Strangers by Rosie Thomas Page B

Martin was two years ahead of her. She had seen him before, in the corridors and once across the room at a party, without noticing him in particular. He had long hair and a leather jacket, artfully ripped, like everyone else’s. Today he was drawing on an artists’ pad, his head bent in concentration. She remembered sitting in the warm, steamy atmosphere listening to the hiss of the coffee machines behind the high counter. The boy at the next table had finished his drawing and looked up, smiling at her.
    ‘Another coffee?’ he asked.
    He brought two cups over to her table, and she tilted her head to look at the drawing under his arm. Obligingly he held it out and she saw an intricately shaded pencil drawing of the coffee bar with the chrome-banded sweep of the counter, the polished levers of the Gaggia machine and the owner’s brilliantined head bent behind it. At her table, close to the counter, he had drawn in her friends but Annie’s chair was empty.
    ‘Why haven’t you drawn me?’ she demanded and he answered, ‘Well, that would have been rather obvious of me, wouldn’t it?’
    He’s nice, Annie thought.
    She felt the intriguing mixture of excitement and anticipation that she recalled years afterwards as the dominant flavour of those days. Everything that happened was an adventure, every corner turned presented an enticing new vista.
    ‘What’s your name?’ the boy asked her. ‘I’ve seen you at the college, haven’t I?’
    ‘Anne. Annie,’ she corrected herself. Since leaving school she had discarded sixth-form gawky Anne in favour of Annie, free-wheeling art student with her Sassoon bob and cut-out Courrèges boots.
    ‘I’m Martin.’
    And so they had met, and the strands had been picked out and pulled together in the first tentative knot. Martin had taken a crumpled handbill from his pocket. It was the term’s programme from the college film society.
    ‘Look. Zéro de Conduite . Have you seen it?’ And then when Annie shook her head, ‘You really should. Would you like to come with me?’
    For all their protestations of freedom they had still been very conventional, all that time ago. He had invited her to see a film and she had accepted, and he had taken her for supper afterwards at the Sorrento.
    But there was no fragment to illustrate what had happened next. She simply couldn’t remember. All she could see was herself, trudging through the rain in the streets beyond Battersea Park, with Martin’s address burning in her pocket. He must have taken her out once or twice and then moved on to someone else. Was that it?
    Perhaps. And perhaps she had been smitten by the anguish that was as much part of those days as the enchantment. She had determined that she wouldn’t let him go, and had boldly gone to the registry to find his address. But she could see her nineteen-year-old self so clearly, in her white plastic mac dotted with shilling-sized black spots, splashing through the puddles wearing her tragic sadness like a black cloak. Just as Jeanne Moreau did, or Catherine Deneuve, or whichever French actress was providing her model for that week. She was going to confront him, beg him to listen to her because she was lost without him. There was a bottle of wine in her carrier bag, and when the time came they were going to drink it together, all barriers down at last.
    There, that little piece fitted there .
    She had reached his door and rung the bell, her face already composed in its beautiful, sad, brave lines. Martin opened the door, brandishing a kitchen ladle. He beamed at her, and her heart lifted like a kite.
    ‘Oh, Annie, it’s you. Great. Just the person we need. Come in here.’
    She followed him into the kitchen and stared around. It wasn’t what she had planned, not at all.
    The room was packed with people, mostly ravenous-looking boys. In the middle of the table, amidst a litter of potato peelings and bottles of beer and cider, there was a slab of roast pork, half carved, with