Instead he had gone off on his own. And in anger, it seemed.
I thought back to our first meeting sixteen years previously. I’d been twenty-four and had just started teaching at Exeter’s Bodley School. I’d taken a break after finishing my training when the grandmother who’d brought me up became seriously ill. I’d looked after her until her death the previous year. Work and independence were still new to me and I didn’t find Bodley easy. As an English literature specialist I had been attracted to the school because it had been named after Thomas Bodley, founder of Oxford University’s famous Bodleian Library, who was born in Exeter. The school was situated in a leafy residential road to the north of the city, and I’d imagined it to be a civilized, rather bookish seat of learning in this predominately rather middle-class old county town. I was, however, to discover that much of Bodley’s catchment area covered the Bridge Estate, a 1960s-built council development already way past its sell-by date, which, by West Country standards anyway, was quite notorious. And Bodley turned out to be a far tougher school than I’d expected.
Perhaps preoccupied with the assorted problems I had to deal with on a regular basis at Bodley, I was riding my bicycle through the city centre on a wet November day, unaware of any danger, when, as he was passing me, a BMW driver swung in too tightly to take the approaching corner and just caught the rim of my front wheel, which folded right round. The bike collapsed, and me with it. I fell to the ground, raking one arm right along the edge of the pavement and knocking my head. I was momentarily stunned.
Robert was my good Samaritan. A kind stranger at my side in a flash. The BMW driver did not stop. Robert, loudly and colourfully Scottish, cursed him as he tended to me. He seemed to know at least the rudiments of first aid — making me count the fingers he held up in front of me to check if I was concussed, and so on — as indeed, I was later to learn, did all Amaco rig workers. He wanted to take me to hospital, but I insisted that I was fine.
‘In that case I’m taking you home,’ he said.
We padlocked my buckled bike to a railing, to be collected some other time, and picked up a taxi from a nearby rank to take us to the little studio flat I rented near the station in Exwick, less than five minutes’ cycle ride from Bodley School.
Robert found some vaguely appropriate ointment, tore up a tea towel to fashion bandages, and dressed my grazed arm. Then he made us both tea. And I began to notice that striking Gaelic colouring, the black hair, the sharply contrasting pale skin, the light-blue eyes. And his big capable hands. I thought he was an attractive man. Obviously a kind man too.
We began to talk. I told him about my grandmother, whom I’d adored, because she was still so much on my mind. And he said that he too had been brought up by his grandmother who’d also recently died. Wasn’t that a coincidence? He was in his early thirties, some years my senior. He’d decided to move from his Glasgow home to Devon, where his gran had taken him on holidays as a boy, after the irrevocable break-up of a long-term relationship a few months earlier. He also told me about his work in the oil industry, which meant he could make his home, such as it was, pretty much anywhere he wanted.
I don’t know if it was love at first sight. Or lust. Or the shock of my accident, minor as it was. I do know I had never done anything like it before in the whole of my rather sheltered life. But we ended up in bed together that very night. It seemed the most natural thing in the world. Not to mention unexpectedly and wonderfully exciting. It somehow never occurred to either of us to take any precautions. We had unprotected sex, at the time quite oblivious to all that might lead to.
Rob, as he called himself then, stayed the whole night but in the morning told me he had to leave for his scheduled spell of duty on a North Sea rig. He would call me as often as he could and be back to see me as soon as he returned on leave right after Christmas. He said he usually offered to work over the festive season to allow the married men time off at home, but he could spend New Year with me, if I liked.
I shared a quiet Christmas with my father in North Devon, as previously arranged, feeling as if I were in a kind of limbo. And even though Robert did phone several times, from one of the land — sea payphones used on the rigs in those days, I couldn’t help wondering, of course, if I would ever see this man again. He was, however, as good as his word, which was just as well, because I soon realized that I was probably pregnant. Tests confirmed this to be the case. I had fallen for Robbie that very first night.
I told Rob — whom I’d already begun to call by what he’d told me was his full name, Robert, because it seemed to suit him so much better — with some trepidation.
He was overjoyed. I couldn’t believe it. He didn’t seem fazed at all to be having a child with a young woman who was more or less still a stranger.
‘That’s it then,’ he said. ‘We have to find a home together and we have to get married.’
And that is what happened. That was the beginning of our life together. I just allowed myself to be carried along by him, to be swallowed up in his plans.
Robert told me he’d been renting a room close to Exeter city centre, because his work kept him away so much and he’d had nobody to make a home with. He went out one afternoon, just a couple of days after I informed him I was pregnant, saying he had some business to attend to, and arrived back at my little studio flat mid-evening carrying a large suitcase. He said he’d given notice and paid off his landlady. I never even had a chance to see where he’d been living. In any case, he said he hadn’t really been living there at all. The room had just been somewhere to keep his stuff, not that there was much of it, and a place to stay when he was on leave.
A few weeks later we married at Okehampton Register Office. It was a quiet occasion, which Robert had made clear he wanted from the start, and, with the benefit of hindsight, convinced me I did too. My father came up from the coast and was my witness, and I invited a couple of friends from college and a fellow teacher I’d become matey with.
We’d already found and were trying to buy Highrise, which even in considerable disrepair was a much more impressive home than I’d expected us to be able to afford. But Robert had explained how well rewarded his job was, as it should be too, he’d said. The estate agent who helped us find the place turned out to be Robert’s witness. An unlikely choice perhaps, but Robert had an easy explanation.
‘He’s the most important person in my life right now apart from you,’ he said. ‘Thanks to him we have our dream home.’
There was nobody else. He had no relatives left, he told me, and he’d moved on so far from his old life in Scotland that there wasn’t anyone from his past he wished to be present.
I just accepted it all at the time and indeed had accepted it for sixteen years. Robert was a loner after all. Only now did I begin to wonder, to wonder about so much.
The photographer Robert told me he had booked failed to turn up. The only photographs of our wedding were taken by my father with his ancient camera, and the film seemed somehow to have become damaged, so that the images were mostly just a blur. I’d been disappointed, of course, to have no pictorial record of our big day, and Robert had professed disappointment too. Only now did I reflect on how he had so often throughout our marriage avoided having his photograph taken, saying merely that he was camera-shy.