Читать книгу Saving Missy - Beth Morrey - Страница 20

It was the summer of 1958 and I was looking up at the roof of the Senate House and musing how they had got the car up there. A peculiarly Cantabrigian student stunt. It was gone by then, of course, but it took nearly a week, and in the end they had to hack it to pieces to get rid of it. It was a shame, really – I liked it perched on the apex, its incongruity somehow reassuring. Anything was possible.

I was a lofty graduate, working as an archivist in the University’s Classical Faculty Library and wondering what to do next. Unlike my contemporaries, I wasn’t being pressured by my family to get married now I had a degree. Henry was busy trying to break into politics, and Mama was as likely to tell me to find a husband as she was to suggest I get a tiger as a pet. As a young girl, my mother – then known as Lena Schorel – had sneaked out to hear Sylvia Pankhurst speak, and was very put out when the First World War began, because it cut short her fledgling career as a suffragist. She had also been rather disappointed when women finally got the vote, because she so enjoyed fighting the good fight.

Neither my brother nor my mother were at all interested in my marital state, and with no other family to speak of, I was left to my own devices. Perhaps my father would have had a say in the matter, but William Jameson was one of the casualties of the Second World War, and we rarely spoke of him, because the loss felt like too sharp a thing to touch. Fa-Fa had died just after the war ended, marching out one morning to buy tobacco and dropping like a stone in the street. He’d have liked that – nice and clean, no messing about. Jette had retreated even further into her shell after he died, and when she quietly passed away just after I went up to Cambridge, it was barely remarked upon. Maybe by that time we’d become inured to death. Aunt Sibby only cared about her animals, so my mother took over the house in Lancaster Villas, which became a kind of campaign base for various activists. If I’d gone back there, no doubt I’d be dragooned into joining one of her causes.

But what did I want to do? I wasn’t sure, walking down King’s Parade that evening in August, clutching a pile of books to my chest and mulling it over. Then I saw Leo Carmichael walking towards me, his golden hair fiery in the sun, and remembered he was all I ever wanted. For a second, the flood of memories nearly floored me and I swayed, dizzy with it. Whispering to my mother in the drawing room; the cold and bright light; prone in bed, staring at the ceiling, ignoring the stale sandwiches. He could not know, he could never know, how much this meant. I hugged the books tighter, preparing to look unconcerned and uninterested. As he approached, for a second I thought he didn’t recognize me, but then his face cleared and he smiled with what looked like genuine pleasure.

‘Milly!’ he said, grabbing my hand and pumping it enthusiastically. Of course I dropped my books, and we spent the next minute scrabbling round for them on the pavement. By the time they were back in my arms, my hair was mussed and I was breathless with effort and embarrassment.

‘Would you like a drink?’ he asked, indicating towards the river.

I shouldn’t appear too keen – let him think I have other engagements, interesting parties and interested parties.

‘Yes, please.’

He took my books and we walked together towards The Anchor, a favourite haunt among students. As we approached the River Cam, I was painfully, ecstatically, aware of everything in that moment – the little toe-pinch in my right shoe, the bead of sweat on the back of my neck, my books tucked under that big arm of his as he strolled along, my still-uneven breathing. I looked towards Queens’ at the punters carefully wielding their poles under the Mathematical Bridge. There was a myth that it was designed by Sir Isaac Newton, and originally built without any kind of connection at the joints. The story went that a group of students took the bridge apart, and were unable to put it together again, thus it had to be re-built with the current nuts and bolts. It wasn’t true, of course, but I liked the idea anyway. I needed to build mine and Leo’s relationship with a few nuts and bolts to make it secure. And above all, he must never know just how much water was under that bridge.

That summer, with a supreme effort of self-control, I channelled my natural repression and presented myself as elusive, chaste, to be chased. When we went for a drink, I left early, telling him there was a rumour some students had towed a Spitfire into Trinity Great Court. When he invited me to see A Tale of Two Cities at the cinema, I told him I didn’t admire Dirk Bogarde. When he asked me to attend a Leavis lecture with him, I went, but made sure to bump into several acquaintances en route that I absolutely had to speak to. I kept him waiting.

Why was all that obfuscation so necessary? I felt instinctively that Leo, so straightforward himself, did not admire that quality in others. He liked guile, caprice, uncertainty. He liked a slippery fish. So that’s what I was. Just before Christmas, he proposed, leaving a ring in my copy of the Odyssey, with a little note about my face launching a thousand ships, though I always felt less Helen, more Trojan horse. He lounged in the doorway watching me open the book, with a lopsided grin and a bottle of champagne. ‘How about it?’ he said, proffering the bottle, while I worked hard not to cry. We were married on a dry, chilly day in January – I was already pregnant in the photo Tristan took of us outside King’s College Chapel, although I didn’t know it. Alea iacta est.

And the problem with all of this? The flaw in my plan? Having got the ring on my finger, the baby in my belly and the little house on Jesus Green … when was I finally going to be able to relax, take out the bolts and see if it would hold?

Never. Having held him fast, I couldn’t let go; I had to hang on.