Alan Goodwin - Gravity's Chain

To be honest, Jo enjoyed the greater satisfaction: for her a great wrong was righted and years of longing gratified. For me it was a routine evening of sex and fairly average, given some of the delights I’d experienced this last year. But knowing how important this was for her, I should have stayed away. I should have ignored her and waited to see what Bebe had rustled up from Auckland’s underbelly. But I know I’m a sucker—‘no’ and me just don’t seem to go together. At least, I hope that’s the reason. Please don’t let there be something deeply Freudian going on.

The one night should have been the end of the Jo thing, the Jo fling. The situation demanded a fond farewell, promises of future contact with absolutely no likelihood of compliance and a firm shut of the door. Why, then, did I not follow such simple rules? Before I could stop myself, before I seemed to have a proper grip on the day, I invited her to the party after that evening’s show. She was delighted. She positively glowed and sank into my arms like the woman in the films who has finally welcomed the return of her long-lost lover. And, of course, she had.

S ome say that first love is the finest love. Casting a weary, nostalgic eye and forgetting that great corrupter of memory, hindsight, there are times I might agree with that sentiment. There is no doubt that first love is always the purest. It alone has that moment of total intoxication when you first grasp the spirit of love and sense its permanence. First love feels as though it will last for ever, it feels invincible and incorruptible. Nothing and no one will ever prise it away. However, when first love is lost and you love again there’s always a part of you that won’t surrender. There’s always a voice to remind you how your love was stolen and how it hurt.

When I returned to New Zealand from Cambridge I was warm with the glow of a man immersed in first love. I’d been faithful to Mary and I knew she’d been faithful to me. I was loyal to our love and I ached with anticipation at seeing and holding her again. Thinking of Mary and replaying over and over in my mind the moment of our reunion sustained me through the hard and lonely times of our separation.

It was deep winter when I left Cambridge. The temperature had remained below zero for a week, and the coat-piercing wind off the Fens made it considerably colder. Even without snow the city resembled an idyllic Christmas Day picture, with frost so thick and heavy it rimmed windows and transformed tree branches into silver limbs. I owned an old purple Mark I Escort and when the cold weather came I played roulette with the starter motor. One day it started first time, the next not at all, the third a start and a stop with no chance of further resuscitation. There was no pattern; it was chaos theory exemplified. Ali Naidu and I lived in Great Chesterford, a small village just south of Cambridge in a house owned by Mrs Grey.

Never was a woman more aptly named. She’d housed university students for twenty years and the house, and its contents, were unchanged since the first lodger took up residence. Every scrap of colour and every vestige of fun were long drained from the place, just like her pale, tasteless vegetables, which had been boiled to buggery. Mrs Grey, everyone called her Mrs Grey, not only had an aversion to vegetables that might offer the merest resistance to a strong set of teeth, she also had something against heat. The front room, small and overpopulated with heavy threadbare chairs, had a wonderful fireplace, but fire never adorned its splendour. Occasionally when it was a ‘bit chilly’, which for Mrs Grey meant either snow or frost so thick it had to be chipped from the front path with a shovel, she put an electric bar heater on for half an hour. The heater had two bars, but one was broken and the one that worked only got an orange glow along three-quarters of its length. Ali and I learnt to live in four layers of clothing. We became well practised in the art of manoeuvring and eating with arms hardly able to bend. Some nights the sound of Ali’s teeth chattering kept me awake. Poor Ali, how must he have felt coming from Cairo to Great Chesterford? I had enough trouble even if she was slightly more recognisable to me from my visits to Grandmother’s farm.

Ali was on the same physics course as I was, though we hadn’t spoken in the two weeks before we moved in with Mrs Grey. We became friends quickly. This was the first time I’d met anyone of equal intellect. I know that sounds elitist, but that’s how it was for me and how I found Cambridge. I met people every day who understood relativity and quantum theory the way others might understand multiplication or division. I was no longer a freak, always fighting to be accepted as normal; suddenly I was among equals and I could begin exploring the boundaries of my intellect. It was a wonderfully liberating experience and I grew like a limp lilo with a new foot pump: fast and in every direction. Cambridge may have been frosty and cold but already it was my intellectual home. The only thing the place lacked was Mary.

I flew into a New Zealand summer. Even early in the morning, heat was beginning to subdue Auckland. I saw Mary first, not surprising since I was looking out for her the moment I rounded customs control. We gripped each other, Mary shaking with a sob. Dad shuffled on the periphery, embarrassed at our affection. Finally, after Mary released me, I went to him and we shook hands. He stared over my shoulder at some distant point on the back wall, unable or unwilling to look me in the eye. We walked to his car, loaded up and I said goodbye to Mary, just minutes after greeting her, though we would meet later that day.

‘Good flight?’ They were the first words spoken by Dad, who still had that faraway gaze.

‘Yeah,’ I lied. I’d worried the entire journey and was sure the arm rests had the indentation of my fingertips on their underside.

I waited for further comment, but our conversation was done. Even though I hadn’t seen Dad for almost a year, I might as well have just stepped off the bus after being away for the afternoon. Poor Dad, I don’t think he got the Cambridge thing or, to be more precise, I think he chose not to understand. It was easier that way. This was how he dealt with life now. There was a time when he understood, but all that went when Mum left him. Life was much simpler and less worrisome if looked at in monochrome. There was no need for detail any more.

‘I expect you’ll go up to the bach sometime, will you?’ he added some hours later as though the intervening time between our first words and these were forgotten.

‘Thought I’d go up with Mary, Helen and Mike. Is that OK with you?’

‘Should be.’

‘Thanks.’

That was that. Holiday fixed. Well nearly: just before we left, Helen and Mike decided they wanted time by themselves, so they packed a tent and headed south. Mary and I travelled north for a week together before the Christmas and wedding onslaught. It was our first time back since the fateful holiday the year before and our golden moment on the beach. The bach was a mythical place for us now, our private Shangrila where dreams came true. The moment we arrived everything in our lives was how it should be. This was a perfect moment of first love. We sat and watched the sun set, casting an orange glow across the bay and sea. All was gentle, even the smallest flick of surf on the beach. It would be hard to think of a more sublime moment.

‘This is amazing.’ Mary propped her legs on the glass coffee table in the middle of the room and sipped a glass of wine. Her body nuzzled into my side and she felt as soft as the picture before us, just as I had dreamt of her as I sat in the cold of Mrs Grey’s front room.