The Tall Girl from Somerset 32

To Harvey she seemed to have a sadness and a yearning for something inaccessible.  For him one of her attractions was that he thought he could help her lose that serious look, and replace it with a laugh or at least a smile.  She did enjoy things with him, but his laugh had to be enough for both of them. She never lost her wistful expression.

He gave her a novel for her 21^st birthday.  It was “Pickwick Papers”.

She had told him that she had never read Dickens, and he wanted to

give her something which would make her laugh. 

He wrote FOR LORNA inside the cover.   

“Forlorn! The very word is like a bell

To toll me back from thee to my sole self!”

Some sadness hung about her in spite of all his efforts. She was in a different dimension, and, Harvey felt modestly, on a higher plane.  Their worlds overlapped a little in space and time, in Australia, in the bar where they played pool and on the beach where they swam and then lay side by side in the Perth sun.  They were like the two circles that have a segment in common in a geometry question at school. Later, he thought, she’ll swing back to her side of the circle, and I will go back to mine.

The weeks passed, and then one evening, after a drink with Lorna in one of those bars near the waterfront, Harvey went to get his car. Nothing.  There was no car there.  ‘That’s odd.  I must have left it in the next street.  Sometimes I park there.  But I am sure it was here.  I am sure it was here.’ Harvey walked round the corner and up and down the road.  Nothing.  He went back to where he thought he had parked and the finally he accepted that it had gone. 

Stolen!  Sometimes an incident can crystallize a feeling that has been growing for some time.  It is the last straw that breaks the camel's back.  It is the drop that brims over the glass. It is that moment when you realize it is time to cash in all the points you have been collecting.  Why did losing his car make Harvey decide to leave? As in dreams, cause and effect are not always clear, but some link exists and this makes us dream as we do. In the street next to the empty space where he had left his car, Harvey decided to go back to Somerset. He felt strangely defenceless and alone when his car had gone and he knew it was time to go home, to go back around the world once more.  His car reappeared a couple of days later with some old blankets on the back seat, beer cans on the floor and it smelled of tobacco.  It didn’t matter.  He was going home.

The next day he saw Lorna.  They met and had a coffee, and that was it. Losing the car crystallised everything. Without it their separation would have taken longer, but it would have come in the end.   With that, they parted.

Harvey bought a ticket for England.  He was going home. As time passed, he thought of Lorna less and less, and, strangely he even found it difficult to remember exactly what her face was like, and he had to look again at the photo he had cut from the weekend supplement.  Yet, for several weeks, in the bright sun of Perth, she had been what he had lived for.

His ticket was for the first Tuesday in November. Perth to London Heathrow, one way.  He was sad to leave but happy to go.  Australia had treated him well and he was grateful. On Tuesday, at 8.15 in the morning, Jake drove him to the airport.  At the security gate, Harvey turned and said goodbye to Jake, to Perth, to Australia, to Lorna and to three years of travelling.  At last he was going home.