“Do you come here often?” he asks, and I almost laugh ’cos it’s like a cheesy line from one of those American films you and I used to watch together.
So I tell him yes, yes, I do. I come here every week.
“And how do you know Libby?” he says, and that’s when I realize that she hasn’t told him yet. And I look at her and she nods, like she’s saying she wants me to be the one to tell him.
“We just met, on the 88,” I say. “Libby told me about your search.”
And I see his eyes go wide then, like the penny’s dropped, and he looks at me but he doesn’t say anything, and I start to panic again that he’s gonna have a heart attack right here on our bench.
“Are you...” he says, and his voice is all quavery, like his hands. “Are you my girl on the bus?”
Let me tell you, when Libby told me about him earlier, this old man and his sixty-year search... well, I didn’t quite believe it, to be truthful. What kind of person spends sixty years looking for someone they met once? I thought he must be off his rocker. But now I look at him and I can see it in his eyes, see the answer to that very question.
Hope.
That’s what’s been driving him, why he hasn’t been able to give up. His search has given him hope, and now he’s terrified I’m going to crush it. So I take a deep breath before I answer.
“No.”
I see him blink.
“I’m not your girl on the bus.”
His eyes flicker then, like a candle that’s been caught in a draft.
“But I think I know who she was,” I say before the candle goes out altogether.
“Are you sure?” he says.
I can’t help chuckling at this. When Libby described her to me earlier, an art student with bright red hair and a beret who liked to draw people on London buses... well, there can’t have been that many of them around in the early sixties, can there? Especially not ones who had a thing for thatBacchus and Ariadnepainting. So I nod at him and tell him I’m sure.
Frank’s staring at his hands, clasped in his lap like he’s trying to stop them shaking.
“What’s her name?” he says, his voice so quiet I can hardly hear him.
“Persephone Fitzgerald.” It feels funny, saying that name out loud after all these years.
“Persephone.” He gives a little smile, a small shake of his head, and then he looks at me. “Will you tell me about her?”
And I smile too, because you know me: there’s nothing I love more than a good story. So I sit back on the bench, and I tell him all about you.
•••
Itell him how we met, back on our first day at art school. I tell him how everyone else spoke all la-di-da and walked around like they owned the bloody place, and then there was you standing in the corner looking like a beautiful Victorian waif and swearing like a trooper. I remember we caught each other’s eyes, and it was like looking in a mirror: we both recognized, without saying a word, how hard we’d had to fight to be there, the sacrifices we’d both made that those other kids would never understand. And then you grinned at me and strolled across the room, your eyes never leaving mine.
“I’m Percy,” you said, and you must have seen me screw up my nose, ’cos you said, “My real name’s Persephone but that’s a bore.”
I tell him how we got a room together, down in Clapham, in a house full of girls trying to make their way in the city. How we were inseparable: Percy and Peggy, Peggy and Percy. How you opened my eyes to London, took me to dodgy little drinking dens in Soho where we were the only girls in the place, taught me to smoke and play poker. And the art galleries, of course. I’d never been to the National Gallery, and you took me that first Saturday and made me sit for an hour in front of one painting. I thought you were barking, but by god,you taught me more about art than any of those stuffy old men at college.
And then, I have to confess, I detour a little bit to tell him what happened to me. Well, you can’t blame me, can you?
I explain how I met Arthur—handsome, charming, dangerous Arthur—and how naive I was when he told me we were safe; he was taking care of things. And then how, a few months later, you held me as I sobbed in the loo with the realization of what had happened. How you were with me when I told my parents, who were so furious they made me and Arthur get married, even though we didn’t love each other. How I had to drop out of art school in our final year and move into that little flat in Clapham Junction and how Arthur had started cheating on me even before David was born.
I can see the girl, Libby, is watching me the whole time I tell them this, biting her lip as she strokes her big pregnant bump. So I stop then, because it’s not my story they’re interested in, after all. It’s yours.
I tell them how you graduated top of our class but stayed in London to help me when David was born, sleeping on the floor next to my bed when Arthur was out drinking all night, barricading the bedroom door when he got home. How you wanted me to leave him and us to get a flat together, you working to support me and the baby. I still wonder sometimes what would have happened if I’d said yes, how differently things might have turned out for both of us. But I didn’t, did I? Too scared of that bloody man and his fists. Besides, I didn’t want to hold you back, love. You were never meant to be tied down.
Then I tell them about the postcards you sent: first from Rome, when you studied there, then from Paris, and finally from New York. I still have them all at home in a box, theweekly cards with your spidery scrawl on the back. I remember standing at the sink in my tiny kitchen, reading in wonder these unfamiliar words: Andy Warhol and the Factory and someone called Edie Sedgwick. And Frank nods at this, his face bright, and I can see that these names mean more to him than they ever did to me.
