I'm sitting on the cold, hard floor of a corridor, my back roughly braced by a concrete wall. It is as silent as a catacomb. I'm quite alone in this bricked basement passage, which meanders unevenly towards the subterranean kitchen.
The students on campus have all gone home; I've elected to stay for my own complicated reasons, sitting here, introspecting, struggling to figure out who my actions are hurting, really.
Just the usual people.
---
Élisabeth was the biggest part of it, I think. She has to be part of the background to my current estrangement, my refusal here and now to do the right thing.
It was the thing with Élisabeth which had prompted the most egregious round of their moralising, even leading to physical violence. Yes, my father had really lost it there.
"I never touched another woman before your mother," he had shouted as the blows landed on my shoulders, battering my raised, defensive forearms.
Why not hit him back? That would surely have marked the path of no return. Besides, I saw, in part, where the anger was coming from: the despair and emptiness in my father's nasty moralistic little life.
And a little bit of me was surprised: what, my father has never had sex with any other woman?
---
My relationship with Élisabeth came in three phases, the first of which was quite innocuous. I left school a year ago, in December, but was not due to start university until the following September (I have been here at university for four months though it feels like forever).
There had been some discussions of voluntary work overseas but the dates didn't quite work out. Instead I spent the spring and summer in that cold, distant northern town, working as a live-in assistant at a special residential home for disabled kids. These were teens who couldn't do much of anything. I helped them get dressed, taught them and organised trips.
On my arrival in January, I had been assigned my own little bedroom at the end of a shiny new corridor (the school was refreshingly modern). Next along was a staff room. And then there was Élisabeth's room, laid out, as I was to discover, just the same as mine.
I was just eighteen: away from home for the first time, growing my hair, pleased that the school had an electric guitar I could practice on. I was in that pleasant state where everything was new, everything I encountered was for the first time. I had the arrogant self-confidence of the intellectually successful, knew I was going places, though I didn't know quite where. Perhaps I didn't appreciate the effect that would have on a sensitive working-class girl steeped only in the rough, brawling, macho culture of that bleak, impoverished region.
Élisabeth was petite, perhaps a little on the plump side but blessed with an artless fashion-sense. On our days off she would show me around her home-town. We’d visit discos, funfairs and the freezing seaside. We shopped, frequented cafés and bars and generally hung out. By local standards we were bohemian - exotic creatures in a drab town.
The kids were the first to notice: "Are you going with her, sir?"
Élisabeth was not on the road to college. As far as I could tell, she had no useful qualifications whatsoever and no real interest in ideas. Her strengths were her warmth and her capacity for affection, traits which were rapidly focused on me. Élisabeth said she loved me: what she got back were mumbled placeholders.
The Easter holidays marked the end of phase one of our relationship. We concocted a plan: I would mislead my parents, inform them that term was starting a few days earlier. And I would come up and stay with Élisabeth at the house she shared with her brother.
It worked. After a long day of connections and delays, my train eventually pulled into town and I made my way to her house (it was late, dark and raining when I arrived). To my frightened bemusement, I was met at the door by the brother. I was struck by his greasy black curly locks before noticing the knife he was waving in his hand.
I froze in that shadowy hall; Élisabeth appeared and stretched her arm to bar him. The message was clear: I was hers. Urgent words were exchanged, fragments I could not make out. The young tough backed off and vanished into the dark interior of the house.
The slim, nervous intellectual entered Élisabeth's home.
That night in her bed: I whispered to her afterwards, "That was my first time."
She said, "I know."
---
I look up and down the chilly, deserted corridor. It's still early, I'm not required for half an hour yet. No-one around. I sink my head back between my knees, ignore the numbness in my buttocks and think back six months, to the start of that fateful summer term in the north.
Term began and now we could not keep our hands off each other. At midnight I would stealthily creep along the dimly-lit corridor, tiptoeing past the closed door of the staff-room where the affable night-nurse would be ironing (she of the friendly, knowing look and closed mouth). And now I would arrive, silently turning the handle and slowly easing her door open, slipping into Élisabeth's room - and into her bed.
During those weeks I was - we were - in a bubble of delicious happiness. A bubble bounded by my approaching departure for university - but we never thought about that.
If she was on early shift she might interrupt her rounds to wake me with a cup of tea. Was it so surprising that I would drowsily draw her into my bed? Despite her protestations that she didn't have time, that she had duties to perform, that there were people waiting? Didn't her feeble attempts to stop me make it even more exciting - as her panic was stifled with my kisses and sudden passion, as I thought?
That was her vulnerability, that in her insecurity she could not deny me. And yet somehow we stayed out of trouble. People said nothing - and covered for us.
The school term ended too soon. During the summer holidays she came down to my home to meet my parents, and see my sights for a change. Phase two: we were still radiant with mutual attraction, each a focus for the other: for her, emotional commitment; for me, a blind, hormonal storm of desire.
I wonder in retrospect about my father's reaction. Crammed into his small working class house was this extraordinarily ravishing teenage girl with a stunning figure - much of it revealed by her tight blouses and short skirts. Did her very presence affront his outdated morality? Was he secretly jealous of his son's success? Did he even, ludicrously, try to chat her up?
At the time I did not give it a second thought. I was too busy pooh-poohing my mother’s tentative suggestions of marriage (laughable!).
Saturday morning I take her on the bus to town, show her the art gallery and the shops. Free from the cramping presence of my parents, we walk hand in hand in the warm sunshine, oblivious to the background hum of traffic, each conscious only of the other.
On the bus back we're in the front seat of a sparsely occupied top deck, kissing and canoodling. A sturdy woman sitting at a window half way back studies us from behind. I glance back, note with amusement the disapproving curl of her mouth. She carefully observes my arm around Élisabeth's shoulder, and hears Élisabeth's quiet gasps of pleasure. But inside she surely feels a disquieting warmth, pierced by a stab of fierce jealousy.
We get off half a mile from home, the nearest this bus goes (is that why I chose it?). The track rises across a field and through a line of trees before entering the outskirts of my housing estate. Fifty yards on I whisper, "Shall we do it?" With a nervous smile she lets herself be pulled through long, bleached, tussock grass, over the brow of a small rise. And here it's dotted with small bushes: a small, secluded space of calm.
She settles gracefully into the grass, arches her back - I have time to notice how skimpy that cotton is in her hand. And then she offers herself.
Afterwards we get to our feet, tidy up. I pull her close and we hug tightly, dizzy with relieved euphoria. I take her hand and we trudge back to the path, back to the oblivious chastity of my parents’ home.
A few days later we had an evening out at a city centre disco. It was getting towards last-bus time and I roamed the town centre with her in tow, looking for somewhere, anywhere, private. In the end it was a multi-storey car park, a gap between lonely cars in the dark. She protested but, selfishly consumed with lust, I insisted. And so she complied, lying on her good coat on the gravel with her knickers clenched tight in her hand.
I wrote to her after she'd returned: crass, indiscreet phrases such as 'missing lying between your legs.' I secreted the letter in my bedroom, waiting for a chance to post it. Which was where my mother duly found it.
Another mark of my former naivety, I think. That I had taken the issue here as breach of confidence - how dare they read other people's mail!
My weeping mother and violent father, battering me round the room, bludgeoned me with the bigger picture.
---
And so the world moved on to autumn, the start of university and the final phase of my tortuous relationship with Élisabeth. Once I was studying I obviously couldn't see Élisabeth at the care-home any more. She moved into a bedsit (I never inquired why) and I hitched up Friday afternoons to spend the weekend with her, returning Sunday afternoon. It's a long way, more than 300 kilometres to the border, hours on the road in both directions. I've forged an intimate relationship with autoroute service stations and the best spots to seek a lift.
Our relationship could not survive without daily closeness and working together. Recently she said to me in dismay, "Can't you get sex at college without having to drag yourself all the way up here?". Another time, she tearfully confessed she had slept with someone else in my absence: sex was especially good after that, I recall with self-disgust.
I was breaking her heart.
But I took her question literally, as something to ponder. I had grown tired of her neediness and despised her drinking (although when drunk she was tearful and honest and... the sex was intriguing). But the lustre was gone; I had lost interest in Élisabeth.
It was the week after I’d dumped her - let's say we mutually agreed that things had run their course -when she wrote with her news. I had never given the matter the slightest thought, had always assumed she had made the arrangements.
'Don't worry,' she wrote, 'I'll make the arrangements.'
I wonder what it took her to write those few, utilitarian lines?
A few weeks later I got the follow-up: 'It's been done.'
I recall my interior dialogue just a few weeks ago, edged in barbed shards of guilt: 'I should have gone up and supported her,' I said to myself, 'But we had already broken up, I'd moved on. There was nothing practical I could do. I had nowhere to stay up there and she didn't want to see me again anyway.'
What a fine collection of excuses! I want to hang my head in shame. And yet my remorse is extraordinarily limited. There is even a consoling sliver of masculine pride: I am potent!
Naturally I have not shared any of this with my parents, I'm telling them nothing these days.
I have reached the outer limits of my capacity for empathy but… just pause a moment with Élisabeth. What did she think when she met (for the first time?) a guy who seemed to her to be bright, witty and sensitive? Someone who listened to her, treated her (when out of the grip of lust) with some measure of respect?
Surely she was bowled over. I think she suddenly saw another life ahead. Her parents and siblings and neighbours, she thought, need not mark out her destiny. She must have asked herself over and over again: why had it all gone wrong? And in her culture and experience that must have come down to: what had she done wrong?
Did she ‘make the arrangements’ or did she think that that was the best she was ever likely to get, a gift to be treasured?
---
I've been home once since term began, I hitched down in my usual student garb. I did not completely anticipate my parents’ response to my embrace of late-sixties counterculture.
My shoulder-length hair, dirty combat jacket, torn jeans and bare feet didn't totally cut it with the neighbours either. There were arguments; voices were raised.
So it seems idiotic to go back now, to scandalise them further and to have them beat up on me with their old-fashioned, patriarchal thinking. Better to earn some cash here as a temporary kitchen porter, servicing the convention they're hosting over the Christmas holidays.
Thinking deep thoughts.
My head jerks to the sound of clanging utensils. Someone is wheeling a trolley full of dirty pots and pans towards the sinks. That's my cue. I trudge, head down, towards the wash-up room. Above the door, someone has outlined a cheery message to staff in gold and silver tinsel.
Happy Christmas.
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