Case Histories

"You're not listening to me, I was saying that we could use some of the money from the house to take a really good holiday." Julia was laying a fire in the grate, folding and pleating sheets of newspaper into makeshift firelighters. Amelia frowned and turned the Television on. At first, Amelia had suggested to Julia that they might watch the more cultural channels, Performance or Discovery or, at a pinch, TV5 to improve their rusty French (although unfortunately finding TV5 seemed to involve trawling through the porn and the sport), but this idea had been soundly squashed by Julia "Get a life, Milly") and now they spent long fireside hours in front of reruns of seventies sitcoms and creaky dramas, Bergerac, followed by Poldark, and topped off by Only Fools and Horses, which seemed to run on a continual loop in the ether.

"I mean a really good holiday," Julia said. "An African safari or a Nepalese trek, visit the temples at Machu Picchu or take a boat to the Antarctic. What do you think, Milly?"

Amelia had never traveled because she'd never had anyone to travel with. Julia was the only person she had ever been on holiday with – once to Portugal (which had been pleasant) and once to Morocco (which had been a nightmare) so that Amelia felt her view of the world was through a small pane of glass, yet the idea of going out there, into the world, high up on some mountain, in the middle of an ocean, in some dangerous, foreign place, far from the safety of an English sitting room, made her instantly dizzy and sick with fear.

"And you could surprise Henry," Julia carried on blithely, "take him to New York or Paris for the weekend, stay somewhere gorgeous, the Georges Cinq or the Bristol -" "Your fire's going out."

More often than not, "Henry" would come down to Oxford for the weekend, and if anyone asked her, Amelia would report back on Monday morning that they had spent a "lovely" weekend – a drive down to Cliveden, a "gorgeous" lunch in Bray. Not many people did ask, but there was a general agreement among her fellow workers that since she had met Henry, Amelia was a little less brittle and abrasive.

The version of Henry that was for her work colleagues was slightly less bald and paunchy than the one she had concocted for Julia. He was also more active and outgoing – all that fishing – and decidedly better off ("In finance, oh God, don't ask me what, it's all Greek to me"). She especially liked to flaunt the more dashing aspects of this Henry to Andrew Vardy, a fellow teacher in the "communications" department and the only man that Amelia had ever – in reality – had sex with.

Amelia had sex with Andrew Vardy ten years ago because she was afraid she would live and die an old maid. Because it had seemed ridiculous to be a virgin at thirty-five years old in the dying years of the twentieth century. Because she didn't understand how she was as good as dead without ever having lived. She supposed she must be in this virginal state because she was shy and easily embarrassed and sex seemed so downright daunting (and, let's face it, vaguely disgusting). At university, she'd had a reputation for being prim and proper, but she always expected that some boy (or some brooding, lowering man) would breach this defensive strategy and sweep away her inhibitions and admit sexual passion into her life. But no one, brooding, lowering, or otherwise, seemed to want her. Sometimes she wondered if perhaps she gave off the wrong scent, or no scent at all, because it was as primitive as that, wasn't it, like cats and queen bees and musk deer?

Perhaps more curious than the fact that there was no one who wanted Amelia was that she, in turn, wanted no one – apart from men in nineteenth-century novels, which put a whole new spin on the idea of "unattainable." Even Sylvia wasn't a virgin. She slept with dozens of boys before her "conversion." And if Sylvia could find boyfriends – Sylvia, who had grown into an ugly duck, not a swan – then why couldn't Amelia? For the longest time Amelia waited for someone to appear who would make her heart race and her brain fog and her intellect crumble and when it didn't happen she thought perhaps she had been intended by nature to be celibate, that she should rejoice (privately anyway) in this vestal state and rather than fretting about her unbroken hymen she should see it as a trophy unattainable to mere mortal men. (A dubious kind of prize, admittedly.)