This was going to take time. I needed to be prepared, so I fixed myself a gin and tonic, took a fresh packet of cigarettes from a duty-free carton of Marlboro that Duncan had tolerantly bought me the previous week, lit the first and opened the box. It wasn’t quite like the boxes that I still have up in my own attic. There weren’t the bundles of old letters tied with ribbon, the old reports, the student cards, essays, certificates, school photos. It wasn’t a life. These were the fragments of the bits in between my life.
I lifted out some old books, The Little White Horse, Anne of Green Gables, Pride and Prejudice, Little Women, Kim and some old Look and Learns, each of which I wanted to read through immediately but put aside for another evening. There were some utterly useless objects: old pens, batteries, flattened out tubes of glue, single earrings, lipstick tubes without lipstick. Why hadn’t I thrown them into the bin? Lots of oddities. A heart-shaped box full of cotton wool. What had it contained? Combs. A heavy painted stone, which I decided I would use as a paperweight. A funny little earthenware dish with a picture of a monkey. I’d forgotten all about that. I could use it for paper-clips, perhaps. Some old cassette tapes. I tossed a couple of pocket guidebooks to Greece and Italy straight into the bin. I’d bought the Greece guidebook and never got around to the actual holiday.
Right at the bottom was a stratum of old notebooks. All of us, but especially Natalie and I, used to write and write, especially in those bits of summers that we suppress in later years, the times when it rained for day after day and we knocked around the echoey house. I took a cursory look through the books, the faded old drawings and stories, games of hangman and ghosts, doodles and letters. And the diaries that I used to keep almost every year. A thought struck me and I rummaged around until I found a dull red exercise book inscribed, ‘J. Crane. Journal. 1969’. I flicked through until I reached the last of the biroed pages. It was useless of course. There was no entry for the day after the party or even for the day of the party itself. Life had become too big, too emotional, to be written about in a diary. What had I felt and done in those last golden days? I turned back a couple of pages and read:
24 July
Theo Theodosius!! Natalie is being completely tedious and won’t talk to me, Paul is moaning all over the place, don’t know what’s got into him, Fred and Jonah are totally childish, Claud has been driven round the bend by organising the whole party and he looks ill and he says that he doesn’t know where the tent will go and who will put it up and whose idea it was to have the barbecue – on which everything depends – built virtually as the party’s about to start, and can anybody get in touch with Alan and Martha if there’s an emergency and he (Claud) looks completely ill. And Luke is hanging around looking miserable and Mum and Dad aren’t exactly in the pink either. With all this chaos, and everyone having nervous breakdowns, I feel more wonderful than I’ve ever felt in my whole life. It’s all starting, and it’s wonderful. As I’m writing this, it’s very late at night (Natalie is asleep – she looked really awful this evening but if she’s not going to be nice to me then I’m not going to bother about her). I’m holding a torch over the page and I’m so excited I can hardly hold my pen straight.
Lots of Claud’s organising during the day – fetching food from Westbury, clearing up, deciding who was sleeping where and I hardly saw Theo at all. Then, after supper, when it was starting to get dark, we caught each other’s eye and met outside and took each other’s hands without even speaking and walked around the lawn and through the trees almost all the way to Cree’s Top. We sat down beside each other and kissed and touched. Theo unfastened some of my clothes and he touched my body through the clothes he hadn’t taken off and I touched his body with my trembling hands and I hoped he couldn’t feel the trembling and didn’t care anyway. I Can still feel ripples everywhere and if I close my eyes I can feel just where he touched me, every bit, every spot. We said we loved each other. We lay holding each other and I felt like I wanted to cry but didn’t. Then we walked back very slowly and it was the last crescent of the moon, the thinnest sliver you could imagine. Then we kissed very deeply and said good-night and I tiptoed up the stairs and wrote this and I know I won’t be able to sleep at all.
July 25
I was almost right. I lay for hours and then slept and was woken early by the birds at half past four and I’ve felt half asleep and half in a dream all day. Boring boring boring day. Lucky Alan and Martha just getting the party and not having to get it ready. Everybody miserable as per yesterday. With the addition of Mr Weston who came with the marquee and bricks and things for the barbecue and he was in a very bad mood. And Claud was telling Mr Weston what to do and then they were both in a bad mood. I couldn’t help giggling. (Natalie a complete misery, natcherly.) First Claud said get the barbecue prepared, then suddenly the tent needs to be put up, then by the end of the day the barbecue hasn’t even been done, Claud says first thing tomorrow will be okay, Mr Weston in a complete state et cetera, et cetera. Lots of shouting. Tomorrow is the party and will be total chaos with everybody going all over the place, about ten million people arriving, people staying in different places, the day beginning with all of us sent on errands to every corner of Shropshire by His Highness Claud of Martello. But these are all the boring bits. Theodore and I talked secretly about it and we are not going to go to the party at all (!!!). While Claud is serving hot dogs from the el nouveau barbecudos, Theo and I are going to slip away and go to the woods and I am going to give myself to him completely and I can’t bear it, I’m so happy and so scared.
When I had read it, I wasn’t exactly crying, I don’t know what I was doing, but my cheeks were wet. I didn’t feel weak or anything. I had a deliberate five-minute howl, felt better, washed my face and rang up Caspar. When he answered, I was suddenly not entirely sure why I’d rung and I asked him if we could have a drink together, and he said yes, when?, and I said now, and he said that the problem was that he had a child asleep upstairs in bed and I suggested that I come over with a bottle of wine and I promised to be polite and well-behaved, not to make a scene, I didn’t want sympathy or advice and he said, stop, don’t make any more promises. All right. So I went.
‘You’re a patient man,’ I said to Caspar, when my bicycle was in his hall and my bottle of wine was on his kitchen table.
‘I’m patient with you,’ he said. ‘Don’t rely on it, though.’
‘I’ve been a trial to you, I know. I’m very sorry.’
‘I’m probably attracted to damaged women. It will be interesting to see how I cope with a happy Jane Martello.’
‘Happy?’ I said. ‘Let’s not get carried away.’
I told him about my evening and described, in somewhat general and vague terms, my reading of the old diary.
‘Are you still looking for something, Jane?’
‘No, of course not, I’m putting it all behind me, but I suppose I hoped there would be some amazing confirming detail in there. It still seems so strange. I want something else, I want somebody to tell me it’s all right.’
There was a long silence which I half hoped Caspar would fill with reassurances but he didn’t. He just smiled in a curious way and toyed with his glass, then took a sip of wine.