Losing Nicola Read Online Free PDF Page B

husband’s awkward undergraduates to sherry once a term, while a docile ‘help’ passed round crustless sandwiches with the aid of a niece who’d caught the bus in from Cowley? Concerts at the Sheldonian, young academics giving clever parties, playing word-games and charades, discussing frivolously but with just a touch of earnestness whom they would throw off the sledge first to sate the ravening wolves following so closely behind. Had she fancied that there would be picnics and bathing parties, punting up the river with her hands trailing, leaving a tiny drift of artist’s ink in the thick green water of the Cherwell? Might she have thought there would be holidays in Scotland or Wales or Cornwall? Is that how she’d seen it, in those days of high expectation before the war? It seemed unlikely.
    Maybe she had hoped that, despite my grandfather, she might make it to Paris or to Rome, wear wild hand-painted smocks, meet some Gauloise-smoking artist who would seduce her on a bed of tiger skins and sweep her down to Nice in an open roadster.
    Because her father had refused her permission to attend art school, she went to Oxford and read History instead, eventually, when we moved to Shale, becoming a teacher at nearby St Ethelburga’s Convent, forcing the Reformation and the Industrial Revolution into the stolid minds of good Catholic girls who had no other thoughts in their heads except to marry boys of their own sort and perpetuate the race.
    At break, she sat in the convent staff room with young women in sensible skirts and blouses, who carried round with them the viscous ghosts of lost fiancés and husbands who’d baled out over Holland or dropped in a ball of flame into some German field, been torpedoed in the cold Atlantic or beaten to death by Japanese guards. They were mild-eyed, those bereaved and grieving women who occasionally visited our house for sedate cups of tea, Miss Thompson, Miss Jackson, Mrs Ffoliot, Miss Hargreaves, doomed by the war to be spinsters for the rest of their lives, the shades of the men who might have lent them some validity, might have fulfilled their femaleness, still lying like a bruise on their hearts.

THREE
    T he final summer that we lived at Glenfield, the steady, boring tempo of my life began to alter. At the time, the first change to our routines seemed the least important. It’s only with hindsight that I see how the events were set in motion during those long slow weeks that would discolour the rest of our lives.
    It was one of those long hot summers that linger on in the memory and stand as the paradigm of all the summers of one’s childhood. Day after day the sun blazed from an empty sky, turning our gray Kentish sea to an almost Mediterranean blue. We spent every day on the beach, swimming or sunbathing or endlessly competing against each other to see who could throw a stone the furthest, who could hit a floating piece of driftwood first, who could chuck a pebble into the air and hit it with another.
    It proved to be the rickety bridge between childhood and adolescence. Julian grew six inches and started to sprout hairs on his upper lip; David’s voice began to break. The old freedoms between us suddenly altered. Charles, Julian, even my Orlando, no longer struggled into their bathing suits on the beach, hidden behind an inadequate war-worn towel, but instead wore them beneath their clothes.
    And Nicola came.
    Nicola Stone had recently moved down from London, along with her mother, Louise, and a brother whom we seldom saw. Among other enticing attributes, she possessed a vocabulary of swearwords which even Julian, the oldest of us, hadn’t yet dared to use. Although she was tiny –
‘I was a premature baby.’
– she seemed to be afraid of nothing, especially not the grown-ups. She was two or three years older than I was and she effortlessly took over from Julian as the unacknowledged leader of our pack. She had