by Alan Bennett
That apart it might be thought strange, his sexual inclinations being what they were, that Graham had never had any worries about the physical side of things. This, though, is to forget how much in love Graham was with himself. True, a mirror was always a help…a real mirror, that is; Graham did have his own full-length mirror that travelled with him wherever he went. No one else could see it, of course, but without it he was nothing whereas with it all things were possible: he could have faced a firing squad if he could have watched himself doing it. And though this wasn’t quite the spirit in which he approached his wedding night he was looking forward to seeing himself perform. However, when he surveyed their sumptuous quarters in the hotel he realised this was not going to be easy.
In many of the hotel rooms Graham had stayed, not always alone, an artfully located mirror afforded a reflection of the bed, the vision of himself naked on the sheets sufficient in itself to excite him with or without a companion. Here it was plush; grand and lavishly furnished with genuine antiques, the side table piled high with copies of Country Life, Tatler and The Field; one lacquer box contained after-dinner mints, another a selection of the Prince of Wales’s biscuits, plus, courtesy of the management, a basket of fruit and a huge bunch of peonies. What there was not was a mirror. There was a massive wardrobe, it’s true (bird’s-eye maple, French, nineteenth century), but there was no mirror.
Nor were there, as Graham swiftly ascertained while Betty was in the bathroom, any porn channels on the TV. On his travels for the bank Graham was used to staying in hotels a notch or two down from this palatial establishment where, though the accommodation might be less well accoutred, porn was always on offer. There, too, the rooms were smaller and the walls were thinner so that one could sometimes catch the occasional hint of what might be going on next door. Here the swagged drapes, the damasked wall covering, the refectory table, the royal biscuits all proclaimed the establishment’s indifference to such unworthy considerations. Honeymoon suite though it might be and the lap of luxury that it certainly was, good taste prevailed and sex was not catered for.
The reflection problem (of which Betty was unaware) was unwittingly solved when hanging up some of her clothes she opened the wardrobe to reveal that the interior of the door was backed by a full-length mirror, so once she was in the bathroom Graham with a little experimentation worked out that fully opened the wardrobe door would give a decent account of what, all being well, would be taking place on the bed.
So when Betty emerged from the bathroom it was to a ready and waiting Graham with the role he chose to play that of the stern and unsmiling husband now at last taking possession of his territory. ‘This,’ he said as he cast aside his towel, ‘this is when the marriage begins in earnest.’
Which it did with Betty abject and submissive and to begin with at any rate their conjunction wholly satisfactory.
Except that as he gazed sideways in admiration at the rise and fall of his buttocks the vigour of the assault caused the wardrobe door to close slightly leaving him with an unappealing reflection of knees and ankles. He twice had to get up and correct this (with no explanation offered to Betty) but when it happened a third time he decided to forget the mirror and just get on with it. From his new wife’s point of view this was preferable not simply because she now had her husband’s undivided attention but because deprived of the stimulating spectacle of his own heaving buttocks Graham took appreciably longer in reaching a conclusion.
Lying post-coitally naked on the bed Graham considered his wife and himself. He had seen a good many bodies in his young life though few that came up to his own. Since the stakes between him and his partners had seldom been equal, sex generally involved a degree of condescension on Graham’s part which in a nicer or less vain man might have been counted as compassion. But not with Graham.
This is where love generally comes in: whether the inequality between the partners is physical or social or indeed financial, evening up the score is what love is about. Still, even in the most perfect of unions there’s often detectable an element of bestowal. And that Betty was of the wrong gender made making love to her seem to Graham the greatest bestowal of all. He turned towards her again; it was actually quite enjoyable.
FOR A MARRIAGE that might be thought to have little going for it things actually went very well. It helped that as a cook Betty was good and also inventive; her mother-in-law had been neither so when Graham arrived home from the bank and there was always a delicious meal to be had it was a novelty. Nor did Betty object to him spending the whole of the evening in front of the television; in fact there was very little Betty did object to so that her young husband found himself even more pampered than he had been before.
At work, too, he was prospering, marriage having reassured his superiors at the bank of his seriousness and his dedication and (though this had never been mentioned) his sexual inclinations.
Betty had come along to one or two of the bank-oriented social occasions, grim affairs which she seemed to enjoy and where, out of earshot of Graham, she had impressed his colleagues with the pertinence of her questions: if she was sceptical of the answers she took care not to show it. ‘Your good lady seems to have her head screwed on,’ said Graham’s project manager. ‘She’s not just a pretty face.’ Since she certainly wasn’t that Graham took no notice anyway. He did, though, make it plain that he now did not actually need the job which naturally made his superiors all the more eager to offer him a better one.
In other respects too, there was no cause for complaint. Once the novelty had worn off it might have been expected that marital sex could quite soon have lost its charm. Not a bit of it. The truth was Graham found a great deal more to do when making love to Betty than he ever had with the most enterprising of his male partners. Moreover there was a burglarious aspect to doing it with Betty which he had never come across before.
There were the clothes for instance. Had a young man in the past insisted on keeping on his trousers thus leaving Graham to negotiate zip, buttons, pants and whatever else, he would have found the corresponding preliminaries with Betty more familiar. But such slow divestment was an apprenticeship he had never had to serve, his partners gladly casting off whatever they had on the quicker to enjoy Graham’s charms. So now, coming home from the bank (and sometimes without even taking off his coat) he gets one in with Betty before supper; he finds the fumbling attendant on her urgent and only partial déshabillé particularly exciting as it comes always with the sense that he is breaking in. It’s a sense she contrives to give him but Graham is not sophisticated enough to know that. The obstacles were also natural ones bred out of unfamiliarity with the geography of the region and the function of its components. Women, he found himself thinking, had to be investigated. But mouth clamped to mouth while he fumbled around below he had the entirely pleasurable notion that he was cracking a safe. Though he never failed to effect an entry the combination still remained a mystery, with married love for Graham still pleasingly felonious.
If any precautions in the way of condoms and suchlike have gone unmentioned that is a casualty of the storytelling. Though the slithering on of contraceptives has been elided in this narrative, in his premarital sexual sorties Graham had been scrupulous never to omit this preliminary even when giddier bedfellows mocked his circumspection. This, though, should have come as no surprise as however frantic the foreplay the neat fashion in which Graham put his shoes by the bed with his socks tucked inside should have signalled that this was not exactly a free spirit.
However, here again married love had its untransgressive attractions. Since Betty was on the pill or took precautions of her own which Graham did not choose to enquire into, the marital bed was untrammelled by tedious prophylaxis so that what Graham had been expecting to find an onerous and even distasteful duty unexpectedly partook of a freedom and absence of restraint that he found exhilarating. He took to his home sheets with unsheathed abandon; here at least he wasn’t going to catch anything and the assurance
lent his efforts both confidence and flair. Betty, whose sexual expectations had not been high, found herself the object of prolonged and vigorous and on the whole pleasurable assault. She was astonished at her husband’s verve and gusto but if she was astonished there was no one more so than Graham.
Elsewhere Mr Forbes had not been allowed to forget his despicable behaviour at the wedding and he spent several months in more or less permanent exile to the garden shed. In his wife’s brief absences from the home he managed to get to his computer and send hurried (and always lying) bulletins to his grass-skirted friend in Samoa. But now he had a new friend.
IN THE MONTHS immediately following their marriage Betty busied herself with furnishing and kitting out the newly bought flat. Firmly rejecting her mother-in-law’s offers of help, with Mr Forbes she was more approachable. Though she was herself a dab hand at the computer Mr Forbes was useful in other respects, particularly in locating and shopping for her various requirements. Besides being good company he was also something of a handyman so more and more he could be found making the trip over to his daughter-in-law’s where they both shook their heads over their respective partners.
Mr Forbes had retired early, his pension tied to the price of shares in his former company. The resultant fluctuations in his income were a constant source of anxiety to Mr Forbes and finding him often groaning over the stock market Betty eventually persuaded him to tell her why and to take her through his portfolio. Though he felt he was only indulging her curiosity Mr Forbes found Betty surprisingly knowledgeable (‘I used to have to do this for my father’) and within a few months (and with a lot of laughter) she had so restructured his retirement settlement as to virtually double his income, the only proviso being that he should mention it neither to Graham nor (which was much the same) his mother. Graham’s notion of a wife was as an ingenuous dependency and knowing much more than he did she had the sense to keep it quiet. Not for the first time Mr Forbes wondered why a woman so decidedly accomplished had chosen to marry his son.
One of the functions of women, Mr Forbes had long since decided, was to impart an element of trouble into the otherwise tranquil lives of men. His wife, for instance, though almost alarmingly robust, claimed to be seldom altogether well, though it wasn’t anything one could put one’s finger on. True the trouble was often to do with that department Mr Forbes might have been expected to put his finger on but rarely did while at the same time being something intangible which, unless the man kept it in the forefront of his mind, allowed him to be accused of a lack of consideration and of being heartless. What was wrong, Mr Forbes felt, even with someone as stalwart as his wife was that the man was not perpetually aware that there was something wrong. That was what was wrong. Perhaps Mr Forbes’s experience was unfortunate and if this was indeed a flaw of the gender it was one Betty wholly lacked, as she was cheerful, funny and, as Mr Forbes remarked to his wife, ‘full of the joys of spring’.
‘Who wouldn’t be, married to Graham?’
Nor did Betty impose any of the linguistic dos and don’ts which so trammelled frank and open discussion with his wife. ‘Balls’ figured, ‘arse’ and the occasional ‘Shit!’ and greatly daring he even ventured on ‘fanny’ (at least in its derivative of fannying about). Betty was not in the least put out. Mr Forbes preferred being called Ted but Mrs Forbes thought Ted Forbes sounded like a character in The Archers and always called him Edward. Betty, without being told, knew enough about her mother-in-law to call him Edward when she was around and Ted when she wasn’t. It was all part of licensing him to be the bit of a devil he felt his wife had never allowed him to be.
Graham, of course, had been a bit of a devil in his time though if Betty has any inkling of his premarital inclinations she keeps her observations (it would be wrong to call them suspicions) strictly to herself though their life together was not without clues.
Thinking Betty was in the bath Graham was watching a late-night programme on Channel 4 called Footballers with Their Shirts Off when she unexpectedly came in on the trail of the hair dryer.
‘I didn’t know you were interested in football,’ said Betty.
‘I keep an eye on Newcastle,’ said Graham just as (in an old clip) Gary Lineker swapped his shirt with some dish from the former Yugoslavia.
‘I prefer him now,’ said Betty.
‘Who?’
‘Gary Lineker,’ said Betty. ‘Grey hair suits him. Still, nice legs.’
‘I wouldn’t know,’ said Graham primly.
‘Funny programme,’ said Betty. ‘Is it recorded highlights?’ and went back to drying her hair.
‘Should we have a child?’ The question is Betty’s and they are in bed.
‘Isn’t that a bit of a shot in the dark?’
‘I wonder about starting a business?’
‘What sort of a business?’
‘On the internet.’ She’d already done this but hadn’t said so to Graham.
Graham was silent.
‘I have to do something with my life, Graham.’
‘You have done something with your life. You’ve married me. I’m the one who has to do something with his life. Why don’t you take up photography?’
Betty sighed.
‘Could we go to bed again?’
‘Betty. We are in bed.’
‘You don’t like me to say the word.
‘Make love. Say “make love”.’
TO SAY THAT BETTY had entertained no suspicions of Graham’s premarital sexual experiences suggests that this is what they were, premarital. This was not entirely true. He still had the odd fling, now more of a treat than it once was partly because it was rarer but also because it was more risky and so seemed to him bolder.
On one of these occasional forays Graham found himself in bed with a well-proportioned young man who, while devoting himself wholeheartedly to the business in hand, still managed to give the impression of being a not unamused spectator.
‘So Toby…’ and the naked young man put his hands behind his head. ‘How’re you surviving the rigours of married life?’
The question was post-coital and mildly disturbed Graham, who had been smart enough to leave off his wedding ring.
‘All right,’ he said diffidently.
‘All right? All right? I don’t like the sound of that. Mind you,’ and he looked down at the equally naked Graham, ‘I think it’s got bigger. Filled out a bit, know what I mean?’
It began to dawn on Graham that they had met before and the name suddenly came to him. ‘Gary.’
‘Aww you remembered.’ Kevin gave his thigh a squeeze. ‘Your stag night, right?’
‘You’re the long-distance lorry driver.’
‘No, no. Your memory is at fault there, Toby. I’m the panel beater.’
‘Your hands are very soft for a panel beater.’
‘I apply a protective cream.’
It was all coming back to Graham.
‘You’ve gone up in the world.’
‘You think so?’
‘This place, it’s a gated development. Last time you were just in a flat.’
‘Nothing but the best,’ said Kevin, stroking his belly, ‘only Toby – you set too much store by material possessions.’
Not a panel beater, thought Graham. An interior decorator, maybe.
‘How’s Shirley?’
‘Who?’
‘Shirley,’ said Graham. ‘Your girlfriend. You fuck her on Fridays.’
‘No such person. I couldn’t have anything to do with a girl called Shirley, Friday or any other day of the week. I’m not sure I’d even get it up.’
Graham noted that Gary had exchanged his chain and label for a pair of dog tags.
‘These are new,’ said Graham.
‘Only to you. I like them. They add that whiff of combat. We could be in the Falklands. Or a tent in the Western Desert.’
He was leaning on his left elbow idly tracing a circle round Graham’s navel.
This wasn’t a sce
nario Graham had much interest in pursuing. He and Betty had once done it in a tent overlooking Nidderdale, and area of outstanding beauty though it was it had not been a success and a vile tea in Pateley Bridge had not redeemed it.
‘I hope you’re being diligent and conscientious in the performance of your marital duties. Is she still getting it twice a night?’
Graham who was not dissatisfied with his record in this department smiled complacently.
‘She know you play for the opposition?’
‘Yes’ would have been the prudent answer.
‘No,’ said Graham. ‘No idea.’
‘Would she mind, do you think?’
‘Of course not,’ said Graham, learning from experience. ‘Not these days.’
‘That’s right, Toby. What’s gender? Spread it around.’
‘Time I was off,’ said Graham.
He reached for his clothes neatly folded on the bedside chair.
‘Don’t fancy a supplementary?’
Graham looked at his watch.
‘Can’t I’m afraid.’
‘She won’t mind. Tell her you were kept late at the bank.’
‘I didn’t say I worked at a bank.’
It’s true he hadn’t, but casting his mind back he couldn’t remember where he’d said he worked. ‘You’re in a bank. I’m a panel beater. That’s how society works. Speaking of which I’m afraid I’m going to have to charge you for this one. Shall we say, £100.’
‘A hundred? Fuck me.’
‘I wish I could say I just had but that’s where you draw the line, Toby, remember?’
‘You’re lucky I’ve got it,’ said Graham, handing over the notes. ‘I don’t carry much cash.’
‘Why should you?’ said Kevin. ‘You work in a bank. Nice car.’
