“What time d’you say it leaves?”
“Half-past seven.”
“Well, it’s nothing. Only twenty minutes earlier than the one you usually get. I’m up at a quarter-to, anyway.” My mother was decorating a cake with candied violets. As I had always done, I put a petal on my tongue, let the sugar melt off, and stuck the tiny dab of bruised silk on my palm. “Don’t be a baby, Helen. I’ll be short.”
But I winced at the idea of getting up still earlier to get to a lecture which had altered my timetable. “You see, here’s the disadvantage of staying out of town. Anyone else can get up at eight o’clock.” I saw by my mother’s precision and arched neck that it would be better not to pursue this reasoning, so I said, as I remembered: “Oh …! I shall miss my early morning talk.”
She was not listening: “Who’s that?”
“You remember I told you about the student with the pipe opposite me? D’you know who he is? He’s married to the Theunissen girl, — Lindsay. I think she’s lucky. We’re quite friendly.”
“That awful man Petrie who was Belle Theunissen’s fancy man that she married off to her daughter—? I don’t know how you can talk to him.” She was making a green bow with strips of candied peel; the loops were exactly the same size, the ends were cut exactly level. I stood watching this. But she knew when she had annoyed or offended me, and she could say to my silence with the laugh of pretended innocence: “Huffed? Well, I can’t help it — I must say you have the most peculiar taste.”
The early train was crowded. Like huddled cattle holding their horns motionlessly clear, men balanced their papers above the press. Yet out of habit I pushed through to stand in the third carriage. “Come and sit down.” Among the strangers, the other young man was there; he got up slowly, waited while I climbed over legs to his seat. “—No protests necessary,” he said.
“Still, it’s very nice of you.”
Holding on to the window frame, he smiled down at me the same way again, the resting smile of long acquaintance. Suddenly I was going to ask him … what, I did not know. But the conductor came struggling down the corridor, drowning hand appearing in an appeal for tickets. When ours had been passed from hand to hand and returned, the young man bent to me and said: “Petrie and Trollope are left entirely to themselves now.” I smiled with the quick pleasure one feels when someone unexpectedly confirms something one has felt and been doubted for. “He’s pleasant company, isn’t he? The journey passes quickly with him.”
“He’s one of those people”—he was searching for exactly what he wanted to say—”one of those men whose presence makes — makes the air comfortable. It’s the only way I can put it. All those people rocking from here to there in the train every day; rocking back: he sits there like a sensible hand over the questions you’d pester yourself with.”
I wanted to interrupt with eagerness to agree. That was it. But the young man with the biblical name returned to his reading. When two or three stations had drawn off their workers and the level of heads in the carriage sank to normal, he sat down opposite me, arranging his legs carefully so that his shoes would not scuff mine. I leaned forward and said: “Thank you all the same for giving me the seat,” and he smiled and slid down in his seat spreading his knees comfortably with a faint air of puzzled surprise, as some close member of one’s family, used to the silent acceptance of intimacy, might be surprised by formal politeness.
I sat back gathering my own silence for a breath or two. But I would not let the moment glide by; in defiance to my mother, in response to the stirring that opposed her in me, I wanted to say something real, a short arrangement of words that would open up instead of gloss over. It came to me like the need to push through a pane and let in the air. I leaned forward. “Why do you treat me as if you know me?”
He looked up; there was that quick change of focus in his eyes: from print to a face. He said patiently: “Because I do.” And now it was easy and my boldness made me laugh. He was laughing too. “I’ve known you ever since I can remember. You used to wear a yellow tartan skirt with a big pin thing in it — I used to think you must have a pretty bad mother, if she wouldn’t even sew up your dresses properly.”
“But it was supposed to be like that!”
“So I found out. Not for years though—” He shook his head. “I’d never seen anything like that.”
“But where? I don’t know how it was you could have seen me, known me, if I don’t know you.”
“In the bioscope, the town with your mother, passing in your father’s car — for years. Ever since I can remember.”
I sat there, smiling, doubting. He nodded his head slowly at me, as if to say, yes, yes, it’s true. “You used to have a little pale blond friend and you both used to carry white handbags. Like grown-up women.”
“Olwen. Olwen Taylor and I! But you’ve got an astonishing memory.” My deep interest in myself made the fact of a stranger’s recollections of me remarkable; it was like being shown an old photograph, taken when one was not looking, a photograph of which one did not even know the existence until this moment. And yet there it is, the face one has sometimes caught unawares in a mirror.
“But I used to see you so often in the bus, too. Coming from school.”
“You were never in the bus — I should have remembered you. I can remember any child who traveled on that bus.” At once I was dubious.
“Not in it. I used to cycle home from school at about the same time, and we used to pass the bus — two or three other boys and I, it was a great thing to race it.”
I was filled with the delight of interest in myself. I asked a dozen questions. “I had a fringe? Did you know me when I had a fringe — awful, it was always too long, into my eyebrows. Or was it later, when I had plaits?”—I stopped in amazement again. “I remember all the phases,” he said.
In the pause an impulse of regret grew in me at not remembering him; I could turn back to so many faces, some I had never known, watched and never spoken to, and all the time the one that had been fixed on me had gone unnoticed. His look questioned me, dark, water-colored eyes, mottled and traced with an intricacy of lines and flecks, like markings of successive geological ages on the piece of polished quartz my father kept. “I was trying to imagine you seeing me, and I not knowing you were.” He laughed. I was curious again: “But what were you doing that way? You certainly didn’t live on the Mine, that I’m sure.”
“At that time we were living out at the store — my father’s store. Not in the town”—he anticipated the association—”The Concession stores just outside your property.” He went on explaining but now it was himself my attention was taking in and not what he was saying. Of course this was a different face. There was no place, no feature, no bone one could point to and say: Here, this is where it is; yet the face was different. The faces that had looked in at me when I was an infant, the faces I had fondled, the faces that had been around me all my life had differences, one from the other, but they were differences of style. This face was built on some other last.
I said: “Your name’s Aaron?” not meaning it to sound, as it did, a conclusion.
But he said with that sweet reasonableness that he seemed to keep inside him the way some people keep strength, or touchiness: “Joel. My surname’s Aaron.”
“I thought Ian Petrie said it was Aaron, that’s why.”—Smiling, but I was thinking of a tortoise shell, a confused memory that brought up with it the faded camphor of a defiance, my mother, angry with me, in white tennis clothes. “There was one time I’ll never forget.” He was laughing, with the relish of a story. “I was riding into Atherton to have two of my mother’s hens killed — one under each arm, and balancing furiously — you were sitting at the back of a half-empty bus and you stood right up and watched me go by with such an expression on your face! I kept my head down and rode like hell.”