Dear Rosemary - a short story by Adam Carlton

 

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Dear Rosemary,

It's curious how a young man's memory shows off its deep, deep roots - even after half a century.

I must have met you at a party in the capital. We were all so young and our organisation was not so large. We'd come up Friday afternoon, sleep in some comrade's house (a surprising number of cadres were rather bourgeois in their well-appointed mansions).

Saturday would be the demonstration, mobilised in our thousands, holding banners, chanting slogans, linked arms; "Flics, porcs, assassins !" on the anarchist banners.

Saturday evening was party time: deeper links forged if we got lucky.

Yes, I rather think I met you at a party.

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Let me see if I can conjure you up: my memories are very clear. You were surprisingly thin, although gamine is more flattering. Your face was round, usually smiling - but from nowhere a little scowl could purse your thin lips.

Your hair was black, fine and quite long but you tidied it behind your head in plaits or sometimes a bun.

You had small breasts and your hips were narrow, not much wider than your slim waist, hence gamine. But you were quite tall, almost as tall as me.

I remember, strangely, your spectacles. I think you were shortsighted. They were quite round, and you had that librarian trick of a cloth loop attached to the arms, behind your neck, so that they could hang down in front.

For me, you were really into librarian chic: you dressed like an elderly aunt though you could not have been older than nineteen (my age). You wore an old-fashioned blouse and a thin cardigan; you generally appeared in long, plain skirts down to your ankles.

I generally thought you looked like a witch - reimagined of course as a bohemian-leftist witch.

You came to visit me in the provincial town where I was a student: it was summer at the end of my second year and everything was still somewhat-new to me: university culture, revolutionary politics, revolutionary girls.

It was the summer vacation. I said to you, why don't we hitch down to the south of France? You said, I knew you'd ask me that.

We slept in barns, in the open, and occasionally in a comrade's house. Once we were picked up by a woman who owned a ski lodge in Annecy. For some reason she took to us and gave us free bed and breakfast, a luxury room whose opulence I would not meet again till much later in my career, when on expenses. Yes, I remember that night - and the sumptuous breakfast next morning 

How weird are relationships on the cusp of adulthood. In Naples we met some guy who offered to drive you up Vesuvius. I was left to my own devices for twenty four hours. What was that about? You were evasive but not a shred of guilt or even concern troubled your face.

On our way back, we were stranded at Avignon for eight hours. The usual tricks - you standing conspicuously, looking cool and superior; I lurk inconspicuously, emerging only at the last moment to catch the grimace of disappointment on the driver's face - those tricks do not work in the absence of traffic. I think our enigmatic relationship frayed from that point on.

In March you came down to see me again, but this time it was just a flyby. You spent the night with our cell leader – who promptly whisked you off to meet his family.

I expected shock, anticipated jealousy, or the visceral jab of loss.

Nothing came: I found myself indifferent.