After Forever Ends (27 page)

I can honestly say that one of the most beautiful experiences of being a girl is finding a best friend. It took me fifteen years to find mine and it had happened at that school. In a number of ways it was a love affair with me and Sandy. From the very beginning we'd understood each other. I trusted her implicitly. I told her everything, things I'd never even told Oliver. She knew about my feelings for my dad, my ambitions, my sexual encounters. She knew my most intimate secrets and my greatest hopes and fears.

She was my harshest critic. I’ll never forget how she tore me to bits while we were gown shopping for a Yule Ball. “Oh, God! Silvia!” She scolded, “You can't wear ruffles! You look like a fucking retarded six year old!”

To this very day I can't even think of wearing a ruffle.

But in contrast she was my greatest, most honest supporter. “Now that dress, Love! Is gorgeous!” She had gasped and slapped her hand over her mouth. I had tried on an off the shoulder black, sequence satin gown, “Bloody gorgeous!”

“Is it really?” I turned in the mirror and looked at myself over my shoulder.

“Oh yeah!” She placed her hands on her slim hips, “I'd fuck you in that!”

“Really?”

“Really! I hate you!”

“Really?”

“No, I love-hate you! You're too cute!”

“I love-hate you, too! You're so tall!”

“Shut up and zip me!”

Sandy and Silvia. That was us. I loved her like a sister, true and real, and I knew that because I had a sister and it was difficult to compare the two.

On that quad the day we left Bennington, we wept knowing we'd be apart for a good, long time.

“You’ve got my address,” I finally let her go, wiping the tears from my cheeks.

“I do! And I’ll be back in Wales around Christmas, we can have tea then.” She dabbed her eyes with a tissue. “I can come back sometimes and you can come to Ireland, too!”

“Of course we can!”

“Oh, Silvia, I feel like I’m losing a sister!”

“You’re not losing anything!” I swore. I grabbed her up again and squeezed her hard, “We’ll be mates forever! I’ll see you around Christmas!”

As much as I meant the mates forever part, I knew somehow deep down in my heart that we wouldn’t meet for tea at Christmas or at any time soon after that, either. She might come to Wales from time to time, but she'd have no time to leave her obligations to come and see me. We would send posts and make phone calls and one day we would reunite, but our lives were going to take us to different destinations. My world was below hers, a simple one, where hers was one born with responsibilities I would never understand. It was like a stone sitting in my gut. I knew that Sandra knew it as well.

As Oliver and Alexander approached us, she let me go and turned to them. They both hugged her and the three of them stood chatting for a bit.

I suddenly felt incredibly lonely. The meaning of the old saying, “A page has turned” dawned on me. How true it was. I had spent three years writing a page of my life at Bennington and it was now over. Those days were safely tucked away, bound by time in my memory. My past could never be edited, revised or changed, but I could re-read it as time went on and review its lessons if I needed to. It was the first time I understood how precious memories are. I felt so empty and so full all at once.

Moments later, Sandra left off with her older brother for their home in Ireland. Lance had left off with his mother for their estate North in Caernarfon. Alexander left off with his parents for the family home in Welshpool and Oliver and I took one last walk around the lake together in silence. We looked at the little gamekeeper's cottage that had been our temporary home, at the tree we sat under when he had kissed me for the first time, and the spot on the bank where we would hang out with our little group of friends and laugh until we ached. Neither of us said a word. Then we walked across the grounds to the bench where we had first met.

“I want to take this with me,” Oliver said quietly, patting its surface. “Maybe I’ll steal it.”

“It’s made of stone. We couldn’t lift it.”

“Yes, but Professor Wilkins took the rubber ball from Lance when Merlyn broke a window with it and wouldn‘t return it, remember?”

I nodded, “You lose a ball and you can’t have a bench. But you ended up with me.”

He wrapped his arm around me, “Just Silvia, who’s not hurt or ticked off, but just fine.” We watched a butterfly flutter past and land on the grass, “What would it have been like here without you?”

“You’d have had loads of girlfriends.”

“Like who?”

“Oh, like Peggy McGhee!”

“Who? Oh, her. Yes. I mean no. Definitely not her.” He was looking straight ahead.

“Serena McLaughlin then.”

Oliver snorted. “Try another!”

“Amber Monahan.”

“No way! She‘s revolting!”

“Well, you could have had the half of the female students that Alex didn’t,” I squeezed his arm, “Or the two you might have exchanged if it wasn’t a good fit. Wait! Would that be twincest?”

I watched the dimple appear in his cheek as Oliver smiled and shook his head, “Gargoyles, ninety-five percent of them. I wouldn’t have wanted any one of them and none of them would have been clever enough to get me through Physics.”

“I didn’t help! You nicked the password to Professor McClellan’s computer, picked the lock on her office and changed your mark yourself! And maybe you wouldn’t have wanted to keep any of those girls, but they’d have wanted to keep you.”

“So? You practically wrote my essay once!” He looked up into the sky, “I’d have been miserable here without you!” He paused, “Well, maybe I’d have gotten an urge to go to Edinburgh then. Maybe I’d have gone and seen a beautiful red haired goddess on a bench and beamed her straight in the back of the head with a rubber ball just so I could meet her.”

“You did that on purpose?”

He looked at me with the devil in his grin, “No, but it would have been brilliant, yeah?”

I lay my head against his arm. We were quiet for a long moment. “So it’s good bye to Bennington now and off to our little house in the wood.”

“Oh, I’ll make it big. I’ll make a mansion out of it for you.”

“I don’t want a big house.”

“Really?”

“No, just a couple of rooms.”

“A toilet with a window?”

“Up high, sure,” I squeezed him again, happily imagining it, “Nothing we can’t manage. Just something where we can go at night and be warm and eat fat sausages and bacon and toast in the morning. Of course, running water would be nice.”

“A room for us and a room for a muffin or two?” He nudged me.

“Oh, yes, definitely, but we’ll worry about the muffins as they come. They can always share a room for a while if they have to. Lucy and I did.”

“I really do think you are absolutely the most fabulous person in the world, Sil.” He looked at me seriously, “Marry me again?”

“As many times as you ask, Sweetheart.”

“Then I’ll keep asking.”

“Good.”

We sat there awhile longer before we both knew that it was simply time to leave the place and everybody in it behind. Both of us sighed, taking one last glance around. How special Bennington was, really. Despite its constraints, it had been a sort of magical place for us. Oliver had spent a good amount of time growing up there, but I tell you this for nothing. That is that I was born there. I said it in the beginning that I swear my life began the day I walked through those gates and I wasn't joking. I certainly would not have grown to be the woman I did had I never set foot on that quad or sat on that bench that morning to check my schedule. It is so amazing the way such a simple act can launch the direction of your destiny. One just never knows, do they?

As we were exiting the quad, Headmistress Pennyweather came scurrying across it, “Ah, the young Dickinson’s! I was hoping to find you!” She was all smiles, her hair tucked up under a grey fedora, “Lovely day, is it not?”

“Yes, ma’am, lovely,” Oliver told her.

“Well, since the term is over and you two are no longer students, there is something I have wanted very much to give to you,” She reached into her pocket and pulled out an envelope, “It is from not only me, but some of the other faculty. We could not formally present you with a wedding gift while you were enrolled here, but now that you’ve graduated we all wanted to wish you well.”

“Thank you,” I told her as she thrust it into my hand, “I don’t know what to say!”

She grinned, looking between the two of us for a moment, “Don’t say a thing at all, Silvia. Just use it well and wisely. And remember these words from an old lady…life can be cruel and at times can be downright ugly, but as long as you remember what you saw when you first knew you loved each other and keep finding it over and over again, there is nothing that you can’t get through together. Not a single thing!” She took a sharp breath, “Now, Mister Dickinson, may I give you a hug as a good bye?” She stood on her tiptoes to embrace him and patted him lovingly on the back, “Hopefully not a forever one, I’d like to see you again. Please do keep your brother in line,” She released him and turned to me, “And one for you, Missus Dickinson, who shall forever be Miss Cotton in my mind…I still can’t get past it,” She laughed, giving me a tight squeeze. “Come back and visit an old lady once or twice! Or give me a ring and let me know how it is going with you two! Now, go on! Get on with your lives! And make them happy ones, too!” She looked at her watch, “I’ve got a plane to catch! I’m spending the first part of my holiday in Monte Carlo!” And with that, she scuttled off and disappeared into the halls of Bennington.

“She’s an angel,” Oliver grinned as he took my hand and began to walk with me toward the gate.

“You really do fancy her, don’t you?” I asked him seriously. He didn’t respond, but kept looking at the school. I slit open the envelope with my finger and opened it, drawing out the card, “Oh my!”

“What is it?”

“Remember when she said that what she doesn’t see herself someone always tells her?”

“Yep.”

“It’s a certificate for lumber from a yard from the staff, like she said. Wow, a lot of them signed the card! And there’s a business card with a note. Oh, my goodness!”

“What?”

“Professor Walker’s son’s a bloody plumber and he’ll do the house at a discount!” I grinned, waving the paper, “I always knew I was his favourite!”

“Yeah, he’s sweet on you. Lots of blokes are, even the Profs. Dirty minded old buzzard he is, if you ask me. You probably didn’t even need to take an exam in his class to pass, yeah?” Oliver turned to me, and then looked back at the school with a deep, longing sigh, “I understand that completely, believe me. You bring that out in a man. But I do know now what I would have done if you hadn’t come to Bennington. I would have gotten past the age difference and I would have run off with that brilliant, beautiful old lady, Headmistress Pennyweather, and I’d have made her my own!”

“No,” I put my arm through his, “Because I’d have had an urge to come to Wales first and I’d have beamed you in the back of a head with a rubber ball. You’d have had no choice but to abandon your feelings for her and run away with me.”

“You know what? You’re right.”

“I’m always right.”

Oliver laughed and pulled me to his side, “That’s why I married you!”

The train is coming to a stop. I am suddenly snapped back into the moment and glance away from the window. I had not been aware I had been staring out of it at all. Kitty has one hand on her chin, leaning forward with her elbow on the table, and the other wrapped around a can of cola.

“She was the one you called my mother after, wasn’t she? Your headmistress?”

I nod. “She was a kind lady. She was one of those people who come into your life for a short time, but leave a profound effect on your soul.”

“She was a romantic, no doubt.”

“It was your granddad she shined on more than me. If she were thirty years younger, I’d have had some competition because he was right stuck on her. But she looked after Alexander, too. She was firm with him, but she protected him. Madame Pennyweather loved those boys and everybody knew it. After she passed on, Sandy told me that our Headmistress had birthed twin sons herself. One had died at shortly after birth and the other only lived to be about five years old. It was a birth defect, both she and her husband were carriers of a rare gene, and there was a three in four chance if she ever had another child it would have the same affliction. She never tried for more. I can’t say that I blame her,” I sigh, thinking of my old Headmistress and how if I could I’d love to pop into Bennington and see her still sitting at her desk, “It was why she became a teacher instead. She taught little ones before she took the position of Headmistress at Bennington.”

“That’s very sad,” Kitty says sincerely.

“Losing a child is the worst thing you can imagine, Kitty. It’s a nightmare you live with every day for the rest of your life. Even if the child dies before you got the chance to bond with it, every once in a while you’ll wake up thinking of it in the night.” I stop speaking and press my fingers against my temples. I don’t want the conversation to go where it’s heading and so I make sure I return to the former subject, “When I found out Madame Pennyweather’s given name was Carolina, I thought it was the most beautiful name I’d ever heard. Carolina Montez was the name she was born with. I’d had no idea she was from Brazil. I really should have taken the time to know more about her when she was alive, but I doubt she would have told me much. Anyway, your granddad and I changed the spelling of your mum’s name so that people wouldn’t mispronounce it. Carolena. I just love that name.”

Kitty watches a few people pass by heading for the exit doors.

“Are we getting off here?” I ask. I’m confused for a second and then embarrassed when I realize we’re not stopped at Welshpool Station. I’ve been to Welshpool Station a million times. I hope Kitty doesn’t think anything of it.

It’s obvious she doesn’t realize I’ve just had a lost moment. “No, Gran. Not yet.”

“Am I talking too much? I’m losing track of what I’m saying,” I rub my forehead. I have a slight headache, “I’m getting old. I think I just blabber on. I don’t know what I’ve told you. I hope I haven’t embarrassed you.”