Of course more than anything I wanted to give Patrick a ride in the Mini, to share the privileges that went with my disadvantages. Ideally it would have been at a weekend, when with any luck the bond between twins would be weaker. But at some point just before I got my test, near the end of the summer term, the Savages had broken off relations with me — both of them. I don’t know who had said what, but one day they just walked past me, and from then on we were classmates only, not friends at all. They didn’t push me around any more. Other hands gripped the controls of the Tan-Sad, though there was no hiatus in my transport schedule. The Savages had selected their own replacements. There seemed no anger involved, just a cool shedding of closeness.
The obvious explanation was that Paul had told Patrick about my interest in him being more than amicable. That would explain why the wrong twin blushed on the day of rupture. As he passed me Paul and not Patrick showed the signs of beta-adrenergic stimulation. Adrenalin was binding to receptors on the surface of his responsive cells for once, triggering the enzyme adenylyl cyclase to raise levels of cyclic adenosine monophosphate (AMP). His face was blatant with secrets.
Looking back I almost think myself pathetic for not insisting on some sort of reckoning. I had done nothing wrong. My love was discreet — how could it be anything else? I had no chance of forcing my affections on him or on anyone.
I should have had my say, my day in court. Except that drama needs a stage, and I had none. How could I have made the estranged twins lean over the Tan-Sad to be arraigned, to have a grievance thrown in their faces? I never even looked into Patrick’s eyes again. I felt as if I had been clean bowled in a game of Howzat when I wasn’t even playing — worse, that I was out lbw. I had never understood how you could be dismissed for something that would have happened, when it hadn’t.
Dad had always been convinced that I made the world dance to my tune, but the incompleteness of this theory was beginning to become obvious. I had a tune, all right, and could hear it myself most of the time, but I couldn’t make it audible to anyone else, let alone persuade them to dance to it.
To raise a differential blush
After breaking up with the twins I was at rather a loose end in matters of the heart. The new hands on the Tan-Sad were attached to bodies, of course, but there could be no question of my transferring my affections to the newcomers (who took quite a while to achieve the teamwork which had come so naturally to the Savages). It had suited me to be obsessed with Patrick Savage, and there was no obvious substitute. Free adults routinely fall in love with married men, creating obstacles to their own fulfilment. I couldn’t exactly reproduce that state of satisfying frustration, but I had come close by developing a crush on one of a pair of twins. It was a sort of insurance policy against anything actually happening. As long as I had devised an insoluble tangle I didn’t need to think about whether there was any risk.
On some level I think I knew I was partly making it up, even at the time. The twins were almost always together — they were like the sets of toys advertised in catalogues, with the footnote not available separately. Perhaps the saddest words young eyes of the period could fall upon.
Patrick and Paul were effectively a couple already, one which resisted the formation of another. I was a fifth wheel from the start. Still, there had been a real fascination in finding one human being bewitching, utterly distinctive even from the back or at a distance, and his twin warmly neutral, even though they were genetically and environmentally so close to identical, and I was one of the very select group that could see through the similarity to the difference. It was quite an achievement, while it lasted, the ability to create embarrassment on one face and leave the other unaffected, to raise a differential blush.
My crush on Patrick Savage wasn’t a very realistic romantic proposition — or else it was profoundly realistic, if deep down I didn’t want things to go anywhere, if I wanted to stay secure in the magic circle of hopeless wishes.
If as the Tibetan Book of the Dead informs us, we choose the womb, then twins also choose each other. Perhaps Patrick and Paul were husband and wife in a previous life, and couldn’t bear to be parted in the next. Except of course that rebirth isn’t a reward but a chore. It’s like getting an essay back with Must try harder written on it. Or elseDon’t try so hard, which is a much harder instruction to obey.
Every Friday I would go to the garage at the end of the village and buy a pound’s worth of petrol. That would set me up for the weekend, and give me five return trips to school. It’s strange that I didn’t mourn the bewitching Broyan, who was of course rendered surplus to requirements by the arrival of the Mini. Peter and I had managed to lay our hands on some Gunmetal Blue of our own in the end, and drove Mum mad painting absolutely everything with it. Plastic kits, to which it wasn’t suited. Doorstops. Any old thing. Mum was mystified by the attraction this smelly stuff had for us.
I don’t even remember my last ride in his taxi, nor our farewells to each other. I’d drunk deep of his being in the weeks when I was taking driving lessons in the evenings but was still being driven to school by him, knowing that I was between stages of life, with the Broyan era drawing to an end. Then in the end I missed him as little as I had missed my budgie Charlie after I had given him away. It was time to go separate ways, but I would never forget the meaty smell of him, or his characteristic gestures — the way, for instance, he would move his neck convulsively, as if he was choking, while actually sliding out his dentures so as to cement them more firmly in place. Pink glue from a little tube. Really, my love for the man was slightly mental. What was the most personal thing he had ever said? ‘Oh, so you had a birfday, did ya? Meant to get a card …’ That was our high-water mark.
Klaus Eckstein was a canny creature, and it may be that he sensed my new availability for non-romantic interests, compensatory obsessions. In his campaign of match-making between me and the Spanish language he escalated from hints (you’ve got so much in common, he was asking about you) to commands (I’ve booked a table — don’t let me down).
‘Here,’ he said at the end of one German lesson, handing me a copy of Nos ponemos en camino, ‘You’ll easily be able to manage the first twenty chapters before the weekend is over, and considering that your work-load is so risibly light, you’ll also have time to take a look at this poem. You can write me an essay on it.’
‘But sir!’ I said. ‘I haven’t even started Spanish, I don’t know if I’m even going to like it or want to do it, and you’re asking me to write an essay on a poem I don’t understand and haven’t any way of translating!’
‘Oh, you’ll manage,’ Eckstein replied. ‘It’s hardly much of a challenge. I’m babying you, really. I had to move from absolutely nothing to degree level in eight months. You should easily manage A-level in a year. And here’s where you begin.’ It did sound easy when he put it that way.
‘So let this help you get off to a good start,’ he added. ‘I’ll expect to receive your completed essay by Tuesday.’ Perhaps he saw panic in my eyes, because he made an uncharacteristic concession. ‘Wednesday at the latest.’ He was even good enough to lend me some Spanish dictionaries. He carried them to the Mini for me, dropping them in the back with a thud. One big, one medium and one small, the Three Bears transformed into reference books.