Lee let the idea niggle him. Ella was livid. They argued, ridiculously and histrionically, but most of all badly. After that they didn’t see each other for over a week.
Lee made the first conciliatory move, driven by some news he had heard in the union bar.
“She did what?” Ella went white.
“She took a load of pills. They had to pump her stomach.”
“Oh God! Can we go and see her?”
“Apparently she’s already gone home.”
“What? Ireland home?”
“Yes, Ireland home.”
“When did all this happen?”
“Four or five days ago.”
“But what about her course? Her exams?” Lee only shrugged. “Why did I know that something like this was going to happen? We never paid enough attention to her. We were too wrapped up in ourselves.”
“Yes.”
Ella sat down and began to roll a cigarette. “Please stay with me tonight,” she said, without looking up. “I get frightened at night and I’m having bad dreams.”
Lee nodded. “You know I want to stay with you.”
They made friends again, and made love again. The news about Honora made them vulnerable, and for a while they were gentle with each other.
The day after Lee broke the news, Ella got Honora’s home telephone number from the university registrar. Honora’s father answered, asked who it was and went to fetch his daughter. He came back on the line to tell her that Honora wasn’t well enough to come to the phone, but that she was much better and thank you for calling.
Lee, on going to find out how much Brad knew, discovered that he had cleared out of his bed-sit without notice. It had been some time since he had turned in for a lecture, and none of his fellow medical students had seen him in weeks. Lee got Brad’s landlady to unlock the door of his room. She stood over him, shaking her keys and listing complaints against student tenants while he inspected the abandoned room. There were a number of medical reference books and a shelf full of sci-fi paperbacks; a battered mono record player and a handful of scratched and sleeveless albums; an oil-fired roadwork lantern, a police bollard and the amber dome from a Belisha beacon, plus other trophies and street paraphernalia which for some reason he felt happy to keep in his room; and a few clothes, though all the decent stuff had gone along with his suitcase and bags. There was nothing there he wasn’t better off without. Lee told the landlady differently, but he knew for certain that Brad wouldn’t be coming back.
With two of them gone, it didn’t come as a complete surprise to Lee, when, towards the end of the spring term, a pink handwritten envelope appeared in his room one morning. It had been shoved under the door sometime during the small hours:
Dear Lee, I still love you but I’ve got to get my head straightened out. Remember that holiday we planned for the Greeks Islands, before every thing got heavy? That’s where I’m going, I don’t know for how long. Maybe I will come back\ after that and finish my degree, though it’s pointless at the moment—/ haven’t done a stroke of work since I met you and we got mixed up in the dreaming. I haven’t got the guts to face you with this, which is why the letter. You’re a good man and there will never be any forgetting the things we have done but I’ve got to get out of it. I’m crying while I’m writing this. I meant that about still loving you. Finish your studies, at least one of us should. Ella
Though it was half-expected, Lee was devastated. The four of them had been isolated from the rest of the university, and now he was left completely alone. Honora had been carried out on a stretcher; Brad had bolted; and now Ella had run away to hide. It was exactly a year since he and Ella had come together. He knew he would never get over her.
Like a good boy he stayed at the university and completed his studies. From the end of that term he lived like a monk, got his head down and caught up on a year’s neglected reading. He worked hard and was awarded a respectable but undistinguished degree.
He didn’t expect to see the others again. Three postcards from Ella arrived in the first couple of months. They showed pictures of brilliantly whitewashed houses against an improbably blue sky, classical temples and definitive Mediterranean sunsets. On their reverse sides were tightly written, difficult-to-read messages with excited descriptions and introspective diversions, all thoroughly impersonal. But Lee kept the postcards and pinned them on his wall close to his pillow as if they would act as a charm against bad dreams and a remedy for spoiled memories. No more arrived.
PART THREE
March 1986
ONE
Crito, we owe a cock to Aesculapius. Please pay it, and don’t let it pass.
“I dreamt it.”
“It doesn’t seem possible.”
“But there it is.”
Ella and Honora, heads together, huddle in secrecy in the panelled snug of Belfast’s Crown, sipping creamy black stout that left thin white moustaches of foam on their upper lips.
“But he was never in your bed, or close to it?”
“Ella, I was dreaming, but I wasn’t drunk. I wasn’t interested in him. Apart from that dreamthing Brad never got near enough, and neither did anyone else. If it had been Lee things could have been different.”
“I always knew that you had something for each other.”
“I could never have stolen him away from you Ella. He was starry-eyed.”
“But this thing with Brad; it was rape.”
“Yes. At least that’s what I thought then, and for a long time afterwards. But he said I could have stopped it if I’d wanted. It was a mind thing, and I let it happen. I’ve thought about it a lot since. I don’t know if he’s right.”
“But you were paralyzed; he was stronger and he took advantage. It’s no different from the real thing.”
“It might as well have been the real thing.”
“That’s the part that doesn’t seem possible.”
“You see! Even you doubt me! You’ve had experience of dreaming, you’ve been there. You know how it is—but you can’t bring yourself to believe that I got pregnant because of something that happened on dreamside. Maybe she was drunk, maybe she can’t remember, maybe she just doesn’t want to admit it, I’ve had plenty of time to try them all on. How could I expect anyone else to accept this, if you of all people can’t see it?”
“Honora, I do believe you; I have to believe you. Like you said, I’ve got some experience of this, but even for me it seems like a long time ago and sometimes I don’t even know how much of it was true.”
“It was all true, all right. The pregnancy was confirmed, absolutely. No question of error.”
“But you lost the baby? It miscarried? Was that before or after you took an overdose?”
“After. It was the pregnancy that made me do it. I was going mad. You don’t know what it was like. I thought I might have the baby; then I thought it might be born with two heads or not even human at all. And me a good Catholic girl. At least, I was then. Anyway, the suicide attempt induced the miscarriage. It was finished.”
Ella put a hand on Honora’s.
“You’d best be moving if you really want to catch that ferry. Will you let me know what Lee found out about you-know-who? Though I’ll tell you something Ella, I didn’t have a bad dream or a repeater while you were here. Maybe they’ve stopped again after all. God help us, I hope so.”
“I hope so too Honora. Now, no more grieving about lost babies, OK? Promise?”
“No more grieving. I mean, if she were out there now, she’d forgive me, wouldn’t she?”