Nano Day 10

'You'll be going up for your interviews soon, won't you?' he continued.

'Yes, I will be soon,' she nodded.

That would be a good trial, perhaps. She had never travelled far from home without Idwal in tow. Perhaps it was a nearness thing. Perhaps two or three hundred miles between them would stretch her feelings until they broke and died. She thought about the interview, what form it would take. She imagined an elderly professor, balding and wearing a tweed jacket, probably scented with pipe smoke, maybe even sitting in his chair smoking it as he spoke to her, and she would sit there inhaling the warm blue smoke, letting it fill her lungs and bring relaxation to her body as he spoke of numbers and logic.

She imagined thick stone walls and thin glassed windows with lead between the panes, and the chill of a venerable institution, and walking the corridors with her footsteps echoing, carrying a sheaf of books and papers under her arm, and doing nothing each day but embracing numbers and letting them cool her mind. She would wear tweed herself, perhaps – a tweed skirt and dark tights, and a plain blouse, and no one would ridicule her for her clothes and her hair because she would be a blue-stocking, and androgynous self-effacement would be expected.

She would return to her halls every evening, and be secure in her own cell-like room, and she would toast bread on the gas fire and perhaps talk with other like minded people, sharing butter and marmalade and cups of tea – and she would meet someone – a tall, young, handsome scholar with dark hair and dark eye, intense and intelligent – and she would fall in love, and her life would begin anew…

'Yes,' she said, looking at Idwal again, after staring through him, not seeing him, for long, stretched out minutes. 'I do want to go, Id. It'll be fun. I'll miss you – of course I'll miss you. But it'll be fun.'

******

And she went to the interviews, travelling up on the train, compartment coaches hauled by one of the new, smooth, swift diesels that pulled her in quiet comfort up the country, along the coast, through the great stone obstacle of the Pennines where the weather closed in and sleety snow beat at the windows, down into the flat lands about York full of fallow fields that would contain golden grain at another time of year but now only contained pockets of snow in dimples in the earth. She leant her head back against the seat and closed her eyes, and let the motion of the train soothe her into a stupor – and then she opened them again and stared at the countryside blurring by, flat land narrowing into cuttings, cuttings turning into tunnels, then light beating back, startling, as yet another range of hills was conquered.

The land became rucked and rugged again – sheep country, a home from home, the rocks that pushed through the soil dark and grey, as if wetness was their natural state. The railway led the train through more cuttings and more tunnels, and the countryside that burst out on the other side was more and more familiar, until she felt the train had turned round while she was asleep and carried her home. But it was not home – it was Durham, perched and sprawling over the sides of hills, the great cathedral rising up above everything else like a prayer set in stone.

Yes, she thought as she stepped from the train into cold, damp winter air. Yes, I could call this home…

She closed her coat more firmly about her chest and held her suitcase tight in her hand, and stood, hesitating. It was colder than it had been at home, and there were patches of snow that had obviously sat for days on the ground, being trampled over by the feet of a thousand travellers. Snow and ice and chill in the air. When she breathed in her lungs seemed to expand with the shock of it.

She unfolded the map that had been sent to her, that she had sat folding and unfolding on the train, and saw where she needed to go. Today she must only find her lodgings, since she would sleep here tonight, the first time she had slept away from home without her family. Tomorrow she would find the university, and the correct department and corridor and room, and the man inside it who would assess her fitness for a place to study. The thought of that interview held no terror for her. She knew that she was good, and better than most. It was the finding of the room that filled her with nerves.

But all she had to do today was find her bed. She crossed the footbridge and left the station. Then she began her walk up into the town, alone and small in a new world.

*******

And the interview did not scare her.

It began with the formal – with, 'Miss Roberts. You are hoping to study Mathematics at Durham?' and she nodded, and replied with polite confidence, with a confidence that was a surprise to her because it did not usually come to her in her dealings with people. But she was not dealing with this man in the context of ordinary human relationships – she was speaking to a mathematician, of mathematics, and her confidence in her own ability with numbers held her buoyant and aloft above any suspicion of the abilities of her gender or her nationality or of a farm girl to grasp and subdue such intellectual concepts.

The interview ended with cordiality, with a dropping of suspicions and a warm handshake and a smile, and an assertion that she had done well, and that with the required results in her examinations she would be very well suited to such a venerable institution as Durham. And she left the room light and calm, with no thoughts of Idwal or of leaving her home behind her – only of the prospects and vistas that would open up to her in this new, fresh place. She closed her coat more tightly against the chill of the vast, stone-built corridors, and thought, this is the cathedral, truly – not the building up on the hill nearby. This is where I will find myself.

The train bore her home, and she was happy. She sat in the carriage, leaning her head against the chill of the window, watching as towns grew more and more familiar and as the land moulded itself to what was right and normal, and as the language in the place names slipped from the Yorkshire and Lancashire –bys and –hams to Welsh llan-s and aber-s, and the houses and roofs and damp streets and roads began to have the inarguable air of home. And she left the train to see the face of her mother on the station, smiling with a relief that Anwen did not yet know herself – with the relief of a mother whose child has come safely home – and warmth filled her as her mother's arms closed around her and her cheek was kissed and her small brown suitcase taken from her hand.

And then Idwal appeared from the other side of the platform, saying something about a new diesel that he had not yet noted down in his book – and then he saw Anwen, and his face lit from within and he hugged her, and she smelt the scent of his hair and his clothes and the faint musk of sweat, and felt his fingers spread over her back and the touch of his cheek against hers – and she wanted to cry with the yearning that exploded inside her chest.

******

'You think you got in, then?' he asked.

She almost hated him at that moment – lying across her bed on his back, his arms sprawled backwards so that his shirt rode up and showed the flatness of his stomach and the dark hair that drifted over it like a spider's dream. She was lying on her side, lying up near her pillows by still too close to him, with her head propped on her hand in a desperate attempt to look as if she was doing nothing more extraordinary than lounging on her bed. But her eyes slanted sideways, trying to see that tantalising strip of flesh without him noticing her seeing it, and she likened that soft hair to a giant's view of saplings bending in the wind, to seaweed drifting in the current, to summer grass. The dimple of his navel was impossibly intoxicating. And even now, even in the middle of winter, his skin still had the healthy, rich colour of a person born to the sun. Perhaps he gained his tan from the kitchen fire… perhaps from the sun reflected off the snow. Perhaps he stole it from ancient gods, and wore it to torment her.

Durham was too far away now – it seemed like another world. When she was there, she had been another person. Now she was Anwen again, undone by her feelings, undone by him, by his lazy stretching over her bed, by his complete unconsciousness of the track of her mind, by his warmth and his closeness and his constant desire to share his time with her.

'I think I got in,' she said, closing her eyes. Even with her eyes closed she could feel every movement he made through the tremors in the mattress. Even with her eyes closed his presence burned into her mind.

'I think I'll love it,' she said. 'You should have seen it, Id. It was beautiful. Like here, but bigger and – wilder, and with such beautiful buildings and a beautiful cathedral. I'll love it. I will.'

And he rolled onto his side to mirror her, and she saw suddenly the expression in his eyes – a moment of regret and sadness that seemed to open a channel into his mind. And then the veil dropped, and he was smiling – but she could still see it, through that diaphanous pretence. He did not want her to leave.

'Oh, An,' he began, and his face was too close to hers, and his breath was warm and alive and unutterably familiar, and his eyes were beautiful and they understood everything about her without her having to speak, and his lips were ripe and she wanted them – and she hated him with all her heart for trying to destroy her.

She sat up with heart-thumping abruptness, closing her mouth into a tight line, willing tears to stay away from her eyes, hating him for sending her mind back into this whirled confusion. He had leant so close… She had felt it – surely she had felt it. It had been like a magnet, as if a magnet in him was drawing her towards him, a natural law of attraction that had to be obeyed. She had felt it in him – the need to be closer than close, the need to never let her leave. But she could not have felt it, because she was the only unnatural one here, and she wanted to sob at coming so close.

She had to leave. She had to hold on only for another year – not even a year. For nine months, perhaps – for the period of a human gestation. She would start from this moment, changing herself, growing into a new being, healing herself and turning herself away from him – and then she would birth herself into a new life and she would be free.