PSoML Part 4

Part 3 is here.

Part 4. Bad Habits

In terms of what people would think on seeing his name on schoolmates, Ronnie had reckoned about 10% would remember his brief flirtation with the album charts in 1989. Maybe a few hardcore music fans would know he’d been working in L.A. and Nashville, if they were in the habit of peering at the songwriting credits of their American cousins’ record collections.

It was a living. Some of the things Marianne and he wrote were worth a pension on their own; you can make a million dollars if your songs were picked by the right artists, or for the right films, and theirs were, and they did. Ronnie thought he’d seen a lot of money until Marianne went global, but that was something else. So since the divorce he’d been living on interest and royalties, not really hungry anymore, and with no really bad habits to do much damage to the principal.

Except for the not-a-mid-life-crisis Audi sports car, and the odd $10,000 guitar, Ronnie really didn’t have very much to spend his money on. Even while Dale Duff was drinking too much, he never had the inclination to join in and dissipate himself. Ronnie always put it down to the fact that he started at a very early age to get the kind of hangovers other people don’t get till they’re in their 40s, so he never really managed to build up the kind of tolerance for mind altering substances that you need to develop a habit.

Three days after sending a response to Hazel, he’d received an acknowledgement from her, and a “Hi, sorry they didn’t reply to your email before…” from Jane, who mentioned she’d be going down with her husband. She asked if he still had a guitar and would he take it with him? Then he got a short note from Lucy.

Would it be too weird if I came too?
****

And there, Ronnie’s realised, hung the tale. In that one, sad, short, question he saw the story of their relationship, and who was in the wrong, and who did wrong, and who had wrongs to right. Ronnie composed his reply with his laptop, sitting on the couch in his mostly empty living room. He’d already made a little vow to himself that, given the bullshit he’d tried when he was 20 (which backfired spectacularly), he was only ever going to be 100% straight with Lucy, no matter what. He wrote that she was his only reason for going. He added if she wasn’t going to go, then he’d think again about going himself; and that she shouldn’t have, wouldn’t have, had to even ask, if there had been a decent bone in Ronnie’s body twenty years ago. He said, in short, that they needed to talk.

He found it hard to put himself there, to imagine what things would have been like if he hadn’t done something particularly mean and stupid 20 years before. After writing the words and hitting Send, he sat staring out of the window at the crows, who were joyously ignoring the scarecrow in the cornfield on the other side of the trees. The room felt cold and unwelcoming, suddenly, and he made a mental note to buy some more furniture. The walls were covered with guitars, but the floor was bare, and the dining table only had two chairs. Ronnie wondered what it would be like if they decided to by-pass the reunion and just meet up. Something in him sensed that the reunion was exactly the excuse, and the protection, they needed.

Within a couple of days, Lucy replied that, okay, she’d see him there, and even mailed him a few days before the trip to confirm she was still planning to go. In his mind, he was already there.

The first time Ronnie noticed Lucy, they were standing in the corridor outside a classroom in the week they all started at the Big School. They were 13 years old. There were twenty, thirty, teenagers all milling around in the narrow space at the top of a staircase, between two locked classrooms. Ronnie was leaning against the outside window, and Lucy was leaning against the firedoor that led to the stairs. She was standing next to a taller, blonder, girl called Ella. Lucy had already developed the crooked smile that he came to love.

So while a lot of people had been there, Ronnie’s could picture just four in his mind. Elaine, Lucy, Jane Hinchcliffe, and himself.
So that was it, thin as it was. The first memory. He didn’t ever remember what they might have talked about. After that there was just a gradual process of growing closer, helped by the fact that Lucy and Hazel Brown and he all did Latin together, an elite crew of people who didn’t want to do Physics.
Later, in the sixth form, he used to do English with Lucy. By that time they were very close, and because Ronnie and he were inseparable, Dave got to know Lucy as well as Ronnie did. They used to talk about her together, how brilliant she was. And then, at some party or other, Dave asked her out. And came back in, from outside in the dark where they’d been seen kissing, amazed, both at himself for asking and at her for saying yes. For saying, I will.
That was the beginning of the end for Ronnie.

He didn’t go for the convertible with the Audi. He didn’t think England had the climate for it, and though he wouldn’t necessarily stay there for ever, for the time being he felt he was curing himself of a long-term homesickness caused by too long living in the States, two divorces and impending middle age.
Hazel’s holiday homes were in the Vendée, the Atlantic coast of France, which is warm, flat, and tranquil; except during the July and August French holiday season, when it’s hot, flat, and crowded. In May and June, the weather can be wonderful and the wide, sandy beaches almost empty.
After flirting with the idea of offering Lucy a ride and deciding against, Ronnie went over to France alone. Besides, there wouldn’t have been the room in the back of the car for all the luggage – and the guitar he’d been asked to bring. The time between February and May was a blur; apart from checking his inbox several times a day to see if Lucy had been in touch again, there wasn’t all that much Ronnie could recall.

He took a Plymouth-St Malo crossing and covered the last bit of the journey without paying too much attention to where he was, listening to Martina McBride and Sara Evans records as loud as they would play without making his ears bleed. It was mostly raining. The last few miles, Ronnie was punchy and could have left the road at any time on one of the many hairpin bends; the roads twisted and wound through the flat countryside as the sky began, finally, to clear. Ronnie’s eyes were drooping when he finally saw the sign for the holiday cottages -- opposite the church exactly where Hazel’s message had said it would be.

There was a narrow, tree-lined dirt track up to the old main house, and the smaller, newer, cottages could be seen dotted around the grounds, a couple of them with their Gites de France wall plaques visible. There were a couple of cars with UK number plates parked outside the main house, and Ronnie breathed a sigh of relief and a silent prayer to the patron saint of mid-life crises that he wasn’t the first to arrive.