She felt burdened by weights. First was the haversack on her back and the “little package of goodies for you, dear” that her mother had pressed upon her before she left, with tears in her eyes and lips quivering. She had said, “We had such dreams for you, Ros,” in a fashion that indicated the full extent to which Rosalyn’s news-growing out of a mindless birthday promise to Melinda-had hurt her.
“It’s just a phase,” her father had said more than once during the gruelling thirty-two hours that they’d spent together. And he said it again as Rosalyn left, but this time to her mother. “The dreams are still there, dammit. This is just a phase.”
Rosalyn didn’t try to disabuse them of the notion. She more than wished it was a phase herself, so she didn’t try to tell them that if it was a peculiar, bohemian stage she was going through, she’d been living it actively since she was fifteen years old. She didn’t even consider telling them that. It had taken all her energy and courage to bring the subject up in the fi rst place. Arguing against the likelihood of its fading from significance was more than she was willing to take on.
Rosalyn shifted the haversack, felt her mother’s package dig into her left shoulder blade, and tried to slough off the heavier, more loathsome weight of her guilt. It seemed to slip and slide round her neck and shoulders like an enormous octopus with tentacles that grew from every part of her life. Her church said it was wrong. Her upbringing said it was wrong. As children, she and her friends had whispered and giggled and shuddered just to think of it. Her own expectations had always called for a man, a marriage, and a family. And still she continued to live in defi ance.
Most of the time, she dealt with her life by simply moving forward, one day at a time, fi lling her time with distractions, keeping her attention focussed upon lectures, supervisions, and practicals, while never giving thought to what the future held for someone like herself. Or if she thought of the future at all, she tried to think of it in the global terms of her childhood when her only dream had been to go to India, to teach and do good and live solely for others.
It was a dream, however, that had lost its definitive clarity on the afternoon fi ve years ago when her fifth form biology mistress had invited her to tea and, along with the cake and scones and clotted cream and strawberry jam, had offered seduction, rich, dark, and mysterious. For a while on the bed in that cottage near the Thames, Rosalyn had felt the contradictory powers of terror and ecstasy driving the blood through her veins. But as the other woman murmured and kissed and explored and caressed, soon enough fear gave way to arousal, which prepared her body for its most acute delight. She hovered on the cutting edge of pain and pleasure. And when pleasure finally took her, she was unprepared for the power of its accompanying joy.
No man had ever been an intimate part of her life since that moment. And no man had ever been as devoted, as loving and concerned as was Melinda. So it had seemed like such a reasonable request, really, that she should tell her parents, coming forward with pride instead of dissembling through paralysis and fear.
“Lesbian,” Melinda had said, enunciating each syllable with especial care. “Lesbian, lesbian. It doesn’t mean leper.”
Entwined in bed one night with Melinda’s arms round her and Melinda’s slender, splendid, knowing fingers making her body ache with increasing desire, she had made the promise. And she’d just spent the last thirty-two hours at home in Oxford, living through the consequences. She was exhausted.
At the top floor, she paused in front of her door, groping in the pocket of her jeans for the key. It was time for formal dinner-she’d missed the earlier meal-and although she gave a moment’s thought to donning her academic gown and joining the others for what was left of the meal, she dismissed the idea. She didn’t feel like seeing or talking to anyone.
For that reason primarily, when she opened the door, her spirits drooped further. Melinda was coming across the room. She looked rested and lovely, and her thick sienna hair had been recently washed, for it lay round her face in a wavy mass of natural curls. Rosalyn noted immediately that Melinda wasn’t dressed in her usual garb of mid-calf skirt, boots, pullover, and scarf. Instead, she wore white: wool trousers, cowl-necked sweater, and a long gauzy coat that reached just above her ankles. She looked as if she had dressed for celebration. Indeed, she looked disturbingly bridal.
“You’re back,” she said, coming to Rosalyn’s side and grasping her hand as she brushed a kiss across her cheek. “How did it go? Did Mum have apoplexy? Was Dad rushed to hospital clutching weakly at his chest? Did they shriek out dyke or just settle for pervert? Come on. Tell me. How did it go?”
Rosalyn slipped the haversack from her shoulders and dropped it to the floor. She found that her head was throbbing, and she couldn’t remember exactly when it had begun to do so. “It went,” she said.
“That’s it? No tantrums? No ‘How could you do this to your family’? No bitter accusations? No asking what you think granny and the aunts are going to say?”
Rosalyn tried to block from her mind the memory of her mother’s face and the look of confusion that had pinched her features. She wanted to forget the sadness in her father’s eyes, but more than that she longed to dismiss the guilt that accompanied her realisation of how her parents both were struggling to dismiss their own feelings in the matter, in the process making her feel only so much worse.
“I should think it was quite a scene between you,” Melinda was saying with a knowing smile. “Lots of weeping, lots of hair pulling, lots of gnashing of teeth, the requisite blame, not to mention the predictions of hell-fi re and damnation. The typical middle-class thing. Poor darling, did they abuse you?”
Melinda, Rosalyn knew, had told her own family when she was seventeen in a matter-offact, take-it-or-leave-it announcement so typical of her, made during Christmas dinner, sometime between the crackers and the pudding. Rosalyn had heard the story often enough: “Oh, by the way, I’m gay if anyone’s particularly interested.” They hadn’t been. But that was the sort of family Melinda had. So she couldn’t imagine what it was like to be the only child of parents who dreamed among other things of a son-in-law and grandchildren and the fragile line of a family continuing into the future for just a bit longer.