Bad Blood (26 page)

Another future came out of the past: Kathleen Winsor's best-selling Restoration romance
Forever Amber
, one of Uncle Bill's dirty books. Amber has been fostered by decent Puritan farming folk, but there's wanton aristocratic blood in her veins, and when the Cavaliers gallop back in 1660 she can't wait to be deflowered in the rotting leaves and hitch a lift to London. Amber falls in love with her ravisher, Lord Carlton, at first sight – he's a rake and a privateer, old enough to be her father, ‘a man free from bonds and ties' who knows the old world and America, too. So her first sexual experience does it all, turns her into her own woman in one swooning paragraph: ‘She was . . . glad with every fibre of her being that it had happened. It seemed until that moment she had been only half
alive.' Although he never stays home and has no intention of marrying her, he's now her mentor for ever, and she takes on his rakish resourcefulness to become an actress and a scheming courtesan.

It was a story as mysterious as the Fall in Genesis. How did Carlton pass on his knowledge with one wave of his phallic wand? I pored over the gaps between the lines to no avail, as I did over the tantalising reference to contraception (also apparently entirely in Carlton's power), when Amber finds herself pregnant:

‘I intended to be careful – but sometimes I forgot.' Amber looked at him, puzzled. What was he talking about? She'd heard in Marygreen that it was possible to avoid pregnancy by spitting three times into the mouth of a frog or drinking sheep's urine . . .

Amber never quite gets the hang of how not to start babies, but since we're in libertine land where you put patches on your plague sores, she has abortions or farms out children with impunity. What she doesn't ever, ever do is lose faith in her Lord. She may be a bad woman, but she's a real woman. Career girls all went to the boys' school. Amber wasn't, in fact, her own property; her very body was on loan.

But that we took for granted. The high school's best swimmer had to ask her parents and the headmistress for permission to use Tampax when her period clashed with a big competition, in case she demystified virginity. But there was little chance of such a thing. Everyone was swaddled in myths, that fourth-form year – perhaps especially Gail and I, who thought we weren't. Actual boys stayed elusive. We missed buses and fed jukeboxes, and in the meantime we had us. At school, every lunch break, on our own in the gym, we would get out a scratched
seventy-eight of a track called ‘Zambesi', with a jaunty saxophone solo, and practise the quickstep, Gail leading. We said to ourselves we'd rather be rocking, but we needed to know the quickstep for next year's school dance, when the fifth and sixth forms of the boys' and girls' schools would mingle. We could never get the bit with the crossed ankles right twice on the run, however. We were wrong-footed repeatedly and had to take up our positions again each time, holding hands at ballroom-dancing angle, our other two just touching her shoulder, my waist. Perhaps we got the steps wrong on purpose, for the pleasure of embracing each other so formally, so inconclusively. One, two three, back to square one.

I always lost the first point when I played singles, but when we played doubles she'd be there, bobbing and weaving at the net, ready to savage some unwary opponent's return of my mild-mannered overarm service, and we'd start fifteen–love up. On the tennis court we did play the game the boys suspected us of – I was the decoy, my girly, limp-wristed strokes led people on and set them up for Gail's lightning shots. And if they went past her along the tramlines, or cheated her reach with a lob, I'd be there backing her up, hitting two-handed. I was a feeble player by any conventional standard and nothing would induce me to approach the net. But the things I could do – stubbornly return hard-hitters, place balls wide and deep with monotonous regularity and the occasional slice – looked wonderfully cunning and effective when fronted by her classic flair. She had an elegant, fast, heavy service, her scoops and leaps at the net were bliss to watch, and her backhand was spring-loaded, with no wobbles at all. I felt happily invisible. The court was hers, I only patrolled the baseline, self-consciousness forgotten. As we played we kept up a continuous sub-conversation of congratulatory murmurs, despairing groans and warning hisses (‘Yours!', ‘Leave it!') which drew us together in defeat and sweetened our victories.

Our finest moment was when we knocked out three pairs
of grown-up ladies in the County Championships before being eliminated ourselves, although we also looked falsely modest when the results of matches against other schools were announced in assembly. The headmistress was gratified: for once we were doing something to the high school's public credit, coming out of our subversive huddle. You couldn't hold hands
and
play tennis. However, we weren't at last learning the joys of competition or the team spirit, as she thought (she was a modernising moralist who hoped for great things from improved personal hygiene and the forthcoming New English Bible), but cementing our union of two.

The double act was the result of hour upon hour spent practising our parts in private, playing
against
each other. Hanmer's only sporting amenity, save for the mere, was a pair of new clay courts a mile out of the village, surrounded by a towering chain-link fence. Like the council houses, they made a squared-off hole in the village's manorial map and they dated from the same post-war era of small breaches in the feudal order. In the daytime in school holidays, when no one had leisure to play except people who had grass courts of their own, Gail and I had sole possession. Love–fifteen. I always lost, every match. I did sometimes manage to break her serve and even very occasionally to retrieve my own, coming from behind, whereupon she'd congratulate me, just as I'd commiserate when she served a double fault, or a smash went out, or a sneaky shot of mine – a return of a return – went past her at the net and I wasn't there on the baseline to look after it. We played ourselves. We played us and we won.

We were never bored with this perverse version of the game, which fitted our differences into each other like pieces of a puzzle. It wasn't simply a matter of Gail having the upper hand (although the will to win was certainly one of her cards), for
my passive character exerted its own pull. Every time we played she would ride her bike to Hanmer from Horseman's Green to meet me, then dismount and wheel it beside her on our walk to the court, since I still couldn't learn to ride a bicycle and that she accepted, that was me. Indeed, she could have found another doubles partner at school at any time, someone who could really play tennis, but she never looked for one, she too was addicted to our Hanmer games. You could play tennis and hold hands.

On humid summer evenings the ageing Young Farmers organised easygoing mixed doubles and broke the spell. In their company we lost conviction, for it was gradually dawning on us that much as we didn't fancy them, they didn't fancy us even more. Paired off with one of these ruddy, solid men whose suntan stopped short at his rolled-up shirtsleeves, I'd look across the net and see Gail's glamour dwindle. Her mother's history and her family's plentiful lack of land were entirely antiaphrodisiac for them, cancelling out the way her thigh muscles were moulded and the strength in her slim, knobbly wrists. And as for me, my family had no acres either, and their fathers, uncles and cousins all owed my father money for taking their livestock to auction, money they paid off at leisure, knowing he couldn't insist (offend one, and you'd have the whole clan conferring and switching their custom next Wrexham or Whitchurch market day). We might jeer at Young Farmers for sprouting hair in their ears or wearing long shorts, but they condescended to us comprehensively. They were down to earth, they had their feet on the ground. The farmer wants a wife, just as we'd sung in the playground under the churchyard wall. No wonder they made us feel insubstantial.

However, mixed doubles didn't do lasting damage to our love affair with tennis. Nor did the clouds of gnats and midges
that came out at the same time as the Young Farmers, although I was horribly allergic to their bites, and several times was actually laid up with disfiguring, rubbery, amber-coloured blisters and elephantine ankles that had to be deflated by applying poultices of hot, grey clay. My legs were a source of shame and distress at the best of times – stocky, too short, mottled pink – so these ugly eruptions were almost a relief, an excuse to hide them altogether, adolescent stigmata like the hormone storms of spots that people would cover up with Clearasil. I coped better with ‘passing' by now. Gail had given me the confidence to conform and tennis gave me the confidence to play hockey. I was a defender, naturally (left back in the second eleven), and for a freezing season I spent my Saturday afternoons stamping my feet behind the twenty-five-yard line, waiting to tackle tired forwards who had run half the field's length with the ball, passing and dribbling in great style, only to have me hook it aside and whack it back to where they got it from. Often it didn't work out like that, though, and after hockey fixtures my legs would be covered in purple-black bruises, cryptic coloration – like playing hockey itself, which was meant to appease the high school spirit.

I wasn't
joining in
, I told myself, only seeming what they wanted, blunting the distrust and dislike. Even sucking on oranges with the other ten at half-time, when our breath made one mist in the raw air, I was watching the effect dubiously from the sidelines. Still, hockey was a sign of a true difference between Gail and me: she never even played at team games, let alone played them. Apart from tennis, she only really went in for field sports and gymnastics, off the court her repertoire was severely early Olympic. She went her own way, but I lacked moral fibre. I couldn't resist the longing to be liked and accepted, even though it was so transparent its very intensity
undermined my efforts. No one in the second eleven was more than dutifully friendly; they were embarrassed by my neediness and wary. Only in her company could I forget myself.

While I wanted to be wanted, she wanted to win her service with four impeccable aces, or break the school's javelin record and see the disbelieving look on their faces when they stretched out the tape, or keep a chimp as a pet, or grow all her nails at once without one breaking and paint them purple, or meet Paul Anka in person and convince him of her undying devotion. Her objects of desire were only just out of reach. They were vivid and particular, and their pursuit was an end in itself, frustration had its own pleasures. By contrast, the character of my wants was shadowy, vague and amorphous, and depended on people I probably didn't even know yet except in books – and except for Gail. I couldn't play games, for I was in deadly earnest, without her. There was only the search for recognition, being reflected back (every eye was a crystal ball) so you could imagine who you were. But people frosted over the more anxiously I peered. The two of us looked forward to our first school dance with very different hopes.

Preparations for making the gym-cum-assembly hall into a ballroom began in November, when Mrs Last's art students cut out stencilled clowns to transform the old blackout curtains into a carnival backdrop and hide the wall bars. It was the high school's turn to provide the premises and hire the band in 1957. We'd have preferred to go to the boys' school – with its picturesque playing fields on all sides and doric colonnade, it was a much better pastiche of a minor public school. There was even a forlorn little band of boarders whose fathers were in the army abroad. But we found it surprisingly easy to pretend that the gym was somewhere new and strange once the parquet floor, as always a little sticky from lunch, was sprinkled with
French chalk, the lights wreathed in pink net and hung with balloons and streamers, the classrooms either side converted into cloakrooms and the lavatories labelled ‘Ladies' and ‘Gentlemen'.

A couple of weeks earlier, to allow time for it to sink in, we'd been given a special lesson in ballroom etiquette for fifth-form debutantes: discreet mouse make-up; a pastel-coloured frock;
small
heels (nicer, and in any case boys probably wouldn't ask a girl who was taller to dance); eau-de-Cologne not scent; no straps showing, but lots of straps (even if you'd hardly any breasts going bra-less was unthinkable, it would have announced you were some kind of retard, a lack of elastic armour was a sign of moral idiocy like being cross-eyed and slobbering); you must accept if a boy asked you to dance, but you mustn't dance too often with the same boy; no holding hands between dances, you should both return to your corners like boxers when the bell rang; no dancing cheek to cheek; and – a new rule – no jiving, no rocking, no rolling. There were other prohibitions too, but they were too vulgar to bear spelling out. No adding alcohol to the fruit punch, no crude contact (no tongues, no bellies, no genitals, no thighs), no assignations on the dark hockey pitch . . .

And no more ‘Zambesi' at break for Gail and me. This was the real thing, boys in the flesh. All the prohibitions, especially the ones that stayed unvoiced, had made boys much more exotic; it was as though we'd never met one. The whole school hummed with excitement and the headmistress's aspect softened with anticipation, for she was about to let the dangerous genie of adolescent sex out of its bottle and tame it. She spoke in veiled, suggestive terms in assembly of freedom and responsibility, and we giggled uneasily – it was all vaguely shocking, like being tickled by a policeman.

On the day itself we were allowed to go home in the afternoon to get ready. My mother and I had compromised over my new dress – her visions of me in floating white chiffon which anyway we couldn't afford, and mine of something cheap in all senses, off the shoulder and tight in the skirt, with a lot of dark red about it, which I'd seen in the catalogue, had converged on a princess-line calf-length frock ‘that emphasises your pretty figure' mused the Shrewsbury saleswoman, looking over my shoulder, smoothing it down over my hips for just a little too long. It was Wedgwood blue, with a white pattern and a square nearly low neck, and I secretly liked it, although I complained it was babyish. Then back to school, to the hot, heaped-up ‘cloakroom' and a confused smell of forbidden scent, bath salts, talc, hairspray and new-fangled, stinging deodorants, and familiar people transformed with shiny sandals and flushed faces jostling for the one full-length mirror. I thought I'd faint when we got into the gym, the ceiling seemed to have vanished, the room stretched upwards into space, and there were pools of solid-looking darkness on the floor and in the corners.