The Only Story

  And with that he stubbed out his cigarette, nodded and walked off down the beach towards the gentle tide.

  * * *

  —

  It came into his head, in one of those whimsical, sentimental moods he always sought to guard against, to try and make one of Susan’s famous upside-down cakes. Over the years, he had become a competent baker, and so imagined that he could work out what had gone wrong. Too much fruit, too little baking powder, too much flour—that was his best guess.

  The mixture certainly looked surly and unpromising in the tin. But when he opened the oven door, it had surprisingly risen to its correct height, the fruit looked evenly distributed, and it smelt like…cake. He let it cool, then cut himself a small slice. It tasted fine. Eating it failed to set off any specific memories, for which he was grateful. He was also grateful that he wasn’t able to repeat someone else’s mistakes, only his own.

  He cut himself another slice and then, suddenly suspicious of his own motives, threw the rest in the bin. He turned on Wimbledon and watched as two tall, baseball-capped men hit aces past one another for game after game. He chewed his cake and wondered idly what might happen if he went back to the Village and presented himself at the tennis club. Applied for membership. Asked to play in, even at his advanced age. The bad boy returned: the Village’s own John McEnroe. No, that was another sentimentality. Doubtless there would be no one left who remembered him. Or, more likely, all he would find would be a neat little housing estate. No, he would never go back. He was deeply incurious about whether his parents’ house, or the Macleods’, or Joan’s, were still standing. Those places would hold no emotions for him at this distance. That’s what he told himself, anyway.

  Towards the end of Wimbledon fortnight, the broadcasters showed more doubles matches: men’s, women’s, mixed. Naturally, he was most interested in the mixed. “The most vulnerable spot is always down the middle, Casey Paul.” Not anymore: the players were so fit, so quick and solid on the volley, and their rackets had sweet spots the size of their heads. Another change was the lack of chivalry, certainly at this level. As he remembered it, back in the day, male players would hit as hard as possible against the opposing man, but when rallying with a woman would hold back on the power, and rely more on a change of angle or depth; maybe throw in a slice or a drop shot. It was a bit more than chivalry, in fact: it was simply boring to watch a man outhitting and overpowering a woman.

  He hadn’t played tennis for years; decades indeed. When he lived in the States, a temporary friend had introduced him to golf. At first this felt an ironic surprise; but it was absurd to hold a prejudice against a game just because Gordon Macleod had once played it. He came to know the joy of a perfect contact between club and ball, the shame of a shank; and to appreciate the strategic intricacies of tee to green. Nevertheless, as he took aim down a fairway, his head properly filled with the coach’s advice about taking the club back, use of the hips and legs, and the importance of the follow-through, he did occasionally hear, as if in a whisper, the sweet, laughing opinion of Susan Macleod that it was plain unsporting to hit a stationary ball.

  * * *

  —

  Gordon Macleod: whom he had once wanted to kill, even if Joan had told him there hadn’t been a local murder since the Villagers wore woad. An exemplar of the kind of Englishman he most loathed. Patronising, patriarchal, manneredly precise. Not to mention violent and controlling. He remembered how it had seemed to him that Macleod was somehow preventing him from growing up: not by doing anything, simply by existing. “And how many Fancy Boys are you providing yourself with this weekend?” Bravely, Susan had responded, “I think it’s just Ian and Eric this weekend. Unless the others turn up as well.” Gordon Macleod’s words had been like fire; he’d laughed at them, as Susan had done, but they had scorched his skin.

  And then there was that other occasion when words were spoken which had echoed down his life. That furious, squat man in his dressing gown, his eyes invisible in the gloom, bullying down on him as he gripped the banister in panic.

  “Whatski? Whatski, my fine and feathered friend?”

  At the time, he had blushed, feeling his skin burn. But beyond this, he thought the fellow must simply be mad. That’s to say, mad enough to have somehow listened in to his and Susan’s private conversations. Unless he’d hidden a tape recorder beneath his wife’s bed. And the thought of that had made him blush all over again.

  It had taken him years to realise that this had not been crazy malevolence, but something quite unintended, which nevertheless held a powerful and destructive resonance. Gordon Macleod, roused from his bed by the sound of his wife’s lover, had merely, in that moment, and probably with no ulterior motive, fallen back on the private language he had shared with Susan. Shared? More than that—created. And which Susan had then brought into her relationship with him. Unthinkingly. You say “darling,” you say “my love,” you say “kiss me hardly,” you say “whatski?,” you say “my fine and feathered friend,” because those are the words which come to you at that moment. With no ulterior motive on her part either. And now he wondered if any of her turns of phrase, which had so beguiled him, had been her own. Perhaps only “We’re a played-out generation,” because it seemed unlikely that Gordon Macleod, in all his self-importance, believed that he and men of his age were played out.

  He remembered a public service advertisement from the time when the government, grudgingly, had acknowledged the existence of AIDS. There were two versions of the ad, he seemed to remember: a photo of a woman in bed with about half a dozen men, and one of a man in bed with about half a dozen women, all side by side like sardines. The text pointed out that every time you went to bed with someone new, you also went to bed with everyone he or she had previously gone to bed with. The government had been talking about sexually transmitted disease. But it was the same with words: they too could be sexually transmitted.

  And actions as well, for that matter. Except that—strangely, fortunately—actions had never caused a problem. He had never found himself thinking, Oh, when you did that with your hand or arm or leg or tongue, you must also have done it with x and y and z. Such thoughts and images had never bothered him, and he was grateful, because he could easily imagine how ghostly antecedents in your head could drive you mad. But ever since Gordon Macleod’s sneer had first made sense to him, he had become conscious—at times, absurdly so—of what must have been going on, verbally, since the day Adam or Eve or whoever it might have been first took another lover.

  Once, he had mentioned this discovery to a girlfriend: lightly, almost frivolously, as if it were natural and inevitable and therefore interesting. A day or two later, in bed, she had teasingly called him “my fine and feathered friend.”

  “No!” he had shouted, instantly retreating to his side of the mattress, “You’re not allowed to call me that!”

  She had been shocked by his vehemence. And he had shocked himself. But he was protecting a phrase which had always been uniquely between Susan and himself. Except that, earlier, it had been a phrase uniquely between the newly married Mr. Gordon Macleod and his hopeful, puzzled wife.

  So, for a while—say, twenty years or more—he had found himself morbidly sensitive to lovers’ language. This was ridiculous, of course. He saw rationally that there was only a limited vocabulary available, and it shouldn’t matter when the same words were recycled, when nightly, across the globe, billions asserted the uniqueness of their love with secondhand phrases. Except that sometimes it did. Which meant that here, as elsewhere, prehistory ruled.

  * * *

  —

  He imagined the Village tennis courts replaced by a spread of the finest modern boxes, or perhaps a more lucrative clump of low-rise flats. He wondered if anyone, anywhere, had ever looked at a housing development and thought: Why don’t we knock them all down and build a nice tennis club, one with the latest all-weather courts? Or
maybe—yes, why don’t we go further and lay some proper old-fashioned grass courts, for tennis as it once used to be? But no one would ever do, or even think, that, would they? Things, once gone, can’t be put back; he knew that now. A punch, once delivered, can’t be withdrawn. Words, once spoken, can’t be unsaid. We may go on as if nothing has been lost, nothing done, nothing said; we may claim to forget it all; but our innermost core doesn’t forget, because we have been changed forever.

  * * *

  —

  Here was a paradox. When he had been with Susan, they had scarcely discussed their love, analysed it, sought to understand its shape, its colour, its weight and its boundaries. It was simply there, an inevitable fact, an unshakeable given. But it was also the case that neither of them had the words, the experience, the mental equipment to discuss it. Later, in his thirties and forties, he had gradually acquired emotional lucidity. But in these later relationships of his, he had felt less deeply, and there was less to discuss, so his potential articulacy was rarely required.

  * * *

  —

  He had read, some years before, that a common psychological trope in men’s attitude to women was the “rescue fantasy.” Perhaps it stirred in them memories of fairy tales in which valiant knights came across pretty maidens locked in towers by wicked guardians. Or those classical myths in which other maidens—usually naked—were chained to rocks for the sole purpose of being rescued by dauntless warriors. Who usually discovered a convenient sea serpent or dragon which had to be eliminated first. In modern, less mythical times, it appeared that the woman about whom men most had rescue fantasies was Marilyn Monroe. He had viewed this sociological datum with a degree of scepticism. Odd how rescuing her seemed inevitably to involve sleeping with her. Some rescue that would prove. Whereas in fact, as it seemed to him, the most effective way to rescue Marilyn Monroe would have been not to sleep with her.

  He didn’t think that, as a nineteen-year-old, he had been suffering from a rescue fantasy with Susan. On the contrary, he suffered from a rescue reality. And unlike maidens in towers or chained to rocks, who attracted a whole swirl of knights looking for chivalric action, and unlike Marilyn Monroe, whom every Western man dreamed of liberating (if only to lock her up in a tower of his own making), in the case of Susan Macleod, there was not a great queue of knights, cinemagoers and Fancy Boys squabbling for the right to rescue her from her husband. He had believed he could save her; further, that only he could save her. That was no fantasy; it was practicality and brute necessity.

  * * *

  —

  At this distance, he realised, he no longer had a memory of Susan’s body. Of course, he remembered her face, and her eyes and her mouth and her elegant ears, and what she looked like in her tennis dress; there were photographs to confirm all this. But a sexual memory of her body: that had gone. He couldn’t remember her breasts, their shape, their fall, their firmness or otherwise. He couldn’t remember her legs, what form they took, and how she parted them and what she did with them when they made love. He couldn’t remember her undressing. It was as if she’d undressed as women did on the beach, with lots of prim ingenuity beneath a capacious towel, but emerging in a nightdress rather than a swimming costume. Had they always made love with the lights out? He couldn’t remember. Perhaps he’d closed his eyes a lot.

  She had a corset, that he remembered; well, doubtless several. Which had—whatever they were called—straps for holding up her stockings. Suspenders, that was it. How many per leg? Two, three? But he knew she only ever attached the front one. This private eccentricity came back to him now. As for what her bras had been like…At nineteen, he didn’t have the slightest underwear fetishism, any more than she took an erotic interest in his vests and pants. He couldn’t even remember what his pants had looked like at that age. He’d had a period of wearing string vests, which for some reason he had imagined to be cool.

  She had no coquetry about her, that was certain. No flirty bits of flesh showing. How did they kiss? He couldn’t even remember that: Whereas, with later, lesser attachments, there were astonishing moments of sexual freeze-frame still in his head. Maybe, as you got better at sex, the sex became more memorable. Or maybe, the deeper your feelings, the less the particulars of sex mattered. No, neither of these were true. He was just trying to find a theory to explain an oddity.

  He remembered when she had told him, just like that, how many times they had made love. A hundred and fifty-three, or some such number. Back then, it had thrown him into all sorts of pondering. Should he have been counting too? Was it a lapse in love that he wasn’t, or hadn’t? And so on. Now, he thought: a hundred and fifty-three, the number of times he had come up to that point. But what about her? How many orgasms had she had? Indeed, did she ever have one? There was pleasure and intimacy, surely; but orgasm? At the time he couldn’t tell, nor did he ask; nor know how to ask. To put it more truthfully, he had never thought of asking. And now it was too late.

  He tried to imagine why she might have decided to count. To begin with, as a matter of pride and attentiveness, in bed with only the second lover of her life, and that after a long drought. But then he remembered the anguished whisper of her question, “Don’t give up on me just yet, Casey Paul?” So maybe counting had turned from a matter of acclaim to one of anxiety and dismay: the fear that he might leave her, the fear that she might never have another lover. Was that it? He gave up. He stopped examining the past, chasing down what Joan had memorably called “my own distant experiences of cock and cunt.”

  * * *

  —

  One evening, glass in hand, he was idly following the televised highlights of the Brazilian Grand Prix. He wasn’t much interested in the bland plutocracy of Formula One; but he did like to watch young men taking risks. In that respect, the race was gratifying. Heavy rain had made the track dangerous; pools of standing water sent even former world champions aquaplaning smack into the barriers; the race was stopped twice, and frequently brought under the control of the safety car. Everyone drove cautiously, except for nineteen-year-old Max Verstappen of the Red Bull team. He overtook his way from almost last place to third, making moves his elders and supposed betters declined to dare. The commentators, astonished by this display of skill and guts, sought explanation. And one of them provided it: “They say your risk profile doesn’t stabilise until you’re about twenty-five.”

  This statement made him attend even more closely. Yes, he thought: a treacherous circuit, visibility reduced by spray to almost zero, others trepidatious while you felt invulnerable, going flat out thanks to a risk profile as yet unstabilised. Yes, he remembered that all too well. It was called being nineteen. And some would crash and some wouldn’t. Verstappen hadn’t. So far, anyway: though he had another six years to go before neurophysiology rendered him entirely sensible.

  * * *

  —

  But if Verstappen was showing youthful fearlessness rather than true courage, did the same age disclaimer apply in reverse: to cowardice? He’d certainly been under twenty-five when he committed an act of cowardice which had haunted him all his life. He and Eric were staying at the Macleods’, and had gone off to a funfair in a hilly park. They were walking down from the top, side by side, chatting, and failed to notice a group of youths coming up towards them. As they drew level, one leaned into Eric with his shoulder, spinning him round; another tripped him, and a third went in with his boot. He took all this in with a kind of heightened peripheral vision—how long before Eric was on the ground? a second? two?—and had instantly, instinctively run away. He kept saying to himself, “Find a policeman, find a policeman,” but even as he did so, he knew that wasn’t the reason he was running. He was afraid of getting beaten up himself. The rational part of him knew that policemen were a rare sight at funfairs. So he ran to the bottom of the hill on this futile, pretend quest, without actually asking anyone where he might find help. Then he walked
back up, nauseous at what he might find. Eric was on his feet, blood on his face, feeling his ribs. He could no longer remember what had been said—whether he offered his fake excuse—and they drove back to the Macleod house. Susan bandaged Eric, with liberal use of Dettol, and insisted he stay until the bruising had gone down and the cuts mended. Which Eric had done. Neither then nor later had Eric rebuked him for cowardice, or asked why he’d disappeared.

  You could get through a life, if you were careful, and lucky, without having your courage much tested—or rather, your cowardice revealed. That time Macleod had attacked him in the book room he’d certainly run for it, after throwing one ineffective punch in reply to Macleod’s three. And when he’d scuttled out of the back door, he hadn’t been trying to find a policeman, either. He had made the probably correct calculation that Macleod was drunk enough and angry enough to go on attempting to hit him until he succeeded. Despite being younger, and reasonably fit, he hadn’t fancied his chances at close quarters. It wasn’t like facing an under-12, under-6-stone schoolboy of equal timorousness.

  * * *

  —

  And then again, more recently. “Recently” in the sense of “fifteen or twenty years ago.” That was how the mind, and time, worked nowadays. He’d been back in England for only a few years. He’d visited Susan a couple of times, bringing no visible pleasure or benefit to either of them. One evening, the phone rang. It was Martha Macleod, now—for a long time—Mrs. Something-or-Other.

  “My mother has been temporarily sectioned” was her opening line.