Losing Nicola Read Online Free PDF

said doubtfully, biting her lip, my hair lying flat across the blade of her hand. ‘Or was it after a lecture? No, I really can’t recall.’
    So I had to supply the details myself. Sometimes I imagined her dashing in from her college playing field in the Woodstock Road, smelling sweaty (no deodorants back then), in a pleated gymslip and baggy blouse, perhaps still carrying the lacrosse stick, which she hadn’t liked to leave outside on the street in case someone stole it, her thin hair wisping around the fine skin of her temples where the blue veins beat. Or she’d be wearing a costume like the one still hanging in her wardrobe, a kind of reddish tweed thing made up for her by her mother’s Scottish dressmaker, a felt cloche on her head, her ink-smudged hands hidden inside leather gloves.
    In the bottom drawer of the chest in her room, there was a Ramsey & Muspratt portrait of her in an ivory satin evening dress, leaning towards the camera with a cigarette in a long ebony holder, her hair arranged in corrugated waves close to her skull. She looked, for the first and perhaps the only time, beautiful. But even I did not imagine she would have turned up at the Cadena Cafe in a satin evening dress, in order to discuss with a stranger the sharing of a motor car.
    I’ve often wondered what he expected, that young lecturer with the shock of wild black hair, madly in love with a pretty girl called Georgina he had met in Germany while a
lektor
at Heidelberg, a girl whose fair hair stood in massed curls around her face and accented her blue eyes. Georgina was English, the daughter of a rich man in Sussex and, since my father was so poorly paid, she was for him what he called a Quite Impossible She.
    So, rising from his seat, newspaper open perhaps at the crossword, perhaps even at the sports page (for he held a half-blue in hockey) did he see the curiously undisciplined inefficient life that marriage to this gawky young woman would provide him with? Did he foresee the wild children, the raffish household, young voices singing round the piano at Christmas time, while turkeys burned and plum puddings boiled dry in their muslin bags? Could he have foretold the unmade beds, the undarned socks, the whole unwifeliness of Fiona? Did he see cold winds blowing in from a grey sea on a winter’s evening, and Miss Prunella Vane, flushed and uncertain, Gordon the Barbarian, Attila the Nun, or any of the other assorted curios that Fiona gathered about her?
    Did he, above all, have the slightest inkling of Fiona’s complete unsuitability for the roles of wife and mother, her total lack of confidence, so much so that she could not even live in Oxford, in case she proved a disappointment to him, which meant that for the whole of his academic life he was forced to live in digs?
    What was it about her that made him marry her? The unattainability of Georgina? The intelligence and, yes, a certain pathos that gleamed in Fiona’s eyes? Or simply a feeling of pity for this awkward creature coming towards him between the tables, knocking over a cup of tea here, dislodging a piece of iced walnut cake there? Could it, unlikely as it seemed, have been love?
    And what had she, the woman who would become my mother, what had she hoped for? Gauche, uncertain, bullied by her scholarly father, ignored by her sister, usurped by her brother, already half in love with a gaunt man from Wycliffe Hall preparing to take Holy Orders, what had she expected from life after she had sat her final exams and graduated? Had she really believed she would become a vicar’s wife and live sedately the rest of her life in some country vicarage or inner city rectory, full of solid worth and good works? Had she expected an ordinary life? A cottage in the Cotswolds? A tall cold house in North Oxford, the gentle plod of academia, dry dons and their starchy wives to dinner, herself in a silk dress, her handsome husband in a suit and tie, inviting her