Metroland (19 page)

‘Photographs?’ I asked, pretty bored.

‘What do you mean, photographs?’

‘Wife and kids – don’t you carry them around?’

‘I only see them every day and all weekend – why the hell should I carry their photos around?’

I had to smile. I stared out of the window at a new tower-block hospital on the edge of playing fields: from high above, the football nets looked the size of hockey goals, the hockey goals like water-polo nets. An early-evening mist hung here and there at ankle height. I began to swap my life for his. Maybe it was guilt at having offended him, or maybe it was the truth, but my life, as it came out that evening, sounded rather like his, except for a lower fertility rate.

Once I’d discarded my instinctive responses, I found that we got on well enough. I told him I was thinking of writing a social history of travel round London.

‘Bloody interesting,’ he said, and I couldn’t help feeling pleased. ‘Always wanted to know about that sort of stuff. Actually, I saw Dicky Simmons the other day – you remember him – and for some reason we got talking about all the disused tunnels there must be under London. Railway tunnels, post-office tunnels. He knows about things like that – works for the GLC now. Might be useful to you.’

He might indeed. Simmons had been an embarrassing schoolboy: lonely, unpredictable, dandruffy, lacking in confidence. He didn’t look right either: and the regulation short haircut had only emphasised the ostentatious discord of his features. He spent his lunchtimes lurking in a corner of the sixth-form balcony, his bony, much-picked nose aimed at an obscure work of sexology, while with his free hand he tried
pathetically to flatten back to his head a ninety-degree ear. There had been no hope, then, for Simmons.

‘Don’t jump,’ said Tim, ‘but Dicky and I are going to the OBA’s annual dinner next month. Come along and meet him.’

I ruefully promised to bear it in mind. In the meantime, he asked Marion and me to ‘a little cheese-and-wine do’ the following Saturday. I said we’d come as long as we didn’t have to wear pyjamas.

In the event, we couldn’t get a baby-sitter, so I went alone. The plot was trite: husband alone at party for the first time in years – drink in pipkinfuls – girl in Fifties revival clothes and lipstick (nostalgic, fetishist effect on husband) – talk of this and that and also of the other – both giggle-drunk – some flirting, verbal feel-up. And then, suddenly, it all started to go wrong; wrong, that is, in terms of my mild fantasy.

‘OK then?’ she suddenly said.

‘OK what?’ I replied. She looked at me for a few seconds, then said, in a threateningly sober tone.

‘OK so we go and fuck?’ (How old was she, for Christ’s sake: twenty? twenty-one?)

‘Oh well, I don’t know about
that,’
I answered, suddenly a blushing fifteen, holding down my stiff petticoat.

‘Why not? Afraid to put your cock where your mouth is?’ She suddenly leaned forward and kissed me on the lips.

I hadn’t felt this sort of panic for years. I thought, I hope to God it’s that new sort of lipstick which doesn’t come off on you. I looked around the room to see if anyone had noticed. I couldn’t see that anyone had. Then I looked again, seeking to catch someone’s eye, anyone’s. I couldn’t. Instead, I dropped my voice and said firmly,

‘I’m married.’

‘I’m not prejudiced.’

The odd thing was, it didn’t feel like a tricky moral situation at all (maybe that was because I only half fancied her); just a tricky social situation. I recovered some of my nerve.

‘I’m glad to hear it. But you see, “I’m married” was short hand.’

‘It usually is. Which one is it this time – I’ll fuck you but don’t want to get involved; or I’ll fuck you and am interested but think we ought to get it all out in the open first; or My wife doesn’t understand me and I don’t know whether to fuck you or not but maybe we could just go somewhere and talk; or is it just plain I’m not going to fuck you?’

‘If those are the only available categories, then it’s the last.’

‘In that case’ – she leaned towards me, and I half-ducked to one side – ‘you shouldn’t tease cunt.’ Christ. Her detached zest was turning to aggression. Is that how they all talk nowadays? Ten years suddenly felt a long time. I thought, Stop,
I’m
the one who’s meant to be in his prime;
I’m
the one who’s experienced yet not set in his ways, principled yet flexible. That’s
me
.

‘Don’t be ridiculous.’

‘Well you wouldn’t deny that you were – how would you put it? – leading me on?’

‘Umm, no more than you were me.’ (You couldn’t compliment a girl these days without being sued for breach of promise.)

‘But I was trying to get off with you, wasn’t I?’

‘I admit I was … flirting with you.’

‘Well, then, you’re a cunt-teaser, aren’t you?’ and she repeated, in the clipped, condescending tone of one instructing a child, ‘Don’t tease cunt.’

The odd thing was, I still found her rather attractive (though her features seemed to have become a little sharper by association); I still wanted to charm her in some way.

‘But why is everything so prescriptive and indivisible? Don’t you ever want to listen to just one track of a record? If you … I don’t know … open a packet of dates, do you have to scoff the lot?’

‘Thanks for the comparisons. It’s not a question of degree, just of honesty of intention. You were dishonest. You’re …’

‘All right, all right,’ (I didn’t want to be held down by the
neck with my nose in that word again) ‘I admit a mild deception. But no more than if I’d asked you what job you did and you told me and I said “How interesting” even though I happened to think it the most boring job in the world. It’s just a fact of social protocol.’

She looked at me with an expression poised between disbelief and contempt, then walked off. Why was I being accused of deviousness? I wondered, with a pained loyalty to myself. And why were there so many misunderstandings about sex?

Later, on the train home, I remembered Toni’s Theory of Suburban Sex, which he had once elaborated to me when we were both sixteen and had yet to enter the land without signposts. London, he explained, was the centre of power and industry and money and culture and everything valuable, important and good; it was therefore,
ex hypothesi
, the centre of sex. Look at the number of gold-chained prostitutes for a start; and look at any Underground carriage – tight-clothed chippies all pressed up against Grosz caricatures. The closeness, the sweat, the urgency of the city all roared Sex at any observer of sensitivity. Now this sexual energy, he assured me, became gradually dissipated as you moved away from the metropolis, until, by the time you got to Hitchin and Wendover and Haywards Heath, people had to look up books to find out what went where. This explained the widespread sexual abuse of animals in the countryside – simple ignorance. You don’t get animals being abused in the city.

But in the suburbs, Toni went on (he was probably helping me understand my parents at the time), you are in a strange intermediate area of sexual twilight. You might think of the suburbs – Metroland, for instance – as being erotically soporific; yet the grand itch animated the most unlikely people. You never knew where you were: a chippy might turn you down; a golfer’s wife might rip off your school uniform without a by-your-leave and do gaudy, perverse things to you; shop assistants could jump either way. The Pope had formally banned nuns from living in the suburbs; Toni was quite
confident of this. It was here, he maintained, that the really interesting bits of sex took place.

There might, I thought that evening, be something in the Theory after all.

4 • Is Sex Travel?

Marion and I hadn’t seen Uncle Arthur for some months when Nigel rang to tell us he had died. I can’t claim the family was plunged into black; surprise was the nearest thing to grief any of us could muster. The last fifteen years hadn’t made me feel any more affectionate towards him; the most you could say was that I grew to respect the honesty of his dislike for me, and to value his warping self-sufficiency.

As Arthur grew older he became more transparently and more insultingly mendacious. In his prime, his ploys had always been carefully prepared: the frangibility of his spinal cord or the old-soldier stiffness of his knee would be established early on: from his sincere glare you suspected he might be lying about them, but couldn’t be sure. Only later would he mention some task for which those lacking steel backs or teak knees were disqualified. Then you smiled your defeat.

But in later years Arthur found no use for the smallest subtlety. He made no concession to style or politeness. ‘Fancy some tea?’ he would begin; then, rising a mere inch from the cushioned funk-hole of his armchair, would utter a lazy ‘Ouch’ and sink back.

‘Shocking, this knee/foot/liver of mine,’ he would observe to Marion, and didn’t even lay on the over-zealous thanks (which formerly gave him such a kick) when she got up and headed for the kitchen. Other physical defects-some longstanding like recurrent dreams, some the dragonfly fads of an afternoon-prevented him from changing plugs, reaching
high shelves, mending his clothes, washing up or seeing us off. One day, when he had confessed to an arthritic thumb, muddy vision and a possibly gangrenous foot within the space of half an hour, Marion suggested a doctor.

‘After me money are you? Horse-butchers, all of them. It’s in their interests to keep you ill, any fool can see that. So that they can claim more money off the Ministry of Health commissars.’

‘But, Arthur,’ Marion pretended to protest, ‘maybe it’s something serious.’

‘Nothing that another cushion’ (pretending to reach for one) ‘can’t oooo ooowww thank you lad cure.’ Then he added dutifully, ‘Blasted knee.’

His meanness, which had previously been subject to coy disguise, gradually assumed the nature of a straightforward pleasure. His dog Ferdinand had died not long after Arthur had decided that there was an unnecessary amount of meat in dog-food. A 50 per cent Pal and 50 per cent wood-shavings mixture had done for Ferdinand. Arthur would have watered its water if he’d known how.

He lost friends as he grew older. He didn’t mend his fences, never drew his curtains, and enjoyed annoying his neighbours with prolonged bouts of scratching. The Christmas cards he sent were always recycled, with an ostentatious patch over the previous sender’s signature; sometimes, with a sort of gnarled playfulness, he would return to Marion and me the same card we had sent him the Christmas before.

The rest of his correspondence was mainly with the directors of mail-order firms, whom he managed to cheat quite efficiently. His technique was to send off for goods on approval; when they arrived, he would wait a month, send off a cheque and immediately order his bank not to honour it. When a query arrived from the firm, he wrote back to them at once (but dating the letter two days earlier, so that it would appear to have crossed in the post), complaining of the quality of the goods, demanding a replacement before he sent back the defective item, and asking for advance reimbursement of postal
and packing charges. He had other, more Byzantine delaying ploys, and frequently ended up gaining an ex-RNVR officer’s heavy-duty parka, or a pair of plastic-handled self-sharpening secateurs, for merely the cost of a few steamed-off stamps and re-used envelopes.

Some of Arthur’s infirmities, however, must have been genuine – though I wonder if he himself knew the difference – and ganged together to produce a fatal heart attack. The fact of his death didn’t move me much; nor did its lonely circumstances, which were of his own choosing. Instead, what upset me when Nigel and I went to clear up the bungalow was the pathos of objects. While Nigel chattered away about the ghoulish features of dying which interested him, I grew melancholy at the half-finished things which a death persuades you to focus on. The heap of dirty dishes was normal for Arthur, who had once applied for a reduction in his water rate on the grounds that he washed up only every fortnight, and then used the leftover liquid for watering his roses. But everywhere I was impaled by objects that lay freshly abandoned, severed, discarded. A half-empty packet of pipe cleaners with one – the next to be used – projecting from it. Bookmarks (more exactly, scraps of newspaper) sadly noting the point beyond which Arthur would never read (not that I cared, in one sense). Clothes which, though others would have thrown them away, still had five good years of wear in them for Arthur. Clocks which would now run down without any interference. A diary killed off at 23rd June.

The cremation was no worse than a family Christmas, or a changing-room encounter with some rugby team of which you are a reluctant member. Afterwards, we filed out into the hot afternoon, the dozen or so mourners whom Arthur’s death had scraped together. We stood around awkwardly, read the wreaths and commented on each other’s cars. Some of our wreaths, I noticed, didn’t have a sender’s name pinned to them; perhaps they had been contributed by the crem to stop us getting depressed at our poor showing.

As Marion drove us home, I held Amy in my arms and
listened to the back-seat prattle of a couple of half-identified relatives. I mused lightly about Arthur’s death, about him simply not existing any more; then let my brain idle over my own future non-existence. I hadn’t thought about it for years. And then I suddenly realised I was contemplating it almost without fear. I started again, more seriously this time, masochistically trying to spring that familiar trigger for panic and terror. But nothing happened; I felt calm; Amy gurgled happily in reply to the alternating strain and roar of the car. It was like the moment when the Indians go away.

That evening, as Marion sewed and I sat over a book, my conversation with Toni in the garden came back to me. I wondered how far off my death would be: thirty, forty, fifty years? And would I sleep with anyone other than my wife until I died? Screw not, lest thy wife be screwn, Toni had jeered. But that against fifty years? And so far, had I been faithful because I still enjoyed making love to my wife (why that ‘still’?)? Is fidelity merely a function of sexual pleasure? If desire slackened, or
timor mortis
rose, what then? And what, in the future, if you suddenly became bored with the same round of friends? Sex, after all, is travel.