As Near as I Can Get by Paul Ableman

fingers groping for his pipe.
    ‘That’s it, gentlemen! No—I’m sorry—there’s no more time now. Your glasses, please, gentlemen!’
    That was the first time I saw Vanessa. The second time, two or three days later, in the same bar, I not only saw her but addressed her (she was alone), not only addressed her, but chatted with her, later walked with her, held her hand, under laburnum and wistaria, and finally, in the mouth of the narrow footpath or defile between buildings, a little way from the Redfern Hostel in which she was living , held her lightly-clad body against mine, stroked her shoulder, arm and back and felt her lipsticked lips against my own thin, dry ones.
    The three tight-trousered, bare-armed athletes who had seemed, on the first evening, such a formidable obstacle to any prospect of an intimate acquaintance with the girl, were vanquished as much by the benign, patronizing toneas by her words when, in response to my cautious query, she replied:
    ‘Oh them? Oh, they’re just—just good Joes. American boys are terribly immature.’
    In a district rich in pretty girls Vanessa still exacted attention. Giddy with pride, I stumbled after her into cheerful, buzzing bar-rooms, covertly noticing the way the blazered swains of the local play-set followed her with their glance even while ostensibly maintaining jocular interchanges amongst themselves. And the girls paid her the tribute of that long look of critical appraisal, which inevitably signifies admiration.
    She let me take her living hand. She permitted me, under the green nets of the lamp-lit trees, to encircle her supple waist with a trembling arm. We walked, she no longer noticing things and I aware of one thing only, the miracle of her yielding presence at my side.
    Soon we were meeting daily, first gazing, in pitiable vulnerability, into each other’s faces and then, with a gasp of secured reassurance, falling into each other’s arms. When we were apart, I chucking mail-bags into reeking goods cars and Vanessa visiting the Dunots, whisky exporters associated with her father’s business (‘He’s just an American business man, a small one….’) in Topeka, or performing some other social obligation, we thought about each other. At first, I could not get over being incredulous, could not convince myself, without endlessly recurring to the fact in the attempt to assimilate its extraordinary truth, that it had happened, that I was allowed to be in love with her and that she loved me, that the sweetness of her youth and health belonged in my arms. I thought of the end of our first evening together. Near the hostel in which she was staying was a narrow passage or right of way between buildings. In the mouth of this defile, under the summer moon, we had stopped to stay good night and, as I had gazed down at her white face, she had suddenly smiled happily. I placed my two palms on her waist anddrew the girl towards me and when we kissed the feel of her warm, slightly-clad body against mine, the smell of her faintly-perfumed body, the warmth of the summer night had blended in my mind into such a powerful impression that when I had tried to speak her name, the word had emerged as a sob.
    At work, during our fairly regular, if unofficial, breaks for a smoke, I would retire, with my newly-lit fag, as far as possible from my grunting and faintly-hostile fellow-workers, to sit on a barrow in the hissing station and think about Vanessa and wonder if I could somehow cease to be a porter in a railway station and live with her. Instead of my customary sense of superiority in the purposeful lowliness of my position and affected scorn for the glamorous voyagers departing for leisurely holidays in unspoiled parts, I began cravenly in my mind to cadge a place amongst them for a dark, ‘hauntingly-lovely’ girl and a tall, ‘romantic looking’ youth who were plainly ‘so much in love’.
    The Dunots went away to Cannes and left us, or rather left Vanessa, the key