Past and Present - A Modern Day Romance of North & South

CHAPTER NINETEEN - WHERE I BELONG

The children standing by the edge of the pond with their mother began to cry as they realised that there was no more bread left with which to feed the ducks. From where she was sitting Margaret could see them clawing at their mother’s skirt, faces upturned, their high-pitched wails of disappointment resonating through the still, morning air.

Margaret smiled, the smile tinged wry and bittersweet. If only life could be as simple as that – that the only sorrow was in not being able to continue feeding the ducks…

Of course, when she’d played amid these ageing headstones gathered before her as a child it had been that simple, she had herself been just like those children; everyday strife, if ever there had been any, shrouded from her by her parents. She had never once heard an argument between them when she’d been growing up; all she had seen was the devotion one had for the other. She had grown up with the idyll of a happy, felicitous marriage before her, the romantic novels that she’d started to devour in early adolescence further fuelling that heady notion that love, when you found it, was something that stayed with you forever and was blissfully perfect in every way.

She had been ripe at that time for such romantic scenarios, riding on a precarious surge of hormones that seemed not only to change her very mindset but also to physically pull in her waist and push out her hips, moulding her body with invisible hands like a sculptor lovingly tending his work, giving her chest, so washboard flat all her life, a fuller shape which irrevocably altered her entire appearance and had the effect of endlessly fascinating Henry. She could remember how he had started to change towards her, his eyes seeming to follow her more often, covertly watching her when he thought she wasn’t aware of it. But it hadn’t been all on Henry’s side. She had spent hours dreaming of love. In the books she had read she had always pictured the hero with black hair and blue eyes, but in reality that ideal was clouded by what stood before her. She started to see Henry in a different light and it bred between them an awkwardness to which neither referred, a determination to hide what threatened to be exposed. She had intuitively known that they had teetered on the cusp of emotions that were no longer ruled by straightforward friendship, that those inherent changes in them had already launched them into a different sphere, leaving the innocence and uncomplicated feelings of childhood far behind.

Henry had been quite casual at first, taking her hand in his as they’d wandered home from school, or putting his arm loosely and casually around her waist as though it was the most natural thing in the world. She had felt both excited and disconcerted by his attentions in the beginning, a small part of her staunchly reminding her that it meant nothing because they had always shared a very easy friendship anyway. It wasn’t as though he’d never hugged her or held her hand before. The difference was that she hadn’t fully appreciated just what such seemingly innocuous gestures could lead to. The girls at school had teased her about Henry being her boyfriend, the fact that she’d known him for virtually the whole of her life not seeming to make any difference to them at all. When she’d casually mentioned to Henry the fact that her friends had the weird notion that he was interested in her, her face flaming all the while with embarrassment, he had merely looked at her and smiled. “Don’t you want me to be your boyfriend then?”  

In her awkwardness she’d laughed, laughed to try and break the tension she’d felt beginning to whir around them and sobering the buoyant mood that had existed between them before she’d perhaps too carelessly decided to mention it. They’d been lazing in the meadow just beyond Helstone under a vast, ancient oak at the time, the place they had always run to as children and now continued to do into their teens, led by instinct and old habits. On that day, however, it had become the place where their friendship had transformed into something quite different as Henry had leaned towards where she sat on the grass and put his mouth to hers for the first time. She’d been fourteen then and rather naively she’d thought that Henry was the love of her life.