‘Tell me it’s not true, Riley,’ those eyes now nauseously sorrowful.
‘What?’
‘Tell me I didn’t turn you into a lesbian.’
I stared at him in disgust. I said, ‘No. But don’t worry. You did your best, Archie.’
To be fair to him, I was experimenting, albeit mildly, with my sexuality at the time but then a lot of women were doing that. It came as a package with all those radical meetings, those courses and conferences. These seem like my Wilderness Years when I look back, and I don’t mean that as any disrespect to those serious about the whole thing and not playing the dilettante. I was full of book learning in those years, not much more, and I could see all the arguments. I agreed with them, in part I still do. I can see what’s wrong with the male/female sexuality but I can also see what’s right about it.
It’s like Sophie said once, throwing aside a magazine with another of those ten-thousand-word angst-ridden pieces, ‘Jesus! Whoever said relationships were supposed to work? It’s the fact that they don’t that makes them interesting,’ and I guess I agree with her.
Danny says he only feels ‘comfortable’ in the arms of a man. He says that’s how he knew he was gay, when he tried sex with a man for the first time, this after several early courtships with women. And I can understand that too – that a woman too might feel this way, ‘only comfortable’ in the arms of another woman. Only for me what I learnt back in those Wilderness Years, on the couple of occasions when, emboldened by a joint and some powerful rhetoric, I put some of the book learning into practice, was that being comfortable was not what I wanted. That it was the sheer uncomfortableness, its ill-fitting quality, that I missed, and this because it provided the bite of the thing, the sheer absurd impossible challenge.
When I asked Danny, ‘How old were you? You know … when you first realised you were gay?’ dragging him into my nature/nurture debate, he said, ‘Gosh.’
‘What?’
‘In all the years we’ve known each other, you’ve never asked me that before, Riley.’
His back was turned at the time and he was holding up the silver sac from the wine box, in front of the window like some medical orderly about to attach it to a patient.
‘Do you mind?’
‘I guess not.’ He began to squeeze the last of the wine into the two glasses. ‘I was about eleven. When the boys around me were beginning to go bug-eyed over things like breasts. I guess I knew even then there was something different.’
‘So when did you know? I mean properly …’
‘Late teens. I’d had something I knew was a pretty serious crush on a guy in my class at school when I was about fourteen. But I never really realised what it was. Never identified it.’ He threw the sac into the bin in one easy movement, sat down at the table with the glasses.
‘What made you realise? In the end?’
‘Going out with a girl. Liking her. A lot. Beginning to get serious but suddenly knowing that it wasn’t right, wasn’t what I wanted.’
Danny makes me nervous sometimes. Against all the odds. He can stare a little censoriously. He was doing it now but I plunged on anyway.
‘I know it can be a dodgy subject. I mean political. But it’s in the interests of my research.’ I said the last words hastily. ‘Do you feel as though you were born gay or you became it?’
He shook his head. ‘I don’t think it’s a tick-box situation. Born, I guess. I mean, I didn’t have one of those Angela’s Ashes home lives to push me into it.’
‘Do you think it’s better … if it’s genetic?’
But now Danny’s shoulders were giving a small irritated little movement as if shrugging off the question. ‘I don’t know. I don’t really care to say. Tell you the truth, I don’t spend that much time thinking about it, Riley.’ He was looking at me over the rim of his glass at the time, a mocking look but with a steely little edge to it. ‘But then I don’t spend as much time staring fixedly down at my own navel as you do.’
It was a fair point, one that I acknowledged, but still not one I felt should be allowed to stand in the way of my scientific inquiry. Which is why I took the matter to the fount of all scientific knowledge in our family, i.e., Fergie.
He was planing a piece of wood when I arrived with his coffee. Something about the way he held it up to his eye, stared down it, made it look like an ancient inherited gesture.
Fergie’s uncle was a master craftsman, a legend among those who knew him. He mended musical instruments. Yehudi Menuhin took his violins there. Paul McCartney brought a guitar in without his uncle recognising him. As a kid, Fergie would watch him work. He’d go with him, on a Saturday, if his uncle had a lot of work on, sit in the cramped little upstairs room in Soho.
‘I’ve got a question to ask you. It’s a serious question …’
‘OK.’ He put the wood back into the lathe again, twisted the handle and picked up the plane.
‘Do you think there could be a spinster gene? You know, like a gay gene?’
‘Who says there’s a gay gene?’
Well, E. O. Wilson for one.
It’s a cardinal sin to interrupt a scene with a long convoluted piece of reflection. But to hell with it. Rules are only there to be broken, beside which, this is not reflection, it’s useful background information.
The idea of the ‘gay gene’ first appeared in E. O. Wilson’s 1975 book Sociobiology, in which he speculated that genes might be doing their own bit for child-rearing by including a ‘gay gene’ in members of the extended family to produce childless uncles for the purposes of baby-sitting, visits to the cinema and art galleries and, in the case of Victorian fiction, taking in grubby and unpromising orphans and thereafter bequeathing them their entire fortunes.* The ‘discovery’ of the gene occurred some twenty years later, this thanks to Dean Hamer, described as part biologist, part psychologist, also as Big Gene Hunter. A gay man himself, he was trying to find out why some of his friends but not others were dying from Aids. Trawling through the DNA of forty pairs of gay brothers for statistical anomalies, i.e., stretches of DNA that were shared by more of them than could be expected by chance, he came across the same set of five markers – short, easily distinguished stretches of DNA – in the region of chromosome Xq28, which men inherit from their mothers. From this he concluded that somewhere in this region lay the gene or genes contributing to the homosexuality of the men concerned, a restrained and scholarly conclusion, which did not stop the world’s media immediately dubbing Xq28 the ‘gay gene’ and it appearing on a million enthusiastic T-shirts along with the legend, ‘IT’S TRUE. MY MOTHER DID MAKE ME A HOMOSEXUAL.’
All of which is far too simple, according to Fergie.
‘Forget about genes for things, Riley.’
At best, according Fergie, genes might indicate tendencies, inclinations. ‘Besides which, they’re not fixed – that’s the latest thinking, anyway. They’re changing from the day we’re born.’
I could see the genes as Fergie was describing them and I knew why he’d been such a good teacher. He was concentrating on pushing the plane across the edge of the wood, but still his voice went on painting the picture of them, ‘pulsing, vital … picking up the data of everyday life, flicking on and off like switches’.
The movements along the wood had rhythm to them now as he bent over the lathe. Each clean, smooth and flowing sweep seemed more like a dance movement than carpentry.
‘It’s nature and nurture, Riley,’ he said, putting the plane down, giving the lathe handle a turn and then a flick that sent it spinning. He pulled the wood out, held it up to his eye again. ‘The two working together.’
All of which delighted me as an explanation, as I exclaimed a short while later.
‘It explains it all,’ I said, clattering the coffee cups triumphantly into the sink.
‘All? All what, exactly?’
‘Why all that marital bickering affected me but washed right over you.’ I gave the tap a merry twist. Water jetted out. I tu
rned, laughing. ‘Why I turned out a spinster and you turned out wife and mother and so disgracefully well adjusted.’
‘What makes you think I am?’ There was that small note of controlled anger in Cass’ voice. She went on carefully folding the laundry, putting it into the wicker laundry basket, not looking at me, which I took as a warning. ‘What makes you think it washed right over me?’
‘I always thought …’
But she went right on. ‘I hated it as much as you did. To this day I can’t bear a raised voice in this damn house. I can’t have a proper argument with my kids or Fergie without a big lump coming to my throat.’
‘I never knew.’
‘No.’ She looked up now, and whatever it was in her eyes made me feel small and mean and selfish. ‘But then you wouldn’t, would you?’ She started to fold stuff again, like she wasn’t that crazy about looking at me. ‘I couldn’t wait to get away to college. To get away from their bickering. But I worried about you, left behind. That’s why I used to come home as often as possible.’
I felt the tears spring but she picked up the laundry basket briskly. She hates fuss like this and, like she said, any form of outburst.
I said, ‘I’m sorry. So very sorry, Cass.’
I can see now, looking back, that things did get worse after Cass left, and this because, even as a child, she’d acted as peacemaker.
‘Now, Mum …’ I can hear the pacifying tone in her voice, and she no more than ten or eleven.
‘Come on, Dad.’ So full of sorrow. So cajoling.
I came to hate Christmas because of their sniping and I know Cass is the same. All that unseasonal spirit lying around house like a black cloud as they were forced, by virtue of the holidays, to be locked up together.
She’d buy him absurd expensive Christmas presents, cufflinks she liked but he’d never wear, expensive sweaters, once a silver hip flask. ‘More use to you, Babs, than me,’ he said, laughing coldly.
Each year Cass and I would prise money out of him to get something for her and pretend it was from him. Each year it grew harder. One year he refused altogether and Cass and I put some money together and bought her a brooch, pretending it was from him. She opened it in delight, pinned it on immediately. She even tried to kiss him but he turned away.
He said, ‘The girls bought it. It’s nothing to do with me,’ and he walked out of the room, and into the hall and reached for his overalls.
She jumped up from her chair, followed him out, screaming at him, ‘I’m leaving you. I’m getting a divorce.’
I remember how it went down my back like a jet of icy water. His voice was very cold but with a brusque, practical edge to it. There was something terribly knowing in it, some edge of premonition.
He said, ‘No you’re not. You don’t want a divorce, Barbara. You just want me to die, nicely and neatly.’
Surely this was true. It’s been said before, but it will bear saying again, that what she wanted to be was a married woman without the inconvenience of a husband. Or maybe she just wanted to be frozen in time, trapped forever in the pictures in her photograph album.
Because in the end, it wasn’t just George Gordon who betrayed our mother. In the end she was sold out by those from whom she could have least expected such treachery and it was the photographs that caused the trouble, first of children, then grandchildren, of family holidays, weddings and christenings, all of these dropping out of Christmas cards, supplanting those grainy pictures of those laughing young faces around the smoke-filled table.
Some of the Buffies and Madges and Snowies have died, of course, but what’s worse for my mother is that some just can’t be bothered to visit. Only one turned up this Christmas – who but Buffy, the famous Buffy, late of Cairo, now of Devizes, she who once may or may not have thrown up over Larry Adler.
As always, she was with her husband, a miserable man from the first (I should know; I was that bridesmaid), one who’s never lost the air over the years of making the trip under sufferance, his grumpiness making my mother’s Chalet School merriment sound the more shrill and unseemly.
‘The things we got up to, Stan, let me tell you. Isn’t that right, Buffy?’
But after all these years of Stan’s irascibility, Buffy has caught the habit. From the kitchen where I’d been dragooned by my mother into making tea for them after calling in with her dry-cleaning, I caught the sound of the key turning in the lock of the cabinet and I knew she was reaching for the photograph album. As the door squeaked open, Buffy’s voice sliced through the air, not troubling to hide its irritation.
‘For goodness’ sake, Babs. Not that old thing again. We’ve had enough of all those old photos.’
When Buffy had gone, almost certainly for the last time, my mother sat with the album on her knee turning the pages slowly. I poured her a large gin and tonic, then another, one for myself too, sitting on the arm of the sofa, turning the pages with her.
‘Nobody cares any more,’ she said, despair in her voice.
‘I care.’
‘No you don’t.’
‘Yes I do. I kid you sometimes that I don’t but I do.’ I put an arm around her shoulders, something I seldom do, gave it a squeeze. ‘Was it really so much fun?’
‘Oh, yes … yes … yes …’ She looked up at me, balling her handkerchief in her fist, and with the eyes of a child. ‘Oh, it was so much fun, I can’t tell you.’ And her voice had that terrible yearning.
I wanted to ask her, ‘Are you sure? Are you really so sure it was so much fun, or is it all just lodged in your memory this way, a mirage, golden-hazed, like an oasis?’
I wanted to ask her because I wanted to ask myself the same question.
After all, isn’t this what I’ve been doing over the years with the memory of Nathan?
Nathan and I in my own private Oasis.
* Also from my mother and quite recently.
‘If you want to come out of the cupboard, darling…’ this after reading some ‘Gay is the New Straight’ piece in Cosmopolitan at her hairdresser’s.
I said, ‘I rather think the word you’re searching for is closet, Mother.’
* A particularly interesting theory, this. After all, as with uncles, so with aunts. That Mother Nature should consider them of such consequence she decided to incorporate them genetically in the species clearly throws a new and fascinating light on the subject. We wait with interest further research on this. Meanwhile, special mention should be made here of the ground-breaking move by Liz Hurley, giving her son, Damian, six godfathers (i.e., ‘uncles’) to assist her with child-rearing. These include Elton John, to look after his musical education, and Hugh Grant, to take him to football.
Way to go, Hurley Burley.
O is for … an Old Maid
Which I am, according to Roget’s Thesaurus.
Dr Peter, for so he was, father of two, inventor of the pocket chess set, and a grand old man of ninety-one when he died in 1824, lists ‘spinster’ under celibacy, which I suppose they were then or at least supposed to be. He lumps us with bachelors, a nice touch, this, bearing in mind our heroine Beatrice’s belief that in the end the Devil would refuse to take us, spinsters all, when we turned up at the gates of hell leading our apes, that instead he would point us upstairs where we would be met by St Peter, who would show us where the bachelors sit, there to live together ‘as merry as the day is long’.*
The list of Roget’s alternatives to ‘spinster’ is long and eclectic, from the slightly vulgar, fifties formica-topped ‘bachelor girl’, through the elegant ‘debutante’, the melancholy ‘maid unwed’, the fancy French ‘feme sole, ‘maiden aunt’, that stalwart of farce, vestal virgin (not technically mine to claim), with ‘Amazon’ and ‘Artemis’ – whoever they may be – bringing up the rear.
According to Roget, we are ‘unmated’ and ‘unhusbanded’, true by definition, also ‘uncaught’, which I like, carrying as it does an image of the sly, spry marriage-avoiding spinster. I must argue against ‘unwooed’
and ‘unasked’, however, this being something he could not possibly know, no more than yet another example of that old cliché-ridden argument that the spinster state could never be of her own choosing. For Jane is not the only one to have flagged down that early coach. There’s many a one has done the same thing, taken that chilly, bumpy, early morning ride and more often than not, to spare the feelings of the person concerned, earning, for her generosity of spirit, nothing more than accusations of philophobia, or to be dismissed by Roget as women who ‘have no offers’, who ‘receive no proposals’. A high-handed, unsubstantiated assumption. Erroneous too. Why, I myself have received even within the last month a firm quite unsolicited offer of marriage …*
‘Heart-whole’, Roget calls us, for which I can forgive him even though he’s wrong. Who could get through life without losing at least some small part of this mysterious sometimes treacherous organ? ‘Fancy-free’? Well, yes. Fancy is as fancy does, and if the shoe fits wear it. It does me – perfectly.
That I live ‘in single blessedness’, I certainly believe, and that my cottage can quite legitimately be termed ‘bachelor hall’.
All of which only goes to show that Nathan was wrong in that bitter aside before we parted.
‘What does it matter?’ he said. ‘Soon you’ll be married.’
This is an old tale, I see that now, a tale preserved in the aspic of memory. For instance, if I close my eyes a quarter of a century on, I can still recapture the precise detail of Nathan’s hotel room, the L shape dictated by the square box of the bathroom planted in one corner, the institutional cream of the walls – that grubby greying cream beloved of hospital and council offices and government departments the world over – the anonymous watery blue of the lino tiles, the trashy thin stained plywood of the bureau between the single beds, and the table in the alcove made by the bathroom wall with Nathan’s books and papers spread across it, their corners lifting lightly in the draught from the air-conditioner that gave out that eternal shuddering hum; the Venetian blinds the same grey cream as the walls, but lined with dust, always closed against the heat so that the hubbub from the street below – the cries of the stall holders, the chain-saw scream of the tuk-tuks, the blare of the taxi horns and screech of the breakneck buses – all this seemed to filter into the cool institutional stillness that was so much a part of Nathan. And I remember too the precise note of the long melancholy squeak with which the plain featureless fire door to his room would open after I rapped on it softly each night, and how his face would appear in the crack, and precisely how he would pull the door open, very slowly, taking one step back, two, like some crazy gavotte; how he would let me in, wordlessly and without expression, as if all these things right down to the grubby grey cream of the walls, and the groaning air-conditioner and my silent entrance were part of some private rueful joke between us.
Not Married, Not Bothered Page 15