Spring Tide

⁹ Frozen Flame

Only recently has it occurred to me that Nicola was also young. She was nine years older than me, and at the time she seemed wonderfully knowing and grown-up, with a husband and kids and everything, but she was only twenty-eight.

She was a mature student on the same course as me at Bristol Poly. We got talking one day, in the little café attached to the library, about a coursework project we’d been set, and we agreed to meet again from time to time to support each other. I assumed she’d latched onto me because she thought I’d be useful to her. I was a very bright student and, though she was very able herself, she’d left school at sixteen and hadn’t played the academic game for a long time. So I guessed it was me that was going to help her, and not the other way round, but I was perfectly happy to play along, just for the pleasure of her company. She was lively, full of irreverent energy, and very quick to laugh and smile. She also swore a lot and, in seminars, she and another mature student, her terrifyingly beautiful friend Fay, spoke about sex in a frank and matter-of-fact way which I found fascinating and disturbing in equal measure, a window into a world which I longed to inhabit but had no idea how to reach.

It was the third time I met with Nicola, this time in a little hippie place a mile or so from the campus, that I first realised there was more to this than just helping her with her coursework. We’d met at 11, and, after two cups of coffee, had got to 12 o’clock without even mentioning the project. I was a creature of doubt, but even I had to admit to myself that there was really no doubt about it: an attractive, properly grown-up woman was enjoying my company for its own sake. She even laughed at my jokes.

Nicola seemed to notice some change in my face as I registered this, for she smiled, reached over and lightly cupped her hand over mine.

‘We’re two of a kind in some ways, aren’t we?’ she said.

Two of a kind! Spoken to this very shy young man who had spent years worrying if he’d ever manage to negotiate a relationship with any woman at all, that phrase was like a shot of heroin into a main artery! Up to that point, I’d known that I liked Nicola and of course I’d known that I found her very attractive too (although this was true of several other women on the course, including Nicola’s friend Fay), but from that moment onwards, I was utterly and desperately in love.

When you look out into the world you can’t see your own face. All you see is a kind of frame round the edge of your field of vision, with, somewhere towards the bottom of it, a shadowy out-of-focus blob that’s the tip of your nose. I often had the feeling back then that this absence of a face wasn’t just the result of my particular perspective, but was the actual case. I really didn’t have a face, in other words. Other people could look straight in, much as you might look in through the window of some psychic washing machine, and see the tangle of anxiety and shame and frustrated desire that was whirling round inside. So I felt this burst of gratitude and love, but then I panicked. Fearing that Nicola could see straight into my head, I looked quickly away from her to avoid her gaze, and realised to my dismay that I was blushing violently.

‘Oh Rick, I’m so sorry! I didn’t mean to embarrass you!’ Her hand was still resting on mine, and she gave it a reassuring squeeze. ‘It’s just that it’s a very long time since I laughed so much, or felt so comfortable in anyone else’s company.’

I made myself look at her again. Her brown eyes were warm and kind. She wasn’t mocking me, I could see. She didn’t think any less of me for having blushed. Incredible as it might seem, Nicola didn’t just see tangled wet stuff churning round when she looked at me, but an actual face with eyes and nose and mouth, which for some strange reason she’d grown to like. She’d always looked pretty to me, but now she had suddenly become quite extraordinarily beautiful, and I saw that what she had to give, in every single respect, was exactly what I’d always wanted.

‘Me neither,’ I said, quite truthfully. ‘We seem to find the same things funny, don’t we?’

‘We really do,’ she said, and then: ‘It’s getting stuffy in here, isn’t it? Have you got time for a bit of a walk? I could use some fresh air before I put my nose back to the grindstone.’

The hippie café was in the suburb of Clifton, which was a slightly more bohemian place then than it is now. We walked up to the green and then to the famous bridge across the Gorge. Neither of us had set a time limit on this little outing, but at about the point we paid our five pence toll and set out across the bridge, we must both have realised that we’d crossed some kind of line. But we pretended not to notice, continuing to talk animatedly about the course and our lives and the world in general as we headed, without actually discussing where we were going, towards the woods on the far side of the Gorge.

‘I love Leigh Woods,’ Nicola said, ‘don’t you? Have you got time to walk into them just a little bit?’

So then we were under the green leaves together, just me, and this dazzlingly beautiful grown-up who’d sought out my company, walking to a particular spot that Nicola knew, where we could stand and look down into the Gorge. The tide was in, I remember, and some sort of tugboat was coming up the river.

‘I really meant what I said back there in the café, Rick. I didn’t mean to be heavy about it, or to make you uncomfortable, and I’m really sorry if I embarrassed you, but I really do feel at home with you, like I’ve known you all my life.’

Soon after that, we kissed.

Looking back, she was quite controlling. She would readily cede power to me in bed or in conversation, as a parent cedes power to a child in play, but it was always her who set the boundaries. She was never free to see me in the evenings when her husband Derek was home, and usually had to head off in the middle of the afternoon to fetch her kids from school, but I had a bedsit not far from the campus, and we’d meet there for sex, sometimes in the morning, sometimes in the early afternoon, sometimes even in the one-hour gap between morning and afternoon lectures.

‘I love Derek,’ she told me, ‘and I love my kids. When I finish the course here, we’re moving to another city, and you and I will have to say goodbye. Really goodbye, I mean: no presents, no promises, no plans to meet again. But I want you to know that I’ve never loved anyone like I love you, and I never will for the rest of my life.’

Back in those days, when I got everywhere by walking, I had a little game that I used to play to keep me amused. I’d pick out some feature ahead of me, a lamp post perhaps, or a street corner, and try to imagine the me that would, in a few minutes, be walking past it. That person was a complete stranger to me, and indeed, while I was still walking towards my chosen point, he didn’t even exist, wasn’t even as substantial as a shadow. A couple of minutes later, when I reached the lamp post, or whatever landmark it was that I’d picked out, I’d look back at the spot where I’d been when I’d chosen it, and remember that past self from a few minutes ago. And of course it was him that was the stranger now, him that didn’t exist. In fact, assuming that no one else had seen him, there wasn’t a trace of him left in the world, outside of my own already fading and imperfect memory.

So I accepted Nicola’s deal quite readily.

‘The future doesn’t matter,’ I told her. ‘What’s important is that you’re with me now.’

She was with me, she really was. Her body was solid, her lips were warm. I could feel her breath on my cheek. I could smell her sex on my hands and the warm scent on her neck, mingling with the aroma of her skin. I could hear her voice speaking just a few inches from my ear.

‘I am with you now, my dearest, completely and utterly with you.’

We kissed and rolled about and laughed. There are times which are so complete and self-contained that it simply doesn’t seem to matter whether or not they’ll last. And a few minutes later, all that was real in the world was that I was pushing myself up inside her body, where I’d been so many times and would go again many times more. And Nicola was loudly welcoming me.

Never in my life until then had the world felt so rich and full and generous. Never mind the as-yet non-existent future; up to now even the living present had always felt remote and unattainable, as if I’d been condemned for some reason to eke out an existence outside the main flow of time, on some other meaner track that ran alongside it. And, if I’m to be completely honest, the only women I’d had an orgasm with up until then were not even three dimensional, but printed on glossy paper in magazines. I still remember the gluey smell of the ink.

‘I love you, Nicola. I can’t believe how much I love you. I didn’t even know such a thing was even possible.’

‘Nor did I, sweetheart,’ she said, and I released myself inside her body.

I knew a lot about mythology back then – reading mythology is the kind of thing you do on that other meaner track – and now I told Nicola the famous story of how Tristan crossed the Irish Sea to fetch Iseult. He was to bring her back to Cornwall to marry his uncle, King Mark, and neither of them meant anything more to happen than that. But, passing the time together on the first evening, with no land in sight and no one to be with but one another, they accidentally drank a love potion. It hadn’t been meant for the two of them. It was for Iseult and Mark, a gift sent from Ireland to bind together the newly married couple and ensure their happiness. But Iseult and Tristan took it for ordinary wine, drinking it down without a thought, and suddenly all that mattered to them was each other.

Of course, even back then in the days before history began, it wasn’t that far from Ireland to Cornwall. Pretty soon the land appeared ahead of them: just a line on the horizon at first, and then hills, and cliffs, and settlements beside the water with tiny houses strewn on the slopes like little coloured dice. And then King Mark’s castle came into view, with its battlements and its stern grey walls.

When there were only two weeks left before Nicola was to leave, the two of us still acted as if our time together would go on forever. But the parting loomed over us, and there was increasing hysteria in our refusal to think of anything other than now. And however hard we tried not to, we noticed clocks ticking, hands sweeping coldly round. Very soon we reached the final week, and the days began to rush by: six, five, four… It was like being in a car with no brakes and no steering, hurtling downhill. We could already see the lamp post straight ahead of us that we were going to crash into, and there was nothing we could do to avoid it.

Nicola had decided that, for our final meeting, we should cross the bridge again, and go back to that spot in the woods overlooking the Gorge, where the two of us had first kissed. When we reached it, she kissed me again, slowly and very gently, and then stepped back a little so she could look at my face.

‘I think we should say goodbye now, Rick,’ she said. ‘Is that okay with you? When you’re ready I’d like you to walk back over the bridge by yourself. I’ll wait till you’ve had time to cross over, then follow after.’

I nodded. There had to be a moment, I could see that.

‘I’ve brought you a little present,’ she said.

‘Oh Nicola, I haven’t got you one. I thought you said no presents.’

‘Don’t worry, sweetheart, it’s only a tiny thing, and no one but you will be able to tell that it’s a present at all.’

She opened her hand and showed me a child’s marble, a little larger than average, but in other respects perfectly ordinary, made of clear glass with a single twist of scarlet along its axis.

‘I was tidying up after my kids,’ she said, ‘and I saw this lying on the floor. I thought it was a bit like what you and me will have from now on. A flame frozen in time, a flame captured forever at the very moment when it was burning brightest.’

We kissed one more time, much more slowly, holding each other tightly for a long time. Then I turned and walked back through the trees.

So now that glass marble was all I had left of her. Nicola had refused to tell me where she was going, and had always been quite clear that this would be the end, and that neither of us was ever to try and track the other down. Tracking people down was much harder, in any case, back in those days before the internet, and I didn’t even know her married name, for she’d always used her maiden name on the course.

Over the weeks and months afterwards, I struggled to get through the absence that she’d left behind her, like I was some sort of jungle explorer trying to hack my way through a kind of inverted rain forest where everything was cold, and creepers clung to me with an icy grip whenever I tried to move. I remember going down to where we’d studied, just to see her name on the list of the students there, and remind myself that she was real. I remember visiting everywhere we’d been together: the woods, the place in Clifton, the café in the library where our friendship had begun. And I remember, many times a day, taking out that marble to feel it and look at it, reminding myself that Nicola had chosen it for me, Nicola had held it in her hand, Nicola had told me that it signified a love that would not die.

Of course, in my many long walks across the city, I’d already proved to myself again and again that the past wasn’t even as substantial as a shadow. With my rational head I knew that my time with Nicola had no more substance now than the ghostly former selves I imagined when I looked back at the empty pools of lamplight behind me. But at the level of emotion, I couldn’t accept it. Perhaps it would have been easier if she hadn’t been the first, and if the whole thing hadn’t taken place inside that bubble of secrecy and finite time that had made it seem so much brighter and more vivid than everyday life. Perhaps it would have been better too if I hadn’t imbibed all those heroic stories of impossible doomed loves like Tristan and Iseult’s. But, for whatever reason, I strained and strained against the great numb wall of intervening space that separated me from her, not knowing where she was, or who was now basking in her lovely gentle smile, but determined not to admit to myself that she’d gone.

I never got over that grief in the way that other people around me seemed to do, ending love relationships, pushing through the sadness, and then beginning new ones with the same optimism as before. But I was a human being with needs and I made pragmatic choices. I couldn’t give up Nicola, but I learnt to divide my heart into two compartments, and in that way, I was able to persuade both myself and a woman called Julie that I was in love with her. When we married, I regretted it almost at once, and we were apart again in less than eighteen months. I met another woman called Mary not long afterwards, and in due course married again, but after twelve unhappy and destructive years, that ended too, this time very bitterly, with Mary demanding that I leave, keeping the house and our two kids, and making it as difficult as she could for me to see them at all.

I remember how I searched out that cold hard marble on the day I left them, taking it from a hiding place at the back of a drawer, and slipping it into my jacket pocket. I drove over to my parents’ house, where I was going to stay until I’d found a place of my own. It was a longish journey, and I was exhausted by weeks of almost sleepless nights. Pausing for a rest in a layby, I took the marble from my pocket in the solitude of my car and turned it over in my hands, feeling its solidity and smoothness. Then, as I’d done many times before, I held it up to the window, so as to let the sunlight shine through that cold unmoving flame and make it look, if only very slightly, like something actually alive and burning.

‘I still love you best, Nicola,’ I whispered. ‘Underneath everything else the fire’s still there.’

But even I had to admit that this wasn’t a fire that could actually warm me, so I divided my heart again, looked around me and eventually got together with another woman called Patrice, moving back to Bristol to be with her.

The thing with Patrice lasted for about a year and a half, until she made the decision that it was over. She didn’t make a scene, or punish me as Mary had done, she simply informed me that she no longer wanted to be with me.

‘I feel like I’m dealing with an automaton most of the time,’ she said. ‘Some kind of robot that you’ve placed on Earth to represent you, while the real you goes off alone to somewhere deep inside yourself, where I can’t possibly hope to follow.’

I knew she was right. She’d spotted the compartments in my heart: the small one I’d allowed her to enter, and the big one behind it with the padlocked door. And so, without even attempting to argue, I found myself a little flat and moved out.

This was a dark time. After so many failures, I’d lost all confidence in my ability either to love or to hold the love of others. But I still had the glass marble. I still had the frozen flame. It couldn’t speak to me, or smile at me, or kiss me, it couldn’t caress me or warm me in bed, but it still could, at least to some degree, reassure me. I could be loved, that was what the marble told me, and I was capable of love, for I had once loved and been loved most wonderfully.

One day I put the marble in my pocket and drove over to Clifton, looking for the café where Nicola had told me we were two of a kind. Of course, it had long since gone. Clifton was way too upmarket by then for sleepy little hippie businesses, and the café had been replaced by a shop selling hand-made fabrics. I’d planned to sit at our favourite table, but now I decided instead to recreate the walk to that place in the woods where Nicola and I had shared our first and last kisses. She wouldn’t be with me, of course, but I persuaded myself that if I moved through that same space again, holding her present in my hand, it would bring her at least a little bit nearer.

Halfway across the bridge, though, I stopped. I don’t know what had changed inside me, but I was suddenly appalled, almost to the point of nausea, by the idea of going over the same wretched ground, prodding that same old wound, and attempting yet one more time to construct the semblance of a living being out of absence and empty air. Clutching the marble tightly in my hand, I looked down into the drop. A wire mesh had been installed since my student days to prevent people throwing themselves off, as so many had done in the past, but there were small square holes cut in it, so as still to allow an uninterrupted view.

What did I remember of Nicola, I challenged myself? What did I really remember? I could call to mind, at least approximately, the colour of her hair and her eyes (brown in both cases, though her hair had likely faded by now, as my own had done). I could remember roughly how tall she was, and the fact that she was fairly slim. But now I tried, I couldn’t call to mind even the vaguest image of her face, or hear in my head the sound of her voice. Yes, and apart from a few iconic words – ‘You and me are two of a kind’ – which had very possibly themselves been worn into new shapes by constant rehearsal, like buffeted pebbles in a stream, I couldn’t clearly remember anything she’d said. All I could really be certain of was the fact that, at the time, I’d found her words engaging, and that she’d found my words engaging too. But that was a long time ago. I fancied myself to be a communist back then. I found Monty Python funny. I thought On the Road was the greatest work of literature I’d ever read. And Nicola, though I still thought of her as excitingly older than me, had been twenty years younger than I was now.

Wasn’t it really the case that what I most loved Nicola for was simply her interest in me? Hadn’t I loved her so very much because she was the first grown-up woman who’d treated me like a grown-up man, when I’d feared that might never happen at all? I remembered Nicola’s friend Fay, that other mature student on the course. She’d been really strikingly beautiful, like a model or a film star, and I’d actually noticed her before I noticed Nicola, though she’d seemed so far out of my own league as not even to be worth fantasising about. But suppose Fay had sought me out to help her with her project, and suppose she’d been the one who’d leant towards me over a café table and told me that she and I were two of a kind. Was there really any doubt that I would have fallen for her just as I fell for Nicola?

After all, I didn’t know who I was back then. Dear God, I didn’t even experience myself as having a face! Wasn’t it the truth that I’d have been happy to be told I was just like them by any halfway attractive human being, perhaps even men as well as women? And wouldn’t I have been happy to believe it too?

I opened my hand and looked down at the marble. I’d been clutching it so tightly that it had made a small bruised dent in the flesh of my palm. Tears came to my eyes. I had invested so much in this little ball of glass. I had laboured so long and so hard to keep the cold flame burning.

But I reached out over the railing and let it fall.