‘You keep asking me questions as if you know the answer to them. Or as if you know the answer you want. So why don’t you tell me what it is and I’ll tell you whether it’s mine as well?’
‘You’re quite cowardly, aren’t you, Tony?’
‘I think it’s more that I’m … peaceable.’
‘Well, I wouldn’t want to disturb your self-image.’
We finished our tea. I wrapped up the two remaining slices of cake and put them in a tin. Veronica kissed me nearer the corner of my lips than the centre, and then left. In my mind, this was the beginning of the end of our relationship. Or have I just remembered it this way to make it seem so, and to apportion blame? If asked in a court of law what happened and what was said, I could only attest to the words ‘heading’, ‘stagnating’ and ‘peaceable’. I’d never thought of myself as peaceable – or its opposite – until then. I would also swear to the truth of the biscuit tin; it was burgundy red, with the Queen’s smiling profile on it.
I don’t want to give the impression that all I did at Bristol was work and see Veronica. But few other memories come back to me. One that does – one single, distinct event – was the night I witnessed the Severn Bore. The local paper used to print a timetable, indicating where best to catch it and when. But the first occasion I tried, the water didn’t seem to be obeying its instructions. Then, one evening at Minsterworth, a group of us waited on the river bank until after midnight and were eventually rewarded. For an hour or two we observed the river flowing gently down to the sea as all good rivers do. The moon’s intermittent lighting was assisted by the occasional explorations of a few powerful torches. Then there was a whisper, and a craning of necks, and all thoughts of damp and cold vanished as the river simply seemed to change its mind, and a wave, two or three feet high, was heading towards us, the water breaking across its whole width, from bank to bank. This heaving swell came level with us, surged past, and curved off into the distance; some of my mates gave chase, shouting and cursing and falling over as it outpaced them; I stayed on the bank by myself. I don’t think I can properly convey the effect that moment had on me. It wasn’t like a tornado or an earthquake (not that I’d witnessed either) – nature being violent and destructive, putting us in our place. It was more unsettling because it looked and felt quietly wrong, as if some small lever of the universe had been pressed, and here, just for these minutes, nature was reversed, and time with it. And to see this phenomenon after dark made it the more mysterious, the more other-worldly.
After we broke up, she slept with me.
Yes, I know. I expect you’re thinking: The poor sap, how did he not see that coming? But I didn’t. I thought we were over, and I thought there was another girl (a normal-sized girl who wore high heels to parties) I was interested in. I didn’t see it coming at any point: when Veronica and I bumped into each other at the pub (she didn’t like pubs), when she asked me to walk her home, when she stopped halfway there and we kissed, when we got to her room and I turned the light on and she turned it off again, when she took her knickers off and passed me a pack of Durex Fetherlite, or even when she took one from my fumbling hand and put it on me, or during the rest of the swift business.
Yes, you can say it again: You poor sap. And did you still think her a virgin when she was rolling a condom on to your cock? In a strange way, you know, I did. I thought it might be one of those intuitive female skills I inevitably lacked. Well, perhaps it was.
‘You’ve got to hold on to it as you pull out,’ she whispered (did she think
I
was a virgin, perhaps?). Then I got up and walked to the bathroom, the filled condom occasionally slapping against the inside of my thighs. As I disposed of it I came to a decision and a conclusion: No, it went, no.
‘You selfish bastard,’ she said, the next time we met.
‘Yes, well, there it is.’
‘That practically makes it rape.’
‘I don’t think anything at all makes it that.’
‘Well, you might have had the decency to tell me beforehand.’
‘I didn’t know beforehand.’
‘Oh, so it was that bad?’
‘No, it was good. It’s just …’
‘Just what?’
‘You were always asking me to think about our relationship and so now perhaps I have. I did.’
‘Bravo. It must have been hard.’
I thought: And I haven’t even seen her breasts, in all this time. Felt them, but not seen them. Also, she’s completely wrong about Dvořák and Tchaikovsky. What’s more, I’ll be able to play my LP of
Un Homme et Une Femme
as often as I like. Openly.
‘Sorry?’
‘Jesus, Tony, you can’t even concentrate
now
. My brother was right about you.’
I knew I was meant to ask what Brother Jack had said, but I didn’t want to give her the pleasure. As I remained silent, she went on,
‘And don’t say that thing.’
Life seemed even more of a guessing game than usual.
‘What thing?’
‘About us still being able to be friends.’
‘Is that what I’m meant to say?’
‘You’re meant to say what you
think
, what you
feel
, for Christ’s sake, what you
mean
.’
‘All right. In that case I won’t say it – what I’m meant to say. Because I don’t think we can still be friends.’
‘Well done,’ she said sarcastically. ‘Well done.’
‘But let me ask you a question then. Did you sleep with me to get me back?’
‘I don’t have to answer your questions any more.’
‘In which case, why wouldn’t you sleep with me when we were going out together?’
No answer.
‘Because you didn’t need to?’
‘Perhaps I didn’t want to.’
‘Perhaps you didn’t want to because you didn’t need to.’
‘Well, you can believe what it suits you to believe.’
The next day, I took a milk jug she’d given me down to the Oxfam shop. I hoped she’d see it in the window. But when I stopped to check, there was something else on show instead: a small coloured lithograph of Chislehurst I’d given her for Christmas.
At least we were studying different subjects, and Bristol was a large enough city for us only occasionally to half-run into one another. The times we did, I would be hit by a sense of what I can only call pre-guilt: the expectation that she was going to say or do something that would make me feel properly guilty. But she never deigned to speak to me, so this apprehension gradually wore off. And I told myself I didn’t have anything to feel guilty about: we were both near-adults, responsible for our own actions, who had freely entered into a relationship which hadn’t worked out. No one had got pregnant, no one had got killed.
In the second week of the summer vacation a letter arrived with a Chislehurst postmark. I inspected the unfamiliar handwriting – looping and slightly careless – on the envelope. A female hand: her mother, no doubt. Another burst of pre-guilt: perhaps Veronica had suffered a nervous collapse, become wasted and even more waiflike. Or perhaps she had peritonitis and was asking for me from her hospital bed. Or perhaps … but even I could tell these were self-important fantasies. The letter was indeed from Veronica’s mother; it was brief and, to my surprise, not in the least accusatory. She was sorry to hear we had broken up, and sure I would find someone more suitable. But she didn’t appear to mean this in the sense that I was a scoundrel who deserved someone of equally low moral character. Rather, she implied the opposite: that I was well out of things, and she hoped the best for me. I wish I’d kept that letter, because it would have been proof, corroboration. Instead, the only evidence comes from my memory – of a carefree, rather dashing woman who broke an egg, cooked me another, and told me not to take any shit from her daughter.
I went back to Bristol for my final year. The girl of normal height who wore heels was less interested than I’d imagined, and so I concentrated on work. I doubted I had the right kind of brain for a first, but was determined to get a 2:1. On Friday nights, I allowed myself the break of an evening at the pub. One time, a girl I’d been chatting to came back with me and stayed the night. It was all pleasantly exciting and effective, but neither of us contacted the other afterwards. I thought about this less at the time than I do now. I expect such recreational behaviour will strike later generations as quite unremarkable, both for nowadays and for back then: after all, wasn’t ‘back then’ the Sixties? Yes it was, but as I said, it depended on where – and who – you were. If you’ll excuse a brief history lesson: most people didn’t experience ‘the Sixties’ until the Seventies. Which meant, logically, that most people in the Sixties were still experiencing the Fifties – or, in my case, bits of both decades side by side. Which made things rather confusing.
Logic: yes, where is logic? Where is it, for instance, in the next moment of my story? About halfway through my final year, I got a letter from Adrian. This had become an increasingly rare occurrence, as both of us were working hard for finals. He was of course expected to get a first. And then what? Postgraduate work, presumably, followed by academe, or some job in the public sphere where his brain and sense of responsibility would be put to good use. Someone once told me that the civil service (or at least, its higher echelons) was a fascinating place to work because you were always having to make moral decisions. Perhaps that would have suited Adrian. I certainly didn’t see him as a worldly person, or an adventurous one – except intellectually, of course. He wasn’t the sort who would get his name or face into the newspapers.
You can probably guess that I’m putting off telling you the next bit. All right: Adrian said he was writing to ask my permission to go out with Veronica.
Yes, why her, and why then; furthermore, why ask? Actually, to be true to my own memory, as far as that’s ever possible (and I didn’t keep this letter either), what he said was that he and Veronica were already going out together, a state of affairs that would doubtless come to my attention sooner or later; and so it seemed better that I heard about it from him. Also, that while this news might come as a surprise, he hoped that I could understand and accept it, because if I couldn’t, then he owed it to our friendship to reconsider his actions and decisions. And finally, that Veronica had agreed he should write this letter – indeed, it had been partly her suggestion.
As you can imagine, I enjoyed the bit about his moral scruples – implying that if I thought some venerable code of chivalry or, better still, some modern principle of ethics had been infringed, then he would, naturally and logically, stop fucking her. Assuming that she wasn’t stringing him along as she had done me. I also liked the hypocrisy of a letter whose point was not just to tell me something I might not have found out anyway (or not for quite a while), but to let me know how she, Veronica, had traded up: to my cleverest friend, and, what’s more, a Cambridge chap like Brother Jack. Also, to warn me that she would be hanging around if I planned on seeing Adrian – which had the desired effect of making me plan not to see Adrian. Pretty good for a day’s work, or a night’s. Again, I must stress that this is my reading now of what happened then. Or rather, my memory now of my reading then of what was happening at the time.
*
But I think I have an instinct for survival, for self-preservation. Perhaps this is what Veronica called cowardice and I called being peaceable. Anyway, something warned me not to get involved – at least, not now. I took the nearest postcard to hand – one of the Clifton Suspension Bridge – and wrote words like: ‘Being in receipt of your epistle of the 21st, the undersigned begs to present his compliments and wishes to record that everything is jolly fine by me, old bean.’ Silly, but unambiguous; and it would do for the moment. I would pretend – especially to myself – that I didn’t mind in the slightest. I would study hard, put my emotions on hold, not take anyone home from the pub, masturbate as and when required, and make sure I got the degree I deserved. I did all that (and yes, I got a 2:1).
I stayed on for a few weeks after finishing my exams, fell in with a different group, drank systematically, smoked a bit of dope, and thought about very little. Apart from imagining what Veronica might have said to Adrian about me (‘He took my virginity and then immediately dumped me. So really, the whole thing felt like rape, do you see?’). I imagined her buttering him up – I’d witnessed the start of that – and flattering him, playing on his expectations. As I said, Adrian was not a worldly person, for all his academic success. Hence the priggish tone of his letter, which for a while I used to reread with self-pitying frequency. When, at last, I replied to it properly, I didn’t use any of that silly ‘epistle’ language. As far as I remember, I told him pretty much what I thought of their joint moral scruples. I also advised him to be prudent, because in my opinion Veronica had suffered damage a long way back. Then I wished him good luck, burnt his letter in an empty grate (melodramatic, I agree, but I plead youth as a mitigating circumstance), and decided that the two of them were now out of my life for ever.
What did I mean by ‘damage’? It was only a guess; I didn’t have any real evidence. But whenever I looked back on that unhappy weekend, I realised that it hadn’t been just a matter of a rather naïve young man finding himself ill at ease among a posher and more socially skilled family. That was going on too, of course. But I could sense a complicity between Veronica and her heavy-footed, heavy-handed father, who treated me as substandard. Also between Veronica and Brother Jack, whose life and deportment she clearly regarded as nonpareil: he was the appointed judge when she asked publicly of me – and the question gets more condescending with each repetition – ‘He’ll do, won’t he?’ On the other hand, I saw no complicity at all with her mother, who doubtless recognised her for what she was. How did Mrs Ford have the initial chance to warn me against her daughter? Because that morning – the first morning after my arrival – Veronica had told everyone I wanted a lie-in, and gone off with her father and brother. No such exchange between us justified that invention. I never had lie-ins. I don’t even have them now.