Now that I was a taxpayer with a meagre income, my scepticism about my sister ran deep. She was clever, brilliant at biology and chemistry at school, and she was kind, she had the human touch. I wanted her to be a doctor. I wanted her to want what she used to want. She lived rent-free with another woman, a circus-skills instructor, in a Victorian terraced cottage renovated by the local council. She signed on, smoked dope, and for three hours a week on Saturday mornings sold rainbow-coloured candles from a stall in the city-centre market. On my last visit home she had talked of
the neurotic, competitive ‘straight’ world she had left behind. When I suggested that this was the world that supported her work-free existence she laughed and said, ‘Serena, you’re so right wing!’
While I was filling in the background and telling Tom this story I was fully aware that he was about to become a State pensioner too, on a grander scale, from the Secret Vote, that portion of government expenditure that parliament may never scrutinise. But T.H. Haley was going to work hard and produce great novels, not rainbow candles or tie-dye T-shirts. As we made our three or four turns about the park, I did feel queasy about withholding information from him, but it helped to remember that he’d visited our cut-out, the Foundation, and had approved of it. No one was going to tell him what to write or think or tell him how he should live. I had helped bring freedom to a genuine artist. Perhaps the great patrons of the Renaissance felt the way I did. Generous, above immediate earthly concerns. If that seems a grand claim, remember that I was feeling a little drunk and lit up by the afterglow of our long kiss in the bookshop basement. We both were. Talking about our less fortunate sisters was our unintentional way of marking our own happiness, of keeping our feet on the ground. Otherwise we might have floated off above Horse Guards Parade, away over Whitehall and across the river, especially after we stopped under an oak, still hoarding its load of rusty dry leaves, and he pressed me against its trunk and we kissed again.
This time I put my arms round him and felt beneath the tightness of his belted jeans the sinewy slenderness of his waist and, below, the hard muscle of his buttocks. I felt weak and sick, my throat was parched and I wondered if I was getting flu. I wanted to lie down with him and stare into his face. We decided to go to my place, but we couldn’t face public transport and we couldn’t afford a taxi. So we walked. Tom carried my books, the Edward Thomas and his other gift, the
Oxford Book of English Verse
. Past Buckingham Palace
to Hyde Park Corner, along Park Lane, past my work street – which I failed to point out – then a long trudge up the Edgware Road, passing the new Arab restaurants, eventually turning right onto St John’s Wood Road, past Lord’s cricket ground, along the top of Regent’s Park and into Camden Town. There are far quicker ways, but we didn’t notice or care. We knew what we were walking towards. Mostly, not thinking about it made the walking easier.
In the usual way of young lovers, we talked about our families, placing ourselves for each other in the scheme of things, counting up our comparative luck. At one point Tom said he wondered how I found it possible to live without poetry.
I said, ‘Well, you can show me how to be unable to live without poetry.’ Even as I said this I was reminding myself that this could be a one-off and that I should be prepared.
I knew the outline of his family’s story from the profile Max had given me. Tom’s luck had been not too bad at all, give or take a Laura and an agoraphobic mother. We shared the protected prosperous lives of post-war children. His father was an architect working in the town planning department of Kent County Council and about to retire. Like me, Tom was the product of a good grammar school. Sevenoaks. He chose Sussex over Oxford and Cambridge because he liked the look of the courses (‘themes not surveys’), and had arrived at a stage of life when it was interesting to upset expectations. I couldn’t quite believe him when he insisted that he had no regrets. His mother was a peripatetic piano teacher until her growing fear of stepping outdoors confined her to lessons at home. A glimpse of sky, of a corner of a cloud was enough to bring her to the edge of a panic attack. No one knew what brought the agoraphobia on. Laura’s drinking came later. Tom’s sister Joan, before her marriage to the vicar, had been a dress designer – the source of the shop-window dummy as well as the Rev. Alfredus, I thought, but did not say.
His MA in international relations had been about justice
at the Nuremberg Trials, and his PhD was on
The Faerie Queene
. He adored Spenser’s poetry, though he wasn’t sure I was ready for it just yet. We were walking along Prince Albert Road, within earshot of London Zoo. He had finished his thesis over the summer, had it specially bound in hard covers with gold embossed title. It contained acknowledgements, abstract, footnotes, bibliography, index and four hundred pages of minute examination. Now it was a relief to contemplate the relative freedom of fiction. I talked about my own background and then for the length of Parkway and the top of the Camden Road, we fell into a companionable silence, odd between near strangers.
I was wondering about my sagging bed and whether it would support us. But I didn’t really care. Let it go through the floor onto Tricia’s desk, I would be in it with Tom when it went down. I was in a strange state of mind. Intense desire mixed with sorrow, and a muted sense of triumph. The sorrow was prompted by walking past my workplace, which had stirred up thoughts of Tony. All week I’d been haunted by his death again, but in different terms. Was he alone, full of blustering self-justifying thoughts right to the end? Did he know what Lyalin had told his interrogators? Perhaps someone from the fifth floor had gone out to Kumlinge to forgive him in exchange for all he knew. Or someone from the other side had arrived unannounced to pin on the lapel of his old windcheater the Order of Lenin. I tried to spare him my sarcasm, but generally I failed. I felt doubly betrayed. He could have told me about the two men who came in the chauffeured black car, he could have told me he was ill. I would have helped him, I would have done anything he asked. I would have lived with him on a Baltic island.
My small triumph was Tom. I’d received what I’d been hoping for, a typed one-line note from Peter Nutting upstairs thanking me for ‘the fourth man’. His little joke. I had delivered the fourth writer to Sweet Tooth. I snatched a glance at him. So lean, loping along by my side, hands deep in his
jeans, his gaze turned to one side, away from me, perhaps pursuing an idea. I already felt proud of him, and just a little proud of myself. If he didn’t want to, he would never have to think of Edmund Spenser again. The Sweet Tooth Faerie Queene had delivered Tom from academic struggle.
So here we were, indoors at last, in my twelve feet by twelve bedsit, Tom in my junk-shop chair, and I perched on the edge of the bed. It was better to go on talking for a while. My housemates would hear the drone of our voices and soon lose interest. And there were many subjects for us because scattered about the room, piled on the floor and on the chest of drawers were two hundred and fifty prompts in the form of paperback novels. Now at last he could see that I was a reader and not just an empty-headed girl who cared nothing for poetry. To relax, to ease ourselves towards the bed I was sitting on, we talked books in a light and careless way, hardly bothering to make a case when we disagreed, which was at every turn. He had no time for my kind of women – his hand moved past the Byatt and the Drabbles, past Monica Dickens and Elizabeth Bowen, those novels I had inhabited so happily. He found and praised Muriel Spark’s
The Driver’s Seat
. I said I found it too schematic and preferred
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
. He nodded, but not in agreement, it seemed, more like a therapist who now understood my problem. Without leaving the chair he stretched forward and picked up John Fowles’s
The Magus
and said he admired parts of that, as well as all of
The Collector
and
The French Lieutenant’s Woman
. I said I didn’t like tricks, I liked life as I knew it recreated on the page. He said it wasn’t possible to recreate life on the page without tricks. He stood and went over to the dresser and picked up a B.S. Johnson,
Albert Angelo
, the one with holes cut in the pages. He admired this too, he said. I said I detested it. He was amazed to see a copy of Alan Burns’s
Celebrations –
by far the best experimentalist in the country was the verdict. I said I hadn’t yet made a start. He saw I
had a handful of books published by John Calder. Best list around. I went over to where he stood. I said I hadn’t managed to read further than twenty pages in a single one. And so terribly printed! And how about J.G. Ballard – he saw I had three of his titles. Couldn’t face them, I said, too apocalyptic. He loved everything Ballard did. He was a bold and brilliant spirit. We laughed. Tom promised to read me a Kingsley Amis poem, ‘A Bookshop Idyll’, about men and women’s divergent tastes. It went a bit soppy at the end, he said, but it was funny and true. I said I’d probably hate it, except for the end. He kissed me, and that was the end of the literary discussion. We went towards the bed.
It was awkward. We’d been talking for hours, pretending that we weren’t thinking constantly of this moment. We were like pen friends who exchange chatty then intimate letters in each other’s language, then meet for the first time and realise they must begin again. His style was new to me. I was sitting on the edge of the bed once more. After a single kiss, and without further caresses, he leaned over me and set about undressing me, and doing it efficiently, routinely, as though he were getting a child ready for bed. If he’d been humming to himself it wouldn’t have surprised me. In different circumstances, if we’d been closer, that might have been an attractive tender moment of role-playing. But this was done in silence. I didn’t know what it meant and I was uneasy. When he stretched across my shoulders to unfasten my bra, I could have touched him, I was about to, then I didn’t. Supporting my head, he gently pushed me back on the bed and took off my knickers. None of this had any appeal for me at all. It was getting too tense. I had to intervene.
I sprang up and said, ‘Your turn.’ Obediently, he sat where I had been. I stood in front of him, so that my breasts were close to his face, and unbuttoned his shirt. I could see that he was hard. ‘Bedtime for big boys.’ When he took my nipple into his mouth I thought we were going to be all right. I’d
almost forgotten the sensation, hot and electric and piercing, spreading up round the base of my throat and right down to my perineum. But when we pulled back the covers and lay down, I saw that he was now soft and thought I must have done something wrong. I was also surprised by a glimpse of his pubic hair – so scant it was almost non-existent, and what was there was straight and silky, like head hair. We kissed again – he was good at that – but when I took his cock in my hand it was still soft. I pushed his head down towards my breasts since that had worked before. A fresh partner. It was like learning a new card game. But he went down past my breasts, lowered his head and brought me off with his tongue beautifully. I came in less than a glorious minute with a little shout I disguised as a strangled cough for the benefit of the lawyers downstairs. When I came to my senses I was relieved to see how aroused he was. My pleasure had loosened his own. And so I drew him towards me and it began.
It was not a great experience for either of us, but we made it through, we saved face. The limitation for me was partly, as I’ve said, my awareness of the other three, who seemed to have no love lives of their own and who would be straining to hear a human sound above the creak of bed springs. And it was partly that Tom was so silent. He said nothing endearing or affectionate or appreciative. Even his breathing didn’t change. I couldn’t banish the thought that he was quietly recording our lovemaking for future use, that he was making mental notes, creating and adjusting phrases to his liking, looking out for the detail that rose above the ordinary. I thought again of the story of the false vicar, and Jean of the ‘monstrous’ clitoris, the size of a little boy’s penis. What did Tom think of mine while he was down there measuring its length with his tongue? Too average to be worth remembering? When Edmund and Jean are reunited in the flat in Chalk Farm and make love, she reaches her orgasm and makes a series of
high-pitched bleats, as pure and evenly spaced as the BBC’s time signal
. What then of my politely muted sounds?
Such questions bred other, unhealthy thoughts. Neil Carder delights in his mannequin’s ‘stillness’, he thrills to the possibility that she was contemptuous of him and was ignoring him. Was this what Tom wanted, total passivity in a woman, an inwardness that
rolled back upon itself to become its opposite, a force that overwhelmed and consumed him
? Should I lie completely still and let my lips part as I fixed my gaze on the ceiling? I didn’t really think so, and I didn’t enjoy these speculations.
I added to my torments by fantasising about him reaching for a notebook and pencil from his jacket as soon as we were finished. Of course I would throw him out! But these self-harming thoughts were merely bad dreams. He lay on his back, I lay on his arm. It wasn’t cold but we drew the sheet and blanket over us. We dozed lightly for some minutes. I woke when the front door slammed downstairs and I heard the receding voices of my housemates in the street. We were alone in the house. Without being able to see, I sensed Tom coming fully awake. He was silent for a while and then he proposed taking me out to a good restaurant. His Foundation money hadn’t arrived, but he was sure it would come soon. I silently confirmed this. Max had signed off on the payment two days before.
We went to the White Tower at the south end of Charlotte Street and ate kleftiko with roast potatoes and drank three bottles of retsina. We could take it. How exotic, to be dining at the expense of the Secret Vote and not be able to say. I felt so grown up. Tom told me that during the war this famous restaurant had served spam
à la grecque
. We joked that soon those days would be back. He filled me in on the literary associations of the place while I smiled loopily, not quite listening because, again, some sort of music was playing in my mind, this time a symphony, a majestic slow movement on the grand scale of Mahler. This very room, Tom was saying, was where Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis founded their vorticist
Blast
magazine. The names meant nothing to me. We
walked back from Fitzrovia to Camden Town, arm in arm and drunk, talking nonsense. When we woke the next morning in my room the new card game was easy. In fact, it was a delight.