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Above the garnet cliffs




The small town of Stonehaven is built around a fishing harbour between craggy, red headlands, made of a multicoloured rock that looks like an old-fashioned pudding. Smooth pebbles with a garnet colour glisten in the sheer cliffs below a steep grass-covered slope on which we lay, out of sight of the footpath above, out of hearing because of the buffeting of wind and waves, but encircled by the gulls that made use of this local piece of turbulence. I met her off the early morning train, the sleeper from London to Aberdeen. Few people disembarked at Stonehaven.
This was new territory. I had no idea what it meant if a person voluntarily undertook a journey of 500 miles to spend a weekend with me. We had just about managed to get off first base. This meant that physical contact was too risky, too forward: the very occasional inadvertent touch was allowed but not spoken of. It was tentative, provisional and fragile. The relationship required nurturing in order for it to blossom, but my naivety imprisoned me, and I was often left surprised and silent, misunderstanding her reactions, failing to anticipate them. Our times of lying on the grassy slopes above the garnet cliffs, or sitting on the roughly hewn harbour walls with their regularly spaced granitic posts, were spent exploring the thoughts of another person from a different universe.
She bounced out of the carriage on to the platform with flared jeans and a cheesecloth shirt, her dark hair tied back loosely, and her entire belongings for the long weekend in an old canvas rucksac in Army green, as if she were about to engage in some short-lived manoevres. I made a kind of gesture towards her that was intended to be welcoming, but I doubt that it was fulsome. We returned later, the two of us, and ate bouillabaisse in a harbour-side restaurant the size of a small terrace house. She often asked what I was thinking, and I would have to invent something interesting at top speed, because my thoughts were not structured. I was confused by a primaeval attraction to this person, but by a singular inability to know what made her tick, what motivated her, what she wanted of me or anyone else. We were two people looking for something, but not knowing where to find it and not knowing quite what it was. There was no route map, and I had not been told how to use the navigation equipment.
I was quiet as we ate a meal before the return train to London. The restaurant close to the main railway station in Aberdeen was deserted and dimly lit, reflecting my own emotions. For some reason I provoked a sharp exchange of words, and became aware of a feeling low in the stomach that I would lose her. I could not eat the food, pushed it around my plate, and looked a little morosely at the walls. My words had not been ill intentioned, but were said out of confusion and uncertainty about where we stood. A casual acquaintance? A mate? A lover? I was not used to thinking much about how my actions might impinge on anyone else, or at least on someone else who was not a carbon copy of me. As she embarked from the station at Aberdeen, I wondered if that would be the last time I would see her, the girl in the cheesecloth shirt.
But it was not. Quite who initiated the idea of going to Paris in April has escaped me in the mists of time, but it was not my mother. With youthful spontaneity, we took a coach from London to one of those dreary Channel ports, then onward to Paris. As the journey continued, and daylight faded to be replaced by the strobe-like flashes from passing vehicles, we occasionally held hands in adjacent seats and her tired head rested on my shoulder. I remember that feeling of intimacy well, but we did not speak of it in case it spoilt its simple and symbolic beauty. We selected a district at random from the travel guide, and found an inexpensive hotel. We booked into two garret-like rooms on the same top-floor corridor, and went out for ‘le menu’ enjoyed over a red check tablecloth and rough wine from an earthenware jug. The other people in the restaurant looked dissipated, and glanced across at us periodically from their dog-eared copies of ‘France Soir’ before returning to their own private blue smoke hazes. The following morning we realized from the concentration of women waiting on street corners that we had ventured into a moderately sleazy quarter best explored by daylight. A couple of blocks away, the road opened up into a wide avenue, and there was La Pigalle - notorious and by virtue of its seeming familiarity, reassuring.
We explored parts of the city with no great aim other than to do it together and ended up in Montmartre, I with images of the place conjured up by too much reading of Jean-Paul Sartre, and by the Pissarro painting in oil of the boulevard leading to the cathedral on the hill, rendered in a watery light that made the stone fabrics and horse-drawn carriages quiver and shift. We descended to the side roads to find a restaurant, where the rough stone walls were covered with original paintings in styles from impressionist to modern. Of rainy street scenes and bright summer flowers. Of sombre matriarchs and walking parties in a Parisian park. And of poplar-lined avenues and beach scenes below high chalk cliffs. But mostly of Montmartre and its cathedral and its streets. We shared those moments, talked about Sartre, and found an innocent frisson in each other’s company. We bought brie and bread, sat on a park bench, and talked and laughed about van Gogh’s bowl of potatoes and peasant’s boots. There was nothing that could be better in the whole world than that springtime in Paris with a girl in a dark duffle coat and tied back hair. Only the Parisian sky could witness our young and tentative love.
I returned to the different reality of a job in Aberdeen for a multinational oil company. Before the year was over, I was told that my next posting was to be to the Middle East. I related this to her in a matter-of-fact way, as if I were passing on the news that a distant aunt had taken on a lodger. Neither of us spoke immediately, as we waited as in a game of chess for someone else’s move to dictate our course of action. With no advice, and no research, but with a visceral momentum, we decided to go to the Middle East together as a married couple. The wedding day was set, the guests invited, and one overcast Saturday in November, two strangers were united. In my pocket lay a recently opened telegram stating that the Middle East posting had fallen through and that I was to report to Head Office in London as soon as possible. Our very short honeymoon before heading off to the Gulf became a very short honeymoon before finding a flat in Highgate.
November 1975. That was the time of cleaving and leaving. Had I gone to Qatar, or had I gone temporarily to London, it made no difference. I parted from my genetic double, leaving nurture to conduct its experiment without the complications of nature. The nucleus was split by a spontaneous fission that was bound to happen, but never did until that November. And like an atom, once split, we were changed forever. My cheesecloth shirt girl was simply the agent by which this happened.
It was not long before my career in the oil industry came to an end. It was not that we did not enjoy living in a modern house with a balcony overlooking a wide canal on the edge of The Hague. Our little Citroen had a canvas roof that could be rolled back, narrow wheels that were prone to get stuck in tram lines, a stuttering engine that stalled at inopportune moments, and failed to climb even the slightest of inclines, of which there are few in South Holland. But our ‘deux chevaux’ was much more interesting than my job looking for oil and gas beneath the North Sea. I had signed up believing that the geological exploration for oil was fantastically exciting. And in a sense it was, and still is. But I found it difficult doing as I was told. I no longer aspired to take the job that my managers now held. And so we returned to the UK for me to start a doctorate at Cambridge. What had not been part of the plan was to turn up in the autumn of 1976 with a wife already 3 or 4 months pregnant. Thus, the cleaving was almost complete. I had left Aberdeen where we had congregated as a group of new graduates, I had married someone whom none of my friends knew, I had left my well-paid job and its good prospects of financial security, and a child lay in waiting in the womb.

Above the garnet cliffs



They lay above the garnet cliffsas waves beneath them, beat them,retreated then repeated,the rhythm of erosion,in the boiling sea below them.
They spoke above the garnet cliffsas the wind surrounded, resounded,thrift in constant motion,the turbulence ascendingin the scudding sky above them.
Eyes met above the garnet cliffs,hearts intersected, not rejected,sweetly mingled, apprehensiveof the sombre time of partingin the day, too soon, before them.
Hands touched above the garnet cliffs,pairs of eyes reacted, retracted,time removed, then deluded,enslaved to past, future precludedin the silent thoughts deep within them.
Together above the garnet cliffs,with pigtails, and suburban tales,her cheesecloth shirt, long eyelashes,he in jeans with coloured patches,glanced at the girl at rest beside him. 

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