Of course, even back then in the days before history began, it wasn’t that far from Ireland to Cornwall. Pretty soon the land appeared ahead of them: just a line on the horizon at first, and then hills, and cliffs, and settlements beside the water with tiny houses strewn on the slopes like little coloured dice. And then King Mark’s castle came into view, with its battlements and its stern grey walls.
When there were only two weeks left before Nicola was to leave, the two of us still acted as if our time together would go on forever. But the parting loomed over us, and there was increasing hysteria in our refusal to think of anything other than now. And however hard we tried not to, we noticed clocks ticking, hands sweeping coldly round. Very soon we reached the final week, and the days began to rush by: six, five, four… It was like being in a car with no brakes and no steering, hurtling downhill. We could already see the lamp post straight ahead of us that we were going to crash into, and there was nothing we could do to avoid it.
Nicola had decided that, for our final meeting, we should cross the bridge again, and go back to that spot in the woods overlooking the Gorge, where the two of us had first kissed. When we reached it, she kissed me again, slowly and very gently, and then stepped back a little so she could look at my face.
‘I think we should say goodbye now, Rick,’ she said. ‘Is that okay with you? When you’re ready I’d like you to walk back over the bridge by yourself. I’ll wait till you’ve had time to cross over, then follow after.’
I nodded. There had to be a moment, I could see that.
‘I’ve brought you a little present,’ she said.
‘Oh Nicola, I haven’t got you one. I thought you said no presents.’
‘Don’t worry, sweetheart, it’s only a tiny thing, and no one but you will be able to tell that it’s a present at all.’
She opened her hand and showed me a child’s marble, a little larger than average, but in other respects perfectly ordinary, made of clear glass with a single twist of scarlet along its axis.
‘I was tidying up after my kids,’ she said, ‘and I saw this lying on the floor. I thought it was a bit like what you and me will have from now on. A flame frozen in time, a flame captured forever at the very moment when it was burning brightest.’
We kissed one more time, much more slowly, holding each other tightly for a long time. Then I turned and walked back through the trees.
So now that glass marble was all I had left of her. Nicola had refused to tell me where she was going, and had always been quite clear that this would be the end, and that neither of us was ever to try and track the other down. Tracking people down was much harder, in any case, back in those days before the internet, and I didn’t even know her married name, for she’d always used her maiden name on the course.
Over the weeks and months afterwards, I struggled to get through the absence that she’d left behind her, like I was some sort of jungle explorer trying to hack my way through a kind of inverted rain forest where everything was cold, and creepers clung to me with an icy grip whenever I tried to move. I remember going down to where we’d studied, just to see her name on the list of the students there, and remind myself that she was real. I remember visiting everywhere we’d been together: the woods, the place in Clifton, the café in the library where our friendship had begun. And I remember, many times a day, taking out that marble to feel it and look at it, reminding myself that Nicola had chosen it for me, Nicola had held it in her hand, Nicola had told me that it signified a love that would not die.
Of course, in my many long walks across the city, I’d already proved to myself again and again that the past wasn’t even as substantial as a shadow. With my rational head I knew that my time with Nicola had no more substance now than the ghostly former selves I imagined when I looked back at the empty pools of lamplight behind me. But at the level of emotion, I couldn’t accept it. Perhaps it would have been easier if she hadn’t been the first, and if the whole thing hadn’t taken place inside that bubble of secrecy and finite time that had made it seem so much brighter and more vivid than everyday life. Perhaps it would have been better too if I hadn’t imbibed all those heroic stories of impossible doomed loves like Tristan and Iseult’s. But, for whatever reason, I strained and strained against the great numb wall of intervening space that separated me from her, not knowing where she was, or who was now basking in her lovely gentle smile, but determined not to admit to myself that she’d gone.
I never got over that grief in the way that other people around me seemed to do, ending love relationships, pushing through the sadness, and then beginning new ones with the same optimism as before. But I was a human being with needs and I made pragmatic choices. I couldn’t give up Nicola, but I learnt to divide my heart into two compartments, and in that way, I was able to persuade both myself and a woman called Julie that I was in love with her. When we married, I regretted it almost at once, and we were apart again in less than eighteen months. I met another woman called Mary not long afterwards, and in due course married again, but after twelve unhappy and destructive years, that ended too, this time very bitterly, with Mary demanding that I leave, keeping the house and our two kids, and making it as difficult as she could for me to see them at all.
I remember how I searched out that cold hard marble on the day I left them, taking it from a hiding place at the back of a drawer, and slipping it into my jacket pocket. I drove over to my parents’ house, where I was going to stay until I’d found a place of my own. It was a longish journey, and I was exhausted by weeks of almost sleepless nights. Pausing for a rest in a layby, I took the marble from my pocket in the solitude of my car and turned it over in my hands, feeling its solidity and smoothness. Then, as I’d done many times before, I held it up to the window, so as to let the sunlight shine through that cold unmoving flame and make it look, if only very slightly, like something actually alive and burning.
‘I still love you best, Nicola,’ I whispered. ‘Underneath everything else the fire’s still there.’
But even I had to admit that this wasn’t a fire that could actually warm me, so I divided my heart again, looked around me and eventually got together with another woman called Patrice, moving back to Bristol to be with her.
The thing with Patrice lasted for about a year and a half, until she made the decision that it was over. She didn’t make a scene, or punish me as Mary had done, she simply informed me that she no longer wanted to be with me.
‘I feel like I’m dealing with an automaton most of the time,’ she said. ‘Some kind of robot that you’ve placed on Earth to represent you, while the real you goes off alone to somewhere deep inside yourself, where I can’t possibly hope to follow.’
I knew she was right. She’d spotted the compartments in my heart: the small one I’d allowed her to enter, and the big one behind it with the padlocked door. And so, without even attempting to argue, I found myself a little flat and moved out.
This was a dark time. After so many failures, I’d lost all confidence in my ability either to love or to hold the love of others. But I still had the glass marble. I still had the frozen flame. It couldn’t speak to me, or smile at me, or kiss me, it couldn’t caress me or warm me in bed, but it still could, at least to some degree, reassure me. I could be loved, that was what the marble told me, and I was capable of love, for I had once loved and been loved most wonderfully.
One day I put the marble in my pocket and drove over to Clifton, looking for the café where Nicola had told me we were two of a kind. Of course, it had long since gone. Clifton was way too upmarket by then for sleepy little hippie businesses, and the café had been replaced by a shop selling hand-made fabrics. I’d planned to sit at our favourite table, but now I decided instead to recreate the walk to that place in the woods where Nicola and I had shared our first and last kisses. She wouldn’t be with me, of course, but I persuaded myself that if I moved through that same space again, holding her present in my hand, it would bring her at least a little bit nearer.