by Alison Whitehead     © 2003

Thou hast committed ... Fornication? But that was in another country: and besides, the wench is dead.

I came across that quotation recently, so it was fresh in my mind when mother said, "Alison, did you see in the newspaper that Meg Sutton had died?" Mother is eighty and impatient with my lack of interest in the histories of remote relatives and forgotten friends.

"Meg Ransom before she married. You can't have forgotten."

But I had, until my mother's words and the quotation from Marlowe unravelled a thread from the tapestry of the past.

Our English teacher was ambitious and one term we tackled The Jew of Malta instead of Shakespeare. I read Friar Barnadine's part while Meg read Barabas, so she had to follow my 'Thou hast committed ...' with the word 'Fornication?'. It was difficult to get the timing right and we had to practice aloud. Our classmates teased us without pity.

Meg and I had been friends from childhood and played together at her house. The first three floors were elegant in a genteel way that befitted her father's dignity as a Master Plumber. The attics were abandoned to discarded furniture and the bric-a-brac of thirty years. This was our domain where we adventured, free of supervision. There was an enormous train set long abandoned by Meg's brother and a doll's house so big that we could almost crawl inside. There were books and children's annuals dating back thirty years and treasures beyond remembering.

Among the furniture was a bed, considered too uncomfortable to sleep on but still too good to throw away. The mattress was covered in blue and grey striped cloth, faded by the sun that shone through the skylight. On that sun-dappled, dusty bed, Meg and I spent hours lying naked and spellbound while our fingers and tongues discovered mysteries that made us tingle with excitement. And there, one summer afternoon I taught her the first lesson of ecstasy. We lay frozen among the echoes of her screams waiting for discovery and retribution that never came.

The tapestry of memory was unfolded to reveal this fragment of the past, vivid because it had been shaded from the light of consciousness for forty years. And with memory came shame for my faithlessness. For I never told Meg that with her, I came as close to unspoiled love as I have ever come.

But if anyone asks me if I've ever loved a woman, I answer 'no', for although my lips touched every other part of her, I don't recall that Meg and I ever kissed. Nor did we ever lend words to our passion. It was a season when we explored the promise of our bodies without guilt.

I cannot think of it as fornication and she was never a wench. But it was another country - the one to which we can never return, lying between childhood and the grown up world.