Rosie Thomas - Lovers and Newcomers

One weekend Miranda’s mother came down from Wolverhampton. Selwyn was banished to his rented room near the hospital. Joyce Huggett was in her forties, a normally outspoken and opinionated woman who was uncomfortable in London, which she hardly knew. She was also a little uncertain of her own daughter these days, because Miranda had gone to an ancient university and had acquired sophisticated friends, and was – or was about to become – an actress.

‘Couldn’t you at least wear white, Barbara? It needn’t be anything bridal. Just a little dress and coat, maybe. I’m thinking of the photographs.’

In Joyce’s own wedding picture, dating from the same month as Princess Elizabeth’s, Joyce was wearing a dress made from a peculiarly unfluid length of cream satin, with her mother’s lace veil. By her side, Miranda’s handsome father smiled in a suit with noticeably uneven lapels. The marriage lasted nine years before he left his wife and daughter for a cinema projectionist.

‘I’m not a virgin, Mum,’ Miranda said.

Mrs Huggett frowned. ‘You’re a modern young woman, I’m well aware of that, thank you. But this will be your wedding day. Don’t you want to look special?’

‘I know what I want,’ Miranda said calmly.

They went together to Feathers boutique in Knightsbridge and chose an Ossie Clark maxi dress, a swirling print of burgundy and cream and russet and rose pink that fell in panels from a tight ribboned bodice. Joyce paid for it and Miranda hugged her in real, unforced, delighted gratitude.

‘It’s perfect,’ she said. She agreed with her mother’s plea for her at least to wear a hat, and they chose a floppy-brimmed felt in dusty pink, from Biba.

‘You look a picture. I hope you’ll be happy, love,’ Joyce murmured.

Selwyn was very quiet. He slept a lot, as if he were clinging to every possible moment of oblivion. Without telling Miranda, he stopped going to lectures and practicals, and he smoked even more dope. Instead of balancing his life out, as he had hoped it would, impending marriage was destabilizing it even further. As soon as she became a bride-to-be, Miranda seemed to slip out of his grasp and turn into someone less compliant, less adoring, much less in his thrall than she had ever been before. She was often irritable with him, and he felt so limp and so hopeless that he knew she could hardly be blamed for that. His only responsibility before the wedding, apart from taking his velvet suit to the cleaners, was to find a flat that they could afford to move into together. He did drag himself out to look at two or three places, but the sheer effort of the process exhausted him, and he was shocked to discover that he couldn’t imagine living in these rooms with Miranda as his wife. He never even suggested that they might visit one of the rickety attics or basements together.

One week before the wedding, he got up very early in the morning and left his fiancée sleeping. From Euston he caught a train to Wolverhampton and then took a taxi to Joyce’s.

When she opened the door to him Joyce thought he had come to tell her that Miranda was ill, or dead. She snatched at his wrists, shouting in panic.

‘Where is she? What’s happened to her?’

‘Let me in,’ he begged. ‘She’s all right, it’s me that’s wrong.’

In the narrow hallway, with bright wallpaper pressing in on him, Selwyn blurted out that he couldn’t marry Miranda after all. In her relief that her daughter wasn’t dead or dying, Joyce turned cold and glittery with anger.

‘Does she know?’

‘No. I’ve come to tell you first.’

‘My God. You cowardly, selfish, pathetic creature.’

‘Yes,’ Selwyn miserably agreed. He didn’t need Joyce to tell him what he was. ‘It isn’t right to marry her. I won’t make her happy.’

Joyce looked him up and down. ‘No. You would not. Right. Now you’ve told me, bugger off out of here. I don’t want to look at your face. And leave my daughter alone, do you hear? We’ll be all right, we always have been, Barbara and me. Just don’t mess up her life any more than you’ve done already.’

‘I won’t do that,’ Selwyn promised.

He was true to his word. He gave up his medical studies, left London, and went to stay with the friends in Somerset who had been going to lend the happy couple their cottage for the honeymoon. He started work with a local carpenter, discovered that he had a talent for woodworking, and in between fitting staircases and kitchen cupboards he began to buy, restore and sell furniture.

Miranda recovered, helped by a rebound affair with an actor.

Seven years later, when Amos Knight married the quiet, pretty girl called Katherine whom he had met at the house of one of the other young barristers in his chambers, Miranda wore to their wedding the Ossie Clark dress and the Biba hat. The outfit was by then grotesquely out of fashion, but Miranda carried it off. She was on the brink of making a small name for herself as an actress.

I can’t stop myself. Instead of walking out of the kitchen I lift my head, and our eyes meet. Selwyn’s eyelashes and hair are coated with grey dust, as if he’s made up to play an old man on some amateur stage. He doesn’t try to reach out for me again, and I’m sharply aware that this is disappointing. My heart’s banging against my ribs, surely loud enough for him to hear, and my mouth is so dry that I don’t think I can speak.

Why now? Why, after all these years, is this happening again?

The answer comes to me: it’s precisely because of now.

We’re not young any longer, there’s no network of pathways branching invitingly ahead of us. No personae to be tried on for size. We’re what, and who, we are.

But we’re not yet ready to be old.

We stand in the silent kitchen, speechless and gaping like adolescents, but both of us realizing that through decades of duty and habit we’ve somehow forgotten about the thrill of choice: oh God, the breathtaking drama of sexual choice . The cliché that swims into my head might have been made for this instant. I do feel weak at the knees. I’m not sure that my legs will hold me upright.

When I don’t say anything, Selwyn sighs. He brushes his hand through his hair and a shower of splinters and plaster particles fall like snow.

‘Would it be all right for me to have a bath?’ he asks.

‘You don’t have to ask permission. You live here.’ My voice comes out in a croak, sounding as if I’ve borrowed it from someone else.

‘Thank you,’ he says.

I listen to his steps as he goes upstairs, the familiar creak of the oak boards, the clink of the bathroom latch somewhere overhead.

Without giving myself time to think, I run after him.

From the linen cupboard opposite my bedroom door I snatch up an armful of fresh towels. I race along the landing and push at the bathroom door. Not locked. It swings inwards.

The taps are full on and the room is already cloudy with steam.

Selwyn’s barefoot. He’s taken off his filthy sweater and shirt and dropped them on the floor. As soon as he sees me he nudges the clothes gently aside with his bare foot, clearing a space. He holds out his arms.

What I feel is an extraordinary lightening, giddiness, swirling of blood; it’s like being very drunk but with all my senses cleansed and heightened.

‘I’ve brought you some clean towels.’

‘No, you haven’t.’

He snatches the towels and drops them on top of the clothes.

It’s me who takes the last step.

Our mouths meet. Immediately we begin to consume each other, as if we’re starving, with the steam billowing in clouds around us. Out of the corner of my eye, as Selwyn twists off my jersey, I see that the bath is almost overflowing.