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Peter Lovesey

Rough Cider

ONE

When I was nine; I fell in love with a girl of twenty named Barbara, who killed herself. True.

It’s an extraordinary story. I’ve been telling myself for years that I must put it in writing. I can’t expect the memories to stay vivid forever. I’m past fifty now.

I have any number of excuses for delaying so long. Where should I start, for instance? Not in 1943, for sure.

To tell it right, I must take you into a self-service restaurant in Reading in 1964, where you meet me at the self-assured age of twenty-nine, eating sausages and chips and rashly trying to read Machiavelli’s The Prince at the same time. A Friday lunch. I know it was Friday because at the end of the week I was in the habit of escaping from the university for a quiet couple of hours on my own. My luckless duty as the most underemployed member of staff in the history department was to offer a course on Europe in the twentieth century to all-comers in the first year. Like many other fiascos, my course was the brainchild of a committee, this one dedicated to promoting a concept known as supportive studies. It was optional and would not be examined. The “all-comers” consisted of a phalanx of political agitators who filled the two front rows, plus sundry casual callers who came in to sleep because all seats were taken in the library. After it I was in no mood for luncheon and pretentious conversation in the senior refectory.

“Excuse me, is this place taken?”

I raised my eyes from the book and stared. It’s a long cultural leap from Machiavelli to a girl with pouting lips like Bardot’s, blond hair, and gold-rimmed glasses.

She was carrying a full tray.

I took a glance around me.

There was no reason for her to have come to my table. The restaurant was three-quarters empty. There were two unoccupied tables to my right.

I’d better explain that I’m obliged to use a stick to get about. My right leg is practically useless. At thirteen I became a victim of polio. Ninety-nine people in a hundred who contract the virus display only minor and temporary symptoms. I was the hundredth. Compared with others I’ve met, mine is a small disability. I try not to let it limit my possibilities. I refuse to wear a leg-iron, so I keep myself vertical with a stick, an ostentatious ebony cane with an inlaid silver band and a leather handle. The reason I mention this is that from time to time I’m bothered by well-meaning people who impose themselves on me to attest their concern for the disabled. My first thought when I saw the girl with the tray was that she was one of these. I didn’t want to be patronized, even by a stunningly good-looking girl.

I guessed from her age (she was not more than twenty) and the glasses that she was a student, but her clothes were definitely more town than gown; red chiffon scarf, black blouse, and peacock-blue corduroy skirt with dark stockings and black, sling-back shoes. Something was wrong, though. Even to my inexpert eye the skirt was inches too long for Britain in 1964. Her accent was unfamiliar, also, which may have explained why she didn’t understand the form in a British self-service restaurant.