Unlike Judith Okely, who decided celibacy was the only dignified solution to the narrow choice of being either sheltered or seduced, my brush with rape and death galvanized me to overcome my shyness. I wanted to wipe out the bad memory of that erect penis on my black silky underskirt by meeting a man. Resolutely I took myself off to a dance club which advertised among foreign students. I hated it. Like a market,’ I said to the handsome young man who had asked me to dance.
He worked at the airport, embodied Gallic charm and commenced a courtly defloration by taking me to see Andrzej Wajda’s compelling film about the Warsaw ghetto Kanal – my introduction to the Polish director’s trilogy. As I glanced around the cinema in the interval, I felt pleased with myself for braving the terrible club and discovering this well-dressed companion. Yet a nagging sense that things did not seem right lingered. Not only was I realizing that my fashionable – in Leeds – fawn plastic coat was going to have to be dumped, I was troubled by a less tangible perception. I was shamming.
The force of circumstance was to be interrupted by the Easter holidays and the reappearance of Tony from his job as an assistant in Bressuire. His visits to Paris always put him in a good mood, promising decadence and an excess of aperitifs which gave him terrible headaches. On this occasion he was in particularly good spirits, as he was accompanied by his new love, Danielle. I must meet her and some art students from the Slade he had met the night before: ‘You’ll like them. They’re really cool.’
By this time my post-Hunmanby reconstruction job was finally shaping up, my hair having grown sufficiently to resemble long and straight. I had never met any London art students but I was still Leeds enough to want to hold my end up with Londoners – cool or not cool. So I got dressed up in my smart beatnik outfit: high heels, black stockings, C&A tight black jumper over a dark, pleated skirt in muted greys and blues, which I considered suitably subtle and interesting. To these I added my precious Paris purchases, alternative accessories, a dangling string of large dark-coloured bean beads and a long black bag made of strips of soft leather sewn together in a patchwork (which my mother was to call my horse’s nosebag).
While we waited in a bar, Tony told me how he had met Dani in the wilds of Bressuire. I listened with one ear, a little apprehensive about the London art students, but reassuring myself that anyone with a discerning artistic eye would note those green and brown bean beads and that Left Bank bag. A Miles Davis record was playing in the background for dramatic tension when, with perfect timing, three young men in black made a rather self-conscious entry. Like Tony, they all wore big black sunglasses – shades, their shields.
Tony introduced first Barry, small with wispy blond hair and a puckish face, and then a dark, sturdy Geoff, who smiled a sensual grin. But it was Bernie Jennings, tall, skinny and pale-faced, like a harlequin in mourning, who provoked peculiar and unrecognizable sensations in me – something between an electric shock and being hit under the ribs. I was drawn to the shyness and pride as much as to the light brown fringe, long white face and black holey sweater. Over the years this kind of agitation would become recognizable as desire, but at just eighteen, I had no reference points, no compass to journey into passion. And I had been programmed since early adolescence to be desired, not to do the desiring.
Intimidated by the cockney voices which prickled with class hostility, I resorted to a Yorkshire no-nonsense manner and teased them about their sunglasses. This cool had to have some cracks. I didn’t realize that my outfit, which I imagined was a unique expression of my personality, made me look like a middle-class Hampstead person to Bernie and his friends. But they’d never met one with a Leeds accent and were completely thrown.
I had rejected flirting as akin to that other no-no, prick-teasing, in the cerebral sexual code I had elaborated against convention. Now, annoyed with myself for feeling like a marshmallow, I dumped my own rules and, in extremity, began flirting defensively with Bernie. I was desperate to break through his surface detachment and my sexuality was edged with aggression. Bernie retreated into complete silence, a crab in a cave backing into some place where he could not be reached. But I had found a crack in the cool; I had managed to insinuate myself into one of those imperceptible spaces where the nerves turn tremors into messages. Bernie, who had sat next to me, slowly began rolling Gauloise tobacco into a cigarette. I could feel a contained response rising. Yet overtly none of this was happening. We were a group at a table, having a drink and waiting for Dani.
Tony’s ironic panache turned suddenly into a benign grin. A bubbly but resolute-looking Danielle was by his side. I smiled over at them wrapped up together on the seat opposite and the tiny figure in jeans and black sweater chuckled back. How did Tony’s Danielle contrive that minimalist chic, I wondered? I could never get it. The flat Leeds accents of smart’ continued to echo in my head years after I had ejected C&A and Lewis’s fashions. It was evident to me, though, that it was not clothes, or even the dark curls peeping from beneath a small bottle-green scarf, which had allured Tony; it was the vitality twinkling in Dani’s two large brown eyes.
We all ambled off to eat couscous in the Rue de la Huchette, with Bernie explaining to the Algerian waiter in bad French that we were ‘Parti Travailliste’. I don’t know what they made of the news that this band of odd-looking English were on the side of the workers, but they saw he was trying to be friends and gave us sweet, sticky, delicious honey cakes. By then Bernie and I had entered into a wordless conspiracy to lose everyone else.
Finally alone, we meandered together into a modern jazz club. We couldn’t afford to go downstairs but sat upstairs in the brown, wooden-walled room on a bench, making one drink last for ever. As the music floated up the stairs we sat in silence, listening hard, until the straining notes seemed to be playing from inside my head. Little by little we kept edging closer. I could just feel his shoulder. This slight touch became overwhelming. We were being carried together into some timeless zone, beyond reason, outside day-to-day experiencing.
But time had passed nonetheless. They were putting the chairs on the tables. It must have been around two in the morning when we found ourselves breathing the chilly night air outside. I shivered. We wandered through Paris all that night, behaving like classic lovers while pretending to ignore the cold. It was all most impractical. I had no idea how to get home after the last métro went and was anyway far too nervous to suggest it. Bernie shared a tiny hotel room with Geoff and Barry; we couldn’t go back there. Eventually, tired, drained and hungry in the dawn, we huddled over a coffee in Les Halles, desire on hold and overlaid by the shouts of the market men, hauling their loads and wiping their stalls. We were extraneous in the bustle of the early morning.
I have no coherent sequence of memory for the days that followed, only a series of cameos. Bernie and Barry were smoking kief – the green leafy cannabis which found its way to France from Morocco – in their little hotel room and playing musique concrète with the bare light bulb. I went out for a sandwich, got lost, forgot the name of their hotel. The streets seemed maze-like and I kept rounding the same corners. Panicking and cursing my hopeless sense of direction, I asked a man the way. He explained with tolerance that there were many possible destinations in the area for one who had no precise notion of what was being sought. I finally unravelled the way back to the hotel entrance and returned to the tiny room, flustered and distraught, to find my absence had not even been noticed. They were still incanting, but in semi-gloom. The light bulb had shattered in a tympanic blow. My anxiety mutated into an irrational fury and I sat glowering at them for no good reason. Barry must have translated this into a message to depart, for eventually he sauntered out.
Neither of us was sure what to do next. I gazed at him, sheepish and uncertain. When you blew all the rules, how did you make a move? We could meditate,’ he said, showing me how to sit cross-legged on the bed. Neither of us wanted to meditate. He drew me to him and undid my bra. A diffuse arousal spun around my body. I’m a virgin,’
I said, clumsy, sensing he assumed I knew more about what was happening than I did. He was incredulous. How could anyone be a virgin at eighteen! Girls he knew in Bermondsey were never virgins by then. I’d never been to Bermondsey, but immediately endowed it with drama and life in the raw. Impossible to explain about Roundhay or Hunmanby; how could he comprehend the peculiar difficulties of losing your virginity in such conditions? He offered to take me to the métro. On the way I tried to tell him about my mother, but he was dismissive about middle-class people and described how his mother had brought him up alone. I was silenced by his scorn and felt ashamed by my class privilege.
My virginity seemed to create a sexual pause but I had nothing to judge such a courtship by and accepted the days as they came. Time wafted past in a haze. Bernie declared I needed some proper clothes and the three of them took me off to the flea market to buy washed old Levi’s with fly buttons, telling me how to cut them down the leg and sew them up tight. The truth was that a five-foot-three female person with a waist and round hips did not look great in men’s Levi’s. However, I was to wear them with pride until they disintegrated, convinced that this was the real thing.
Bernie drew tourists’ portraits in the squares for money. He looked the part, was quite a hit and we set out happily to eat. On the way there an old tramp put out his hand. Bernie fished the money out of his pocket and gave him half. My small-business Yorkshire self was aghast, but the mystical Methodist in me recognized an economic justice beyond common sense.
Bernie, at twenty, appeared to invent how to behave in every encounter he made. He looked out at the world like no one I had ever met. Through his eyes the ordinary became extraordinary, the mundane miraculous. You have such a capacity to wonder,’ Bernie announced once out of the blue. I didn’t tell him this was called being gormless in Yorkshire. He informed me that beauty could be seen everywhere, pointing to the corner of an advertisement or the patterns left by his espresso coffee on the side of the cup. I was surprised; I’d thought it was in art galleries or Swedish-designed teapots.
One day he took me on a winding trek through the back streets of the Latin Quarter. There was an exhibition he was eager to see in one of the little galleries. Used to the Louvre, I was put out by the sight of creatures made of sacking with cork noses and funny hats around the walls. This was ridiculous. Annoyed to be walking around looking so solemnly at things that kids might make, I growled in irritation. Bernie said this was a good reaction. The artist wanted me to respond. This made me even crosser. I think it was Marcel Duchamp who was responsible for my bad humour.
Knowing nothing about the conflicting theories of aesthetics simmering away among tiny groups in the art colleges, I presumed Bernie’s views on art and existence were entirely individual. In fact of course he was communicating to me a mix of attitudes circulating during the early sixties, when the shock tactics of the avant-garde were shifting towards celebrating the popular. Pop Art was to inscribe familiar motifs with new meanings in an effort to break with élitism, only to become rapidly commercialized itself. This tension in aesthetics between separation from mass consumerism and the desire to find a relation to popular culture prefigured a political dilemma for the left which was to erupt in the late sixties and rumble through the subsequent decades.
Only recently did I discover that Bernard Jennings was among the signatories of the Fine Artz Associates’ Manifesto from the Slade in 1964, announcing they were going to take ‘art back into society … and give it a larger public’. It figured. My personal memories suddenly fell into a new relief. They had acquired surroundings. Odd when the social meets the personal unawares, as if two trains enter a tunnel at opposite ends and, instead of colliding, just merge.
Bernie and I eventually managed to make our way back to the Seiziéme the night before I was to leave on a visit to the Loire home of one of the French students. We stopped in a café and he drank a coffee. I sipped a hot chocolate, reflecting anxiously that he looked so pale and thin he might just fade into the ether. I had known him for one week. It felt much, much longer.
I smuggled him nervously past the concierge, who was luckily snoozing. Up we went in the cranking, creaking little lift, which always had a peculiar effect on my bladder – perhaps because it seemed so unlikely that the ancient thing would make it to the top floor. I opened the door of the little room with its cold mosaic floor, the bidet, the bed, the dresser and my postcards. ‘Quite a picture gallery you’ve got here,’ he remarked sardonically, making me want to tear them off the wall. Before he crossed its threshold, nothing had happened in that room. It had been my ascetic cell, where I read or slept or ate bread and yoghurt, watching the elaborate lives and brightly striped sun chairs of a rich French family in the flat across the road.
In bed Bernie produced a crinkled brown object. This antique sheath was so ugly it appalled me. Ignorant and unpractical, I declared I didn’t want him to use it and stuffed it under the pillow. I felt a moment of fear. Would I find his penis repellent? I looked down anxiously. There it was, just part of him, part of the skinny body that was utterly unthreatening. I wanted his closeness, loved the touch of him as we embraced. But sex remained a puzzle. Was it just this moving up and down? After all that worrying about your shape, your lipstick, your clothes; after all that prohibiting and whispering and all that longing? Was this it then, backwards and forwards? Could losing your virginity be a kind of non-event? What about all those D. H. Lawrence explosions? Was this really not being a virgin any more? I was far too shy to ask Bernie. Anyway, while he slept I was lying there with other worries. This was the first time since I was a child that I had slept without rollers in my hair. What on earth would I look like in the morning? To my surprise, I didn’t look much different. The rollers had got bigger and bigger anyway, to accommodate the natural Bardot look.
I left him asleep in my single iron bed and hurried away, late and flustered, to meet a crew-cut American student who had offered to drive me to the Loire on a scooter. In the métro window I could see my reflection. I smiled the secret smile of a satisfied sinner. These other people in the carriage could not possibly imagine! If it had been yesterday they would have been sitting with a virgin. A unique, momentous divide of before and after had occurred in my life. Or had it?
My geography was little better than my physiology. I had no idea that France was so big. The scooter journey was an ordeal of dust and fumes, hour after hour. That evening, amidst the châteaux and lush countryside of the Loire, surrounded by polite young people making small talk, I rued the dutiful politeness which had made me leave Paris. Pleading tiredness, I escaped to bed.
In turmoil, the following day I wandered down the garden and, finding a stream which ran at the bottom, sat, drawing a strange peacefulness from its flow. Acute, exhausted, the borders of perception seemed to open; it was as if I was seeing the everyday for the first time, through new eyes. The green of the grass, the shine on the wetness of the stones and the moving water became more real than real. I seemed to vanish into them. Ordinary existence melted away, leaving a calm delight, an intensity of joy. And ever since in my life when such moments have recurred I remember being eighteen and so hopelessly in love.
Time was a merciless slowcoach that weekend, but at long last I was back and heading for the Monaco, where I had arranged to meet Bernie. The Monaco was a tiny triangle of a place, near Danton’s statue and overlooking the Carrefour de l’Odéon. Round metal-rimmed tables stood outside on the pavement, or tucked themselves between thin pillars inside. The bar was on the left as you entered, backed by the standard mirror. There was little room for anything else apart from an old black and white clock on the wall and a notice board where drifters and bums left messages for one another. The café, now, has been completely refurbished and renamed Le Comptoir du Relais, but in 1961 it was cheap and served as a kind of beatnik social club.
I waited nervously, glancing at the big round clock, pulling my skirt down – that twitchy, on-edge kind of waiting
for someone you are longing to see. I was early. The hands on the clock went slowly round. And round. I followed the second hand with my eyes, willing the seconds to become minutes. I was no longer early; he was late. My heart was doing heavy thuds. Then Geoff was leaning at the bar and looking towards me. I started, collected myself, moving forward to greet him, smiling. Awkwardly he handed me a note. Bernie had gone to the Welcome café in Brussels.
I stared at Geoff in dumb incomprehension. All at once nothing made sense. Geoff was looking exceedingly embarrassed and saying something, but I was not hearing conversation normally. His words sank in only after they’d hung for a while suspended in the air. There was thus a delay before I realized that he was offering himself as consolation. Some barely functioning part of my consciousness knew he thought this might cheer me up. But my immediate response was outrage. Geoff shrugged. We were both relieved when Tony strolled in.
Tony walked and walked through Paris with me in the drizzle. Obsessively, I interpreted and reinterpreted – he’d said, I’d said, he did, I’d done, I felt, what did he feel? – until the evening became night. Whereupon Tony sat patiently on a bench with me as I wept and wept, making the misty wet night even wetter. But he had to go back to Bressuire.
Every day was painful afterwards. I staggered through them in a disconsolate trance. Classes and lectures at the Sorbonne had become out of the question. I drifted through the streets of the Latin Quarter. But so many places were haunted with memories: the Rue de la Huchette, M. Pierre’s with its sawdust floor where we ate steak and frites, and the Monaco itself. I turned over in my head the places he had mentioned. The Welcome café, the Partisan, a left coffee bar in Soho, Sam Widge’s café at King’s Cross. Perhaps I could find him. I wrote to him at the Slade. I didn’t know then that time padded the betrayals of passion, that time would heal the wrenching loss. About a year later he wrote to say sorry. He had cut out’ because he’d wanted to be a hipster and was afraid of getting involved. He’d visited Giacometti, admired de Kooning, told me to read Wilhelm Reich, listen to Eric Dolphy and take out a sub to Anarchy. I was glad to get his letter, but by then I had become another person.
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