Unravelling Oliver(9)
Some of the girls I liked more than others. I certainly did not hate women, but I can’t say that I felt an emotional connection to any of them. Except for Laura.
Laura was a challenge from day one. The first time I saw her, she was crossing the campus with two other girls. It was a cold day, and I noted their breath wisping into the air as they laughed and chatted. She was wearing a home-knitted red woollen scarf around her neck and a long trench coat. She waved at me and smiled and I was caught for a moment, captured by her vivacity and unsure of how to respond, and then Michael, with whom I was walking, called out to her and I realized that she was waving at him, and I felt foolish.
Michael Condell introduced Laura as his sister, and I admit to being taken aback that siblings could look so different.
Ironic, when you think about it.
After that, I made a point of seeking her out, but unlike the other girls, she took no particular interest in me. Laura was darkly beautiful, wilful and spirited, impulsive and brave. She was a year behind me, reading French, Philosophy and Politics. She dated the rugby boys, the rich boys who had their own cars. It was going to be hard for me to compete, but, as I made an effort to get to know her, at least on the periphery, I realized that I didn’t just want to sleep with her. I wanted her in my life. I hoped that the golden aura that surrounded her might somehow encompass me and lift me to her pedestal. I can’t even now put my finger on what it was that was different about Laura. I had been out with beautiful girls before who all failed to tug at my alleged heartstrings. It may have been the way her blue eyes sparkled when she laughed, or the way she walked with purpose. It could have been her confidence, the fact that she seemed so sure of her place in the world when the rest of us were just pretending.
My usual tactics did not work with Laura. She appeared not to notice me at all. I was conscious of my second-hand clothes and my squalid bedsit, and knew I would have to reinvent my story if I was to stand a chance, so I befriended Michael and began to curry favour that way. I was invited to their home for dinners and sat across the table from Laura, ignoring her and pretending to be riveted by her mother’s conversation, feigning fascination in her father’s rhododendrons. When oblique questions were asked about my parentage, I deflected them, hinting at a father who was always travelling abroad on important but unspecified business. I hinted at a country house that I might one day inherit and was vague and enigmatic enough to discourage further questioning. Still, Laura paid me no heed.
I changed my game, and instead began to pay her some attention, included her in our plans, took an interest in her course work, offered help with essays and invited her for drinks with us. Sometimes I would try subtly to ask Michael about her, but he would react huffily. Jealous of my interest in her, I assume. Michael was as gay as Christmas. It was never mentioned or acknowledged. Later, in France, I tried to help him be straight. Back in the day, we genuinely thought it might be possible. Perhaps we knew it wasn’t, but we were not willing to accept it. He liked me. I did not mind. He was useful. I liked him too, but not in the way that I know he wanted. However, his fraternal connection to Laura allowed me to get closer to her, although she was still proving immune to every seduction ploy I knew.
Eventually, inspired by Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac, which we were studying at the time, I decided to send her a love letter. I wrote more drafts of this letter than I have of any of my books. There were flowery versions, there was a terrible one in my own rhyming verse entirely ripped off from Keats, there was a version which included a Shakespearian sonnet, but in the end I simply told her how I felt about her, how beautiful I thought her, how she made me smile and that I hoped she might one day let me take her to dinner. Above everything I have ever written, that letter is the text of which I am most proud. It was honest.
Two days after I posted the letter, I exited the lecture theatre to find that Laura was waiting for me. She hooked her arm into mine, wrapped her red scarf around both of our necks and gave me a chaste kiss on the cheek. I loved her then, I think, if that warm and giddy feeling is love.
Our courtship was slow and sweet and delicate. I let Laura dictate the pace of our relationship. On a practical level, I had to deflect her curiosity about my background and lied that I lived with a strict aunt, which negated the possibility of her visiting my home, but Laura was not interested in my home, my past, my parents. Now that Laura had decided that we were a pair, she was interested in me. Me. We became quite the golden couple in a few short months and I basked in the sunlight she reflected upon me. I was no longer the grubby boy in the second-hand coat trying to get his leg over.
When we did eventually make love, it was entirely different from anything I had experienced before. It was an early March afternoon in her parents’ house and a wintry sun cast shadows across the tiled kitchen floor as we drank tea from china cups, leaning back, side by side, against the Aga oven. We were talking about our plans for the summer and Laura suggested that we needed to get out of Dublin, ‘to get some privacy’, she said, and looked quickly at me, fiercely, and then looked away again. I knew what she meant, but I teased her – ‘Privacy? For what?’ – and I brushed a strand of her dark hair out of her eyes and kissed her mouth gently. She responded softly at first and then twirled and stood in front of me so that we were nose to nose. ‘They won’t be back until after four,’ she said, and led me by the hand up the back stairs to her bedroom. Once there, we quickly stripped and dived under the covers, both of us shy and tentative, and there we stayed for the next two hours, tenderly touching and tasting, and as I moved inside her I thought, idiotically, that life was good and that all would be well.