Sweet Sorrow(82)

‘Really up for it,’ she said, and we kissed again. ‘But do you get the shape of the thing?’

‘Of what?’

‘The lines. It’s a sonnet. Fourteen lines, ending with a couplet.’

I counted them up. ‘I didn’t get that. So …’

‘So it’s like they meet and start talking in verse – not just finishing each other’s sentences, but perfect rhyme and sonnet form. The final couplet is the kiss. It’s brilliant, isn’t it?’

I could see that it was, but was aware of being taught again. Miles, I knew, would recognise sonnet form and these reminders of my ignorance troubled me more than the kiss. I didn’t mind being taught if I could teach her something in return. But what? She even smoked better than me.

‘Shall we go again? From the top.’

Yet even in the rat-a-tat repetition of learning by rote I loved to listen to her, and though I’m not sure that I’d have admitted it, I also began to love the language, looking forward to passages in the same way that I looked forward to a key change or crescendo in a song: not always for the meaning – which still often escaped me – but for reasons that were in themselves musical, a change in pitch or pace or key, a rhythm. My bounty is as boundless as the sea! The mask of night is on my face! Cut him out in little stars! I’d listen all day and then again each night as we ran lines. My mind was more impressionable then and even now I could recite great long passages. I can’t imagine the circumstances in which that might happen, but they’re there, like initials scratched into drying cement. She was also the first person to tell me I was funny, the greatest praise I’d ever had because it was the praise that I’d most wanted. Not in a stand-up comedy way but with friends, small groups, which is where it mattered.

We’d try to get back to Fran’s house before it got dark, but the lanes were unlit and too treacherous to cycle down and so we’d walk. This was the second half of August, and I’d become aware of the accelerated shortening of the days, and fearful and resentful of it, as if our summer together was a coastline succumbing to the waves. The motion of the sun is but the thief of lovers’ time and, like autumn waves, wears down the season’s fragile shore; it was contagious, poetry. This kind of stuff occurred to me more often now, the words, the ideas and feelings all tangled up, and though I had the good sense not to say it out loud, I wondered if I should write it down.

And perhaps the play was right in this respect too: that being in love might change not just how you felt, but the way you thought and spoke. Not sonnet form exactly, but as darkness came on, we’d talk in a different way; small confessions, revelations, the formation of little private jokes. We already knew each other; now the project was to really know each other. Such transparency involved a fair amount of deception, at least by omission; she’d have run a mile from the real real-me, and any darkness I confessed had to be the right kind of darkness. I did not, for instance, tell her I was a thief.

But I did tell her all that I was prepared to say about the break-up of my family, my father’s breakdown and what it was like to live with this. For perhaps the first time, I trusted someone entirely. There was nothing relaxed about our conversation but even so I was aware that this was a new way of talking, free of prepared questions and answers. It was both adult and a plausible impersonation of ‘adult’, selfconsciously earnest, effortfully profound. In short, we were ridiculous but a part of us knew we were ridiculous and didn’t care, and I think now of an illustration I’d once seen in a children’s book, Maurice Sendak I think, of children dressed in grown-up clothing, hats falling off the backs of their heads, long sleeves hanging empty.

At her house, we’d hear the television through the open window and kiss goodbye for some time in the shelter of the high hedge. She’d invite me in to meet her parents but I’d always say no. The next day we’d rehearse again and occasionally I’d take a night off from running lines to work my resentful shift in the petrol station, still stealing scratch cards but in moderation. Perhaps I’d use the money for some kind of gift – jewellery from Argos in Woking, an eat-in dinner at the Taj Mahal.

Then, on the Thursday evening of the second week of running lines, she asked if I minded going a little further. ‘I’ve consulted a map,’ she said.





River


‘Look – Ordnance Survey. Duke of Edinburgh Award Scheme, you see. I think we have time,’ and she took the edges of the blue cotton dress she wore that day, bunched and tucked it into the elastic of her underwear, and we set off, laboriously ascending the brow of the hill behind the Manor then freewheeling into an unfamiliar valley, Fran leading the way, the map flapping and cracking on her handlebars, a dark patch of sweat spreading on her back. We coasted down a long, straight avenue of poplar trees like something from a French film and, at the far end, slowed to a halt and paused while she peered at the map again – ‘What happened to your Duke of Edinburgh Award?’ ‘I gave up after Bronze. This way!’ – then struck off across a meadow, walking single file along an overgrown footpath at the edge of a field, pushing past brambles dotted with crimson unripened berries. There were scratches on our arms and legs but ‘It’ll be worth it, I promise you.’ Sure enough, a sound was growing, a long, husky sigh, until suddenly we stepped out onto a low bank, a beach with black sand at the edge of a bend in a great dark river. The air trapped beneath the canopy of trees was hazy with midges, hot and still with a metallic smell like the air before a storm, and wagtails strutted at the water’s edge, swallows and martins dabbing at the surface.