Sarah spent Christmas that year with Elizabeth and her family in Cricklewood. She relaxed with gin and tonic, listened to Elizabeth’s husband complaining about his sister, from whom he had just bought a faulty car. She received presents and gave them, she helped to cook the Christmas dinner. Preparing stuffing for the turkey, she heard herself saying:
‘It’s the only thing that worries me, being alone when I’m old.’
Elizabeth, plumper than ever this Christmas, expressed surprise by wrinkling her nose, which was a habit with her.
‘Oh, but you manage so well.’
‘Actually the future looks a little bleak.’
‘Oh, Sarah, what nonsense!’
It was, and Sarah knew it was: she had learnt how to live alone. There was nothing nicer than coming back to the flat and putting a record on, pouring herself a drink and just sitting there listening to Mozart. There was nothing nicer than not having to consider someone else. She’d only shared the flat with Elizabeth in the first place because it had been necessary financially. That period was past.
‘It’s just that whatever shall I do when I finish at Pollock-Brown?’
‘But that’s years away.’
‘Not really. Thirteen years. When I’m sixty.’
‘They’ll keep you on, surely? If you want to stay?’
‘Mr Everend will be gone. I don’t think I’d want to work for anyone else. No, I’ll retire at sixty. According to the book.’
‘But, my dear, you’ll be perfectly all right.’
‘I keep thinking of the flat, alone in it.’
‘You’ve been alone in it for years.’
‘I know.’
She placed more stuffing in the turkey and pressed it down with a wooden spoon. Sandra Pond would be forty-three when she was sixty. She’d probably look much the same, a little grey in her hair perhaps; she’d never run to fat.
‘How are things going?’ Elizabeth’s husband demanded, coming into the kitchen in a breezy mood. ‘Drink for Sarah?’
She smiled at him as he took tonic bottles from the fridge. ‘I think she’s got the change,’ she heard Elizabeth saying to him later. ‘Poor thing’s gone all jittery.’
Sarah didn’t mention the subject of her flat again that Christmas.
Well Im a les and I thought you was as well, the letter said. Im sorry Sarah I didnt’ mean to of end you I didnt’ no a thing about you, Ive loved other girls but not like you not as much. I really do love you Sarah. Im going to leave bloody PB because I dont want reminding every time I walk into that bloody canteen. What I wanted was to dance with you remember when I said I wanted to do something? Thats what I ment when I said that. Sandra Pond.
Sarah tried not to think about the letter, which both upset and shocked her. She tried to forget the whole thing, the meeting with Sandra Pond and how she’d felt herself drawn towards having a friendship with the girl. It made her shiver when she thought about all that the letter suggested, it even made her feel a little sick.
Such relationships between women had been talked about at school and often occurred in newspaper reports and in books, on the television even. Sarah had occasionally wondered if this woman or that might possibly possess lesbian tendencies, but she had done so without much real interest and had certainly never wondered about such tendencies in relation to herself. But now, just as she had been unable to prevent her mind from engaging in flights of fancy after her meeting with Sandra Pond, she was unable to prevent it from straying about in directions that were inspired by the girl’s letter. The man called George, who over the years had become the root of many fantasies, lost his identity to that of Sandra Pond. Yet it was all different because revulsion, not present before, seemed everywhere now. Was it curiosity of a kind, Sarah wondered, that drove her on, enslaving her to fancies she did not care for? No longer did she think of them as silly; malicious rather, certainly malign, like the stuff of nightmares. Grimly she watched while Sandra Pond crossed the floor of a room, coming closer to her, smiling at her. As the man called George had, the hands of the girl undid the buttons of her dress, and then it seemed that fear was added to revulsion. ‘I really do love you, Sarah,’ the slack voice said, as it had said in the letter, as no other voice had ever said. The passion had a cloying kind of headiness about it, like drunkenness. It was adoration, the girl said, whispering now: it was adoration for every inch of skin and every single hair that grew from Sarah’s body and every light in her eyes, and the beauty of her plainness. The pouting lips came closer to her own, the dimples danced. And Sarah, then, would find herself weeping.
She never knew why she wept and assumed it was simply an extension of her revulsion. She felt no desire to have this kind of relationship with a person of her own sex. She didn’t want a girl’s lips leaving lipstick on her own, she didn’t want to experience their softness or the softness of the body that went with them. She didn’t want to experience a smell of scent, or painted fingernails.
In rational moments Sarah said to herself that as time passed this nightmare would fog over, as other occurrences in her life had fogged over with the passing of time. She had destroyed the letter almost as soon as she’d read it. She had made inquiries: Sandra Pond, as she’d promised, had left Pollock-Brown.
Sarah visited Elizabeth and her family more frequently, she spent a weekend with her brother and his wife in Harrogate, she wrote at length to her other brother, saying they must not lose touch. She forced her mind back into childhood, to which it had regularly and naturally drifted before its invasion by Sandra Pond. It was a deliberate journey now, requiring discipline and concentration, but it was possible to make. Her father ambled into the sitting-room of the rectory, the spaniel called Dodge ambling after him. The wood fire brightly burned as indoor games were played, no one sulky or out of temper. ‘And the consequences were,’ her brother who was an engineer said, ‘fire over England.’ In the sunny garden she read about the girls of the Chalet School. Her brothers, in short trousers and flannel shirts, ran about catching wasps in jam jars. ‘The peace of God,’ her father’s voice murmured, drifting over his small congregation. ‘Of course you’ll grow up pretty,’ her mother softly promised, wiping away her tears.
The passing of time did help. The face of Sandra Pond faded a little, the wording of the ill-written letter became jumbled and uncertain. She would never hear of the girl again, she said to herself, and with an effort that lessened as more months passed by she continued to conjure up the distant world of the rectory.
Then, one Saturday morning in November, nearly a year after the Christmas party, Sandra Pond was there in the flesh again. She was in the Express Dairy, where Sarah always did her Saturday-morning shopping, and as soon as she saw her Sarah knew the girl had followed her into the shop. She felt faint and sickish when Sandra Pond smiled her pouting smile and the two dimples danced. She felt the blood draining away from her face and a tightening in her throat.
‘Sorry,’ Sandra Pond said instead of saying hullo, just standing there.
Sarah had a tin of Crosse and Blackwell’s soup in one hand and a wire shopping basket in the other. She didn’t know what to say. She thought she probably couldn’t say anything even if she tried.
‘I just wanted to say I was sorry,’ Sandra Pond said. ‘I’ve had it on my mind, Miss Machaen.’
Sarah shook her head. She put the Crosse and Blackwell’s soup back on the stack of tins.
‘I shouldn’t have written that letter’s what I mean.’
The girl didn’t look well. She seemed to have a cold. She didn’t look as pretty as she had at the Christmas party. She wore a brown tweed coat which wasn’t very smart. Her shoes were cheap-looking.