Day One: Tuesday 28 March 1978
Day One: Tuesday 28 March 1978
Easter began for Robbie when Dr Bletchley released his mouth from two years of orthodontic captivity. A brace gone. A kiss—finally—within reach.
Kissing had been postponed, and without a kiss, how was anyone supposed to get anywhere? Or so Robbie thought, knowing little about such matters. At least now, he could use his lips for what God intended.
In the waiting room, where he returned for his coat, having had the brace removed (and a further two fillings added), he checked his teeth and mouth in every mirror that caught his eye. He was so busy admiring the absence of steel in his mouth that he almost missed the girl scribbling notes nearby. “Fen!” he said, louder than intended. “Aren’t we seeing each other this afternoon?” Fenella Penny—Fen Pen to a chosen few—looked up and smiled. “Apparently we are.”
She accepted his eager kiss on the cheek with the grace of a French exchange student. All very Nouvelle Vague.
“You’re not here for a brace, are you? That’d be a disaster.”
“No,” she said, flashing him a smile and a row of perfect teeth. “Hygienist. Who knows what uses I might be putting my mouth to this holiday.”
Robbie drew his tongue along his teeth as if looking for food; he was simply enjoying the new sensation.
“Bletchley wanted me to keep it in three more months. But I wasn’t having that. I need this mouth.”
As if summoned, Dr Bletchley popped through the waiting room door, spotted Robbie and Miss Penny and gave a cheerful wave. “No kissing for ten days,” he said. “Your lips’ll be too sensitive.”
Fen was called through before Robbie could say anything.
“He’s joking,” she reassured him. “Let’s see if those lips work when I come out.”
Later, they walked back to Robbie’s together. He wondered when the kissing would begin or if Fen had been joking about that too.
In the afternoon, they went to see ‘Close Encounters of the Third Kind. ‘ Robbie wrapped his arm around Fen in the cinema, but they still didn’t kiss. Afterwards, they talked about aliens and escape. Robbie had hoped they could discuss something closer to home and real – their relationship. He said he’d go willingly into space, anything to avoid another term at “posh prison.” Fen knew by now that he was leaving Brougham, the minor public school he’d attended for the last few years. She didn’t know what to make of that. Her circle of friends was close-knit. The boarding school kids inhabited their own world, following a different rhythm than the rest of Northumberland.
Back at his place and with his twin sister Kizzy about a way and out of earshot (she’d gone to clean out her horse down the road), Robbie brought Manwatching into the conversation. She’d followed the BBC series, surely?
“My mum got it for me,” he said, without irony. Fenella had brothers. She understood boys. She could guess where this was leading: not quite ‘where do babies come from’ so much as the part that comes before. When a relationship, if she could call it that, sounded like it could serve as a stand-in for a biology practical, then it wasn’t the type of relationship she wanted.
Nonetheless, Fenella revealed more than he expected—worries about love and desire, intimacy, and virginity. Robbie had no response. He became tongue-tied when it came to such matters, even though boys had discussed it in various ways through cubicle walls and in shared studies back at school.
His next gambit was Tarot. Fen was too smart to believe in Tarot cards, palm readings, and astrology, but she thought she’d indulge Robbie to see how bold he could be. And there it was, let the cards do the talking. The Lovers appeared; he knew they would, and she suspected he had manipulated the cards. This cunning aspect of his character was making her reconsider her thoughts.
Fifty years later, flipping through her twin brother’s diary from that time, Kizzy noted, ‘Day One, and there it is—a precious moment with Fenella Penny. You let her slip by in the rush to reach Cece, Diana, India, and Helen… but there she was. They say, ‘a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush. ‘ Robbie and Kizzy, now in their mid-60s, laugh at themselves as younger kids of various ages- some teenagers and adults with babies- mingle at a family gathering.
A few of them are playing a friendly game of darts. Thwack! One dart misses the board and strikes the door to the broom cupboard, bringing it all back.
Their doomed enterprise was designed to impress Robbie in front of the girls that mattered. Not the Fenella Pennys of this world, but the girls in Kizzy’s form at Eastfield.
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