The Forever Girl

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.

“Darling,” she said, “there’s an expression that people bandy about: love hurts. It sounds like one of those things that people say without thinking because they’ve read about it somewhere, or heard it in a song. But those things are often true, even if they sound corny and over-used. Love really does hurt. It hurts when you realise how much you love somebody. It hurts whether or not that person loves you back and everything goes well, or whether they don’t and they ignore you or treat you badly. It just hurts, because that’s the way love works. Does any of this make any sense to you?”

There was a murmur – nothing more.

“So as you go through life, you work out a way of dealing with it – just as you work out a way of dealing with the other things that happen to you. You could deny your feelings and try never to fall in love – lots of people do that – but that’s no way to live. So you work out how to control the impact of love. You learn to protect yourself from being too badly bruised by it. You let yourself go, but always remembering that you have to keep part of you from being … well, I suppose, from being too badly hurt – from being drowned.”

Clover looked away. “I like James. That’s all.”

“That’s all?”

“Yes.”

Amanda looked at her watch. “We need to begin our picnic. Perhaps you could go and fetch your brother from the water.”

“He’ll come if you shout food,” said Clover. “Like a dog.” She paused. “Do you think boys are a bit like dogs?”

Amanda laughed. “In some respects,” she said.