The expectation of an experience governs and distorts the experience itself. I may not know anything about sperm tasting, but I know about wine tasting. If someone puts a glass of wine in front of you, it is impossible to approach it without preconceptions. To begin with, you might not actually like the stuff. But allowing that you do, then many subliminal factors come into play before you’ve even taken a sip. What colour the wine is, what it smells like, what glass it is in, how much it costs, who’s paying for it, where you are, what your mood is, whether or not you’ve had this wine before. It is impossible to factor out such pre-knowledge. The only way to get round it is an extreme one. If you are blindfolded, and someone puts a clothes peg on your nose, and hands you a glass of wine, then, even if you are the greatest expert in the world, you will be unable to tell the most basic things about it. Not even whether it is red or white.
Of all our senses, it is the one with the broadest application, from a brief impression on the tongue to a learned aesthetic response to a painting. It is also the one that most describes us. We may be better or worse people, happy or miserable, successful or failing, but what we are, within these wider categories, how we define ourselves, as opposed to how we are genetically defined, is what we call ‘taste’. Yet the word – perhaps because of its broad catchment area – easily misleads. ‘Taste’ can imply calm reflection; while its derivatives – tasteful, tastefulness, tasteless, tastelessness – lead us into a world of minute differentiations, of snobbery, social values and soft furnishings. True taste, essential taste, is much more instinctual and unreflecting. It says, Me, here, now, this, you. It says, Lower the boat and row me ashore. Dowell, the narrator of Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier, says of Nancy Rufford: ‘I just wanted to marry her as some people want to go to Carcassonne.’ Falling in love is the most violent expression of taste known to us.
And yet our language doesn’t seem to represent that moment very well. We have no equivalent for ‘coup de foudre’, the lightning strike and thunderclap of love. We talk about there being ‘electricity’ between a couple – but this is a domestic not cosmic image, as if the pair should be practical and wear rubber soles to their shoes. We talk of ‘love at first sight’, and indeed it happens, even in England, but the phrase makes it sound rather a polite business. We say that their eyes met across a crowded room. Again, how social it sounds. Across a crowded room. Across a crowded harbour.
Anita Riberas didn’t, in fact, die ‘on the breast of Garibaldi’, but rather more mundanely, and less like a lithograph. She died while the liberator and three of his followers, each holding a corner of her mattress, were moving her from a cart into a farmhouse. Still, we should celebrate that moment with the telescope and all it led to. Because this is the moment – the moment of passionate taste – that we are after. Few of us have telescopes and harbours available, and in the rewinding of memory we may discover that even the deepest and longest love relationships rarely start with full recognition, with ‘you must be mine’ pronounced in a foreign tongue. The moment itself may be disguised as something else: admiration, pity, office camaraderie, shared danger, a common sense of justice. Perhaps it is too alarming a moment to be looked in the face at the time; so perhaps the English language is right to avoid Gallic flamboyance. I once asked a man who had been long and happily married where he had met his wife. ‘At an office party,’ he replied. And what had been his first impression of her? ‘I thought she was very nice,’ he replied.
So how do we know to trust that moment of passionate taste, however camouflaged? We don’t, even if we feel we must, that this is all we have to go on. A woman friend once told me, ‘If you took me into a crowded room and there was one man with “Nutter” tattooed on his forehead, I’d walk straight across to him.’ Another, twice-married friend confided, ‘I’ve thought of leaving my marriage, but I’m so bad at choosing that I wouldn’t have any confidence I’d do better next time, and that would be a depressing thing to learn.’ Who or what can help us in the moment that sets the wild echoes flying? What do we trust: the sight of a woman’s feet in walking boots, the novelty of a foreign accent, a loss of blood to the fingertips followed by exasperated self-criticism? I once went to visit a young married couple whose new house was astonishingly empty of furniture. ‘The problem,’ the wife explained, ‘is that he’s got no taste at all and I’ve only got bad taste.’ I suppose that to accuse yourself of bad taste implies the latent presence of some sort of good taste. But in our love choices, few of us know whether or not we are going to end up in that house without furniture.
When I first became part of a couple, I began to examine with more self-interest the progress and fate of other couples. By now I was in my early thirties, and some of my contemporaries who had met a decade earlier were already beginning to break up. I realised that the two couples whose relationships seemed to resist time, whose partners continued to show joyful interest in one another, were both – all four – gay men in their sixties. This may have been just a statistical oddity; but I used to wonder if there was a reason. Was it because they had avoided the long travail of parenthood, which often grinds down heterosexual relationships? Possibly. Was it something essential to their gayness? Probably not, judging from gay couples of my own generation. One thing separating these two couples from the rest was that for many years and in many countries their relationship would have been illegal. A bond made in such circumstances may well run deeper: I am committing my safety into your hands, every day of our lives together. Perhaps there is a literary comparison: books written under oppressive regimes are often more highly valued than books written in societies where everything is permitted. Not that a writer should therefore pray for oppression, or a lover for illegality.
‘I just wanted to marry her as some people want to go to Carcassonne.’ The first couple, T and H, met during the 1930s. T was from the English upper-middle classes, handsome, talented and modest. H came from a Jewish family in Vienna, who were so hard up that when he was a small boy (and his father at the First World War), his mother gave him away to the poorhouse for several years. Later, as a young man, he met the daughter of an English textile magnate, who helped get him out of Austria before the Second World War. In England, H worked for the family firm, and became engaged to the daughter. Then H met T under circumstances which T, rather coyly, refused to specify, but which were life-changing from the start. ‘Of course,’ T told me after H’s death, ‘all this was very new to me – I hadn’t been to bed with anybody at all.’
What, you might ask, about H’s deserted fiancée? But this is a happy story: T told me that she had ‘a very good instinct’ for what was going on; that in due course she fell in love with someone else; and that the four of them became close and lifelong friends. H went on to become a successful clothes designer for a high-street chain, and on his death – given the liberal nature of this employer – T, who for decades had committed many illegal acts with his ‘Austrian friend’, found himself in receipt of a widow’s pension. When he told me all this, not long before his own death, two things struck me. The first was how dispassionately he narrated his own story; all his strongest emotions were aroused by the misfortunes and injustices of H’s life before the two of them had met. And the second was a phrase he used when describing the arrival of H into his life. T said he was very bewildered, ‘But sure of one thing: I was determined to marry H.’
The other couple, D and D, were South African. D1 was formal, shy, highly cultured; D2 more flamboyant, more obviously gay, full of teasing and double entendres. They lived in Cape Town, had a house on Santorini, and travelled widely. They had worked out how to live together down to the smallest detail: I remember them in Paris, explaining that as soon as they got to Europe they would always buy a large pannetone, on which to breakfast in their hotel room. (A couple’s first task, it has always seemed to me, is to solve the problem of breakfast; if this can be worked out amicably, most other difficulties can too.) On one occasion D2 came to London by
himself. Late in the evening, after drink had been taken, and we were talking about provincial France, he suddenly confessed, ‘I had the best fucky-fuck of my life in Carcassonne.’ It was not a line you would easily forget, particularly since he described how there had been a storm brewing, and at what the French call le moment suprême, there was an enormous roll of thunder overhead – a coup de foudre indeed. He didn’t say he had been with D1 at the time, and because he didn’t, I assumed he hadn’t. After he died, I put his words into a novel, though with some hesitation about the accompanying weather, which raised the frequent literary problem of the vrai versus the vraisemblable. Life’s astonishments are frequently literature’s clichés. A couple of years later, I was on the phone to D1 when he alluded to this line and asked where I had got it from. Worrying at my possible betrayal, I admitted that D2 had been my source. ‘Ach,’ said D1 with sudden warmth, ‘we had such a wonderful time in Carcassonne.’ I felt relief; also a kind of surrogate nostalgia about the fact that they had been together.
For some, the sunlight catches on the telescope out there in the lagoon; for others, not. We choose, we are chosen, we are unchosen. I said to my friend who always picked nutters that maybe she should look for a nice nutter. She replied, ‘But how could I tell one?’ Like most people, she believed what lovers told her until there was a good reason not to. For several years she went out with a nutter who always left promptly for the office; only towards the end of the relationship did she discover that his first appointment of the day was always with his shrink. I said, ‘You’ve just had bad luck.’ She said, ‘I don’t want it to be luck. If it’s luck, there’s nothing I can do about it.’ People say that in the end you get what you deserve, but that phrase cuts both ways. People say that in modern cities there are too many terrific women and too many terrible men. The city of Carcassonne looks solid and enduring, but what we admire is mostly nineteenth-century reconstruction. Forget the hazard of ‘whether it will last’, and whether longevity is in any case a virtue, a reward, an accommodation or another piece of luck. How much do we act, and how much are we acted upon, in that moment of passionate taste?
And we shouldn’t forget that Garibaldi had a second wife (also a third – though we may ignore her). His ten years of marriage to Anita Riberas were followed by ten years of widowhood. Then, in the summer of 1859, during his Alpine campaign, he was fighting near Varese when a message was brought to him through the Austrian lines by a seventeen-year-old girl driving alone in a gig. She was Giuseppina Raimondi, the illegitimate daughter of Count Raimondi. Garibaldi was immediately smitten, wrote her a passionate letter, declared his love on bended knee. He admitted the difficulties to any union between them: he was nearly three times her age, already had another child by a peasant woman, and feared that Giuseppina’s aristocratic background might not play well with his political image. But he convinced himself (and her), to the extent that on 3rd December 1859, as a later historian than Trevelyan worded it, ‘She put aside her doubts and entered his room. The deed was done!’ Like Anita, she was evidently dashing and brave; on 24th January 1860, they were married – in this instance, with the full dogma of the Catholic Church.
Tennyson met Garibaldi on the Isle of Wight four years later. The poet greatly admired the liberator, but also noted that he had ‘the divine stupidity of a hero’. This second marriage – or rather, Garibaldi’s illusions about it – lasted (according to which authority you believe) either a few hours or a few days, the time it took for the bridegroom to receive a letter detailing his new wife’s past. Giuseppina, it turned out, had begun taking lovers at the age of eleven; she had married Garibaldi only at the insistence of her father; she had spent the night before her wedding with her most recent lover, by whom she was pregnant; and she had precipitated sexual events with her husband-to-be so that she could write to him on 1st January and claim to be carrying his child.
Garibaldi demanded not just an immediate separation but an annulment. The romantic hero’s deeply unromantic reasoning was that since he had slept with Giuseppina only before the wedding and not after, the marriage had technically not been consummated. The law was unimpressed by such sophistry, and Garibaldi’s appeal to higher influences, including the king, also failed. The liberator found himself shackled to Giuseppina for the next twenty years.
In the end, the law is only ever defeated by lawyers; in place of the romantic telescope, the legal microscope. The freeing argument, when it was eventually found, ran like this: since Garibaldi’s marriage had been solemnised in territory nominally under Austrian control, the law governing it might therefore be construed as the Austrian civil code, under which an annulment was (and perhaps always had been) possible. So the hero-lover was saved by the very nation against whose rule he had been fighting at the time. The distinguished lawyer who proposed this ingenious solution had, back in 1860, prepared the legislative unification of Italy; now, he achieved the marital disunification of the nation’s unifier. Let us salute the name of Pasquale Stanislao Mancini.
Pulse
MY PARENTS WERE walking down a farm track in Italy about three years ago. I often imagine myself watching them, always from behind. My mother, greying hair pulled back in a bunch, would be wearing a loose-cut patterned blouse over slacks and open-toed sandals; my father has a short-sleeved shirt, khaki trousers and polished brown shoes. His shirt is properly ironed, with twin buttoned pockets and turn-ups, if that’s the word, on the sleeves. He owns half a dozen shirts like this; they proclaim him a man on holiday. Nor do they give the least hint of athleticism; at best, they might look appropriate on a bowling green.
The two of them could be holding hands; this was something they did unselfconsciously, whether I was behind them, watching, or not. They are walking down this track somewhere in Umbria because they are investigating a roughly chalked sign offering vino novello. And they are on foot because they have looked at the depth of the hard clay ruts and decided not to risk their hire car. I would have argued that this was the point of renting a car; but my parents were a cautious couple in many ways.
The track runs between vineyards. As it makes a bend to the left, a rusting, hangar-like barn comes into view. In front of it is a concrete structure like an oversized compost bin: about six feet high and nine across, with no roof or front to it. When they are about thirty yards away, my mother turns to my father and pulls a face. She may even say, ‘Yuck’, or something similar. My father frowns and doesn’t reply. This was the first time it happened; or rather, to be exact, the first time he noticed it.
We live in what used to be a market town some thirty miles north-west of London. Mum works in hospital administration; Dad has been a solicitor in a local practice all his adult life. He says the work will see him out, but that his type of solicitor – not just a technician who understands documents, but a general giver of advice – won’t exist in the future. The doctor, the vicar, the lawyer, perhaps the schoolmaster – in the old days, these were figures everyone turned to for more than just their professional competency. Nowadays, my father says, people do their own conveyancing, write their own wills, agree the terms of their divorce beforehand, and take their own advice. If they want a second opinion, they prefer an agony aunt to a solicitor, and the internet to both. My father takes this all philosophically, even when people imagine they’re capable of pleading their own cases. He just smiles, and repeats the old legal saying: the man who represents himself in court has a fool for a client.
Dad advised me against following him into the law, so I did a BEd and now teach in a sixth-form college about fifteen miles away. But I didn’t see any reason to leave the town where I grew up. I go to the local gym, and on Fridays run with a group led by my friend Jake; that’s how I met Janice. She was always going to stand out in a place like this, because she has that London edge to her. I think she hoped I’d want to move to the big city, and was disappointed when I didn’t. No, I don’t think that; I know it.
Mum … who can describe their mot
her? It’s like when interviewers ask one of the royals what it’s like to be royal, and they laugh and say they don’t know what it’s like not to be royal. I don’t know what it would be like for my mum not to be my mum. Because if she wasn’t, then I wouldn’t, I couldn’t, be me, could I?
Apparently I had a difficult birth. Perhaps that’s why there’s only me; though I’ve never asked. We don’t do gynaecology in our family. Or religion, because we don’t have any. We do politics a bit, but rarely argue, since we think the parties are as bad as one another. Dad may be a bit more right wing than Mum, but essentially we believe in self-reliance, helping others, and not expecting the state to look after us from cradle to grave. We pay our taxes and our pension contributions and have life assurance; we use the National Health Service and give to charity when we can. We’re ordinary, sensible middle-class people.
And without Mum we wouldn’t be any of it. Dad had a bit of a drink problem when I was little, but Mum sorted him out and turned him into a purely social drinker. I was classified as ‘disruptive’ at school, but Mum sorted me out with patience and love, while making it clear exactly which lines I couldn’t cross. I expect she did the same with Dad. She organises us. She still has a bit of her Lancashire accent left, but we don’t do that silly north–south stuff in our family, not even as a joke. I also think it’s different when there’s only one child, because there aren’t two natural teams, kids and adults. There are just the three of you, and though I might have been more coddled, I also learnt from an earlier age to live in an adult world, because that’s the only game in town. I may be wrong about this. If you asked Janice if she thought I was fully grown up, I can imagine the answer.