The Tall Girl from Somerset 31

LORNA

She would have looked right in Vogue, modelling loose cotton summer clothes at an evening barbecue in the garden of some large country house.  She had a wispy beauty, and to Harvey she seemed not entirely of this world.  He felt she might become insubstantial at any moment, and fade away into the forest dim.  Her hair was red and long, and full as only a young woman’s can be.  It fell lightly over her shoulders. Her eyes were green.  She was slim and about four inches shorter than Harvey, but then he was well over six foot.  She often seemed abstracted, staring over her wineglass into the distance, and in those moments Harvey imagined that she was dreaming of the mists of some green valley on the west coast of Ireland or longing for the endless sands of a lonely beach in the Hebrides.

Harvey was not far wrong in thinking this, because, as he later discovered, Lorna’s father was from a small town near Aberdeen and her mother was from Ennis in County Clare.  She didn’t tell him much more about herself.  How or where her parents had met and what had then made them go to Australia, Harvey never found out.

From the first moment he saw her, as she leaned over the green baize of the pool table, he was enmeshed.  This sort of attraction happens to us all too frequently, but time and place have to lend a hand for things to stand a chance.   How often do people meet someone on the very day before they have to move on and leave a place where they have been lonely?  Many times Harvey had seen a girl that he knew he could spend the rest of his life with.  But she had always been on the other escalator going up, while he had been going down, in the other car at the traffic lights, leaving the airport in a taxi when he was arriving, or coming out of a cinema while he was going in.  He had often thought of stopping her, this fleeting woman, but he never had.  But, here in Perth, for once, circumstances had lent a hand, and time and place were right.

When he first saw her, she was leaning over a pool table, her red hair almost touching the green, in the back room of a smoky Perth bar.  Her long cigarette was on a corner of a table.  She usually won her games.  Celtic apparitions can play pool, and Lorna played very well.  That is how she and Harvey met. ha asked her if she wanted to play pool. She won the first time they played, but Harvey was not concentrating on his game.  How could he?  But, after that first encounter, they won about equally.  

They had an unusual relationship, which Harvey always felt would be transient, just as he felt his stay in Australia would be. At the weekends they went to the beach.  Lorna wore a green bikini.  As he looked at her, and at the sun and at the sea and the swimmers, Harvey felt that life was treating him very well.  He had always been lucky, but being in Perth with Lorna was a time that would be hard to forget.

  One day when they were on the beach they saw a photographer taking photos of girls for a weekend supplement of the newspaper.  This was Australia.  As soon as the photographer spotted Lorna he came up to her and asked if he could take photos of her.  Harvey bought the paper for the next few weekends and cut out the picture when it eventually appeared six weeks later.  Harvey spent hours with Lorna, but he felt that he would never really know her well.  What did she do?  Nothing connected with playing pool.  She was a musician.  She played the violin in a string quartet, and gave classes as well.  This was a world that was closed to Harvey. There were many compartments of her life that were closed to him. 

Harvey loved Lorna, but he couldn’t imagine talking with her about new tiles for the bathroom.  Loving was easy; loving was in the blood and in the limbs. Liking was the  hard thing to manage.  Liking was the day-to-day.  Not minding if the toothpaste tube was squeezed the wrong end, sharing a joke or an umbrella, worrying if she was late home, the whole of the “in sickness and in health” thing.  Loving gets things moving, but liking has stamina. Harvey wondered about his stamina with Lorna.

“Oh what can ail thee knight-at-arms,

Alone and palely loitering?

The sedge has withered from the lake

And no birds sing.”

Lorna was a perfect Belle Dame Sans Merci. She would need no preparation, no instructions. She would entice men to their doom on the lonely hill by the lake.  How many palely loitering knights she had already enthralled Harvey never knew, and never dared to ask. 

He knew that she was 20.  She was at that age, or just entering it, when youth is approaching its peak, full of sap and full of the present. For many that is the highest point and later comes the slow decline, but Lorna was one of those women who would turn heads and lift eyes for many years to come.