Frighten me? Yes you do frighten me. You act as though we will be together for ever. You act as though there is infinite pleasure and time without end. How can I know that? My experience has been that time always ends. In theory you are right, the quantum physicists are right, the romantics and the religious are right. Time without end. In practice we both wear a watch. If I rush at this relationship it’s because I fear for it. I fear you have a door I cannot see and that any minute now the door will open and you’ll be gone. Then what? Then what as I bang the walls like the Inquisition searching for a saint? Where will I find the secret passage? For me it’ll just be the same four walls.
You said, ‘I’m going to leave.’
I thought, Yes, of course you are, you’re going back to the shell. I’m an idiot. I’ve done it again and I said I’d never do it again.
You said, ‘I told him before we came away. I’ve told him I won’t change my mind even if you change yours.’
This is the wrong script. This is the moment where I’m supposed to be self-righteous and angry. This is the moment where you’re supposed to flood with tears and tell me how hard it is to say these things and what can you do and what can you do and will I hate you and yes you know I’ll hate you and there are no question marks in this speech because it’s a fait accompli.
But you are gazing at me the way God gazed at Adam and I am embarrassed by your look of love and possession and pride. I want to go now and cover myself with fig leaves. It’s a sin this not being ready, this not being up to it.
You said, ‘I love you and my love for you makes any other life a lie.’
Can this be true, this simple obvious message, or am I like those shipwrecked mariners who seize an empty bottle and eagerly read out what isn’t there? And yet you are there, here, sprung like a genie to ten times your natural size, towering over me, holding me in your arms like mountain sides. Your red hair is blazing and you are saying, ‘Make three wishes and they shall all come true. Make three hundred and I will honour every one.’
What did we do that night? We must have walked wrapped around each other to a café that was a church and eaten a Greek salad that tasted like a wedding feast. We met a cat who agreed to be best man and our bouquets were Ragged Robin from the side of the canal. We had about two thousand guests, mostly midges and we felt we were old enough to give ourselves away. It would have been good to have lain down there and made love under the moon but the truth is that, outside of the movies and Country and Western songs, the outdoors is an itchy business.
I had a girlfriend once who was addicted to starlit nights. She thought beds belonged in hospitals. Anywhere she could do it that wasn’t pre-sprung was sexy. Show her a duvet and she switched on the television. I coped with this on campsites and in canoes, British Rail and Aeroflot. I bought a futon, eventually a gym mat. I had to lay extra-thick carpet on the floor. I took to carrying a tartan rug wherever I went, like a far-out member of the Scottish Nationalist Party. Eventually, back at the doctor’s for the fifth time having a thistle removed, he said to me, ‘You know, love is a very beautiful thing but there are clinics for people like you.’ Now, it’s a serious matter to have ‘PERVERT’ written on your NHS file and some indignities are just a romance too far. We had to say goodbye and although there were some things about her that I missed it was pleasant to walk in the country again without seeing every bush and shrub as a potential assailant.
Louise, in this single bed, between these garish sheets, I will find a map as likely as any treasure hunt. I will explore you and mine you and you will redraw me according to your will. We shall cross one another’s boundaries and make ourselves one nation. Scoop me in your hands for I am good soil. Eat of me and let me be sweet.
June. The wettest June on record. We made love every day. We were happy like colts, flagrant like rabbits, dove-innocent in our pursuit of pleasure. Neither of us thought about it and we had no time to discuss it. The time we had we used. Those brief days and briefer hours were small offerings to a god who would not be appeased by burning flesh. We consumed each other and went hungry again. There were patches of relief, moments of tranquillity as still as an artificial lake, but always behind us the roaring tide.
There are people who say that sex isn’t important in a relationship. That friendship and getting along are what coast you through the years. No doubt this is a faithful testimony but is it a true one? I had come to this feeling myself. One does after years of playing the Lothario and seeing nothing but an empty bank account and a pile of yellowing love-notes like IOUs. I had done to death the candles and champagne, the roses, the dawn breakfasts, the transatlantic telephone calls and the impulsive plane rides. I had done all of that to escape the cocoa and hot water bottles. And I had done all of that because I thought the fiery furnace must be better than central heating. I suppose I couldn’t admit that I was trapped in a cliché every bit as redundant as my parents’ roses round the door. I was looking for the perfect coupling; the never-sleep non-stop mighty orgasm. Ecstasy without end. I was deep in the slop-bucket of romance. Sure my bucket was a bit racier than most, I’ve always had a sports car, but you can’t rev your way out of real life. That home girl gonna get you in the end. This is how it happened.
I was in the last spasms of an affair with a Dutch girl called Inge. She was a committed romantic and an anarcha-feminist. This was hard for her because it meant she couldn’t blow up beautiful buildings. She knew the Eiffel Tower was a hideous symbol of phallic oppression but when ordered by her commander to detonate the lift so that no-one should unthinkingly scale an erection, her mind filled with young romantics gazing over Paris and opening aerograms that said Je t’aime.
We went to the Louvre to see a Renoir exhibition. Inge wore her guerilla cap and boots in case she should be mistaken for a tourist. She justified her ticket price as ‘political research’. ‘Look at those nudes,’ she said, although I needed no urging. ‘Bodies everywhere, naked, abused, exposed. Do you know how much those models were paid? Hardly the price of a baguette. I should rip the canvases from their frames and go to prison crying “Vive la resistance”.’
Renoir’s nudes are not at all the world’s finest nudes, but even so, when we came to his painting of La Boulangère, Inge wept. She said, ‘I hate it because it moves me.’ I didn’t say that thus are tyrants made, I said, ‘It’s not the painter, it’s the paint. Forget Renoir, hold on to the picture.’
She said, ‘Don’t you know that Renoir claimed he painted with his penis?’
‘Don’t worry,’ I said. ‘He did. When he died they found nothing between his balls but an old brush.’
‘You’re making it up.’
Am I?
Eventually we resolved Inge’s aesthetic crisis by taking her Semtex to a number of carefully chosen urinals. They were all concrete Nissan huts, absolutely ugly and clearly functionaries of the penis. She said I wasn’t fit to be an assistant in the fight towards a new matriarchy because I had QUALMS. This was a capital offence. Nevertheless, it wasn’t the terrorism that flung us apart, it was the pigeons …
My job was to go into the urinals wearing one of Inge’s stockings over my head. That in itself might not have attracted much attention, men’s toilets are fairly liberal places, but then I had to warn the row of guys that they were in danger of having their balls blown off unless they left at once. A typical occasion would be to find five of them, cocks in hand, staring at the brown-streaked porcelain as though it were the Holy Grail. Why do men like doing everything together? I said (quoting Inge), ‘This urinal is a symbol of patriarchy and must be destroyed.’ Then (in my own voice), ‘My girlfriend has just wired up the Semtex, would you mind finishing off?’
What would you do under the circumstances? Wouldn’t impending castration followed by certain death be enough to cause a normal man to wipe his dick and run for it? They didn’t. Over and over again they didn’t, just flicked the drops contemptuously and swapped tips about the racing. I’m a mild-mannered s
ort but I don’t like rudeness. On the job I found it helped to carry a gun.
I pulled it out of the waistband of my RECYCLE shorts (yes I’ve had them a long time) and pointed the barrel at the nearest dangle. This caused a bit of a stir and one said, ‘You a loony or something?’ He said that but he zipped his flies and buzzed off. ‘Hands up boys,’ I said. ‘No, don’t touch it, it’ll have to dry in the wind.’
At that moment I heard the opening bars of ‘Strangers in the Night’. It was Inge’s signal to say we had five minutes ready or not. I motioned my doubting John Thomases through the door and broke into a run. I had to get into the mobile burger-bar Inge used as a hide-out. I threw myself in beside her and looked back from between the bread rolls. It was a beautiful explosion. A splendid explosion, much too good for a load of demi-johns. We were alone on the edge of the world, terrorists fighting the good fight for a fairer society. I thought I loved her and then came the pigeons.
She forbade me to telephone her. She said that telephones were for Receptionists, that is, women without status. I said, fine, I’ll write. Wrong, she said. The Postal Service was run by despots who exploited non-union labour. What were we to do? I didn’t want to live in Holland. She didn’t want to live in London. How could we communicate?
Pigeons, she said.
That is how I came to rent the attic floor of the Pimlico Women’s Institute. I don’t feel a great deal about the Women’s Institute either way, they were the first to campaign against aerosols that contain CFCs and they make a mean Victoria sponge but I don’t really care. The point was that their attic faced roughly in the direction of Amsterdam.
I can tell by now that you are wondering whether I can be trusted as a narrator. Why didn’t I dump Inge and head for a Singles Bar? The answer is her breasts.
They were not marvellously upright, the kind women wear as epaulettes, as a mark of rank. Neither were they pubescent playboy fantasies. They had done their share of time and begun to submit to gravity’s insistence. The flesh was brown, the aureoles browner still, nipples bead black. My gypsy sisters I called them, though not to her. I had idolised them simply and unequivocally, not as a mother substitute nor a womb trauma, but for themselves. Freud didn’t always get it right. Sometimes a breast is a breast is a breast.
Half a dozen times I picked up the phone. Six times I put it down again. Probably she wouldn’t have answered. She would have had it disconnected but for her mother in Rotterdam. She never did explain how she would know it was her mother and not a Receptionist. How she would know it was a Receptionist and not me. I wanted to talk to her.
The pigeons, Adam, Eve and Kissmequick, couldn’t manage Holland. Eve got as far as Folkestone. Adam dropped out and went to live in Trafalgar Square, another victory to Nelson. Kissmequick was scared of heights, a drawback for a bird, but the WI took him in as their mascot and rechristened him Boadicea. If he has not died yet he is still living. I don’t know what happened to Inge’s birds. They never came to me.
Then I met Jacqueline.
I had to lay a carpet in my new flat so a couple of friends came over to help. They brought Jacqueline. She was the mistress of one of them confidante of both. A sort of household pet. She traded sex and sympathy for £50 to tide her over the weekend and a square meal on Sunday. It was a civilised if brutal arrangement.
I had bought a new flat to start again from a nasty love affair that had given me the clap. Nothing wrong with my organs, this was emotional clap. I had to keep my heart to myself in case I infected somebody. The flat was large and derelict. I hoped I might rebuild it and myself at the same time. The clap-giver was still with her husband in their tasteful house but she’d slipped me £10,000 to help finance my purchase. Give/Lend was how she put it. Blood money was how I put it. She was buying off what conscience she had. I intended never to see her again. Unfortunately she was my dentist.
Jacqueline worked at the Zoo. She worked with small furry things that wouldn’t be nice to visitors. Visitors who have paid £5 don’t have a lot of patience for small furry things who are frightened and want to hide. It was Jacqueline’s job to make everything bright and shiny again. She was good with parents, good with children, good with animals, good with disturbed things of every kind. She was good with me.
When she arrived, smart but not trendy, made-up but not conspicuously, her voice flat, her spectacles clownish, I thought, I have nothing to say to this woman. After Inge, and my brief addictive return to Bathsheba the dentist, I could not foresee pleasure in any woman, especially not one who had been victimised by her hairdresser. I thought, You can make the tea and I’ll joke with my old friends about the perils of a broken heart and then you shall all three go home together happy in your good deed while I open a can of lentils and listen to ‘Science Now’ on the wireless.
Poor me. There’s nothing so sweet as wallowing in it is there? Wallowing is sex for depressives. I should remember my grandmother’s motto offered to the suffering as pastoral care. Not for her the painful dilemma, the agonised choice, ‘Either shit or get off the pot.’ That’s right. At least I was between turds.
Jacqueline made me a sandwich and asked if I had any washing-up I’d like done. She came the next day and the day after that. She told me all about the problems facing lemurs in the Zoo. She brought her own mop. She worked nine to five Monday to Friday, drove a Mini and got her reading from book clubs. She exhibited no fetishes, foibles, freak-outs or fuck-ups. Above all she was single and she had always been single. No children and no husband.
I considered her. I didn’t love her and I didn’t want to love her. I didn’t desire her and I could not imagine desiring her. These were all points in her favour. I had lately learned that another way of writing FALL IN LOVE is WALK THE PLANK. I was tired of balancing blindfold on a slender beam, one slip and into the unplumbed sea. I wanted the clichés, the armchair. I wanted the broad road and twenty-twenty vision. What’s wrong with that? It’s called growing up. Maybe most people gloss their comforts with a patina of romance but it soon wears off. They’re in it for the long haul; the expanding waistline and the little semi in the suburbs. What’s wrong with that? Late-night TV and snoring side by side into the millennium. Till death us do part. Anniversary darling? What’s wrong with that?
I considered her. She had no expensive tastes, knew nothing about wine, never wanted to be taken to the opera and had fallen in love with me. I had no money and no morale. It was a marriage made in heaven.
We agreed that we were good for each other whilst sitting in her Mini eating a Chinese take-away. It was a cloudy night so we couldn’t look at the stars and besides, she had to be up for work at half past seven. I don’t think we even slept together that night. It was the next night, freezing cold in November and I’d lit the fire. I’d arranged a few flowers because I like to do that anyway but when it came to getting out the tablecloth and finding the good glasses I couldn’t be bothered. ‘We’re not like that,’ I told myself. ‘What we have is simple and ordinary. That’s why I like it. It’s worth lies in its neatness. No more sprawling life for me. This is container gardening.’
Over the months that followed my mind healed and I no longer moped and groaned over lost love and impossible choices. I had survived shipwreck and I liked my new island with hot and cold running water and regular visits from the milkman. I became an apostle of ordinariness. I lectured my friends on the virtues of the humdrum, praised the gentle bands of my existence and felt that for the first time I had come to know what everyone told me I would know; that passion is for holidays, not homecoming.
My friends were more circumspect than me. They regarded Jacqueline with a wary approval, regarding me as one might a mental patient who has been behaving for a few months. A few months? More like a year. I was rigorous, hard working and … and … what was that word beginning with B?
‘You’re bored,’ my friend said.
I protested with all the fervour of a teetotaller caught glancing at the bottle. I was co
ntent. I had settled down.
‘Still having sex?’
‘Not much. It doesn’t matter you know. We do now and then. When we both feel like it. We work hard. We don’t have a lot of time.’
‘Do you look at her and want her? Do you look at her and notice her?’
I lost my temper. Why was my happily settled, happily happy Heidi house coming under fire from a friend who had put up with all my broken hearts without a word of reproach? I struggled in my mind with all kinds of defences. Should I be hurt? Surprised? Should I laugh it off? I wanted to say something cruel to expiate my anger and to justify myself. But it’s difficult with old friends; difficult because it’s so easy. You know one another as well as lovers do and you have had less to pretend about. I poured myself a drink and shrugged.
‘Nothing’s perfect.’
The worm in the bud. So what? Most buds do have worms. You spray, you fuss, you hope the hole won’t be too big and you pray for sunshine. Just let the flower bloom and no-one will notice the ragged edges. I thought that about me and Jacqueline. I was desperate to tend us. I wanted the relationship to work for not very noble reasons; after all it was my last ditch. No more racing for me. She loved me too, yes she did, in her uncomplicated undemanding way. She never bothered me when I said, ‘Don’t bother me,’ and she didn’t cry when I shouted at her. In fact she shouted back. She treated me like a big cat in the Zoo. She was very proud of me.
My friend said, ‘Pick on someone your own size.’
And then I met Louise.
If I were painting Louise I’d paint her hair as a swarm of butterflies. A million Red Admirals in a halo of movement and light. There are plenty of legends about women turning into trees but are there any about trees turning into women? Is it odd to say that your lover reminds you of a tree? Well she does, it’s the way her hair fills with wind and sweeps out around her head. Very often I expect her to rustle. She doesn’t rustle but her flesh has the moonlit shade of a silver birch. Would I had a hedge of such saplings naked and unadorned.