"Mock Recall" - a short story by Adam Carlton

 

Mock Recall

It is summer, a sunny afternoon in this remote village in the deep Ardèche.

We walk together, just the two of us. No-one else around. The sun, high in this dark blue sky, pours forth its torrents of heat. It's so hot.

We pass by the village school. “Remember,” I say, “when you were fourteen? How I used to offer to carry your books home for you?”

“I had a satchel,” she scoffs.

“And when I thought no-one was looking, I'd take your hand; we'd shyly walk hand in hand?”

“The school would never have permitted us to do that in the street,” she says primly, squeezing my fingers.

The French have this utopian delusion of la France profonde - all pretty villages and delightfully-inefficient small farms. Economic reality, however, is this: this dilapidated main street with its small, decrepit park.

We sit on the ancient, sun-blasted wood of the bench.  On the other side of the road is a small games-pitch of scraggy. dried-up grass: intermingled tufts and bald patches. On the far side, deserted swings and a seesaw.

The silence is immense: everything bakes.

I say, “Even in those days I thought your skirt was remarkably short.”

Like now, I think.

“I looked at those few centimetres of gray pleat and wondered what your teachers thought; how you managed to defy your mother's iron will."

“It wasn't short,” she says.

“Sometimes we used to sit together, at the back of the class,” I say. “Remember those ancient Greek lessons: ‘The Iliad’? Dr Thompson was pretty scary, wasn’t he? The way his eye would rove around the desks, looking for the next victim to pick up the passage, standing up to read aloud from the page, translating from Greek into French in real time. How we’d sit quaking, hoping his eye would not catch ours!”

She doesn’t react. Perhaps she doesn’t know where this is going. Or perhaps she does.

“So much relief when someone else was called out. Driven by unbearable anxiety and tension, I’d put my hand on your knee - under the table, out of sight - running the palm of my hand up the curve of your leg. Knowing you'd not dare make a scene; hoping you’d put your little hand on mine. What mysteries, I thought as my hand encountered the hem of your skirt, would I encounter next?”

“You never did any of that. We never sat together. I did not study Greek.”

“In my first technical job - I was a programmer in a small accountancy company - the marketing director was a handsome, boyish thirty-something guy with fashionably long black hair. He had such confidence and charisma, and his girlfriend was his young PA. She was exquisitely fashionable, dressed impeccably, with stunning good looks. What a couple they made! I remember being sat next to her at the Christmas dinner (he was opposite her) when he was called away for an unexpected phone call.

“The PA excused herself and went to the ladies room. When she got back she smiled at me and said by way of explanation, “I’ve got a surprise for him,” And she opened her hand to show me her rolled-up underwear.”

"You're making that up," she says, "In a pathetic attempt to..."

"No I'm not," I say, "That actually happened; it really happened."

I extend my arm slightly and push my palm between her knees - which part slightly. No overt reaction but suddenly my hand has been tightly gripped.

Locked in position.

Nowhere to go.

Our car is close. What a joy to get back into the air-con! We both drink from the water bottles we’d brought along in the cool-bag. On the drive back I ask her whether she thinks it’s true that men and women have quite different attitudes to sexual exhibitionism.

“When I read the English novelist John Fowles’s notebooks, I was struck by one passage where he describes a walk with his wife Elizabeth - in the woods surrounding Lyme Regis, where he had made his home.

“He wrote that the two of them were overcome with desire for each other, and they went off the path to find a shady nook, where they made passionate, languorous love.

“I think that only happened once, although I am sure that if it had been up to John Fowles that would have been the outcome of every walk. Yet women seem curiously reluctant.

“In fact, as we’re driving now I can’t help but recall how, in very similar countryside, we were once returning from your parents. I had my hand on your thigh and you were quite responsive. We were looking and looking and then we pulled over in a forested lay-by, we got out and there - just a few metres inside the treeline - was a perfect, isolated spot. Do you remember - as I do - all the details of what we both did next?”

We pull up at our hotel, park and scamper across the baking tarmac into the air-conditioned reception area.

“None of those things ever happened,” she says fiercely, “We didn’t even meet until university!”

I smile at her mockingly, “And then I recall…”

“Shut up!” she says, turning on her heel. 

“I’m going up to our room now to lie down!”

She takes a few paces, then stops and turns with a look of mock puzzlement.

“You coming?”