They had met again in London in April, at their mutual friend Callum’s twenty-third birthday party, spending the whole of the next day in Kensington Gardens together, drinking wine from the bottle and talking. Clearly she had been forgiven, but they had also settled into the maddening familiarity of friendship; maddening for her at least, lying on the fresh spring grass, their hands almost touching as he told her about Lola, this incredible Spanish girl he’d met while ski-ing in the Pyrenees.
And then he was off travelling again, broadening his mind yet further. China had turned out to be too alien and ideological for Dexter’s taste, and he had instead embarked on a leisurely year-long tour of what the guide books called ‘Party Towns’. So they were pen pals now, Emma composing long, intense letters crammed with jokes and underlining, forced banter and barely concealed longing; two-thousand-word acts of love on air-mail paper. Letters, like compilation tapes, were really vehicles for unexpressed emotions and she was clearly putting far too much time and energy into them. In return, Dexter sent her postcards with insufficient postage: ‘Amsterdam is MAD’, ‘Barcelona INSANE’, ‘Dublin ROCKS. Sick as DOG this morning.’ As a travel writer, he was no Bruce Chatwin, but still she would slip the postcards in the pocket of a heavy coat on long soulful walks on Ilkley Moor, searching for some hidden meaning in ‘VENICE COMPLETELY FLOODED!!!!’.
‘Who’s this Dexter then?’ her mother asked, peering at the back of the postcards. ‘Your boyfriend, is he?’ Then, with a concerned look: ‘Have you ever thought about working for the Gas Board?’ Emma got a job pulling pints in the local pub, and time passed, and she felt her brain begin to soften like something forgotten at the back of the fridge.
Then Gary Nutkin had phoned, the skinny Trotskyist who had directed her in a stark, uncompromising production of Brecht’s Fears and Miseries of the Third Reich back in ’86, then kissed her for three stark, uncompromising hours at the last-night party. Shortly afterwards he had taken her to a Peter Greenaway double-bill, waiting until four hours in before reaching across and absent-mindedly placing his hand on her left breast as if adjusting a dimmer switch. They made Brechtian love that evening in a stale single bed beneath a poster for The Battle of Algiers, Gary taking care throughout to ensure that he was in no way objectifying her. Then nothing, not a word, until that late-night phone-call in May, and the hesitant words, softly spoken: ‘How would you like to join my theatre co-operative?’
Emma had no ambitions as an actress or any great love of theatre, except as a medium to convey words and ideas. And Sledgehammer was to be a new kind of progressive theatre co-op, with shared intentions, a shared zeal, a written manifesto and a commitment to changing young lives through art. Maybe there’d be some romance too, Emma thought, or at the very least some sex. She packed her rucksack, said goodbye to her sceptical mum and dad, and set out in the mini-bus as if heading out on some great cause, a sort of theatrical Spanish Civil War, funded by the Arts Council.
But three months later, what had happened to the warmth, the camaraderie, the sense of social value, of high ideals coupled with fun? They were meant to be a co-operative. That’s what was written on the side of the van, she had stencilled it there herself. I-hate-this-job-I-hate this-job, said Sid. Emma pressed her hands against her ears, and asked herself some fundamental questions.
Why am I here?
Am I really making a difference?
Why can’t she put some clothes on?
What is that smell?
Where do I want to be right now?
She wanted to be in Rome, with Dexter Mayhew. In bed.
‘Shaf-tes-bury Avenue.’
‘No, Shafts-bury. Three syllables.’
‘Lychester Square.’
‘Leicester Square, two syllables.’
‘Why not Ly-chester?’
‘No idea.’
‘But you are meant to be my teacher, you are meant to know.’
‘Sorry,’ Dexter shrugged.
‘Well I think it is stupid language,’ said Tove Angstrom, and punched him in the shoulder.
‘A stupid language. I couldn’t agree with you more. No need to hit me though.’
‘I apologise,’ said Tove, kissing his shoulder, then his neck and mouth, and Dexter was once again struck by how rewarding teaching could be.
They lay in a tangle of cushions on the terracotta floor of his tiny room, having given up on the single bed as inadequate for their needs. In the brochure for the Percy Shelley International School of English, the teachers’ accommodation had been described as ‘some comfortable with many mitigating features’ and this summed it up perfectly. His room in the Centro Storico was dull and institutional, but there was at least a balcony, a foot-wide sill overlooking a picturesque square that, in a very Roman way, also functioned as a car park. Each morning he was woken by the sound of office-workers breezily reversing their cars into each other.
But in the middle of this humid July afternoon, the only sound came from the wheels of tourist suitcases rumbling on the cobbles below, and they lay with the windows wide open, kissing lazily, her hair clinging to his face, thick and dark and smelling of some Danish shampoo: artificial pine and cigarette smoke. She reached across his chest for the packet on the floor, lit two cigarettes and passed him one, and he shuffled up onto the pillows, letting the cigarette dangle from his lip like Belmondo or someone in a Fellini film. He had never seen a Belmondo or Fellini film, but was familiar with the postcards: stylish, black and white. Dexter didn’t like to think of himself as vain, but there were definitely times when he wished there was someone on hand to take his photograph.
They kissed again, and he wondered vaguely if there was some moral or ethical dimension to this situation. Of course the time to worry about the pros and cons of sleeping with a student would have been after the College party, while Tove was perching unsteadily on the edge of his bed and unzipping her knee-length boots. Even then, in the muddle of red wine and desire he had found himself wondering what Emma Morley would say. Even as Tove twirled her tongue in his ear, he had conducted his defence: she’s nineteen, an adult, and anyway I’m not a real teacher. Besides, Emma was a long way away at this moment, changing the world from a mini-bus on the ring road of a provincial town, and what was all this to do with Emma anyway? Tove’s knee-length boots sagged in the corner of the room now, in the hostel where overnight visitors were strictly forbidden.
He shifted his body to a cooler patch of terracotta, peering out of the window to try to gauge the time from the small square of vivid blue sky. The rhythm of Tove’s breathing was changing as she slipped into sleep, but he had an important appointment to keep. He dropped the last two inches of cigarette into a wine glass, and stretched for his wristwatch, which lay on an unread copy of Primo Levi’s If This is a Man.
‘Tove, I’ve got to go.’
She groaned in protest.
‘I’m meeting my parents, I’ve got to leave now.’
‘Can I come too?’
He laughed. ‘Don’t think so, Tove. Besides you’ve got a grammar test on Monday. Go and revise.’
‘You test me. Test me now.’
‘Okay, verbs. Present continuous.’
She coiled one leg around him, using the leverage to pull herself on top of him. ‘I am kissing, you are kissing, he is kissing, she is kissing . . .’
He pulled himself up on his elbows. ‘Seriously, Tove . . .’
‘Ten more minutes,’ she whispered in his ear, and he sank back to the floor. Why not, he thought? After all, I’m in Rome, it’s a beautiful day. I am twenty-four years old, financially secure, healthy. I ache and I am doing something that I shouldn’t be doing, and I am very, very lucky.
The attraction of a life devoted to sensation, pleasure and self would probably wear thin one day, but there was still plenty of time for that yet.
And how is Rome? How is La Dolce Vita? (look it up). I imagine you right now at a café table, drinking one of those ‘cappuccinos’ we hear so
much about, and wolf-whistling at everything. You’re probably wearing sunglasses to read this. Well take them off, you look ridiculous. Did you get the books I sent you? Primo Levi is a fine Italian writer. It’s to remind you that life isn’t all gelati and espadrilles. Life can’t always be like the opening of Betty Blue. And how is teaching? Please promise me you’re not sleeping with your students. That would just be so . . . disappointing.
Must go now. Bottom of page looms, and in the other room I can hear the thrilling murmur of our audience as they throw chairs at each other. I finish this job in two weeks THANK GOD, then Gary Nutkin, our director, wants me to devise a show for infant schools about Apartheid. With PUPPETS for fuck’s sake. Six months in a Transit on the M6 with a Desmond Tutu marionette on my lap. I might give that one a miss. Besides, I’ve written this two-woman play about Virginia Woolf and Emily Dickinson called ‘Two Lives’ (either that or ‘Two Depressed Lesbians’). Maybe I’ll put that on in a pub-theatre somewhere. Once I’d explained to Candy who Virginia Woolf was, she said that she really, really wanted to play her, but only if she can take her top off, so that’s the casting sorted. I’ll be Emily Dickinson, and keep my top on. I’ll reserve you tickets.
In the meantime, I have to choose whether to sign-on in Leeds or sign-on in London. Choices, choices. I’ve been trying to fight moving to London – it’s so PREDICTABLE, moving to London – but my old flatmate Tilly Killick (remember her? Big red glasses, strident views, sideburns?) has a spare room in Clapton. She calls it her ‘box room’, which doesn’t bode well. What’s Clapton like? Are you coming back to London soon? Hey! Maybe we could be flatmates?
‘Flatmates?’ Emma hesitated, shook her head and groaned, then wrote ‘Just kidding!!!!’ She groaned again. ‘Just kidding’ was exactly what people wrote when they meant every word. Too late to scribble it out now, but how to sign off? ‘All the best’ was too formal, ‘tout mon amour’ too affected, ‘all my love’ too corny, and now Gary Nutkin was in the doorway once again.
‘Okay, places everyone!’ Sorrowfully he held the door open as if leading them to the firing squad, and quickly, before she could change her mind, she wrote—
God I miss you, Dex
—then her signature and a single kiss scratched deep into the pale blue air-mail paper.
In the Piazza della Rotunda, Dexter’s mother sat at a café table, a novel held loosely in one hand, her eyes closed and her head tilted back and to the side like a bird to catch the last of the afternoon sun. Rather than arrive straightaway, Dexter took a moment to sit amongst the tourists on the steps of the Pantheon and watch as the waiter approached and picked up her ashtray, startling her. They both laughed, and from the theatrical movement of her mouth and arms he could tell that she was speaking her terrible Italian, her hand on the waiter’s arm, patting it flirtatiously. With no apparent idea what had been said, the waiter nevertheless grinned and flirted back, then walked away, glancing over his shoulder at the beautiful English woman who had touched his arm and talked incomprehensibly.
Dexter saw all this and smiled. That old Freudian notion, first whispered at boarding school, that boys were meant to be in love with their mothers and hate their fathers, seemed perfectly plausible to him. Everyone he had ever met had been in love with Alison Mayhew, and the best of it was that he really liked his father too; as in so many things, he had all the luck.
Often, at dinner or in the large, lush garden of the Oxfordshire house, or on holidays in France as she slept in the sun, he would notice his father staring at her with his bloodhound eyes in dumb adoration. Fifteen years her elder, tall, long-faced and introverted, Stephen Mayhew seemed unable to believe this one remarkable piece of good fortune. At her frequent parties, if Dexter sat very quietly so as not to be sent to bed, he would watch as the men formed an obedient, devoted circle around her; intelligent, accomplished men, doctors and lawyers and people who spoke on the radio, reduced to moony teenage boys. He would watch as she danced to early Roxy Music albums, a cocktail glass in her hand, woozy and self-contained as the other wives looked on, dumpy and slow-witted in comparison. School-friends too, even the cool complicated ones, would turn into cartoons around Alison Mayhew, flirting with her while she flirted back, engaging her in water fights, complimenting her on her terrible cooking – the violently scrambled eggs, the black pepper that was ash from a cigarette.
She had once studied fashion in London but these days ran a village antiques shop, selling expensive rugs and chandeliers to genteel Oxford with great success. She still carried with her that aura of having been something-in-the-Sixties – Dexter had seen the photographs, the clippings from faded colour supplements – but with no apparent sadness or regret she had given this up for a resolutely respectable, secure, comfortable family life. Typically, it was as if she had sensed exactly the right moment to leave the party. Dexter suspected that she had occasional flings with the doctors, the lawyers, the people who spoke on the radio, but he found it hard to be angry with her. And always people said the same thing – that he had got it from her. No-one was specific about what ‘it’ was, but everyone seem to know; looks of course, energy and good health, but also a certain nonchalant self-confidence, the right to be at the centre of things, on the winning team.
Even now, as she sat in her washed-out blue summer dress, fishing in her immense handbag for matches, it seemed as if the life of the Piazza revolved around her. Shrewd brown eyes in a heart-shaped face under a mess of expensively dishevelled black hair, her dress undone one button too far, an immaculate mess. She saw him approach and her face cracked with a wide smile.
‘Forty-five minutes late, young man. Where have you been?’
‘Over there watching you chat up the waiters.’
‘Don’t tell your father.’ She knocked the table with her hip as she stood and hugged him. ‘Where have you been though?’
‘Just preparing lessons.’ His hair was wet from the shower he had shared with Tove Angstrom, and as she brushed it from his forehead, her hand cupping the side of his face fondly, he realised that she was already a little drunk.
‘Very tousled. Who’s been tousling you? What mischief have you been up to?’
‘I told you, planning lessons.’
She pouted sceptically. ‘And where did you get to last night? We waited at the restaurant.’
‘I’m sorry, I got delayed. College disco.’
‘A disco. Very 1977. What was that like?’
‘Two hundred drunk Scandinavian girls vogue-ing.’
‘“Vogue-ing”. I’m pleased to say that I have absolutely no idea what that is. Was it fun?’
‘It was hell.’
She patted his knee. ‘You poor, poor thing.’
‘Where’s Dad?’
‘He’s had to go for one of his little lie-downs at the hotel. The heat, and his sandals were chafing. You know what your father’s like, he’s so Welsh.’
‘So what have you been doing?’
‘Just wandering around the Forum. I thought it was beautiful, but Stephen was bored out of his skull. All that mess, columns just left lying around all over the place. I think he thinks they should bulldoze it all, put up a nice conservatory or something.’
‘You should visit the Palatine. It’s at the top of that hill . . .’
‘I know where the Palatine is, Dexter, I was visiting Rome before you were born.’
‘Yes, who was emperor back then?’
‘Ha. Here, help me with this wine, don’t let me drink the whole bottle.’ She already had, pretty much, but he poured the last inch into a water glass and reached for her cigarettes. Alison tutted. ‘You know sometimes I think we took the whole liberal-parent thing a bit too far.’
‘I quite agree. You ruined me. Pass the matches.’
‘It’s not clever, you know. I know you think it makes you look like a film star, but it doesn’t, it looks awful.’
‘So why do you do it then?’
‘Because it makes me look sens
ational.’ She placed a cigarette between her lips and he lit it with his match. ‘I’m giving up anyway. This is my last one. Now quickly, while your father’s not here—’ She shuffled closer, conspiratorially. ‘Tell me about your love-life.’
‘No!’
‘Come on, Dex! You know I’m forced to live vicariously through my children, and your sister’s such a virgin . . .’
‘Are you drunk, old lady?’
‘How she got two children, I’ll never know . . .’
‘You are drunk.’
‘I don’t drink, remember?’ When Dexter was twelve she had solemnly taken him into the kitchen one night and in a low voice instructed him how to make a dry martini, as if it were a solemn rite. ‘Come on then. Spill the beans, all the juicy details.’
‘I have nothing to say.’
‘No-one in Rome? No nice Catholic girl?’
‘Nope.’
‘Not a student, I hope.’
‘Of course not.’
‘What about back home? Who’s been writing you those long tear-stained letters we keep forwarding?’
‘None of your business.’
‘Don’t make me steam them open again, just tell me!’
‘There’s nothing to tell.’
She sat back in her chair. ‘Well I’m disappointed in you. What about that nice girl who came to stay that time?’
‘What girl?’
‘Pretty, earnest, Northern. Got drunk and shouted at your father about the Sandinistas.’
‘That was Emma Morley.’
‘Emma Morley. I liked her. Your father liked her too, even if she did call him a bourgeois fascist.’ Dexter winced at the memory. ‘I don’t mind, at least she had a bit of fire, a bit of passion. Not like those silly sex-pots we usually find at the breakfast table. Yes Mrs Mayhew, no Mrs Mayhew. I can hear you, you know, tip-toeing to the guest room in the night . . .’
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