When the novel she narrates begins, 15-year-old Marianne Clifford is as sweet and as innocent as they come, even if she is about to lose her virginity in the back of a Morris Minor. The sudden daring in this case, you see, is only for the noblest of causes, for she’s passionately in love with the car’s owner, a floppy-haired god called Simon Hurst who’s going to Oxford and hopes to be a writer. Arriving home after the big moment, she hardly cares if her parents, busy playing Scrabble at a baize-covered card table, notice the stains on her taffeta dress. “My days as a girl in this house are numbered,” she thinks. “Soon enough, I’m going to marry Simon and travel the world with him and eat dates in Arabia and snorkel among exotic fish along the Great Barrier Reef.”
On such dreams young lives are built or ruined – or they are at the back end of the 1950s, when Rose Tremain’s Absolutely & Forever opens. But is this a tale of true love or agonising abandonment? When Simon, having flunked his Oxford entrance exam, disappears to Paris, we begin to suspect that things may not, after all, work out between them – though Marianne lives in hope, every day at her dreary boarding school dominated now by her longing to see Simon’s “titchy” writing on a letter, his characters “like angels trying to stand on the head of a pin”. Trapped in her “love asylum”, with only her fiery friend, Pet, to talk any sense into her, she’s about to flunk a few exams of her own.
