“I’m sorry,” I said. “It’s really not that at all. But you see,” I added, looking at him with melancholy seriousness, “it’s just that I’m a member of a played-out generation. You may think we’re a bit young for it, but even so, we’re played out.”
He left shortly afterwards.
“Oh, Casey Paul, you are one wicked person.”
“Me?”
“You. Didn’t you hear him say he’d worked for Reynolds News?”
“No, I thought he was a spy.”
“You mean, a Russki?”
“No, I just mean he was sent along to check up on us and report back.”
“Probably.”
“Do you think we should worry about that?”
“Not for a couple of days at least, I’d say.”
* * *
—
You decide that, since you are a student, and all your fellow students, apart from those who live at home, pay rent, then you should do so too. You ask a couple of friends how much they pay. You take the midpoint: four pounds a week. You can afford this out of your state grant.
One Monday evening, you hand Susan four pound notes.
“What’s that?” she asks.
“I’ve decided I should pay you rent,” you reply, perhaps a little stiffly. “That’s about what others pay.”
She throws the notes back at you. They don’t hit your face, as they might do in a film. They just lie on the floor between you. Awkward silences follow, and you sleep on your sofa bed that night. You feel guilty about not having introduced the subject of rent with more subtlety; it was like when you gave her that parsnip. The four green pound notes lie on the floor all night. The next morning you pick them up and put them back in your wallet. The subject is never mentioned again.
* * *
—
As a result of Martha’s visit, two things happened. The attic rooms were let out to lodgers, and Susan went back to the Village for the first time since we ran away together. She said it would be necessary and practical to return from time to time. Half the house belonged to her, and she could hardly rely on Macleod to pay the bills or remember to get the boiler serviced. (I didn’t see why not, but still.) Mrs. Dyer would continue to serve and thieve on a daily basis, and would alert Susan to anything that needed her attention. She promised that she would only go back when Macleod wasn’t there. Grudgingly, I agreed.
* * *
—
I said a bit ago that “This is how I would remember it all, if I could. But I can’t.” There’s some stuff I left out, stuff I can’t put off any longer. Where to start? In the “book room,” as they called it, downstairs at the Macleods’. It was late, and I was unwilling to go home. Susan might already have been in bed; I don’t remember. Nor do I remember what book I was reading. Something I’d picked off the shelves at random, no doubt. I was still trying to get my head round the Macleod collection. There were leather-bound sets of the classics, old enough to have been handed down through maybe two generations; art monographs, poetry, a lot of history, some biography, novels, thrillers. I came from the sort of household where books, as if to confirm that they should be respected, were put in order: by subject, author, even size. Here, there was a different system—or rather, as far as I could see, no system at all. Herodotus was next to The Bab Ballads, a three-volume history of the Crusades next to Jane Austen, T. E. Lawrence sandwiched between Hemingway and a Charles Atlas manual of bodybuilding. Was it all an elaborate joke? Mere bohemian muddle? Or a way of saying: we control the books, they don’t control us.
I was still musing when the door banged back against the bookcase, then rebounded far enough to be kicked again. Macleod stood there in his dressing gown, which—and this I do remember—was plaid, with a maroon cord tied and dangling. Below were his elephant pyjamas and leather slippers.
“What are you doing here?” he asked, in a tone of voice normally attached to the words “Fuck off.”
My default position of insolence kicked in.
“Reading,” I replied, waving the book in his direction.
He stomped across and ripped it from my hand, briefly inspected it, then threw it like a Frisbee across the room.
I couldn’t help grinning. He thought he was chucking my book away, when it was one of his own. Hilarious!
That was when he hit me. Or rather, aimed a succession of blows—three, I’m pretty sure—one of which landed as a wrist slapping the side of my head. The other two flailed past.
I got up and tried to hit him back. I think I aimed one blow, which skidded off his shoulder. Neither of us was doing any snappy defensive work; we were just equally incompetent attackers. Well, I’d never hit anyone before. He, I assume, had, or had at least tried to.
While he was concentrating on what to say, or where to hit, next, I squirmed past him, ran to the back door, and escaped. I was relieved to get back to a house where I hadn’t been assaulted since a few doubtless-merited spankings a decade and more previously.
* * *
—
No, that wasn’t quite true—about never having hit someone. In my first year at school, the gym master had encouraged us all to enter the annual boxing competition, which was organised by weight and age. I had absolutely no desire to inflict or receive pain. But I noticed that, with only a few hours to go, there were no entrants listed under my category. So I gave my name in, expecting to win by walkover.
Unfortunately for me—for both of us—another boy, Bates, had the same idea at almost the same time. So we found ourselves in the ring together, two skinny, scared things in plimsolls, vests and house shorts, with these big bobbly gloves suddenly at the end of our arms. For a couple of minutes we each did a reasonably good job of feinting attacks and then backpedalling at great speed, until the gym master pointed out that neither of us had yet landed a blow.
“Box!” he had commanded.
Whereupon I leaped at the unprepared Bates, whose gloves were down near his knees, and punched him on the nose. He squealed, looked at the sudden blood on his clean white vest and burst into tears.
And so I became school boxing champion in the under-12, under-6-stone category. Naturally, I never fought again.
* * *
—
The next time I went to the Macleod house, Susan’s husband couldn’t have been friendlier. Perhaps that was when he showed me how to do the crossword, making it some kind of exclusive male preserve. Or at any rate, a Susan-excluding one. So I put the book-room incident down as an aberration. And anyway, it might have been partly my fault. Perhaps I should have engaged him about which version of the Dewey system his library was organised under. No, I can see that might have been equally provoking.
How much time then went by? Let’s call it six months. Again, it was lateish. At the Macleod house, unlike my own, there was a main staircase near the front door, and a narrower one near the kitchen, presumably for those mob-capped servants now replaced by machines. Often, when I visited Susan during term time, I would sleep in a small attic room which could be reached from either direction. Susan and I had been listening to the gramophone—preparing for a concert—and the music was still in my head when I reached the top of the back stairs. All of a sudden there came a kind of roar, and something which might have been a kick or a trip, accompanied by a thump on the shoulder, and I found myself falling back down the stairs. I managed somehow to grab the banister, wrenching my shoulder but just about keeping my balance.
“You fucking bastard!” I said automatically.
“Whatski?” came an answering bellow from above. “Whatski, my fine and feathered friend?”
I looked up at the squat bully glaring down at me from the semi-darkness. I thought that Macleod must be absolutely, certifiably mad. We stared at one another for a few seconds, then the dressing-gowned figure stomped away, and I heard a di
stant door close.
It wasn’t Macleod’s fists I was afraid of—not principally. It was his anger. We didn’t do anger in my family. We did ironic comment, snappy rejoinder, satirical elaboration; we did exact words forbidding a certain action, and more severe ones condemning what had already taken place. But for anything beyond this, we did the thing enjoined upon the English middle classes for generations. We internalised our rage, our anger, our contempt. We spoke words under our breath. We might have written some of those words down in private diaries if we kept them. But we also thought that we were the only ones reacting like this, and it was a little shameful, and so we internalised it all even further.
When I got to my room that night, I placed a chair at an angle, wedged under the doorknob, as I’d seen done in films. I lay in bed thinking: Is this what the adult world is really like? Underneath it all? And how close beneath the surface does it—will it—lie?
I had no answers.
* * *
—
I didn’t tell Susan about either of these incidents. I internalised my anger and shame—well, I would, wouldn’t I?
And you’ll have to imagine long spells of happiness, of delight, of laughter. I’ve described them already. That’s the thing about memory, it’s…well, let me put it like this. Have you ever seen an electric log-splitter in action? They’re very impressive. You cue the log to a certain length, lay it on the bed of the machine, press the button with your foot, and the log is pushed onto a blade shaped like an ax-head. Whereupon the log splits pure and straight down the grain. That’s the point I’m trying to make. Life is a cross section, memory is a split down the grain, and memory follows it all the way to the end.
So I can’t not continue. Even if this is the hardest part to remember. No, not to remember—to describe. It was the moment when I lost some of my innocence. That may sound like a good thing. Isn’t growing up a necessary process of losing one’s innocence? Maybe, maybe not. But the trouble with life is, you rarely know when that loss is going to happen, do you? And how it will be, afterwards.
My parents were away on holiday, and my granny—my mother’s mother—had been drafted in to look after me. I was, of course, twenty—only twenty—so obviously couldn’t be left in the house by myself. What might I get up to, whom might I import, what might I organise—a bacchanalia of middle-aged women, perhaps—what might the neighbours think, and who might subsequently refuse to come for sherry? Grandma, widowed some five years, didn’t have anything better to do. I had naturally—innocently—loved her as a child. Now I was growing up and she seemed boring. But that was a loss of innocence I could handle.
At this time, I used to sleep quite late during the holidays. It could have been mere idleness, or a belated reaction to the stress of the university term; or, perhaps, some instinctive unwillingness to reenter this world I still called home. I would sleep on until eleven without compunction. And my parents—to their credit—never came in and sat on my bed and complained that I was treating the place like a hotel; while Grandma was happy to cook me breakfast at lunchtime if that’s what I wanted.
So it was probably closer to eleven than ten when I stumbled downstairs.
“There’s a very rude woman asking for you,” said Grandma. “She’s rung three times. She told me to wake you up. Actually, the last time to ‘B’ wake you up. I said I’m not interfering with his beauty sleep.”
“Good for you, Grandma. Thanks.”
A very rude woman. But I didn’t know any. Someone from the tennis club, persecuting me further? The bank about my overdraft? Maybe Grandma was beginning to lose her marbles. At which point, the phone went again.
“Joan,” said the very rude voice of Joan. “It’s Susan. Get over there. She wants you, not me. You, now.” And she put the phone down.
“Aren’t you having your breakfast?” asked Grandma as I rushed out.
At the Macleods’, the front door was open, and I walked around until I found her fully dressed, handbag beside her, on the sofa in the sitting room. She didn’t look up when I greeted her. I could only see the top of her head, or rather, the curve of her headscarf. I sat down beside her, but she immediately turned her face away.
“I need you to drive me up to town.”
“Of course, darling.”
“And I need you not to ask me any questions. And absolutely not to look at me.”
“Whatever you say. But you’ll need to tell me roughly where we’re going.”
“Head for Selfridges.”
“Are we in a hurry?” I allowed myself that question.
“Just drive safely, Paul, just drive safely.”
We got to near Selfridges and she directed me down Wigmore Street, then left up one of those streets where private doctors practise.
“Park here.”
“Do you want me to come with you?”
“I’d rather not. Get yourself some lunch. This won’t be quick. Do you need some money?”
I had indeed come without my wallet. She gave me a ten-shilling note.
As I turned back into Wigmore Street, I saw ahead of me John Bell & Croyden, where she had gone for her Dutch cap. A terrible realization came upon me. That the system had failed, that she’d found herself pregnant, and was even now dealing with the consequences. The Abortion Law was still going through Parliament, but everyone knew there were doctors—and not just at the backstreet end—who would perform “procedures” more or less on demand. I imagined the conversation: Susan explaining how she had got herself pregnant by her young lover, hadn’t had sex with her husband for two decades, and how a child would destroy her marriage and endanger her own mental health. That would be enough for any doctor, who would agree to what went down euphemistically in medical records as a D&C: dilatation and curettage. Just a little scraping away at the lining of the womb—which would also scrape away the embryo attached to its wall.
I was working all this out as I sat in an Italian café having my lunch. I didn’t know what I thought—or rather, I thought several incompatible things. The notion of being a father while still a student struck me as terrifying and crazy. But it also struck me as, well, kind of heroic. Subversive yet honourable, annoying yet life-affirming: noble. I didn’t think it would get me into the Guinness Book of Records—no doubt there were twelve-year-olds hard at work getting their grannies’ best friends pregnant, but it would certainly make me exceptional. And irritate the hell out of the Village.
Except that now it wasn’t going to happen. Because Susan was getting rid of our child at this very moment, just around the corner. I felt sudden rage. A woman’s right to choose—yes, I believed in that, theoretically and actually. Though I also believed in a man’s right to be consulted.
I went back to the car and waited. After an hour or so she turned the corner and came towards me, head lowered, scarf pulled around her cheeks. She averted her face from me as she got into the car.
“Right,” she said. “That’s that for the moment.” There was something slurry about her articulation. The anaesthetic, presumably—if they used any. “Home, James, and don’t spare the horses.”
Normally I was charmed by her turns of phrase. Not this time.
“First tell me where you’ve been.”
“The dentist.”
“The dentist?” So much for my imaginings. Unless this was just another euphemism among women of Susan’s class.
“I’ll tell you when I can, Casey Paul. I can’t tell you now. Don’t ask.”
Of course not. I drove her home, as carefully as I could.
Over the next days, she told me bit by bit what had happened. She had been sitting up late, listening to the gramophone. Macleod had gone to bed an hour previously. She kept playing over and over again the slow movement of Prokofiev’s third piano concerto, which we’d heard a few days before at the Festival Hall. Then sh
e put the record back in its sleeve and went upstairs. She was just reaching for the handle of her bedroom door when her hair was seized from behind, and with the words, “How’s your fucking musical education coming along?,” her husband smashed her face into the closed door. Then he had gone back to bed.
The dentist’s examination showed that her two front teeth were broken beyond repair. The two teeth on either side of them would probably have to go as well. There was a crack in her upper jaw which would, over time, heal itself. The dentist would make her a plate. He asked if she wanted to talk about how it had happened, but didn’t press her when she said she would rather not.
As the bruising came up in all its furious colours, and she powdered over it as well as she could; as I drove her up to town and back for appointment after appointment; as I wasn’t able to get her to look at me for days, or kiss me for weeks; as I realised I would never again be able to tap her “rabbit teeth,” long discarded in some Wimpole Street waste bin; as I understood that I now had greater responsibilities than before; as I found myself wondering, and not idly, how I might kill Gordon Macleod; as first my grandma and then my returning parents drove me mad with their careful, safe, banal views of life; as Susan’s bravery and lack of self-pity nearly broke my heart; as I absented myself from her house a good hour before Macleod’s daily return; as I accepted her word—or was it his word?—that nothing like this would ever happen again; as anger and pity and horror washed through me; as I realised that Susan would have to leave the bastard somehow, with me or without me, but obviously with me; as at the same time a kind of impotence overcame me; as all this was happening, I learned a little more about the Macleod marriage.
Of course, that bruise on her upper arm had not just been the size of a thumbprint, it was the imprint of an actual thumb as he forced her to sit in a chair and listen to his denunciations. There had been grabbings and slappings, and more than a punch or two. He would put a glass of sherry down in front of her and order her to “join in the fun.” When she declined, he would grasp her by the hair, pull her head back and hold the glass to her lips. Either she drank, or he poured it down her chin, and throat and dress. It was all verbal and physical, never sexual; though whether there was anything sexual behind it…well, that is beyond my competence, or, indeed, interest. Yes, it was usually connected to his drinking, but not necessarily; yes, she was frightened of him, except that mostly she wasn’t. She had learned to manage him over the years. Yes, every time he attacked her, it was of course her fault—according to him; she drove him to it with her airy bloody insolence—that had been one of his phrases. Also, her irresponsibility; also, her stupidity. At some point after he had smashed her face against the door, he had gone downstairs and bent Prokofiev’s third piano concerto until the record broke.