As he got older it seemed that chances to tell his story, his life story, had diminished. Not that he preferred speaking above listening or particularly liked the sound of his own voice; but if someone was genuinely interested, if he felt that in his bones, or better still in his heart, then he would happily talk for hours and hours. Unexpectedly he had been given a chance to tell it all in the greatest detail to someone who was infinitely interested in how he had arrived at the point in time at which they met. And so it had been for her too. It was a gift that neither of them would ever be less than deeply grateful for.
But now it felt like his story was on hold again, or even that it had gone back on itself. He couldn’t help wishing that he could go on telling the story to the woman who had become part of it, could go on filling in the gaps and creating new chapters; chapters bursting with the life that somehow seemed to have slipped away from his.
It was chance that took him in the direction of her ghost. He was attending a day of seminars at the university where she had once been a student. Typically he had decided to turn chance into a kind of pilgrimage. He would rather see the house in which she had once lived than the blue-plaqued or unmarked residence of any of his favourite writers. Besides, she was his favourite writer, and this city a part of the story of her life. She told him once the name of the street on which she had lived, but it was at the overgrown fringes of his memory now and he couldn’t pluck it from its hiding place. He would just have to hope that he bumped into it and underwent a sudden jolt of recognition.
Late arriving, he had to run from the car park to the building in which the seminars were taking place in order to pick up a parking permit, then run back to place it on view. So he was breathless as he twice crossed the campus, much changed since her time, he guessed. But there would still be buildings here she had been in, and around them streets which she had walked down. He wanted to breathe the same air as her for a while, albeit displaced by time.
In the lobby of the building he was visiting he spotted a colleague and knew that for a time he would have to put all thoughts of pilgrimage aside. The seminar was delivered against the background hum of ventilators. He fought to let neither the hum nor the dryness of the lecturers’ content send him to sleep; went further by making sufficient salient points to underline his presence, his engagement even. As the other attendees – the majority of whom were women – voiced their opinions, he gave them the once over, took in their characters. None even came close to what she was, to having what she had. None of the people in any of the rooms in which he habitually found himself had it. As so often he wondered how he had ended up in this world. He felt miscast, misplaced. If only he could step from one reality into another, he would do so. But they had decided not to merge their parallel worlds. He was stuck in his and she in hers. Watching rain fall silver in the white light of the sun outside the window, all he could do was take his mind to her. He imagined himself into the past, into her world. Imagined the two of them as fresh and new and unburdened. Imagined their paths crossing, and making a friendship or a love in bars or halls or a seminar room such as this. She would have set lecture hall, refectory and bar ablaze, he knew it. They would rarely if ever have seen her like. But he also knew that if he really had met her then, he may not have had the visible force of personality to have engaged her attention. Instead he would have admired her from afar, always debating with himself whether to attempt to bridge the space between them. It was age which gave him the confidence to do what he had done, to make eyes across the celebratory table at which he first saw her.
He emerged from his bubble and looked at his watch. Not even half way through. He was longing for lunch and the afternoon session to be over, so that he could for a time follow her traces and walk around what he thought of as her streets.
At last he was free to go. He wandered out into the air, breathed in its moisture to replace the dryness in his lungs, and set off walking. Soon he found himself faced with a path across a common and knowing that at some point she would have walked this way, he walked it too. Now they had a common in common. The path was signed Lover’s walk. It might have been for lovers a long, long time ago, but today – and he imagined it was so in her time too – it was creepily enclosed and disconcerting. He soon diverted off into a grassy space on whose turf he was sure she would once have sat and stretched out. And drank and kissed, in a life he could never be a part of. Seeing a pair of magpies, he thought to himself, I’m confused; she and I have attached so many terms and conditions to the sight of one that I don’t know what two means any more.
He headed back into the streets around the university. Past redbrick houses with gabled fronts and a redbrick hall of residence, past a yellow brick pub in which he felt sure she would have drunk. Down a hill and back up, passing a church on the corner, looking off to left and right at the name of each street, searching for that stab of recognition, but though some seemed achingly familiar, none came. As the rain began to fall again, he gave up, turning back into the campus. Soon he found himself in front of an old, foursquare redbrick building: the Union. He knew for sure then that if he trod the steps of its entrance he would cross over with her in space if not time. A student, a woman, was standing in the doorway. She took in his approach, as anyone does while waiting and on seeing someone coming towards them. For a moment he allowed himself to imagine that it was her, that this was where they had arranged to meet; that here was his portal to the parallel world he wished to enter. But if he kept up this pretence he knew he risked unnerving the waiting woman. In any case it was going to be perturbing if he walked up the steps and turned about in her face. But he felt impelled by his pilgrimage to do it; he couldn’t not. So as he came up one side of the steps he comically made as if he had forgotten something, and came back down the other. She gave him a look, but that was all. Just some hare-brained, harmless maths lecturer, she might have thought.
Not far from the union building was a little rectangular pool in which a geometric figure had been set. Blue-green with copper patina, it looked to be by some contemporary of Henry Moore. Dawdling on summer days, she must have stood here and gazed upon it. He watched the rain patter on the viscous-seeming surface of the water and on the lily pads which part-covered the pool. Perhaps if he span a coin into the air, a piece of silver to break the water’s skin, he could make a wish and that would be his portal. He flipped ten pence skywards and watched it arc and puncture the water. Through the settling ripples he saw its resting place, and closed his eyes. He stretched out his right hand and wished. He felt her hand brush his, but when he opened his eyes she was gone.
It was only when he got home and dug out a map that he spotted and remembered the street name, and realised with one more pang in his heart that he had driven along her road and had parked just off it. Had crossed and recrossed it on foot. Had walked in her steps without knowing that he was.
