Free The Pull of the Moon by Diane Janes Page A

the cinema with Danny and me. Cecile and Simon just didn’t hit it off. ‘He was
hopeless,’ she said afterwards, ‘like trying to kiss a flatfish.’
    After that, Danny and I went out a couple of times on our own. There was no opportunity for more than this before he and Simon went back to university, the very word inducing terror in my heart,
with its guaranteed complement of scheming females who probably couldn’t wait to get their claws into him. I was secretly terrified that I would never hear from him again, but he rang me
almost every day and about once a month he came down to Birmingham on the train – each brief visit like a colourful explosion against an otherwise grey canvas.
    When Danny was around he made things happen. While I only talked about going down to London for the day, he went to buy the tickets. He introduced me to rock concerts, folk clubs and
Chinese food. The boundaries of my life expanded from home and college to seemingly encompass the whole world. I was finally taking part in life, instead of being a mere spectator. I think it was
when the flowers arrived on my birthday – not just any old flowers, but a bunch of red roses – a gesture both impossibly expensive and incredibly romantic – that the relationship
leapt up several notches from merely ‘seeing’ one another, to a grand passion. From then on I was sold.
    In those days a boyfriend proved you weren’t a failure or a freak. Having one all but defined your worth as a person. Friends from college who had seen the two of us together sidled up to
say, ‘He’s gorgeous. Where did you get him?’ Danny charmed everyone who met him and I basked in the envy he generated. Of course I could rely on my parents to strike a discordant
note. Although they made Danny superficially welcome, in private they grumbled that I was ‘infatuated’ and becoming ‘besotted’ with someone I ‘hardly knew’.
    ‘You’re not in love with him, you know,’ my mother chided. ‘You’re in love with the idea of falling in love.’ I was familiar with her Rodgers and Hart LP and
ignored the reference. ‘You’re too young to know your own mind yet, Katy,’ she persisted. ‘You’ve always had your head in the clouds. It’s very easy to imagine
you’re in love with the first boy who comes along, you know.’ It was absolutely typical of her to pour cold water on what was shaping up to be the best time of my life. She never
understood that when you’re dancing on top of the mountain, the last thing you want to do is look down.
    It was about three months after our first meeting that Danny raised the idea of spending the summer at Simon’s uncle’s. ‘Say you’ll come,’ he begged.
‘We’ll have a great time.’
    ‘Will it be all right with Simon?’ I asked. I had only met Simon a handful of times by then, but Danny had no hesitation in assuring me that it wouldn’t be a problem at all.
‘The more the merrier,’ he said, from which I construed that there would be a whole crowd of us, living as a sort of commune in a big old house, having loads of fun all through the
summer.
    The prospect of a whole summer living with Danny was the stuff of wildest dreams. In those days, only the most avant-garde of couples lived together openly before marriage. Respectable couples
from provincial lower middle class backgrounds ‘went out’ before getting publicly ‘engaged’. At this stage the more liberal of parents might have agreed to the occasional
overnight stay, or winked at the obvious connotation of joint holidays, or flats officially shared with same sex friends; but for most of us the expected fiction was a white wedding dress and
‘tonight’s the night’ jokes at the reception.
    I knew better than to broach the Uncle’s-House-in-Hereford plan at home – my parents would never have agreed to it, and I knew that if I fabricated any of the arrangements Hereford
was close enough for them to come out and check up on me.