Sex and Other Changes (2 page)

‘Thank you.'

There were usually fewer than twenty people at these meetings. Nick had hated the first one, which had been on the subject ‘Can tests on animals be justified?' He had been frightened that he would dare to speak. He had been trying to force himself to speak. He had only just failed – several times. It had been terrifying.

Gradually, however, through ‘Should smoking be banned?', ‘Does Socialism kill initiative?', ‘Is philosophy a waste of time?' and ‘Is marriage before sex too risky?' he had bravely come to terms with the fact that he would never dare to speak, and there was no need for him to dare to speak, and he had begun to enjoy sitting there anonymously in the pavilion with its faint unthreatening aroma of the stale sweat of generations of jockstraps.

Sometimes he would allow himself to dream that he was at the girls' school, that after the debate he would wander off with Prentice and they would … well, he could never bring himself to use the actual words even to himself. He had to be so careful, he thought, not to reveal any hint of this to Prentice, or he might lose the only friend he had.

On this occasion, however, Nick didn't have time to dream. He was entirely taken up with Alison. She spoke fluently, confidently, loudly, as if to a vast crowd that only she could see. She insisted that unselfishess was possible. True, she hadn't met any of it in her life, and none of it among her friends, but she gave examples of her own unselfishness as proof of the absurdity of the proposition.

Her speech did not go down well. Later speakers offered other motives for her apparently unselfish actions. Nick didn't care. It wasn't what she said that impressed him. It was how she said it. It was what she was.

He felt that she was speaking directly to him. He recognised that her confidence was bluster. He realised that her conceit was grown out of self-disgust. He knew that she was as lonely as he was, that she was as awkward with herself as he was with himself, that they were soul-mates. It wasn't love. It wasn't even sexual attraction. It was compatibility at first sight.

After she had spoken, he began to plan what he would say to her after the meeting: ‘You were magnificent', ‘You can inspire me to total unselfishness', ‘I thought you were marvellous about the shortcomings of the rest of the world', ‘I do totally agree about the awfulness of humanity', ‘Your cynicism is excessive. I will prove it by being as unselfish as you', ‘Would you like a milk shake?', ‘Where have you been all my life?', ‘Where have I been all your life?', ‘Would you like to come and see my pressed ferns?', ‘Have you read
Tess of the D'Urbevilles?'
, ‘My dad could get us on a Mediterranean cruise if you're interested', ‘I don't suppose you'd fancy coming to my friend's father's camp site near Filey?' All were tried, weighed up, placed in a constantly varying order of possibility.

And then the meeting was over, and she strode out contemptuously, and he had to struggle past Prentice's thick legs and by the time he got out she was already striding away across the outfield of the cricket ground. A low sun made her shadow immensely thin and long.

Nick ran after her but, even though no match was in progress, he couldn't bring himself to walk on the outfield. He scurried round the boundary.

‘Hey!' he cried.

She stopped and turned. At that time she was at least three inches taller than he was. He felt over-awed. All his opening
gambits, so carefully rated from one to twelve, flew away. He could think of nothing to say. He approached her slowly. She stood there, mercilessly. In the nets, a ball thudded into a batsman's box. Behind them some wag had arranged the scoreboard to read ‘Home Team 1176 for 2. Last man 617.'

His mouth was dry. His tongue was sticking to the side of his cheek. He found it almost impossible to speak at all.

He only spoke three words, and it's ironic to realise, with the hindsight for which Throdnall is so famous, that his statement, so apparently simple, was actually something in which he had no confidence, something which he didn't believe to be entirely true even then.

‘Hello,' he said. ‘I'm Nick.'

Nick's mother was a snob. ‘You'd think he was Captain of the
Queen Mary
, not a piddling purser on a crummy cruise line,' was the comment of her chiropodist. She wasn't liked in the shops. She thought that shopkeepers feared her. ‘They see me coming,' she said proudly, ‘and they cringe.' They did see her coming, but they didn't cringe. The greengrocer gave her the oranges that had been on the shelves too long and would soon go bad.

She was not the ideal mother for a boy who had the natural inclination to be a mother's boy.

Nick loved his father's postcards. ‘You would have adored the Malacca Straits, old son.' His father seemed like a hell of a fellow, on deck, seeing the world. In Thurmarsh, on leave, he seemed smaller, less real. His shore leave always came in termtime. ‘Holidays are synonymous with our peak periods, my boy.'

One day, just after his father had gone back to the ship, Nick asked his mother, ‘Do you think Dad likes me?'

‘Of course he does,' she said. ‘He loves you.'

‘Then why does he never invite me on the ship? Surely he could wangle a cruise?'

‘He doesn't want you to see his other life,' hissed his mother through gritted teeth. She raised her hand to her neck in horror at what she had said. Her neck went red. She swept out of the room, slamming the door.

Everything in Nick's life propelled him towards Alison.

It would have been impossible to have invited his mother to Garibaldi Terrace, or to have taken Bernie and Marge to Upcot
Avenue. Nick and Alison's relationship grew in secret, and secrecy is heady stuff.

During their last year at school they went to several films and several concerts together. He preferred the films, she preferred the concerts. Sometimes they went to pubs. She liked pubs, he didn't. Eventually he did get to meet Bernie and Marge. Occasionally they went to the pub with Bernie, and even more occasionally with Bernie and Marge. Nick liked that. He felt more comfortable in the pub then. He felt he had his camouflage on. He dealt with the class divide by mocking it. ‘Got your cloth cap, Bernie?', ‘Ferrets locked up, Bernie?' Alison held her breath, but Nick had realised that Bernie found every joke funny as long as he featured in it, and the routine made Nick begin to feel, for the first time, that one distant day he might become a man of the world.

He no longer welcomed his father's cards. His father wrote, on his eighteenth birthday card, ‘How I wish you were here to share the incredible views of Istanbul from the incomparable Bosporus, old son. What a shame this is such an important year of study for you.'

He tore the card into twenty-seven pieces – his best yet. He felt that if he'd controlled his anger he could have topped thirty.

Nick and Alison didn't have access to any place where they could make love without tension. To do it in Garibaldi Terrace would seem like a betrayal of trust. To do it in Upcot Avenue would be like suspending weightlessness on the moon. Neither of them minded this at all, though each pretended to.

The first time they spent a night in bed together was in Prentice's father's static caravan near Filey. They'd gone over there for a party. Prentice had said it was fancy dress. They'd gone as Helen of Troy and Achilles. Alison was used to dressing up and made a convincingly warrior-like Achilles. Nick was extremely shy and self-conscious about the whole thing.
Somehow his unease made him disturbingly attractive as Helen. At the time they thought it all a great joke. Later, much later, looking back on it, they wondered how they could have been so naïve.

They only thought it a great joke until they arrived at the party to find that no one else was in fancy dress, not even Prentice.

‘You are a bastard, Prentice,' said Alison.

‘That's true,' said Prentice.

Nick and Alison got so drunk in their embarrassment that when they got to bed they fell asleep straightaway, and in the morning they were so hungover that they made straight for the toilets. Alison held Nick by the shoulders while he retched into the bowl. He found that extraordinary. He didn't think many women would have done that.

Would Nick and Alison ever have made love to each other, would they ever have married each other, if the driver of a white van hadn't fallen asleep at the wheel just two days after Daniel Divot had arrived home on shore leave?

It's impossible to know. The driver
did
fall asleep, Nick's parents
were
killed instantly, he
was
all alone in the world.

Oh he had uncles and aunts, and a granny with dementia near Knebworth, and cousins, but they were never close.

One of his uncles made all the funeral arrangements. Nick drifted through the nightmare, rudderless, steered by Alison. On the morning of the funeral she dressed him. In the church she held his arm and led him to and from his seat. At the funeral tea she held him when she thought he was going to faint. That night she fucked him for the first time.

They had woken up that morning as friends, chums, a bit more than platonic but a lot less than sexual. During that one day Alison became his father, his mother and his lover.

Where did they make love? Friends in Throdnall would find this difficult to believe, but it was on the back lawn of his
parents' house, just beside the tool shed, under the stars, on a groundsheet (Nick was subject to chills of the kidneys as a young man). Mock ye not, though. Grief is a great aphrodisiac, and Nick was a fine and fervent lover that night, for all his inexperience. He turned his sorrow into love, and poured it into Alison.

The following week, Nick passed his driving test first time, to everyone's astonishment, and the week after that, heady with excitement and independence, he set off on what he called
La Grande Route de Sympathie,
or
Der Grossmitzgefuhlstrasse
. In other words, he drove round rural England in an elderly Ford Anglia which he was only just capable of controlling, and spent two nights at each of five different outposts of Divots. He returned with a multitude of vague offers of future support, but had met no great warmth. ‘Divots tend to be good people, but they take some getting to know,' his Aunt Jessica warned him. Long before the end of his little trip, the excitement was a thing of the past, and independence seemed a lonely game. He proposed to Alison on the day of his return, and she accepted him. They were both eighteen.

The wedding was a quiet little affair. The loss of both Nick's parents forced it to be so.

He risked a break with his family by not inviting any of them. As he wrote to his Uncle Stanley, the unofficial leader of the tribe, ‘If we invite anyone we have to invite everyone. We can't afford to invite everyone, so we're not inviting anyone. We hope you'll all understand.'

He relied on Uncle Stanley to pass the message round. He half hoped that somebody might say, ‘Don't worry. I'll pay', but nobody did.

So Bernie and Marge were there, and a smattering of Thurmarsh friends, and Prentice, and Jen, and the registrar of course, and the photographer, and that was about it.

The men wore suits. Prentice, the best man, already showing intimations of obesity, told Nick, ‘You look better in a suit than any eighteen-year-old should. You look as if you were made for suits.'

‘Thank you.'

‘It wasn't meant to be a compliment.'

Alison wore pink in the knowledge that she needed help to look feminine, but her dress was simple in view of the recent tragedy and of her temperament. Jen looked tactlessly gorgeous in virginal white, which Alison thought inappropriate and inaccurate. Anyone who had seen them on the steps of the register office would have assumed Jen to be the bride.

Marge, with Alison's permission, wore the dress in which she had got married to Bernie twenty-three years before. She could still get into it, but only just. Bernie, awkward in his shiny best suit, had tears in his eyes when he saw it.

‘You still look a picture, love,' he said, ‘and I don't mean no Picasso neither.'

‘I hope so,' said Marge. ‘I daresay it looks old-fashioned, but we have to put on a show for them. It'd all seem so straggly else.'

‘Straggly?'

‘Forlorn. They're marrying under a cloud. We've got to pull all the stops out.'

‘Oh aye. We've got to pull all the stops out.'

So there was champagne at the reception, which was held in a small private room at the Midland Hotel, where they were watched over by photographs of railway engines from the golden age of steam, and there was a slap-up, sit-down breakfast of lobster, steak and Black Forest gâteau, washed down with lashings of Mateus Rosé. Nobody could say they weren't well done by.

Prentice made a short speech, full of tasteless references to the activities of the wedding night, references so oblique that luckily
nobody understood them. Then he read out the telegrams. There were three.

‘ “Good luck – Uncle Stanley, Auntie Flo and all the Divots”,' read Prentice.

‘Very nice,' said Marge.

‘ “Don't do anything I wouldn't do. That leaves you quite a lot – Len Pickup”,' read Prentice.

There was laughter, but not much.

‘ “Wish you could be sitting here beside me in heaven, old son – Dad”,' read Prentice.

There was a stunned silence. Nick went white. His mouth opened but no sound came. He swooned. Alison grabbed his face before it crashed on to the table, and lowered it gently. He soon came round. Sweat poured off him.

Prentice sat with no expression whatever on his jowly face.

After the meal the drink flowed. Bernie went on to pints – ‘I can't be doing wi' fancy drinks, me' – and the other men followed suit. Nick felt obliged to join in, though he hated pints. He just couldn't find room for all that liquid. And as the drink flowed, people moved around, and tongues were loosened.