The Forever Girl

23



“Colours,” she said to a friend, much later. “That’s how I remember the stages of my life – by the colours.”

She had to explain. “I began in the Cayman Islands. The colours there were Caribbean – very intense.”

“Blue?”

“Yes, of course. That was the sea. Blue or turquoise, depending on the depth. Deep sea was deep blue, like that intense blue ink. You don’t find it elsewhere, I think. Or if you do, I’ve never seen it. But it wasn’t just that blue. There was another blue that people liked – a much lighter shade that they used to paint houses. That and pink. They loved pink too. They were pastel shades, I suppose.”

“I can see them. Houses with blue window-frames and doors.”

“Exactly. Those were the colours I grew up with. And then suddenly I was in Scotland and …”

“The colours were very different.”

“Yes. Everything was gentler. There were no bright colours – just those soft greens and purples and, yes, white. There are lots of whites in Scotland. White in the sky and in the rain. Sometimes even the water seems white, you know. You look at a loch and the surface of the water seems white. White or silver, like a mirror.”

“And grey.”

“Yes, there is plenty of grey in Scotland. The buildings are made of grey stone – granite and so on – and they’re grey. Hard and grey, though some of them are made of a different sort of stone. It’s the colour of honey, actually; sometimes even almost red.”

Honey-coloured … She looked up at the building that was to be her home during the university terms. The stone used for the four-floored tenement building was of just that stone. It was far softer than granite and had weathered here and there, softened at the edges, where the action of rain and wind had made its impression. The flat was on the top floor, tucked under the slate roof, reached by a shared stone stairway with a curving, ornate ironwork banister. The overall impression was one of nineteenth-century confidence and solidity. Stone was the right medium for that; stone was the expression of the values that lay behind these buildings; solid; designed to last for hundreds of years; crafted so as to allow the living out of whole lives within thick walls.

The flat belonged to a friend from school, Ella, who was starting at Edinburgh at the same time as Clover was. Or rather, it belonged to Ella’s parents, who had bought it a few years earlier for their son, who had studied engineering at Edinburgh. The son had graduated and left for a job in Bristol, but the flat had been kept on for his sister. Ella had offered Clover a room, and had then let another by placing an advertisement in the student paper.

“I have no idea what she’s like,” she said to Clover. “I tactfully asked for a photograph, but she ignored my request.”

“Why would one want a flatmate’s photograph?” asked Clover.

Ella had looked embarrassed. “You never know.”

“You mean that you want to make sure that you’re not taking on a serial killer?”

Ella nodded. “Something like that. Don’t you think that you can tell what somebody’s like from their photograph?”

Clover was not sure. “Maybe. Maybe not. Some people look unpleasant but aren’t really – not when you meet them.”

“It depends on what you mean by unpleasant. I think I’d pay attention to what her hair looked like. And her make-up.”

“Really?”

“If she was caked in make-up – you know, bags of mascara, and so on, then you’d think: this one’s not going to be easy to live with.”

“Why would you think that?”

Ella hesitated. “She’d hog the bathroom. We wouldn’t get near a mirror.”

They had laughed. And when Karen, the other flatmate, arrived – after Clover had moved into her room – they had been relieved to see that she was, outwardly at least, quite normal.

“You didn’t send a photograph,” said Ella. “But I assume it’s you.”

Karen looked blank. “Photograph?”

“I suggested that you should send a photograph – when you got in touch first. Remember?”

“No. I don’t. I can give you one now, if you like.”

“No, now we can see you. We don’t need a photograph.”

Karen later said to Clover: “Why did she want a photograph? Did you send her one before you got the room?”

“I didn’t need to. We’ve known one another for ages. I was at school with her, you see.”

“But why did she want one of me?”

“To check up.”

“Why? What can you tell from a photograph?”

“Lots of things – or that’s what Ella thinks.”

The photograph was forgotten about; they liked Karen, who came from Glasgow and brought an entirely different perspective with her. “Glasgow,” said Ella, “could be on the moon, you know. It’s that different.”

Karen had the room at the front – a room that looked out onto the street four floors below – while Ella and Clover each had a room overlooking the drying green behind the building. This was effectively a great courtyard serving the line of buildings on every side and divided, like a medieval field, into small sections, each allocated to a different flat. In places the boundaries between these postage stamps of garden were marked with low fences, barely knee-height; elsewhere the owners had long since abandoned any attempt to distinguish their property from that of their neighbours and grass – and weeds – ran riot across human divisions. Cats, too, observed their territorial arrangements across the face of the map of human ownership, moving around any contested space on top of such stone walls as could be found, or surveying the green from windowsills or doorways.


It was Clover’s first room. She did not count her room at home – mothers or younger brothers can enter your room at home with impunity – nor did she count the single room that she had eventually been given at school; that had been meant to be private, but never really was. Now she had somewhere that was at her complete disposal. She was paying rent for this and it was hers.

She stood in front of her window and looked down onto the green below. A woman in blue slacks, presumably one of the neighbours, was tending a small bed of discouraged-looking flowers; a pigeon, alighted on a branch of the single tree in the corner, was puffing up its breast in a display of bravado; the sky, a patch of blue above the surrounding rooftops, was enjoying one of its rare cloud-free moments. Greys. Greens. Light, almost whitened blue.

She thought about her mother. She would take a photograph and send it to her; she had asked for that. She looked at her watch; her mother would be up by now and might be having her morning swim in the pool. Or she might already have started a game of tennis at the club. She would not change places with her. Cayman, for all its colours, was boring, she thought. Money, money, money. Tennis. Parties. Gossip. And after that there was nothing, but the same all over again.

She smiled to herself, savouring the sheer joy of freedom. For the first time in her life – the very first – there was nobody to tell her what to do. If she wished, she could stay in this room all day. She could lie on her bed and page through magazines. She could drink as many cups of coffee as she liked. The course was due to start the following day with both morning and afternoon being given over to orientation. It was an odd word to use, she thought, and she imagined for a moment a group of confused and uncertain students standing in a room and being gently turned by assistants so that they faced north or south or whatever direction the authorities thought best. She smiled again.

Then lectures were to start the day after that, after everybody had recovered from the orientation party that she had already seen advertised. Half-price drinks, announced a poster, and underneath, somebody, presumably with experience of student parties, had written Full-price hangover.

She had already investigated the departmental offices in a restored Georgian house on one side of a square of such houses and had found out where the first lecture would be held. That first lecture would be at ten, she had been told, and since a large crowd was expected she should get there early.

“Some people sit on the steps,” said one of the secretaries disapprovingly. “We don’t encourage it, but if there are no seats, then there really is no alternative.”

She went to the orientation party, which was solely for those enrolled on the art history course – almost three hundred and twenty students. The secretary who had advised her about sitting on the steps was there, standing at the entrance, at the same time giving the impression of being both disapproving and hesitant, as if undecided as to whether to join the party. “There are far too many people for this room,” she said to Clover as she arrived. “I tell them every year to get a bigger room, but they ignore me. They just ignore me.”

Clover, feeling that she was being drawn into some internal issue, some obscure matter of the workplace, was uncertain as to what to say. “They shouldn’t,” she said at last.

“Well, it’s nice to hear that you think that,” said the secretary. “Because others don’t.”

Clover looked around the crowded room.

The secretary noticed her wandering gaze. “And that’s another thing,” she said, taking a sip of her drink. “I tell them every year that they should recruit a few more young men. Look at all these girls.” She sighed. “We used to have some very nice young men. But these days …”

Clover looked. There were a few boys, but those who were there were heavily outnumbered by young women.

“A group of women is always different,” said the secretary. She glanced at Clover, appraising her reaction. “The atmosphere is more difficult. I don’t think that women have as much fun as men, do you?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” said Clover.

“Well, I do,” said the secretary. “Look at them.” She gestured towards the group of students.

Clover’s eye was caught by a group of three young women standing near a window. She was sure that she recognised one of them, but was not sure why she did. She stared harder. The ears were right. She always used to wear one of those odd hair-bands that showed the ears rather too prominently. She had some sort of patterned hair-band on now, although it was hard to make out exactly what it was. And the brow, too. That was unusually high, as it had been all those years ago.

It was somebody from Cayman, she thought; there was no doubt about it. She had met her. And then, as she detached herself from the disgruntled secretary and began to make her way across the room, the girl in the hair-band unexpectedly turned round and looked straight at her, as if suddenly warned of her presence.

They had not seen each other for some years. For a brief period, now suddenly remembered, she and Judy had been in the same class at the Prep; there had been a running argument over something – Clover tried to remember it – and sides had been taken, with each of them in a different faction. The casus belli was soon forgotten and they had briefly shared the same friend; then she had gone – somewhere, as people did when you were a child – although she had returned to the island with her parents some years later and they had acknowledged each other distantly, and somewhat warily.

Judy’s face broke into a broad smile of recognition. “I thought it was you,” she said as she came up to Clover. “You know something? I haven’t met a single person – not one – I know since I came to Edinburgh, and now you … Would you believe it?”

Clover shrugged. “Big world,” she said. “Not small, as some people keep saying.”

“Well, big and small,” said Judy. “Here I am. Here you are. Small, maybe.”

Clover noticed the bracelet – a thin band of tiny diamonds. Who would wear something like that to a student party?

“A present from my dad,” said Judy. “My eighteenth birthday, last year. He said I should wear it.”

Clover showed her embarrassment. “Why not? I like it.” She glanced at Judy’s clothes. They were expensive; expensive jeans could be frayed and distressed as much as you liked, but they remained costly-looking.

“So you’re on the course too?”

Clover nodded absently. She wanted to know what had happened to Judy in the intervening years. “Where have you been?” she asked. “I mean, where have you been the last five years?”

“My dad moved to Singapore,” Judy said. “He got remarried – remember my mum died?”

Clover nodded. It was coming back to her now; it had been an overdose, people said, and her mother had found it awkward explaining what that was. Too many pills, probably by mistake. People get confused, you see. What do you think, Clover asked herself at the time, if your mother takes too many pills – by mistake? How do you actually feel about that? She could not imagine it; she could not see her mother doing that; she counted things out; she never made a mistake. Other mothers took too many pills, not hers.

“So my dad married this Chinese lady – well, actually she’s Singaporean. We moved to Singapore because her family had a company and my dad went and worked for them. They’re quite important, actually – my Singaporean relatives.”


“You went to school there?”

Judy shook her head. “No. I came to the UK. Boarding school. It wasn’t too bad, I suppose.”

“I went too.”

Judy raised the glass she was holding. “Yeah, well, we’re survivors, aren’t we?” She paused. “I’ve got a flat in Singapore. I lived there for five months before I came here. I’ll go back to it in the university vacations. Come and visit me.”

“Your own place?”

“I told you – my stepmother’s family is rich. Sorry, I’m not boasting – just explaining. There’s a difference.”

“Of course. I didn’t think you were boasting.”

Judy cast an eye back to where she had been standing earlier on. “That girl … The one in red. Dreary! Seriously dreary! She went on about that museum in St Petersburg – the whatever it’s called …”

“The Hermitage.”

“Yes, that place; she says that her aunt knows the head conservator there and they’ve offered her an internship for a month next year. She went on and on about it. I told her that Russia was a ghastly place and that I wouldn’t ever spend a month there if I could avoid it. She became very defensive.”

“Oh well …”

“But the boy she’s talking to – see him? He’s called Graham and he’s seriously cute. I don’t think he’s gay either. You can tell, you know. They start talking about the High Renaissance or Michelangelo and you say to yourself Here we go! But he hasn’t mentioned Michelangelo once – not once! That’s almost like declaring yourself a rugby player round here.”

Clover laughed.

“Did I say something amusing?” asked Judy disingenuously. “I should hate to miss my own jokes.”

“Michelangelo …” began Clover.

“Oh not you too!”

“No, I was going to ask why Michelangelo was …”

“The litmus? Search me. It may be something to do with his statue of David. Who knows? But that guy, Graham, is seriously interesting.” She paused. “And you know who else?”

“Who else what?”

“Who else is in Edinburgh. Not that I’ve seen him, but I gather he’s here. He’s doing economics or something like that.” And then she added casually, without knowledge of the effect of what she said, “His dad was that doctor.”

Clover caught her breath. “You mean Dr Collins?”

“Yes. He was my mother’s doctor. She liked him a lot.”

Clover battled to keep her voice even. “James?”

“Yes. That’s him. I didn’t know him very well – did you?”

“I did. Quite well. I’m a bit out of touch now.”

Judy took another sip of her drink. “He was gorgeous, if I remember correctly. Or he looked as if he would be gorgeous … with time.” She smiled. “I heard he was here because that other guy who was in our class – the one who went to Houston – he’s kept in touch in an odd sort of way. We never see one another and I never really liked him very much, but he still sends me e-mails sometimes and tells me that so-and-so has done whatever. Some people like that sort of thing – gossip, I suppose. There’s no real point to it, but they don’t seem to get it. He told me that James was coming to university in Edinburgh. That’s how I know.”

Clover was silent. She had been trying not to think of him, and had succeeded – at least to some extent. But every day, almost without exception, some thought would come to her unbidden; his name, or the memory of him, like a tinge of pain from tissue that has not altogether recovered from a wound – and perhaps never would.

When she spoke, her voice was level. “I didn’t know that.”

“Well, you do now. If I see him, I’ll tell him you’re here. We could all meet up – like a bunch of stranded expatriates – and talk about old times. Or maybe we won’t. I can’t stand that sort of thing. You know how it is? Remember how we … that sort of garbage.”

Clover nodded absently. She suddenly wanted to leave the party. She had come hoping to meet her future classmates – to make friends – but now she just felt empty. She did not want to talk to anybody; she wanted to get away, to go somewhere where she could just sit and think of James. It was precisely what she had been trying to avoid – she had sat and thought enough about him in the past – and now she was starting afresh. But tonight was different; this was a shock, and she could allow herself to think through the implications of what she had just been told. James was in Edinburgh. In Edinburgh. And he was at the same university as she was. That meant that he was one of – how many was it? – twenty-five thousand students, maybe a few more. Edinburgh was not a large city – not as cities went – and you were bound to bump into somebody else sooner or later. There would be parties – university life was full of parties – and that meant that they could find themselves in the same room together. She would see him.

The thought both appalled and excited her. It appalled her because she had stopped thinking about him; it was over – whatever it was. No, it was love, she told herself. You can’t dodge love by calling it whatever it was; it was love, and you might as well admit it. Use the word, Miss Hardy had said to them in English class; use the short, accurate, expressive word – not the circumlocution. And a boy at the back had muttered, “Circumlocution isn’t a short, accurate expressive word.” They had all laughed – Miss Hardy included.

“Touché,” the teacher had said. “And here’s another suggestion: if you can’t find an English word, use a French one.”

She extricated herself from the party as discreetly as she could. Just outside the doorway, though, she met one of the lecturers, a thin, rather worried-looking man. He had interviewed her the day before in his role as her director of studies, and now he frowned as he greeted her.

“Clover – it is Clover isn’t it? You’re not leaving, are you?”

“Well, I was …”

“The Professor was going to make a speech – just going to say a few words of welcome. Can’t you stay for that?”

She looked down at the floor. “I’m sorry, I just don’t feel in the mood for a party. It’s nothing to do with the Professor.”

He looked at her with concern. “Are you sure you’re all right? It can be a bit of a strain, the start of a new academic year; and this is your first year, which is always more stressful.”

She looked up at him. “Thanks. I’ll be all right.”

But she felt the tears welling in her eyes and after a moment or two she could not disguise them.

His concern grew. “But you’re crying …”

She wiped at her cheeks. “I’m sorry. I’m all right. It’s just that …” Her voice tailed off. What could she say? I’m in love with somebody who doesn’t love me. I thought I’d got over him, but I haven’t, I haven’t at all …

He was looking at her expectantly. “Something’s obviously wrong. It’s not my job to pry, but I don’t like to see you leaving in this state. I really don’t.”

She reassured him that she would get home safely and that she had just been a bit upset about a personal matter; she would feel much better in a few minutes. Really. Honestly. He did not have to worry.


She went outside into the street and began the fifteen-minute walk back to her flat. Yellow sodium street-lights glowed against the sky; a bus moved by with a shudder, one of the passengers looking out and briefly making eye contact with her as she walked past. She thought: this is the last news I wanted to hear, and for a moment she felt an irrational anger towards Judy for being the messenger who conveyed it. But after a brief struggle that stopped, and she felt calmer. I shall put him out of my mind, she said to herself. He is nothing to me any more; just a boy I once knew and to whom I can be indifferent when I see him again. I shall not be unkind; I shall not cut him nor ignore him; I shall simply be indifferent. Like this. She closed her eyes, expecting to see nothing, which is what she imagined a state of indifference should produce on the inner eye. But it did not. She saw James, and he was smiling at her.