Faced with the prospect of parting, I realized bitterly I was just a kid. How could I keep her? Or find her again once she had gone?
One thing at least was certain: those grey school buildings would be utterly intolerable without her dear transforming presence.
I broke down and wept, but later and alone, when the shock really hit me. When Virginia was beside me I met her news with schoolboy flippancy.
‘Oh, you’ll look so ducky in nursing uniform, Virginia, and all the men will go mad about you! I must see you in it at least once.’
‘I don’t want to drive you mad!’
‘I am mad already. Before you go – Mother keeps asking me to ask you – come and have tea with us! Mother is anxious to see you again. And you’ll see Ann – she’s getting quite grown-up. She bought a lipstick in Woolworth’s the other day, and puts it on when Mother is out.’
She sighed and looked down at her shoes.
‘Do you want me to come to tea?’
‘Not much. I mean, I shall be glad of the chance to see you, any old chance. But Mother can be a bit oppressive.’
‘She doesn’t think there’s anything … funny going on between us?’
I frowned at her. ‘Funny? What’s funny between us, Sister Traven? I’m dead serious, I don’t know about you!’
In the end she agreed to come to tea that Friday. I have already given some account of that farewell feast.
When it was over, and I had driven with her to the cemetery, and she had gone, and I had dragged slowly back home to make another entry in my secret ‘Virginia Journal’, I lay for a long while on my bed, thinking about my life. Seldom had I so rigorously searched my soul; introspection was rare for me.
In those days I was incapable of seeing myself as essentially the ordinary fellow I now reluctantly conclude myself to be; I alternated between holding myself a great saint or a great sinner. One thing I did see: that, by what I then reckoned my own fault, I had failed to awake any real loving response in my parents. My brother and sister loved me, and I was lucky in them; but theirs was the slaphappy relationship of fellow nestlings in the brood. I had become a rather isolated and independent character. Sex, I told myself, had taken the place of affection.
However, there was Virginia. Out of the sordid chaos of school and my life in general, she had provoked, inspired, the best love of which I was capable. I wanted more of her love (even if she didn’t love me very greatly); and I wanted to give her more. What had I ever given her, I, a spotty youth?
A great emptiness filled me to think how unworthy I was.
With the emptiness, a stabbing knowledge; she’s left school now – the world’s big – you will lose sight of her any day – she’s not so closely tied to you, why should she be? – she could disappear without another word.
True! Within me, waiting for this opportunity to reveal itself, lay more intuitive understanding of this strange woman I loved. She was elusive to me; and so she was to herself. Infinitely precious, she could so easily be infinitely lost.
I almost broke out of my room in search of her at that instant. Standing caged, I rested my forehead against my locked bedroom door.
I resolved to go and see her again next day. I had to make some definite arrangement with her. That was what we had never had. Never had I shown her how deeply I cared; maybe I had been afraid to.
We had to have a proper relationship. After all, I was no longer a child. Neither of us was going back to Branwells. No longer need our love be clandestine. At last I saw the advantages of growing up!
That night brought me no sleep. I tried to read, could not; slipped down the drainpipe outside my window, walked to the outskirts of the town, came back, still could not rest. Eventually, tired and disgusted with myself, I took the usual way into oblivion and tossed myself off. Then I slept.
Next morning, her lovely face, half-mocking, was before me. While Mother told Father across the breakfast table everything Virginia had said at tea the previous day, I resolved that I must speak to Virginia – speak to her seriously.
Clear on what I had to do, I was muddled on how to do it.
Virginia’s arrangements were slightly complicated. She had never wanted me to write to her at Traven House because one of the servants there pried into her affairs; I always wrote to an address in Nottingham, where she said she had some rooms. It was to this address that I resolved to go – it was accessible by train, whereas Traven House stood miles off the map, and was too intimidating besides. I slipped away from home after lunch, pretending I was off for a game of cricket.
Such idiot plans court disaster. It was, really, my first set-back in the Virginia affair, and indirectly it may have helped me to stand apart from her.
The train chugged into Nottingham Midland Station by 2.30 and I set out on foot for Union Street. The name on paper always sounded so romantic: the union referred to was ours, hers and mine. The reality lay near the lunatic asylum and was extremely drab, a succession of terraced houses punctuated by shops in a semi-industrial area. My step faltered in dismay.
After much hesitation, hoping to run into her in the street, I went up to the number I had and rang the bell. After a while, a girl of about my age opened the door and peered out. She wore curlers in her hair, a pink apron, and fluffy pink slippers. From behind her came the cabbagey whiff of the house.
‘Yes,’ she said.
I asked politely for Sister Traven, making as if to walk in.
‘That slut ain’t in and she owes us rent!’ And with that the bitch slammed the door in my face.
Shaken, horrified, doubting, I stood back. I was conscious of people looking at me from behind curtains.
What should I do? Post Virginia a note through the door? Knock again? Wait till someone else arrived at the house? In the end I did nothing. I walked to the end of the street, stood there with my hands in my pockets, and at last went away.
Everyone must experience such bitter reversals in love. Things happen which seem nothing to do with the quality of the human beings involved, glass-sharp nasty things that come grinding up out of the system in which mankind has to live, reminders of the horrid fact that we as humans must camp out as best we can among complex series of natural laws, which came into being long before man did, and so contain no provision for him or any finer feelings.
All I could do was return to the railway station. The one distraction was meeting Spaldine, then heading back from Spalding by train. He was as subdued as I was, having come over to Nottingham to volunteer for the R.A.F. We worked our way through a cup of vile coffee and a biscuit together in the station buffet before departing to our separate platforms. Strangely enough, the name of Sister Traven emerged in our conversation, but from a guarded question I put, I gathered that he knew nothing of her whereabouts.
Back home I went, empty-handed, empty-hearted. A certain ability for self-dramatization may have eased the situation slightly. Nothing else did.
September wore on. At last my father wrote to the Head and said that he did not think any useful purpose would be served in sending me back to Branwells; I would be doing some war work until I was of age to join the forces. The Head wrote back saying he entirely understood the position, that patriotism must come first, and that he required a term’s fee in lieu of notice.
I was really alone. No, not really alone; Ann and I took to cycling off into the country with sandwiches for lunch. On one occasion Esmeralda came