He calls at an unrespectable hour the next day and insists we meet for breakfast so I can hear about it. I inform him that the nanny, as nannies do, has lost the will to live and that it is difficult to get a baby-sitter first thing in the morning. But at last I arrive at the café, happy to be out and to have someone bring me breakfast, rather than running about, as I normally do, with slices of toast with jam which inevitably end up face-down on the floor.
Victor doesn’t omit a moment.
‘And what were you doing?’ he enquires politely, at last.
I sigh. Wearing an old tracksuit and drinking beer in bed, coughing, smoking and listening to a late Beethoven quartet on my headphones.
He and the woman never meet again. Most nights Victor watches TV alone, a plate of saveloy and chips on his lap, a pickled onion or two on the side.
Another friend: a plump, middle-aged alcoholic who is an accountant. I envied his enthusiasm as he talked of the life that marriage, for the moment, was keeping him from. He had worked too hard to enjoy sufficiently his teenage freedom the first time. He leaves his wife, buys underwear, aftershave, cufflinks, a bracelet and hair-dye. He presents himself to me.
My eyes and mouth widen.
At last I say, ‘You’ve never looked better.’
‘As always, you’re very encouraging,’ he says. ‘Thank you, thank you.’
We shake hands and off he sets for singles clubs and bars for divorcees. He meets a woman, but she will only have him in her marital bed, to provoke her husband. He meets another. You remind me of someone, she says; an undertaker, as it turns out. My furious friend replies that it isn’t her body he has come for. He soon learns that at his age he cares far more than formerly whom he spends his time with. What he wanted then he doesn’t want now. He notices also that people become eccentric as they get older, and that there is a lot of them to take in.
‘Shall I go back to my wife?’ he asks.
‘Try it,’ I say, the expert speaking.
But she regards him suspiciously, wondering why his hair has turned aubergine and whether he has had his name engraved on a bracelet to make him identifiable after an accident. She has realized that life is possible without him.
The boys have fallen asleep. I carry them upstairs, one by one. They lie side by side under vivid duvets. I am about to kiss them when I notice their eyes are open. I dread a second wind. I am a liberal parent, afraid of my occasional rages. I always regret any superfluous restraint. I wouldn’t want them to fear me; I wouldn’t want them to fear anyone. I don’t want to break or discourage anything in them. Occasionally, though, I do want them to believe I am in charge. Soon they are leaping from bed to bed. When they make for the door, since I am too tired to grab them, I am forced to put on my ‘cross’ voice. Their reluctance to go to sleep I don’t understand. For months the highlight of my day has been the anticipation of unconsciousness. At least they regret the passing of each day, as do I, in a different way. Tonight we want the same thing, my boys and I: more life.
‘If you lie still I will read to you,’ I say.
They regard me suspiciously, but I find a book, and make a place between them. They stretch out across me, occasionally kicking one another.
It is a cruel story, as most children’s stories are, and it involves a woodcutter, as most children’s stories do. But inevitably it concerns a conventional family from which the father has not fled. The boys know the story so well they can tell when I skip a bit or attempt to make something up. When they stop asking questions I put the book down, creep out of the room and switch off the light. Then I return to find their faces in the covers, and kiss them. Outside I listen for their breathing. If only I could stand here all night. Then I hear them whispering to one another and giggling.
Old wives; old story.
From the beginning, starting with the girls at school, and the teachers in particular, I have looked at women in shops, on the street, in the bus, at parties, and wondered what it would be like to be with them, and what pleasures we might kindle. At school I would toss my pencil under the teacher’s desk in order to crawl underneath and examine her legs. The desultory nature of the education system enabled me to develop an enthusiastic interest in girls’ skirts – in the material and texture, and in whether they were billowy, loose or tight, and in which places. Skirts, like theatre curtains later, quickened my curiosity. I wanted to know what was under them. There was waiting, but there was possibility. The skirt was a transitional object; both a thing in itself and a means of getting somewhere else. This became my paradigm of important knowledge. The world is a skirt I want to lift up.
Later, I imagined that with each woman I could start afresh. There was no past. I could be a different person, if not a new one, for a time. Also I used women to protect me from other people. Wherever I might be, if I were huddled up with a whispering woman who wanted me, I could keep the world outside my skin. I could stop wanting other women. At the same time I liked to keep my options open; desiring other women kept me from the exposure and susceptibility of loving just the one. There are perils in deep knowledge.
Unsurprisingly, Susan is the one woman, apart from Mother, with whom I can do practically nothing. But now, when I am certain that I am able to speak to women without being afraid of wanting them, I am not sure that I can touch someone as I used to – frivolously. After a certain age sex can never be casual. I couldn’t ask for so little. To lay your hand on another’s body, or to put your mouth against another’s – what a commitment that is! To choose someone is to uncover a whole life. And it is to invite them to uncover you!
Maybe that is what happened with Nina. One day a girl walks past and you want her. I’ve examined the moment a score of times. She and I would go over it repeatedly, in joy and in puzzlement. I can remember how tall and slim she was; and then there was the jolt, the violent jolt, when we met, and met. Something about her changed everything. But I had wanted people before, and I knew nothing about her. She was from another world. After a certain age you don’t want things to be so haphazard. You want to believe that you know what it is you are doing. Perhaps that explains what I did.
*
My young gay friend Ian liked to stand with me outside tube stations where I would watch the flocks of girls in the summer, after I had finished work for the day, around lunch time. There were certain locations that guaranteed more interest than others. ‘A picture of impotence,’ he called it. With him, looks would be exchanged and off he would go, while I waited, having coffee somewhere. Sometimes he fucked five people in a day, shoving his arm up to the elbow into men whose faces he never saw. Every night of the week there were orgies he might attend.
‘I’ve never understood all the fuss you straights make about infidelity,’ he’d say. ‘It’s only fucking.’
‘Fucking means something,’ I’d reply. But what? I’d add, ‘Surely, for there to be beauty there must be mystery too.’
‘When there are other people there is always mystery,’ was his answer.
Susan has already laid the table. I open the wine and pour it. The man in the off-licence said it is an easy wine to drink. These days I find anything easy to drink.
Susan brings the food in and sets it down. I glance over the newspaper. As she eats, she turns on the TV, puts on her glasses and leans forward to watch a soap opera.
‘Oh my God,’ she says, as something happens.
The noise presses into my head. You’d think, if she wanted domestic drama, she could look across the table.
But I am looking away, at a tree in the garden, at a print on the wall, longing for something beautiful or made with care. I have begun to hate television as well as the other media. I was young when the rock-‘n’-roll world – the apotheosis of the defiantly shallow – represented the new. It was rebellious and stood against the conventional and dead. Television, too, remained a novelty throughout my youth – all those flickering worlds admitted to one room, Father making me hold the aerial up at
the window on tiptoe. Every few months something new and shiny arrived: a car, a fridge, a washing machine, a telephone. And for a time each new thing amazed us. We touched and stared at it for at least a fortnight. We were like everybody else, and ahead of some people. We thought – I don’t know why – that things would be enough.
Now I resent being bombarded by vulgarity, emptiness and repetition. I have friends in television. They talk constantly of their jobs and salaries, of the politics in which they’re enmeshed, and of the public, whom they never meet. But if you turn on the TV and sit down hoping to see something sustaining, you’re going to be disappointed – outraged, in fact, by bullying, aggression and the forcible democratization of the intellect. I am turning off; rebelling against rebellion.
A nerve in my eye is throbbing. My hands seem to be shaking. I feel hollow and my nerves raw, as if I have been pierced by something fatal. My body knows what is going on. If I am frightened now I will feel worse tomorrow, and the day after, and the day after that. All this, in the name of some kind of liberation. But terrible feelings go away after a time – that is one of the terrible things about them.
At university I met a woman as sad as me, if not sadder. For six years, before I met Susan, we lived together. To me now, that seems a long time. But then I imagined there would be time for everything. We slept in the same bed every night, and cooked and ate together. Our friends took it for granted that we were one, though at times we had other lovers. About once a month we would have sex. It was the late seventies, and relationships were nonchalant and easy, as if it had been agreed that the confinement of regularity made people mentally sick. I think I believed that if you didn’t have children monogamy was unnecessary.
I want to say the smell of mimosa reminds me of her. I want to say she will always be with me in some way. But it has gone, and she is an unmourned true love.
But Nina has not gone from my mind. I am unable to let her go, yet.
I force myself to eat. I will need strength in the next few days. But no tomato has ever tasted so intransigent. Suddenly Susan touches my face with her fingertips.
‘You,’ she says.
‘Yes?’
Maybe she can sense the velocity and turmoil of my thoughts.
‘Just you, Jay. It’s all right. Only that’
I stare at her. The kindness of the gesture shocks me. I wonder if she does somehow, somewhere, love me. And if one is fortunate enough to be loved one should, surely, appreciate it. I have been anticipating an argument. That would certainly get me out of the house tonight. But I know I must do this sane and sober, and not run out of the door with my hair on fire, or while hallucinating, or while wanting to murder someone.
Tonight I want to be only as mad as I choose; not more mad than that, please.
This is not my first flight. You see, I have run away before. As a boy I would sit in my bedroom with my hands over my ears while my parents raged at one another downstairs, convinced that one would kill the other and then commit suicide. I imagined myself walking away like Dick Whittington, with a spotted handkerchief tied to a stick over my shoulder. But I could never decide on a destination. I did consider going up north, but Billy Liar was one of my favourite films and I knew that northern malcontents, when they could, were fleeing down south.
A few years later, one dreary afternoon, a friend and I walked out of the house and took the train from Waterloo to the coast, and then a ferry to the Isle of Wight, where we expected to catch Bob Dylan performing ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’. All night we lay out in the drizzle in our tie-dyed T-shirts and frayed jeans, returning home the next day, disappointed and afraid. My mother was crying ‘What have you done?’ as I stepped back into the house. I was muttering, ‘Never the same again, never the same again.’
I was right. My excursion was all round the school. It increased my standing with the hippies who had previously scorned me. They invited me to a party where I met their group – girls and boys from the local area, aged from thirteen to seventeen, who spent most evenings and all weekends together. They smoked pot, or ‘shit’ as it was called, and took LSD, even during classes. In the houses of absent parents, the parties were orgies, with girls and boys openly copulating and exchanging partners. Most of the children were, like me, fleeing something: their homes. I learned it wasn’t necessary to keep one’s parents company. You could get out. A decent teacher had shown me a Thorn Gunn poem, ‘On the Move’, which I tore from the book and carried in the back pocket of my Levis. At parties I would lie on the floor and declaim it. ‘One is always nearer by not keeping still.’
You gotta go.
Again.
After we have cleared up, Susan sits at the table writing invitations for the boys’ party. Then, making a shopping list for next week, she says, ‘What meals do you fancy?’
‘I don’t want to think about it now.’
‘What’s your favourite ice-cream flavour at the moment? Is it the nut crunch or the vanilla?’
‘I don’t know.’
She says, ‘It’s not like you to be unable to think of food.’
‘No.’
I am considering how well I know her. The way she puts her head to one side, and the grimace she makes when concentrating. She looks as she must have as an eleven-year-old taking an exam. No doubt she will have a similar look at seventy, her gestures and movements unchanged, writing a letter to one of our sons.
How would I describe her? A characteristic image would be of her as a young teenager, getting up early to study in her bedroom, bent over a table as she is now. She would prepare for school, make her sandwiches, and leave the house, while her parents slept. She got herself into Cambridge, where she ensured she knew the most luminous people. She is as deliberate in her friendships as she is in everything else.
Though we exist at all ages at once, I can’t say that I have ever seen her girlish. She is an effective, organized woman. Our fridges and freezers are full of soup, vegetables, wine, cheese and ice-cream; the flowers and bushes in the garden are labelled; the children’s clothes are washed, ironed and folded. Every day there are deliveries of newspapers, books, alcohol, food and, often, of furniture. Our front path is a kind of thoroughfare for the service industries.
There are also people who come to clean the house, iron our shirts, tend the garden and cut the trees, as well as nannies, baby-sitters, child-minders and au pairs, not to mention masseurs, decorators, acupuncturists, financial advisers, piano teachers, accountants, the occasional drug dealer and people to organize all of the above and some of the below. When the numerous gadgets stop working, men come to mend them, one for each. Chalked on a board are instructions for the week, with several underlinings. Susan is always thinking of how to improve things here. She will, too, have strong, considered opinions on the latest films and music. In bed she reads cookbooks.
Being lower-middle class and from the suburbs, where poverty and pretension go together, I can see how good the middle class have it, and what a separate, sealed world they inhabit. They keep quiet about it, with reason; they feel guilty, too, but they ensure they have the best of everything, oh yes.
As with any other business, in marriage there soon develops an accepted division of labour, and a code of rules. But couples are never quite sure if they are both playing by the same ones, or whether they might have changed overnight, without the other having been informed.
It wasn’t her wit or beauty that fascinated me. There was never great passion – perhaps that was the point. But there was enjoyment. Mostly I liked her humdrum dexterity and ability to cope. She wasn’t helpless before the world, as I felt myself to be. She was straightforward and firm; she knew how to get things done. I envy her capability, and wish I had half of it. At the expense of feeling weak, I enable her to feel strong. If I were too strong and capable, I wouldn’t need her, and we would have to part.
Susan is too prudent to want much power, but at the office she is clear and articulate. It is not difficult
for her to make less confident people feel ineffectual. She doesn’t know how to protect them from her stretch and vigour, and can’t understand how I might see the other side. After all, she is cleverer than her colleagues, and has worked harder. Like many girls brought up to be good and well-behaved, she likes to please. Perhaps that is why young women are so suitable for the contemporary working world. They are welcome to it. Not that Susan cannot be ruthless, intent, as she has to be, on concealing her more sympathetic aspect. However, ambition without imagination is always clumsy.
Unlike me she doesn’t constantly lucubrate on the splendours and depths of her mind. She finds even interesting self-awareness self-indulgent. The range of her feeling is narrow; she would consider it shameful to give way to her moods. Therefore she keeps most of herself out of view, for fear of what others, and she herself in particular, would think. I would say this odd thing. Because she has never been disillusioned or disappointed – her life has never appalled her, and she would never lapse into inner chaos – she hasn’t changed.
But to keep everything going she can be bullying and strict, with a hard, charmless carapace. You have to take care with her: she will rarely cry, but she could burst into flames.
She does, too, have a curious attachment to the minor and, when permitted, major aristocracy. I don’t mind a little snobbery, just as one cannot object to the more poignant vanities; they are amusing. But she does have a penchant for anyone titled, as some girls will only go out with drummers, rather than, say, bass players. I find it a puzzling attachment to a class that is not even rotting, but which is completely uninteresting. Clearly one must tolerate all kinds of irritating tendencies in others, but what of the occasions when one cannot grasp the other person at all?