Meeting Lydia Page 6

  “These are the Grand Banques,” he smiled and paused. Marianne understood the joke and she glanced at Edward. They’d been studying Canada in geography.

  “Excellent fishing grounds for the inhabitants of these little towns along the coast.” He chalked a string of dots irregularly spaced down the side of the island.

  “Brockleland’s coastal waters are full of dangerous rocks and are not good for sailing or fishing. The Brockleonians therefore buy their fish from the Banquese. But! Guess what this is? Brockleland has a large forest in the middle.” Mr Jenks turned to sketch in some fir trees. What can you do with fir trees Colquhoun?

  “Christmas trees, Sir,” said Willie, proudly.

  “Yes Colquhoun, possibly, but it wasn’t quite what I had in mind … Harvey?”

  “Timber, Sir.”

  “Excellent!”

  “Now, what shall we call this forest?” He looked around the class. “How about the Forest of Colquhoun?”

  Willie Colquhoun looked pleased and Barnaby Sproat shrugged in a don’t-mind-me type of way. Jenky noticed at once.

  “The Forest of Sproat doesn’t have the same ring to it, Sproat, does it? But you will see that the River Sproat is the largest river running across the central plain, and a major highway for the logging industry.” He looked at Barnaby Sproat over the top of his glasses then pushed them back up his nose. “Does this river remind you of anything – Marianne?”

  “The St. Lawrence Seaway.”

  “Attagirl! The Sproat is fed by many tributaries which we’ll come back to in a minute. During the rainy season, the river floods for a short while and deposits alluvium. Do you know what that is?”

  Edward put up his hand again. “Earth from the river, Sir.”

  “Very good, Harvey. Yes, when the river floods it leaves earth on the surrounding land. This is called an alluvial plain. The fields are very fertile. Excellent for agriculture. There are farms here, and here and here … What shall we call them?”

  The children now understood the game they were playing and suggestions for the farms and towns soon came forth by the dozen. Jenky encouraged them to use corruptions of the names of the class members and of their local area. Glan Ville was a town on the coast, and there was Hayward Farm and the Great Lake Lanigan.

  For the next few weeks during double English on Wednesdays, the partition between the third and fourth forms was opened and the two classes – representing the inhabitants of the two countries on the island of Wynlandia – engaged in a type of trading.

  Marianne was a corn merchant, and she bought from the arable farmers and sold to the miller in Banquaroon and the chicken farmer in Brockleland. Edward was a timber merchant in charge of the forest, while Pete Glanville ran the sawmill. There were all kinds of exchanges going on and although issued with cheque books, there was also scope for bartering. Abi and Waverley Grossett in the fourth form had an export and import business and it was their job to act as the middle persons between the indigenous Wynlandia population and the rest of the world.

  Monsieur ‘Jenques’ ran the general grocery store and the Bank and Post Office on Brockleland and as he claimed his English was very poor, the pupils had to speak French to him whenever they went to buy household provisions, post a letter or cash a cheque.

  Effortlessly, painlessly, the Brocklebank pupils were being educated in all manner of things, yet they thought it was just a game. Piaget would have been delighted! The school was way ahead of its time in promoting such a diverse range of cross-curricular links.

  It was an ambitious project which had the potential to go far. But it took up a significant amount of curriculum time and as the exams approached in the summer term, the island life was abandoned in favour of revision.

  Marianne had been doing exams since she was five and she wondered why the early part of the brief northern summer should be spoiled for children every single year. It wasn’t that she much minded revising, but it was all added stress and she would have preferred to be doing something else. Each day following the exams, the children would scan the notice board in the classroom for the list of results for each subject. Marianne and Edward were usually top or second in most subjects, but it was a source of little pleasure to her because of the scathing comments from the others. Whenever people said that schooldays were the happiest days of life, she thought about the bullying and the exams and wondered whether her optimistic hopes that her future would be different were just crazy, unrealistic dreams.

  Despite all this, when Abi and Marianne were together, they had a wonderful time. Abi was socially skilled and confident in ways that Marianne was only just beginning to learn, but they shared similar interests and had the same zany sense of humour. Laughter was never far away and by summer, they had become firm friends.

  One lunchtime, they were sitting on the little bank by the tennis lawn absently making daisy chains and chatting about girly things.

  “François is looking nice today,” said Abi. François was the visiting French student, tall and mature and aged about twenty, but he wore his hair short and tidy and was rather too conventional for Marianne’s developing tastes.

  She gazed over her shoulder at the rippling green cornfield on the other side of the wire fence. “He’s okay,” she said tactfully. Still Edward was the only person from school who deserved any sort of admiration, but she hadn’t yet confessed this to Abi for fear of criticism.

  “Nearly as nice as Napoleon,” continued Abi. Napoleon Solo, played by Robert Vaughan, being one of the men from UNCLE in the cult TV show.

  “And he’s much nicer than Ilya,” said Abi with deliberate provocation.

  “No-he-is-not!” said Marianne defensively, the more mysterious and enigmatic secret agent being much more to her liking.

  “Yes he is!”

  “Isn’t!”

  “Is!” Abi sprang forward and grabbed at Marianne’s daisy chain, breaking it in two. Then they chased each other round the tennis net throwing handfuls of grass and daisies and buttercups until their hair was full of green fronds and flowers.

  They collapsed laughing and panting on the bank.

  “Look, there he is!” Marianne spotted François emerging from between the Hut and the house and heading up onto the cricket field where the team was having a practice session under the guidance of Mr Russell.

  The two girls skipped across the tennis court, over the rockery and began following him. When François stopped to watch the game by the edge of the field, they lurked behind him under the shade of a silver birch tree, managing to remain undetected for some minutes, until Abi stifled a sneeze. François turned. He was used to them doing this and he beamed at them benevolently.

  “’Ello girls,” he said, with a heavy French accent.

  “Bonjour, François,” said Abi.

  “Bonjour Mesdemoiselles. Comment allez-vous?”

  “Très bien merci, Monsieur,” said Abi, boldly.

  “Show off!” whispered Marianne.

  The two girls burst into fits of giggles and François blushed. He may have been flattered by their attention, but was far too mature to take them seriously.

  “You play cricket, non?” said François.

  “We play tennis instead,” said Abi. “Come and have a game. You against both of us.”

  François smiled again and Abi melted. “You girls would win, I think. Tennis, I am not good.”

  On the other side of the field, Marianne spotted Edward diving on a ball then throwing it to Barnaby Sproat who was keeping wicket. Perhaps they would be allowed to watch the match against Netherby House that afternoon.

  The girls bounded back to their sunny place on the bank and Abi continued musing. “In your form, Edward Harvey seems nice … but too young for me …”

  Now it was Marianne’s turn to blush.

  Later in the afternoon, Mr Wallis said they could finish the history lesson early and join the gathering of people in deckchairs on the boundary of the cricket field. Marianne l
oved to hear the sound of bat on ball and the evocative spattering of clapping out of unison after a shot well struck, or a ball well bowled, and she didn’t have a care in the world as she sat beside her best friend in the late afternoon sun, cheering the team and especially Edward.

  But something happened in the intervening years between Brocklebank and being a grownup. She forgot the good times there; forgot the fun she had with Abi and just remembered always feeling isolated, marginalised, bullied and downtrodden. It was a fact of life that repeated itself over and over: one little negative outweighing all the positives like an unbalanced seesaw. The lesson was to learn perspective, but she hadn’t learnt it yet.

  9

  The M Word

  Almost to the day when the heat episodes started, Marianne felt as if someone had flipped a switch inside. Along with the heat came a complete loss of sensual feeling and topsy-turvy emotions that had her laughing one minute, and close to tears the next. These were all signs of the dreaded M word and she was filled with an inescapable sense of finality and that ‘it’ was all over. The ‘it’ was the stuff that made life enjoyable and she mourned the loss.

  Or she was pregnant. Once she would have been overjoyed. Now, the thought filled her with complete horror.

  She couldn’t cope with the idea of telling anyone her fears because speaking them aloud would make them real. And she certainly couldn’t tell her husband. Things had been bad enough recently and this would be the last straw. She was terrified of not feeling sexy any more; not being desirable. If only she had married someone who didn’t compare her all the time to other women. He never used to. Only this past year or so. Only since the drink had become such a significant part of his life. Before that he had been an unwavering diplomat and kept his thoughts to himself.

  The surgery was small, but brightened by having a big window opposite the door, and cream walls. Marianne sat in a chair to the side of Dr Curren who looked like Sebastian Coe with a beard. All counselling types arranged their furniture this way nowadays. Supposed to be more empathic and less confrontational. She hated being here among the faintly antiseptic smell and the ominous bed behind the cream curtain.

  Dr Curren was a man of few words, and he looked at her expectantly.

  “I’d like you to have another look at that mole of mine, please,” she said. She had been paranoid about moles ever since Valerie at work had a chunk taken out of her thigh just in case the mole she’d had since childhood might turn malignant. Valerie’s mother had died two years earlier from skin cancer and Valerie wasn’t going to take any chances. Her doctor had said there was no need to be alarmed. Said to beware of moles that change colour, of moles that move, moles that itch or weep and of satellite moles. He also said that the inside of the thigh was a very unlikely place for a malignant mole. But Valerie insisted, and the offending mole was duly removed and found to be perfectly safe. Valerie was surprised by the size of the dent in her leg and wondered if perhaps she had been over-cautious.

  Marianne remembered it well and had surveyed her own moles regularly ever since. ‘Mole-mapping’, she called it. She had already been to see Dr Curren a couple of times about the one by her hip bone that had appeared one winter after a summer of intense sunbathing at a time when the dangers of such had not been established. Slowly the mole was getting bigger. He had told her it was a seborrhoeic keratosis and innocent. She didn’t think that anything called a seborrhoeic keratosis could possibly be innocent and she watched it suspiciously for any of the signs that Valerie’s doctor told her.

  Again she showed it to Dr Curren and again he said it was fine, though he did add that there was some fairly simple procedure he could perform on it involving local anaesthetic, a needle and some scraping.

  Marianne thought she detected a gleam in his eye as if he might relish the chance of performing minor surgery.

  She leaned forward, taking the weight onto the balls of her feet, ready to spring from the chair and leave as fast as possible. But then she paused, sat back and took a deep breath.

  “I’m not sure if you need to know this for your records, but I think I’m going menopausal … hot flushes, and that sort of thing … Lots … Didn’t expect it so soon. Didn’t think it would happen for a few years yet. But there you go … On the other hand, could I be pregnant?” She’d said it. It was out in the open. Real. No going back.

  Marianne hoped for some sympathy, but Dr Curren seemed unphased by the news.

  He asked questions about the likelihood of contraception failure.

  She said she couldn’t recall any.

  He asked her to describe her hot flushes and other symptoms.

  She did.

  He said that the onset of peri-menopause was the most likely explanation, then tapped on his keyboard, took her blood pressure and said she should come back if there were any problems, in which case they could discuss HRT.

  She raced from the surgery and headed for the supermarket.

  As if she wasn’t feeling bad enough already, on the fish counter it took some time before the young man in a white coat and with the face of a bulldog, noticed she was there, and even then he was barely polite as she asked him to search for a piece of haddock that wasn’t the size of a shark.

  Then on the checkout, a woman of a certain age who should have known better, carried on a conversation with the young blonde girl at the next till, laughing about some stroppy member of staff.

  I am here, thought Marianne. I should like to have your full attention as you pass my broccoli and turnip across the bar-code scanner.

  Then it was, “Would you like help packing, dear?” and “Thank you love,” and Marianne thought don’t you ‘dear’ and ‘love’ me. Don’t make me feel like an inconsequential ancient person not a million miles from taking ages rooting through my purse to find the exact change.

  So that was it, she was officially invisible. But it wasn’t like that when she went shopping after work. Oh no. With her make-up on and her high-heeled shoes, there was none of this ‘dear’ and ‘love’ and none of the lack of acknowledgement from whichever acne’d youth was on the fish counter. Hmm.

  Now she sat at the computer in the upstairs office clutching a hot water bottle. At least she now knew for certain that she wasn’t pregnant. She’d always known, really, but it was a relief to be sure. Her brow was furrowed. Hesitantly, she typed the M word into Google’s search engine box.

  She wanted to do it differently from the paper-flapping bunch at work who seemed to have lost their sense of joy and lost their dreams. She wanted to do it without the scary, controversial, contradictory HRT. She was alarmed at the speed with which Dr Curren had suggested this.

  An array of options presented themselves on her computer screen: Guaranteed Menopause Mood Swing Stabiliser. Momentarily she visualised herself riding one of those old-fashioned children’s bicycles with thick white tyres and two extra tiny little wheels sprouting from either side at the back.

  It was true that her moods were all over the place, but she was rather enjoying the rollercoaster ride reminiscent of teenage years. Without the capability of plunging to the depths of despair, there can be no highs; no sweet sensations of euphoric joy.

  Herbs for Menopausal Symptoms; Symptoms of the Menopause; Sex and the Menopause.(She sneaked a quick look at this last one and found it to be about vaginal dryness, bladder weakness, loss of libido, infections and the risks of pregnancy. All cheery stuff!)

  Menopause: a New Beginning … Now this looked interesting. She found the web page and scanned the information. It was all about ancient civilisations revering the post-menopausal as Wise Women. It was the modern western world that looked upon it with dread and loathing. Loathing, now there’s a word, thought Marianne, thinking of her husband’s possible reaction.

  Then Male Menopause: Myth or Magic caught her eye. Maybe that was what was wrong. Maybe that was the cause of the drinking. Perhaps it wasn’t her at all, but him. She printed off a few sheets for future reference
and was about to switch off the machine when she thought she would have another peek at Friends Reunited.

  It was now mid-September and so far her searching had led to a communication with an old grammar school classmate and two exchanges with university friends. It had been interesting hearing about how lives had panned out. Neurotic Angela now with three children, married to an artist, and seemingly calm, whereas tranquil Sheila, once so placid, sounded extremely anxious and onto her second husband. Steve – always a little off the rails in his youth – settled into farming in Wales. One could never predict what would happen to people.

  But there was still no sign of the three she most sought, Sarah Strong, Nick and Edward, and she was beginning to lose hope.

  10

  The Blond Adonis

  There is an uncommon enthusiasm about Marianne this morning as she says good bye to her father and steps from the car onto the asphalt in front of Brocklebank Hall.

  “Pens-pencils-handkerchief?” he calls towards receding heels.

  She runs toward the Hut, wondering if he’s there yet. Not that he will speak to her if he is, but she can enjoy the propinquity and live in hope.

  She turns the handle of the door and steps inside …

  After three terms of her penance as the solitary girl in the class, Marianne was moved up to the fourth form to join Abi and a new girl, Willie Colquhoun’s elder sister Susannah. What joy! Abi and Marianne were already inseparable, and Susannah was a great source of fun and wouldn’t stand any nonsense from the boys, least of all her brother. Even Barnaby Sproat kept silent when Susannah was nearby and Marianne felt like she had two personal bodyguards. When they went on walks in the lowlying hills around the town during games lessons, Abi and Suzannah kept Marianne between them and the worst of the bullying stopped. She watched how the older girls parried the insults from the boys and began to do the same, growing in confidence as the weeks went by and at last feeling safe.