When the boat docked at Dover, she still hadn’t finalised her story. But Martin had a surprise for her—himself on the quay with twelve red roses. He had never done a thing like that before. Extravagant, romantic. She burst into tears, sobbed like Pierre. It was while he was trying to comfort her that he discovered the mark. She had to comfort him, then—or rather lie to him. Much more difficult to lie in your own language and she didn’t want to lie. She loved Martin (well, almost. At least she wanted to, and he loved her which was nearly the same thing). She stuck to the truth, with variations. The party on her last night, but no Pierre. The Cognac, drunk not willingly, but slipped into her Coke when she wasn’t looking by a drunken lout who later took advantage of her when she was too far gone to know what she was doing.
It was an hour at least before Martin stopped shouting and creating, or agreed to start for home, and even then she wasn’t all that sure if he believed her. Then, when they were just about halfway, she suddenly remembered that she had left his roses behind. He refused to go back, said someone would have nicked them long ago, and serve her right since they obviously meant nothing to her. That set off another row and she was fool enough to drag in her father’s invitation to Los Angeles, as if they didn’t have enough to spat about already. Martin was so rattled he all but roared away without her, there and then, and she had to almost grovel before he let her clamber on the bike again, and then he only dropped her at the far end of her road, careered off round the corner, still with all her luggage.
She felt rotten about the rows, rotten about the roses—though they would never have fitted on his bike, in fact, and they’d have had to leave a bag behind instead, which would only have peeved her mother. Her Mum was upset enough already. Couldn’t blame her—what with them slamming out before they’d even eaten, and embarrassing that David bod who was obviously someone special since her mother had put on eye-gloss in his honour, when she never normally wore it. They had upset Martin’s Mum as well, and in the end she’d felt so knocked out with guilt and misery that she had apologised to everyone in turn, agreed not to go to Los Angeles, divided Christmas with a slide-rule between his family and hers, and even eaten Martin’s mother’s steak and mushroom pie, picking out the steak and shifting it to Martin’s plate when his mother had her back turned. By the time they had reached the Arctic Roll, Martin had relented, even promised her more flowers.
Chris got up to stretch her legs, prowled around his room. He had new posters on the wall of groups she didn’t know. Martin never played top-of-the-pops stuff, but discovered bands for himself who were foreign or unorthodox or unfashionably way-out. Chris moved round to the table where he kept his diving treasures, objects he had brought up from the bottom—old bottles, lumps of coral, multi-coloured sea urchins, and his two prize exhibits centre front—a First World War brass shell-casing, and an eighteenth-century cannonball which he had found when he was only fourteen and snorkelling in Devon, and had managed miraculously to conserve with the help of an older friend and several coats of thick black varnish. Diving was Martin’s life. He had a job in printing, but that was only a means to an end, a way of paying for his equipment or covering his expenses when he went on new and advanced courses underwater. He was an instructor already, at nineteen and a half, had impressive plans to dive wrecks, join expeditions, travel the world, even run a diving school himself, one day, somewhere exotic like Bermuda or the Red Sea. He needed time, that’s all—and cash. He already had the skill, the passion.
She was lucky, really. Many divers were loners, or kept their women as sandwich-making landlubbers whom they fitted in if and when they could. But Martin had insisted that she learn to dive herself, wanted her to join him, become part of all the plans. He had bought her the equipment (secondhand), supervised her training in the local swimming baths. She had stopped at F-test. The next test after that was in the open sea, and she had to admit she was scared. Stupid, really, because she longed to go down with Martin and the crowd, share the life he dreamed of rather than settle for a boring job and never see the world except for a fortnight in August in some tame and crowded resort.
She was meant to be trying for Cambridge, embarking on a career, but career was only a fancy name for a more serious sort of boring job, which took longer to get and was harder to hold down. She wasn’t even sure she wanted to go to Cambridge in the first place. Everyone would be clever there and cultured like her mother. That’s why she loved (loved?) Martin. She could be brilliant in his company without even trying, without having to borrow ideas from books or spout other people’s opinions from the heavy Sunday papers when she’d rather be reading the New Musical Express. And Martin had taught her other skills—not just the whole diving thing, but how to service a motorbike, catch and gut a bass, change a wheel, handle a boat; made her one of the boys. She was happiest when riding pillion behind him, speeding down to the coast to meet Tony, Rob, Scott and all the rest, drinking draught Guinness with them, discussing the newest equipment, the latest expeditions; making herself useful filling cylinders or repairing wet suits. It didn’t matter then that she wasn’t blonde like Claire or busty like Fiona. In fact it was actually an advantage to have no curves—at least in one way. Excess fat was more likely to retain the dreaded nitrogen bubbles which could give you the bends, even paralyse or kill you. Anyway it was fitter to be slim, meant you were more agile. Even though she hadn’t braved the sea yet, Martin and his mates respected her because she had done well in her pool tests, knew her stuff. She had mugged up all the diving books and could talk intelligently about air embolism or nitrogen narcosis; had even helped Martin plan and write the lectures he had been asked to give this autumn at the club. There was his name in bold type on the programme which he had pinned up on his noticeboard—M.J. Brett; Martin Brett again in a newspaper cutting which reported how he had towed a yacht to safety when it was headed for the rocks—a swanky thirty-footer saved by his old and patched inflatable.
She was proud of Mr Brett. Most of her girlfriends’ boys were feeble in comparison; wimpish public school types (Grandma’s type), still fretting through their A levels or planning to do boring standard things like accountancy or law. Only Martin had real guts—not just physical courage, though he had enough of that, all right, but the sheer determination to get there on his own. He didn’t have rich and doting parents or a posh supportive school, just nerve and dedication. She felt guilty, sometimes, about her own fancy education—all that cash lavished on her when Martin had been at a dump where one or two of his classmates had fathers who tore up their books to light the fire, or kept them out of school so they could run errands to the betting-shop. She didn’t even believe in private schools. Martin would have made it if he’d had all the perks she did. He’d make it, anyway—wasn’t just the duffer her Mum and Grandma assumed. He was even reading things like history and archeology to help him in his wreck-diving, and was doing an extra printing course at night school so he could take exams, earn more cash.
Chris plumped back on her chair. She would fail her own exam if she didn’t settle down to work. It wasn’t easy to work in Martin’s room. The house was on a main road, trembled with the lorries. She couldn’t use the table when it had half the ocean bed on it, and there wasn’t a desk, only a chest of drawers. If she wanted to write, she had to pull the middle drawer out and put a board on top, so that at least she had something to lean on. She returned to her board, re-read the last draft of the letter, tore it up like the seven attempts before it. It was probably wrong to try and write to Pierre in Martin’s room. And yet her own room was just as dangerous. If her mother saw that ‘Pierre Cheri’ …
She ought to be reading, anyway, not writing. School in two days time, and great chunks of Racine and Thomas Mann to plough through. She glanced up at Martin’s scanty shelf of books—half on diving, half on printing, with a motor cycle maintenance manual at one end and a few dog-eared thrillers at the other—wished she could put her feet up with a thriller. She took down the
fattest one, with handcuffs on the cover and a pool of unlikely looking blood, found her Four Quartets skulking underneath it. She must have left it there last June, when she was cramming T. S. Eliot for A level. She had done well—got an A—which only went to show how crappy the system was. She didn’t understand Eliot, not really, not if she were truthful. Oh, she could write the essays, discuss his use of imagery or analyse his sources, but underneath she wasn’t sure if she knew what he was on about. And she didn’t like him enough—not with the undivided passion her English mistress had, or Anne-Marie who had won the English Prize each year since she was twelve. Perhaps she couldn’t love—not anyone, not wholly—not Martin or Pierre or Anne-Marie or Thomas Stearns or even her mother.
She opened the book, turned to ‘Burnt Norton’. Eliot depressed her.
‘Timid apathy with no concentration
men and bits of paper, whirled by the cold wind …’
She felt her own bits of paper crumpled in her pocket, bits of Pierre, the cold wind on the Channel-ferry blowing her lies back in her face. Mind you, there were some things in Eliot which were really great, got you where it hurt. ‘The still point of the turning world ‘. That was wonderful, though still depressing, mainly because she had never known it, probably never would. Things were rarely still for her, always churning, breaking into pieces. There were yards of footnotes after it, ruining its perfection. She hated footnotes, making things too complicated, showing up her ignorance—references to Dante and Heraclitus whom she had never read, probably never would. Strange that Grandma should have a romantic name like Beatrice, when she was so down-to-earth and strict and all her church friends had stuffy saintly names like Agnes and Edwina. Dante’s Beatrice had died at twenty-three—younger than Pierre. Probably best to die then, when you were unhaggard and still loved. She couldn’t be a genuine intellectual because she didn’t worry about death like her mother did. It seemed so far away. Even twenty-three seemed miles off, especially when one night could drag on and on for ever, as last night had. It was always difficult to sleep in Martin’s bed, but when you were missing the man you resented and resenting the one you were meant to love, sleep was more or less impossible. And then guilt had kept exploding into excitement. She couldn’t be that boring if two men wanted to sleep with her. Fiona had always stuck to Paul, and Claire was still a virgin, and although Emma did it with anyone who asked her, they were all mostly teenagers and hardly even shaved.
She turned back to the Four Quartets:
‘Descend lower, descend only
Into the world of perpetual solitude.’
The trouble was, every bit of life was in a separate box—Eliot and Thomas Mann and sex and school and France and diving and … Everything had little fences round it like the school timetable itself. 9.15, English I; 10.30, French drama. If you brought sex into literature at all, it was only Sexual Imagery In Shakespeare or John Donne’s Love Poetry Compared With The Holy Sonnets. Had Eliot actually fucked? He hadn’t any children, so you couldn’t prove it. She had read somewhere that his first wife was mad and poured melted chocolate through people’s letter boxes. They didn’t tell you things like that at school, just discussed his religious conversion or digressed onto the footnotes. Had he been unfaithful? He’d never use a word like that, in any case. It was too open-ended and not obscure enough. Unfaithful to whom, to what? There’d be acres more footnotes, charting every stage of the affair—Heraclitus at foreplay, Dante at climax.
‘Only by the form, the pattern,
can words or music reach
the stillness, as a Chinese jar still
moves perpetually in its stillness …’
That was beautiful. Grandma had a Chinese jar standing on the piano which she never played. Grandma had a stillness. It seemed to come from her religion. Nice to have a God, though He would probably turn out crackpot like Eliot’s first wife, and all Gods made Commandments which meant she wouldn’t be able to go to bed with Martin, let alone Pierre; and if it were Grandma’s kind of God, then there’d be a kid each year with no chance of contraception. Religion hadn’t done much for Eliot, despite the fact he was always on about it—nor for her mother, either. Probably best to follow Martin and refuse to worship anyone.
She could hear him now, the motorbike crescendoing as it skidded to a halt, the slam of the front door, his heavy thudding footsteps on the stairs.
‘Finished?’ he asked, as he burst into the room.
‘I’m never finished.’ She should have said ‘Yes’ and hugged him, but thinking of God upset her, and since Pierre she felt irritable, defensive. The mark was still purple, fading into yellow at the edges. She hadn’t even started her work. That was Pierre’s fault, too.
Martin was kicking off his trainers. ‘You said you’d be undressed.’
‘I am—well, underneath.’ She slipped her sundress off, stood naked, stooping. Pierre had undressed her himself, sliding both his hands down inside her knickers before he eased them off, kneeling while he unbuckled her sandals, kissing up her thighs …
Martin couldn’t even see her. He was struggling out of his sweatshirt, head down as he tugged it off, then turning away to lock the door.
‘I thought it was your Mum’s late Saturday at work?’ Chris closed the Eliot, crossed her arms across her chest.
‘It is. But in case she breaks her leg or something and the bossman sends her home.’
‘She’ll hardly come upstairs with a broken leg.’
‘Sshh. Get on the bed.’
He smelt different from Pierre. She hadn’t really realised until she’d had another man, that every naked body had its individual odour—not a bad one—not sweat or nicotine or obvious things like different brands of aftershave, just the intimate smell of skin and hair and hands. She had noticed it last night. It had been very brief last night. Martin’s mother didn’t object to sex, only to disturbance. The walls were thin, so they had done it sort of gingerly and in total silence. It was another sort of branding, a deliberate solemn one, so that Martin could overlay her body with his own fingerprints and monogram, in place of the drunken lout’s who had spiked her drink. He’d been rougher than he ever had before, left marks himself, faint bruises.
This time it was better. Martin was less angry, spent longer turning her on. The Frenchie bloke was still in bed with them, but instead of thrashing him, Martin was trying to prove he was every bit as good. She lay back and enjoyed it. Emma had had two boys at once, or so she claimed. She could hear Pierre murmuring ‘mon chou, mon petit lapin, ma minette’, as Martin thrust into her. The bed was creaking—didn’t matter when his mother wasn’t there. Marvellous creaking. They had broken a spring once and Martin had spent ages mending it, still naked, and then insisted they do it again, to try it out.
‘I love you,’ she shouted. ‘I love you, Martin.’ It didn’t count in bed. You said crazy things—anything—couldn’t think. ‘It’s wonderful! I love you. Hey, come out!’
He almost didn’t. She loved that, too. The danger, the excitement, his come spurting on her thighs while he grabbed his thing himself, pumped it up and down and sort of shuddered. She only worried afterwards, especially if her period was late. Martin promised it was safe. His Dad had done it all his life and only produced two kids. Pierre had used a Durex—or whatever the French equivalent was—a decadent looking black one. She was almost disappointed when he came inside her. She had got so used to Martin snatching out when they were both so frantic and worked up, then rubbing in his come like body lotion. Such a tiny drizzle after all that pounding and excitement. She was always surprised—felt there should be gallons of the stuff, streaming out like a petrol pump or one of those ice cream machines where you pulled a handle and Soft-Whip frothed and billowed into the cornets. With Pierre, she hadn’t seen it at all, just a limp black chrysalis with something white and sticky at the bottom. He had left it behind in the attic and she had worried someone would find it in the morning, but what could she have done with it—put
it in her handbag?
Martin’s finger was stopping her from thinking. He always touched her once he had come himself. It was the best bit really, except she made him close his eyes. She knew she looked ridiculous, gasping and grimacing. Strange to think what people did in bed, when you only saw them dressed and public. Fences and boxes again. Maggie Thatcher might be the Iron Lady, but did she also like a finger? Had Thomas Stearns ever used black Durex?
‘Oh dark, dark, dark, …
… with a movement of darkness on darkness …’
It was darkness, but bright as well behind her lids and down where. Martin’s finger jabbed and circled. Marvellous, bloody marvellous. Hands clenched, face screwed up.
‘Oh, Martin. Martin!’
He was always starving afterwards. Already he was pulling on his jeans, not white, but blue and oil-stained. She lay back, closed her eyes. He would crash downstairs, bring up Mr Kipling cake, or bacon-flavoured crisps.
‘Chris …’
‘Not hungry, thanks. You eat.’
‘No, I want to ask you something.’
She squinted through one eye. ‘What?’ She was still tired after her journey, exhausted from the guilt.
‘Something—well—important.’
‘Get on with it, then.’
‘Look, Chris.’ He was still hesitant, embarrassed. ‘I think we ought to get … you know, engaged.’
She sprang off the bed. ‘You mean you’re asking me to marry you?’
‘Yeah. Well, not exactly … asking. I reckoned we ought to talk about it, see how you felt and …’
Chris slumped against the wall. He should be on one knee, in evening dress, punting down the Cam with nightingales pouring out their love song overhead, or in Eliot’s summer midnight with the music and mysterious dancers, not slouching in his bedroom with its cheap carpet and chipped paintwork and the lorries rumbling through everything he said.
The Stillness the Dancing Page 15