Her childhood had given her no preparation for what happened to her in London in her early twenties. Her mother had always put her down; her father had been unpredictable and cruel; her elder sister was jealous and sniping. Not one teacher throughout her schooling had ever been so much as slightly impressed by a single piece of her work. Everything in her early years had sown deep into Helen’s heart a sense of her profound averageness. She had never even felt the lack of any superior qualities, since to be clever or beautiful or interesting had never seemed to be an option. Her life had been lived exclusively in a dreary town filled with people who felt their role in the world was to make up the numbers. Helen hadn’t known there was any alternative.
Then, aged twenty, against the advice of her parents, she took the Derby to London train, heading blindly for the capital, having no idea what she would find. A friend of hers had done the same and had found work within a week as a waitress. Helen had enough money to last a fortnight.
Within two days, she had a bedsit off the Edgware Road and a job in a Chelsea café. For the first month, she spent her spare time simply walking around the city, plugging herself into the buzz and zip of a place that knew it was important, filled with people jostling for position. At first she felt like a spectator, but as the tin under her bed began to fill with wages and tips, which she spent with gleeful abandon on the King’s Road, she gradually stopped looking and feeling like a hick. The sight of her own reflection in shop windows sometimes caused her to double-take. Her first thought was often, ‘She looks good – what’s she wearing?’, before she realised that the unfamiliar form she had glimpsed was her reinvented self.
The two best things that ever happened to her took place that month. First, she discovered that everything her parents had ever taught her was wrong. Even though she had known this would happen, the revelation was still, as it is for everyone, an utterly joyous surprise, like a first-ever lungful of fresh air.
Second, she discovered men; specifically, the effect she had on them. They wanted her. All of them, it seemed, wanted her. They wanted her body, or, failing that, just a conversation, or a smile, or the shortest little gift of eye contact. Whatever she gave, however meagre, they lapped up. Even old men and bus conductors and cheeky schoolkids; almost every male gave her a look that she only now fully understood. She began to realise that, anywhere she went, men were at her service. This, she imagined, must have been how Clark Kent felt when he discovered he could fly.
Not only did she have the joy of exercising her powers whenever she felt like it; she also, even when she was alone, had the secret thrill of knowing that she possessed them, and could use them whenever she wanted. She could be happy simply sitting alone in her flat, listening to the muffled thrum of the city, privately relishing the knowledge that, despite everything her parents had led her to believe, she was, after all, someone special.
There was a quality to Larry she instantly liked. His flirting had an overtness, a directness that was unusual, and that made her smile. There was nothing veiled or oblique in his approach to her. You could barely even call it flirting; it was closer to simple, naked lust.
Larry had persuaded her to write her phone number on the bill, and later that week he’d taken her to what he described as a gig. She’d been expecting loud music in a seedy dive, but it had turned out to be a Prom at the Albert Hall, culminating in the Britten Violin Concerto, which she had never heard before, but which ever after caused her heart to race with the thrill of new love, and these days always made her cry. That night they had made love frantically at first, then again with slow and intense relish, then once more, because they couldn’t quite believe they still wanted to and were capable of it. That third time, halfway through, he had whispered in her ear that one day they would get married. She had told him to shut up, biting his neck with mock annoyance, but he was right, and even at the time she suspected he might be.
He was an American by birth, and though he had left years before, he still carried something of New York in his bearing. Wherever he was felt like the centre of things. He was in no way a handsome man, his nose, lips, chin and brow being all too big to fit neatly on to one face, but he was astonishingly attractive, perhaps just because his own confidence that this was the case somehow made it true.
No other human had ever exerted such a pull over her, and she enjoyed watching him have the same effect on others, both men and women, which he did with ease. When they went to parties together, Helen loved staying by his side, feeling the centre of the room shift towards them. No room, however heavily populated, could remain unaltered by the presence of Larry. In fact, the bigger the audience, the happier Helen felt with him.
He had introduced her to a west London and Soho party scene, his gregariousness soon proving to be as oversized as his facial features and his libido. Their first two years together had been so sociable that Helen’s first worry about their relationship was that, although they were rarely apart, they only ever seemed to be alone together in the bedroom.
When Paul was born, they bowed out of this demanding social regimen, but after a month or so, Larry simply carried on without her. The birth had left Helen bruised, sore and uninterested in sex. Despite his protestations to the contrary, Helen never believed for a moment that Larry was the type of person who could leave a party alone. Nor was he a man who could send his libido on vacation. His good intentions were just about plausible, his chances of seeing them through virtually nil.
But the rules were different then. She had even, at the time, thought herself irrational for finding his behaviour upsetting. As the pretence of fidelity slipped away, he even occasionally brought women back to the spare room of their flat. She was once woken up by the sound of them, late at night, and had put on the bedside radio to block out the noise. And it had all seemed normal. Among their peers, it was normal.
Helen was in no position to object to Larry’s breach of their marriage vows, since she had done the same herself. It was the thing to do at that time, and by taking up with Larry, Helen had bought into an ethos and a way of life from which you couldn’t pick and choose the elements you fancied. You were either in, wholesale, or you were out.
That she had never enjoyed her infidelities – they had been performed more out of social obligation than anything else – was immaterial. She had done it, ironically enough, largely to please Larry: to show him that she was with it. She hadn’t initially realised that, by doing so, she was handing Larry a passport to the bedrooms of all her friends.
She never regretted marrying Larry. Her main regret was simply that she had allowed herself to be so weak. At the time, she and her friends had thought their lifestyle was a historic leap forwards in the liberation of women. She now realised it was closer to being the final fling of patriarchy: the last time men had it all their own way, and had been able to con women into believing it was for the common good.
Her insistence that they move to the suburbs had been founded on the argument that a child needs a garden. Larry had resisted, but for once, on this one issue, Helen had refused to compromise. It was her attempt to extricate them from the social set she knew would destroy their marriage. She eventually got the house she wanted, but only really succeeded in moving herself and her child into it. Larry effectively only lodged there. In his heart, his home was always Soho.
Helen was astonished, sometimes, that she and Larry had stayed together so long. It was in the eighties that all these marriages fell apart. Every last one of them.
They had divorced almost twenty years ago, now, and every day she thought about him at least once. This long reminiscence, if she was lucky, could be today’s thought, but on an idle day he was likely to haunt her more than once, and her visit to Paul made the prospects worse. Paul was half-Larry; in looks he was three-quarters Larry, closer to how Larry had looked when she fell in love with him than Larry now was himself.
The sight of Paul was an exquisite torture for Helen, like scratching a rash or pick
ing a scab. It made her think thoughts she knew were bad for her, it plunged her back into all the emotions she had worked so hard to be rid of, but in some way she relished the pain. She wanted as much as she could get. She wanted to hold Paul close and nuzzle herself into the Larryness of his neck; she wanted, just for a moment, for Paul to not be Paul, but to be the Larry he so resembled, the Larry before everything had turned bad.
How happy she’d be if there had been a daughter, if there was now a lookalike of the young Helen to match this time-capsule Larry. It would make everything so much fairer. Why did Larry not have to go through these agonies? If only this woman could exist, ready to bounce into his life every time he thought he was beginning to forget Helen, an ally to help make Larry suffer the way Helen suffered. Why had everything always been so much easier for him?
If there was a medical procedure by which doctors could erase a person from your head, Helen would be at the front of the queue. Larry was a poison in her brain. He still afflicted her because she couldn’t make herself stop loving him, however much she also hated him. Paul sometimes seemed like an antibody, sometimes like more of the poison, often both at once.
Three coffees later, Helen was abuzz with caffeine-and-Larry-induced anxiety. She couldn’t sit there any longer, and she couldn’t allow herself to be alone with her thoughts for so much as one more drink. It was still only five o’clock, but she had reached the limit of her capacity to wait.
She’d go and ring the bell. See what happened. If no one was in, she’d take it from there.
eccentric and vaguely unwholesome groups
Paul’s door was answered by a handsome man in his early twenties who somehow managed to look both neat and scruffy at the same time. Scruffiness was the look he had chosen, but it had been put together with immense care. He was wearing a tight, short T-shirt and a pair of jeans so low and loose-fitting that they appeared to be held up only by his genitals. A good five inches of midriff were on display, though it was more low-riff than midriff, since the revealed band of flesh started at the navel and descended to what was unmistakably a frond or two of pubic hair.
The clothes, even to a woman who was no expert on these matters, said very clearly, ‘I am gay’. The way he stood said, ‘I am gay’; the hair said, ‘I am gay’; even the way he opened the door somehow succeeding in saying, ‘I am gay’.
He was gay.
‘Are you the new cleaner?’ he said, with a sceptical lilt to his voice, as if she didn’t quite look poor enough.
‘No,’ she said. ‘I’m Paul’s mum.’
His mouth silently opened and closed, like a fish.
The reason Paul had never invited her to his Hoxton house was suddenly obvious. Helen had thought Paul might be gay since he was eight, and had been pretty sure of it by the time he was fourteen. She had a fairly good idea of when he first came out to his friends, and a strong sense of when he had his first boyfriend. But not once had he ever so much as hinted at it to Helen. He only ever had ‘lovers’ or ‘partners’, never ‘girlfriends’ or ‘boyfriends’, and was frequently shifty with his pronouns, hiding behind an obfuscatory ‘they’ in place of a ‘he’ or ‘she’.
Why he was like this, why he had never been able to talk to her about his sexuality, she had no idea. She was a modern, open-minded woman. Paul couldn’t possibly have thought she was homophobic: she had gone out of her way to make clear to him that she wasn’t, and to let him know that she would accept him whoever he was and however he chose to behave, but none of her hints had ever been picked up on, and he had never opened up to her, even though it often seemed that he knew she knew. She sometimes thought that perhaps he kept it private not because he was ashamed of it, or because he was afraid she would be critical of him, but simply to keep her at a distance.
The neatly scruffy man at the door was still staring at her, rendered speechless by her explanation of who she was.
‘Can I come in?’ she said. If this man didn’t know anything about her, he wouldn’t have any reason to be shocked. And for him to know anything at all about her, he had to know a fair amount about Paul. She was already certain this was Paul’s lover, even though the size of the house suggested that more than two people lived here. Half an hour with him over a coffee – it might have to be a decaf if she didn’t want to end up a twitching zombie – and she’d be prepared for Paul’s arrival.
‘Is he expecting you?’ said the man. ‘Cause he’s not here.’
‘Oh, yes. We spoke on his mobile a couple of hours ago. He said he was coming home early from work and I should meet him here.’ Helen found it extremely easy to lie to men. It was a talent she had perfected during her waitressing years.
‘Oh. OK. Shall I call him and tell him you’re here?’
He was resisting. Lying to gay men, she remembered, was not as easy as lying to straight men.
‘He’ll be back any minute. He sent me a text. I’m dying for a cup of tea.’ Less threatening than coffee. More harmless-old-womanish. ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t catch your name.’
‘Andre.’
‘With an accent?’ If she made enough small talk and generally acted as if he had already invited her in, his defences would weaken.
‘No, no accent. Just Andre. Like Andrex without the x.’
Helen laughed. ‘Well, I think it’s a lovely name. I always regretted calling Paul Paul. It was his father’s idea. He deserves something more exciting, don’t you think?’
‘You’d better come in and wait here,’ said Andre. ‘I’ll get you that tea.’
Inside, a sleek but doleful lurcher clicked over the floorboards towards the door and greeted her with a welcoming sniff. Helen went down on her haunches and gave the dog a friendly barrage of pats. ‘Hello, beautiful,’ she said in her dog voice. ‘Who are you?’
‘He’s called Oscar,’ said Andre.
‘He’s gorgeous,’ said Helen. Be nice to the dog, and you’re in. ‘Is he yours?’
‘He’s everyone’s,’ said Andre, ambiguously. ‘He belongs to the house.’
Everything Andre said was a clue. There were clearly several people who lived here, and the implication was that they were more than just flatmates. More than strangers, at least. Did people still use the word commune? Was this a gay commune? Or was it a homophobic fantasy that such a thing existed, that gay people clubbed together in eccentric and vaguely unwholesome groups to couple in ways that mathematically simple-minded heterosexuals could never even dream of? Helen had recently heard a physicist on the radio talking about calculations he was doing on a nine-dimensional universe. Maybe gay people were like that about sex. Maybe they could get their heads round forms of cohabitation that binary-thinking people like her weren’t capable of comprehending. Maybe Andre wasn’t Paul’s boyfriend. Perhaps he was something similar for which there was no word, the workings of which she was as likely to understand as the formation of black holes.
‘Kitchen’s downstairs,’ he said, leading the way. He walked without lifting his feet, like a figure-skater. Helen checked her hair and lipstick in the large art nouveau hall mirror before following him down.
Helen was relieved to see that Andre made two cups. There was no way of knowing what kind of social rules prevailed in this place. For all she knew, he might easily have made one tea, then disappeared to leave her waiting for Paul. Whatever went on here, some common courtesies at least prevailed. Unless, of course, he didn’t believe her story and was keeping an eye on her to make sure she didn’t nick anything.
Oscar came down and joined them, which put Helen a little more at ease, helping the situation resemble something comprehensible and familiar. This was a man and a woman in a kitchen, drinking tea, in the company of a dog. If all else failed, the presence of a dog was a conversational safety net. If a silence went on too long, there was always dog-talk to fall back on.
Once they were settled across the table from each other, Helen decided to go for the big one, before he got in first and started exploring how
much she knew.
‘So how long have you been Paul’s boyfriend?’ she said. Anything less would have put Andre in a difficult position. Putting it like this, she bypassed the coming-out question and gave the impression there were no secrets Andre had to tiptoe around.
Andre appeared almost to choke on his tea. Helen pretended not to notice. She allowed the silence to run on, giving him no way out.
‘About four months,’ he said. ‘Give or take.’
‘Oh. And it’s going well?’
Andre smirked, and nodded, then got up and fiddled in a cupboard, as if playing for time. He came back to the table with a packet of Jaffa cakes, which he offered to Helen, who declined. He then broke one up and fed it to Oscar, bit by bit, allowing him to duck the conversation without being too rude.
Helen refused to offer him a conversational lifeline. It was Andre’s turn to speak, and she wasn’t going to hand him a let-off.
‘You’re not what I was expecting,’ he said, eventually.
‘Oh?’
‘I had the impression Paul hadn’t come out to you.’
‘Maybe he never had to. I’m not an idiot.’
‘If someone doesn’t want to see something, often they don’t. That doesn’t make them an idiot.’
‘Why would I not want to see it?’
‘Search me, but lots of people don’t.’
‘And Paul acts like I’m one of them, does he?’
‘No. It’s just the impression he gives. He doesn’t talk about it, really.’
Otherhood Page 3