produced a wallet from his back pocket and found a creased black-and-white photograph. Nina didn’t take it. She let him hold it in front of her and Martin peered over her arm. There was Nina with long, free-flowing hair, wearing a layered skirt and waistcoat. Her right fist was in the air in a clenched salute, her left hand curled around one pole of a banner saying, TROOPS OUT NOW! A young man whose face still held the last residues of puppy fat lifted the other pole.
Nina took a step back and sipped her drink, looking down into it. ‘Declan Lally. It rings a bell. We were always demonstrating about something then.’
The young man nodded, moving closer to her. ‘I was home for Christmas and I was talking about some of the lecturers, the ones worth mentioning, the ones who don’t just take the money and run. Dad said he’d known a Nina Rawle. When I described you he said you must be the same person and he found this photo in an old album. The right-on sixties!’
‘This is Belfast?’ Martin asked, looking at that other, grainy Nina and then turning to her, touched her arm. ‘I didn’t know that you’d lived in Ireland.’ He was puzzled, because he’d told her that his grandmother who lived in Dagenham was originally from Galway and he had once had a holiday with her there.
‘No, you didn’t know. I don’t teach you, do I?’ she asked Conor, her voice polite but tight.
‘No. I’m doing Spanish and International studies.’ He was pleasantly drunk and you could tell that he was one of those earnest young types who pin you to the wall at parties and give you their world view.
‘Dad said that you were both into politics in a big way. He wanted me to ask you if you still sing “The Red Flag”? He’s active but he’s gone soft; he’s in the SDLP, refuge of the woolly middle-of-the-roader. That was the time to be a student, back then. There was real radicalism, burning-hot stuff. Look at the leaders you had: Tariq Ali, Danny Cohn-Bendit, Bernadette Devlin. Not like now – there are no real lefties, it’s hard enough to find a committed feminist. People spend their time worrying about bank loans and keeping their noses clean in case they can’t get a job. You’ve no idea how lucky you were to have been part of things then, you had the chance to make a real difference.’
Martin was looking at Nina as Conor delivered his enthusiastic monologue. Her face was freezing and setting, shutting down. He was shocked because her features were usually so expressive and the severity of her look alarmed him.
‘You’ll have to excuse me,’ she said, putting her glass down. ‘I think the pizza’s disagreed with me, I must go home.’
Martin hurried after her to the car. She was accelerating away before he managed to close his door.
‘Are you feeling sick? I can drive if you are.’
‘I’ll be okay, probably needed some air.’ She was winding her window down full and an icy breeze caught in his throat.
‘He was a bit of a bore, that guy. Do you remember his father?’
‘Vaguely. I might have spoken to him once or twice. We all went to lots of meetings.’ She turned her head towards her window, taking deep breaths. Her tone was flat, tired, her profile still expressionless.
‘What did you make of Belfast?’
‘It wasn’t a happy time in my life. Could we drop the subject? I think maybe I’ve caught that bug that’s doing the rounds.’
And so the subject was dropped and they never returned to it. Martin assumed that Nina had been homesick in Ireland or experienced a bad love affair. He had nearly left Warwick after a girl jilted him. Because he never met anyone close to Nina, a confidante of any kind, he had no one to ask casual questions of, no way of filling in the gaps she left.
There were other subjects that brought on Nina’s mask face. Funerals, for example; when Martin’s Dagenham grandmother died Nina told him she wouldn’t be going to the mass and service at the cemetery. He was astonished. She hadn’t known his grandmother well but he had assumed that she would accompany him. He had loved his grandmother and felt her loss. When he heard Nina’s words, spoken rigidly, the loss was heightened because he had expected to have her by him in his grief.
‘What’s the problem?’ he asked her.
‘I just don’t like funerals. They’re morbid, they make me feel desperate.’
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