Eventually I got him to the point where he couldn’t help but ask me if he could give me a lift home after work. I felt embarrassed then, as if my game had gone too far. He waited for me while we cleared up, and reassured me that he’d only had one pint and was all right to drive, and then he led me proudly around the corner to his car, which looked very shiny under the street lamps. I hoped that he hadn’t cleaned it for my benefit. I think he felt more confident about his car than about himself, but it was wasted on me, I couldn’t tell one type of car from another.(Was it a Ford Focus? It might have been.) While he was driving me back to the house I shared with some other students, we both turned shy. I nervously asked him about his work, and he told me that he had worked for British Gas for several years and then set up his own business with a friend. For reasons to do with the VAT they’d recently had to split the business into two, one side dealing with boilers and central-heating systems and the other with gas appliances, although in effect they still worked together. He explained this to me in some detail, and I was bored. I was hoping that none of my housemates would be around when I asked him in for coffee, and they weren’t.
It was always better when he wasn’t talking. I was glad that he didn’t talk much. When he was silent I could recover the illusion I was in pursuit of. I hardly talked to him about myself – about college, about reading, about my plans. I hardly talked to him at all. I turned on my light, which had a pink bulb, so that the room was dim. I kissed him, I touched him, I undid his clothes, I made all the first moves. I don’t think he was quite comfortable with the speed with which these things happened. He was a nice chap, he would have preferred to take things slowly. He would have preferred to have me as his proper girlfriend. On the other hand, he was a man; he didn’t turn me down. Perhaps he felt a bit ashamed of himself afterwards. Or ashamed of me, more likely. I don’t remember him staying long in my room, I don’t remember watching him while he dressed to go home. I think he shared a flat with his brother and another man, but I never went there.
We didn’t ‘go out’ together. We only ever did one thing together. For a couple of months, before I gave up my job at the pub and went home for the summer, we did that every week. Of course I was pretending the whole time that I was with Patrick, that it was Patrick who was making love to me. Only the pretence was never complete. Even in the dim light from the pink bulb, even if I half closed my eyes and didn’t look directly at him, even when I was mixing up together in my mind the physical reality of our bodies grappling and one of my stories about Patrick, the knowledge that he wasn’t Patrick seeped irresistibly in. This wasn’t the real thing. It was only a second-hand enactment of love.
I have forgotten to give his name. His name was Dave.
It’s only a few years ago but a lot has happened since then. Those are the years when a lot happens; when your life lurches across crucial transitions like a train hurtling across points at speed. It doesn’t always feel like that at the time. At the time you sometimes feel that life has slowed down to a frozen stillness. There’s no tedium like the tedium of twenty. But all the while you are in fact flying fast into a future decided by a couple of accidental encounters or scraps of dreams.
In the end, Patrick Hammett reached out for me. Unbelievably, what he actually said when he did it was something like he had always loved me, he had been fascinated by me from the moment I first walked into the lecture room. Or words to that effect. Which just goes to show how you mustn’t trust a scrupulous realism, that sometimes sloppy fantasy comes nearer the true state of things. I became the person it had been unimaginable for me to be: Patrick’s girlfriend, Patrick’s wife. We had to wait until I wasn’t his student any more before we could tell everyone about this, and those months were the most wonderful months, the secret months, when I had to sit in his classes and engage in discussion as usual, as if there was nothing going on between us.
I love Patrick. I think we’re well matched. But of course I’m not infatuated with him any more, and it’s a kind of relief when all that ends. You can’t go on being infatuated with someone you share toothpaste with, whose crusty inside-out balls of socks you have to put into the washing machine. I haven’t changed my mind about how intelligent and articulate he is; I count on that. But I’m irritated by the gulp of breath he takes before he pours out some hoarded-up information, and at how he works conversations around to an opportunity for him to be surprised at someone else’s ignorance. When he’s holding forth in an argument he fills any gaps while he searches for words with a loud ‘um’, so that no one else has a chance to break in with a different point of view.
I’ve never told Patrick about Dave. And I’ve never seen him since. I once looked up gas engineers in the Yellow Pages and found a company that might have been his; I couldn’t look him up in the residential phone book because I never knew his surname. In my first few months with Patrick, if I ever thought about Dave I was just embarrassed at what I’d done. But then the idea of him began to preoccupy me, like an unsolved mystery. Why had he lent himself so unquestioningly, so pliably, to my fantasy? How did he explain to himself what was happening between us? I try to remember the details of our lovemaking and I can’t. I can hardly believe that we were pressed naked against one another again and again. I feel as if I wasted something important, longing all the time for him to be someone else. What was he feeling, when he didn’t speak?
There’s no real equivalence, between my situation now and my situation then. I’m genuinely happily married to Patrick and given the chance would not even seriously consider throwing in my luck with a stranger I have nothing in common with. The little hunger of wasted opportunity only gets expressed in my fantasies, which contrive themselves in spite of me. No green lane, no gate into a wood. He’s a gas engineer in the fantasy, of course. He comes to my house to mend the boiler. At first we pretend we don’t recognise each other. I show him the problem and hover discreetly while he takes the front of the boiler off and crouches to look inside. He asks me to hand him a spanner from his toolbox; when he takes it from me he touches my hand with his.
I wish he wasn’t a gas engineer. It sounds too much like a scenario from one of those funny sixties pornographic films, where the milkman or the postman is served up to the bored housewife amid all the conveniences of her own kitchen. But I’ve tried giving him other, outdoor, professions, and I didn’t believe in them, they had no connection with the real man.
When he stands up to tell me there’s a problem with the regulator, he steps towards me and begins to kiss me. It’s then I see that what we did together has had consequences, for him. It has made him rather reckless, sexually. He has learned the audacity to reach across, through all the mess we make with thinking and talking, through to the body and the body’s truth.
I have to be careful not to believe in this. It is only a dream.
EXCHANGES
TWO FRIENDS ARE walking together round the new British Galleries at the Victoria and Albert Museum. These women look interesting. One is fine-boned, small, with crinkled black hair pinned up; she’s wearing a green dress and a mohair cardigan. The other is taller and more awkward; her red hair is shoulder-length with a fringe. She has put gold-rimmed glasses on to look at the exhibits, but obviously doesn’t like wearing them, because when they stop to talk she takes them off and dangles them dangerously on her finger. Once she drops them with a clatter but they are OK.
The new galleries are very hands-on; you can make a chair, design a coat of arms, identify porcelain. The women try on a crinoline over their clothes, they take turns to walk up and down in it.
—Oh, it’s nice, see how it swings, it’s very light.
—Wouldn’t you just clear space?
—You could have a man inside, said one.—Imagine.
The women are at that age which on the outside is ambivalent: young and not-so-young are difficult to disentangle, in good clothes, in a good light, after a good life of the privileged kind of work that doesn’t weather
or wizen you. Inside, though, these years register for the women themselves, inexorably and determiningly as a clock ticking. There’s a year when you’re thinking anything could still happen, reproduction-wise (this either makes you hopeful or cautious, depending on what you want). Then there’s a year when you think you never know (after all, Cherie Blair had one). And then there’s a year when you think it isn’t any way going to happen now, not without an improbable Old Testament miracle or the intervention of some crazed Italian doctor. These women are both, in fact, at this Old Testament stage, although they can both get away with looking as if they might not be.
One of them – Louie, the taller one with red hair – is a mother: she has two daughters. The dark one, Phil, is not. You can’t tell this from looking at their bodies either, not from the outside: both are trim and slender. Perhaps you might guess, though, that Louie is the mother. Although she’s more awkward than Phil, and probably thinks she’s not as attractive, she’s less self-conscious about parading up and down in the crinoline in front of other visitors. That might come from seeing herself reflected in the eyes of her daughters, who will love her or think her absurd however she tries, so that she doesn’t need to try so hard. (In the early days of motherhood, she wouldn’t have put it as positively as that: it felt sometimes as though she’d been taken out of her own possession and become no more than a rag doll for her daughters’ entertainment. But now the girls are fifteen and twelve, and she’s recovered, somewhat.)
In the museum café they talk unstoppably, as they always have done since they first got to know one another at college. They used to talk about men, with intensity and absorption: the rage against men was almost as stimulating as the sexual excitement men generated. Now all that’s eased off. Sometimes Louie grumbles about Duncan, her husband, but the fervour’s gone out of it. Once you’ve been together with someone for twenty years there’s no excuse for hanging on with them if you think they’re so awful: and of course she doesn’t really think Duncan’s awful, she supposes that she even loves him dearly, these days, underneath it all. Phil, on the other hand, has only been with Merrick for five years, and she’s still tender about him and defensive, so that she won’t reciprocate when Louie makes sniping remarks about his sex. Talking about men was more fun when Louie was really, really, planning on leaving Duncan, or at least having an affair with someone else; and when Phil was in the throes of a tormenting love for a no-good community activist who made her do things in bed that frightened her.
Now they talk about all kinds of other interesting subjects. Work, of course: Phil is a designer for a publisher, Louie works from home as a translator. And then about writing, painting, politics, parents. Phil’s mother is very frail and may have to go into a home. Louie took her girls on the march against the war in Afghanistan. Both friends have, separately, seen the Auerbach exhibition: both were moved and disturbed by the monastic absolutism of his pursuit of truth. Louie confides in Phil (at tedious length, she fears) about the terrible struggle she is engaged in with her older daughter Ella, over Ella’s attitude, over whether she’s allowed out on her own in town, over what time she’s supposed to come in if she is allowed out, and so on. Louie has noticed that when she begins to complain about Ella, Phil’s expression tightens slightly: as if she is not completely, absolutely, on Louie’s side.
When they have finished looking round the galleries Phil and Louie both go back to Phil’s flat; they are hosting a meeting of their creative writing group there that evening, and Louie is staying over. Duncan is going to look after the girls (for once). Merrick is away (he is a rep for a wine company and often has to travel abroad).
Phil has been in this same small flat for years (from long before she knew Merrick): in the same period Duncan and Louie have moved three times, once with each promotion Duncan has had at the newspaper. Phil has a gift for making a place inviting: the shelves are piled with collections of books and objects, there are cushiony corners for reading. Everything promises retreat and solitude and concentration. Louie has never, in truth, liked any of her own houses as much as she likes it in here.
—I’ve brought you a present, says Louie.—I got this in the museum shop when you weren’t looking.
Phil feels inside the paper bag: then she turns a strange face on her friend.
—Oh, Louie, she wails. —You’ve given me an egg.
Louie realises what she has done: she blushes darkly. The egg is an (expensive) replica of the kind that Victorian dairywomen put under hens to encourage them to lay: made in off-white porcelain with a grey crazing all over its surface. She had only wanted it because it was heavy and cold and smooth and she was bothered and footsore in the crowded shop.
—Don’t you like it?
—Another egg! Phil laughs. —You really don’t know you’re doing it, do you? Merrick won’t believe that you don’t know; but I’m sure.
—I’ve never given you an egg before, have I?
Phil goes off into the front room and brings back a plate on which there is a whole collection of eggs: blown and painted ones, wooden ones, stone ones, one in burnished metal. The collection must have been out on display among all the other interesting things, on all the many evenings Louie has spent here.
—I gave you all those? When? Surely not. Some of them I’ve never seen before.
—All of them. Over the past – oh, five or six years?
—God: have you thought that I meant something by it? Some awful kind of hint?
—You tell me.
—No, honestly, Phil, if I really try to think, it’s probably just that there’s something contained and satisfying and . . . you know . . . elliptical . . . about the shape, which makes me think of you. Of how you are. That’s all I can imagine.
—Only I’d rather, says Phil, —that we agreed that at this point my egg collection’s complete. It’s finished. There aren’t ever going to be any chickens.
They only began writing about a year ago: but it has taken hold of them both with a ferocity and a destructive importance. Neither is satisfied with anything they’ve done, yet. There are five of them in the writing group: under its surface appearance of supportive and sane encouragement a kind of anarchy of need and self-doubt and competition runs loose. Phil and Louie agree privately that none of the other three are very good. Even more privately, they doubt one another. That evening Phil reads out a story about a love affair between an older woman and a boy: the paper shakes in her hands. Louie feels embarrassed for her: the story is unconvincing and mawkish. Because of the egg disaster, however, she feels absolutely unable to say anything critical about it; in fact she praises it exaggeratedly, singling out the one or two moments which could be read as if they were ironic.
—About these eggs, says Louie when the others have gone. —I feel so awful. But do you know what occurred to me? You’re always giving me jugs.
—Jugs?
—Really. The Habitat one for my last birthday, that old blue and white spotted one, a big one with a leaf pattern you brought back from Portugal . . . Perhaps you mean something about me pouring myself out. Perhaps you mean that I’m wasting myself; giving myself away.
Phil sits with her feet tucked under her in a corner of the deep blue sofa. She doesn’t seem very interested in the jugs. She tells Louie that what she wrote in the story, the older woman and the boy, really happened to her.
—You’re joking, says Louie, slopping scalding tea. —You had a whole love affair, and never told me a word about it? When, for God’s sake? Is this before Merrick?
Phil says that she finished it six months ago, that Merrick doesn’t know. She says she finished it because it was really so unforgivable, he was the son of a friend of hers from work, someone Louie didn’t know. He was eighteen.
—Not much older than Ella, says Louie.
—No.
—I don’t know how you could.
—No.
But Phil sits with her face shining in some way – contained, oblique – wh
ich closes Louie out. She tells Louie that the boy was so special, so gifted, so lovely to look at. She tells her how they spent nights together at the seaside in Suffolk because his parents had a holiday place there, and how the room they slept in was full of his boyhood photographs and birdwatching lists and Airfix models. He was so completely serious about her. He was so concentrated. He had had no idea that things could be like that. (Louie supposes that ‘things’ means sex.) He had got a place to read English at Cambridge. (That was how it had all started: Phil’s friend had asked her to give her son extra tuition for his English A level.)
—He met someone we both knew at a party the other day, Phil says.—He asked after me, and before they could say that I was fine, he filled up with tears. It was all right. The person just thought he had a crush.
—It’s terrible, says Louie.
—I had to finish it because I didn’t want to be with him and be fifty. Or anywhere near fifty.
Louie sits up late, alone, on the sofa that is now pulled out and made into a bed for her. She’s beginning to remember all the writing Phil brought to the workshop while she must have been carrying on this ridiculous affair. How could she have failed to guess? How could she have thought those poems were about Merrick? The writing wasn’t particularly good. Love makes you stupid, she thinks, that kind of love.
You couldn’t be sorry that it wasn’t going to happen to you, ever again.
She feels as if a door is closing painfully on her, squeezing her shut: she holds the cool porcelain laying-egg against her hot cheeks and her wrists. Was she burning with envy: would she, in truth, give anything to have what Phil had had, just one last time? She reviews the things she wouldn’t give, not in her right mind: children, kindness, peace, writing. But then that kind of love has nothing to do with your right mind.
Sunstroke and Other Stories Page 10
