The minor detail of never having met Dave was growing larger in my mind. I loved Dave and accepted Dave, but would he love me? I wasn’t sure. I knew nothing about him and only a few things about myself. I knew I hated mustard and ham. I rejected Lucifer and apartheid. Although I rejected politics in general, and didn’t know much about South Africa, I knew apartheid was wrong. I rejected Rod Stewart, Leonard Cohen and chocolate. Maggie loved all three. I rejected Mr Rochester for humiliating Jane. I rejected acne and rain.
Unlike Emily, my younger sister, I accepted baked beans on toast, fish fingers and return bus fares. I accepted anything written by the Brontë sisters apart from Anne’s poems that we read in class, and which seemed sad and full of God and flowers and death but no men.
I accepted the Thames, narrow paths along the banks, boats, swans and Wye on Thames, the small town by the river. We had been in Wye for ten years and we accepted Wye and Wye accepted us. We lived in the first house you came to down the main road from the rest of England, and it was the largest house in the village. Four bedrooms, two toilets and a massive great garden that stretched at least twenty yards to the fence of our nearest neighbour. It didn’t matter how many times you told them, we don’t own the house, it belongs to the Church of England, we just live in it, most Wyovians believed we had millions of pounds stuffed in our socks and coat pockets.
From our front gate you could see the grey majestic outline of Bowater Castle, about three miles down the road. Leave Bowater Station on the ten o’clock train and you’d be arriving at Paddington Station thirty minutes later, after a quick change at Hampden Village on to the main London line. Golden fields of wheat and grass grew out the front of our house in the summer and turned to brown fields of mud in autumn and winter. Poplar trees lined the roads in and out of town. If you walked out through our front gate, crossed the main road to Bowater and walked for twenty minutes along the hard brown path winding in front of you, you’d reach the River Thames flowing, mostly sluggishly, along.
Every weekday morning at ten past eight I cycled past Dave with my school uniform on and my satchel fastened to the metal tray at the back of my bike with two octopus grips that I obsessively checked and rechecked before I left the garage at 8.05 am. I was precise with my timing. Every day I turned right at the top of my road towards Hampden High, my school, and there was Dave, heading left to Bowater High, watching me and my thin legs pedalling along. I wasn’t sure if the expression on his face meant he was smiling at me or not so I didn’t smile. I just checked that he was there . . . yep, there he was.
I turned away, instantly fascinated by the wheat fields which I saw every day of my life. On a bike, it’s hard to find somewhere else to look. I stuck one hand in my blazer pocket, one hand holding the handlebars and my eyes fixed on the yellow wheat stalks blowing in the spring breeze. I believed I looked as if I didn’t have a care in the world. I certainly wasn’t thinking about the tall ginger-haired boy waiting for his bus.
I also believed, deep in my heart, that if Dave had been given a choice, he would have flung the anorak that he always wore on his bedroom floor and sat, sartorially elegant, at the bus stop in his school shirt, shivering slightly in the balmy English spring. He’d been made to wear it, Poor Lamb, school uniforms made fools of us all. In the spring of ’73 there seemed to be a renaissance of the much-maligned shimmery shiny all-weather jacket. Like bulbs clumped around the bottoms of trees, there were anoraks popping up at every corner.
Come, sweet Jane, honest truthful Jane, take this shiny jacket and give me your shawl. St John will never want to marry you if he sees you in this . . . Come, Jane, come, don’t run from me . . . you’ll slip and fall . . .
My mother loved outer garments and welcomed them, all colours, all sizes, all shapes, into her life. Anything that kept the weather from the skin was accepted. My father preferred the classic beige down-to-the-mid-calf mackintosh. My mother also accepted fresh fruit, homegrown lettuces and tomatoes, Jesus Christ and Marks and Spencer’s cotton underwear. My father accepted raspberry canes, long leaf Darjeeling tea, pork sausages from Harrods and the Church of England. The Church of England accepted my father. That was why we lived in the largest house in the village, it went with the job.
When you’re nearly sixteen the world is a weird enough place, but there are some things you know with great certainty, no questions needed, no inner doubt. When I saw Dave, something happened to the pit of my stomach, a kind of lurch that ended up as an ache in my arms and a desire to run naked down the street screaming and eating cream buns at the same time. Doubt was for everyone else.
My parents loved the Queen of England but their love for the Queen was not quite the same as my love for Dave. Their love for the Queen was restrained and gracious, forever locked away in some restrained and gracious space. They had to wait another four whole years before they could celebrate the Silver Jubilee with the Queen of England. Four more years before the flags and street parties and my parents, like good English folk, knew they had to wait quietly. They were married in 1953, the year of the Queen’s coronation, and they had been with her in spirit ever since.
My mother said, ‘A steady pair of hands on the throne.’
I didn’t care about any of that. I cared about Dave. I knew he was called Dave because Maggie told me when I asked her.
‘Who’s that?’
‘That’s Dave. He lives down the road. His brother’s in the army.’
‘Which road?’
‘Milton Close, two streets over from us. I met him the other night.’
‘You met Dave?’
‘No, I did not meet Dave, I met his brother Simon. I actually left the house and went out and met Simon, Dave’s brother. And he told me about Dave.’
‘Really? Like what?’
‘I know he hates soccer. I know he plays the guitar and thinks he’s better than he actually is. Oh yeah, I know he’s got a girlfriend and she’s really, really nice.’
‘A girlfriend? Is she from school? What’s her name? Has he really got a girlfriend?’
Maggie pushed my hair out of my face. ‘He hasn’t really got a girlfriend, Abes, I only said that to wind you up.’
‘Get off me. I hate you.’
‘Invite him over. Simon said Dave checks his watch by you every morning. Call him.’
‘And say what?’
‘Ask him for help with your maths. Abes, you need help with your maths. Go on. I bet he’ll do it.’
‘You don’t know that.’
‘I know more than you do.’
Maggie always knew more than I did. She was just about to turn eighteen, and in the eyes of the law she would legally be an adult, a person whose vote counted. She could do anything she wanted to do whenever she wanted to do it. This was her permanent refrain. I can do what I want to.
A small side street led down one side of our house away from the Bowater road and that was where I left the house on my bike each morning. If I turned left I would soon find myself in Milton Close and my stomach churned at the very thought of seeing Dave’s house. Out through the large green wooden gates, turn right, right again at the top and there was the road to school. My father’s church was opposite our house, two hundred yards along the main Bowater road.
The graveyard surrounding the church looked like a bright happy place to me then. I didn’t know any other graveyards. It was full of fresh flowers on tended graves, and in spring and summer my grandmother’s deep red roses bloomed, climbing up the church wall getting closer to God. Two tall fir trees stood either side of the church gates and one of them was mine. After an hour on a hard pew singing hymns and listening to the wisdom of my father, I was desperate to reach for that first spiky branch. The rough bark hurt my hands and I had to grab and swing at the same time in order to pull myself up on the branch.
I slowly inched up the tree pressing my back against the trunk and holding the branches above my head until I felt safe to move again. No one could get me now, not that anyone was trying. I was at least fifteen feet off the ground by my reckoning, and that was about my limit. Any higher and I felt weird in the head. I was part of the tree now, high in its beautiful green branches, invisible to the world.
I watched the parishioners traipsing slowly from the church, chatting to my father in his billowing white robes at the church door. From my great height I could also pelt Emily with small turquoise stones I filched from the tops of the graves. I was sure the buried ones wouldn’t mind. They were dead, after all.
‘Ouch! That hurts. I know you’re up there, Rebecca. I’m telling Mum. MUM!’
Mum sighed and wagged a finger at me, a small gesture which contained words I knew all too well. Stop that. Set a good example for your sister. Whatever will people think of us?
After church, Mum set off back to the house to cook the Sunday roast or do any number of the household chores that our large cold house demanded and which held our family together. I knew, without knowing how I knew, that Sunday afternoon was the time my mother missed our grandmother most of all. After lunch, when all the dishes had been washed and put away, we would find her in the sitting room in one of our threadbare chairs, reading her favourite author, turning the pages of another world.