With No Crying Read Free

and so Miranda and Sharon (clever girls anyway, to whom the school work came easily) nudged and whispered their way through the sunlit, easy-going lessons, and spent the long, delicious hours of “private study” lying in the long grass that bordered the playing fields, giggling, imagining and egging one another on into being in love.
    To an observer (if such there had been) looking down on them through the great white heads of cow parsley, and listening to the rapturous whispered confidences borne on the soft, sweet-scented airs of spring, it might have seemed that they were merely in love with love.
    And perhaps they were. But what of it? There is nothing “mere” about this kind of love, especially if you are not quite fifteen and drunk with the returning sun. And in any case, they had each of them, according to her questing fancy, given to this abstract passion a temporary incarnation and a name from among the remote and inaccessible sixth-formers at the top of the school. Thus Sharon was madly, hopelessly in love with the schoolcricket captain, one Gordon Hargreaves, tall and fair, lithe as a whip, and as brilliant at work as he was at games; while Miranda, not to be outdone, had succeeded in working herself into a delicious state of unrequited passion for the Secretary of the Sixth Form Chess Club, a dark, saturnine youth with shining almond-shaped eyes and black, springy hair lifting from his scalp as if blown by some eternal wind. His name was Trevor Marks, and he played the zither as well as chess; and sometimes Miranda, catching the faint, distant twang of the instrument through the windows of the Sixth Form Common Room, would almost faint for joy standing out there on the gravel path in the sunshine, the books for whatever class she was on her way to clasped ecstatically against her pounding heart.
    The joy of it was beyond belief; and while the magical springtime burgeoned towards summer, and branches heavy with may looped low above their giggling heads, they would whisper low to one another about the latest crop of wonders. How Gordon the cricket captain had been glimpsed putting his cycling-clips on and mounting his bicycle yesterday afternoon just by the school gate; or how Trevor (Miranda’s one) had almost collided with her as he raced down the steps of the Science Block, evidently late for something.
    Suppose they had actually collided, Miranda rapturously surmised , her eyes half-closed against the incredible blueness of the sky: suppose he had knocked her right to the bottom, and had then kneeled by her, white-faced with concern, his hand on her breast to make sure her heart was still beating…. And then again (for fair’s fair, and Sharon was entitled to her turn) suppose that, mounting his bicycle, Gordon Hargreaves had caught sight of Sharon, her newly-washed hair lapping almost to her waist, and had paused for a moment to wonder who she was, and why he’d never noticed her before? Leaning his bicycle carefully and deliberately against the fence, suppose he’d strolled towards her, with a look of growing wonder in his laughing blue eyes…
    Supposing … supposing …! It was no wonder that the actual experiences of the supposedly-luckier girls who had real-life, flesh-and-blood boy friends, seemed tame indeed in comparison,not to say depressing. Listening, on Monday mornings, to the variegated setbacks and traumas endured over the weekend by their ostensibly more fortunate classmates—the tales of telephone calls that never came; of dates that ended in tears and recriminations; of being kept waiting; of being stood-up; of being kissed “like that”, and of not being kissed “like that”; of unloving words and of uncouth behaviour; of being taller than him and looking like a pair of Charlies walking along together—listening to all this, Miranda and Sharon could hardly help, sometimes, giving way to a deep, secret conviction of their own superior good fortune.
    Because, of course, there