of their partner quickly waned once they had formalised the relationship but when he asked Nina – and he asked her often, more often than he wanted to – if she was happy she would smile and say yes, of course, he mustn’t mind her strange foibles. Mystified, he would put his arms around her, sniffing the brackish odour of the river or polish from a museum bench in her clothes and hair.
She was rushing past him the first day he noticed her at the university. He had been appointed manager of personnel a month before and was still finding his feet. A person flashed by him, sweeping him into her slipstream rather as a tornado sucks up objects from the ground. He sought out that small, slim figure with the huge brown leather satchel that banged against her hip as she blew around the corridors. It was her lightness, a kind of sprite-like quality, that attracted him and held his interest. He would have to put his hand on her arm to secure her attention and keep her still. Her students, he discovered, called her ‘The Exocet’. She was a popular lecturer, admired for her zest and wit. Her singing voice was surprisingly strong for someone so slight and she occasionally entertained her colleagues or students with Italian and French songs. Her talent for mimicry was well known; she did a convincing Edith Piaf and Shirley Bassey.
He sat opposite her in the buffet one day and introduced himself, explaining that he’d seen her whirling along a corridor. Ah yes, she said she’d noticed his name in the university newsletter. Her head was neat, her glossy brown hair cut like a cap, glinting where the sun was illuminating it from behind. He found out that she had spent the summer in Italy which accounted for her lightly tanned complexion, the same honey shade as the melba toast she was crunching, and the deeper, caramel scatter of freckles across the bridge of her nose. He recounted his own fortnight spent on a walking tour of Tuscany and they swapped stories of Florence and Siena. She pushed her plate away and rested her chin on linked knuckles. He saw that she bit her nails and guessed that her confident air was overstated. He wanted to reach out and cradle her head, which to him seemed terribly vulnerable, between his hands. When she laughed she ran her fingers through her feathery hair so that strands stuck out. He liked the way she didn’t care, wasn’t bothered about her image. She reminded him of one of the wood pixies in an illustrated plate in one of his favourite childhood books, a hardback volume called Tales of the Forest Folk. The pixies were nimble and busy, collecting berries and honey, bandaging the wounded paws of squirrels and badgers. As she talked she played with an empty sugar sachet, folding and smoothing it with narrow fingers, shaping it into a star. Even when she was sitting she appeared active, her arms moving, shifting in her chair.
He used to joke that if he’d known he was going to fall for someone so energetic, he’d have taken up fitness training. Their relationship grew as they walked and cycled. He had to buy a bike, not having owned one since he was sixteen. At weekends they caught the tube and tramped around Epping or Theydon Bois or drove down to Sussex and walked on the Downs. Their cycle routes took them through Hampstead Heath or south of the river, following the Thames. It was autumn when they met and the air was growing misty. Yellowing leaves dived under their wheels and an edge of cold nipped their fingers. Their conversations rose and fell with dips in the road, paced to the rhythms of their booted feet and clicking gears. He found some of the longer walks, the ten-mile ones, hard going but the intensity of a new love buoyed him up, willing his legs on.
She was unlike any other woman he had come across. The two serious relationships he had been involved in before now seemed pleasant but arid affairs. Neither Helen nor Suzy would have made him stop on a road, pushing his head towards a bush and urging him to sniff deeply the pungent leaves. Nina knew the names of trees, plants and wild flowers; she would bend and scoop rainwater from a blossom with a quick flick of her tongue or deftly pick berries and cram them into his mouth so that his lips were purple stained and he would taste the tang of wild fruit for the rest of the day. She told him the best places to find small sweet plums in August and took him to a bridle path where blackcurrants massed, so heavily clustered that they bent to the ground. Her small garden was a riot of carefully tended plants and tubs brimming with greenery. Often, when he arrived, he found her crouching, hands buried in a bag of compost or taking cuttings. Herbs grew everywhere, on window ledges throughout her flat and in a special trough just outside the back door so that it seemed that there was no dividing line between inside and out. She gave bunches of herbs away at the university; dill, sage or marjoram frequently trailed from her satchel, scenting the pages of marked essays as she stood in corridors, advising on their use in cooking or in medicinal drinks. Sometimes she would slip from bed in between love making, returning with a handful of lemon balm which she would massage onto his skin. They rolled on the leaves, crushing them on the sheet as they slipped down a tunnel of fragrance.
One warm morning, when he had stayed the night with her, she took him onto the patch of lawn outside her garden flat and got him to lie face down with her on the damp grass, one ear to the ground. If you listened quietly you could hear all of London moving, she said; the tramp of thousands of feet, the rolling of buses and trains, the surging of boats on the Thames. Concentrating, eyes closed, he thought he could; there seemed to be a humming under the soil.
‘This is my favourite season,’ he said, freewheeling near Richmond. ‘The colours are soft.’
‘Yes, but the tastes are tart and many of the berries are inedible or poisonous. It’s a deceptive time of year; the golds and russets make you want to linger when you should be on your way home, securing your winter nest.’
He gathered that all this evening and weekend activity was what Nina was used to; she had done these walks and cycle trips alone. He wasn’t overweight when they met and he lost half a stone in the first months. A friend commented that love makes some people sleek and others thin. Perhaps he should have read more into the fact that Nina’s weight stayed the same.
It was at a campus party where Nina had sung ‘La Vie en Rose’ in the style of Piaf that he first noticed what he came to recognise as her mask look. It had dawned on him that Nina had no friends, just acquaintances. Her general popularity was exactly that; general, not specific to any one person. He was used to women having networks of friends but apart from when she was socialising in a group, Nina spent her time on her own. He pieced together a picture of a life lived reading, gardening and preparing lectures with frequent exercise and the odd party or theatre outing. She wouldn’t go to the cinema; she couldn’t stand the way it falsified life, she said, lending it a glamour it didn’t deserve.
Piecing together was exactly what he had to do because he found it difficult to form a comprehensive picture of Nina before he met her. She side-stepped those questions that lovers ask each other, confiding in return images of themselves at ten, fourteen, twenty, the problems of previous relationships, the flavour of a childhood. When he talked about his family or his first girlfriend or Angus, a close friend from university days in Warwick, Nina listened and nodded and made the odd comment, but there was no return of information. When he jokingly said that he sometimes thought she must have landed from another planet, that she was an alien sent to gather information, she laughed, replying that she was in regular contact with Mars. Nina would never give an inch when she didn’t want to. The pattern of their life together was quickly established in those first months; when she was being elusive he would joke, nervously trying to conceal how frustrated he felt and, taking his cue, she would joke back. So on each occasion he set a trap for himself and provided the escape route that she used for swift avoidance. Unwittingly, he sowed the seeds of his own unhappiness.
After Nina had done her Piaf at that New Year’s Eve party a young Irishman, a student, came up to them and told her how much he’d enjoyed it. He was obviously on a return trip to the sixties: his hair was long and he wore John Lennon glasses and a tie-dyed shirt.
‘It’s unusual to find a person singing at a party in England,’ he said, ‘other than drunken rugby choruses or the Birdie Song. It’s more the kind of thing you get back home in Ireland.’
‘Which part of Ireland are you from?’ Martin asked him.
‘Strabane.’
