I limped through 2013, constant pain mitigated slightly by exercises and drugs. I began to think of myself as disabled. Not getting a parking place near my destination could reduce me to tears. When I enquired about parking at the University someone from ‘Occupational Health’ told me that I could use buses to get round Campus. I never worked that one out. Real help came from a kind librarian who gave me access to the disabled entrance so that I did not have to cope with Basil Spence’s statement staircase.

In July 2014 Catherine came to visit and was horrified by my transformation into an old woman bent over a stick. Then, in that same month I finally overcame my terror of hospitals and surgery and went in for a hip replacement. They promised me pre-op Diazapam, but on the day I was told sternly (and correctly) that this was not going to happen. After the operation I hated my short-lived dependency on the nurses, whose kindness brought tears to my eyes. I was lucky to undergo the operation in a specialised arthritis clinic, with one of the best hip surgeons in the country, and wonderful nursing and physio – on the NHS. I was in the clinic for two nights, then home, walking on two sticks. The man who had invited me to dinner in Merton College in 1972, now a world famous surgeon himself, came to see me with his son, a medical student. They took great interest in my recovery, and found it quite remarkable.

For me, it was a miracle to be able to walk again, without pain. Exactly a week after the operation I put on new lime-green shorts and went out to revisit Virginia Woolf’s house at Rodmell. There was a semi-spontaneous reading of ‘Flush’ in the garden, and I read one of the female parts, leaning on my sticks.

By December that year, it was possible to contemplate the kind of holiday where you are on your feet all day long, exploring a city, looking at art. We went to Venice with friends, and stayed in a simple but beautiful hotel on the Grand Canal, opposite the fish market. We woke every morning to scenes of the deliveries to the market, of vaporetti packed with people going to work. In the evenings we drank prosecco in the deserted lounge of the hotel, then went out for dinner, and more walking, until beauty could keep us awake no longer. It was, in every sense, a renaissance.

A year later, in November 2015 we returned to the same hotel, with the same friends. The miracle was repeated. I bought a coat in a designer shop that at first I hardly dared to enter. But I could not resist the chance to practice my Italian, and to try on the coat I had spotted through the window. It shone out at me, and when I put it on, the sensation of lightness and warmth merged with my delight in my regained ability to walk. The coat was the outer expression of the prosthesis that had restored me. It was also the polar opposite of the dressing gown I had slumped around in for over a year. A garment for going out into the world, a feminine take on the pleasures of the flâneur. The old mac I had brought with me to Venice, that just did not look right among the elegant Italian women, was thrown back into the suitcase. In the coat I felt European, not English, and with a new confidence I booked tables in crowded restaurants, ordered meals for the group and exchanged pleasantries in my basic Italian. On Friday 13^th we stumbled on the University degree ceremony in St Mark’s Square. For the rest of the evening the streets were full of young people wearing their laurel crowns, celebrating with friends and families, singing an obscene song. We were carried along in the flow of joyous humanity.

On November 14^th, we woke to the news of the Paris attacks. Anxiety about friends, text messages, reassurance, tears. I lit a candle in the church of San Salute, for the victims, for another European city I had grown to love, for the attack on conviviality, joy and pleasure, on the mixing of diverse people in urban spaces.

We returned home, and a few weeks later set out for Paris, where the welcome was warm, as if the mundane act of getting on the Eurostar was now a statement of solidarity. I had my picture taken in the coat, in our hotel room, before going to lunch with Annie, the writer whose work has illuminated my life for more than two decades, and whose friendship was, is, so precious to me.

July 2016. The Venetian coat is the last garment to be pegged on my clothes line.

In recent weeks (and years) the national and international news has made me rage and weep and rage again. On the morning of the referendum on Britain’s EU membership I delivered leaflets to the bungalows near our village, in high humidity and then rain. I returned home exhausted, conscious of the futility of my efforts, wishing I had started earlier, done more. Social media debates and a split in my own family added a new and painful personal twist to political issues. In the family row that blew up over Brexit I realised more than ever that I am separated from my family by social class, by my education, and that underneath the affection and everyday chats, there is resentment and anger: ‘You are never here’ one relative protested. I muttered about monthly visits, the M25, the seven hour journey home, in turn angry and guilt-ridden. My visits are like a royal progression. In preparation floors are washed, windows cleaned, tables dusted. They buy olive oil (the wrong kind) and Greek yoghurt, and wonder what to cook for my delicate middle-class tastes. My views on Brexit, on immigration make them uncomfortable, angry. What do southerners from Sussex villages know about how Wolverhampton has changed, what the town used to be like, and is no more? In the result they won, I lost, but in the longer term, of course, we all lose.

A week after the referendum we flew to Nice, then on by taxi to Villefranche-sur-mer.

When we tell the taxi driver that after this we are going on to Marseilles, he comments ‘Marseille, c’est l’Afrique’. He complains about paying too much tax. We spend an idyllic week with a dear Canadian friend, trying not to think about Britain’s impending isolation from the rest of Europe, the racist attacks, and new energy of the extreme Right in Britain and elsewhere. On the beach police officers make a group of young black people pick up litter they have supposedly dropped. They argue about every piece.

We visit the now state-owned villas of the Côte d’Azur for the first time, our hearts warmed, souls fed by their beautiful, luxuriant gardens and decadent, slightly camp interiors. A day trip to Nice. The narrow streets of the old town, a market, warmth, sunshine, insouciance. On the way back to the station we notice armed soldiers and comment on how ineffective their presence is, just a symbolic gesture aiming to convince the public that things are under control.

In Marseilles we spend the warm evenings in our friends’ garden, eating delicious food, commiserating on the state of Europe and the world, gazing admiringly at their thriving flowers and vegetables in the midst of a desert landscape. It has not rained for months, trees are dying. The honey harvest will be poor. We can scarcely imagine our own damp, snail and slug infested garden. The next day we drive north to look at the lavender fields in bloom, something I have always wanted to do, a dream realised. The intense purple stripes fading towards the horizon are almost too beautiful to contemplate. Japanese tourists pose among the blooms, women carrying parasols, in fear of the sun. We swim in the cool waters of a lake, picnic, return to our friends’ house. Easyjet whizzes us uncomfortably home the next day.

Days later, on Bastille day, Nice becomes a scene of carnage. I email my Canadian friend to check she is safe. She and her companion had an aperitif at the hotel Négresco that night, wondered whether to stay for dinner and fireworks. But they had left-over chicken in the fridge, so they went home.

We have a new government, we are the laughing stock of the world. I discover that the new Prime Minister studied at the same Oxford college as me, that in my fourth year she was in her first. Not very strangely, we never met. I imagine she would have had little time for me as I was then – disillusioned about my Oxford education, lost, looking for love. Perhaps I saw her marching briskly across the gardens of St Hugh’s to her tutorial, the efficient essay in her hand written well in advance.

This winter I will wear my Venetian coat again, I will be culturally European. The prime of life; so far from ‘the best of all possible worlds’.

 

 

Paris, in the coat, December 2015.

Post-op, July 2014, in the new lime-green shorts, and the pink vest from 1987.

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Fast forward to Autumn 2011. I was working at home that day. The phone rang. My friend Catherine’s beloved gentle Australian tones: ‘Have you seen the email?’ I rushed to open it and there it was: the offer of voluntary redundancy. I ran out into the garden shouting ‘freedom!’

I imagined this would be the start of what Annie Ernaux, my French writer friend once called ‘the long summer holidays of life’, that I would garden and write and read and see friends. My life would be transformed – on sunny days I would not be locked in meeting rooms or my gloomy office with the view of the brick wall, there would be no more schlepping back and forth between London and home, no more deadlines, no more targets, no more research assessment exercises. I had no hesitation in applying, and my certainty and joy seemed contagious – Catherine and another close colleague decided to go too. It felt like getting out of school in the middle of term. The leaving events and presents added to the party feeling.

In the first few months we would phone each other regularly, delighting in our new decadence – ‘It’s 3pm and I’m not even dressed yet’, ‘I spent all day yesterday reading a novel in bed’ – and our new domesticity – cleaning out cupboards, putting old photographs into albums, cooking from recipes.

We decided that we needed a whole new wardrobe – clothes that would suit our new leisurely life, but would still allow us to answer the door without embarrassment. I went to Marks and bought two dressing-gowns with hoods and zips – one pale blue, one purplish brown, both with white spots. Comfortable garments, if a little too obviously nightwear to fulfill the door answering requirements. But I liked them because there was something reminiscent of the 1950s in their spot design. The dressing-gowns reminded me of a game I had played with a friend at Primary School. We played the game every day, and because of that called it ‘the ordinary game’. In this game, we each had two little girls, who we dressed each morning in matching dresses – perhaps a daisy print, one pink one blue, or stripes, or spots.

The ordinary game was no doubt a template for life in the feminine, a kind of idealised vision of our mothers’ lives, as they laboured to dress us nicely in cotton frocks and white sandals and socks. My life had not followed the template, and needless to say, retirement didn’t quite work out as planned either. Arthritis stalled my gardening ambitions, and after only a year I could not resist taking a part-time job, which took up more and more time, even if I did much of the work at home, in the dressing-gown. Just keeping body and soul together seemed to require ever more work: eating seven portions of fruit and veg a day, doing exercises to mobilise the spine, Pilates class, swimming. We had to pay someone to clean the house, and someone else to keep the garden under control.

In the evenings, the dressing-gowns provided a kind of solace for the recalcitrant body; their softness wrapped around the aching joints was comforting, and donning them a signal that I could stop trying to be mobile, to do stuff as if nothing was wrong. The dressing gowns were a resting place, like a shroud, but not exactly, not quite yet.

My repose was sometimes interrupted, not just by the part-time job, but by a crisis in the lives of my elderly parents. In a frenzy of anxiety I would temporarily abandon my beautiful home, cultural pursuits and friends and partner, in favour of a necessary exile in the house I grew up in. When I was there I could not believe that my other life existed; I was temporarily imprisoned in the routines of late old age, in a house without books, or Radio 4, or olive oil, or a power shower. I would plan to stay three nights, but make my escape after only two, consulting the Virgin trains timetable as if it had magical powers, terrified that the taxi would not come, the trains would not run, and that I would be marooned in my original home forever. In the train I would alternate between relief and joy that I had escaped, and sorrow over my parents’ decline, the limitations of their lives.

On those train journeys another phrase from Annie Ernaux came to mind – ‘Now I really am a middle-class woman’. In the home that had once been my world I was cut off from everything I cared about, except my parents themselves, and my family of origin. With them, especially with my mother, there were moments of great intimacy, but this could no longer sustain me in the way it once had.

So I would rush home, to joyous reunion with my bourgeois life. In the dressing gown, in the safe space of my own room I could imagine the little girl who had seen her future in pastel shades, who had dreamt of a daughter wearing a pale blue dress with white spots.

 

 

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For my interview for the job teaching French at the Polytechnic of North London I wore the red tulip dress. I had spent the previous night with Frank so was not on best form. But they were nice to me, and I spoke enthusiastically about teaching French cinema and mixed ability classes. At PNL my background as a schoolteacher seemed to be a positive advantage – they were actually looking for someone who could teach. I did not think for a minute I’d got the job. At Victoria I ate a consolatory bar of chocolate, and once back in my pink and blue living room in Brighton I collapsed in front of the TV. When the Head of Department rang to offer me the job I was in shock. He was also shocked – that I did not immediately accept, but instead asked what the salary would be. Apparently that was a minor consideration. But I explained I would have to travel to London so needed more money. The next day I consulted Frank, and my therapist. Frank did not say much – I had broken the rule of not phoning him at anything other than the appointed hour, and he was agitated. The therapist, who expressed her opinion rather more freely than she was supposed to, regarded it as a ‘no-brainer’: ‘people have actually heard of PNL’. ‘Unlike that totally culturally insignificant dump where you work now’ was the implication. I realised that going to London would give me an excuse to stop seeing that therapist, which was a definite plus, so I took the job, and started work in September 1989.

I was welcomed into the French department at PNL, and gradually learnt the technical terms for the exam board: ‘couper la poire en deux’ – splitting the difference when the first and second marker didn’t agree, and ‘il y a une couille dans le pâté’ – which could be roughly translated as ‘this marks list is a cock-up’. I was surprised to discover that the students did not attend every class, and that my colleagues were sometimes late for class as well. Iris, who like me had done French at Oxford, but two decades earlier, was reliably late for everything, but nobody minded because she was funny and kind and always there till 7pm, ready to listen to the students’ worries. She was quite punctual in leaving at 7, however, as she liked to listen to ‘The Archers’ as she did her long drive home from Kentish Town to Putney. Iris and I were a little oasis of Englishness in a sea of gallicity, and when we talked about the goings on in Ambridge, the Parisian eyes of our colleagues glazed over.

Iris shared an office with Marcel, who was punctual and neat, and grew red geraniums on the windowsill of the office. It was a miracle that he and Iris did not come to blows as Iris’s section of the office was a deluge of papers and books. Marcel was also horrified by Iris’s tendency to spill food and drink on the Chinese silk shirts her husband Johnny had brought back from a business trip to Beijing for her. When I offered to get Iris a sandwich from the Greek deli over the road he would say ‘no houmous!’ emphatically. Every year around Christmas Iris and Johnny had a party in their house in Putney and we were all invited. Johnny cooked a huge ham, and a salmon, and made delicious salads, while Iris ‘tidied the house’ – this activity consisted of throwing the excess books and papers that covered every surface into the cellar. A high point in the party was the moment when Iris opened the door to the cellar so that we could admire the hellish chaos she had created.

By the time I started work in London my hair was a bit less spiky, but I still had the bleach highlights and the lime-green cardigan. The French department, or more precisely Marcel received frequent visits from Barry from Film Studies. They taught a course on French cinema together, but there were some tensions between them. Marcel described how Barry would sit in the front row in his lectures and look at him disapprovingly whenever he waxed too lyrical and lost his grasp of ‘film theory’. Referring to Brigitte Bardot as a ‘natural woman’ was a terrible faux pas. Outside class they got on much better and liked to play a game of matching their colleagues to a film or style of cinema. The Dean was definitely film noir. They fixed their critical gaze on me in the lime-green cardy and a short black skirt and both exclaimed in unison ‘nouvelle vague!’.

On Mondays I had to entertain 100 beginners in French in a lecture theatre – not in any way a conducive environment for language learning. I spent the weekends choosing tiny snippets of French TV and inventing quizzes to accompany them. I felt I had to dress up for these pedagogic ordeals, and so I bought a 1940s suit from a second-hand shop in Kemptown. Somehow the suit gave me the confidence to face my large audience. After the lecture I would return to the haven of the French corridor to prepare the next day’s classes. The audio-visual course we used with the beginners was called ‘Avec plaisir’, and Marcel and I delighted in imagining that it was actually the preamble to a porn film, such were the meaningful glances and ambiguous gestures exchanged by the hapless actors in the videos.

These were exciting times at PNL – our students loved us and we loved them, and the combination of new and old Humanities subjects in one building meant that everyone was thinking differently. The Management thought even more differently and decided to close down Classics and South Asian Studies. So the students occupied the building and ran the library and the canteen – probably a high point in their education. The occupation was even covered by the national BBC news – the ‘loony left’ was a favourite news theme in those days. The staff transferred to a building in Tufnell Park, and to a more or less constant union meeting, debating what to do about the forthcoming exams. Two of us were delegated to address the occupation – another occasion to wear the suit. We won a small victory over the timing of the exams, but after a few weeks the Dean forced her way into the occupied building with a pair of wire-cutters she had bought in a nearby ironmongers. The occupation ended and the courses were closed.

Soon after this the Polytechnic became a University. We got UNL mugs and biros in our pigeon-holes, and were invited to a celebration in the cavernous and dimly lit space of ‘The Rocket’ on the Holloway Road. There was a huge sickly-sweet cake, jazz and sparkling wine but the enforced jollity did not quite work. You could not help feeling that the soul had gone out of the place. Three years later the whole Humanities Faculty was moved to the main building on the Holloway Road, where we could more easily be kept under control. The Vice-Chancellor was rumoured to have said that he would get rid of the lot of us if he could. Marcel decided to retire, he could not face the upheaval of the move. We were bereft, and there was a fabulous party in his honour, with Barry at the piano singing a specially composed song to an old Maurice Chevalier tune. On the Holloway Road site we discovered that the Humanities were a very small cog in a large wheel of the mysterious Polymers and Business and the like. Predictably our offices and classrooms were not ready for the start of term, and the French lectrice threatened to leave – ‘but it is ’orrible in ’olloway’.

Iris carried on for a few more years, and then she too left us, even more bereft. Our old building in Kentish Town became a Pizza Express and luxury flats. Quality Assessment kept us at work till late in the evenings, filling filing cabinets with papers no-one would ever read. I bought a smart linen jacket and took the second-hand suit back to the shop where I had bought it in the hope of persuading them to sell it on, but they looked at it sniffily and would not take it back.

 

 Wearing the jacket of the second-hand suit on  Brighton sea front

 

 

In the office at the Poly on a more ‘dressed down’ day…Note the ‘bum bag’…

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I bought the red tulip dress one bright June afternoon, in a daze of passion and sunshine, on a street that opens out to the sea, East Street in Brighton. The dress was white, with a pattern of large wine-red tulips; sleeveless, fitted, with a slightly flared skirt which swung as I walked. Summer 1989 – the hot weather seemed to have set in permanently, and southern Britain had taken on Mediterranean hues and modes of living. I was a student again, this time more seriously and more capably than at Oxford.

I studied that year in London, at first sagely, completing my essays on time, attending all my classes, and scurrying home after class while the other students lingered in the bar. After the years of school teaching I could hardly believe my luck in having time to think and read and learn again, so I immersed myself in my studies.

Until, that is, I noticed one of my fellow students. Frank was an escapee from school teaching, like me, and like me, funded by the local authority to do the MA. We were probably the last teachers in the country to enjoy this privilege. Frank travelled down from Birmingham every Monday morning, stayed overnight in a basic Bloomsbury hotel, and travelled back late on Tuesday, usually after a pint or two in the bar. He had been an art teacher, and his interest in colour manifested itself in the carefully and interestingly co-ordinated outfits in delicate shades of purple and green, or brown and mustard, that adorned his slender form, and set off his chestnut locks. He spoke with a slight Birmingham accent, the kind of accent you have if you hail from the Midlands, but have had your native speech educated out of you. He wrote all his essays long hand, a strong and neat hand, which merged with his reflections on German Expressionist cinema to such an extent that as I read, I realised the content was passing me by, I was only seeing Frank’s shapely letters. I had fallen in love with everything about Frank, from his green jumper to his handwriting, but it was probably the accent that was at the root of my affection, with its promise of a return to my origins, but in a more genteel, and above all intellectual version.

I knew nothing of Frank’s life, beyond the fact that he lived in Birmingham, and had done all his life, that he liked good food and fine wine, and knew a lot about art. One night we talked in the bar about our Midlands origins; his father had been a toolmaker, in a neat symmetry with mine, a pattern-maker. Frank and I got into the habit of walking back to Euston together, talking non-stop all the way, then saying goodbye when I headed south on the underground to Victoria, and he boarded his train to Brum. I imagined him returning to his solitary abode, a slightly untidy flat, full of art books and papers, in the city centre. I imagined the weekends I would spend there with him once my love was declared and reciprocated, the visits to art galleries, the sex on the study floor, the wine, and the walks round the city late at night. I hoped to be able to combine all of that with the occasional visit to my parents, who would be delighted that I was no longer completely exiled in the South. Quite how I would manage this transition was never explored in these fantasies, where I would return to my home town in a golden glow of new love.

In February the whole MA group went to Ronnie Scott’s one night, and after the jazz we danced in the disco upstairs till the small hours. I discovered that Frank was a neat dancer as well as dresser. We jigged about to the Gypsy Kings, with such energy and excitement that the rest of the group commented ‘Who would have thought Frank could do that?’. As we went downstairs at the end of the evening, Frank stumbled, and I held out my arms to catch him, ‘as if in an embrace’ as he said later.

In May I invited the whole group down to Brighton for the weekend, carefully designing the sleeping arrangements so that Frank was in the room next to mine. The first night we talked till 2am, and I waited in vain for him to make a move. But no, chaste insomnia was my lot. The next day the rest of the group drifted away, back to London, apart from Frank and one other woman, Kath, who I liked a lot. That night the three of us started the evening with gin and tonics in my back yard, then went out to eat, or mainly drink some more. When we came back I realised I had forgotten my key, but fortunately Frank was agile and slim enough to climb in through the lavatory window. We continued drinking in my front room, or rather Kath and Frank did. Perhaps that was why, when I left the room momentarily, they were kissing when I came back in. I was horrified, and I made no attempt to conceal the fact, blurting out all the months of repressed passion. ‘Oh so that was why you started staying behind in the bar to drink G and Ts instead of rushing off’, said Kath, while Frank, warming to the subject, insisted that the last thing they wanted to do was exclude me. So I was included, until, finally Kath retired to bed, and Frank and I found ourselves alone. Then, at last he said the words that extinguished the images of that untidy Birmingham flat: ‘I shouldn’t be doing this, I live with someone, and I love her’.

The next day, they both had terrible hangovers, and they left early. I listened to Vivaldi and lurched between the new fantasy material the night had provided, and the resolve to walk away from this ménage à trois, or even à quatre, if we counted the unknown woman in Birmingham.

My resolve lasted exactly two weeks. The group went to Ronnie’s again, but I stayed out of trouble in Brighton, working on my dissertation on Desperately Seeking Susan. Then one night, after a seminar, we went to the pub, and Frank was wearing the green jumper again. He and I walked back to Euston together, but we never got there. Instead we jumped into a taxi and went back to the room I was renting in a friend’s house in Queen’s Park. After that, we spent our London afternoons in that room. On the way we would buy tomatoes and mozzarella and then pick basil in my friend’s greenhouse. The heat of the greenhouse, the scented leaves, and the red, green and white on our plates were the prelude to the afternoon’s pleasures. Sometimes Frank would stay the night, and the next morning too. I never went to his hotel, as if that was part of the territory he shared with the woman in Birmingham, even though she never accompanied him, and I had the impression she knew as little about his London life as I did about his Brummie one.

There was an end of year party, at the house of one of the foreign students, Aleksi. It was a lunch party, but Frank and I arrived at 3pm. Our friends met us with a camera, filming our red-faced arrival, and providing an ironic commentary. We had betrayed the spirit of the group by becoming a couple, and an illicit one at that. Even though I begged for a copy, my wish was not granted, and I saw the film only once: there I was in the red tulip dress, trying to look nonchalant, while Frank was clearly horrified to be the centre of attention. That night we parted as usual at Euston, and Frank said the dark red tulips made him feel heavy, intoxicated. I liked the dress even more.

In September I started a new job in London, teaching French at a Polytechnic. I still had my room in Queen’s Park, and it was there that I broke it off with Frank, the first time. My friend soothed me with brandy and comforting words, even though her mind was by then on her own passion, which was to have a happier conclusion than mine. That Autumn she and I spent cosy evenings by the gas fire, watching Brookside and the fall of the Berlin Wall on TV, and encouraging each other to pursue passion in her case, and forego it in mine. I had acupuncture, and eventually psychotherapy. Nonetheless, the following spring I resumed contact with Frank. For four years we telephoned each other every week, and saw each other when we could, unless I was breaking it off, again.

I asked endless questions about his relationship and the woman. She was different from me in every way: small, dark, not English, a cordon bleu cook. Once he told me about their evenings – how he would wash up from the night before, so that she could cook, then they would eat, and drink wine, and he would make the coffee. On one occasion she stabbed his leg with a knife she was using to peel fruit, no doubt sensing his betrayal. He told me because I noticed the scar.

I knew I was behaving badly in relation to this woman, but I just wanted him to leave her, and I wrestled constantly with Frank’s consistent statements that he never would, and that he loved her.

In November 1993 I got chicken pox. By this time I was living alone in a flat in Kilburn. My mother came down to look after me, as I was in a pretty bad way. Frank was due that weekend, and when he phoned I realised that in my pock-marked and feverish state he was the last person I wanted to see. This was my punishment, I thought, for what I had done to her. Perhaps, after all my Oxford studies had left some traces – this was the Liaisons dangereuses, late twentieth century style. I wrote Frank a postcard, telling him of my new, and firmer resolve. This time it stuck, and a year later, I began a relationship that endured and was not rooted in betrayal. When I moved back to Sussex to live with this man, I gave Frank my address and phone number. He had asked me always to let him know where I was in the world. We spoke on the phone, and flirted a bit, and I knew it was impossible to see him.

But I did see him, once more. I was in Paris with my new partner, dining in Les Fontaines, rue Soufflot. I turned round and saw Frank at a table a few yards away, sitting next to a woman who answered the detailed descriptions he had given me years before, and opposite an older couple, almost certainly her parents. When we left I waited by the bar while our coats were brought to us. Frank was steadfastly ignoring me, clearly terrified that I would say hello. I did not. We went back to our hotel, and I spent the night writing a long letter to a French writer I knew, about lost love, and this strange rendez-vous manqué. The letter was never sent.

Several years later, I got a phone call one night. ‘It’s Rebekah’, ‘Rebekah?’ ‘Yes, I’m ringing to tell you that Frank has passed away. He was very ill. Please don’t write, or send anything’.

I don’t know why she rang, but I imagine somehow he asked her to, thinking he had better keep his side of the bargain, and let me know where he was, or rather, was not, in the world. And she respected his wish, treating me with more generosity than I had ever shown to her.

I grieved for Frank silently, in the midst of my happiness and security. In Bloomsbury squares, to this day, I think of him, of that summer, and my red tulip dress.

 

 

 

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