I wandered off by myself through the sparse crowds. For a while I stood by the ring and watched the senior jumping. I love watching horses jump. The lyrical tension as their great bodies spring away from gravity and arc over the seemingly impassable barriers gives me a repetitive sensation of swiftly winding-up tension and relief, tension and relief, which excites me. There is something sexual in it. The muscles down there draw tight like a suture and then relax again as the swift flight ends, the bunched hindquarters hit and bounce off the ground, projecting the horse on towards the next encounter, the next moment of take-off. My breath came sharply as one particularly lithe and lovely bay horse, his coat contriving to gleam even in this dull light, swept around the ring in a clear round. His tail switched continuously, giving his performance a careless air, as if the effort of clearing those chest-high obstructions was no effort at all, as if he were truly able to fly.
I was almost in tears when his round was finished. I don’t know why. He made it look so easy. He and his rider were so beautiful—flawless really. I craved the satisfaction of that flying feeling, that splendid muscular triumph which was a matter of the heart and spirit as well.
My hand gripped the rough, wet rail, I knew very well what I really wanted. And there was Andy, ready and aching to give it to me. Toby was like a warp in my soul, looming large beyond all that was natural or reasonable, a barrier I couldn’t leap. An aberration, a neurosis. If only I had done what I wanted to do eight years ago, grabbed him, sunk my grapples into him, fettered him to me, to us, forever. The gnawing regret, the guilt at letting him go to wreck Melissa’s life, to beget children of a broken home—it all, in some moments of despair like this one, seemed to be my fault. And David—he was my fault, all, all my fault. On one hand I hadn’t been selfish enough, on the other—ever since Toby—I had been too selfish.
That night, after David was in bed, I felt so desperate that for the first time I telephoned Andy in London.
‘What is it, darling?’ he asked.
‘I’ve got to talk to you.’
‘Do you want me to come now?’
I hesitated. ‘It’s so late—’
‘Never mind. I was coming down tomorrow anyway. Hang on, I’ll be there in about an hour.’
I didn’t see how this was possible, but he was. He must have driven like a fool all the way. He’d brought a bottle of vodka, but it was, like the orchid, the wrong thing. I just wanted him.
‘I don’t want to drink anything just now, Andy. I only need to talk.’ He put the bottle aside without taking any himself, and followed me into the living-room. It was untidier than usual, with shop-papers scattered about with a lot of books I’d been trying to read. He sat down with me on the sofa.
‘Let’s have it now. All of it.’
After struggling for a while, I temporised, unfairly perhaps. ‘What you said the other night makes it hard to talk to you.’
‘I know. But I can’t soften any of that, or take it back. That’s not to say I don’t regret having said it,’ he added.
‘So why did you?’
‘Trying to be honest, I suppose.’ After a pause he said, ‘Though now I think about it, it’s obvious I’ve lied to you, by silence, all the time.’
‘Do you mean, by not telling me about Chris until I asked?’
‘That, among other things.’
‘What other things?’
‘My origins, my marriage.’
‘Andy—’ I began, then stopped. We were holding hands and staring into the fire. It’s odd to live so much of your life in one house. This sofa, this fireplace, the rug in front of it, had witnessed so many crucial moments in my life. The very locale we were in threw shadows on us from my past. Toby and I had once lain kissing in the firelight—and long before, I had sat on this same, then bright and new, cretonne upholstery and read Addy’s magical book and felt new life of all sorts moving inside me. I suddenly gave a laugh. ‘What?’ asked Andy.
‘Nothing, really. I was just thinking. I was once almost raped on that rug.’
‘Good grief! Is that what you got me down here to tell me?’
‘Of all the things that have happened in this room, that was probably the most unpleasant and the least important.’
‘What were you going to say before?’
‘Something about how I feel about you.’ He turned towards me with a look of hunger which seemed to fall on me like a net. A look of shameless need—the kind I had spent my adult life trying not to show to men. And yet here was a man showing it to me, and it was, for all its inevitable fettering qualities, more like a gift than a stone to hang around my neck.
‘Yes,’ I said, looking from one of his grey eyes to the other, ‘I do love you, in a way—’
‘In what way?’ he interrupted almost harshly.
‘That’s what I have to find out.’
I leant and kissed his mouth and strangely remembered the story of Mary Tudor who felt a baby ‘leap in her womb’ on the day of her marriage when none was there to leap. It did feel as if some living thing was quivering in spasms inside me, and this was before he said on a gasp of controlled breath after the kiss: ‘We must get it all straightened up soon so that we can start having a child together.’
I sat back, our hands still locked.
‘There’s a lot to straighten.’
‘Yes. Come on.’
‘But you were going to tell me about your marriage—’
‘It can wait. All that need matter to you about that, anyway, is that I loved her with all myself and that something went out of me when she died which I thought could never be put back. But I’ve found out I was wrong. It’s only important to you—my marriage I mean—because it proves I am an exclusive lover. I haven’t loved anybody since Liz. I haven’t slept with anybody since Liz. But it’s all there, saved up, and I know I’m capable of lavishing it on you in a way that may possibly surprise you.’
‘I doubt the surprise,’ I remarked, amazed at the simulated casualness in my tone when my blood was clamouring for this love to begin on the instant, my famished sexuality tugging unavailingly at the strange imprisoning strings of my spirit. I obliged myself to stand up and move to the pile of books I had been trying, earlier, to concentrate on. Several of them were Toby’s novels. I picked up one of these—his second and least successful—and put it, back uppermost, into Andy’s hands. Toby’s photograph stared up at him, a patent publicity shot of him posed at his typewriter looking sideways at the camera. But it caught something of the essence of him, the gentleness, the wit, the immature quality which made women of all ages—and men too, if they were like John—reach out towards him instinctively, sensing his vulnerability.
Andy looked up at me, puzzled, then looked down more closely at the photo. He turned the novel over to see the title.
‘I’ve read this,’ he said flatly. And then after a while, ‘Is this him?’
‘Yes.’
‘I knew there was someone.’
‘I haven’t set eyes on him for seven years.’
‘Good God.’
‘I know it seems extraordinary.’
‘No, not really. Most of the great novels of the past contained some indication of the human power to sustain unfed love . . . It’s only recently we’ve decided that since it’s hard, ipso facto we must be incapable of it.’ He turned the book over again and stared at Toby. ‘Jewish,’ he said.
‘Yes.’
‘None of my best friends are Jews.’
‘What do you mean?’ I asked with some trepidation.
‘I was just making a stupid remark. I hardly know any Jews. Perhaps this present incident will turn me into a fully-fledged anti-semite, who knows?’ He smiled grimly and put the book on the table. ‘Come on, let’s get it over with.’
‘It’s hard to begin.’
‘Do you love him?’
‘That’s what I don’t know.’
‘Did you love him?’
‘Oh yes.’
?
??Just talk. I’m listening.’
I talked. I must have talked for nearly an hour. I told him about the L-shaped room and what Toby had meant by way of getting me through that time. In the end, I even told him the damning truth—that I could have had him as a husband, as a father for David, had I only been able or willing to pounce and pin down.
‘And you’ve been regretting this incapacity ever since?’
I said nothing, looking at our hands, linked together. Impossible not to notice that, though the hands were still in physical contact, our spirits were now separated, withdrawn, as it were, up our arms and into our heads and memories. His instinctual honesty made him take his hand away from me, his natural kindness made him cover the gesture by lighting his pipe. This took some time.
He leaned his head back and blew smoke at the low cottage ceiling.
‘So what now?’ he said calmly, but before I could answer he jerked suddenly to his feet and strode to the window. The abrupt change from apparent calm to violent movement startled me.
‘What is it?’
‘I’m jealous,’ he said in a muffled voice after a moment. ‘Christ, what a hideous feeling! I’m quite blind with it.’ After a pause during which I watched him uneasily over the back of the sofa, he added, ‘I’ve never experienced anything like this before. I didn’t think it was in me.’ And in an unfamiliar, harsh, strained voice: ‘Damn it all, it’s torture!’
‘I know, and it’s so degrading.’
‘Yes!’ he agreed, turning, almost as if he were enthusiastic at finding he had even this vile emotion in common with me. Then his face grew hard again. ‘You learnt the horror of it from him. When he married.’ I nodded. ‘This whole thing is beyond me!’ he exclaimed. ‘How can it be possible that I am wishing with all my soul at this moment that it was I who’d aroused this nightmare feeling in you?’
His voice and his control broke and he seemed to stumble forward towards me. I felt his hands on me, gripping to and beyond the point of real pain; but it was his face I minded—it was all different: distorted, angry and unloving. He clutched me against him almost viciously and shouted, ‘Don’t go on loving him! You can’t, I feel so strongly for you it must be answered, it can’t be left to go stale!’ He kissed me, if you could call that a kiss—it was more like hitting me on the mouth, and I winced back. ‘Oh God, dearest! I’m sorry! Forgive me. I’m not like this. I feel mad. How can you love someone else?’ He had let me go and was stroking and fondling my face and arms, where he had bruised me, almost frantically, caressing me with his own face, rubbing his cheeks and lips against me. Somehow, still holding me, but more gently now, he came round the sofa and our bodies met, not in a conventional embrace, but in little rubbings and strokings, until we lay huddled up, our arms finally round each other and our lips together.
Eight years makes a lot of difference. When you’re young, your body states its demands and it all seems much simpler, even when you are rather mixed up mentally about sex. You accede or you don’t, and you face the consequences later. You don’t know enough for a relationship to be really complicated. But at 36, with the body’s demands as imperative as ever, all your experience, all your imagination, all your knowledge of yourself and other people and what can happen, give even the lightest gesture and contact a depth and a dimension beyond anything you could have conceived of, ten years earlier. What’s a kiss, in your twenties? What is the act of love? A climax of what has led up to it, with the double-doors of every next minute blankly closed just ahead of you, like those thrilling rides at the fair when your little self-contained go-cart-for-two careers round bends and down chutes and up hills, bursting through the swing doors by the force of its own velocity, with its twin occupants, locked together in mutual excitement, screaming and gasping at the delicious jolts and shocks, dives and swoopings . . . You don’t even have breath to anticipate what might be round the next corner, nor do you bother to try. A climb, a downward dash, a throat-catching wheel round a curve—more doors just ahead—crash! This moment, this, this, only this very instant of sensation counts!
But you grow older, and you learn that beyond those doors lies Afterwards; your this-moment’s actions are only a trigger for the future. This insight so colours the moment that sometimes its sensations of pleasure, or otherwise, are numbed by foreknowledge, or apprehension, or conjecture. So, as I lay in Andy’s arms, almost obliterated mentally by the force of sheer physical experience, I was aware simultaneously of the shadow—Dottie’s backward shadow of the future, thrown back upon now. I knew this was the moment when my physical doubts could be resolved. I had only to shift my position a little bit, accommodatingly, and the metaphorical, and physical, doors would be thrust apart, the next vital inevitable step into the following stage in my life and our relationship taken. But what then? Intimacy, dependency, vulnerability; need, exposed and acknowledged; the physical link forged, with all of its associated mental, emotional and domestic sublinks wrapping whole chains of commitment around us.
Lying there, listening to the inner calls, I could almost envy ‘the moderns’, those shallow, playful, on-again-off-again lovers who lie down together, ‘have it off’ as the saying goes, get up, dress, kiss (perhaps) in tender or indifferent farewell, and turning their backs on each other, walk away. Unfettered, uninvolved, guiltless. Unremembering, even. With them, the double doors close behind as well as in front; most of them seem to do it so often (I heard a young man on television only the other day claim with great good cheer to have had sex with a hundred and twenty-two girls and thirty men) that it must be impossible to add even a fleeting sketch to their gallery of remembered love-portraits. Even when I was living with Toby, our encounters in bed were so relatively few that I retain some recollection of nearly all of them. Naturally that would be impossible with a more prolonged relationship; but at least then, a total picture would be formed to which each act of love would add a detail. No, senseless to envy them. It was only for a moment when, with Andy’s hand at last on my breast, and my whole lower body on fire with a clean, lovely lust, I craved a divorce from my mind and my imaginings of future complexities. I longed for the simplicity of total, unambiguous surrender, which I could only make if I knew that there would be no repercussion when the rapture was over.
In the end, though, it did happen. The surrender was not, could not be, unconditional, but the terms were within my own brain and involved, I hoped, only myself in penalties and forfeitures. He must not be called on to pay my guilt-bills, or solve my personal problems which this act of ecstatic capitulation would give rise to.
My last thought before the white-out was, ‘My wretched soul was filched at birth by the Puritans.’ For how else to explain why the bliss was not flawless? Andy’s ways in love were marvellous—violent and tender by turns, as if his beast were in bondage and the bonds kept yielding a little, straining here and there to breaking-point, but always, in the end, just holding. Generosity made them hold, and a will for my pleasure, and his own innate belief in self-control as a way of life and an oblique spur to the delights of sensuality. In the happy aftermath, before my mind or body had recovered strength to start niggling, I lazily recalled Huxley’s metaphor of the hose-pipe. Pierced along its length, it dribbles forth a dozen ineffectual trickling fountains; held in, contained, the water shoots out of the nozzle in a powerful jet. How could I have envied them, even for a second, those poor young dissipators of the flesh? The barren years I had spent without love were, of course, a grotesque misuse of my body; but, in the moment of breaking fast, the power of released feeling was almost unendurably intense, and this—surely?—was the way it should be. I no longer begrudged the aching years, while acknowledging them to have been an exaggeration. They had led inexorably to this, this overbearing physical sensation, this feeling of my own bonds bursting gloriously asunder. Flawed, because I was not certain of loving him, and he was certain of my uncertainty, so his loving was perhaps too fierce, as if forcing the issues of the spirit aside with an assault
on the flesh. Because of this, his first words afterwards were, inevitably but heart-wrenchingly, an apology.
‘Dearest—I’m sorry.’
‘Don’t!’
‘I should have waited—’
‘I didn’t want you to. Don’t be all pardon-me-for-living, Andy! There’s a limit to self-control. Don’t spoil it. Don’t abuse yourself. If you do, I shall start on myself, and then where shall we be?’
I had both arms round him and was cradling his big, spent body, which lay upon me heavily and still-sensuously. There was such luxury in this, these moments when I lay under his weight, my breathing enforcedly shallow, my head still light, my own limbs too exhausted to lift. I had only felt the weight of smaller men before; I liked this crushing pressure of a bigger body. The physical burden of it evolved mysteriously into its own antithesis, no burden at all but a lightening, as if gravity had gone into reverse and I were sucked upward against him, as if we might both float away, upwards into space and worldlessness, guiltlessness, problemlessness . . .
Toby was nowhere.
I didn’t realise it clearly, but there was an empty place somewhere inside me which was generally filled with pain and anxiety and regret. It was as if Andy’s act of love upon my body had had the effect of electrical shock treatment, which knocks a hole in your mind or your memory. I felt Toby at that moment only as an absence of hurt, something blown hollow which I didn’t want refilled.
I stroked Andy’s sleeping face and his brown hair. I was drowsy but still wakeful, waiting for gravity to reassert itself, waiting for the gnawing anxieties, the guilty naggings to begin. They didn’t.
I fell asleep too. Our bodies were still moistly, limply joined.
I awoke with a violent start some time later. David was calling.