Крис Бекетт - Spring Tide

‘I really meant what I said back there in the café, Rick. I didn’t mean to be heavy about it, or to make you uncomfortable, and I’m really sorry if I embarrassed you, but I really do feel at home with you, like I’ve known you all my life.’

Soon after that, we kissed.

Looking back, she was quite controlling. She would readily cede power to me in bed or in conversation, as a parent cedes power to a child in play, but it was always her who set the boundaries. She was never free to see me in the evenings when her husband Derek was home, and usually had to head off in the middle of the afternoon to fetch her kids from school, but I had a bedsit not far from the campus, and we’d meet there for sex, sometimes in the morning, sometimes in the early afternoon, sometimes even in the one-hour gap between morning and afternoon lectures.

‘I love Derek,’ she told me, ‘and I love my kids. When I finish the course here, we’re moving to another city, and you and I will have to say goodbye. Really goodbye, I mean: no presents, no promises, no plans to meet again. But I want you to know that I’ve never loved anyone like I love you, and I never will for the rest of my life.’

Back in those days, when I got everywhere by walking, I had a little game that I used to play to keep me amused. I’d pick out some feature ahead of me, a lamp post perhaps, or a street corner, and try to imagine the me that would, in a few minutes, be walking past it. That person was a complete stranger to me, and indeed, while I was still walking towards my chosen point, he didn’t even exist, wasn’t even as substantial as a shadow. A couple of minutes later, when I reached the lamp post, or whatever landmark it was that I’d picked out, I’d look back at the spot where I’d been when I’d chosen it, and remember that past self from a few minutes ago. And of course it was him that was the stranger now, him that didn’t exist. In fact, assuming that no one else had seen him, there wasn’t a trace of him left in the world, outside of my own already fading and imperfect memory.

So I accepted Nicola’s deal quite readily.

‘The future doesn’t matter,’ I told her. ‘What’s important is that you’re with me now.’

She was with me, she really was. Her body was solid, her lips were warm. I could feel her breath on my cheek. I could smell her sex on my hands and the warm scent on her neck, mingling with the aroma of her skin. I could hear her voice speaking just a few inches from my ear.

‘I am with you now, my dearest, completely and utterly with you.’

We kissed and rolled about and laughed. There are times which are so complete and self-contained that it simply doesn’t seem to matter whether or not they’ll last. And a few minutes later, all that was real in the world was that I was pushing myself up inside her body, where I’d been so many times and would go again many times more. And Nicola was loudly welcoming me.

Never in my life until then had the world felt so rich and full and generous. Never mind the as-yet non-existent future; up to now even the living present had always felt remote and unattainable, as if I’d been condemned for some reason to eke out an existence outside the main flow of time, on some other meaner track that ran alongside it. And, if I’m to be completely honest, the only women I’d had an orgasm with up until then were not even three dimensional, but printed on glossy paper in magazines. I still remember the gluey smell of the ink.

‘I love you, Nicola. I can’t believe how much I love you. I didn’t even know such a thing was even possible.’

‘Nor did I, sweetheart,’ she said, and I released myself inside her body.

I knew a lot about mythology back then – reading mythology is the kind of thing you do on that other meaner track – and now I told Nicola the famous story of how Tristan crossed the Irish Sea to fetch Iseult. He was to bring her back to Cornwall to marry his uncle, King Mark, and neither of them meant anything more to happen than that. But, passing the time together on the first evening, with no land in sight and no one to be with but one another, they accidentally drank a love potion. It hadn’t been meant for the two of them. It was for Iseult and Mark, a gift sent from Ireland to bind together the newly married couple and ensure their happiness. But Iseult and Tristan took it for ordinary wine, drinking it down without a thought, and suddenly all that mattered to them was each other.

Of course, even back then in the days before history began, it wasn’t that far from Ireland to Cornwall. Pretty soon the land appeared ahead of them: just a line on the horizon at first, and then hills, and cliffs, and settlements beside the water with tiny houses strewn on the slopes like little coloured dice. And then King Mark’s castle came into view, with its battlements and its stern grey walls.

When there were only two weeks left before Nicola was to leave, the two of us still acted as if our time together would go on forever. But the parting loomed over us, and there was increasing hysteria in our refusal to think of anything other than now. And however hard we tried not to, we noticed clocks ticking, hands sweeping coldly round. Very soon we reached the final week, and the days began to rush by: six, five, four… It was like being in a car with no brakes and no steering, hurtling downhill. We could already see the lamp post straight ahead of us that we were going to crash into, and there was nothing we could do to avoid it.

Nicola had decided that, for our final meeting, we should cross the bridge again, and go back to that spot in the woods overlooking the Gorge, where the two of us had first kissed. When we reached it, she kissed me again, slowly and very gently, and then stepped back a little so she could look at my face.

‘I think we should say goodbye now, Rick,’ she said. ‘Is that okay with you? When you’re ready I’d like you to walk back over the bridge by yourself. I’ll wait till you’ve had time to cross over, then follow after.’

I nodded. There had to be a moment, I could see that.

‘I’ve brought you a little present,’ she said.

‘Oh Nicola, I haven’t got you one. I thought you said no presents.’

‘Don’t worry, sweetheart, it’s only a tiny thing, and no one but you will be able to tell that it’s a present at all.’

She opened her hand and showed me a child’s marble, a little larger than average, but in other respects perfectly ordinary, made of clear glass with a single twist of scarlet along its axis.

‘I was tidying up after my kids,’ she said, ‘and I saw this lying on the floor. I thought it was a bit like what you and me will have from now on. A flame frozen in time, a flame captured forever at the very moment when it was burning brightest.’

We kissed one more time, much more slowly, holding each other tightly for a long time. Then I turned and walked back through the trees.

So now that glass marble was all I had left of her. Nicola had refused to tell me where she was going, and had always been quite clear that this would be the end, and that neither of us was ever to try and track the other down. Tracking people down was much harder, in any case, back in those days before the internet, and I didn’t even know her married name, for she’d always used her maiden name on the course.

Over the weeks and months afterwards, I struggled to get through the absence that she’d left behind her, like I was some sort of jungle explorer trying to hack my way through a kind of inverted rain forest where everything was cold, and creepers clung to me with an icy grip whenever I tried to move. I remember going down to where we’d studied, just to see her name on the list of the students there, and remind myself that she was real. I remember visiting everywhere we’d been together: the woods, the place in Clifton, the café in the library where our friendship had begun. And I remember, many times a day, taking out that marble to feel it and look at it, reminding myself that Nicola had chosen it for me, Nicola had held it in her hand, Nicola had told me that it signified a love that would not die.