The Forever Girl

22



For the next two years, she did not see him, not by design, but because they were never on the island at the same time. James had slightly different school holidays, and often filled these with projects that took him elsewhere. There was a cricket tour of Australia, and a working trip to Malawi, where his school was renovating an orphanage. She heard about these things from Ted, whom she did see, and who sent her regular messages. She tried not to appear too interested – but in secret she was like an addict deprived, poring over each scrap of news Ted gave her about James as if it were a sacred text, an utterance to be dwelt upon, weighed for meaning.

“He doesn’t do e-mails,” Ted assured her. “It’s nothing personal.”

She was not convinced; Ted was trying to comfort her. “But you hear from him. He must e-mail you.”

Ted explained that he heard the news indirectly, from other friends. “It’s true, Clove. I swear. There are some people who just don’t e-mail. It seems odd, but they don’t.”

“How can they? Everything’s done by e-mail now. How can they do anything if they don’t use it?”

He shrugged. “They use it a little. Now and then.”

She shook her head. “They can’t. They have to.”

He did not want her in his life; that was clear to her. He was not hostile; he had been friendly, even encouraging, at that party, but it seemed to her that she was just part of his background – nothing more than that. Sensing this, she decided to fall in love with somebody else – she willed that to happen – but it did not. Unconscious, irresistible comparisons with James meant that other boys were found wanting. Nobody was as good-looking; nobody made her laugh in quite the same way; nobody listened, as James did, was as sympathetic. In short, James had changed the world for her, had set a bar that others simply could not surmount.

Her education taught her self-awareness. Strathearn was a school that encouraged intellectual seriousness – it was what the parents who sent their children there paid for – and there was an English teacher, Miss Hardy, who opened eyes. Clover’s reading was guided by her and she expanded the horizons of everybody in that particular class. Clover thought a great deal – about people and their emotions, about how things were in the world. By the time she was due to leave school at eighteen, she had as mature an understanding of the world as many in their mid-twenties – perhaps even more mature.

“University is not a finishing school,” said Miss Hardy. “It is not a place to mark time for three or four years until you find yourself a job.”

The conversation arose in Miss Hardy’s study. Clover had called to say goodbye, and to thank the teacher. The following day, Commemoration Day, would be her last day at the school.

Miss Hardy closed the book that had been open on her desk before her. Clover squinted to read the title upside down: Edward Thomas: A Life in Poetry. She remembered that he was an enthusiasm of the teacher, and they had spent the best part of an hour talking about one of his poems about a train stopping at a station in the country, and steam escaping, and birds singing. She had wanted to cry, and almost did, because she knew the poet would be killed in the trenches of France.

“Edward Thomas,” said Miss Hardy.

“I remember. That poem about the train.”

Miss Hardy touched the cover of the book almost reverentially. “If you forget everything else I ever taught you, I suspect you’ll remember that poem.”

She assured her that she would not forget. “No, you’re wrong. I’ll remember a lot.”

“You’re kind … But, back to the topic of university. It’s your one chance, you know. Or for most people it’s their one chance.”

“Of what?”

“Of opening the mind.”

“Yes.”

“Education – educere, the Latin for to lead out. How many times has somebody explained that to you while you’ve been here?”

“One hundred.”

“Well, there you are. So choose carefully. And don’t throw it away.”

“Yes.”

Miss Hardy looked at her thoughtfully. “Your family lives overseas, don’t they?”

“In the Cayman Islands. My father’s an accountant.” Clover’s tone became apologetic. “He works there.”

The teacher smiled. “You don’t have to explain. You don’t have to justify it. At any rate, not to me.”

She felt she had to; people had their views on the Cayman Islands.

“I didn’t raise it for that reason,” said Miss Hardy. “I mention it because I suppose it affects your choices. You’re probably in a position to do what you want to do. Your choice need not be too vocational.”

“What you mean is that I can do something indulgent if I want to. Shouldn’t you say what you mean? Haven’t you tried to teach us that?”


It was not impertinence, although it may have sounded like it. This sort of bantering exchange was allowed – even encouraged – with the students about to leave; the school believed in independence of thought and in the ability to hold one’s corner in debate. “Don’t be too ready to read things into what people say. But, broadly speaking, yes. You can study something that isn’t necessarily going to lead to something else. You’ll have plenty of opportunity to do that later.”

“Whereas most people can’t?”

“No, they can’t. A lot of people have debt to consider. They can’t afford to study expensive subjects that don’t lead to a paying career.”

She looked down at the floor. “Should I feel guilty? Should I feel bad about it?”

“No. Not at all.”

“Why?”

“Because sometimes in this life we’re given things that we don’t deserve – that we haven’t done anything to merit, so to speak. We don’t have to give those up if they come our way. And remember this: plenty of people are better off than you. Inequality is written into the way the world works, no matter how hard we try to correct it.” Miss Hardy paused. “You may be fortunate in one respect and less fortunate in another. Nobody’s guaranteed happiness across the board. Fate has her own ideas of equality.”

“Nemesis? Isn’t she the person you told us about?”

“Yes, Nemesis. She stalks us, we’re told. If we get above ourselves, she may take action to cut us down to size.”

“I’ll be careful.”

The teacher affected mock seriousness. “So you should be. But I suspect that you’ll do nothing much to risk corrective action by Nemesis or any of the other gods and goddesses.”

She laughed. “They were so nasty, weren’t they – the Greek gods?”

“Horrible. Full of mean tricks and petty jealousies. Worse than the girls in the third form, although not by much.”

“And punishing people too. Making them bear all sorts of things … Sisyphus.”

Miss Hardy was pleased that she had remembered. In class they had read Camus’s essay The Myth of Sisyphus. “Yes, Sisyphus – condemned to push a rock up a hill eternally. They certainly knew how to impose burdens.” She paused, but only briefly. “Of course, we’re quite good at imposing burdens on ourselves – without any assistance from Parnassus.”

“I suppose we are,” said Clover. “Unreturned love, for instance. That’s a burden, isn’t it?”

Miss Hardy looked at her with interest. She had not been able to make this girl out – not entirely. Other seventeen- or eighteen-year-olds were transparent – at least to those who spent their lives teaching them. Clover was more complex; there was something there that she could not quite put her finger on; some sorrow, perhaps, that was more specific, more focused than typical teenage angst. Now she had revealed it as clearly as if she had spelled it out in capital letters.

She would be gentle. She wanted to say: don’t worry. Unrequited love was painful to begin with, but the passage of time dulled the pain – it always did. “The Greek legends have a fair dose of that.”

Clover’s voice was even. “Unrequited love?”

“Yes. Greek mythology may be full of instances of the revenge and pettiness we were talking about, but it also involved profound insights into the human condition – of which unrequited love is just one feature. Echo and Narcissus – remember?”

“Vaguely. She fell in love with him and he …”

“He was too preoccupied with himself to return her love. He gazed at his reflection constantly and eventually wasted away. As did she. All that was left of him was a flower by the water’s edge, and of her a sound. That was it.”

Clover was silent for a while. In their art class they had looked at a Pre-Raphaelite picture of Echo and Narcissus, with Echo watching Narcissus crouching by his pool, gazing at his reflection. It was a perfect depiction of what it was to be cut out of somebody’s life.

Miss Hardy was smiling. “Would you mind if I said something critical of your generation?”

“Why should we mind criticism? We criticise people who are older than us. All the time …” She grinned.

“Oh, we know that,” said Miss Hardy. “Any teacher who isn’t aware of what is said about us must have her ears closed.”

Clover waited.

“This is nothing personal,” said Miss Hardy. “I’m not talking about the boys in this school.”

“Of course not.”

“It’s a difficult thing to explain, but there are those who say that young men these days have been encouraged into narcissism. They’ve been presented with images of themselves that are essentially narcissistic. All those brooding pictures of members of boy bands sucking in their cheeks to make themselves look more intense. What’s the message there? Be cool. Don’t express your feelings. Gaze at yourself and your image … The problem is that this doesn’t leave them much time – or emotional energy – for other people.”

“Maybe …”

“Of course I overstate it a bit, but then you have to overstate some things if you’re to see them in the first place. But there’s a rather odd consequence to all this, I think.”

“Which is?”

“It can leave the girls out of it. You end up with a lot of self-obsessed young men, all trying to fulfil the cultural expectation of the detached, moody young hero, and lo and behold, these young men don’t have much time for the girls.”

“But they do!”

Miss Hardy conceded. “For some things, yes. Disengaged sex, maybe. But not for others.” She hesitated before continuing. “I think that’s probably enough of that. You can make too much of a theory.”

“It’s an interesting one.”

“You think so?”

“Yes, I do.”

The teacher considered this. Then she said, “I suppose we can speak pretty frankly. You’re about to leave this place, to go out into the world, and I don’t have to treat you as a child any more. May I ask you one further thing?”

She waited for Clover to nod before she continued. “I get the strong impression that you’ve already been in love with somebody and that it hasn’t worked out. I don’t want to pry, and you don’t have to speak about it if you don’t want to.”

Clover looked past Miss Hardy, out through the window behind the teacher’s desk. The hills – gentle in that part of Perthshire – rose off towards the north; an attenuated blue now in the warmth of summer. She felt, more sharply now, the pang of regret that had first touched her a few weeks ago when she realised that she was shortly to leave a place where she had been happy. “I don’t mind speaking about it. It’s all right now.”

“You’re getting over it?”

“Yes, I think so. I’m forgetting him. That’s what you have to do, isn’t it?”

Miss Hardy sighed. “That’s the conventional wisdom. And I suppose there’s some truth in the conventional wisdom – there usually is. But it’s not always entirely true. I’m not sure that you should forget entirely, because what you’re forgetting may be something really rather important to you. Something precious.”

It occurred to Clover that the teacher was talking about herself. “You didn’t get married, did you?”

“I did.”

“But your name … Miss …”

The teacher shook her head. “Don’t go by names. I was married for three years. Just for three years – my fault as much as his, but I didn’t want it to end. When it came apart, I went back to my own name. I’d been Miss Hardy, and I went back to that. My nom de guerre, so to speak – not that the classroom is a battleground.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Divorce happens. I hope it doesn’t happen to you, but it happens.”

“You said that we shouldn’t forget.”

“No, I didn’t say that. I think that we need to forget a certain amount – just to be able to keep going – but we shouldn’t forget everything. I suppose it’s a question of forgetting to the extent that you don’t think about it too much. But keep some of the memory, because it’s part of what … of what you’ve had.”

Clover’s gaze returned from the window. “But if you keep thinking about …”

Miss Hardy interrupted her. “You don’t have to keep thinking about him. You change the way you think about him – that way he won’t dominate your life. What do they call it now? Moving on. I’ve always thought that a resounding cliché, but I suppose it has its uses, like any resounding cliché. Move on.”

“I have. Or at least I think I have.”

Miss Hardy looked relieved. “It’s not easy to forget something, is it? But let’s talk about university now. Where are you going?”

“Edinburgh. History of Art.”

“Good. Where I was.” She paused, and then added, with contrived wistfulness, “That’s where I met him.”

They both smiled.