Helena Read Online Free PDF

the
same with me.
    And my exams
were so important to me. Without Gregory at college, I had put all
my effort into passing them. My head was full of English and
Religious Studies. I so desperately wanted a first. It seemed some
validation of my own intelligence, of my own self-belief.
    I had
restrained my anger all during his visit, but then as he was about
to depart, he asked me if I was going to go down to visit him in
London the following week.
    It all came
out. How could he be so inconsiderate, so selfish to ask such a
thing when he knew that I would be in the middle of my exams? What
did he think I was studying for?
    He apologized
immediately, confessed to his tactlessness, but by then I was
uncharacteristically furious. Maybe it was that his apology seemed
a little too practiced. He always apologized if I was angry, even
if he had no reason to. Humility meant nothing to him, apart from a
functional way of him getting out of a domestic scrap.
    My specific
annoyance at his insensitivity demonstrated at his having to come
to see me in the first place, led to a more general assault on his
character: a veritable assassination. I lambasted him for emotional
cowardice, for taking me for granted; for intellectual pomposity;
for not being a real man. I was terrible, lashing him with my
tongue, my frayed nerves flaying his. He cowered under my attack,
his eyes lowering, his shoulders shrugging with a kind of, 'if
that's the way you feel about it,' attitude.
    He listened
and listened, making no attempt to interrupt me, let alone
contradict me. All that studying had caused me such stress, had
been in a way symptomatic of all those things I had held inside me
for too long, my social and sexual repression, my low self-esteem,
even my predictable future, all my interests and my desires
subsumed by Gregory's unchallengeable convictions. I was out of
control and I knew it. My bitter invective culminated in a slur on
his manhood, as I told him that he didn't even know how to make me
happy in bed.
    Gregory's
train came before we had reached any resolution, before my anger
could subside into a desire for reconciliation. Why couldn't he
have stayed, taken a later train? I wondered. He didn't. He slumped
onto the carriage, relieved perhaps to be no longer under the lash
of my acid tongue. I watched as he took up his window seat, not
even looking at me as I glared at him, shouting my parting words,
"It's finished Gregory. It's all over."
    The train
pulled away. I watched it recede into the distance, imagining it
was my future, prescribed since childhood, disappearing into the
spring night air.
    It was as if I
had seen him for the first time, seen an old, tired young man, a
moral coward who hid his fear behind noble Christian platitudes.
The love he felt for god seemed overwhelming; the love he felt for
me seemed flimsy, half-hearted. I was suffused by a wonderful sense
of freedom and possibility. I was free and I could do anything that
I desired, no longer having to somehow fit in with what Gregory
wanted.
    Of course, a
few hours later I was crying in my room. How could I have been so
callous, so stupid? I had thrown the one good thing in my life
away. And how unfairly! Gregory had come to see me because he cared
about me, because he loved me. How could I accuse him of being
half-hearted, of not really caring about me, if he had spent his
scarce money coming up to see me? And the things that I had said!
Had he really deserved such an onslaught? That first flirtation of
freedom seemed like an aberration once back ensconced with my dry
texts, my dull academic books.
    But for all
that, I felt an incipient pride stirring in me, something holding
me back, something that remembered the sombre, tensed face in the
train window; and I felt that if he truly loved me he would call
me. I suppose that that is why I refused to ring him. I should have
done it that night when I knew that he was back in his college, but
I didn't; maybe also, I was ashamed of my