by C. K. Stead
Billy is South African. His full name is Villiers de Groot Graaf which among our group became Billy Goat Gruff—Billy for short. Billy and Bertie were friends before I knew them. They were at Oxford together, at the same college, Merton, Billy studying (‘reading’, as they say in England) engineering, Bertie law. Like Bertie, Billy had money, lots of it, which came from what he called ‘a family in diamonds’.
I was a graduate student on a scholarship from New Zealand, writing a thesis which I hoped might be published as a book. But it was our passion for sport that brought us together—that, and a particular kind of boyish behaviour. (‘Laddish’, I think it might be called these days, and with strong disapproval.) There was a lot of beer drinking, a lot of horsing about, a lot of talk about ‘girls’. We loved Western movies and practised shoot-outs in the parks. I think we were quite serious students, but we were having a good time.
There was another student of that time I should mention because he has provided my title—or the first half of it: Peter Mapplethwaite from Scunthorpe. I’ve once or twice glanced at a map looking for Scunthorpe and not found it, but the way Pete pronounced it, and the word itself, suggested slums, coal mines, sunless skies and rickets—the part of England which those of us who were (shallow and ignorant, no doubt) visitors skirted around on our way to the lakes or the moors, to North Wales or to Scotland.
Mapplethwaite was a Marxist and a man of the people. Peoplethwaite, Bertie called him; and then Pepperpot, Maxiwank, Whistlestop, Cuttlefish—anything at all but his real name. Pete could be good company. Billy and I imitated his accent and he imitated ours. He knew me as the New Zillander who liked igg sendwiches; and Billy as the Seth Ufrican who didn’t want to talk about Bleck prytest.
Pete had absolutely no sense of tune, but he sang dialect songs—I suppose they were from his region—in a flat ugly-funny voice. Some of these took the form of dialogues, one of which went, as I remember,
‘Where’s tha bin, lud?’
‘’awkeen paypers.’
‘’oo for?’
‘Me uncle Benjamin.’
‘Wha’s ’e gin thee?’
‘Skinny ole ’et’ny.’
‘Silly ole blawk
’e ought ta dee.’
I tried to make Pete part of the group but it was no use. It didn’t matter too much that he sometimes wanted to lecture Billy about the situation of the ‘Blecks’. There were a few occasions when Billy hung his head in helpless shame, and then flared up in angry Boer pride; but mostly he could cope with it.
But it was the two Englishmen, Pete and Bertie, who couldn’t mix. It wasn’t even that there was great animosity between them. It seemed more like embarrassment.
Once I asked Bertie was it a problem for him that Mapplethwaite was a Marxist. Lord no, he said; that was no problem at all. Lots of chaps from school (he always spoke of ‘school’ as if the word meant to me exactly what it meant to him) had been ‘of that persuasion’. When I wanted more he said, ‘It’s just chalk and cheese, old boy.’
So it was ‘chalk and cheese’; but I’ve gone on seeing Pete on my visits to England, calling on him at the North London polytechnic where he lectures on what’s called Culture and Gender Studies, and going for a drink with him at his local.
Over the years Pete has been a Moscow communist, then a Peking communist, his faith coming to rest finally, when Mao died and the Gang of Four were arrested, on the regime in Albania. Later again, when the Berlin Wall came down and piece by piece the whole communist empire fell apart, I expected to find him depressed and defeated, but he wasn’t. On my last visit he seemed more relaxed and confident than he’d been for years. Communism was pure now, pure theory; it hadn’t yet, he explained, been put into practice—not anywhere. All those attempts at it had been corrupt and imperfect. Communism lay somewhere up ahead, the great future which all the world’s peoples would enjoy when at last they came to their senses and realised the evils of capitalism. Meanwhile all serious ‘analysis’ (his favourite word) of anything and everything came down to three things: class, race and gender.
That’s why Peter Mapplethwaite figures in my account: because if I told him this story (something I can’t imagine I would want to do) he would say that it illustrates perfectly the justness of the intellectual framework which has ruled his life; whereas to me it illustrates (if it illustrates anything) just the opposite—that life is subtler and more complex than the theories humans construct to explain it.
I’ve also continued to see Bertie—much more of him than of Pete—and so has Billy. But Billy’s visits to England and mine have never coincided; and it wasn’t until he came to New Zealand, accompanying the Springboks on their first post-apartheid tour, that we were able to get together again. Our talk was of rugby, of the new South Africa (which made him proud, but nervous too), and of the old days when we’d been students at Oxford. Bertie’s name came up often, and we were sorry he wasn’t with us, but we knew he would be watching the test matches on television.
Bertie, of course, speaks that tortured, alternately clipped, squeezed, swallowed and diphthongised English which signals, even (and perhaps especially) to those who mock it, impeccable social credentials. He has lived most of his adult life in a fine old house with a beautiful walled garden in the town of Marlow on the Thames. He inherited the place from a maiden great-aunt when he was still a young man; and for many years he commuted all the way in to London where he worked as a solicitor specialising in marine insurance which he liked to tell us was properly called ‘bottomry’. After his first marriage ended Bertie gave up the city firm in which he’d risen to become a partner, and opened a small office of his own in his home town. He’s there still, prosperous and apparently content, with a wife so young he sometimes jokingly introduces her as ‘My wife and child’.
Bertie’s house is full of sporting prints and cricketing photographs. Along the hallways and up the stairs you can see the rugby and cricket teams—school, university, business and local—he has played for. There’s a cabinet of sporting trophies; and two painted portraits of himself, one in cricketing whites with a bat across his knees, and one in flannels and a Merton blazer with a rep pocket.
In his youth Bertie let his hair grow rather long, with sideburns, and that’s the look he has tended to stick with; and as the hair has thinned and gone grey-streaked, and fashions have changed, it has left him looking less than the dashing and fashionable fellow he once was. But he’s tall (six foot two or three), strongly built, still handsome, still full of charm and energy and generosity. Bertie does things in style; and to be met by him off the train with flowers and champagne, as if you were a visiting foreign dignitary, is to experience a sort of expansiveness few of us where I come from would be capable of, even if the wish and the impulse towards it should happen to stir.
It was when Billy was on one of his visits to England that Bertie told him the story about his involvement with the cockney woman whose name was Michele Button, but who was known to her work mates as Shelly, or sometimes Shell, and to her husband as Mish. During Billy’s Springbok-accompanying visit to New Zealand he passed the story on to me. (‘You’re a writer,’ he said; ‘you can disguise it can’t you?’) And so, on my most recent visit to England, when I recognised during a late-night drinking session with Bertie that we were on the borders, so to speak, of this same narrative territory, I prompted, listened, questioned, remembered. Here is what I learned.
Bertie was, as he put it, ‘between marriages at the time’—depressed, bored, restless. This was in the last of his years working for the big impersonal city firm he’d been with for almost twenty years. His wife Françoise had left him, not for another man, nor for any reason except that she’d grown to hate living in England. One day she packed her things and, with their one child, returned to Paris.
‘It was a fearsome blow to the pride,’ Bertie said. ‘Nothing quite like it had ever happened to me before. So of course the old mind went blank for a time and I came to
consciousness a few months later realising I was drinking too much, eating fast fodder, not getting any exercise, becoming fat, ratty and inefficient. It was bad. All bad. That was when I started thinking about Shell.’
She served lunches in a popular place where lawyers often went for a quick bite when they weren’t entertaining clients. She was small, well-shaped, bright-eyed, pretty, good-humoured, with the broadest of London accents, and she and Bertie had hit it off right from their first encounter. She teased him; he responded. Their exchanges were always (as he put it) ‘remorselessly jokey’, but with an undertone of flirtation. But what really attracted him was her hair. It was shiny brown, wiry and curly, and despite her best efforts to keep it neat, it sprang out from her head as if it had a life of its own. It was the kind of hair, he said, that you want desperately to touch.
Bertie never thought about this woman except when she was there in front of him, serving him salad or cottage pie. She was a very minor character in his life, one of hundreds with walk-on parts. The idea that she might be more, or other, never occurred to him. When she disappeared from the lunch place and went to work somewhere else he didn’t notice she was gone.
Then one day he met her in the street. He was used to seeing her in a white smock and apron, and if it hadn’t been for that head of hair he might not have recognised her. She told him she had a new job, with hours that suited her better because she started early and was finished in time to pick up the kids (she had two, Jack and Jill) from school. Also she had every Wednesday afternoon free.
And then, taking him by surprise, she said if he was ever passing on a Wednesday afternoon he ought to drop in for a cuppa.
‘It was the boldness of the thing,’ Bertie said. ‘You couldn’t be mistaken about it. She just looked me in the eye, grinned and said it. And then she wrote her address on a piece of paper and pushed it into my hand. I must have looked flabbergasted, but that only made her laugh. She said, “Come on, Mr Lawson-Grieve. Hasn’t a pretty girl ever invited you to tea before?” And she walked off and left me there.’
Shortly after that Françoise left him. There were those months of dereliction, and the realisation that he must take himself in hand, re-order his life, discipline himself. But it shouldn’t be all hard work. There must be some fun, entertainments, some good times. Clearing the pockets of a jacket and trousers one day, readying things for the dry cleaner, he found the slip of paper with Michele Button’s address, and remembered that invitation with its suggestion of a good deal more than tea.
So an affair (if that’s the word for such an arrangement) started. Michele, or Shelly as he was soon calling her, lived in a block of flats just off Clerkenwell Road near to Gray’s Inn, only twenty minutes’ walk, or five by taxi, from Bertie’s office which was close to the Barbican. His secretary learned to keep the hours from one to 3.30 clear on a Wednesday and he spent them in bed with Shelly; and even after however many years had gone by since what was to be their last dreadful encounter, Bertie couldn’t speak of the first weeks and months of that association without a certain brightening of the eye and a lift in the voice.
The flat, on the second floor of a red-brick apartment block, was drab and cramped, but it had a balcony looking inward to a shady courtyard with a single tree. They used to make love, then lie in bed looking out into the upper branches of the tree, talking, exchanging stories, dozing, until they’d recovered sufficiently to do it again, after which they would shower together and return to their separate lives.
Their talk was full of teasing and banter, but with a rich undertone of affection. He told her about the people in his office; she talked about Jack and Jill, family, neighbours. Because he called her Shelly he told her about the poet Shelley who had once lived in his town of Marlow, writing revolutionary poems, and about his wife Mary writing Frankenstein after the poet had been drowned in Italy. A week or so later she had Frankenstein beside her bed. She’d found it in a second-hand bookshop, bought it and read it. He asked what she thought of it.
‘’orrible,’ she said. ‘Did you like it Ber’ie?’
He had to admit he’d never read it.
Once he bought her a gold chain, knowing—or thinking—that she would have to hide it from her husband. But she made him help her put it on, saying she would never take it off.
‘What about Arthur?’ he asked. She said she would say she’d found it in the street.
Bertie seldom asked about Arthur, preferred not to hear or think about him; but now and then she would speak of him. He was a guard at the British Museum, and though she always said he was ‘harmless’, that seemed to be the best she could say of him. All day he sat in a chair watching over ancient vases and statues, and in the evening he sat watching television, especially football, which didn’t interest her. His back was bad. He never had much to say. ‘Not like you, Ber’ie, you old gasbag.’ Sometimes Shelly would tell Arthur about something she’d read or seen and he would say, ‘That’s very interesteen, Mish.’ That’s what he’d said when she told him the story of Frankenstein. ‘Interesteen’. She seemed to find Arthur’s pronunciation of that word unforgivable. It drove her mad. It excused her infidelity.
As Bertie explained it to me, it was some time before he began to understand what kind of a woman Michele Button was and why she’d made him this, as it had seemed, outrageously frank offer of herself. She was not at all what he’d supposed—not ‘wild’, desperate, a beaten wife, or even attracted to him by his patrician looks and manner. Shelly was not inexperienced; but her life had been on the whole sober and orderly, constrained by modest beginnings, low income, early marriage and two children born just a year apart.
As for Bertie’s attractions: she knew perfectly well that he was of a certain ‘class’; but to her such men had always seemed faintly comic (‘You’re a joke, Ber’ie, you know that?’). It was almost an obstacle to her liking him; just as her ‘class’—the fact that she referred to her husband as ‘Arfur’, complained that her children came home ‘filfy’ from school, talked about someone having ‘nuffing in ’is ’ead’, or said she’d heard this or that ‘on good aufori’y’—had made her seem to Bertie quite beyond the pale. No. Bertie’s attractiveness to her had been something else, something she told him she didn’t understand. She said his voice was nice even though his accent was posh. And also, once she got to know him better, there was his smell, which was especially nice and had nothing to do with soap or aftershave.
But almost from the first exchange between them she was falling in love with him. This was a fact which slowly became clear to him. He found it flattering, disconcerting, unintelligible, reassuring—both welcome and unwelcome. It made for great sex, and helped restore the confidence a much-loved wife’s departure had undermined; but it added a burden of responsibility and of guilt. Increasingly as he got to know Michele Button, Bertie felt affection and gratitude. Her talk was lively and funny. Her generosity was boundless. Her body was lovely and her hair magical. He began to think of her as his secret garden. But to fall in love, even a little, with someone who had things ‘on good aufori’y’ was quite beyond him.
‘Not possible,’ he said when I asked him. ‘Simply out of the question. Sometimes, you know, I’d try to imagine taking her to things—to dinner parties, Lords, Wimbledon, Covent Garden. It was …’ He looked at me with an expression that appealed for understanding, for absolution.
‘Unfinkable?’ I suggested.
He laughed. ‘Yes exactly. Unfinkable.’
So he’d decided he must stop seeing her. If she’d been able to take their affair as he did, as an adventure, a diversion, an unlooked-for luxury, a secret bonus that life had handed out with no strings or complications, it would have been different. But he could see that every visit made the love she felt for him, and which he couldn’t think of matching, more powerful, more all-consuming.
She, of course, soon recognised that this depth of feeling troubled him, and she tried to conceal it or make light of it. But there w
ere moments when she would say, ‘I’d die for you, Ber’ie,’ or even (and much worse), ‘I’d let you kill me if you wanted to. I’d love you for it.’ He would be struck with a sense of awe and helplessness then, and with the wish to escape. To have evoked great love could only be good for his wounded ego; on the other hand, to find himself unable to return it inevitably reduced the beneficial effect. Herbert Lawson-Grieve’s secret garden had begun to have about it the feel of a cage.
But still the decision that he must end their affair wasn’t translated into action. He would think of it as he left her flat, resolving that this visit would be the last. By the following Monday the resolve would be gone. By Wednesday he would hardly be able to complete his morning’s work for thinking of what the afternoon was to bring. But now, because he was in two minds about Shelly, an ambiguity had begun to creep into his feelings about what he did in that bedroom. He enjoyed—and yet did not. He marvelled, and was half repelled. Sometimes he felt like a circus animal required to do ever more remarkable tricks. Shelly was the trainer and her whip was true love.
The break didn’t come until he was asked to go to New York on business for the firm. He accepted the task willingly, and even made it last longer than was necessary. By the time he got back to London he felt the Shelly habit had been broken.
But now came phone calls from her; and when these were blocked off by his secretary, there was a postcard. It was of a large pink breast painted to look like a winking pig, the nipple its snout. On the back she had written, ‘Here’s my knocker, Bertie luv. Where’s yours?’
This, coming to him in the office, giggled over by the secretaries, was outrageous—but of course she meant it to be. Bertie was angry; but he was also ashamed. It had been cowardly and wrong to try to end the thing by simply absenting himself. He was an honourable chap, wasn’t he? He must go and (as he put it) ‘face the music’.