A Rhapsody Of Sorts

14- Clarissa and Sally Forever

September 23, 2012.

Belinda Ferrence smelled like summer. I'm not sure if it was the strawberry lemonade she was drinking or the flowery scent of the perfume she was wearing, but every time I breathed in through my nose I felt like I was sitting on a bench in Queen Mary's Gardens under a noontime sun in the middle of June instead of on a wobbly metal chair with a cup of cinnamon tea going cold in front of me.

When I'd walked into Bluebeard's Books & Tea, a little place squeezed between a boutique and an antique rocking chair shop near Soho Square, I'd expected to find a group of wizened women in reading glasses and oversized wool sweaters crowded around a pot of Earl Grey. What I didn't expect to find tucked away in the back corner of the shop's café was Belinda Ferrence sitting all alone, a copy of Mrs. Dalloway open in front of her and the cap of a yellow highlighter held between her teeth as she flipped through dog-eared pages.

"Oh, Oliver," she'd laughed, smoothing her hands over the pleats in her pink sundress after I asked her when everyone else would arrive, "it's just us. You're the only other person I could convince to do this with me."

The two of us sat close to one another at a table with just enough space for the plate of raspberry scones Belinda had ordered for us to share. Our knees knocked together every time I squirmed in my seat, but she either didn't notice or didn't care. She dove into a monologue on Clarissa Dalloway and Sally Seton, directing me to pages and important passages, and talking about symbols and themes like her life depended on it. I felt like I was in literature class again, sitting in the back and zoning out, coming up for air every few minutes to nod thoughtfully so my teacher thought I was listening.

"I feel like Sally was her person, you know?" Belinda sighed wistfully, pausing to take a sip of her watered-down lemonade after a half an hour of barely letting me get a word in. "For Clarissa, Sally was it. A friendship like theirs, or a relationship, is once in a lifetime."

I tried and failed not to grimace.

I'd experienced that kind of deep-seated friendship — that kind of impassioned love between two people who were meant to sit next to each other on train rides and park benches, and I could tell that Belinda Ferrence and her crooked smile had never known anything like this outside of the novel clutched in her hands.

"But...Clarissa and Sally didn't stay friends. They didn't last," I said, and it was the longest string of syllables I'd gotten in all morning. "If they loved each other as much as you say they did, they wouldn't have fallen apart to begin with. But they did, and they ended up with lives they probably never would've ended up with if they'd just stuck together." I swallowed down the lump in my throat. "Doesn't that bum you out a bit?"

She raised her eyebrows before she said, "I think you're missing the point of them, Oliver. They lasted as long as they were supposed to."

Discouraged, I scoffed and bit down on my thumbnail.

Belinda smiled at me over the rim of her glass. Her lips were glossed baby pink, and her eyes — a startling shade of teal that had escaped me when we first met — were bright and filled with curiosity.

"Have a scone." She tilted the plate towards me, smiling so wide her face nearly split in half. I wasn't hungry but I took one to appease her, tentatively nibbling on a corner.

She trained her eyes on me expectantly but I didn't know what she wanted me to say. The night we met at Gateshead, I'd drunk enough to loosen my tongue, so the conversation had flowed smooth as syrup — but now, sitting in a shop with naught but Belinda and the barista behind the till for company, I felt like I never should've given her my phone number.