something for dinner, if you’ve got an appetite … They keep feeding you on planes. I suppose it keeps you busy and stops people asking for things all the time.”

She was hungry; she had not eaten much on the plane.

“I’m quite the cook these days,” he said. “Not that I’m boasting. It’s just that necessity is the mother of invention.”

“I’m sorry.”

He smiled. “Oh, I don’t say that out of self-pity. I actually rather like it. If you look in the kitchen you’ll see all my books. Delia. Jamie. All those people.”

“I’m impressed.”

He moved towards the door. “Come through when you’ve unpacked. I only have to heat it up.”

Standing in the doorway, for a moment it seemed that he was going to say something else, but he did not. She looked at him expectantly, and it seemed to her that in their exchange of glances, at one time both uncertain and regretful, was the whole history of what had happened between them.

She unpacked, throwing her clothes into a drawer that she now remembered clearing, years earlier, for visitors; little thinking then that she would be a visitor in her own house. That was the most painful thing about separation, she felt: the ending of the very small things, the ordinary sharing, the unspoken reliance; removing one’s toothbrush from the bathroom was as big a step, in a way, as making an appointment with the divorce lawyer.

She went into the bathroom that led off the bedroom. There was a slight smell of mustiness about it – inevitable in that climate, when towels became fusty within hours of going on the rail. But he had put a small bag of lavender on a dish, and she picked this up and smelled it, holding the muslin to her cheek. He had remembered that she loved lavender, and the thought that he had done this, had bothered himself, touched her.

She had thought about it before, of course; had entertained the possibility that she could fall in love with him again – as suddenly, perhaps, as she had fallen out of love with him. People did that, sometimes going to the extent of remarrying the person whom they had already divorced. She had met a couple like that – an elderly couple from Savanna who spent several months of each year in Cayman; he had divorced her in order to go off with a younger woman. The younger woman had treated him badly, leaving him for a youthful band instructor. He had waited a few months and then gone round to see her to propose marriage again, and she had said yes; an example of forgiveness, she had decided, when it would have been so much easier to crow, to enjoy the Schadenfreude that such a situation could provoke.

She looked in the bathroom mirror. What exactly was one entitled to expect from life? Romance that could last a lifetime, or, at best, the comfort of friendship with a chosen person? Had she been na?ve, she wondered, to imagine that she should have remained in love with David rather than just to have lived with him in reasonable comity? Husbands and wives did not stare fondly into one another’s eyes; that required mystery and a sense of wonderment at the other, which surely could not last very long. And she knew – as everybody did – that you had to accept that marriage could not be a fairy story, that you could not go through life feeling as if you have just had a glass of champagne, that all you could hope for was a sort of unchallenging companionship – an understanding not to judge each other too harshly.


Yet even that required a form of belief in the other, and that could be so quickly ruined by the wrong words, by an expressed doubt, an act of disloyalty, that would weaken the pact that you both wanted to exist. It was rather like saying that you do not believe in God; God can be a fine pretence, can give all the comfort that you need, until you doubt his presence; and with that you find that he is indeed not there.

She turned away from the mirror. She would try.

She started to leave the room, but stopped. She closed her eyes. Standing below the air conditioning vent, the cool air blew directly on her skin. And she thought: insecurity. He had brought it up when they had been talking about over-eating but now she was going over it in her mind and realising that if she went back to David it might just be because she felt at some subconscious level that this was where her best chance of security lay. She needed him because he had the money and paid for everything.

She opened her eyes again and started to make her way to the kitchen, where she heard the sounds of his preparing whatever it was he was heating up for her.

“Bouillabaisse,” he announced. “Made with red snapper.”

“And …”

“And conch.”

She raised a hand to her lips in a gesture of gastronomic anticipation. She did not carry it through, as she felt the tears well in her eyes. How stupid of me to cry, she thought; how stupid.

“Onions,” she stuttered.

But he knew that it was not the onions that she could see he had been cutting that were making her cry, but memories. He put an arm around her; and this was the first proper touch of him for years.

“Start again?”

She was unprepared for this. The move, she had thought, would come from her, not from him, and now she felt gratitude, sheer gratitude, that he had chosen to make it so easy for her. She moved against him, into his embrace. Three years, she thought, of pointless misunderstanding and separation are coming to an end in a simple touch. There had been no elaborate discussion, no rehearsal of pros and cons, and she felt that she was falling into this decision without thinking things through. But she had had enough; she had had enough of loneliness; as he had, too, she imagined.

He kissed her, and she wondered whether she really still liked it. She remembered what a friend had said to her at high school, all those years ago: if you wouldn’t use a boy’s toothbrush – and you wouldn’t, would you? – then why kiss him? The things people say can ruin the things we would otherwise like to do, and kissing – or the prospect of kissing – had never seemed the same to her after that. She had forgotten what it was like to be this close to him; it was familiar and yet unfamiliar; she had become used to his separateness and had not given thought to the physical. Perhaps I have shrivelled within me. Perhaps I can’t. “Tonight?” he said. “Or you can wait if you like. You mustn’t feel under pressure.”

She said that this was not the way she felt. “I feel so silly crying like this. This was not the way it was meant to be.”

“But it is,” he said.

His embrace turned into a playful hug, and then they broke apart, each as surprised as the other by what had happened. “Are they both asleep?” he asked, nodding in the direction of the bedrooms along the corridor.

She said she thought they were.

“Clover’s very excited,” he said.

She nodded. “There’s a reason for that.”

He looked at her enquiringly.

“She wants to see that boy,” she said. She looked at him hesitantly. “James. He’s the reason.”

“Ah.”

“Yes. I fear she’s in for a disappointment. These teenage romances … Particularly one-sided ones.”

“Poor girl.”

“We want to protect them, don’t we? We want to protect them from the pain that we know is coming their way, but what can one do?”

He shrugged. “We can warn them. We can tell them the truth.”

“That won’t work,” she said. “You think you know what the truth is at sixteen. All other versions of it are wrong.”

“Just like us?”

“Yes. Just like we did at that age.”

He sighed. “My little girl … thinking about other men.”

She laughed, and she realised that this was the first time she had laughed in his company for more than three years. He seemed to sense this too, and he grinned at her. She thought: he’s changed, and of course I can fall in love with him again, or at least fall in friendship, if there is such a thing.