Given these constraints, the journey from the plausible encounter to the moment when he reached out for me could still be travelled in a thousand different ways.(Even in my fantasies I didn’t dare reach out for him, in case he turned me down.) He had to be surprised out of his position of friendly neutrality and into a dawning, uneasy recognition of his growing attraction to me, an attraction that he perhaps couldn’t quite rationally account for. The transformation could be precipitated in various ways; these were the only extravagance I allowed myself. Sometimes we would be accidentally stranded by a breakdown in the middle of nowhere, after he’d innocently offered me a lift home from college. Or we’d be caught by a freak storm when calling at a cottage belonging to friends of his to pick up some books he’d lent them. Or he would have to take refuge in my room one night after being beaten up by muggers and left bleeding in the road just as I was on my way home.
My favourite scene was acted out somewhere that I don’t think I’ve ever actually been. I imagined a path through a green meadow. I’m absolutely a city girl and don’t know much about the countryside but of course I’ve visited it. I needed to be clear in my mind exactly how we’d got there. Sometimes it was in the aftermath of some other encounter nearer home. (‘Why don’t you come out for a walk next weekend, and I’ll show you where Coleridge is supposed to have started writing “The Ancient Mariner”?’) Or a whole group of us were out on a college field trip and Patrick and I got separated from the others while we were talking. (Tricky, as the only trip he ever came on was to the theatre at Stratford.) Or he had employed me to do some research over the holidays and then on impulse said he’d like to buy me tea in the country as a reward.
We’d walk down this grassy path and reach a gate, which opened into a wood beyond. At the threshold of the wood the light changed from broad bright sunlight to a secretive and dappled shade. There were rustlings among the dead leaves that spread like a carpet under the trees. It was a place I’d invented for a transition, for the passage over from my life into his, from his to mine. The gate was made of old grey wood washed silvery by the rain, it swung crookedly on rusting hinges. He held it open for me, or I climbed over and he helped me down. Something in the change of light stilled us, made us pause; the wood with its pillar-like tree trunks and its tracery of branches was a cathedral. He was still supporting my weight, or I was cast up against him in some way as I came through the gate or passed him on the narrow path. I could feel the heat of his body under the ragged grey wool of the sweater he really often wore.
I could only really sustain the stories up to this point. After that, his face came closer, he put his arms around me, there was kissing, there was pressing together, and the narrative failed; it lost its sequence. I could — and did — imagine plenty of what happened after, but not in a clear order. It came in a hallucinated muddle. I would try to disentangle it. I’d return again and again to the gate, the threshold, the movement with which he reached across the distance between us. I’d start again from there. But it was no good. The dream beyond that point was a stuck film repeating itself. Exhausting, after a while. Dispiriting. Because in truth it was nothing at all.
In my second year I was so short of money that I got a job working three evenings a week at a pub in town. It must have been an old pub once, with lots of twisty little rooms winding around the different levels, but it had been knocked through into one huge, cavernous space, low-ceilinged and gloomy. There were still confusing steps up and down in places, and the floor changed from flagstones to boards to carpets; drunks and women in heels sometimes tripped and spilled their beer. Games machines flashing ruby- and emerald-coloured lights stood against the walls. The place didn’t have much atmosphere. It was more fashionable to go to one of the new bars with long pine tables and stainless-steel counters, where food was served; or to one of the old quaint pubs that had kept their little rooms and served real ale. Big parties came to my pub because there was usually room to seat them all. And men came in to watch the football on the TV screens; the kind of men who didn’t want roasted vegetables in pittas or real ale.
I’d worked in nicer pubs. When I lived at home I’d worked in our local, where the old-timers expected you to start pulling their pints the moment they pushed open the door. I didn’t mind the anonymity of this place. I was often on with temporary staff I didn’t know, and that meant I didn’t have to talk too much. If we weren’t busy, I just kept order behind the bar. I made sure that the glasses were clean, the lemons sliced, the drip trays emptied, the bottles in the optics replaced as soon as they ran out, the ice bucket filled.
While I was taking care of all this I forgot that I was a student. I rarely saw anyone from the college in there, students or staff. Then one night when I came back from asking the landlord to change a barrel, I thought for a moment that I saw Patrick. A man with the same long narrow build and thick shoulder-length hair was standing with his back to the bar, a pint of lager in one hand, looking up at the TV screen. Although this was exactly the sort of plausible scenario I was always dreaming up to bring us together, in reality I didn’t want it to be him. I panicked. I didn’t think I could cope with my two roles at once — competent barmaid and besotted student — and I had no idea how to respond when he turned round and recognised me. But the man, when he turned round, wasn’t Patrick, though he did look rather like him. Rather like him but quite different. He had the same crooked nose — more exaggerated, even — and the same close-together eyes that you saw when Patrick took his glasses off. But he didn’t wear glasses. He didn’t have any of Patrick’s concentrated excitement.
He asked for a pint of Stella in an ordinary accent, not like Patrick’s educated one. When I smiled at him and made some comment about the match, he blushed, and I guessed that he was shy, and maybe not very clever. He probably would have liked to keep the conversation going, but he couldn’t think of what to say to me. And I got a certain pleasure out of the situation. It was like a game; I could play at talking to Patrick, without its really mattering, without being afraid of what he thought of what I said. I chatted while I was handing his change over, before I was called away to serve someone else. When he left the pub, fifteen minutes later, he put his glass on the bar and said goodbye to me in such a way that I knew he’d planned it in advance, hoping that I’d be looking in his direction.
I forgot all about him, I didn’t expect him ever to come in again. But a week later he was back, and after that it was a regular thing. He came with his friends, and I really don’t think it was because I was there; they were just a gang who met up regularly and were going through a phase of drinking in this particular pub. But he did remember me, and looked for me when he came in the door, and blushed if I served him. When his friends saw us chatting together they teased him. They made him go to the bar for every round, and then they whistled and laughed to encourage him.
— Go on, ask her, they said, meaning me to hear.
— Fuck off, he said, red-faced, pretending to be busy with the first mouthful of his pint.
Every time I saw him I’d feel the same shock at his likeness to Patrick. People come in physical types; I’ve seen girls I immediately recognised as belonging to the same type as me: small and round with these deep-lidded frog-eyes. There are dark ones and blonde ones, but the type is as unmistakable as if we belonged to the same subspecies. And, even though there were specific points on which they didn’t match, this man and Patrick had the same overall effect. The man in the pub was blurred where Patrick was definite. His skin was coarser. His hair wasn’t as black and straight: it was dark brown, with honey-brown curling bits in it. He was a little shorter than Patrick, but more muscular, as if he did physical work. I asked him, and he said he was a gas engineer, which wasn’t all that physical, but presumably more strenuous than lecturing in literature of the Early Modern period. He had a little beer belly like Patrick’s. His jeans hung on his narrow hips in the same way. Actually — oddly, considering how unlike their lives and personalities were — they even dressed the same. They wore tight V-necked sweaters over jeans, without a shirt. They wore black T-shirts with those little cap sleeves. I suppose they had both found the styles that suited them.