Over the next three years, we continued to meet now and then. Alice moved back to London after qualifying and took up a post at a high school in Brockley Rise. Now, the rabbits securely back in place, she and I were ‘just good friends’ once more. Meeting outside the ICA, we seem still to be climbing broad steps towards the clubs and Piccadilly, off to catch a show in Cork Street, perhaps, or at the Royal Academy, disappearing into the crowds of another all but forgotten afternoon.
How did we stop meeting altogether? The last time we set eyes on each other had been a pure accident. There she was standing in the queue for tickets to a concert at the Albert Hall. As I gazed towards her, not quite believing it, because there were thousands of people crowding around, she turned—and her start of recognition was one to which I couldn’t but respond. Was she pleased? She didn’t introduce me to her friends, momentarily glancing down the queue towards mine. Maybe she wondered were you coming to the concert too. But, no need to worry, you weren’t. She mentioned, as if her words were suggested by the chance meeting, how she had recently heard from some other old boyfriend of hers at university. The name meant nothing to me. All the same, it produced the unflattering sensation of being a closed chapter in her past, located beside other episodes, other brief affairs.
‘Good to see you,’ she said. ‘Let’s talk more when we’re inside.’
Once past the box office, I went searching around so we could continue the conversation, but I wasn’t able to see her anywhere in the crowded concert hall. Perhaps she had even tried to look for me too.
Then, four years later, a Christmas card arrived by a roundabout route. It contained a telephone number. She was still living in the capital.
‘It’s the year for mending contacts,’ she said.
‘Let me phone you again when I get back from Italy. I’m just going over for a few days research.’
‘Glad you’re still gadding about,’ I heard her say.
One week later the card had mysteriously disappeared, the phone number with it. When I asked, you vehemently denied throwing it away. More years of silence followed, till again by chance news of her married life and motherhood arrived via that dinner with my sister, who had met her, you remember, at Isabel’s wedding. For some time after that I would imagine her ferrying her children to a playgroup, or smartening up her daughter for Brownies, wondering what she should do with the letter—the one sent after my sister found an address through Belle. Perhaps it never reached her. Whatever, it resulted in silence.
Then, a few years back, I was trying to sort out the chaos of my office bookshelves after yet another hectic term. A thin brown pamphlet with nothing printed on its spine found its way into my hands. I was just wondering whether it was one more bit of college ephemera that could be tossed in the trash. But it turned out to be the catalogue from an exhibition of sculptures and bas-reliefs by Jean Arp at the Galleria Schwarz, Milano—a show that ran from the 8th of May to 4th of June 1965. Published along with the reproductions of exhibits were various examples of the artist’s poems in French, including one called ‘les pierres domestiques’ which still did something for me when I gave it a go. Underneath the English phrase ‘For Arp, art is Arp’, attributed to Marcel Duchamp, she had written ‘For Richard, a token of my arpreciation (not in the best line of McLeod wit, but one tries). From Alice, Christmas 1974.’ After standing there amongst the chaos, lost in memory a moment, I closed the catalogue and put it back into the bookshelves, but properly filed in the Dadaist section—making a mental note to see if the Gallery Schwarz was still there at Via Gesú 17 next time I was in Milan.
Alice. Yes, I hope she’s content, her marriage happy and her family thriving. What attracted me to her, what created that particular fondness and desire, remained caught inside, as if it were a puzzle without a piece. Of course, the years would alter the feelings about how we might have been experimenting, trying to invent our lives—whether needing to change or become what we thought ourselves likely to be. Is it self-forgiveness that alters others’ characters in memory, or the complacency of middle age? Alice McLeod: it stood for somebody gone for years, for a trace of what remains, what was once a living person, now these words.