Therapy

by David Lodge

  I had never had a girlfriend before, and was uncertain of how to start, but I knew that courting couples often went to the cinema together, because I had queued with them outside the local Odeon, and observed them necking in the back rows. One day, as Maureen lingered outside the florist’s, I summoned up the courage to ask her if she would go to the pictures with me the following weekend. She blushed and looked at once excited and apprehensive. “I dunno. I’d have to ask my Mum and Dad,” she said.

  The next morning she appeared at the top of Beecher’s Road accompanied by an enormous man, at least six foot tall and, it seemed to me, as wide as our house. I knew it must be Maureen’s father, who she had told me was foreman at a local building firm, and viewed his approach with alarm. I was afraid not so much of physical assault as of a humiliating public scene. So, obviously, was Maureen, for I could see she was dragging her feet and hanging her head sulkily. As they drew nearer, I fixed my gaze on the long perspective of the main road, with its shining tram-tracks receding to infinity, and hoped against hope that Mr Kavanagh was just escorting Maureen, and would ignore me if I made no attempt to greet her. No such luck. A huge shape in a navy-blue donkey-jacket loomed over me.

  “Are you the young blackguard who’s been pesterin’ my daughter?” he demanded in a thick Irish accent.

  “Eh?” I said, stalling. I glanced at Maureen, but she avoided my eye. She was red in the face and looked as if she had been crying. “Dad!” she murmured plaintively. The young overalled assistant arranging flowers in buckets outside the florist’s paused in her labours to enjoy the drama.

  Mr Kavanagh poked me in the chest with a huge forefinger, horny and calloused and hard as a policeman’s truncheon. “My daughter’s a respectable girl. I won’t have her talkin’ to strange fellas on street corners, understand?”

  I nodded.

  “Mind you do, then. Off you go to school.” This last remark was addressed to Maureen, who slouched off with one despairing, apologetic glance at me. Mr Kavanagh’s attention seemed caught by my school blazer, a gaudy crimson garment with silver buttons, which I loathed, and he screwed up his eyes at the elaborate coat of arms with its Latin motto on the breast pocket. “What’s this school that you go to?” I told him, and he seemed impressed in spite of himself. “Mind you behave yourself, or I’ll report you to your headmaster,” he said. He turned on his heel and walked back up the hill. I stayed where I was, looking along the main road until my tram came in sight, and my pulse rate returned to normal.

  Of course this incident only drew Maureen and me closer together. We became a pair of star-crossed lovers, defying her father’s ban on further contact. We continued to exchange a few words every morning, though I now prudently stationed myself just round the corner, out of sight of anyone surveying the Five Ways from the top of Beecher’s Road. In due course Maureen persuaded her mother to let me call at their house one Saturday afternoon when her father was out, working overtime, so that she could see for herself I wasn’t the kind of street-corner lout they had imagined when she first asked if she could go to the pictures with me. “Wear your school blazer,” Maureen advised, shrewdly. So, to the astonishment of my own parents and disgust of my mates, I missed a home game at Charlton and put on the blazer I never normally wore at weekends and walked up the long hill to Maureen’s house. Mrs Kavanagh gave me a cup of tea and a slice of home-made soda bread in her big, dark, chaotic basement kitchen, and burped a baby over her shoulder as she assessed me. She was a handsome woman in her forties grown stout from childbearing. She had her daughter’s long hair, but it was going grey, and piled up in an untidy knot at the back of her head. Like her husband she spoke with an Irish brogue, though Maureen and her siblings had the same South London accent as myself. Maureen was the eldest child, and the apple of her parents’ eye. Her scholarship to the Sacred Heart convent was the subject of particular pride, and the fact that I was a grammar-school boy was obviously a mark in my favour. Against me was the fact that I was a boy, and non-Catholic, therefore an inherent threat to Maureen’s virtue. “You look like a decent sort of lad,” said Mrs Kavanagh, “but her father thinks Maureen is too young to be gallivanting about with boys, and so do I. She has her homework to do.” “Not every night, Mum,” Maureen protested. “You already have the Youth Club on Sundays,” said Mrs Kavanagh, “That’s quite enough socializing at your age.”

  I asked if I could join the youth club.

  “It’s the parish youth club,” said Mrs Kavanagh. “You have to be a Catholic.”

  “No you don’t, Mum,” Maureen said. “Father Jerome said non-Catholics can join if they’re interested in the Church.” Maureen looked at me and blushed.

  “I’m very interested,” I said, quickly.

  “Is that so?” Mrs Kavanagh looked at me sceptically, but she knew she had been out-manoeuvred. “Well, if Father Jerome says it’s alright, I suppose it’s alright.”

  Needless to say, I had no genuine interest in Catholicism, or indeed in religion of any kind. My parents were not churchgoers, and observed the Sabbath only to the extent of forbidding me and my brother to play in the street on Sundays. Lambeth Merchants’ was nominally C of E, but the prayers and hymns at morning assembly, and occasional services in the chapel, seemed part of the school’s ceaseless celebration of its own heritage rather than the expression of any moral or theological idea. That some people, like Maureen and her family, should voluntarily submit themselves to such boredom every Sunday morning, when they could be enjoying a long lie-in instead, was incomprehensible to me. Nevertheless I was prepared to feign a polite interest in her religion, if that was the price of being allowed to keep Maureen company.

  The following Sunday evening I turned up, by arrangement with Maureen, outside the local Roman Catholic church, a squat redbrick building with a larger-than-lifesize statue of the Virgin Mary outside. She had her arms extended, and a carved inscription on the plinth said: “I AM THE IMMACULATE CONCEPTION.” A service was going on inside, and I lurked in the porch, listening to the unfamiliar hymns and droning prayers, my nostrils tickled by a strong sweet smell which I guessed must be incense. Suddenly there was a clamour of high-pitched bells, and I peeped through the doorway, looking down the aisle to the altar. It was quite a sight, ablaze with dozens of tall, thin lighted candles. The priest, dressed in a heavy embroidered robe of white and gold, was holding up something that flashed and glinted with reflected light, a white disc in a glass case, with golden rays sticking out all round it like a sunburst. He held the base of the thing wrapped in an embroidered scarf he had round his shoulders, as if it was too hot to touch, or radioactive. All the people, and there were a surprising number of them, were kneeling with their heads bowed. Maureen explained to me in due course that the white disc was a consecrated host, and that they believed it was the real body and blood of Jesus, but to me the whole business seemed more pagan than Christian. The singing sounded queer too. Instead of the rousing hymns I was used to at school (“To be a Pilgrim” was my favourite) they were singing slow, dirge-like anthems that I couldn’t comprehend because they were in Latin, never my best subject. I had to admit, though, that there was a kind of atmosphere about the service that you didn’t get in the school chapel.

  What I liked about Catholics from the beginning was that there was nothing holier-than-thou about them. When the congregation came pouring out of the church, they might have been coming out of the pictures, or even a pub, the way they greeted each other and joked and chatted and offered each other cigarettes. Maureen came out accompanied by her mother, their heads covered with scarves. Mrs Kavanagh began talking to another woman in a hat. Maureen spotted me, and came over, smiling. “You found the way, then?” she greeted me. “What if your Dad sees us talking?” I asked nervously. “Oh, he never comes to Benediction,” she said, untying her headscarf and shaking out her hair. “Thank the Lord.” The paradoxical nature of this remark didn’t strike me, and in any case my attention was fully absorbed by her hair. I h
ad never seen it unrestrained before, fanned out in shining waves over her shoulders. She seemed more beautiful than ever. Conscious of my gaze, she blushed, and said she must introduce me to Father Jerome. Mrs Kavanagh seemed to have disappeared.

  Father Jerome was the younger of the two priests who ran the parish, though he wasn’t exactly young. He didn’t look at all like our school chaplain or any other clergyman I had encountered. He didn’t even resemble himself on the altar – for it was he who had presided over the service just finished. He was a gaunt, grizzled Dubliner, with nicotine-stained fingers and a shaving cut on his chin which he seemed to have staunched with a fragment of toilet-paper. He wore a long black cassock that reached to his scuffed shoes, with deep pockets in which he kept the materials for rolling his own cigarettes. One of these he lit with a pyrotechnic display of flame and sparks. “So you want to join our youth club, do you, young fella?” he said, brushing glowing wisps of tobacco from his cassock. “Yes please, sir,” I said. “Then you’d better learn to call me Father instead of sir.” “Yes, sir – Father, I mean,” I stammered. Father Jerome grinned, revealing a disconcerting gap in his stained and uneven teeth. He asked me a few more questions about where I lived and where I went to school. The name of Lambeth Merchants’ had its usual effect, and I became a probationary member of the Immaculate Conception parish youth club.

  One of the first things Maureen had to do was to explain the name of her church. I presumed that it referred to Mary’s being a virgin when she had Jesus, but no, apparently it meant that Mary herself was conceived “without the stain of original sin.” I found the language of Catholicism very strange, especially the way they used words in their devotions, like “virgin”, “conceived”, “womb”, that would have been regarded as bordering on the indecent in ordinary conversation, certainly in my home. I could hardly believe my ears when Maureen told me that she had to go to Mass on New Year’s Day because it was the Feast of the Circumcision. “The feast of what?” “The Circumcision.” “Whose circumcision?” “Our Lord’s, of course. When he was a baby. Our Lady and Saint Joseph took him to the Temple and he was circumcised. It was like the Jewish baptism.” I laughed incredulously. “D’you know what circumcision is?” Maureen blushed and giggled, wrinkling up her nose. “’Course.” “What is it, then?” “I’m not going to say.” “You don’t really know.” “Yes I do.” “I bet you don’t.” I persisted in my prurient interrogation until she blurted out that it meant “snipping off a bit of skin from the end of the baby’s widdler,” by which time my own widdler was standing up inside my grey flannel trousers like a relay-runner’s baton. We were walking home from the youth club Sunday social at the time, and fortunately I was wearing a raincoat.

  The youth club met twice a week in the Infants’ School attached to the church: on Wednesdays for games, mainly ping-pong, and on Sundays for a “social”. This consisted of dancing to gramophone records and partaking of sandwiches and orange squash or tea prepared by teams of girls working to a roster. The boys were required to stack the infants’ desks at the sides of the room at the beginning of the evening, and replace them in rows at the end. We had the use of two classrooms normally divided by a folding partition wall. The floor was made of worn, unpolished wood blocks, the walls were covered with infantile paintings and educational charts, and the lighting was bleakly utilitarian. The gramophone was a single-speaker portable, and the records a collection of scratchy 78s. But to me, just emerging from the chrysalis of boyhood, the youth club was a site of exciting and sophisticated pleasures.

  I learned to dance from a matronly lady of the parish who came in on games nights (when Maureen was seldom allowed out by her parents) and gave free lessons. I discovered that I was surprisingly good at it. “Hold your partner firmly!” was Mrs Gaynor’s constant injunction, one I was glad to follow, especially when Maureen was my partner on Sunday nights. I danced mostly with her, needless to say, but club protocol forbade exclusive pairing, and I was a rather popular choice in “ladies’ invitation” sets because of my nifty footwork. It was of course ballroom dancing – quickstep, foxtrot and waltz – with a few old-time dances thrown in for variety. We danced to strict-tempo music by Victor Sylvester, diversified with popular hits by Nat King Cole, Frankie Laine, Guy Mitchell and other vocalists of the day. Pee Wee Hunt’s “Twelfth Street Rag” was a great favourite, but jiving was not allowed – it was expressly forbidden by Father Jerome – and the solo twisting, ducking and swaying that passes for dancing nowadays was still in the womb of time, awaiting its birth in the sixties. When, nowadays, I put my head inside a discothèque or nightclub patronized by young people, I’m struck by the contrast between the eroticism of the ambience – the dim, lurid lighting, the orgasmic throb of the music, the tight-fitting, provocative clothes – and the tactile impoverishment of the actual dancing. I suppose they have so much physical contact afterwards that they don’t miss it on the dance floor, but for us it was the other way round. Dancing meant that, even in a church youth club, you were actually allowed to hold a girl in your arms in public, perhaps a girl you’d never even met before you asked her to dance, feel her thighs brush against yours under her rustling petticoats, sense the warmth of her bosom against your chest, inhale the scent behind her ears or the smell of shampoo from her freshly washed hair as it tickled your cheek. Of course you had to pretend that this wasn’t the point of it, you had to chat about the weather or the music or whatever while you steered your partner around the floor, but the licence for physical sensation was considerable. Imagine a cocktail party where all the guests are masturbating while ostensibly preoccupied with sipping white wine and discussing the latest books and plays, and you have some idea what dancing was like for adolescents in the early nineteen-fifties.

  Admittedly, Father Jerome did his best to damp down the fires of lust, insisting on opening the evening’s proceedings with a tedious recitation of the “Hail Mary” ten times in succession, something he referred to as “a mystery of the holy rosary” – it was certainly a mystery to me what anybody got out of the droning gabble of words. And he hung about afterwards, eyeing the dancing couples to make sure everything was decent and above board. There was actually a clause in the club rules – it was known as Rule Five, and was the subject of mildly risqué humour among the members – that there must always be light visible between dancing couples; but it was not rigidly enforced or observed. Anyway, Father Jerome usually left (it was rumoured to drink whisky and play whist with some cronies in the presbytery) well before the last waltz, when we would turn out some of the lights, and the bolder spirits would dance cheek-to-cheek, or at least chest-to-chest. Naturally I always ensured that Maureen was my partner then. She was not an exceptionally good dancer, and when I saw her partnered by other boys she sometimes looked positively clumsy, which I didn’t mind at all. She was responsive to my firm lead, and laughed with delight when I whirled her round and round at the end of a record, making her skirts swirl. She had two outfits for the Sunday-night socials: a black taffeta skirt worn with various blouses, and a white frock covered with pink roses that fitted her tightly round her bosom, which was shapely and well-developed for her age.

  I was soon accepted by the other members of the club, especially after I joined its football team, which played on Sunday afternoons against other South London parishes, some with similarly bizarre names to ours, so you would get scorelines like, “Immaculate Conception 2, Precious Blood 1” or “Perpetual Succour 3, Forty Martyrs nil.” I played at inside right, to such good effect that we won the league championship that season. I was top scorer, with twenty-six goals. The manager of a rival team found out that I wasn’t a Catholic and made an official complaint that I shouldn’t have been allowed to play in the league. For a while it looked as if the trophy might be taken away from us, but after we threatened to pull out of the league we were allowed to keep it.

  We played on bumpy, sloping pitches in public parks, travelling by tram or bus, and changing in damp
cheerless huts with a toilet and cold-water handbasin if we were lucky, but never baths or showers. The mud caked on my knees on the way home, and sitting in the bath later I would slowly straighten my legs in the water and pretend my knees were two volcanic islands sinking into the sea. When they had disappeared my engorged penis would rear up from the steaming, murky water like a wicked sea-serpent, as I thought about Maureen who would be washing her hair at the same time in preparation for the Sunday-evening social. She had told me she usually did this while taking a bath, because it was difficult to rinse her long hair while bending over a sink. I imagined her sitting in the warm, sudsy water, filling an enamel jug from the tap, pouring it over her head and making the long tresses stick to the curve of her breasts, like a picture of a mermaid I had seen once.

  Maureen and some of the other girls from the youth club used to come to the Sunday-afternoon football matches to support us. When I scored a goal, I would look for her on the sidelines as I trotted back to the centre circle with the modest, self-contained demeanour I imitated from Charlie Vaughan, the Charlton Athletic centre-forward, and receive her adoring smile. I remember one goal in particular I scored with a spectacular flying header, I think it was a match against Our Lady of Perpetual Succour, Brickley, the neighbouring parish, and therefore something of a local derby. The goal was a pure fluke, actually, because I was never a great header of the ball. It was two-all in the last minutes of the game when I collected the ball from a clearance by our goalkeeper, beat a couple of opposing players and passed the ball out to our right-winger. His name was Jenkins – Jenksy, we called him: a small, prematurely wizened, stooped-shouldered boy, who smoked a Woodbine not only before and after every match, but also at half-time, and had been known to beg a drag of a spectator’s cigarette during a lull in the game itself. In spite of appearances, he was surprisingly fast, especially going downhill, as he was on this occasion. He scuttled down the wing towards the corner-flag and crossed the ball, as he usually did, without looking, anxious to get rid of it before the opposing left-back caught up and crunched into him. I came pounding into the penalty area just as the ball came across in front of me at about waist height. I launched myself into the air and by lucky chance caught it smack in the middle of my forehead. It went into the net like a rocket before the goalie could move. The fact that the goal had a net (not many pitches we played on ran to such refinements) made it all the more satisfying. The opposing players gaped at me. My team-mates pulled me to my feet and clapped me on the back. Maureen and the other girls from Immaculate Conception were jumping up and down on the sidelines, cheering like mad. I don’t think I have ever experienced a moment of such pure exultation in my life since. It was that night, after walking Maureen home from the youth club social, that I touched her breast for the first time, outside her blouse.