Goodness (4 page)

I wash my hands of you all, I thought.

Lucky Stars

What was it I liked so much about Shirley? Why did we become so rapidly and permanently attached? I can’t rightly remember. At seventeen, eighteen, one is so much immersed in life. One likes without noticing quite what or why, in a whirl of vanity and self-gratification.

We met at a retreat intended to promote church unity. There must be an irony there. The well-to-do Anglo Caths in Chiswick High Street were dallying with the Shepherd’s Bush Congregationalists and Park Royal Methodists, and the youth of the three churches were lured off to an Easter Week of Prayer in a boarding school outside High Wickham. Shirley and I were drawn together in the second round of the table-tennis tournament.

Thin as a rake, poignantly flat-chested, sinewy, imperious, athletic, dynamic, she bounced and swayed threateningly at the other end of the table, four or five bracelets rattling on each wrist, be-ringed fingers lifted to cover her laughter, long copper hair falling away from a cocked cheek. One of the Anglo Caths, I thought, even before she spoke. I had to sweat blood to beat her.

Perhaps it was the freedom and assurance she had which attracted me first, a strength of character and cheerfulness that meant you could never feel you were hurting her. And naturally I was impressed that someone from a higher class was interested in me. I liked the fact that her father was a lawyer, that the family was well-off, respectable, moneyed, and that my mother, with the way she always confuses respectability with morality, wholeheartedly approved of them. I was overwhelmed by all the contact of skin on
skin, the way she shivered and melted when I kissed her ear, as I soon learnt to, the way she put a hand in my shirt as we walked across Gunnersbury Park. She liked to touch me. She wore a green silk scarf over her hair the way gipsies do, which somehow made me feel unspeakably tender, it gave her face such a bright, bird-like look, all eyes. But it was the sudden and complete intimacy that was most extraordinary. From the very first days together Shirley and I could talk about anything, everything. And amazingly we always agreed. She with me and I with her. It was uncanny. Had we not thrown religion and all its imponderables very promptly out of the window, we would have said we were made for each other.

So that on arrival back in Leicester that evening, I immediately turned to Shirley for support. Hadn’t I been right? Hadn’t I? One sounded mean saying certain things, but the fact was they had to be said. We talked it over. Shirley agreed wholeheartedly; it was a case, she decided, where the older generation, my mother, and the sixties aberration that had followed it, my sister, were both erring in sentimentality and romanticism, were refusing to look long and hard at future reality, future practicality.

Our room-mates Gregory and Jill were there, another solid sensible couple, and I was surprised, as we talked, how rapidly, on the basis of just a smattering of information, they came to the same conclusions I had. It was reassuring. Gregory said he found it extraordinary that people were even allowed to go on making the same old mistakes you read about in every novel, newspaper and social study, as if the centuries past had never been and the race had learnt absolutely nothing.

We cooked ourselves omelettes with green peppers and ate, unusually, in front of the TV, since BBC 2 was kindly interrupting the snooker to show somebody’s version of Carmen (both Jill and Shirley came from the right class to be opera buffs). We drank some decent wine Gregory had tracked down that Sainsbury’s had started importing from Friuli, and toasted to high-paying jobs and plenty of nights at
the opera. ‘But no running off with gipsy girls,’ Jill frowned. ‘Nor army boys,’ Gregory replied.

We really were a happy foursome in that house. There were no overbearing characters, no martyrs, no one was even particularly idiosyncratic. We shared the housework and the bills. We studied quietly and helped each other. We all knew what we wanted and how to go about getting it. We were young, cheerful, optimistic.

In bed later that evening, Shirley said, ‘Poor Peggy. Really.’ And she said: ‘Praise be to God for Reckitt & Colman though. A pink one a day keeps the gynaecologist away. Or the shotgun at bay. And you still can make hay. And have a damn good lay. Oh yea!’ ‘Oh shut up,’ I laughed, trying as always to be serious. Though one of the best things about bed with Shirley was, not just the excitement, but the fact that this was when she was at her merriest. Sometimes we’d be reduced to such helpless laughter we’d have to give up and start all over again when we’d got over the giggles. ‘Maybe,’ she said, ‘if Peggy’s so anti hormone-juggling and all that, you could tell her to get a bedside book of jokes. Excellent contraceptive.’ ‘Just,’ I said, ‘that you’d always be worried she might miss the punchline.’ ‘She does seem,’ Shirley agreed, ‘a rather inattentive creature.’

Still, appreciating that sometimes I’m too quickly irascible and categorical, and because I really do love Mother and Peggy and wish them well, and since I felt I might yet influence the situation for the good somehow, I decided not to overreact and cut myself off from them. A few days after getting back to Leicester, I wrote Peggy the following letter:

She wrote back from an address in Holloway beside which she had scribbled the words: ‘Temporary. Communicate via Mum.’

Georgie bruv – she wrote in blue wax crayon on a large sheet of graph paper – ‘ might just as well ask, 1. What if a brick were to fall from a great height on your big head leaving you totally mentally handicapped? 2. What if Shirley’s dad lost all his jolly lolly and you couldn’t go horseriding at the weekends? 3. What if you were paralysed from the waist down in a hit-and-run accident and Shirley not only refused to push your wheelchair but ran off with a well-hung Rastafarian . . .? See what I mean?

George, when you love a man as I love Dave, I mean love deeply, then you want to have a baby with him and
he with you. It’s something you both feel
in your souls
. It’s the ultimate human experience. And once it’s started, the baby I mean, you can’t say, no, no, we’ll have it in three years’ time, for the simple reason, brother mine, that ‘it’ would be a different baby, wouldn’t it, not the baby of our love now, but the baby of our love then. I shall have that baby too when the time comes, okay? No need to worry about Mum either as she has Big G on her side.

By the way, is it okay if I crash a night at your place on the way back from the Loughborough festival?

Lots of love and thanks, no really, for your concern.

PEG
.

Fair enough, I thought, if she insisted on being romantic about it (’baby of our love now’, indeed, as if it wasn’t just any sperm meeting any egg). Time would tell how right I was.

In the event, however, this was not to be the case. For coming back from her roadying at the Loughborough Festival, Peggy crashed not at our place but about fifteen miles away shortly after leaving the M6. It happened around midnight on the pillion of a 500cc Honda behind a bloke called Marcus Robbins, a folk singer apparently. They hit a broken-down, unlit Mini-van stationary in an underpass. Marcus was killed instantly. Peggy suffered only mild concussion, but miscarried.

She was heartbroken. I sat by her hospital bed for hours upon hours while she did nothing but cry and squeeze my hands. Her chubby face was pale. Carelessly she let her big breasts show through her nightdress, the kind of thing you just can’t help noticing even when you don’t want to. She cried and I felt very close to her and gave up my last week of revision to be with her, shuttling back and forth on trains and buses. We talked about this and that, and for the first time we talked about our childhood at home – Mother, Grandfather, Mavis – as something definitely past and gone. We were adults. I remember her surprising me by saying she
often thought of Mother as the Virgin Mary and Grandad as the Devil. I never think in these terms. People are who they are. Anyway, who did that make Mavis? Some possession case JC ought to hurry up and heal? And where was the man himself? Certainly not me.

At one point, laughing through her tears, Peggy said: ‘You want to bet Mum will find some way of saying it was her fault.’ I smiled. ‘Poor baby,’ she whispered. ‘Poor little baby.’ Her plump cheeks ran with tears. In a kind of daze she said, ‘You know there’ll never never be another baby the same. In all eternity. I was going to call her Elsa. Don’t you think it’s a nice name?’

Deep true lover Dave didn’t show up once the whole week they kept her in, but I didn’t mention this. Sensibility so often seems to entail not mentioning the most painfully pertinent. Peggy should have been counting her lucky stars.

I Do the Right Thing

Shirley and I on the other hand were truly in love. We were quite sure of it. We had been together four years now, formative years. We had grown into each other, made sacrifices for each other. For the last two years we had had our bank accounts in common, at my insistence, since I felt that as soon as you knew something was the right thing, the best course of action was to commit yourself at once. Some people fret and fritter their whole lives away, wondering whether to take this plunge or that. It inhibits them in every area, love, work, play. They sit for years caught uncomfortably on the prongs of their fences. But I was eager to get a move on.

I was ambitious. I wasn’t sure in what direction, but I was eager to prove myself. Half I would have liked to travel, see places, have adventures, half I wanted to get right down to it and make money now in the city I’d grown up in, buy a car, buy a house, then a better car, a better house, eventually go into business, politics, who knows. Over those last four years, since adolescence, the world had gradually been transformed from my prison to my oyster. I felt ready to dive in, rather than merely desperate to get out. And understandably I associated this change and the euphoria that went with it with Shirley.

In any event, it seemed important to get marriage out of the way. Shirley was fun to be with. She was attractive. She had hazel eyes and a straight nose with a tiny sprinkling of freckles (like a bouquet I told her) around the bridge. And we got on together. She was intelligent herself and she believed in me. She said I had a good mind, a good body, a good face, a good voice and rotten taste, but the latter,
fortunately, she felt she could rectify. She smiled wrily. She had large, well-spaced, fine white teeth with just one small endearing chip on the left upper incisor – skiing accident, the Dolomites (whereas my own chip I owe to a scuffle in a playground on the Tubbs Road Estate). Her lips were wide, her manner, at least in social conversation, exquisitely sardonic and ‘collected’ I think must be the right word. She would never embarrass you. She was always cool, polished. And talented too. She could dance, play the piano, play tennis (all the upper middle-class accomplishments denied to Peggy and I). She could sing counterpoint alto to my solid harmony church tenor. We often, hamming it up, sang hymns and even anthems together about the house. Plus she was an eager lover and she swore blind she didn’t want kids. Who wouldn’t have married her?

Her parents lashed out on the clothes and rings. My mother, delighted, spent more than she need have done buying a Moulinex she would never have dreamt of getting for herself. The venue was Christ Church, Turnham Green. Peggy, Grandfather and Mavis were all there, Grandfather with his navy medals, Peggy in a whorish pink jumpsuit, but I shut my mind to any embarrassment, they couldn’t harm me now. I had escaped.

In a lemon dress, hair permed for the first time in lovely copper ringlets, opals in her ears, wide eyes truly glowing as it seemed to me only hers could, Shirley whispered at the chancel steps: ‘If only I had a pair of tits, I’d make quite a picture,
n’est-ce-pas
?’

For my own part, acknowledging stout Mr Harcourt’s complacent approving, just very slightly boss-eyed smile, bespeaking wealth, respectability, unassailable common sense, I knew I had done the right thing. I was set. Why shouldn’t we be happy?

We rented a flat in North Finchley and got down to business with the rat race. House prices were spiralling and we would have to spiral after them. Shirley quickly found a place teaching infants at a private school for girls, St Elizabeth’s, a temporary arrangement as what she was
really suited for was something in publishing or advertising maybe. But we both felt that this was a moment to swallow pride and get some experience behind us. We didn’t want to live off her parents. Meanwhile I got a foothold on the bottom rung at InterAct Management Systems and proceeded to become an expert (perhaps I should say one of ‘the’ experts) in network planning. Within a couple of years I was turning out software they’d never dreamt of till I arrived.

There was Johnson, an electronics man retired young from the airforce having lost an arm; pompous, mannered, always a fresh handkerchief in his pocket and so on, but very sharp. He’d had the idea. Then there was a dithery, worried type, Will Peacock, a great adjuster of trouser belts and twister of ties. He was putting up the money he’d inherited, and at the time I arrived still losing it. To look at him, death pale, stooped and fiftyish at thirty-five, you’d have thought he’d been bleeding for weeks on end. He needed a transfusion. But these were the halcyon days of software design and really you couldn’t go wrong (to my credit actually that I sensed this at once).

I remember the interview as one of the turning points of my life, one of those rare moments of real self discovery. These two dull three-piece men began to explain that they’d just won their first large contract, a network planning system for oil rig construction in the North Sea. The idea (it seems very old hat now) was that the constructors should feed into the computer all the information relative to task sequences and durations, specifications and quantities of material and labour required, estimated idle time, possibility or otherwise of simultaneous operation, etc. etc. and InterAct’s custom-written network program would then schedule all their work for them, time their orders, give advance warning of when they would need to draw on specialised labour, programme their payments, spot liquidity problems way ahead, and so on. Any unforeseen hitch or delay (flash welders not available for three days, interest rates up half a per cent) and the project manager need only tap in the details
on a portable keyboard to have complete rescheduling and costing of absolutely everything.

It caught my imagination, I suppose because of the wonderful vision of life it implied (I still love network planning). All the complexities of people working together, people with different skills and temperaments, from different races and social classes, all the complications of fashioning and fitting together a vast range of heterogeneous and often obstinate materials, the hazards of shifting massive structures tens of miles across lashing seas and anchoring them to the sludge or rock of the sea bed – all this was to be controlled by one man tapping rapidly on a portable keyboard. And any snag, obstacle, inconvenience, rather than being allowed to send the whole house of cards tumbling to the ground, would simply be absorbed, analysed, and then the entire structure very finely altered, re-tuned, counterbalanced, and set on its way again, all embarrassments and dilemmas foreseen and neutralised, all interpersonal relations and moral issues rendered superfluous, nothing left to chance. It seemed a worthy cause to me and obviously profitable.

I told them I was their man. I really was. I’d study night and day to get into it. I’d be an expert on network planning before the year was out (and it was already September). They could pay me the absolute minimum salary for the first six months and then we could negotiate something reasonable on the basis of my performance, but I really wanted this job. I gave full reign to my enthusiasm, and you’ve got to remember these were still the bad old days pre-Thatcher when enthusiasm, at least for work, was taboo. But instinctively, and the feeling was overwhelming, I knew I was doing the right thing. It’s something I’ve noticed so often since then, that when I’m outside the exhausting claustrophobia of family and intimate relationships, my personality flowers, I get so damn confident. I knew I didn’t have quite the qualifications they wanted, I knew less than zero about network planning, so rather than bluffing it I simply offered to come in at a low price and work my bum off. I was dealing with a couple of canny older guys who needed a bargain and, as I suspected,
would know one when they saw it. ‘Look, don’t even bother interviewing anybody else,’ I said with a sniff of humour so as not to sound unpleasant. ‘Take me. Please. I can guarantee it won’t be a mistake.’

In the end they picked up my soul for just £3500 a year. But I was sure I was the winner.