Such things lead the heart-sore to the Jacquelines of this world but the Jacquelines of this world lead to such things. Is there no other way? Is happiness always a compromise?
I used to read women’s magazines when I visited the dentist. They fascinate me with their arcane world of sex tips and man-traps. I am informed by the thin glossy pages that the way to tell if your husband is having an affair is to check his underpants and cologne. The magazines insist that when a man finds a mistress he will want to cover his prick more regally than of old. He will want to cover his tracks with a new aftershave. No doubt the magazines know best. There’s Mr Right furtively locking the bathroom door to try on his brand new six-pack of boxer shorts (size L). His faithful greying Y-fronts lie discarded on the floor. The bathroom mirror is fixed to give him a good view of his face but to get at the important thing he will have to balance on the edge of the bath and hold on to the shower rail. That’s better, now all he can see is an ad from a men’s magazine, fine lawn cotton pouched round a firm torso. He jumps down, satisfied, and splashes on a bucket load of Hommage Homme. Mrs Right won’t notice, she’s cooking a curry.
If Mrs Right is having an affair it will be harder to spot, so the magazines say, and they know best. She won’t buy new clothes, in fact, she’s likely to dress down so that her husband will believe her when she says she’s going to an evening class in mediaeval lute music. Unless she has a career, it will be very difficult for her to get away with it regularly except in the afternoons. Is that why so many women are choosing careers? Is that why Kinsey found that so many prefer sex in the afternoon?
I had a girlfriend once who could only achieve orgasm between the hours of two and five o’clock. She worked in the Botanical Gardens in Oxford where she bred rubber plants. It was tricky work trying to satisfy her, when at any moment a fee-paying visitor with the proper ticket of admission might require advice about Ficus elastica. Nevertheless, passion propelled me and I visited her in the depths of winter, muffled from head to foot, stamping rushes of snow from my boots like a character from Anna Karenina.
I’ve always been fond of Vronsky but I don’t believe in living out literature. Judith was deeply sunk in Conrad. She sat amongst the rubber plants reading Heart of Darkness. The most erotic thing I might have said to her was, ‘Mistah Kurtz – he dead.’ The Soviets, I am told, suffer extremely from having to wear wrappings of fur when outside, only to shed down to their knickers when inside. This was my problem. Judith lived in a perpetual hot-house world of shorts and T-shirts. I had to carry my skimpy garments with me or risk a dash through the cold aided only by a duffle-coat. One quiet afternoon after sex on the wood chippings beneath a trailing vine, we had a tiff and she locked me out of the greenhouse. I ran from window to window banging vainly at the panes. It was snowing and I was wearing only my Mickey Mouse one-piece.
‘If you don’t let me in I’ll die.’
‘Die then.’
I decided I was too young to freeze to death. I ran through the streets back to my lodgings with as much insouciance as I could muster. An old-age pensioner gave me 50p for rag week and I wasn’t arrested. We should be thankful for small mercies. I rang Judith to tell her it was all off and would she return my things?
‘I’ve burnt them,’ she said.
Perhaps I’m not meant to have any worldly goods. Perhaps they are blocking my spiritual progress and my higher self continually chooses situations where I will be free of material burdens. It’s a comforting thought, slightly better than being a sucker … Judith’s bottom. I treasure it.
Into the heart of my childish vanities, Louise’s face, Louise’s words, ‘I will never let you go.’ This is what I have been afraid of, what I’ve avoided through so many shaky liaisons. I’m addicted to the first six months. It’s the midnight calls, the bursts of energy, the beloved as battery for all those fading cells. I told myself after the last whipping with Bathsheba that I wouldn’t do any of it again. I did suspect that I might like being whipped, if so, I had at least to learn to wear an extra overcoat. Jacqueline was an overcoat. She muffled my senses. With her I forgot about feeling and wallowed in contentment. Contentment is a feeling you say? Are you sure it’s not an absence of feeling? I liken it to that particular numbness one gets after a visit to the dentist. Not in pain nor out of it, slightly drugged. Contentment is the positive side of resignation. It has its appeal but it’s no good wearing an overcoat and furry slippers and heavy gloves when what the body really wants is to be naked.
I never used to think about my previous girlfriends until I took up with Jacqueline. I never had the time. With Jacqueline I settled into a parody of the sporting colonel, the tweedy cove with a line-up of trophies and a dozen reminiscences about each. I have caught myself fancying a glass of sherry and a little mental dalliance with Inge, Catherine, Bathsheba, Judith, Estelle … Estelle, I haven’t thought about Estelle for years. She had a scrap metal business. No, no, no! I don’t want to go backwards in time like a sci-fi thriller. What is it to me that Estelle had a clapped-out Rolls-Royce with a pneumatic back seat? I can still smell the leather.
Louise’s face. Under her fierce gaze my past is burned away. The beloved as nitric acid. Am I hoping for a saviour in Louise? An almighty scouring of deed and misdeed, leaving the slab clean and white. In Japan they do a nice virgin substitute with the white of an egg. For twenty-four hours at least, you can have a new hymen. In Europe we have always preferred a half lemon. Not only does it act as a crude pessary, it also makes it very difficult for the most persistent of men to drop anchor in what may seem the most pliant of women. Tightness passes for newness; the man believes his little bride has satisfyingly sealed depths. He can look forward to plunging her inch by inch.
Cheating is easy. There’s no swank to infidelity. To borrow against the trust someone has placed in you costs nothing at first. You get away with it, you take a little more and a little more until there is no more to draw on. Oddly, your hands should be full with all that taking but when you open them there’s nothing there.
When I say ‘I will be true to you’ I am drawing a quiet space beyond the reach of other desires. No-one can legislate love; it cannot be given orders or cajoled into service. Love belongs to itself, deaf to pleading and unmoved by violence. Love is not something you can negotiate. Love is the one thing stronger than desire and the only proper reason to resist temptation. There are those who say that temptation can be barricaded beyond the door. The ones who think that stray desires can be driven out of the heart like the moneychangers from the temple. Maybe they can, if you patrol your weak points day and night, don’t look don’t smell, don’t dream. The most reliable Securicor, church sanctioned and state approved, is marriage. Swear you’ll cleave only unto him or her and magically that’s what will happen. Adultery is as much about disillusionment as it is about sex. The charm didn’t work. You paid all that money, ate the cake and it didn’t work. It’s not your fault is it?
Marriage is the flimsiest weapon against desire. You may as well take a pop-gun to a python. A friend of mine, a banker and a very rich man who had travelled the world, told me he was getting married. I was surprised because I knew that for years he had been obsessed with a dancer who for wild and proper reasons of her own wouldn’t commit. Finally he had lost patience and chosen a pleasant steady girl who ran a riding school. I saw him at his flat the weekend before his wedding. He told me how serious he was about marriage, how he had read the wedding service and found it beautiful. Within its confines he sensed happiness. Just then the doorbell rang and he took receipt of a van-load of white lilies. He was arranging them enthusiastically and telling me his theories on love, when the doorbell rang again and he took receipt of a crate of Veuve Clicquot and a huge tin of caviare. He had the table set and I noticed how often he looked at his watch.
‘After we’re married,’ he said, ‘I can’t imagine wanting another woman.’ The doorbell rang a third time. It was the dancer. She had come for the weekend. ‘
I’m not married yet,’ he said.
When I say ‘I will be true to you’ I must mean it in spite of the formalities, instead of the formalities. If I commit adultery in my heart then I have lost you a little. The bright vision of your face will blur. I may not notice this once or twice, I may pride myself on having enjoyed those fleshy excursions in the most cerebral way. Yet I will have blunted that sharp flint that sparks between us, our desire for one another above all else.
King Kong. The huge gorilla is at the top of the Empire State Building holding Fay Wray in the palm of his hand. A bevy of aircraft have been sent to wound the monster but he brushes them away as you would a fly. In the grip of desire a two-seater bi-plane with MARRIED on the side will hardly scratch the beast. You’ll still lie awake at night twisting your wedding ring round and round.
With Louise I want to do something different. I want the holiday and the homecoming together. She is the edge and the excitement for me but I have to believe it beyond six months. My circadian clock, which puts me to sleep at night and wakes me up in the morning in a regular twenty-four-hour fashion, has a larger arc that seems set at twenty-four weeks. I can override it, I’ve managed that, but I can’t stop it going off. With Bathsheba, my longest love at three years, the faithful ticker was cheated. She was so little there that while she occupied a fair stretch of time, she filled my days hardly at all. That may have been her secret. If she had lain with me and eaten with me and washed scrubbed and bathed with me, maybe I’d have been off in six months, or at least itching. I think she knew that.
So what affects the circadian clock? What interrupts it, slows it, speeds it? These questions occupy an obscure branch of science called chronobiology. Interest in the clock is growing because as we live more and more artificially, we’d like to con nature into altering her patterns for us. Night-workers and frequent fliers are absolutely the victims of their stubborn circadian clocks. Hormones are deep in the picture, so are social factors and environmental ones. Emerging from this melée, bit by bit, is light. The amount of light to which we are exposed crucially affects our clock. Light. Sun like a disc-saw through the body. Shall I submit myself sundial-wise beneath Louise’s direct gaze? It’s a risk; human beings go mad without a little shade, but how to break the habit of a lifetime else?
Louise took my face between her hands. I felt her long fingers tapering the sides of my head, her thumbs under my jawbone. She drew me to her, kissing me gently, her tongue inside my lower lip. I put my arms around her, not sure whether I was a lover or a child. I wanted her to hide me beneath her skirts against all menace. Sharp points of desire were still there but there was too a sleepy safe rest like being in a boat I had as a child. She rocked me against her, sea-calm, sea under a clear sky, a glass-bottomed boat and nothing to fear.
‘The wind’s getting up,’ she said.
Louise let me sail in you over these spirited waves. I have the hope of a saint in a coracle. What made them set out in years before the year 1000 with nothing between themselves and the sea but pieces of leather and lath? What made them certain of another place uncharted and unseen? I can see them now, eating black bread and honeycomb, sheltering from the rain under an animal hide. Their bodies are weathered but their souls are transparent. The sea is a means not an end. They trust it in spite of the signs.
The earliest pilgrims shared a cathedral for a heart. They were the temple not made with hands. The Eklasia of God. The song that carried them over the waves was the hymn that rung the rafters. Their throats were bare for God. Look at them now, heads thrown back, mouths open, alone but for the gulls that dip the prow. Against the too salt sea and the inhospitable sky, their voices made a screen of praise.
Love it was that drove them forth. Love that brought them home again. Love hardened their hands against the oar and heated their sinews against the rain. The journeys they made were beyond common sense; who leaves the hearth for the open sea? especially without a compass, especially in winter, especially alone. What you risk reveals what you value. In the presence of love, hearth and quest become one.
Louise, I would gladly fire the past for you, go and not look back. I have been reckless before, never counting the cost, oblivious to the cost. Now, I’ve done the sums ahead. I know what it will mean to redeem myself from the accumulations of a lifetime. I know and I don’t care. You set before me a space uncluttered by association. It might be a void or it might be a release. Certainly I want to take the risk. I want to take the risk because the life I have stored up is going mouldy.
She kissed me and in her kiss lay the complexity of passion. Lover and child, virgin and roué. Had I ever been kissed before? I was as shy as an unbroken colt. I had Mercutio’s swagger. This was the woman I had made love with yesterday, her taste was fresh on my mouth, but would she stay? I quivered like a schoolgirl.
‘You’re shaking,’ she said.
‘I must be cold.’
‘Let me warm you.’
We lay down on my floor, our backs to the day. I needed no more light than was in her touch, her fingers brushing my skin, bringing up the nerve ends. Eyes closed I began a voyage down her spine, the cobbled road of hers that brought me to a cleft and a damp valley then a deep pit to drown in. What other places are there in the world than those discovered on a lover’s body?
We were quiet together after we had made love. We watched the afternoon sun fall across the garden, the long shadows of early evening making patterns on the white wall. I was holding Louise’s hand, conscious of it, but sensing too that a further intimacy might begin, the recognition of another person that is deeper than consciousness, lodged in the body more than held in the mind. I didn’t understand that sensing, I wondered if it might be bogus, I’d never known it myself although I’d seen it in a couple who’d been together for a very long time. Time had not diminished their love. They seemed to have become one another without losing their very individual selves. Only once had I seen it and I envied it. The odd thing about Louise, being with Louise, was déjà vu. I couldn’t know her well and yet I did know her well. Not facts and figures, I was endlessly curious about her life, rather a particular trust. That afternoon, it seemed to me I had always been here with Louise, we were familiar.
‘I’ve spoken to Elgin,’ she said. ‘I told him what you are to me. I told him we’d been to bed together.’
‘What did he say?’
‘He asked which bed.’
‘Which bed?’
‘Our marital bed, as I suppose he’d call it, was made by him when we were living on my money in a tiny house. He was training, I was teaching, he made the bed in the evenings … It’s very uncomfortable. I told him we’d used my bed. The Lady’s Occasional … He was calmer then.’
I could understand how Elgin felt about his bed. Bathsheba had always insisted that we use their marital bed. I had to sleep on his side. It was the violation of innocence I objected to, a bed should be a safe place. It’s not safe if you can’t turn your back before it’s occupied again. I air my scruples now but it didn’t stop me at the time. I do despise myself for that.
‘I told Elgin I had to be able to see you, to be free to come and go with you. I told him I wouldn’t lie and that I didn’t want him to lie to me … He asked me if I was going to leave him and I said I honestly didn’t know.’
She turned to me her face serious and disturbed. ‘I honestly don’t know. Do you want me to leave him?’
I swallowed and struggled hard for the answer. The answer in my throat coming straight from my heart was ‘Yes. Pack now.’ I couldn’t say that, I made my answer from my head.
‘Shall we see how we go?’
Louise’s face betrayed her for a second only but I knew that she too had wanted me to say yes. I tried to help us both.
‘We could decide in three months. That would be fairer wouldn’t it? To Elgin, to you?’
‘What about you?’
I shrugged. ‘I’ve done with Jacqueline. I’m here for you if you want me
.’
She said, ‘I want to offer you more than infidelity.’
I looked into her lovely face and I thought, I’m not ready for this. My boots are still muddy from the time before. I said, ‘Yesterday you were angry with me, you accused me of trophy hunting and you told me not to declare my love to you until I had declared it to myself. You were right. Give me time to do the work I must do. Don’t make it easy for me. I want to be sure. I want you to be sure.’
She nodded. ‘When I saw you two years ago I thought you were the most beautiful creature male or female I had ever seen.’
Two years ago, what was she talking about?
‘I saw you in the park, you were walking by yourself, you were talking to yourself. I followed you for about an hour and then I went home. I never imagined to see you again. You were a game in my head.’
‘Do you often follow people in the park?’
She laughed. ‘Never before and only once since. The second time I saw you. You were in the British Library.’
‘Translating?’
‘Yes. I noted your seat number and I asked the desk clerk if he knew your name. When I had your name I found your address and that is why six months ago you found a drenched distressed creature in the road beyond your door.’
‘You told me you had had your bag stolen.’
‘Yes.’
‘You asked me if I could let you dry off and phone your husband.’
‘Yes.’
‘None of that was real?’
‘I had to speak to you. It was the only thing I could think of. Not very clever. And then I met Jacqueline and I thought I must stop and I thought about Elgin and tried to stop. I lured myself into believing that we could be friends, if I was your friend that would be enough. We made good friends, didn’t we?’