Slipstream (63 page)

One of the wounds in my leg took a very long time to heal, and during that time I didn’t work much, and consequently wrote more letters. By now I knew, or thought I knew, a good deal about
the man and the women in his life. Apart from that, he wrote a good deal about me, had read the biographies of Peter and Kingsley, and kept telling me how beautiful I was. I wrote back saying I was
no such thing: my hair was white and I was fat, and not what he’d taken to imagining from the books. This reminded me of a very young man years before, in the days of Robert Aickman,
who’d stared and stared at me and finally stuttered, ‘You’re ageless! Ageless and shapeless!’ and how much this had made me laugh. A part of me thought that perhaps I could
be loved whatever my appearance – I was certainly shapeless – and his reply to that letter reinforced this.

It’s commonly supposed that women of my age must, or should, have lost all interest in sex. Nature, after all, has no further requirements of women past the menopause. It may well be that
a woman who has had a happy and fulfilled marriage, and has brought up her children, is able to let her sexual activity fade to be replaced by the affection and intimacy that a good marriage
yields. But I wasn’t one of those women: frigid throughout my first marriage and for some time after it, I hadn’t understood that sex was for both partners until I met Laurie. When I
did fully understand, the long-term partners weren’t available, until Kingsley.

For years I went to bed with men because I wanted their affection, which is what I thought the exchange involved. By the time I met Kingsley I was in a parlous state. I was violently attracted
to him. I didn’t think I was going to see very much of him, but knew I wouldn’t see anything if I proved to be a disappointment to him. So I cheated, pretended it was better than it
was. It was only when he began to love me that it changed.

It was now sixteen years since I’d left Kingsley and there had
been no sex for some years before that. Since being on my own, I’d been mildly attracted to one or
two people, but I didn’t expect them to be attracted to me. It was just nice for me to know that I
could
feel even a mild attraction. But this man was definitely courting me. I thought
about the promised tea in March. Since he lived in Scotland and I in Suffolk, this would probably mean meeting in London in an hotel. I found this a daunting thought. So, after consultation with a
friend, I decided to ask him for a weekend where others would be present. It would give not only me but also my friends a chance to see what we all thought of him.

He came on Friday evening. Jane Wood and her lover, Edward, were due on Saturday morning, so I asked my friend Nick McDowell, then the publicity director at Macmillan, whether he could come for
the Friday night. He kindly agreed. When my visitor arrived, we had a glass of wine together before Nick joined us for dinner. He wasn’t particularly good-looking, but it was immediately
clear that he possessed enormous charm. I could see that he was very nervous – his palms were sweaty when we shook hands – but that soon wore off as we drank the wine. When we had
dinner he lapsed into relative silence. Nick told Sargy the next morning that there was no need to worry about him, he was simply rather dull.

Much the same thing happened with Jane and Edward. ‘I can see he’s potty about you,’ Jane said, when I asked her about him. Edward said he quite liked him. I was so nervous at
the prospect of going to bed with him that, as is my wont when afraid of something, I plunged in and invited him to share my bed. It was clear at once that this was his element. But, less like
other people I’d known, he made no sudden conquest, said we needed time – or rather, I needed time to get to know him. This remark, which had never been made to me before, enchanted
me.

That was it. He went early on Monday morning. Correspondence was resumed on a more intimate level, and some weeks later I invited him to stay ten days so that we could spend more ordinary time
together.

I think in all he came to stay three times, and on the second and third occasions he mentioned marriage. I told him that I didn’t want to be married to anyone else in
my life. He didn’t accept this or, rather, he seemed to accept it, but then reverted to it as though for the first time. The second time was soon after I returned home after the vascular
operation, and Nicola had come to stay with me. She knew he was coming, and fetched him from Norwich airport. I could see he was making great efforts to be nice to her, and that she wasn’t
impressed. At some point I fell on the wet York stone on my terrace. It was a bad fall, on the bad leg, and I was afraid I’d broken it as I couldn’t get up until Fran and Susanna
rescued me. I was in a good deal of pain, and he delighted in looking after me – cups of tea, and doing the shopping. He suggested coming to live in Bungay and buying a cottage. I felt what
he really meant was that he wanted to live in my house with me, and something somewhere in me told me that this was a bad idea.

On the second visit, another convalescent was staying with me. Each of them came to me to say that the other was drinking too much – secretly, of course. In front of me he drank wine and
beer and not a great deal of either.

It’s really difficult to recall my state of mind then. I enjoyed sex with him, and we talked together very companionably. It felt extraordinary to be
having
a sex life. And yet,
when he left after the second visit, I felt curiously relieved. I wondered whether – like Elizabeth Taylor’s very good story about meeting someone to whom she’s written for years
and finding she’s unable to bear him through a lunch – we might be better on paper. But no, as soon as he was away I thought of when he’d be back. ‘You like me in
bed,’ he said one day, and it was true. What he didn’t know was how unusual that was for me.

The third time he came, Selina, Monkey and Susie Allison came for the weekend. It was clear that Selina, though polite about it, didn’t think much of him. Monkey had spent an evening with
him in London, and hadn’t liked him either. Susie, however, made one
of those provocative remarks that have the opposite effect of their intention. ‘He’s not
remotely
up
to you – different background and all that––’

‘You mean, he’s working class,’ I interrupted. She said, well, yes, that’s what she did mean. I said I didn’t care a damn about his class, it made no difference to
me. But in one way it did. It made me both defensive about and protective of him. I decided not to worry about the future, to enjoy being loved and cared for, to foster our mutual trust and to hell
with anyone else . . .

When he left after the third visit, we’d planned that he wouldn’t come again until August, as I’d been invited by the McDowells to spend two weeks with them on Ios, and then
was going to spend a fortnight with Selina in Ireland.

By now I knew that he lived in a council house and he had given me to understand that he’d not got much, if any, money. As he had to do all the travelling, I paid half his fares. I also
gave him some money to pay off his credit-card debt. But I was beginning to wonder why he didn’t seem to have any sort of job; he was sixty-two and in good health. All he wanted to do, he
said, was to look after me. This sounded both nice and not quite right. I drove him to the station and it was agreed that he would come down on 12 August – he’d already booked a seat on
the plane.

About ten days later, I went to London to stay the night before going to Greece. My brother met me at the station. This was a surprise. He’d never met me before. I said I had to go to the
dentist and then to Camberwell to stay the night with the McDowells, as we were leaving early. He’d take me there. After the dentist, Monkey said he’d done some alterations to his house
that he would like me to see. When we got there, and he’d seated me in his new sitting room and made some tea, he said he had something rather awful to tell me.

My family had been worried by my affair and had started to make some enquiries. One monstrous lie – out of which this man had made much emotional capital – was uncovered, and this
had led to more. In fact everything he’d told me, that they could verify, had
been a pack of lies – some disgusting, some positively dangerous. There seemed to be
nothing of the truth about him, and his reasons for making up to me became humiliatingly clear. I was too stunned at first to take it all in. There were enough verifiable lies to suggest that they
were only the tip of the iceberg and, indeed, Monkey said, more and more of them were still coming out. I had to do something – put a stop to his letters before I went to Greece. I wrote a
brief note to him saying I now knew things about him that made me not wish to see or hear from him again, and that I’d told all of my friends that he was
persona non grata
, and that
was that. I didn’t tell him what I knew: I wanted him to dread what the things might be, as it was clear now that somebody with his record of lies and destruction had reason to be afraid. I
told friends I thought he might possibly ring up, and they said they wouldn’t talk to him. He did ring some of them, clearly agitated about what I knew. So that was it. The next morning I
went to Greece.

It’s not easy to accept that somebody you thought close to you, who claimed such unconditional love, wasn’t anything he’d seemed. Liars destroy the currency of all words: there
was no single fragment of truth I could hang on to. Of course it was humiliating, but I wish it had been only that. In my mind, during the sleepless nights on Ios, I went back to the naïve
conviction I’d had with Jim Douglas-Henry which had been my undoing: that people didn’t tell lies about love. How long it had taken me to recognize that this was a fallacy! I have said
earlier that I am a slow learner – and here I was, at seventy-four, having to discover this all over again. I have learned it now. It was cold comfort to say that con-men couldn’t
be
con-men unless they were successful in giving the impression they chose to give. I should have known by now that any man who made up to me would be doing it for unsimple reasons. But it
was a bit late to know that. I
did
constantly live in the slipstream of my experience.

In the autumn, I scrapped the novel I’d been writing and started upon
Falling
.

Ever since the cancer treatment I’d been going to see the oncologist to ensure there was no recurrence. I’d started to have a good deal of pain, so I asked him
about it. ‘You’ve got a couple of tiny little ulcers in there – a result of the radiation. They’re very small,’ he added, with a smile, meaning, I suppose, that
they’d go away, or I’d get used to them.

To relieve what had been a rather black year, I decided to rent two little houses on Nevis in the Caribbean and invite friends to come on a fortnight’s holiday. Jim and Pam Rose, very old
friends, said they’d like to come, and the Wyndhams, Minky and Monkey. We were to go very early in January, a good month to be away, and I looked forward to it very much.

But by November the pain was so much worse that I told my doctor. He sent me to see Professor Nichols, the best consultant. I went to him privately as I couldn’t bear to wait for what
might have been months to see him.

My kind Nicola came all the way from Gloucestershire to meet me at the consulting room in Harley Street. When he’d examined me, he said, ‘You poor thing, you must be in agony!’
and rang his hospital, St Mark’s at Northwick Park, for me to go in for a biopsy as soon as possible. I’d been told, I said, that I had no recurrence of cancer, and he said there was no
way that anyone could know that without giving me an anaesthetic. ‘I should hurt you too much if we didn’t do that.’

I felt I was back at square one. Nic and I took a taxi to Liverpool
Street, but she had to leave me there to go home. I went back on the train to my empty house. I could see
Nevis slipping away and had a good cry about that to relieve some of the fear.

The following week I went for the biopsy. It only meant staying in for one night. They told me the result would come in about ten days, as Professor Nichols was going to be away. I went home and
thought about this, then rang the registrar and said, could I please be told as soon as
they
knew? Surprised at this whimsical suggestion, they agreed I could. The result came through five
days later. I hadn’t got cancer, but I had several ulcers that would have to be operated on, and this would mean a colostomy. Dates were discussed. I had the choice of going in over
Christmas, ‘but you won’t want to do that’, or the end of January. I opted for Christmas: the pain was too obtrusive for me to enjoy a holiday and I still felt anxious that cancer
might be found. Losing the holiday made me feel childishly deprived. I cried about it as I had years previously over losing the house I’d wanted in north London. It was to have been a holiday
with friends, something I always wanted, and this time I’d put a lot of energy into arranging it. Everyone went except me. It was a success, and I was sent kind postcards.

Selina, most loyal, staunch friend, drove me to Northwick Park, a vast hospital near Harrow. St Mark’s hospital had been in Islington, and had transferred to a wing there.

The first operation was a long one. I woke up with all kinds of appliances attached to me, including a small bulb I could press to get morphine. I was in a ward with four other women in varying
stages of recovery. Professor Nichols came round and said he’d only been able to stitch up two of the ulcers and I’d need a further operation in due course.

There were two wonderful nurses there, one woman and one man. To begin with I felt very uncomfortable at having a man do all the awful things to me that had to be done, but he dealt with that
with extreme kindness and tact. ‘I do it all the time,’ he said, ‘it’s my profession. I love looking after people, whatever it entails.’
When I was
coming round he was there. He leaned over me and said, ‘I read a marvellous book last year.’ What was it? ‘
Captain Correlli’s Mandolin
by Louis de
Bernières.’