The day was sunny, remember? The words had been written in pencil and in some places the point had gone through the paper, as if the writer had rested it on a trousered knee. There wasn’t a signature.
I glanced around, tucked the note into my pocket, put a clip around one leg of my jeans, and unlocked the bikes. I picked a daffodil from a nearby flower bed, threaded it through the spokes of the bike next to mine, and rode home. The next day another note had been tucked under the brake wires, although I’d propped my bike in a different spot. This one, in the same handwriting, made me laugh: “You shouldn’t pick the university’s flowers,” it said. “The bigwigs won’t like it, and, no doubt, were the dean to hear, you’d have to sit through one of his interminable speeches about university standards. I can assure you it’s not worth it, however beautiful the flower and welcome the gesture.”
After supper with Louise, I lay on my bed in the flat. I should’ve been working on an English paper but cut up a yellow envelope that I’d taken from the wastepaper basket. I shaped daffodil petals from it and glued them to a pencil, and when it was finished I laid the flower on my bedside table. It was the last thing I saw before I switched off the light. The next morning, I tucked the homemade daffodil between the handlebars and the brake cable of the note-writer’s bike. The bike was gone when I returned that afternoon, the flower with it.
Then it was Easter and, on a crackling telephone line to Oslo, I convinced my aunt that since my rent had been paid for the whole year, I might as well stay on in London. Every morning during the holidays, Louise and I cycled north through Regent’s Park to the swimming ponds at Hampstead Heath, no matter the weather. We took hard-boiled eggs and Ritz crackers, towels, and swimming costumes. Louise always wanted to go to the ladies-only pond, and although it was farther and I’d have been happy to take my chances in the mixed pond, I didn’t argue—it was the water I went for: the chill of it as I lowered myself from the ladder, the verdigris hue of my legs as they kicked, the coot’s-eye view of the pond as I swam, with the insects hovering and the sunbeams refracting and reflecting, or rain speckling the surface. I liked the slap of the water against the boards of the wooden jetty, the distant laughter and shouts of other swimmers, and how, if I ducked below, I could open my eyes into a secret underwater world of weeds, mud, bubbles, and the quick flashes of other swimmers’ limbs. I was disappointed that, unlike the men in their pond, in the ladies-only we were forbidden to swim naked.
When summer term started, so did the creative-writing module I’d signed up for, and in that first session we were still chattering at our desks when you came in. You put down your bag and leaned back on the lecturer’s table at the front of the room and crossed your ankles until one by one we noticed you and stopped talking. You looked young for thirty-nine, and handsome. On the blackboard behind you was a pie chart showing the chemical composition of seawater.
The first thing you ever said to me was “What’s your name?” I remember thinking that your voice had been made for bedtime radio. The second thing you ever said to me was “Ingrid Torgensen, please would you lock the classroom door.”
I shuffled on my chair and glanced at my neighbour, who gave an embarrassed laugh.
“Well, come on. What’s the worst that could happen?”
I hesitated another moment, then went to the door and put my hand on the locking catch. Behind me there was talk and laughter as you directed the class to push the tables and chairs to the side of the room. I looked over my shoulder and saw you unpacking your bag. You took out an object wrapped in tissue paper and unrolled it from its covering—an empty jam jar. It was 1976, remember; we were young and ready for something new, excited by possibility. You placed the jar on the carpet, then sat cross-legged while you took out something else, also in tissue paper, and unwrapped it as if it were a precious thing. One by one the other students sat in a circle. You bent over the jam jar and inside it you put my homemade daffodil. The door lock turned under my fingers.
“I’m going to tell a secret,” you said when I’d edged into a gap in the circle and sat down too. “And afterwards it’ll be your turn. Something you’ve never told anyone before. Something you’ve always been hiding.” You stared at the daffodil, your words slowed and quietened, and we leaned in to catch them. “Secret truths,” you said, “are the lifeblood of a writer. Your memories and your secrets. Forget plot, character, structure; if you’re going to call yourself a writer, you need to stick your hand in the mire up to the wrist, the elbow, the shoulder, and drag out your darkest, most private truth.” You came forwards and squatted on the floor in front of us.