PART ONE Obstacles to Young Love 1978

      Three mighty obstacles threaten the burgeoning love of childhood sweethearts Timothy Pickering and Naomi Walls. They are Steven Venables, a dead curlew, and God.

      God it is who comes between them in Earls Court.

      ‘I don’t feel like it tonight, Naomi.’

      She has turned towards him, sweet in her slenderness in the sagging bed beneath the print of old Whitstable. She has run her hand down his cheek and over his chin. Their roughness has pleased her. ‘You’ll need to shave again tomorrow,’ she has said. And he has stiffened, not in the manner of the night before but in a shrinking way that has shocked her to her core, and she in the eighteenth year of her life has for the first time been forced to ask the question that has been asked a billion times before by women of their men, ‘What’s wrong?’ And it is this that has drawn from him, like a wasp sting from a plump arm, the grudging admission, ‘I don’t feel like it tonight, Naomi.’

      ‘You felt like it last night.’ Naomi knows that her riposte is not worthy of her.

      ‘Last night was last night.’ Timothy is aware that his riposte is abysmal. He has spoken it sullenly, and his awareness of its inadequacy makes him feel more sullen still. He is also seventeen years old, and unaware of so much, including his own good looks. When he wakes in the mornings he feels awkward, clumsy, raw, shy, ignorant. He does not feel handsome.

      They are now miles apart, their naked bodies only touching because the exhausted, abused bed sags so much that it’s impossible not to roll towards the middle.

      ‘We shouldn’t have done any of it,’ he says. They are speaking in little more than whispers. It’s a cheap hotel, and the soundproofing is almost non-existent. ‘We shouldn’t have come.’

      ‘No use regretting it now. We did come.’

      She is aware of the double entendre. He isn’t. His thoughts are a million miles from sex.

      ‘We’ve had a great time,’ she says. ‘Whether we should have done it or not, why spoil it now? Why go home with our tails between our legs?’

      She touches his tail between his legs. It’s as soft as an underdone egg.

      ‘Please don’t.’

      ‘Timothy!’ It’s both a rebuke and a wail of anguish. ‘If you’re tired, that’s all right. It’s been a long day and you must have…’ She wants to say ‘really knackered yourself last night’ but there are some words that you can’t easily say to Timothy and she comes out with the much less felicitous, ridiculously formal, ‘…taken a lot out of yourself last night.’ And put some of it into me, she thinks, shocking herself and realising for the first time that there might be quite a gulf between them.

      ‘It’s not that,’ he exclaims, his manhood threatened. ‘It’s just…it’s wrong.’

      ‘It wasn’t wrong yesterday.’

      ‘It was. We just forgot it was.’

      ‘I actually thought it was fantastic. I thought it was as good as being Juliet in front of four hundred kids.’

      ‘Well, it was better than being Romeo. I hated every ruddy minute of that.’

      ‘I know you did.’

      Everyone at Coningsfield Grammar had expected that Naomi would be Juliet in the school play, but Mr Prentice chose Timothy as Romeo on a whim. Most people, and especially Mark Cosgrove and his mother, had assumed Mark Cosgrove would be Romeo. His mother has not forgiven Mr Prentice. Indeed, she has left her husband for him, run away with him, and embarked on the task of making the rest of his life miserable.

      Mr Prentice’s whim wasn’t exactly a success, but it wasn’t a catastrophe either. Timothy hadn’t possessed the skills to play Romeo well, but the combination of his gawkiness, his intensity and those dark good looks of which he was so unaware moved the audience quite remarkably. The school hall became Verona.

      Mr Prentice had cast them both in small parts in the previous year’s play, Peter Shaffer’s The Royal Hunt of the Sun, but they hadn’t taken much notice of each other. Now, though, he told them, ‘Feel. Feel. Feel. Feel the excitement of young love in the face of the world’s hostility. Feel the emotion. Feel the sexuality.’ They felt it. Mr Prentice, yes and Shakespeare too, must share some of the blame for what happened, for their falling in love, pretending to their parents that they were going on a school trip to Paris, and ending up in a sagging bed with thin, exhausted pillows in Earls Court.

      ‘Don’t you fancy me any more?’

      ‘Oh, Naomi!’

      She is almost as disgusted by her question as he is. He doesn’t say, ‘Of course I do,’ and she doesn’t blame him.

      There’s a silence, quite a long silence, but she knows that he is going to speak and that he is only silent because he’s wondering how to begin, so she doesn’t break it. A motorbike roars boastfully past. Naomi thinks of all the grown-up things that they have done in London. They’ve been to see foreign films, films with subtitles, films that don’t ever reach Coningsfield. They’ve eaten in restaurants. Well, no, only in one restaurant actually. The Pasticceria Amalfi, a cheery Italian place in Old Compton Street. It had all the easy surface friendliness