Chapter 13
We end up spending a few more nights in the area, as there is a great camping ground nearby where we can tend to all of Joy’s needs, and because Tasha and Lily and their family are staying there and Charlie wants to have more time with them.
He has never had a serious girlfriend, and I have never pushed him on which way his interests lie. It has simply never mattered to me, as long as he is happy. I am guessing from the lingering glances he shares with Lily, the older of the two, that his interests most definitely extend in her direction. I wonder if I should give him a talk about toxic masculinity and avoiding teen pregnancies but decide that I don’t need to. He is not even remotely toxic, and I am in no position to lecture anyone on the latter.
We are invited to their motorhome for a barbecue on one of the evenings, where Luke and their dad spend endless happy hours discussing their vehicles and their travels, and I get embroiled in embarrassing conversations with the mum, where I explain that Luke is not Charlie’s dad, and no, also not his stepdad, and no, also not my boyfriend. She looks so shocked when I explain the truth of the situation that I resolve there and then to simply say, “Yes, he’s my boyfriend—cute, isn’t he?” in the future.
I get a better grip on Joy’s functions and tackle exciting tasks like replacing the gas bottle and emptying the waste tank, and we spend our days exploring the nearby countryside and our nights sitting out and chatting and eating as though we are in the Mediterranean, not the Midlands. It is really rather splendid, aided by the fact that I stay off my email and concentrate instead on the Sausage Dog Diaries.
Charlie does all the boring stuff for me and also posts ferociously on social media. Lily is a whiz at it all as well and sets me up with all kinds of hashtags and promo ideas. I leave them to it, because it is not my scene, but smile in encouragement when they tell me I already have some followers. Apparently sausage dogs are “hot right now,” and a lot of the people who read my posts on the camping forums have joined in the fun. By the time we decide to move on, I have more than two hundred people signed up to the blog.
That is a slightly scary amount of people—what if I’m rubbish? What if I make a spelling mistake, or post a picture of my boobs by mistake, or, even worse, put an apostrophe in the wrong place? Writing on the forums felt anonymous and safe; this feels terrifying. I’ve always seen writing as a form of escape, but this seems to be becoming more than that, and I’m not sure I’m ready. I’m not sure I have the confidence for it.
I adapt my usual policy—Just Don’t Think About It—and simply carry on doing what I like doing. Luke tells me this is the equivalent of dancing like nobody is watching, and I think he is right. It is enjoyable, and distracting, and it feels good to exercise a part of my brain that has long been dormant.
After the third night, we decide it is time to move on, and we make a draw from the hat. For the first time, the tiny ball of paper turns out to be one of my picks.
“Oxford?” says Charlie, sounding disappointed. “But that’s just a place! That feels like cheating!”
“I’m sorry, son,” I say, patting him on the shoulder in consolation. “But them’s the rules—and off to Oxford we go. If it makes you feel any better, we could pretend I put The Golden Compass instead? Or Inspector Morse ?”
“No idea what that one is, must be something from the last century, but yeah... okay. The Golden Compass will do.”
We set off disgustingly early, because Charlie wants to call in at a stone circle, and after our experience at the last one, we aim to be there before anybody else. He tells us, as we arrive just after seven, that there is an old story about a witch who turned a king and his men to stone, and also that witches used to come here “skyclad.” This, he explains with a smirk, means naked. I assure him that I am not a witch and therefore will not be following suit, but he should feel free to take a nude gallop around them if he feels the call.
“That’d be weird, Mum,” he says as we get out of Joy into pale morning sunlight.
“It would, but I don’t want to restrict your development as a human being. Plus, I grew you in my own body, you know—it wouldn’t be anything I’ve not seen before.”
“I’ll do it if Luke will...,” he mutters, earning himself a jokey kick on the backside from the man in question. We make our way down a pathway through a wooded copse, thick with lush vegetation and alive with birdsong. We are near a main road, but somehow the noise of the passing traffic seems to disappear as we emerge out onto the open space where the stones lie.
It is almost eerie how fast that happens, and I pause to relish it.
In front of us is an enormous ring of pale pockmarked stones, almost shining in the early light. Some are upright and tall, some seem to be having a lie-down. I suppose they’ve earned a rest after being here for a few thousand years. We wander from stone to stone, and I can’t resist running my hands across them, wondering what they were for and who built them and how. So many centuries of human lives have passed while they have stood here—through wars, through revolutions, through eons of change, they have remained, still and silent and strange.
Whoever built them is long gone, together with their motives, but they were still human beings—still people with hopes and dreams, still connected to us, through that long stretch of time, now, standing here together as we gaze at them. It is mysterious and majestic and utterly mind-bending.
We spend a good hour there in that magical place, drinking coffee from the thermos, wandering from stone to stone, finding something new and gnarly about each of them. Charlie tries to count them but gives up when he reaches fifty and gets confused.
Eventually, we settle on the grass in the middle and just soak it all up. The birds, the sunshine, the stones. The still, calm sense of serenity. These ancient dudes definitely knew how to pick a top location.
After a while, a small family arrives—mum, dad, toddler, cockapoo—and we take that as our cue to leave. We have had our mystical moment—now it is time to pass it on to someone else to enjoy.
As we stand up and dust ourselves down and prepare to walk away, Charlie says: “Hey, you know in the Julian Cope book? It tells a story about how women used to come here when they wanted babies, and put their boobs on the stones to make them fertile!”
I involuntarily cross my arms over my chest, and they both laugh at me.
“What?” I say, genuinely concerned. “You never know! I might trip and fall and accidentally land with one of the girls on a baby-stone... and nobody wants that!”
Charlie pulls a face and mutters the word girls in mock horror, and we leave happy and content, and in my case brimful of “just imagine.” We put some money into the honesty box, clamber back into Joy, and continue on to Oxford, which is less than an hour away.
Luke has found a place for us to stay overnight on the outskirts of the city, a few miles out and essentially at the back of someone’s very large garden. It’s amazing how many places there are out there willing to share their space with a great big motorhome.
We chat with the homeowner and fill two backpacks with what I now see as essentials—water, snacks, phones, swimmers, and towels—before getting the bus from a nearby stop.
We emerge onto a long main street edged by picture-perfect stone buildings, already awake at nine thirty. I presume the students are gone for the summer, but there are still lots of interesting-looking people striding around with purpose, already some tourists, and dozens of bicycles whizzing past us. Presumably, everyone is in a real hurry to get back to curing cancer or solving mathematical equations or pondering ancient Sanskrit texts.
We follow the flow of people farther into the town, and when we reach a large cobbled square with a round, domed building in the middle of it, it starts to look familiar.
“I remember this...,” I murmur, turning in a full circle, taking in the colleges and the church with its soaring spire and the quaint passageways.
“What? You’ve been here before?” says Charlie, looking confused.
“Only once,” I reply, “on a school trip. It was an open day. My English teacher wanted me to apply here, and a minibus full of us came to visit. It’s not changed at all...”
I realize, as I take in the sheer antiquity of the buildings, that they haven’t changed in centuries. It is busy and bustling and real, but it is also so very beautifully old. If you took away the people on mobile phones, you could literally be in another era.
“Wow,” says Charlie, staring at me with a strange expression, “you were clever then, Mum?”
“Clever enough, I suppose. Are you about to say, ‘What happened?’ and laugh at me?”
“No,” he replies quietly. “You’re still clever, whether you went to Oxford or not. And as for what happened, well, I know that, don’t I? I happened.”
He sounds wistful, and I reach up to hold my hand to his cheek. I might have to stretch, but he is still my baby.
“And, Charlie James, I would make that deal a million times over—I’d swap every single one of these hallowed halls for one minute with you, I promise!”
He smiles and looks a bit embarrassed, whether at his own display of emotion or at mine, I’m not quite sure. “What is that, anyway?” he says, pointing at the central building with its magnificent pale columns and massive doors and intricate stonework.
“It’s called the Radcliffe Camera,” replies Luke. “And it’s part of the Bodleian Library. When you join, you have to actually declare an oath and promise that, among other things, you will never kindle flame within its walls.”
“How do you know that?” I ask, loving the olde-worlde language.
“Erm... well. I was a student here, in another lifetime.”
“What!” declares Charlie. “So you’ve both been here before? I feel betrayed!”
His expression is so comically outraged that I have to stifle laughter.
“Why?” I ask. “We never made any rules about only visiting new places. We made no rules at all, in fact—I refer you back to ‘zombies,’ young sir.”
“I know, but... well, it’s better when it’s new, isn’t it? When we’re all doing it for the first time? Together? So we can all ooh and aah in the right places, like we did this morning at the stones?”
“I do know what you mean,” I assure him, “but you’ll just have to deal with it. Luke can be our expert guide for the day, and I barely remember it anyway.”
I am, in fact, lying about that—I remember it vividly. I grew up in Cornwall, one of the most beautiful places in the world, but my life had been dominated by local villages and the occasional exciting trip to the big city, otherwise known as Penzance, which isn’t even a city. Coming here had felt like visiting some exotic metropolis, and I’d spent the whole day in a fog of wonder, overwhelmed at the thought of actually maybe living here one day.
My teenage brain filled in the gaps: the dusty attic room hidden up flights of higgledy-piggledy steps; the exciting friends I’d make and who I’d have intellectual debates with all through the night; the handsome boy with the floppy hair I’d meet in the college bar; the stories I would write as I retraced the steps of Tolkien and C. S. Lewis and Iris Murdoch... It had all seemed so wild, so thrilling. And then I met Rob, and it felt tame in comparison.
I wonder, in that moment, how I would have reacted in my parents’ shoes. It has been easier, over the years, to not engage with their perspective, but I am increasingly finding myself doing just that. Maybe it’s Charlie’s age, maybe it’s this road trip, but, for whatever reason, it’s sneaking in and raising all kinds of questions.
Back then, to them, it must have felt like a monumental and disastrous shift—from their good girl with the good grades who was going to go to Oxford to a lovestruck rebel obsessed with a drummer. I have no idea, though, how things would have worked out if they hadn’t pushed me, pressured me, tried to keep me away from him. Involved the police. Perhaps the infatuation would have run its course, perhaps I would have tired of him, matured enough to realize that I wanted to do something else with my life.
I’ll never know, of course—and I meant every word I said to Charlie. I can’t regret any step that led me to here, to now, to being his mum. And maybe having two hundred followers on a camping blog isn’t exactly Oscar Wilde, but it’s good enough for me.
Charlie still looks a little miffed, but then Luke tells him about a place nearby called the Covered Market that has the world’s best cookie shop, and all is good in his universe. I give Luke a secret thumbs-up sign behind Charlie’s back; he has already found the key to my son’s heart.
First we do a circuit of Radcliffe Square and wander through the courtyards of the Bodleian, and Luke shows us a pretty stone arch called the Bridge of Sighs. He points out various colleges and tells us stories of his time here, and promises to take us to his favorite pubs at some point during the day.
We cross over the High Street and he guides us down to the colleges that are next to the river, walking across Christ Church Meadow. It is a vast and glorious open space to find in a city, a sprawling vista of green fields and trees and flowers, all backed by the grandeur of Christ Church College. Christ Church looks like every TV image of an Oxford college and is so beautiful it feels unapproachable. It is the supermodel of colleges.
Down across the meadow we go, past grazing cows with long horns, which is something you don’t see every day in an urban setting. This isn’t really like any other city, though, I remember—it’s unique and strange and incredibly charming. Betty barks at the cattle, who are approximately seven thousand times bigger than her, as if to say, “Come on then, if you think you’re tough enough.”
“So this bit of the Thames is called the Isis,” Luke tells us as we walk along the waterside and over a bridge. “And these are the college boathouses on the left. Not so busy now, but in term time, it’s heaving down here, even early in the morning. The college teams all come down to practice, and the river is crammed with boats, and the coaches cycle along the path yelling into megaphones... and when there are contests, like in Eights Week in the summer term, which is inexplicably called Trinity, it’s packed with students cheering their teams on, and family visiting, and everyone gets very drunk on mammoth jugs of Pimm’s...”
“That sounds like a lot of fun,” replies Charlie, clearly trying to visualize it.
“It was. You know, a hundred years ago, when I was a lad, and life was a simpler thing...”
“Your life seems pretty simple now, to be honest,” says Charlie as we amble back up the path. “You’re not exactly high-maintenance, are you? I mean, you don’t even have Netflix.”
“This is true,” Luke responds, smiling. “I am but a simple creature.”
I smile, but I know that isn’t in fact true at all. He may appear simple on the surface, but his life has been anything but. I imagine him here, in his late teens and early twenties, young and carefree. The younger him had no idea of what joys and what pains lay ahead—but I don’t suppose any of us do. That’s not part of the deal with life, is it? We can plan and work and set a course, but none of us can be sure of where we will end up. Maybe the trick is accepting that, and just trying to enjoy what you have when you have it.
We walk along a small pathway to a place with the amusing name of Magpie Lane and make our way to the famous Covered Market, home of the Cookies of Yore. It is a marvelous place with a medieval feel, traditional butcher shops and greengrocers nestled in rows with boutiques and craft stores and cafes. We fuel up on chocolate chip and macadamia nut and continue our exploring for the rest of the morning. We have our lunch at a pub called The Bear, which has a collection of thousands of different ties in frames on its sloping walls, and we call into shops and visit a surreal place called the Pitt Rivers Museum, which has a macabre display of shrunken heads that totally freaks me out. Not knowing where life will take you is one thing—but I bet none of these chaps expected to end up as part of an exhibit on the other side of the world, being gawked at by twenty-first-century tourists. Charlie, naturally enough, is fascinated. After that, we make a long walk to a place called Port Meadow, where we swim in clear water as cattle at the side gaze down at us with curiosity.
The day is long, and full, and tiring. As we lounge on the riverbank drying off, watching children play and lapwings soar in the sky, I realize that I could quite easily fall asleep. Charlie is snoozing, with Betty tucked into the crook of his arm, and Luke is sitting up, chewing a long stalk of grass and gazing out at the landscape.
“I was really happy here,” he says quietly. “Had so many good times. Feels like a million years ago now. I stayed involved with my college for a while, came to events, stayed over for reunions—they call them gaudies, because why use a normal word when you can use one that’s based on Latin? But after Katie got sick, everything felt too hard. I couldn’t face the prospect of seeing all those old faces, catching up with old friends.”
“Having to tell them about Katie?”
“Yeah. That, I suppose. I mean, it’s not exactly a great conversational gambit, is it? ‘Hi, how are you, haven’t seen you for years—I’ve been fine, apart from my daughter dying...’ I hated telling people about it even when I had to, and the idea of putting myself in a situation where I had to do it repeatedly for a whole night... well, that wasn’t my idea of a good time. So I dropped out of the whole circle. Dropped out of everything really.”
“Are you not in touch with anyone from your old life? Friends, family?”
I ask this as though it is strange, but in reality I am exactly the same.
“Not really,” he says, frowning as he thinks about it. “Sally, obviously. But, thinking back, it was so easy to leave everyone else behind—work colleagues, people I knew socially—that I suspect none of them were especially important relationships anyway. I didn’t find it hard to not look back. I just kept driving. Sometimes I wonder if I was just a coward, running away like that.”
I sit up next to him, lay my hand over his. “You did what you felt you had to do. Don’t judge yourself so harshly. This is the way you live for now, and it’s helped you survive. One day, things might be different, you might be different. This is one moment, not forever.”
He turns to look at me, and there is an intensity in his eyes that momentarily startles me. “Right now,” he says, twining his fingers into mine, “maybe I wouldn’t mind that. If you had to pick a moment to last forever, this wouldn’t be a bad one, would it?”
I feel a flush of heat that has nothing to do with the fading sun, and everything to do with the touch of his skin against mine. Everything to do with those green eyes, that wide mouth, the hair I always want to stroke. Everything to do with Luke.
“No,” I murmur, “it really wouldn’t.”
We are silent, both still, as though afraid to speak or to move in case we break some kind of spell. The sounds around us seem to become faint, the rest of the world retreating into the background. I am immobile, frozen, both desperate to know what will happen next and terrified of it. This is indeed perfect , I think— this moment. Nothing needs to come next. I wish we could hit the Pause button, that I could sit here nuzzled against this man, holding his hand, feeling this sense of peace and communion and underlying want.
Of course, I don’t have a Pause button, and the world stops for no woman. Charlie wakes up, snorting loudly as he stretches his arms, and Betty decides to run off and bark at a duck. The spell is broken, and I pull my hand away from Luke’s, shaking my head to clear the fuzz. We make eye contact for one second more, and he smiles.
“Okay?” he mouths quietly, and I nod.
Yeah. I’m okay , I think. Nothing another dip in the river wouldn’t cure, I’m sure.
“Can we get some food?” Charlie says, and I laugh out loud. I can always rely on Charlie’s stomach to save me from the most tempting and dangerous of situations.