BEFORE I DROPPED by to see Alastair with a poem, I thought I would visit the Poetry Society, a group that met once a week in a room over the bar at the Star Hotel in Market Street. Most of those who came brought copies of a poem of their own to pass around. Occasionally someone would read a favorite poem by a classic or contemporary poet. I’d been meaning to attend one of these workshops since my return to St. Andrews but had put it off. Perhaps arrogantly, I thought I was better than any of them—they were mostly undergraduates, after all. But I was afraid as well. Many of them, as I recalled from my junior year, spoke without restraint. But now, imagining Alastair scratching out my adverbs and adjectives, I thought I had better push past my reluctance.
Bella Law (as I will call her) presided over the society, running it with graceful firmness. I recognized her at once as the leader of the antiwar protest, and wheels spun in my head: a coincidence, perhaps, though one got used to expecting the unexpected in a small town. She had pale gray-green eyes that seemed to take in the whole room at a glance. I liked her fragile wrists and very long, thin legs. Her voice had a quality of throaty freshness that appealed to me. When she laughed, she tipped her head to one side. I noticed her slightly puffy lips and her long beautiful neck. She was appealing in unconventional ways. Even the way she would occasionally shudder and smile awkwardly at me cut into my heart.
Her red sneakers made her stand out from the others. I hadn’t seen red sneakers in St. Andrews before this.
“Do you have a poem to share?” she asked.
I had brought the one I planned to show Alastair, but what mattered now was that it impressed Bella. Feeling tense, I read it aloud as best I could:
The blood-soaked jungle floor is empty
Of the bodies now,
Men who in valor, lethargy, or mere indifference
Fell down in battle.
Forces from the North and South
Advance upon a blistered world.
There is no factory.
There is only Death,
And Death is sly, is greedy and indifferent as well.
It devours all comers, and returns
In kind a crimson pall.
The group offered no responses, which prompted Bella, perhaps dutifully as well as out of kindness, to comment.
“One thing puzzles me,” she said. “Can Death be sly and greedy as well as indifferent? Isn’t that possibly a contradiction?”
Heads bobbed in agreement like pigeons dipping to feed, and I began to regret the line. But surely there was more to say about my poem?
After the meeting, I sat beside Bella as she leafed through a folder. “I saw you marching in Market Street the other day,” I said.
“Our antiwar group, yes. You should join us. Other marches are coming. I’m working on a speaker from London, a Vietnam vet. The antiwar movement in Britain is getting some traction now.”
I agreed to go and invited her downstairs to the bar, where we found seats at a table by the back oak-paneled wall, and I brought her a pint of lager, as requested.
“Ta,” she said.
“It’s good to see these protests.”
“They’re probably useful if they raise awareness. But what about you? Why haven’t they sent you to Vietnam?”
“I drew a reasonably good number in the lottery,” I told her, “but I’ve got this insane draft board. Their letters keep coming. I don’t open them.”
“A protest of sorts.”
“You don’t get to ignore the draft without consequences,” I said.
This caught her attention. “So what brings you to St. Andrews? It seems far away from whatever you were doing in America.”
“That’s the point,” I said. “I needed some distance.”
By way of self-justification, I told her about my thesis on George Mackay Brown, amusing her with the fact that Falconer worried that Brown was “still alive.” I mentioned in passing that I had majored in English but had also studied Greek in my senior year at Lafayette—a subject I had begun at St. Andrews during my year abroad. I was currently in a seminar on the comedies of Aristophanes taught by Professor K. J. Dover, a legendary figure in the classics department.
Bella pulled a white handkerchief from her sleeve and blew her nose. “An American who reads Greek and rejects his draft board. There is a God after all.”
“You must tell me about yourself,” I said.
“Must I?”
“I’m one of those people who ask a lot of questions.”
“I don’t mind.” She told me that she had gone to Benenden, a tony girls’ school in Kent that her mother had attended before her. (This explained why, though she was a Scot, she spoke with an English public school accent, wherein toast rhymed with taste and house rhymed with nice.) But she was reluctant to answer questions about her school days, she said. “Not terribly interesting.” Her family apparently had a “shooting lodge” in Perth, and she suggested that I should come for a visit sometime. “Daddy is always looking for someone to shoot with him.”
“So is my father,” I said, but I didn’t pursue the joke. Not if I wished to pursue this woman, and I knew I did.
I tried to piece her world together in my head: private school in England, wealthy parents with a shooting lodge in the foothills of the Highlands. This somehow combined with her radical politics as well as a strong interest in poetry and—as I later discovered—modern art. I hadn’t met any girls like her in Scranton, and to a ridiculous degree I liked hearing about life at English boarding schools, with their quaint traditions. I had visions of pupils taking cold showers, being snapped at by schoolmasters in mortarboards, and playing games into the soft dwindling chalk-light of early evenings on sumptuously green fields as church bells in village towers gonged softly in the distance. I found something to admire in the old imperial sentiments of Sir Henry Newbolt in “Vitaï Lampada,” a wonderfully dreadful poem, with its stoutly martial refrain: “Play up! Play up! And play the game!”
Bella winced when I mentioned this poem, saying, “I’ve had enough of jolly hockey sticks.”
She lived in Hamilton Hall, which I knew well because of Miss Wright, and I asked her to come back to my flat for coffee. “Ah, coffee,” she said. “The problem is that I’m swotting this term. Years of neglect, and I’m having to catch up.”
“All work and no play…”
“And,” she said, glancing away for an instant, “I have a boyfriend. Angus is a medical student.”
“I do want to offer you a cup of coffee one day,” I said, determined not to let go of this easily. “That is, if Angus won’t mind.”
“We’re not engaged or anything.” She leaned forward and planted a kiss on my forehead. I couldn’t tell if she meant this gesture as dismissive or as something to encourage me. “I’m not sure what or where we are as a couple,” she went on. “We’re…a quondam couple. Everywhere and nowhere.”
A quondam couple? Everywhere and nowhere?
Back in my flat in the late evening, still bristling with confusion and the memory of her lips pressing on my forehead, I drank tea and started to draft a poem about what had happened—or not happened—between us. Perhaps this could be the poem I’d show to Alastair the next day.