The Only Story Read online

  Oh, and another thing. The way, doubtless through some atavistic terror of admitting to real feelings, they ironised the emotional life, turning the relationship between the sexes into a silly running joke. The way men implied that women ran everything really; the way women implied that men didn’t really understand what was going on. The way men pretended they were the strong, and women had to be petted and indulged and taken care of; the way women pretended that, regardless of the accumulated sexual folklore, they were the ones who had the common sense and practicality. The way each sex blubbingly admitted that, for all the other’s faults, they still needed one another. Can’t live with ’em, can’t live without ’em. And they lived with ’em in marriage, which, as one wit put it, was an institution in the sense of mental institution. Who first said that, a man or a woman?

  Unsurprisingly, I looked forward to none of this. Or rather, hoped it would never apply to me; indeed, believed I could make it not apply to me.

  So, actually, when I said, “I’m nineteen!” and my parents triumphantly replied, “Yes, you’re only nineteen!” the triumph was also mine. Thank God I’m “only” nineteen, I thought.

  * * *

  —

  First love fixes a life forever: this much I have discovered over the years. It may not outrank subsequent loves, but they will always be affected by its existence. It may serve as model, or as counterexample. It may overshadow subsequent loves; on the other hand, it can make them easier, better. Though sometimes, first love cauterises the heart, and all any searcher will find thereafter is scar tissue.

  “We were chosen by lot.” I don’t believe in destiny, as I may have said. But I do believe now that when two lovers meet, there is already so much prehistory that only certain outcomes are possible. Whereas the lovers themselves imagine that the world is being reset, and that the possibilities are both new and infinite.

  And first love always happens in the overwhelming first person. How can it not? Also, in the overwhelming present tense. It takes us time to realise that there are other persons, and other tenses.

  So (and this would have happened earlier, but I am only remembering it now): I am visiting her one afternoon. I know that at three o’clock, by which time her thieving daily will have left and there will be three-and-a-half hours before Mr. E.P. returns, she will be waiting in bed for me. I drive to the Village, park, and set off along Duckers Lane. I am not in the least self-conscious. The more disapproval, real or imagined, from “the neighbours,” the better. I do not approach the Macleod house via the back gate and the garden. I turn down their driveway, walking openly and crunching the gravel, rather than discreetly, adulterously, on the grass edge alongside. The house is red-brick, symmetrical, with a central porch, above which is Susan’s narrow little bedroom. On each side of the porch, as a decorative feature, every fourth course of brick has been laid to jut out half a brick’s width. A couple of tempting inches, I now see, of handhold and foothold.

  The lover as cat burglar? Why not? The back door has been left open for me. But as I walk towards the porch, a lover’s confidence infuses me, and I decide that if I go at it with enough initial speed, I might be able to scoot up the ten feet or so of wall, which will get me to the flat, leaded roof on top of the porch. I take a run at it, filled with bravado, ardour and decent hand-eye coordination. Easy-peasy—and here I am, suddenly crouched on the leading. I have made enough noise to bring Susan to the window, first in alarm, then in surprised glee. Someone else would have rebuked me for my folly, told me I might have broken my skull, expressed all their fear and protectiveness: in short, made me feel a foolish and guilty boy. All Susan does is yank up the window and pull me in.

  “I could always get out the same way if Trouble Comes,” I say pantingly.

  “That would be a lark.”

  “I’ll just go down and lock the back door.”

  “Ever the thoughtful one,” says Susan, getting back into her single bed.

  And that’s true, too. I am the thoughtful one. That’s part of my prehistory, I suppose. But it’s also about what I could have said to Joan: that I am prepared to be grown-up if it will help Susan.

  * * *

  —

  I am a boy; she is a married woman of middle years. I have the cynicism, and the purported understanding of life though I am the idealist as well as the cynic, convinced that I have both the will and the power to mend things.

  And she? She is neither cynical nor idealistic; she lives without the mental clutter of theorising, and takes each circumstance and situation as it comes. She laughs at things, and sometimes that laughter is a way of not thinking, of avoiding obvious, painful truths. But at the same time I feel that she is closer to life than I am.

  We don’t talk about our love; we merely know that it is there, unarguably; that it is what it is, and that everything will flow, inevitably and justly, from this fact. Do we constantly repeat “I love you” in confirmation? At this distance, I can’t be sure. Though I do remember that when, after locking the back door, I climb into bed with her, she whispers,

  “Never forget, the most vulnerable spot is down the middle.”

  * * *

  —

  Then there’s that word Joan dropped into our conversation like a concrete fence post into a fishpool: practicality. Over my life I’ve seen friends fail to leave their marriages, fail to continue affairs, fail even to start them sometimes, all for the same expressed reason. “It just isn’t practical,” they say wearily. The distances are too great, the train schedules unfavourable, the work hours mismatched; then there’s the mortgage; and the children, and the dog; also, the joint ownership of things. “I just couldn’t face sorting out the record collection,” a non-leaving wife once told me. In the first thrill of love, the couple had amalgamated their records, throwing away duplicates. How was it feasible to unpick all that? And so she stayed; and after a while the temptation to leave passed, and the record collection breathed a sigh of relief.

  Whereas it seemed to me, back then, in the absolutism of my condition, that love had nothing to do with practicality; indeed, was its polar opposite. And the fact that it showed contempt for such banal considerations was part of its glory. Love was by its very nature disruptive, cataclysmic; and if it was not, then it was not love.

  You might ask how deep my understanding of love was at the age of nineteen. A court of law might find it based on a few books and films, conversations with friends, heady dreams, aching fantasies about certain girls on bicycles and a quarter-relationship with the first woman I went to bed with. But my nineteen-year-old self would correct the court: “understanding” love is for later, “understanding” love verges on practicality, “understanding” love is for when the heart has cooled. The lover, in rapture, doesn’t want to “understand” love, but to experience it, to feel the intensity, the coming-into-focus of things, the acceleration of life, the entirely justifiable egotism, the lustful cockiness, the joyful rant, the calm seriousness, the hot yearning, the certainty, the simplicity, the complexity, the truth, the truth, the truth of love.

  Truth and love, that was my credo. I love her, and I see the truth. It must be that simple.

  * * *

  —

  Were we “any good” at sex? I’ve no idea. We didn’t think about it. Partly because any sex then seemed by definition good sex. But also because we rarely talked about it, either before, during or after; we did it, believed in it as an expression of our mutual love, even if, physically and mentally, it might have given us different satisfactions. After she had mentioned her supposed frigidity, and I had—from my vast sexual experience—airily dismissed it, the matter was not discussed again. Sometimes, she would murmur, “Well played, partner,” afterwards. Sometimes, more seriously, more anxiously, “Please don’t give up on me just yet, Casey Paul.” I didn’t know what to say to that either.

  From time t
o time—and not in bed, I must point out—she would say, “Of course you’ll have girlfriends. And that’s only right and proper.” But it didn’t seem right, or proper, to me, or even relevant.

  On another occasion, she mentioned a number. I can’t remember the context, let alone the number; but I slowly realised that she must be talking about how many times we had made love.

  “You’ve been counting?”

  She nodded. Again, I was baffled. Was I meant to have been counting too? And if so, what was I meant to count—the number of times we’d been to bed together, or the number of my orgasms? I wasn’t in the least interested, and I wondered why the notion had crossed her mind. There seemed something fatalistic about it—as if she would have something tangible, calculable, to hold on to if I suddenly wasn’t there. But I wasn’t suddenly going to be not there.

  * * *

  —

  When, once again, she made reference to my future girlfriends, I said, very clearly and firmly, that she would always be in my life: whatever happened, there would always be a place for her.

  “But where would you put me, Casey Paul?”

  “At the very worst, in a well-appointed attic.”

  I meant it metaphorically, of course.

  “Like a piece of old lumber?”

  I was hating this conversation. “No,” I repeated, “you’ll always be there.”

  “In your attic?”

  “No, in my heart.”

  I meant it, I truly meant it—both the attic and the heart. All my life.

  I didn’t realise that there was panic inside her. How could I have guessed? I thought it was just inside me. Now, I realise, rather late in the day, that it is in everyone. It’s a condition of our mortality. We have codes of manners to allay and minimise it, jokes and routines, and so many forms of diversion and distraction. But there is panic and pandemonium waiting to break out inside all of us, of this I am convinced. I’ve seen it roar out among the dying, as a last protest against the human condition and its chronic sadness. But it is there in the most balanced and rational of us. You just need the right circumstances, and it will surely appear. And then you are at its mercy. The panic takes some to God, others to despair, some to charitable works, others to drink, some to emotional oblivion, others to a life where they hope that nothing serious will ever trouble them again.

  * * *

  —

  Though we were cast out of the tennis club like Adam and Eve, the expected scandal failed to break. There was no denunciation from the pulpit of St. Michael’s, no exposure in the Advertiser & Gazette. Mr. Macleod seemed oblivious; Misses G. and N.S. were abroad at the time. My parents never mentioned the matter. So by a very English combination of ignorance, true or feigned, and embarrassment, no one—apart from Joan, and that at my invitation—acknowledged the story’s existence. The Village tom-tom might have been beating, but not everyone chose to hear its message. I was both relieved by this and disappointed. Where was the merit, and the joy, in scandalous behaviour if the Village declined to be scandalised except behind closed doors?

  But I was relieved, because it meant Susan brought her “thinking” period to an end. In other words, we took a deep breath and started going to bed together again, taking as many risks as before. I stroked her ears and tapped her rabbity teeth. Once, to demonstrate that all was still the same, I sprang up the jutting brickwork onto the porch and through her bedroom window.

  And, as it turned out, she had a running-away fund too. With more than five hundred pounds in it.

  * * *

  —

  I keep saying that I was nineteen. But sometimes, in what I’ve told you so far, I was twenty or twenty-one. These events happened over a period of two years and more, usually during my student vacations. In term time, Susan would often come and visit me in Sussex, or I would go up and stay at the Macleods’. Six minutes’ drive from my parents, yet I never told them I was there. I would get off the train at a previous station, and Susan would pick me up in the Austin. I slept on the sofa bed, and Mr. Macleod seemed to tolerate my presence. I never went into the Village, though I did occasionally think of burning down the tennis club, just for old times’ sake.

  Susan got to know my circle of friends at Sussex—Eric, Ian, Barney and Sam—and from time to time one or more of them would also stay at the Macleods’. Perhaps they were another kind of cover story—at this distance, I can’t remember. They all considered my relationship with Susan an excellent thing. We were on one another’s side when it came to relationships—any relationship, really. They also liked the freewheelingness of Susan’s household. She used to cook big meals, and they liked that too. We always seemed to be hungry back then; also, pathetically incapable of making a meal for ourselves.

  One Friday—well, it was probably a Friday—Mr. Macleod was chomping on his spring onions, I was playing with my knife and fork and Susan was bringing in the food, when he asked, with more than the usual edge of sarcasm,

  “And how many fancy boys are you providing yourself with this weekend, if I may make so bold as to ask?”

  “Let me see,” Susan replied, holding the stew dish in front of her as she appeared to ponder, “I think it’s just Ian and Eric this weekend. And Paul of course. Unless the others turn up as well.”

  I thought this amazingly cool of her. And then we ate dinner normally.

  But in the car the next day, I asked her, “Does he always call me that? Us that?”

  “Yes. You’re my fancy boy.”

  “I’m not that fancy. I’m a bit penny plain at times, I think.”

  But the word hurt. Hurt me for her, you understand. For myself, I didn’t care. No, really: perhaps I was even pleased. To be noticed—even to be insulted—was better than to be ignored. And a young man needed a reputation, after all.

  * * *

  —

  I tried to assemble what I knew about Macleod. I could no longer think of him as Mr. E.P. than I could as Old Adam or the Head of the Table. He was called Gordon, though Susan only used that name when speaking of the distant past. He looked a few years older than her, so must have been in his mid-fifties. He worked as a civil servant, though I had no idea in which department, nor was I interested. He hadn’t had sex with his wife for many years, though in the old days, when he was Gordon, he had done so, and two daughters were the proof of this. He had declared his wife frigid. He might, or might not, fancy the front half of a pantomime elephant. He believed that rioting mobs of Communists should be shot by the police or army. His wife hadn’t seen his eyes, or not properly, for many years. He played golf, and hit the ball as if he hated it. He liked Gilbert and Sullivan. He was good at disguising himself as a shabby but efficient gardener; though according to his own father he could be a difficult row to hoe. He didn’t like or take holidays. He liked to drink. He didn’t like going to concerts. He was good at crosswords and had pedantic handwriting. He didn’t have any friends in the Village, except, presumably, at the golf club, a place I had never entered, and had no intention of doing so. He didn’t go to church. He read The Times and The Telegraph. He had been friendly and polite with me, but also sarcastic and rude; mainly, I would say, indifferent. He seemed to be cross with life. And was part of what may or may not have been a played-out generation.

  But there was another thing about him, which I felt rather than observed. It seemed to me—I’m sure Macleod wasn’t conscious of it, hadn’t given it a thought—but it felt to me as if he—he in particular—was somehow standing in the way of me growing up. He wasn’t at all like my parents or their friends, but he represented even more than they did the adulthood I regarded with some horror.

  * * *

  —

  A few stray thoughts and memories:

  —Shortly after the Sharpeville Incident, Susan reported that Macleod had called me “a very acceptable young man.” Desp
erate for praise, like anyone else of my age, I took it at face value. Perhaps more than that: because he had first shouted at me, then later come to sober judgement, I considered the comment all the more valuable.