Whatever You Love Read online

  I loved my mum. She was old enough to be my grandmother but we were great friends. Her advice about romance, when it came, was full of vague generalities and devoid of any reference to the physical realities of relationships – there was little she told me that could not have been lifted directly from a dating manual, circa 1956. Once, as we knelt next to each other in our tiny square garden, digging up carrots, she said to me thoughtfully, as if it had been preying on her mind, ‘If you ever go to a cocktail party, Laura, and you walk in and there’s another girl in the same frock, it’s important not to act embarrassed. Just look at her and shout merrily, snap!’

  That one got repeated in the corridor at school, to uproarious laughter. Cocktail parties? Frocks? What planet was my mother living on?

  *

  Occasionally, I spied a certain sagacity in her words. One such comment I remember clearly because it resurfaced in the early days of my relationship with David. ‘Duck…’ she said to me solemnly, as we ate chicken and mushroom pie with peas and gravy for supper. ‘Duck, there’s only one way to make sure a boy’s family likes you, and that’s to make sure they didn’t like the girlfriend that came before you.’ It was ten years before the truth of that became apparent to me.

  *

  This is what I remember most clearly about the early days of David: the way he looked at me after we made love. He liked to lie on his back after sex, one arm behind his head. I would lie on top of him and rest my chin on his chest. He would stare at me, his gaze both thoughtful and possessive. I would tip my head back as I stared at him in return, moving it a little from side to side to enjoy the brush of my hair across my bare shoulders. Sometimes, he would massage my scalp, rubbing his fingertips hard against it. The light through my half-closed curtains gave the room a greenish glow, as if we were underwater. We could stare at each other endlessly like that, hardly talking, just gazing, as if we had never looked at each other properly before, as if we were trying to work out precisely who it was we had made love to.

  Weekend afternoons were our favourite time – whole great rested hours together, our working weeks forgotten, white sky and winter weather outside and us, heedless of the cold and the rain and the people going past in the street outside my flat, heedless of the whole existence of other people’s lives. It was always he who had to say, eventually, ‘Fancy a coffee?’ or ‘We should go out and eat.’ Left to me, we would have slipped into the night like that, careless of all other bodily needs, in the subtle grip of that lethargy. I had no sense that our time together, naked and sated, could ever end – or that something so easy, so natural, was granted to me only for the present while, mortal.

  2

  There is a look that a certain sort of man gives a woman before he has had sex with her but never after. I wonder where they learn this look, those men, whether it is something they are born with, or acquired behaviour. I wonder how cynical it is, if they even know they are doing it – my guess, from my limited experience, is that they do. David knew he was doing it, although I don’t believe it was cynical: it was more an instinctive reaction to a woman he found attractive, that intent, expressionless stare.

  It was in a pub, our first meeting. I was there with a group of other physiotherapy students one of whom, called Carole, was weeping copiously because her boyfriend hadn’t shown up and she was sure he was seeing someone else. She left mid- evening, and the boyfriend came in not long after, with two friends. The boyfriend was David.

  I saw him as soon as he came in the door – tall, dressed in a heavy coat that bulked out a neat frame. His hair was dark and needed washing. One of the other girls I was with knew who he was and nudged me saying, ‘Look, that’s him, Carole’s boyfriend. He’s such a jerk,’ but I was already looking.

  While he was at the bar, we discussed him. He was public property, after all. Carole’s tears were the sauce with which he had been served and we had a right – no, an obligation – to pass judgement.

  ‘Not bad…’ I said, sipping my pint of lager top.

  The others disagreed.

  ‘Too confident,’ said Abbie.

  ‘I can’t bear men like that, Carole should dump him,’ declared Rosita.

  David finished buying a round for himself and his mates and only then did he look around the pub and see us, sitting in the corner. Abbie waved frantically. David and his two friends sauntered over, so laid-back they were almost visibly bending at the knees. As they neared our table, Abbie thrust her chest out and said in a sing-song voice, ‘She’s gone, you know. You’ve left it too late. She’s furious.’

  David shrugged, and pulled up a stool, then folded himself down on to it, opposite me. He nodded. I nodded back. We were not of an age where either of us would do anything so uncool as introduce ourselves. Abbie flopped back on the bench seat. ‘Bloody hell…’ she muttered, apropos of nothing.

  We spent the rest of the evening around the small wooden table. The pint glasses piled up: the girls bought each other rounds and the boys bought their own. There was little in the way of shared conversation – the table stood between us like a demarcation line. That was the way relationships with the opposite sex were in those days; careful displays of mutual indifference punctuated by infrequent, clumsy sex. We talked about sex all the time amongst our peer groups, of course, but when any of us actually did it, we took care to reassure the person concerned, our friends and ourselves, that it was nothing personal.

  The barman called time and a moment later strode over to our table and reached behind my head for the bank of light switches on the wall above me, flicking on a whole row with a single swooping gesture of his hand. Repulsed by the sudden fluorescence, we all started, like vampires at an unexpected dawn. Vanity amongst us girls was socially acceptable, so the three of us scrambled to our feet, dragging coats up our arms, winding scarves around our necks, flicking our hair, while the boys scooped up their pints with affected casualness. The lighting laid bare the grubbiness of the table we were sitting at – the empty crisp packets half-folded in the ashtray, the sticky circles on the table’s shiny surface. When I eased myself out from behind the table, I could feel that the carpet beneath my thin shoes was soggy. I was already thinking of the essay I had to finish by Monday, on anterior and posterior tibials. I wanted to get back to the house I shared with Abbie and two other students. I wanted a cup of tea and my lumpen single bed.

  I was the first outside. David followed close behind. ‘You’d better give me your number, then,’ he said, as if we were concluding a previous conversation. Close to me, his voice low, I detected a Welsh lilt. It made him sound older than the boys I knew, more experienced.

  I stopped and looked at him. Up until that moment, neither of us had given any indication that we were interested in one another. He stared back at me, his gaze both purposeful and blank, and in one deliberate, hot-eyed moment did the work of a whole evening’s worth of flirting. It was a bold gesture and I knew it for what it was. I also knew it was quite beyond most other boys our age. I was impressed.

  I did what I was supposed to do. I returned the stare for a couple of seconds, acknowledged it, then looked to one side with a hint of embarrassment, as if I was flattered but caught off-balance, intrigued but a little nervous. I glanced at the ground, which made my hair tumble in front of my face. As I looked up again, I had to push my hair back with one hand and play with it a bit to get it to stay behind my ear. When I eventually looked at David, he was smiling at me. I smiled back. God you’re cheap, Laura, I thought.

  He stuck his hand into the inside pocket of his bulky coat and pulled out a biro. I took it from him, then took hold of the hand, twisted the palm upwards and wrote my number on the fleshy part of his thumb. He winced melodramatically. While I was engaged in this, the others piled out behind us. They gathered around, watching, blowing white clouds of breath into the cold. When I had finished, Abbie grabbed my elbow and pulled me away. ‘What was that about?’ she hissed.

  I shrugged as we strolled off, a
rms linked.

  ‘Hey! Don’t you want my number?’ David called after me brazenly.

  The other girls were close either side of me, hustling me off. I turned. Walking backwards, I called out to him, grinning, ‘Well, you’ll call if you want to, won’t you?’ He was staring after me, still smiling.

  Abbie pulled me back round again. ‘Carole will bloody kill you.’

  ‘Not if you don’t tell her,’ I said. ‘And anyway, he doesn’t belong to Carole, does he?’

  ‘I can’t believe you were flirting with David!’

  I hadn’t even asked his name. That’s how little interest I had succeeded in showing during the evening. Oh, I was pleased with myself.

  David. I lay on my poorly sprung bed that night, wide awake, with the orange streetlight glimmering through the thin brown curtains and the shouts of the Saturday drunks ringing softly in the streets around our house. So it was David. I thought of how I had risen from the table that evening, in the cold glare of the fluorescent light, while he was still seated on the stool opposite me. I had to push past his shoulder to get by – my hip had grazed his shoulder. He had not leaned away to make room for me to pass. He had sat completely still. And I had pushed against him, slowly and deliberately. My body had asked his body a question. David. He had my number but I didn’t have his. All I could do was wait.

  *

  He never called and I didn’t see him again for over two years. I heard news of him from time to time, and whenever I heard his name in conversation, I felt that small folding motion in my stomach and had to be careful not to ask questions or react. David had made it up with Carole. David and Carole had split up. A group of engineering students, him amongst them, had nearly got expelled from the university because of some prank involving a concrete mixer. One of them had hot-wired it and they had set it going then been unable to brake as it headed towards the riverbank. They had to jump for their lives. Two local cops were standing on the bridge watching as they waded ashore.

  I had two boyfriends during my final year of study but I was going through the motions. Neither of them measured up to the one with the stare – or rather, neither of them measured up to my daydreams of him.

  *

  After I graduated, I stayed on at the Royal Infirmary to do my probationary year. Most of my fellow students went off to more glamorous cities but I needed to be able to visit Mum. She was in a nursing home on the outskirts of our home town, thirty miles away – I couldn’t afford to be further from her than that. She could still walk with a delta frame, just, and her physio was getting her to do four hundred yards twice a day. Her larynx was going, though, and I was trying to persuade her to use audio feedback. I went twice a week, three times when I could. The home was good. ‘Be nice to yourself,’ the receptionist always said to me, as I left, smiling brightly, my wave brisk and my eyes glittering.

  *

  It was at a house party – a twenty-fifth birthday for a friend of a friend. I only went because I was feeling miserable about Mum and forcing myself to do things I didn’t want to do: the TENS machine principal of pain relief. During childbirth, we give women a small machine with two adhesive pads and suggest they electrocute themselves at the base of the spine during each contraction, on the basis that it will take their minds off the excruciating pain in their abdomens. I tried it with Betty. It didn’t work for me. David said I might as well have got him to kick me on the shins. As my mother’s health had deteriorated, I made myself go out to the sort of merry social occasions I disliked more and more often.

  I arrived early. There were only half a dozen other people there, none of whom I knew. Half an hour, I thought, then I’m off. Then I saw him. Yes, it was definitely him.

  The sitting room was over-lit. There was nowhere to hide while I observed him. I busied myself with extracting a glass of wine from one of those boxes with a plastic spout and a button that invites you, prophetically, to Depress Here. I talked animatedly to the other people that I didn’t know in the hope that he would recognise me if I stood there long and conspicuously enough. Covertly, I managed to observe that he was with a short blonde woman. He had to stoop to hear her when she spoke.

  If there had been enough other people there, I might have spent the whole evening circling him but the party didn’t seem likely to fill up and I knew I couldn’t hang around for long with no one else to talk to, so, emboldened by awkwardness, I went over and stood in front of him. He looked at me expectantly, with no flicker of recognition. The short blonde woman stared at me. I leaned towards him and said, ‘Sorry, aren’t you a friend of Carole’s?’

  ‘Carole…’ he said, turning from his companion, who responded by turning away from him with a degree of ostentation and beginning an animated conversation with someone behind her.

  He pursed his lips and furrowed his brows. ‘Now… oh God…’ he groaned rolling his eyes. ‘Carole. That Carole.’

  I exhaled, laughingly, as if I knew the whole story.

  ‘Carole,’ he said, shaking his head, ‘she was mad, wasn’t she?’ His accent was slightly more pronounced than I remembered. Later, he confessed that he instinctively accentuated it when he met people for the first time. It was a useful conversation point when he was chatting up women and a way of testing men. There was nothing made his hackles rise more than an Englishman taking the mickey out of his accent.

  ‘Er, yes.’

  ‘And you were her friend?’

  ‘For a bit, yes.’ I took a gamble. ‘I used to hear all about you.’

  He groaned again. ‘Well, that’s blown my chances of ever shagging you.’

  At this point, Shorty chose to re-appear at his elbow. She placed her hand lightly on his forearm and smiled at me.

  I lifted my wine glass, ‘Well…’

  As I walked back to the drinks table, David followed. ‘I remember you…’ he said. ‘Abbie.’

  I shook my head and reached for a bottle on the table. ‘Keep trying.’

  He screwed up his face. ‘God, now I really have no chance.’

  I turned to survey the room and spoke to him out of the corner of my mouth. ‘Try a different tack.’

  He was surveying the room as well, as if we were spies trying not to acknowledge each other too obviously. Shorty had her back to us but the two women she was talking to in the corner were staring at me.

  ‘Will you marry me?’ he said.

  ‘That’s certainly different,’ I acknowledged, dipping my glass in his direction.

  I am sure that at that stage he still didn’t remember our first meeting in the pub – although later he claimed he did – not even when he turned his back on the women glaring at us from the corner, looked down at me where I was half-perched on the edge of the table, and gave me that slow, deliberate stare.

  I looked to one side. I should have waited for him to speak, but I was both too nervous and too sure of myself. ‘Are you still in engineering?’ I asked.

  It was too ordinary a question. Immediately, I lost him. ‘I’m working at a pen factory on the coast,’ he replied, his voice flat, routine. He could have been talking to anyone.

  ‘Hennett’s? I grew up near there,’ I said quickly.

  ‘My family all live near Eastley. Well actually, they are Eastley. I’ve got a big family. Half of Aberystwyth lives in Eastley now.’

  ‘I grew up behind the Recreation Ground, the new estate, lots of pebbledash, the one with…’ I was gabbling. Despite our discovery that we had grown up in neighbouring towns, I sensed that his attention was elsewhere. He glanced around the room. Suddenly, it was full of people. The party had begun.

  ‘I’d better…’ he said, raising his glass and nodding towards the other side of the crowded room, where his short girlfriend was invisible behind the sudden influx of partygoers. I could think of no excuse to detain him. Never mind, I thought. Give it half an hour, then get your coat on and go up to him and ask for his number, suggest a coffee or something, just casually. That way, if he makes you fe
el like a prannet you can get out straight away.

  I went to the kitchen. I gave it half an hour, then I got my coat on – green wool, with a belt – and returned to the sitting room. Someone had dimmed the lights. I pushed through the people, ‘Sorry… sorry…’ When I couldn’t find him, I pushed through them again. ‘Sorry…’ The sitting room was crowded but small. There was no doubt. He had gone.

  *

  Two years later, I was fully qualified but discovering that my school careers’ adviser had been right about one thing: posts as newly qualified physios were hard to come by. In the end, I got a job in a small unit at the local hospital of my home town. I didn’t really want to move back home but my radius of opportunity was limited while Mum was still in the care home. I had a dim sense that some time in the future I would move back to my university town, which had things like nightclubs and cinemas, and resume the life of a normal single person. In the meantime, rent in my old town was cheap. I got a whole bedsitting flat to myself five minutes from the esplanade for what I was paying for a room in a shared house when I was a student.

  It was autumn – the town was unexpectedly golden, that year. It had been a good summer and holiday trade was up. There were optimistic reports in the local newspaper amidst talk of building a pier. Most seaside towns lament their tacky tourist image. We aspired to it. I was thinking of how I should make the effort to get out more. My life post-Mum was distant, indistinct, and I was vaguely aware that I was using it as an excuse. I had a nice bunch of friends at the clinic and we went out drinking once in a while. I still saw a man I thought of as my university boyfriend, Nick, who came over every other weekend but was due to move up north soon to take up a teaching post. My life was comfortably suspended between that of a student and that of the woman I imagined I would be in some misty future elsewhere, but only if the future was the one who took the initiative. I wasn’t unhappy, just apathetic.