Meeting Lydia Read online

  I saw a novel today in Smith’s about school reunions. Everyone is jumping on the bandwagon now. Friends Reunited has spawned a whole new genre of twenty-first century literature. Reuniting will be done to death in books, on the radio, on TV and in films. For a whole generation, FR will be part of common parlance and while there will be the success stories charting tearful discoveries of lost friends and relatives, it will be the damning tales of marriage breakdown and betrayal that will command the most column inches in the tabloid press.

  Then it will stop. Today’s youth won’t lose each other like we did. I remember writing to several friends during my time at college, but then work began, new friends came on the scene and there just wasn’t time to keep so many balls in the air at once. So some contacts were lost and then regretted years later when they were remembered but beyond reach.

  There was Hesta who made me scrambled eggs and marmite on toast when I had ’flu; Jenny from Chorleywood who was mad about Bryan Ferry and wanted to be a spy; Freda who introduced me to Portobello Market and avocado pears; Mandy, kind and reliable and an expert in maths. What lives did they find after college? What paths beckoned? Perhaps Friends Reunited will throw up the answers or maybe I’ll never know.

  Now, advanced communication systems make it easy to keep in touch with more people at once; even acquaintances. A text message now and then might be enough. Gone will be the vast separations spanning thirty-three years and more.

  Oh Lydia, I cannot begin to tell you how I miss you at the moment. I miss writing to you and you replying. Crazy! Totally, utterly, crazy when we have only been exchanging mail for two weeks. Finding you was one of those frontier moments when the life before and the life after are never the same.

  But I know that I mustn’t take up too much of your precious time, or seem too needy or seem to care too much. In any case, how can I care too much when I don’t know you? One meeting and all the silly bubbles will burst, I am sure. But I think that left behind would be something worthwhile, something friendly and sincere and respectful.

  I think of you in an idealised way, heaping upon you all the traits that I admire and dismissing any thought that you are flawed. Not for you the moods and foibles of ordinary mortals! Not for you inconsideration, impatience and incapability with an iron! Until we meet, you are airbrushed to perfection in my fantasy world and I know that this could never be the real you. I am not under any illusions. This is all a game. Nothing makes sense. These are the ramblings of a hormonally imbalanced woman. Forgive me.

  Hi Edward,

  If we meet will it be as easy as it has been in cyberspace? Will we have things to talk about beyond the memories of yesteryear and the trials of life at Brocklebank? Will you see me as an equal and not the downtrodden girl I once was? Will there be just enough attraction for us to want to be friends, but not so much as to make it complicated?

  I wish I could tell you about the M word! Perhaps you would understand, but it’s just not the kind of thing you discuss with men. Makes men feel uncomfortable. A few of us women were talking about hot flushes in the staffroom the other day, and the man beside us went silent, then escaped … You don’t want to know about the early waking and the lying for hours unable to sleep. And how bad I feel some mornings – hardly able to prise myself from bed, and when I do, the lethargy …

  Sometimes there’s so much going on in my head, I can’t focus. Information overload with neurons firing off in all directions, like a pyrotechnic display. And each time I try to grab a coherent thread, the image blurs. Thinking this; thinking that. What is that lesson I have to teach tomorrow? Is the filling that’s gone sensitive to hot and cold a sign of something worse? And Johnny …

  Then there are the moods that dip down into a pit of despair like I have never known, only to bounce back without warning to an extreme of happiness. This is bungee jumping for the psyche and I’ve never been much of a thrill seeker.

  I wonder for how long this will be; if it will get worse; if it will ever stop. Sometimes I feel so gloomy at the thought of being no longer young, but finding you has at least reminded me of my inner potential. I hope it’s not too late.

  Do you have midlife fears, Edward? Most people do. It is natural, normal and potentially productive as we reassess and subtly shift the way we do things. If we met face to face would we be able to talk about these things, or would you shy away like the man in the staffroom?

  Someone wrote a book once about travelling backwards through life – being raised from the dead and gradually getting younger… With the certainty of incapacity, helplessness and the sure knowledge of exactly when this would happen, culminating in a most painful departure from the outside world, this would be an even more frightening prospect than the chronology as we know it.

  Hi Edward,

  In the winter months I am a bear. I would happily stay at home in my cave through the dark days. We are not programmed to get up in the pitch blackness of a December morn, working through until it is dark again. It is not natural. No wonder we suffer from SAD. Why can’t we go back to a time when we synchronise with the seasons? I’m sure we’d be much happier.

  In 1984, I stayed on British Summer Time after the clocks went back. People thought I was mad. Johnny thought it was slightly batty, but those were the days when he loved me for it. I thought it was utterly sensible! I rose at my seven thirty instead of six thirty, and went to bed at my eleven. So much better for an owl like me. Are you an owl, Edward, or a lark? I bet you’re a lark. Tapping out research papers on your computer before breakfast while the world sleeps … You are so productive it makes my head spin.

  Edward,

  Why do we worry about leaving things for posterity? Children, books, inventions …

  All will be gone sometime when the world ends. And this may be sooner than we think. The erratic climate could soon make the earth uninhabitable. And we sit alone in our cars and say, ‘you can’t ask me to catch a bus when I’ve been driving all my life.’

  And we say that wind farms destroy the scenic beauty of the moorland and the seas, but soon there may be no scenic beauty left to destroy.

  I want to write a book about my Brocklebank memories; a book for all those tortured souls who have been burdened all their life by the bullies from their youth. But who’s going to read it when the world ends?

  Dear Edward,

  You appeared in my dreams last night, young and dark and lithe from a long lost time when I never knew you. And I am young too, teenage or twenty perhaps, and we have that easy familiarity that comes from a lifetime of knowing, which is strange when it is a lifetime of knowing we have missed.

  And when I woke, I woke with a feeling of loss and I missed you.

  But if you come back from Australia and we never write again, it won’t make any difference. I will be sad of course; sad that you only reentered my life for such a short time. But that time has been so special. Like the rocket boosters that send a spacecraft on its journey to the stars, you have given me impetus to face the rest of my life. You have reminded me of who I was and what I could be; re-ignited a motivation and ambition that I thought I no longer needed. I will never lose it now. I owe it to you to do things differently from now on.

  And just for an hour or two as the day took hold and the watery light of dawn became the assured light of day, I longed for that precious sleep again when I might find you and be young and happy again. I wonder at the oddness of it all. How can I feel this way when you and I have shared nothing but a classroom, a hockey field, a stage?

  Am I losing my rational sense? I know that this manufactured image of you is anything but real. It’s what I hope you could be, yet cannot be; the recipe for the perfect man. But we all know he doesn’t exist. It is my defence against cynicism at a time when my life is full of fears and doubts and disappointments; the frailty of the human condition; the human male; Johnny …

  But is it any different for him? While I want so much love and romance and certainty forever, perhaps
I am a disappointment to him as I age and lose vitality and youth?

  The old fox in the copse at the back of the college has found a young vixen to bear his young this year. I swear I saw a spring in his step and a new gleam to his coat. I wonder what happened to his previous wife?

  All the things she might’ve wanted to say but never did; all the conversations they never had – perhaps never would. It was like he wanted to listen now where once he had been unsure; like he’d given her permission to speak and this had opened the floodgates of her outpouring.

  So Edward became a fantasy object; a distraction from the mundanities of life. How he would have laughed if he had known – far too modest to imagine such a thing. In saner moments, Marianne considered the real picture, but this was much less fun and while her hormones were spinning, she decided to enjoy it. She knew she was thinking the ridiculous thoughts of an adolescent, but there were two ways to approach this obstacle in her life: either become depressed at the thought of losing her youth, or embrace it wholeheartedly as an opportunity – even an excuse – to be silly again.

  21

  New Tactics

  Johnny came back from Ardnamurchan, windblown and healthy-looking with designer stubble, wild hair and a fresh, cold country smell on his outdoor clothes.

  “Marianne!” he shouted as he came through the door, dropping his rucksack in the hallway. “Mari! I’m back!” An icy blast of approaching winter accompanied him, together with a few dried-up leaves from the maple in the garden.

  It was late on Friday afternoon. Marianne saved the work that she was doing on the computer and hurried downstairs to greet him. In her heart, she was really pleased he was home, but her head said don’t forget his pursuit of the fluffy trollop. She didn’t want to overdo the enthusiasm. He would pay a price for his thoughtlessness this past year.

  She gave him a hug and a kiss on the cheek, then released him quickly. She ran her fingers gently over his beard then turned away. “You’re looking very well … Good time?”

  “Exhausting, freezing cold, but yes.” He unzipped his padded jacket and slung it over the end of the banister rail. “We counted them out and we counted them back! Yvonne put her foot down a rabbit hole and twisted her knee, but apart from that, no problems … I brought you this,” he added, producing something from out of his jacket pocket. Close your eyes!”

  Marianne shut her eyes and held out her hand, apprehensive lest it was something alive or slimy. But it was hard and smooth and cold. “It feels like a stone.”

  “It is a stone. Ardnamurchan granite!”

  She grinned. “Thank you! We can use it as a doorstop.” This was a glimmer of the old Johnny; the Johnny who knew that little things given with thought are more important than big things given without it.

  Johnny walked into the kitchen and took a long drink of water from a bottle on the counter. “What’ve you been up to?” He held out his free hand to her, grasping her fingertips, making an effort.

  “This and that; the usual weekly grind.” Marianne let him squeeze her hand briefly, then withdrew it.

  “Have you heard from Holly?”

  “An email saying she was making lots of friends and enjoying the lectures. She’s joined the riding club. Seems to have settled in well. Sounds very happy. It’s been very quiet without you both.” Marianne thought he looked so sexy in his rough Arran jumper that she was finding it difficult to restrain herself. Two days earlier, she had noticed fewer hot flushes and a feeling of being alive again. It was as if the switch had been turned back on, and she wanted him again. Hold back, she said to herself. Wait, then wait a little bit more. Let him come to you. “How about a leisurely bath before we eat?”

  “Will you come and scrub my back?” He twinkled.

  “I might,” she teased.

  Later when they lay flat on their backs on the bed after a steamy session of sex, initiated by Johnny and evoking memories of a long lost time, Marianne decided to tell him about the M word. Catch him while the mood was right; while he was sober; while he thought her desirable and was basking in the afterglow.

  “Johnny …”

  “Zzzzz!”

  “Johnny! Don’t you dare go to sleep on me!”

  “Zzzzz …”

  “Johnny!”

  “Yes, Mari …”

  “I need to tell you something.”

  “Oh God, here we go. I knew this was too good to be true.”

  She frowned.

  There was a long pause. Johnny’s eyes were wide open now.

  “I’m going – this is difficult.”

  “To leave me?” offered Johnny, half-jokingly.

  “Menopausal.” She blurted it out through clenched teeth. It was so hard saying the word, but there it was, in the open, swooping around, hard to catch. It could never be put back in the bottle again.

  “It’s a bit soon, isn’t it?”

  “Early, but not too early.”

  “What does this mean?”

  “It means I am emotional and cranky like a teenager, but when you’re thirteen, you don’t understand what’s going on, but suspect things will get better. Now you do understand, and fear they’ll get worse. So it means I need sympathy and compassion because it’s hard feeling that it’s all slipping away. It’s a very odd experience. All the things that people have said are true. You do become absent minded: sugar in the fridge; keys left in the boot of the car. Keys left everywhere. Forgetting names of people you know really well. Forgetting the simplest facts.”

  Johnny turned to face her, looking concerned. “I don’t know what to say.”

  “You don’t have to say anything.”

  “I wondered if there was something wrong.”

  “Well now you know.” Marianne sat up for a moment, the duvet slipping and revealing her nakedness.

  Now it was his turn. She lay back down again and waited. He could apologise; perhaps say that it was all his fault. He could tell her if he was having a crisis too.

  Nothing.

  “Don’t go yet,” Johnny reached over and put a warm hand on her shoulder.

  “Things to do,” she said. “If you want to eat. But you can stay and have a snooze. Catch up on some sleep. I’ll call you when supper’s ready.” And with that she got up and back into her clothes, ran a comb through her hair and went downstairs feeling pleased.

  She was redressing the power-balance and leaving him wanting more.

  As the days went by, Marianne continued her new policy of being non-judgemental about pub-visits and ceased to grumble if Johnny drank too much. She stopped rising to any swipes that were aimed to tease and taunt, and ignored any references to other women. She also became much more available for sex, though careful to let him make most of the advances. She was newly confident about her allure and decided to enjoy it while the switch was back on.

  And day by day, little by little, Johnny returned to his former attentive self. He spent fewer and fewer evenings at the pub, and when he did go, he drank less and came home earlier.

  But Marianne was a long way from forgiving him yet. She still couldn’t forget the image of him laughing with Charmaine on the steps of the school. She remembered the sinking feeling in the pit of her stomach and how she had felt she might lose him.

  Then Holly came back for the Christmas vacation. Marianne marvelled at how she had changed in the short three months since being away. There was a touch of the rebel about her dress and she had crimson streaks in her luscious dark hair that matched the blood-red lipstick she was habitually wearing. She sounded different – using long words and wanting to talk endlessly about everything and nothing, in the way that students do; in the way that Marianne had once, long ago, in a faraway room in a students’ hall of residence, when she thought that she had been put on this planet to make a difference and change the world.

  Oh to be so young again, she thought, but then remembered all the insecurities that being young entailed. Perhaps it was easier being hot and forty-someth
ing. And she wouldn’t want to go back to a time when the Brocklebank horrors scourged her waking life from dawn to dusk.

  “Mum …” said Holly when they sat one morning after breakfast. “Can I call you Marianne?” My friend Thalia calls her mum ‘Helen’ – ‘Mum’ makes you seem old, and you’re not.”

  “I’d rather you didn’t,” said Marianne, taken aback as she said the words because they were spoken in the same disapproving tone used by her own mother. Her mother would have said ‘no’. Was that how she really felt? Her mother got really uppity when some slip of a girl barely out of school called her Daphine instead of Mrs Hayward. But did it really matter what you were called? In any case, it would be just another adolescent phase that wouldn’t last.

  “Thalia’s parents live in Christchurch and have a yacht at Keyhaven. They go sailing round the coast in the summer holidays. She said I could go with them.”

  “How nice.” Marianne tried to be enthusiastic, but the more she heard about Thalia, the more she thought she was the kind of girl to lead her daughter astray. But what could you do? Her own mother had thought that about Sasha at first, especially when Sasha embroidered an upward pointing arrow on the leg of her jeans. It was all misjudgement and misunderstanding of the times. Sasha was a fund of knowledge at a time when a little knowledge was a dangerous thing. And Marianne had made her own decisions. She had been her own person, and no doubt Holly would be too.

  It was snowing outside. Not the kind of snow that turns everything Christmas card white in a matter of hours, but wet flakes mixed with rain that melted as soon as they touched the ground. Sad snow, Marianne called it. Not the kind of snow to get excited about. Marianne always felt nostalgic in the snow: memories of carol-singing, mistletoe and bright burning fires. Snow at Brocklebank brought out the toboggans, and attempts to create a sledge run in the lane on the other side of the fence by the cricket field.

  “You and Dad seem better.” Holly interrupted her reverie. “I haven’t heard you arguing since I got back.”

  Marianne smiled. “You notice everything. You should be studying psychology.”