Two of a kind! Spoken to this very shy young man who had spent years worrying if he’d ever manage to negotiate a relationship with any woman at all, that phrase was like a shot of heroin into a main artery! Up to that point, I’d known that I liked Nicola and of course I’d known that I found her very attractive too (although this was true of several other women on the course, including Nicola’s friend Fay), but from that moment onwards, I was utterly and desperately in love.
When you look out into the world you can’t see your own face. All you see is a kind of frame round the edge of your field of vision, with, somewhere towards the bottom of it, a shadowy out-of-focus blob that’s the tip of your nose. I often had the feeling back then that this absence of a face wasn’t just the result of my particular perspective, but was the actual case. I really didn’t have a face, in other words. Other people could look straight in, much as you might look in through the window of some psychic washing machine, and see the tangle of anxiety and shame and frustrated desire that was whirling round inside. So I felt this burst of gratitude and love, but then I panicked. Fearing that Nicola could see straight into my head, I looked quickly away from her to avoid her gaze, and realised to my dismay that I was blushing violently.
‘Oh Rick, I’m so sorry! I didn’t mean to embarrass you!’ Her hand was still resting on mine, and she gave it a reassuring squeeze. ‘It’s just that it’s a very long time since I laughed so much, or felt so comfortable in anyone else’s company.’
I made myself look at her again. Her brown eyes were warm and kind. She wasn’t mocking me, I could see. She didn’t think any less of me for having blushed. Incredible as it might seem, Nicola didn’t just see tangled wet stuff churning round when she looked at me, but an actual face with eyes and nose and mouth, which for some strange reason she’d grown to like. She’d always looked pretty to me, but now she had suddenly become quite extraordinarily beautiful, and I saw that what she had to give, in every single respect, was exactly what I’d always wanted.
‘Me neither,’ I said, quite truthfully. ‘We seem to find the same things funny, don’t we?’
‘We really do,’ she said, and then: ‘It’s getting stuffy in here, isn’t it? Have you got time for a bit of a walk? I could use some fresh air before I put my nose back to the grindstone.’
The hippie café was in the suburb of Clifton, which was a slightly more bohemian place then than it is now. We walked up to the green and then to the famous bridge across the Gorge. Neither of us had set a time limit on this little outing, but at about the point we paid our five pence toll and set out across the bridge, we must both have realised that we’d crossed some kind of line. But we pretended not to notice, continuing to talk animatedly about the course and our lives and the world in general as we headed, without actually discussing where we were going, towards the woods on the far side of the Gorge.
‘I love Leigh Woods,’ Nicola said, ‘don’t you? Have you got time to walk into them just a little bit?’
So then we were under the green leaves together, just me, and this dazzlingly beautiful grown-up who’d sought out my company, walking to a particular spot that Nicola knew, where we could stand and look down into the Gorge. The tide was in, I remember, and some sort of tugboat was coming up the river.
‘I really meant what I said back there in the café, Rick. I didn’t mean to be heavy about it, or to make you uncomfortable, and I’m really sorry if I embarrassed you, but I really do feel at home with you, like I’ve known you all my life.’
Soon after that, we kissed.
Looking back, she was quite controlling. She would readily cede power to me in bed or in conversation, as a parent cedes power to a child in play, but it was always her who set the boundaries. She was never free to see me in the evenings when her husband Derek was home, and usually had to head off in the middle of the afternoon to fetch her kids from school, but I had a bedsit not far from the campus, and we’d meet there for sex, sometimes in the morning, sometimes in the early afternoon, sometimes even in the one-hour gap between morning and afternoon lectures.
‘I love Derek,’ she told me, ‘and I love my kids. When I finish the course here, we’re moving to another city, and you and I will have to say goodbye. Really goodbye, I mean: no presents, no promises, no plans to meet again. But I want you to know that I’ve never loved anyone like I love you, and I never will for the rest of my life.’
Back in those days, when I got everywhere by walking, I had a little game that I used to play to keep me amused. I’d pick out some feature ahead of me, a lamp post perhaps, or a street corner, and try to imagine the me that would, in a few minutes, be walking past it. That person was a complete stranger to me, and indeed, while I was still walking towards my chosen point, he didn’t even exist, wasn’t even as substantial as a shadow. A couple of minutes later, when I reached the lamp post, or whatever landmark it was that I’d picked out, I’d look back at the spot where I’d been when I’d chosen it, and remember that past self from a few minutes ago. And of course it was him that was the stranger now, him that didn’t exist. In fact, assuming that no one else had seen him, there wasn’t a trace of him left in the world, outside of my own already fading and imperfect memory.
So I accepted Nicola’s deal quite readily.
‘The future doesn’t matter,’ I told her. ‘What’s important is that you’re with me now.’
She was with me, she really was. Her body was solid, her lips were warm. I could feel her breath on my cheek. I could smell her sex on my hands and the warm scent on her neck, mingling with the aroma of her skin. I could hear her voice speaking just a few inches from my ear.
‘I am with you now, my dearest, completely and utterly with you.’
We kissed and rolled about and laughed. There are times which are so complete and self-contained that it simply doesn’t seem to matter whether or not they’ll last. And a few minutes later, all that was real in the world was that I was pushing myself up inside her body, where I’d been so many times and would go again many times more. And Nicola was loudly welcoming me.
Never in my life until then had the world felt so rich and full and generous. Never mind the as-yet non-existent future; up to now even the living present had always felt remote and unattainable, as if I’d been condemned for some reason to eke out an existence outside the main flow of time, on some other meaner track that ran alongside it. And, if I’m to be completely honest, the only women I’d had an orgasm with up until then were not even three dimensional, but printed on glossy paper in magazines. I still remember the gluey smell of the ink.
‘I love you, Nicola. I can’t believe how much I love you. I didn’t even know such a thing was even possible.’
‘Nor did I, sweetheart,’ she said, and I released myself inside her body.
I knew a lot about mythology back then – reading mythology is the kind of thing you do on that other meaner track – and now I told Nicola the famous story of how Tristan crossed the Irish Sea to fetch Iseult. He was to bring her back to Cornwall to marry his uncle, King Mark, and neither of them meant anything more to happen than that. But, passing the time together on the first evening, with no land in sight and no one to be with but one another, they accidentally drank a love potion. It hadn’t been meant for the two of them. It was for Iseult and Mark, a gift sent from Ireland to bind together the newly married couple and ensure their happiness. But Iseult and Tristan took it for ordinary wine, drinking it down without a thought, and suddenly all that mattered to them was each other.