Therapy

by David Lodge

  I don’t think Dudley can have ever used lavender on me before, because sniffing it triggered the most extraordinarily vivid memory – of Maureen Kavanagh, my first girlfriend. She’s been flitting in and out of my consciousness ever since I started this journal, like a figure glimpsed indistinctly at the edge of a distant wood, moving between the trees, gliding in and out of the shadows. The smell of lavender drew her out into the open – the lavender and Kierkegaard. I made a note some weeks ago that the symbol for the double aa in modern Danish, the single a with a little circle on top, reminded me of something I couldn’t pin down at the time. Well, it was Maureen’s handwriting. She used to dot her is that way, with a little circle instead of a point, like a trail of bubbles above the lines of her big round handwriting. I don’t know where she got the idea from. We used to write to each other even though we saw each other every morning at the tram stop, just for the thrill of having private letters. I used to write her rather passionate love-letters and she would send back shy little notes of disappointing banality: “I dd homework after tea, then I helped Mum wth her roning. Dd you lsten n to Tony Hancock? We were n fts.” She used mauve stationery from Woolworths that was scented with lavender. That whiff from Dudley’s phial brought it all back – not just her handwriting, but Maureen in all her specificity. Maureen. My first love. My first breast.

  There was a letter from Samantha in the mailbox when I got in, with her idea for writing Debbie’s part out of The People Next Door : in the last episode Priscilla is knocked off her bike by a lorry and killed instantly, but returns as a ghost, which only Edward can see, and urges him to find another partner. Not exactly original, but it has possibilities. You have to admit, the girl is smart. In another mood, I might have tinkered with it. But all I can think about at the moment is Maureen. I feel an irresistible urge coming over me to write about her.

  A MEMOIR

  I FIRST BECAME aware of Maureen kavanagh’s existence when I was fifteen, though nearly a year passed before I managed to speak to her and discover her name. I used to see her every weekday morning, as I waited for the tram which took me on the first stage of my tedious three-leg journey to school. That was Lambeth Merchants’, a direct-grant grammar school to which, pushed by a well-intentioned junior-school head, I unluckily gained admission at the Eleven-Plus. I say unluckily because I believe now that I would have been happier, and therefore have learned more, at some less prestigious and pretentious establishment. I had the innate intelligence, but not the social and cultural back-up, to benefit from the education on offer at Lambeth Merchants’. It was an ancient foundation that took obsessive pride in its history and tradition. It accepted fee-paying pupils as well as the cream of the II-Plus, and modelled itself on the classic English public school, with “Houses” (though there were no boarders), a chapel, a school song with words in Latin, and numerous arcane rituals and privileges. The buildings were sooty neo-gothic redbrick, turreted and crenellated, with stained-glass windows in the chapel and the main assembly hall. The teachers wore gowns. I never fitted in and never did well academically, languishing at the bottom of my class for most of my school career. My Mum and Dad were unable to help me with my homework, and indulged my tendency to skimp it. I spent most evenings listening to comedy shows on the radio (my classics are ITMA, Much Binding in the Marsh, Take It From Here, and The Goon Show, not the Aeneid and David Copperfield) or playing football and cricket in the street with my mates from the local secondary modern. Sport was encouraged at Lambeth Merchants’– they even gave “caps” for representing the school – but the winter game was rugby, which I loathed, and school cricket was played with a pomp and circumstance that I found tedious. The only success I enjoyed at school was as a comic actor in the annual play. Otherwise I was made to feel stupid and uncouth. I became the class clown, and perennial butt of the masters’ sarcasm. I was caned frequently. I looked forward to leaving school as soon as I had taken the O-Level examinations I did not expect to pass.

  Maureen went to the Sacred Heart convent school in Greenwich, also courtesy of the Eleven-Plus. She had an equally awkward journey from Hatchford where we both lived, but in the opposite direction. Hatchford was, I suppose, a desirable outer suburb of London when it was first built at the end of the nineteenth century, just where the Thames plain meets the first Surrey hills, but was almost part of the decaying inner city by the time we were born. Maureen lived at the top of one of the hills, in the lower half of a huge Victorian villa that had been divided into flats. Her family inhabited the basement and ground floor. We lived in a little terraced house in Albert Street, one of the streets off the main road at the bottom of the hill, where the trams ran. My dad was a tram-driver.

  It was a hard job. He had to stand for eight hours or more at the controls, on a platform open to the elements on one side, and a certain amount of brute force was needed to apply the brakes. In the winter he came home from work chilled and haggard, and crouched over the coal fire in the living-room, hardly able to speak till he had thawed out. There was a more modern type of tram, streamlined and fully enclosed, which I saw occasionally in other parts of London, but my Dad always worked on the old clapped-out pre-war trams, open at each end, that screeched and rattled and groaned as they lurched from stop to stop. Those red, double-decker trams, with a single headlamp that glowed in the fog like a bleary eye, with their clanging bells, their brass fittings and wooden seats polished by the friction of innumerable hands and bums, their top decks reeking of cigarette-smoke and sick, their muffled grey-faced drivers and chirpy, mittened clippies, are inseparably linked with my memories of childhood and adolescence.

  Every weekday I caught my first tram at Hatchford Five Ways on my way to school. I used to wait not at the stop itself but on the corner just before it, outside a flower shop, from which I could sight my tram as soon as it appeared around a distant curve in the main road, swaying on the rails like a galleon at sea. By moving my angle of vision about thirty degrees I could also look up the long straight incline of Beecher’s Road. Maureen always appeared at the top at the same time, at five minutes to eight, and took three minutes to reach the bottom. She passed me, crossed the road, and walked a few yards to wait for a tram going in the opposite direction to mine. I watched her boldly when she was distant, covertly as she approached me, while ostensibly looking out for my tram. After she had passed, I would saunter to my stop, and watch her as she waited, with her back turned to me, on the other side of the road. Sometimes, just as she came up to the corner, I would risk turning my head in feigned boredom or impatience at the non-appearance of the tram, and glance at her as if by accident. Usually she had her eyes lowered, but on one occasion she was looking straight at me and our eyes met. She blushed crimson and looked quickly down at the pavement as she passed. I don’t think I breathed for five minutes afterwards.

  This went on for months. Perhaps a year. I didn’t know who she was, or anything about her, except that I was in love with her. She was beautiful. I suppose a less impressionable, or more blasé, observer might have described her as “pretty” or “nice-looking” rather than beautiful, judging her to be a little too short in the neck, or a little too thick in the waist, to qualify for the highest accolade, but to me she was beautiful. Even in her school uniform – a pudding-bowl hat, a gaberdine raincoat and pleated pinafore dress, all in a dead, depressing shade of navy blue – she was beautiful. She wore the hat at a jaunty angle, or perhaps it was the natural springiness of her auburn hair that pushed it to the back of her head, the rim framing her heart-shaped, heart-stopping face: big, dark brown eyes, a small, neat nose, generous mouth, dimpled chin. How can you describe beauty in words? It’s hopeless, like shuffling bits of an Identikit picture around. Her hair was long and wavy, drawn over her ears and gathered by a clasp at the back of her neck into a kind of loose mane that fell halfway down her back. She wore her raincoat unbuttoned, flapping open at the front, with the sleeves turned back to expose the cuffs of her white blouse, and the bel
t knotted behind. I discovered later that she and her schoolfriends spent endless hours contriving such tiny modifications of the uniform, trying to outwit the nuns’ repressive regulations. She carried her books in a kind of shopping-bag, which gave her a womanly, grown-up look, and made my big leather satchel seem childish in comparison.

  I thought of her last thing at night, before I fell asleep, and when I woke in the morning. If, as very rarely happened, she was late appearing at the top of Beecher’s Road, I would let my tram go by without boarding it, and take the consequences of being late for school (two strokes of the cane) rather than forfeit my daily sight of her. It was the purest, most selfless romantic devotion. It was Dante and Beatrice in a suburban key. Nobody knew my secret, and torture wouldn’t have dragged it from me. I was going through the usual hormonal storm of adolescence at the time, swamped and buffeted by bodily changes and sensations I could neither control nor put a name to – erections and nocturnal emissions and sprouting body hair and the rest of it. There was no sex education at Lambeth Merchants’, and my Mum and Dad, with the deep repressive puritanism of the respectable working class, never discussed the subject. Of course the usual smutty jokes and boasts circulated in the school playground and were illustrated on the walls of the school bogs, but it was difficult to elicit basic information from those who appeared to know without betraying a humiliating ignorance. One day a boy I trusted told me the facts of life as we walked back from an illicit lunchtime visit to the local chip-shop – “when your dick gets stiff you poke it in the girl’s slit and come off in her”– but this act, though inflaming to contemplate, seemed ugly and unclean, not something I wanted to associate with the angel who descended daily from the top of Beecher’s Road to receive my dumb adoration.

  Of course I longed to speak to her, and thought continually about possible ways of getting into conversation with her. The simplest method, I told myself, would be to smile and say hallo one morning, as she passed. After all, we were not total strangers – it was a quite normal thing to do to somebody you met regularly in the street, even if you didn’t know their name. The worst that could happen was that she would ignore me, and walk straight past without responding to my greeting. Ah, but that worst was chilling to contemplate. What would I do the next morning? And every morning after that? As long as I didn’t accost her, she couldn’t rebuff me, and my love was safe even if unrequited. I spent many hours fantasizing about more dramatic and irresistible ways of making her acquaintance – for example, pulling her back from certain death as she was about to step under the wheels of a tram, or defending her from attack by some ruffian bent on robbery or rape. But she always showed admirable caution and common sense when crossing the road, and the pavements of Hatchford at eight o’clock in the morning were rather short of ruffians (this, after all, was 1951, when the word “mugging” was unknown, and even at night unaccompanied women felt safe in well-lit London streets).

  The event that finally brought us together was less heroic than these imaginary scenarios, but it seemed almost miraculous to me at the time, as if some sympathetic deity, aware of my tongue-tied longing to make the girl’s acquaintance, had finally lost patience, plucked her into the air and flung her to the ground at my feet. She was late appearing at the top of Beecher’s Road that day, and I could see that she was hurrying down the hill. Every now and then she would break into a run – that rather endearing kind of running that girls do, moving their legs mainly from the knees, throwing out their heels at an angle behind them – and then, encumbered by her heavy bag of books, she would slow to a brisk walking pace for an interval. In this flustered and flurried state she seemed more than usually beautiful. Her hat was off her head, retained by the narrow elastic strap round her throat, her long mane swung to and fro, and the energy of her stride made her bosom move about thrillingly beneath her white blouse and pinafore dress. I kept her in my direct line of vision longer than usual, as long as I dared; but eventually, to avoid giving the impression of staring rudely, I had to avert my eyes and go through the pretence of looking along the main road for my tram – which was in fact, by this time, quite near.

  I heard a cry and suddenly there she was, sprawled at my feet, her books scattered all over the pavement. Breaking into a run again, she had caught the toe of her shoe on the edge of an uneven paving-stone, tripped, and fallen, dropping her bag as she broke her fall. She was up on her feet in an instant, before I could lend her a supporting hand, but I was able to help her pick up her books, and to speak to her. “Are you alright?’ “Mmm,” she mumbled, sucking a grazed knuckle. “Stupid.” This last epithet was clearly addressed to herself, or possibly to the paving-stone, not to me. She was blushing furiously. My tram passed, its wheels grating and squealing in the grooved tracks as it took the corner. “That’s your tram,” she said. “It doesn’t matter,” I replied, filled with rapture at the implication of this remark – that she had been observing my movements as closely as I had been observing hers over the past months. I carefully gathered up a number of foolscap sheets that had fallen out of a folder, covered with large round handwriting, the is topped with little circles instead of dots, and handed them to her. “Thanks,” she muttered, stuffing them into her bag, and hurried away, limping slightly.

  She was just in time to catch her usual tram – I saw her emerge from the top of the stairs on to the upper deck as it passed me moments later. My own tram had gone without me, but I didn’t care. I had actually spoken to her! I had almost touched her. I kicked myself for not having been quick enough to help her get up from the ground – but never mind: a contact had been made, words had been exchanged, and I had done her a small service by picking up her books and papers. From now on I would be able to smile and say hallo every morning when she passed me. As I contemplated this exciting prospect, something shiny caught my eye in the gutter: it was the clip on a Biro pen, which had obviously fallen out of her bag. I pounced on it exultantly and stowed it away in an inside pocket, next to my heart.

  Ballpoint pens were still something of a novelty in those days, and absurdly expensive, so I knew the girl would be pleased to have it restored to her. I slept with it under my pillow that night (it leaked and left blue stains on the sheet and pillowcase, for which I was bitterly berated by my mother, and clipped round the ear by my father) and took up my usual position outside the florist’s shop the next morning five minutes earlier than usual, to be sure of not missing the pen’s owner. She was indeed a little early herself in making her appearance at the top of Beecher’s Road, and descended the incline slowly, with a kind of self-conscious deliberation, carefully placing each foot in front of the other, looking down at the pavement – not, I was sure, just to avoid tripping up again, but because she knew I was observing her, waiting for her. They were tense, highly charged minutes that ticked by as she walked down the hill towards me. It was like that wonderful shot at the end of The Third Man, when Harry Lime’s girlfriend walks towards Holly Martins along the avenue in the frozen cemetery, except that she walks right past him without a glance, and this girl was not going to, because I had a flawless pretext to stop her and talk to her.

  As she approached me she affected interest in a flight of starlings wheeling and swooping in the sky above the Co-op bakery, but when she was a few yards away she glanced at me and gave me a shy smile of recognition. “Erm, I think you dropped this yesterday,” I blurted out, whipping the Biro from my pocket and holding it out to her. Her face lit up with pleasure. “Oh, thanks ever so much,” she said, stopping and taking the pen. “I thought I’d lost it. I came back here yesterday afternoon and looked, but I couldn’t find it.” “No, well, I had it,” I said, and we both laughed inanely. When she laughed, the tip of her nose twitched and wrinkled up like a rabbit’s. “Well, thanks again,” she said, moving on. “If I’d known where you lived, I’d have brought it round,” I said, desperately trying to detain her. “That’s alright,” she said, walking backwards, “As long as I’ve got it back. I daren’t
tell my Mum I’d lost it.” She treated me to another delicious nose-wrinkling smile, turned her back on me and disappeared round the corner. I still didn’t know her name.

  It wasn’t long before I found out, though. Every morning after her providential dive at my feet I smiled and said hallo as she passed, and she blushed and smiled and said hallo back. Soon I added to my greeting some carefully rehearsed remark about the weather or enquiry about the functioning of the ballpoint pen or complaint about the lateness of my tram which invited a reply on her part, and one day she lingered at the corner outside the florist’s for a few moments’ proper conversation. I asked her what her name was. “Maureen.” “Mine’s Laurence.” “Turn me over,” she said, and giggled at my blank look. “Don’t you know the story of Saint Laurence?” I shook my head. “He was martyred by being slowly roasted on a gridiron,” she said. “He said, ‘Turn me over, this side is done.’” “When was that?” I asked, wincing sympathetically. “I dunno exactly,” she said. “Roman times, I think.”

  This grotesque and slightly sick anecdote, related as if there was nothing the least disturbing about it, was the first indication I had that Maureen was a Catholic, confirmed the following day when she told me the name of her school. I had noticed the heart embroidered with red and gold thread on her blazer badge, but without realizing its religious significance. “It means the Sacred Heart of Jesus,” she said, making a little reflex inclination of her head as she pronounced the Holy Name. These pious allusions to gridirons and hearts, with their incongruous associations of kitchens and offal, made me slightly uneasy, reminding me of Mrs Turner’s threats to wash me in the Blood of the Lamb in infancy, but didn’t deter me from seeking to make Maureen my girlfriend.