Sweet Sorrow(113)

Of course we didn’t quite believe it, not until we were back in Alex’s car and listening to the news on the radio, driving cautiously along the early-morning roads, the sun shining bright on the last good day of the summer, the four of us quite silent all the way home.





Part Four


WINTER


–

And summer’s lease hath all too short a date.

Shakespeare, sonnet 18





1998


We broke up in January. A love we thought would outlast all storms and struggles could not survive Fran’s daily commute to Basingstoke.

Until that time, and for some time afterwards, I’d told myself that I would happily give my life for Fran Fisher. Well, not happily but I would give it. ‘Take me, not her,’ I’d say, though it seemed an important part of the deal that she should know the sacrifice was being made. If I was going to drink the potion, I didn’t want it to be a waste. I think, too, that she’d have sacrificed her life for me, to begin with at least, though a willingness to die seems a rather blunt measure of devotion. Was there some sort of sliding scale? Did a day come when she thought, Well, I’m not sure I’d die, but I’d definitely give an arm, then a hand, a kidney then maybe a toe, a little toe? Some hair, until finally Take him, not me! If Juliet had woken to find her Romeo dead and, instead of reaching for the happy dagger, had decided to carry on, to learn to live with grief and work towards reconciliation in the community, would we think less of her? What if she met someone else and lived happily into old age? No, self-destruction was the gold standard. In our case, the opportunity did not arise and, with a banality that no one would ever bother to dramatise, we came apart.

We did our best to prevent it. Fran’s results – all excellent – meant that she’d go to a college that specialised in the performing arts, and while she began the daily commute, I started to look for a job. We both knew how things might go – envy and exclusion on my part, self-consciousness and awkwardness on hers as this new world opened up – and we’d laid down strategies to avoid these tensions. She would be free to do whatever she wanted, to go to parties, to study, to talk about the course if it excited her, and in turn I’d be free to come along and meet her friends or to stay away if I chose to. There’d be no jealous-boyfriend act, and we’d see each other three, or at least two, evenings a week.

I met her parents properly and grew to like them, though they never lost the question in their eyes: is this someone we really need to get to know? Is it worth the investment? But I was allowed to stay over in the same bed, holding our breath and waiting until they were asleep before cautious, silent love-making. We’d take the train to London at weekends, go to galleries or to see the arty movies – not movies, ‘cinema’ – that never made it anywhere near our town. We went to restaurants – restaurants! – sometimes just the two of us, sometimes with her friends, and I did my best to get along with them, just as I had with Full Fathom Five. I was ‘taking some time out’ – this was the line that we both chose to stick to. Really I was one of them, a student, just twelve months behind. We both learnt to drive and for my seventeenth birthday Mum bought me a battered old Citro?n with wind-down windows and moss growing in the window seals. As autumn faded into winter, we’d drive out to the coast and walk on the cliffs or beaches, then go back to the car, find some hidden spot, collapse the backseat and make partially clothed love behind the steamed-up windows.

There was a tenderness to that time, a sense that we were taking care of each other, and for a while it seemed plausible that we might make it through. But through to what? Would I come to university open days with her? What would she say when she discovered that I’d not filled out the college forms? I had a new job, I had the house with Dad and friends in town, and what was this obsession with education anyway? I understood the arty films just as well as she did, I was reading more, and not everyone wanted or needed A-levels or a degree; to expect it was just snobbery. I rehearsed this argument in my head, ready for the day when I’d have to use it out loud.

Then, in early November, we had the accident. We’d had sex in the back of the car, giggling and cracking shins and elbows, but this time I’d failed to fit the condom properly and it was only after we’d collapsed and pulled apart that we discovered it had disappeared like some terrible magic trick, only to reappear soon after, sticky and alarming. We’d both been frightened but it was Fran who’d insisted that we drive into Brighton first thing for a morning-after pill. ‘I just want to do it as soon as possible, for peace of mind,’ she’d said, and I’d sat in the driver’s seat on a wet, grey Monday morning and watched as she pressed the pill from its packaging and washed it down with water as if it were an antidote to something.

Which, of course, it was, and we were both relieved. But if she had become pregnant, who would have had the most to lose? My father had become a parent at twenty-one, which wasn’t so much older, though perhaps my parents weren’t the best example. Still, an accident that was a disaster for Fran would, for me, have been – not ideal, not what I craved but something that I might have embraced. I wanted only to be with her, but she wanted very much more. An inequality had been illuminated, of achievement and potential, ambition and desire.

The break-up took place early in the New Year – she had, I suppose, wanted to ‘get through Christmas’ – so that it had the quality of a resolution: 1) drink more water 2) end relationship. The scene itself was conventional and predictable, with the fraught and overwrought quality of a drama-class improvisation. Even the location, the beach at Cuckmere Haven, in drizzle on a desolate Sunday afternoon, gave the break-up that site-specific quality. I’d become angry, said Fran, and negative; we weren’t natural or at ease with each other, and I, in turn, got to make my speech about her snobbery. ‘Charlie, when,’ she said, ‘when have I ever, ever said any of those things?’ and though I couldn’t point to examples, I think she was shocked and saddened by how viciously I turned on her student friends, the parents who clearly thought she could do better. It was an argument from which neither of us could recover and as the light failed and the drizzle turned to rain, we were left with the practical problem of how we might escape this bleak and windswept beach. She would not get in the car with me, I would not leave without her and even when we finally set off in silence, we had to pull over frequently, to shout or scream or cry a little more.