Two Men by a Duck Pond

Nell had realised it long before seeing what she saw – or more to the point, whom she saw, in front of her in the queue at the Post Office. Melvin was boring. He was quite monumentally, soul-sappingly, brain drainingly boring – and the latter, at least, was ironic, as nobody could say he was stupid. He had, most people agreed, more or less single-handedly pulled up the Pub Quiz team at the Chandler’s Arms up by its bootstrings, so it was now challenging for the local championship, not languishing in the fourth tier. 

     But oh, dear God, he was boring. There was an irritating innocence about it. There was nothing self-aware or (that word again!) ironic about Melvin’s boringness. If such a word existed. Well, it probably did. It didn’t get a red squiggle on Word. And it didn’t mean the same thing as boredom. One was what you inflicted, the other what you endured. 

     Even as she queued with the parcel she needed weighing, Nell reminded herself that Melvin was a good man. After all, everybody said so. Her mother, who was an almost uncanny judge of character, said so; her friend Priscilla, who had a low tolerance threshold, said so, and her brother Kevin who secretly thought nobody was good enough for his little sister (touching, but vaguely ridiculous, as they were both in their forties) said so. The children, who weren’t children any more, Sinead and Cameron, loved him in a prosaic, undemanding way. He was good old Dad. He might not be the world’s most inspirational and interesting father, but he had always looked after them and never embarrassed them. He had never gone in for Dad-dancing, or displaying his (lack of) soccer skills or wearing silly T-shirts. 

     And as she queued in the Post Office, wondering why things got heavier the longer you carried them, and already dreading how much it would cost to send her parcel, she saw Lewis. She only saw the back of his head, at first, and yet she knew. It wasn’t just his curly dark brown hair, though that was as lustrous as ever, and hadn’t thinned in the least. It was the set of his shoulders, the way he seemed both relaxed and alert at the same time. And then she heard his voice. What he was saying was something and nothing, just a polite reply to a rather tedious comment about the weather. But it was the same voice she had last heard ten years ago, or more, the last time they met, not entirely by chance. And it was the same voice that she had heard call her teasingly and lovingly Ellie, or even “Miss Ellie”. Not because she bore any resemblance to any kind of Southern Belle or Texas oil billionaire, but because he liked the sound of it. Because he said it suited her. Not many people called her Ellie, now. Come to think of it, nobody did. Everyone who called her by her first name called her Nell. A sensible, monosyllabic name. And Nell and Mel was so – easy to remember! To his credit, Melvin preferred his full name, but said it wasn’t worth making an issue of it. On occasion her mother, when she was displeased with her, gave her her full handle of Eleanor, but otherwise she was Nell. 

     I don’t know if I want him to turn round or not, thought Nell. But she did know. She wanted him to turn round. And her wish was granted. He turned round, and exclaimed, “Ellie!” And oh, yes, his face lit up, just as she remembered, and there was that glint in his hazel eyes she remembered. You often heard the word glint but not many people actually had one in their eyes. Lewis did. They did not need to “arrange” it to know that when they had done what they needed to at the Post Office counter they would have a chat. There was no harm or consequence at all in that. Having a chat was a casual thing, what all old friends did when they met up. 

     The chat lasted an hour, and they sat in the Bouncing Bean letting their coffees go cold, and then sat in the park, pretending they were smiling indulgently at the children feeding the ducks, when their smiles had nothing whatsoever to do with children and ducks.

     When she had been 17 and he had been 19, they were almost one of those Hollywood portmanteau couples. Well, so far as their names went. Lewisandellie. And the funny thing was that though, even then, she was generally called Eleanor or Nell, when it was in conjunction with Lewis, she became Ellie. 

     Her mother didn’t much like him, yet admitted she was hard pushed to say why. To be fair, she never made any attempt to break the couple up, though how much because she thought she had no right to and how much she thought it would be counter-productive, she probably didn’t entirely know herself. As Ellie once overheard her saying to her father (who left that kind of thing to her) 17 was a funny age. She wasn’t quite an adult, but she certainly wasn’t a child. And there was nothing obviously problematic about Lewis. He was the son of a local solicitor (okay, such things as background shouldn’t matter, and she resolutely told herself she would never let snobbishness rule her opinions) and a very clever lad himself – he was in his first year at university, studying physics. Rather surprisingly he had chosen the university closest to home. There was general approval of that as the “official” version was that he was close to his grandmother, who also lived in the town, and she was in failing health. But Ellie’s mother knew the local chiropodist who attended to the old lady’s needs in that area, and said she got the impression that though she and Lewis were fond enough of each other, they weren’t inordinately so, and though his grandmother wasn’t, as folk said, as young as she used to be, and a martyr to her feet, she wasn’t especially ailing. More likely he liked his Mum to do his laundry. And to be close to me, thought Ellie, who was now changing her own plans to study at her hometown university. Her mother was reminded of the old saying about beware of what you wish for. Though she loved her daughter, it would be no bad thing for her to fly the nest. And to get away from Lewis for a while? Once you started thinking proverbially, things got awkward. Did absence make the heart grow fonder or out of sight mean out of mind?

     It would be untrue to say Lewis hadn’t changed a bit. Or course he had, and it would be unnatural if he hadn’t. He was a grown man now, a man in his prime. Ellie had always thought she never liked that expression, but when it came to Lewis, it was different. But she couldn’t help knowing he had changed less than she had. Some of it was superficial. Her hair, that had been long and flowing then, was cut in a sensible pageboy bob. She had put on a few pounds. Well, that was no problem. She could lose a bit of weight. She could let her hair grow – after all, hadn’t she discovered that the easy to care for style wasn’t so easy to care for after all? It might not be as long and lustrous but – Lewis wasn’t the kind to bother about such superficial things, was he?

     That didn’t mean he was like Melvin, who said “Oh, you always look lovely,” without, it appeared, seeming to look at her at all. Lewis was attentive and observant. He always had been. He had once called her hair a chestnut waterfall. Her seventeen year old self had repeated that over and over as she lay in bed, blissfully replaying every moment of her last date with Lewis. A chestnut waterfall. And her hair was still a natural chestnut. Well, more or less. Hint of a Tint was a wonderful invention. She left the bottle on open display in the bathroom cabinet. It didn’t matter if Melvin knew about it. 

     She got her way, and went to the same university as Lewis, in her case to study Modern Languages. 

     “And you’ve not even got an alibi ailing Granny,” Kevin said. She treated that remark with the contempt it deserved. She and Kevin had been very close as children, and would become very close again later on, but they were going through a bit of an awkward phase. At times she felt as if she were the older of the two! She was quite relieved that he was going to a university fifty miles away. Still, they parted amiably, with a hug. The trouble was, he spoilt it a bit by saying, “Nell, I can’t help it. He just rubs me up the wrong way.”

     “Go on, you only say that because Mum does!” He gave her a strange look, but then one last kiss before he got on the coach. 

     A couple of weeks later she was to be so deeply grateful that they had made up. Kevin was involved in a car crash. As it turned out, he made a full recovery from his injuries, but there were some dark hours that would have been even darker if they had parted on bad terms. Lewis couldn’t have been more supportive and understanding. He offered to drive her (she still hadn’t passed her test yet) to the hospital.

     “Look, I don’t want any falling out or unpleasantness, specially at a time like this,” her Mum said, “And you’re a grown woman now, I suppose. If you want Lewis to drive you down, we’re certainly not going to try to stop you. But you must understand that seeing Kevin will be family only. Things are looking more hopeful, thank God, but he’s still in intensive care and even if the hospital don’t put their foot down about it, I will.”

     Lewis seemed to take it very well. “Fair enough,” he said “It would hardly be a pleasure trip, anyway!”

     Afterwards she thought that was a slightly strange thing to say, in the circumstances, but she didn’t read much into it. It was just his way. He could be flippant and thought sacred cows were best taken to McDonalds. That made him very refreshing. And at least he wasn’t being a hypocrite. He wasn’t pretending he and Kevin were good mates when they weren’t. Still, that troubled Ellie. If Kevin and Lewis were going to be brothers in law, she hoped they could at least get on. 

     It was a shock to see Kevin hooked up to machines in a clinical white hospital ward. She knew it couldn’t really be so, but he seemed to have lost weight in the few days since the crash, to be thin and frail. But he smiled and said “Nobody gets rid of me that easily!” There was something almost Lewis-like about that remark, and yet there wasn’t.

     At their university, everyone recognised Lewisandellie as an item and off-limits for others. Oh Lewis could and did, flirt in a quite charming manner, but Ellie didn’t read anything into it and at the same time told herself she must not become insecure. Lewis had once told her that he had issues with people who were insecure and needy. “Oh, I’m not proud of it, and I don’t suppose they can help it,” he said, “But that doesn’t mean I have to seek our their company.”

     Though he had predicted himself he would get a first, he was not remotely bothered by his 2.1. He could still go on to do postgraduate work, and told Ellie that he was going to St Andrews. Now she had accepted, as much as she could, that their university didn’t offer much in the way of postgraduate work in the sciences and that he would have to go elsewhere. But she hadn’t reckoned with him going all the way to Scotland. She did her best to take it well, at least on the surface, especially as she resented the relief her family couldn’t entirely hide. 

     They kept in touch, of course. They phoned, they wrote letters, and both were early adopters of the internet and email. Lewis was an erratic and quirky correspondent. He could write a five page letter full of delicate and winsome and frank and funny phrases and then go a couple of weeks with only the most perfunctory of phone calls. Well, fair enough, thought Ellie, as she laboured through her own last year at university. She hadn’t exactly lost interest in her studies, but they had lost their sparkle. Well, quite a few of her peers said the same thing. It was only natural. Lewis didn’t talk much about his in his communications, and that was fine with her. He never suggested that she wouldn’t understand much about them, but it was true. 

     She had already decided that, even though she certainly didn’t intend to spend all her life teaching, it would do no harm to get a Postgraduate Certificate in Education, and announced her plans to do so in Scotland. She was quite prepared for opposition from her parents and Kevin, but less so for Lewis’s – to put it mildly – antipathy to the scheme. She told herself no doubt her mother thought she was handling it beautifully when she said, “Love, I’m not going to pretend I’m wild about Lewis, but I do want you to be happy. Teenage sweethearts do drift apart, you know. It happens. Your dad wasn’t my first boyfriend by any means, and he knows it!”

     Too much information, thought Ellie. And now she was becoming very insecure. After all, hadn’t Prince William met his girlfriend at St Andrews? 

     Her thoughts, which had been so lovely and were now starting to turn awkward, were interrupted by the anguished screech of a little girl who had dropped her dolly, which she was clutching as lovingly as only a four year old can clutch a dolly, into the pond as she fed the ducks. She was obviously on the point of going in after her, and though the duck pond wasn’t deep, like most people of her generation, Ellie had seen those public service films about toddlers only needing three inches of water to drown. She made to run after her, and Lewis said, “Oh, leave the kid alone, for heaven’s sake! She’ll be fine and you don’t want to get wet!” A glance told Ellie that to her relief, the child was fine, her dad rushed to the rescue, pulled her back from the water’s edge and rescued her dolly. 

     She suddenly remembered Melvin doing just the same for Sinead, and taking her in his arms and saying that she was fine, and her dolly would be fine, and Sinead, consoled, buried her head in his well-worn sports jacket. And though she would never have gone so far as to talk of a revelation or an epiphany, she remembered exactly why she had been originally so drawn to Melvin, who was a maths teacher at the school where she was teaching, She remembered how he had nursed her and the children though a ghastly bout of gastric flu that had spared him, only to go down with it a week later when they were well, and having to miss the “treat” of a trip to a cricket test match he had promised himself. But he hadn’t made an issue of it and was the most undemanding of invalids himself. She remembered how he had taken things quietly in hand when teenage Cameron got in with a bad crowd, not remotely heavy-handed, but after initial resentment from the lad, leading to a strong and trusting bond between them. 

     She stood up from the bench by the duck pond, gave Lewis an affectionate peck on the cheek, and said, “It was nice to meet up again, Lewis. But I must be getting home now.”