An Abduction by Tessa Hadley

Jane Allsop was abducted when she was fifteen, and nobody noticed. This happened a long time ago, in Surrey, in the nineteen-sixties, when parents were more careless. She was home from boarding school for the summer, and day after day the sun rose into a cloudless sky, from which Jane couldn’t unfix the word “cerulean,” which she’d learned in the art room. (She wasn’t clever or literary, and was nervous of new words, which seemed to stick to her.) “Cerulean” was more of a blank, baking glare than mere merry blue.

 

It prised its way each morning like a chisel through the crack between Jane’s flowered bedroom curtains and between the eyelids she squeezed tightly shut in an effort to stay inside her dreams. It wasn’t acceptable in Jane’s kind of family to complain about good weather, yet the strain of it told on them, parents and children: they were remorselessly cheerful, while secretly they longed for rain. Jane imagined herself curled up with a bag of licorice beside a streaming windowpane, reading about the Chalet School. But her mother said it was a crime to stay indoors while the sun shone, and Jane couldn’t read outside with the same absorption; there was always some strikingly perfect speckled insect falling onto your page like a reminder (of what? of itself), or a root nudging into your back, or stinging ants inside your shorts.

 

The morning of the abduction, Mrs. Allsop—dishevelled in a limp linen shirtdress—was wielding her secateurs up a ladder, pruning the climbing roses. She was immensely capable; tall and big-boned with a pink, pleasant face and dry yellow hair chopped sensibly short. Jane admired her mother greatly, especially when she transformed herself at night, for a concert in London or a Rotary Club dinner, with clip-on pearl earrings and lipstick and scent, a frilled taupe satin stole. Jane coveted this stole and tried it on when her mother was at the shops, making sultry faces at herself in the mirror—although sultry was the last thing her mother was, and everyone told Jane that she looked just like her. She certainly seemed to have her mother’s figure, with not much bust, no waist to speak of, and a broad flat behind.

“Why don’t you call up some of your old friends?” Mrs. Allsop suggested from the ladder top. “Invite them round to play Ping-Pong.”

 

Jane responded with evasive enthusiasm. (She didn’t know her old friends anymore; that was what happened when you were sent away to boarding school.) She said she was heading inside to find her Jokari set (a rubber ball attached by a long elastic string to a wooden base—you could hit the ball back and forth with a paddle all by yourself for hours on end). It was part of the family code that sport and physical exercise were meaningful ways of passing leisure time; without them, you risked dissipation, letting value slip away.

 

Only Jane’s brother, Robin, was allowed a special dispensation, because he was studying to get into Oxford—it was all right for him to have his head stuck in a book all day and to go around scowling, complaining that the sun gave him headaches. When Jane strayed into Robin’s room (“Buzz off, shrimp, you’re not permitted across my threshold”), he was curled up on his side on the bed, his clasped hands between his drawn-up knees, his glasses off, and his book propped across his face, Pink Floyd playing subduedly on the stereo. It was obvious that he’d been smoking. Mrs. Allsop smoked, with a casual elegance that startled Jane, but only on the silk-stole evenings, or if she had women friends around for tea. (For Robin, blind on his bed with a headache and sex fantasies and short-circuiting flashes of insane ambition, his sister, mutely protesting—she simply stood there till he got up and pushed her out and locked the door behind her—was a visitant from his insipid past, when they’d been friends.) 

 

Jane was listless, her mind a blank with vivid little jets of dissatisfaction firing off in it. Real children, somewhere, were wholesomely intent on untying boats or building dams or collecting butterflies to asphyxiate in jars (as she and Robin had done one summer). She should be like them, she reproached herself; or she should be more thoroughly embarked on her teen-age self, like some of the girls at school, painting on makeup, then scrubbing it off, nurturing crushes on friends’ brothers she’d only ever seen from a distance, cutting out pictures of pop stars from Jackie magazine. Jane knew that these girls were ahead of her in the fated trek toward adulthood, which she had half learned about in certain coy biology lessons. Yet theirs seemed also a backward step into triviality, away from the thing that this cerulean day—munificent, broiling, burning across her freckled shoulders, hanging so heavily on her hands—ought to become, if only she knew better how to use it.

 

She carried the Jokari set down through the patch of woodland toward the bottom of the garden. Her sister, Frances, dark-skinned and fey, not at all like their mother and not yet old enough for boarding school, had chums around to play with. They were supposed to be clearing the drive of rabbit droppings with spoons and plastic bags, for money, but they were all four hunkered in a semicircle under the pine trees, where they had set out tea things for their dolls, a pinecone on each tiny plate, a rabbit dropping in each tiny cup. Jane heard Frances chanting in two alternating voices while the others watched, in thrall to her.

 

“Don’t want it! Don’t want it!” Frances said in her whiny voice.

 

“Eat it up,” her vicious voice replied. “Take your nasty medicine.”

 

When Jane came near, the little girls melted into the undergrowth with hostile backward looks. She kicked their dolls over and hurled the pinecones as far as she could toward the flaunting patches of sky between the treetops (she had a strong throw, her father always said, better than Robin’s); but she lacked conviction even in her malevolence. “We hate her! She’s so ugly,” the witch-children hummed, drifting between the bald pine trunks, keeping out of sight.

 

Jane remembered, as she often did, how once at a friend’s house she had overheard the dotty grandmother asking too loudly who the “plain” one was. The witches didn’t even bother to follow her, to spy on her, which would at least have been some kind of game. She set up her Jokari on a scorched patch of grass beside where their chalky drive debouched onto the road. No cars passed. The road was a dead end, leading only to more big houses like theirs, secretive behind their screens of trees, some atmospheric with the half-timbering that Jane didn’t yet know was a badge of inauthenticity, some with tennis courts from which the thwack of balls didn’t often come.

 

Kicking off her flip-flops, she settled resignedly into her game. The pock and thud of the Jokari ball on the baked ground soothed her, and she started to care about whether she could break her own record of consecutive hits. (She had passed Robin’s record long ago.)

 

Rapt, she didn’t notice her father steering the Rover down the drive, on his way out to pick up the Saturday paper; to save petrol, he liked to roll down with the hand brake off, starting the engine only when he turned into the road. Jane scooped low to the ground under an awkward shot, getting it up with too much force just as the sleek black of the car eased into the edge of her vision; the ball on its elastic must have seemed smashed deliberately and vindictively against the car’s side window (which luckily was not open). Assaulted amid his reverie, Mr. Allsop was outraged out of all proportion to the offense—nothing was broken. He stopped the car and half stood up out of it to rant across its roof at Jane: Stupid girl! Didn’t she have anything better to do?

 

Then the car rolled on, ominously firing to life when it felt the road, and Jane was left wounded, staring after it. The wings of her spirit, which had been beginning to soar, faltered and flung her to earth, because, after all, she had been doing her best, nothing else; and also because her father was supposed to be her ally in the family, though they weren’t at all alike. Mr. Allsop was small and dark, like Frances, easily bored, and clever with figures. He thought about Jane vaguely, through a fog of fond concern, fearing that she had her mother’s flat, bland surface without Mrs. Allsop’s force of conviction—or whatever it was that kept her impermeable, buoyant.

 

Jane dropped her paddle in an uncharacteristic gesture of despair. Tears stung her eyes; she stood with her hands by her sides, palms outward, in a kind of resigned openness. What next, then, if even her attempt at virtue had failed?

 

And that was how they first saw her. They passed Mr. Allsop in the Rover; he was turning out of the unmade-up road just as they turned into it. Mr. Allsop noticed them, because he knew most of the cars that visited the road, and he didn’t recognize or much like the look of this one: an expensive dark-green sporty two-seater convertible, with one long-haired youth in a sloppy vest lolling in each seat, and one—smoking something that might have been more sinister than a cigarette—squeezed into the little luggage space behind, craning forward, as he was bound to, between his friends.

 

The driver, who had one languid hand on the wheel, cornered carelessly in a puff of chalk dust, tires spitting loose stones. (If they were my kids, Mr. Allsop thought, catch me allowing them anywhere near my car. It’s not all bad that Robin’s such a drip.) Had the family ever realized that Jane had been abducted, her father would probably have remembered and suspected these visiting aliens.

 

The boys were drunk and stoned, and hadn’t been to bed at all the night before (but then they hadn’t got out of bed until four the previous afternoon). They were out looking for girls, in Nigel’s father’s car. (Nigel was the one squeezed into the luggage space.) They’d finished their second year at Oxford and were staying at Nigel’s house, about a twenty-minute drive from the Allsops’, while his parents were away in France. After sagging at dawn, dozing in the angular Swedish armchairs in the lounge, and filling Nigel’s mother’s fashionable ashtrays while listening to the Grateful Dead, all three had found a second wind, swimming several thrashing lengths in Nigel’s pool.

 

The loveliness of the morning had then seemed their own fresh discovery: the light as limpid as the water, birdsong skimming the flat echoless air, the sun’s touch intricate on their skin. They had decided that they needed to find girls to crown the day. That was a few hours ago. It had taken them a while to get started; and then there’d been a striking absence, everywhere they’d driven, of available girls.

 

“She’ll do,” one of them called out when they saw Jane, loud enough for her to hear. It was Paddy (not Irish at all), the bulky, clever-looking one in the passenger seat, with small eyes like chinks of bright glass and greasy hair the color and texture of old rope, pushed behind pink ears. He took the joint from Nigel and blinked at Jane through its smoke with a sort of appraising impartial severity, not lascivious.

 

“But where will we put these girls?” Nigel asked facetiously, after one glance at Jane: he didn’t fancy sharing his small space (and wasn’t, in fact, much interested in girls). Paddy explained that they’d have to collect them one at a time.

 

Jane stood barefoot, hands still open in that gesture of self-relinquishment. She wasn’t plain in that moment, though she didn’t know it. Something was revealed in her that was normally hidden: an auburn light in her face, her freckles startling as the camouflage of an animal, blotting up against her lips and eyelids. There were ginger glints, too, in her hair, which she wore in two bunches, fastened with different-colored elastic bands. Her eyes with their pale lashes, because she was unhappy, communicated keenly. Her family called her pudgy, but she just looked soft, as if she were longing to nestle. Her jawline was pure, the pale lips rather full, cracked, parted. She seemed not fake or stuck up—and, just then in the dappled light, not a child, either. None of this was wasted on the boys.

 

It didn’t occur to Jane that the car would stop for her; she watched it hungrily, sifting the silky dust between her toes. Daniel, the driver, Jane saw at once, was the best-looking of the three; in fact, he was crushingly beautiful—his features smudged and vivid at once, as if sketched in black ink—and her heart fastened on him. When he had stopped the car, he asked her what her name was and she told him. “Want to come for a ride?” he said kindly.

 

She hesitated only for a moment.

 

“Not in the back,” she said, quite clear about it. Already, she didn’t care for Nigel.

 

“Between us in the front,” Paddy said, squeezing over.

And so she climbed in, carrying her flip-flops in her hand. On a whim, she had decided against shorts that morning; she was wearing a washed-out old dress in flowered cotton, with a Peter Pan collar.

 

On their way back to Nigel’s house, Jane was an accomplice in an episode of shoplifting—which fortunately went undetected, or at least unreported. She had never stolen anything before; the possibility hadn’t crossed her mind. But she was disoriented: as they drove along, Paddy had pulled the elastic bands off her two bunches so that her hair blew crazily into all their faces. Whipping across her vision, the strands of it were like a hallucination, distracting her from her larger bewilderment at half sitting on Paddy’s knee, feeling Daniel ease his arm around her once, on a straight stretch when he wasn’t changing gears. (Nigel’s father had chosen a manual gearbox on the M.G.C.) “It’s all right,” Daniel had said. “Don’t worry about us. We’re not all bad.”

 

“I like her,” Paddy commented. “She doesn’t talk too much.”

 

The oddest thing was that she wasn’t worrying, although she knew she ought to be; especially when they made plans to keep the shopkeeper talking while she, Jane, slipped bottles of whatever alcohol she could get into their canvas haversack. “He keeps it in a little side room,” Daniel said. “You don’t look as if you drink, so no one will suspect you. If they do, you can cry and say that we kidnapped you and made you do it.”

 

Jane didn’t recognize the shop, though it was only a few miles from her home; her mother had most of their groceries delivered, and, anyway, Mrs. Allsop would never have shopped in such a dimly lit, cellar-smelling place, its windows hung with conflicting advertisements for cigarettes and tea, its shelves crowded promiscuously with faded tins, china souvenirs, regiments of sweet jars. A naked fat ham in orange bread crumbs jostled for space on the counter with packets of parsley sauce and marked-down broken biscuits.

 

Repulsion at the ham’s sickly flesh smell fuelled Jane’s impossible swift acts. She chose the cool bottles by feel in the dark little off-license nook, beyond a curtain of plastic strips, because she could hardly see in there; her eyes were dazzled from the light outside. Her heart thudded as violently as an engine stalling, but her hands were sure. The boys paid for the sliced bread and tomatoes and tin of tuna they bought, thanking the shopkeeper loftily as they left. Jane sat in the car again between them, her trophies chinking on her knee.

 

“Isn’t she good?” Paddy said when they’d driven on and he’d excavated in the haversack, finding dusty Mateus rosé and Johnnie Walker and several bottles of barley wine.

 

“She’s a natural,” Daniel said.

 

“Now she belongs to us,” Paddy said. “We’ve got the dirt on her.”

 

Jane sought in the recesses of her consciousness the remorse that she knew ought to be lying in wait—that poor honest shopkeeper, struggling to make a living! But it was as if all recesses had flattened out for the moment, into a balmy infinite present amid the sunshine and the gusts and swirls of wind as the M.G.C. swerved around bends. Her consciousness was filled to the brim with her contact—astonishing because she was so virgin in contacts—with the boys’ warm bodies, lapping against her; she didn’t even much mind Nigel’s chin resting showily on her shoulder, when he leaned over from his perch in the back. It had never occurred to her, until now, that the masculine—a suspect realm of deep-voiced otherness, beard growth, fact-authority, and bathroom smells—could be so intimately important, in relation to herself; it seemed as improbable as two planets colliding.

 

Now, below the surface of the moment, she began to wait in secret—patiently, because her self-discoveries were very new—for Daniel’s hand to jostle her thigh when he changed gears. She stole long gazes at him from behind the blinding strands of her hair, drinking in whatever it was in his looks that tugged at her so exquisitely. His head was poised on his slight frame in a way that reminded her of the poet’s bust (she couldn’t remember which poet) on the piano at home, which nobody played; his dark hair fell in floppy curls like the poet’s sculpted ones, and his face had the same keen, forward-slanting lines. A fine dimple of skin, puckering beside his mouth when he gave one of his rare quick smiles, was a fatal last touch: Jane thought he was as handsome as a rock star or a film star—only more so, because they flaunted crudely from their posters, whereas Daniel held something back.

 

Nigel had a bottle opener on his key ring, and they started on the barley wine, after a discussion with Jane over whether she drank alcohol or not. “I don’t,” she owned up candidly. “But I might start.” Daniel, solicitous, said that they mustn’t give her too much, just a little sip at a time. They watched her face to see whether she liked the taste and laughed delightedly when it was obvious that she didn’t, although she bravely insisted (“I do! I do quite like it!”), as entertained as if they were feeding beer to a puppy.

 

If Nigel’s parents’ house had been anything like Jane’s, she might have felt a pang of recollection when they arrived, but although it was secluded behind trees like hers, and with the same defensive air of privilege, it was modern—all glass rectangles and slats of unpainted reddish wood. Somehow it explained Nigel, Jane thought: his angular unease and his gape, as if he were blinking in reflected light. Daniel braked on the gravel with a flourish, and they got out of the car, straggling in through the front of the house and then out again at the back almost immediately, as if the bright indoors were an optical trick, not absorbent like the gloomy interiors Jane knew, which were dense with family history. A terrace at the back overlooked a garden landscaped in Japanese style, with artful quartz boulders and ginkgo and Japanese maple trees. The boys seemed unsure for a moment what to do next; Jane knew from observing her mother that it was her role to fill awkward silences.

 

“What a shame I didn’t bring my costume,” she remarked conversationally, looking at the pool, which Nigel was supposed to skim of its flotsam of twigs and leaves and dead insects every day, but hadn’t.

 

“What costume, Bo Peep?” Nigel said. “This isn’t a fancy-dress party.”

 

He’d become waspish at the sight of the awful mess in the house, torn between bravado and responsibility (he thought about his mother); toying with the idea of washing dishes, he put it aside for later.

 

“My swimming costume,” Jane explained.

 

Transplanted out of her familiar world, she seemed to find it easier to be dignified, as if she were moving inside a different skin, sleeker. Perhaps it was partly the barley wine. She was able to penetrate, too, into the others’ motives and relations—grown-up insight seemed to come not through gradual accretion but all at once. Daniel had power over the other two, she saw, just as he had power over her, though not through any conscious exertion of his will. They tracked his movements and his moods: if he was at ease, then they could be, too.

 

And yet he wasn’t tyrannical, was only either pleasant or absent; if he was abstracted, you felt the curse of your failure to interest him. (Paddy, who picked up a book to read as soon as he sat down on the terrace, didn’t care as much as she and Nigel did. Because he was cleverer, he was more detached, with reserves of irony.) Now Daniel suggested coffee and sandwiches, as if this were a summer lunch party and not the tail end of an all-nighter. The idea made everyone carefree; they discovered they were starving. Nigel hunted in the fridge for butter. If Jane had been older, she might have taken the opportunity to parade her femininity in the kitchen, but it didn’t occur to her. Daniel and Nigel made tuna-and-salad-cream sandwiches; she waited with an air of calm entitlement for hers to be brought to her.

 

While they ate, they catechized her on her opinions, and were delighted to find that she believed in God and expected to vote Conservative when she was twenty-one. (“Not just because my parents do,” she insisted. “I shall read the newspapers and make up my own mind.”) They were sitting on the terrace in Nigel’s mother’s striking wicker chairs; Jane’s was a shallow cone set in a cast-iron frame. Daniel was cross-legged on the terrace beside her. She said that it was only fair for everyone to do a day’s hard work, and that people who criticized England all the time should try going to live somewhere else, and that she hated cruelty to animals.

 

All the time she was talking, Daniel was doing something to her feet, which dangled from the rim of the wicker cone: tickling them with a grass seed head, pulling the grass backward and forward between her toes where they were calloused from the thong on her flip-flops. Jane was suffused with a sensation that was mingled ecstasy and shame: shame because she hated her feet, prosaic flat slabs that took an extra-wide fitting. Daniel’s feet (he had been barefoot even when he was driving and in the shop—the shopkeeper had stared) were brown and finely complex, high-arched with wire-taut tendons, curling dark hairs tufting each toe.

 

“D’you think we’re layabouts and social parasites?” Paddy asked her.

 

“I thought that perhaps you were students,” she said shyly. “I sort of know the type, because my brother’s trying for Oxford.”

 

Daniel said that he’d rather not talk about Oxford. “His career there hangs in the balance between brilliance and disaster,” Paddy explained on his behalf. (Daniel’s senior tutor had warned that after certain brushes with the drug squad he might not be allowed to sit his finals.) “And he doesn’t know whether he cares.”

 

“I think we should swim,” Daniel suggested. “It’s just too fucking hot.”

 

Jane blushed: his word was so forbidden that she hardly knew how she knew it—the girls never used it at school. It was an entrance, glowering with darkness, into the cave of things unknown to her.

 

“But I haven’t got a costume,” she said.

 

“Bo Peep’s lost her sheep,” Nigel mocked.

 

“Swim nude,” Daniel suggested. “No one can see—except us, and we like you.”

 

She looked around at them all to see if they were joking, then drew her breath in testingly as you did on the brink of plunging into water. Inspired (and she had been sipping barley wine again, with her sandwich), just then she was capable of anything. Tipping herself out of the cone chair, she took hold of the hem of her dress, to pull it up over her head while the boys watched. (It was as easy as playing with Robin in the old days, she thought, in the garden with the paddling pool.) She was aware uninhibitedly of her young body beneath the dress, in its knickers and bra (she would keep those on, perhaps).

 

But at that very moment another girl appeared from inside the house, astonishing them all: she came through the sliding doors, carrying a glass of fizzing drink ceremoniously, stirring the ice cubes and sucking at it through a plastic bendy straw. Slender and disdainful, with a long narrow nose and slightly squinting eyes, she was wrapped in a sarong. Her chestnut-dark hair fell well below her waist in symmetrical waves, as if it had been tied in plaits and then undone.

 

“She can borrow my old swimsuit if she wants,” the girl said, with an air of unmasking male proceedings beneath her dignity.

 

Nigel had leaped out of his chair, a suspended wicker basket, which went swinging wildly.

 

“Fiona! When did you get here? How did you get in? What on earth are you drinking?”

 

“Vodka,” Fiona said. “And I got in while you were out, because you actually failed to lock anything up behind you, you idiot. I mean, God, Nige, what if I’d been a burglar or something? Then I was fast asleep, until you lot started banging around down here. And this pool’s a disgusting swamp—weren’t you supposed to do something about it? Hi, Daniel and Paddy. Hi, what’s-your-name. My cozzy’s in a drawer in the chest in my bedroom, if you want it.”

 

Fiona was Nigel’s younger sister, aged eighteen and returned by herself from the South of France on her way to drama school. She chose to sit with her drink under an orange umbrella at the far end of the terrace, as if she were semidetached from her brother and his friends. But Jane, with her new intuitiveness, guessed that she sat there because it meant that she was in Daniel’s sight lines the whole time she was yawning and stretching and pretending to sunbathe, showing off her legs through the slit in her sarong.

 

Jane borrowed Fiona’s swimming costume (which was tight on her) and powered up and down the short pool with her strong crawl, face turning into the water then out to breathe, as she’d been taught, all the accumulated rubbish (leathery wet leaves, sodden drowned butterflies and daddy longlegs, an empty cigarette pack) bobbing against her breasts and lips and knees as she swam. No one joined her in the pool. Jane had hardly expected them to; she had accepted immediately the justice of her defeat—right at the moment that she’d had all the boys’ eyes on her—by the older, prettier, more sophisticated girl. (Still, the word “woebegone” nudged at her, from a poem she’d read at school.) When she got out, she would ask Paddy to drive her to a bus stop, then to lend her the money for her bus fare home. She would ask for his address, so that she could repay him: out of her pocket money, because she could never tell her parents where she’d been.

 

Heaving herself out at the side of the pool, she stood streaming water, too shy to ask for a towel. The others were planning a visit to the pub in the nearest village. Jane had never been inside a pub in her life, but she thought there was bound to be a bus stop somewhere in the village.

 

“Come on, let’s go,” Fiona said impatiently. There was only half an hour until afternoon closing time.

 

“We can’t all get in the car,” Nigel said, worrying.

 

“We can if we hold on tight. It’ll be a scream. Paddy, come on.”

 

Obediently, Paddy stood up, stuffing his book into his back pocket. (It was Herman Hesse’s “Steppenwolf.”) He went to look for shoes. Fiona was aware suddenly of Jane. “Oh, God, she’s still got that costume on. Can’t you just put your dress on over the top?”

 

Jane looked down mutely at herself, still dripping.

 

Daniel hadn’t moved from where he was spread-eagled now in a deck chair. He’d been watching Jane’s steady stroke in the pool, how she submitted to the rhythm of it and forgot herself, forgot to wonder whether they were looking at her or not. He had felt, while he watched, that he was seeing deeply into her raw sensibility: fatalistic, acutely responsive, open to anything. He was aware all the time, of course, of Fiona’s maneuvering to make him notice her—there was a bit of past history between them, which he was wary of reviving, not wanting her to get it into her head that she had any rights of possession over him. Anyway, her blasé, bossy voice was grating on him this afternoon. Her displays of sophistication seemed childish, and he was unmoved by the skinny brown stomach flashing at him so insistently from above the sarong.

 

“You go ahead,” he said. “Jane has to change. I’ll wait and walk down with her. We’ll catch up.”

 

Fiona couldn’t hide the sour disappointment in her face, but she had staked too much, too noisily, on her desperate need for the pub to back down now. Jane looked anxiously from one to the other. “I don’t mind,” she said. “You don’t have to wait for me.”

 

“What are you up to, Daniel?” Fiona laughed ungraciously.

 

Daniel kept his eyes closed against the sun while the others quarrelled, getting ready; Jane went inside to change. When he heard the car receding on the road, he followed her in, confused at first in the interior patchwork of light and shadows, after the glare outdoors. He stood listening at the bottom of the open-tread staircase, his breath barely stirring the bright dust motes in their circling. The house was as perfectly quiet as if it were empty, yet he was aware of the girl standing somewhere upstairs, equally still, listening for him. The moment seemed eloquent, as he put his foot on the bottom step and started up, breaking into the peace.

 

He found Jane in Fiona’s room, where she’d left her dress; she was still in the wet costume, although she’d pulled down the blind out of modesty, so that he saw her waiting in a pink half-light. (She’d been afraid, suddenly, to be naked, in case he came looking for her.) His mouth when he kissed her (her first-ever kiss) seemed scalding, because her mouth was cold from the water and from fear. She was cold and clammy all over. When Daniel tried to peel off the sodden swimming costume it knotted itself around her in a rubbery clinging rope and she had to help, rolling it and dragging at it. They left it where it lay when she kicked it off, and its wetness soaked into Fiona’s red rug.

 

Fiona found the wet patch on her rug later and guessed immediately (she had intuitions, too) the story behind it; she thought for one outraged moment that they’d actually done it on her bed. But her bed was intact—thank God for that, at least. Daniel must have taken Jane into the spare room, where he and Paddy were staying. By now it was late afternoon, and Jane was in a phone box in the village, ringing home. (Nigel didn’t want them using the phone at the house, in case his parents complained about the bill.) Daniel waited for her, not interested in her difficulties over what to say. He was smoking, leaning back against the phone box, head tilted to look up at the sky, which was still immaculately blue, just beginning to pale.

 

Even while Jane spoke to her mother in the ordinary words that seemed to flow convincingly, as if from her old self, her new self pressed her free palm on the rectangle of thick glass against which, on the other side, Daniel in his blue shirt was also miraculously pressed, oblivious of her touch. (And she knew now the long brown nakedness of his back under the shirt, with its ripple of vertebrae.) Forever afterward, the smell inside one of those old red phone boxes—dank and mushroomy and faintly urinous—could turn Jane’s heart over in erotic excitement.

 

Her mother’s mild voice was in her ear, incurious: they had begun to wonder where she was. “I told Daddy you’d probably gone off to play Ping-Pong somewhere.”

 

“I’m at Alison’s,” Jane said. “Alison Lefanu. You remember, from Junior Orchestra? French horn. Can I stay the night? It doesn’t matter about toothbrush and pajamas. Her mum says I can borrow them.”

 

Mrs. Allsop, blessedly vague, sent her love to Mrs. Lefanu. “The Lefanus live out at Headley, don’t they? You didn’t walk all that way?”

 

“I was on my way down to the village, and they drove past. I just got in.”

 

Jane was thinking, Will I ever see my home again? It seemed unlikely.

 

“Don’t be a nuisance,” her mother said. “Eat whatever they put in front of you, even if it’s cauliflower.”

 

Now they all sat talking on the terrace in an evening light as thick as syrup; clouds of insects swarmed above the Japanese water features, swallows slipped close along the earth, a blackbird sang. They were drinking Jane’s shoplifted wine and her whiskey; then the boys started messing around with a needle and little glass vials of methedrine, which Paddy fetched from his room. “Don’t look, it’s not for nice girls,” Daniel said to Jane, and so, obediently, she closed her eyes. The boys’ huddle over this ceremony—so intimate, taken so seriously—frightened Fiona and made her even more furious than the wet patch on her rug.

 

She went inside and crashed around the house, effecting a transformation: washing dishes, scrubbing the stove and the kitchen floor, throwing the windows wide open, emptying ashtrays with a clang of the dustbin lid. She shook out the mats from the sitting room, cracking them like whips over the boys’ heads on the terrace. Gradually, as she worked, the resentment slipped out of her and her mood changed. She began to enjoy her own strength and to feel serenely indifferent to the others. If her brother’s friends wanted to get doped up, why should she care? She started to think about drama school. Later, she warmed up some tinned soup, and brought out cheese and crackers for them all. By this time it was dark and the only light came from the lamps she’d turned on inside.

Daniel was trying to explain the idea of the soul as it was understood in the Hindu Vedanta. His words were punctuated by the clonk of the bamboo shishi-odoshi in the garden, which filled up with water then tipped and emptied, falling back against its rock. What he wanted to describe was how the soul’s origins were in wholeness and light, but on its entry into the world it took on the filth of violence and corruption. The soul trapped in the individual forgot its home and despaired; but despair was only another illusion to be stripped away. He wanted to say that revolution was a kind of cleansing that conferred its own immortality in a perpetual present. Art had to be revolutionary or it would die in time. He believed as he spoke that he was brilliantly eloquent, but in truth he was rambling incoherently.

 

Paddy, getting the gist of it, quoted poetry in an ironic voice: “ ‘Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter.’ "

 

“Signor Keats, I do believe,” Nigel said.

 

“Oh, that’s the poet,” Jane said. “We have his bust at home, on the piano.”

 

Cross-legged on a cushion at Daniel’s feet, she was leaning lightly against him, as if she could ground the tension quivering in his right foot, which was balanced across his left knee. His intelligence seemed as ceaseless as an engine working. She felt exceptionally attuned to the boys’ voices rising through earnestness to mockery and back again, although she hardly heard their words, only what ran underneath: a current of strain, a jostling of contest and display. She saw how Nigel tried to match the other two and failed, and how he suffered, yearning for Daniel’s approval.

 

Meanwhile, her own new knowledge filled her up, not in the form of thoughts but as sensations, overwhelming. Her experience in the strange bed that afternoon hadn’t been joyous: there’d been some swooning, obliterating pleasure in the preliminaries, but then too much anxiety in the clumsy arrangements, which she had known (from her biology lessons) would follow. Remembering it all now, though, she was sick with desire and longed for the time to come when Daniel would touch her again.

 

When they did go to bed, however, Daniel was suddenly exhausted; stoop-backed, he crawled between the sheets in his underpants, turning away from Jane, toward the window. “Watch over me” was the last thing he mumbled.

 

And so she kept vigil faithfully for hours in the quiet of the night, presiding over the mystery of her changed life, adjusting her body against the peremptory curve of his turned back and legs in the narrow single bed. But at last she couldn’t help it—she fell asleep herself. And when she awoke in the morning Daniel was gone. After a while, when he didn’t come back, she put on her underclothes and her dress, and set off around the house in search of him. Downstairs, she smelled Paddy’s sweat and saw the tousled mess of his hair, poking from the top of a sleeping bag on the sofa in the lounge. Nigel was making a racket outside with the sliding door of the garage, in search of the net for the swimming pool. Jane climbed upstairs again. Nigel’s parents’ bedroom was at the front of the house, opening off the landing ahead of her; the door was ajar, and Jane stepped soundlessly inside.

 

It was a beautiful room, like nothing she’d ever seen before, with a pale wood floor and plain white walls, creamy sheepskin rugs. Fresh sunlight, pouring through windows all along its length, was reflected in the mirrored doors of the built-in wardrobes; the curtains, in some kind of rough white translucent linen, were cut too long for the windows, and the cloth fell in heaps on the floor. A huge bed seemed to be all white sheets and no blankets. (Jane had never seen a duvet before.) In the bed, with the duvet kicked to their feet, Daniel and Fiona lay naked and asleep, facing away from each other, their slim tanned legs tangled together. Jane, who had done the Greeks in history, thought that they looked like young warriors in a classical scene, fallen in the place where they had been wrestling. She withdrew from the room without waking them, as quietly as she had come in.

 

Nigel, rather the worse for wear, in his pajama bottoms, was smoking and skimming the pool, dumping the rubbish in a soaking heap beside him. He watched when Jane came to stand at the pool’s brink; she stared in with dry, hot eyes.

 

“So now you know,” he said.

 

But she repudiated his offer of companionship in her unrequited love. Her experience was not like anyone else’s. She asked only if he would drive her home, and he said he’d get the car out as soon as he’d finished with the pool.

 

“I’d like to go now,” she said crisply, sounding like her mother. “If you don’t mind.”

 

On the way back, they hardly spoke, except when Nigel asked for directions as they drew near the house. Jane forgot, in her absorption, to notice the way they’d come, so that she never afterward knew where she’d been. And she never saw Nigel’s house again, or any of the boys (Fiona once, perhaps, at a party).

 

He dropped her off at the bottom of the drive. It was still quite early in the morning—only nine o’clock. Jane stared around her as if she’d never seen the place before, as if it were more mysterious than anywhere she’d been—the scuffed dirt at the edge of the road, the old mossy gateposts, blackbirds flitting in the dead leaves at the bottom of the hedge, the hard lime-yellow fruits in the hedge apple tree, her own footprints from the day before intact in the dust, the Jokari paddle left where she had dropped it.

 

Her mother didn’t seem surprised to see her so early.

 

“Did you have a nice time, dear?”

 

Jane said that she’d had fun. But that afternoon she suffered with pain in her stomach and bloating (“What exactly did you eat at the Lefanus?”). And the next day her period came rather copiously and early—which ought to have been a relief but wasn’t, because it hadn’t occurred to her until then (despite the biology lessons) that she could be pregnant. The weather changed, too. So it was all right for her to curl up under her eiderdown, hugging a hot-water bottle to her stomach, reading her Chalet School books and looking up from time to time at the rain running down the window. Her mother brought her tea with two sugars, and aspirin.

 

Jane never told anyone what had happened to her (not even, years later, the boyfriend who became her husband, and who might have wondered). And in a way she never assimilated the experience, though she didn’t forget it, either. As an adult, she took on board all the usual Tory disapproval toward drugs and juvenile delinquency and underage sex, and never saw any implications for her own case. She was fearful for her own daughters, as normal mothers were, without connecting her fears to anything that had happened to her. Her early initiation stayed in a sealed compartment in her thoughts and seemed to have no effects, no consequences.

 

Jane and her husband divorced in their mid-fifties, and her friends advised her to have counselling. The counsellor was a nice, intelligent woman. (Actually, she couldn’t help feeling exasperated by Jane and her heavy, patient sorrows: her expensive clothes, her lack of imagination, the silk scarf thrown girlishly over one shoulder. Of course, she was much too professional to let this show.) Jane confessed that she had always felt as if she were on the wrong side of a barrier, cutting her off from the real life she was meant to be living.

 

“What’s it like, then, real life on the other side?”

 

Haltingly, Jane described a summer day beside a swimming pool. A long sunlit room with white walls and a white bed. A breeze is blowing; long white curtains are dragged sluggishly backward and forward on a pale wood floor. (These women’s fantasies, the counsellor thought, have more to do with interior décor than with repressed desires.) Then Jane got into her stride, and the narrative became more interesting. “A boy and a girl,” she said, “are naked, asleep in the bed. I am curled on a rug on the floor beside them. The boy turns over in his sleep, flings out his arm, and his hand dangles to the floor. I think he’s seeking out the cool, down there under the bed. I move carefully on my rug, so as not to wake him. I move so that his hand is touching me.”

 

That’s more like it, the counsellor thought. That’s something.

 

As for Daniel, well, he trained as a lawyer after he’d finished his literature degree. He got out of the drink and the drugs not long after university. (Paddy never did; he died.) Daniel lives in Zurich now, with his second wife, whom he loves very much, and occasionally, when he’s bored with his respectable Swiss friends and wants to shock them, he tells stories about his wild youth. He is in international human-rights law; he’s a force for good. He’s a good husband and father, too (more dedicated, because of the wildness in his past). Of course, he’s ambitious and likes power.

 

He can just about remember Nigel, and Nigel’s parents’ house that summer, and Fiona (they were together off and on for a few months afterward). But he has no memory at all of Jane. Even if by some miracle he ever met her, and she recognized him and told him the whole story (which she would never do), it wouldn’t bring anything back. It isn’t only that the drink and the drugs made him forget. He’s had too much happiness in his life since, too much experience; he’s lost that fine-tuning that could hold on to the smell of the ham in the off-license, the wetness of the swimming costume, the girl’s cold skin and her naïveté, her extraordinary offer of herself without reserve, the curtains sweeping the floor in the morning light. It’s all just gone.

[The End]

From The New Yorker