An Oxford Love Story

Photo by Miranda Ward

See, my son

time here turns into space

- Richard Wagner, Parsifal (1882)

Almost three years on, and every morning starts with a sleepy intimacy. The warmth of skin on skin is comforting when it’s so cold outside, and even in early May the house has a chill.

Today is a grey day, with a wind that buffets the rubbish bins and presses against the sash windows. I drink tea in my study, overlooking the garden. It’s our own English jungle, unkempt, the washing line and the compost bucket obscured by weeds and trees.

The first time I saw this house it was the same – always this wildness. He took me here in the dark of a late May night. I say ‘took me’ – but I went, I went willingly. On my first day in Oxford I got into a taxi with a man I’d just met and let him say the address of this house and as we passed through the city I closed my eyes and we moved fast.

Nowadays I cycle to the office. It’s is the best part of work, crossing Magdalen Bridge on my old Dutch bicycle, with the tower shimmering and the bells ringing. This morning as I start up the High Street the sky is clearing, the wind carrying the clouds away though it’s still cold.

The day I arrived was cloudless and hot. The first really glorious day of the season, I’d heard someone saying, so I went for a long walk. In Christ Church Meadow, amongst girls in sundresses and boys in shorts, I felt free. For a moment I became someone with no past and no future, no childhood, no family. No knowledge. Time slid away from me and I was alone with the city.

The same city now makes a mockery of my attempts to work, while the hour hand makes slow turns around the clock. The sun comes and goes, the wind smells sweet, the children at the primary school nearby are laughing. Late in the afternoon I emerge from a meeting and on a whim I go into a shop and buy three summer dresses. Soon I’ll be able to wear them; soon he and I will sit in our wild garden and watch the summer stars come out.

On my way to meet a friend for dinner, I run into him outside a pub. Our days are like this sometimes – full of shared but disconnected moments. I sit astride my bike and he gives me a kiss, says, “See you later, my love.” I’m somebody’s love. Here, in the street outside this pub, I’m somebody’s love.

We met at a pub, an old tucked-away tavern, with low ceilings and strong cider. There I turned to him and we spoke for the first time.

“Do you have a cigarette?” I said. He did, and he lit it for me, and that was it.

Hours later we wound up at a dingy bar off the High Street, where we have never since been, where I kissed him, or he kissed me, and in that moment of kissing, the freedom I had felt in Christ Church Meadow earlier was lost forever, but in its place was something better, something stronger.  No longer was I untied to this place, history-less, loveless, separate, alone.

I talk to my friend about what it’s like to be here. She’s Australian, knows how it is to have a family 5,000 miles away. After dinner we eat ice cream at the top of the steps of the Martyr’s Memorial. We watch a middle-aged couple kissing. The man reaches forward and squeezes her breast; the woman slides her hand into his pocket.

On my way home I pause on Broad Street to adjust the lights on my bicycle. A group of students pass. They’re American and full of an infectious sort of energy. One of them dances in the middle of the street, her arms in the air. Their demeanor makes no sense; it is so disproportionately merry for this drab Tuesday evening. I pull my scarf tighter around my neck. There’s something in my chest, a funny sort of almost-envy; I look at them and I think, I was like that, I’ve been there.

I remember thinking, as I woke in a strange bed the next morning, that something was happening, something I was powerless to predict or prevent – but then I forgot it, let it happen, because the way he offered me his phone number, the way he kissed me just before I got on my first Oxford bus, took my first trip as someone who belonged here, overshadowed everything else.

I watch the carefree Americans. The dancing girl has grabbed a boy’s hands; now they are waltzing past the grim little newsagent, past the dark shop windows and away from me. They do not even see me. Is that what happens here, after a time? We who were once golden fade into the golden walls, fated to watch a new bloom of youths bounding their way through the last weeks of spring. It is a nostalgic city, after all. What was it that Jan Morris wrote? “In recollection every Oxford summer day is warm, bright and sunlit, like the pictures of Oxford on the old postcards.”

But then, there’s this: when I get home he’s there. I undress and we lie together under the duvet, with the bedroom window open so that we can smell the night air, hear the shouts as the last drunks stagger home. And in the morning we will wake to discover our limbs tangled and we will stay too long in bed because it is just so sweet.