by David Lodge
Tessa had locked her door and Edward had to knock for admittance. When he explained that they had come on the wrong weekend, she collapsed on to one of the beds in hysterical giggles. Like many people who are good at stage comedy, Edward did not like to appear ridiculous unintentionally, but after a while he saw the funny side of his mistake too. It was too late to leave and travel back to Town, and although the house was undoubtedly full of empty bedrooms, he didn’t want to go prowling around looking for one in case he made another embarrassing mistake. “You’d better sleep here,” said Tessa. “And tomorrow morning we’ll creep away early.”
“All right, then,” said Edward.
They undressed very decorously with the light off, but then they collided with each other in the dark and one thing led to another and before long they were in, or on, the same bed, and Tessa’s nightdress was up round her armpits and she was moaning and writhing with pleasure in his arms. It was a long time since the dentist had petted her and she had missed such comforts in Edward’s chaste courtship. Edward himself was quite out of his depth. Feeling the pressure of an imminent and unstoppable orgasm, he was filled with shame and panic at the thought of spilling his seed all over Tessa and the bedclothes. In his perturbation it seemed to him that their sin would be less, certainly his own humiliation would be less, if they performed the act properly. Desperately he rolled on top of Tessa and, with a fluke thrust at the right place and angle, entered her in a single movement. Tessa uttered a loud cry that, if it was heard in that house, was probably not recognized; and Edward, groaning into the pillow, pumped rivers of semen into her willing womb.
Afterwards he was aghast at what he had done, but Tessa covered his face with kisses and told him it had been wonderful, and he was moved with grateful pride. Tessa herself was delighted: she felt finally absolved from guilt on account of the freedoms she had allowed the dentist (which she had confessed in the vaguest terms on her reception into the Church) and finally sure of Edward’s love. The next day they rose while it was still dark and let themselves stealthily out of the house. Their feet crunched resoundingly on the gravel of the drive, and looking back over her shoulder Tessa thought she saw the old nun watching them from a high, lighted window. Outside the gates they hitched a lift from a lorry taking vegetables to Covent Garden. “Not eloping, are you?” quipped the driver, looking at their overnight bags. They often wondered afterwards what the other, the real Mr and Mrs O’Brien thought when they arrived at the convent later that morning to find their bedroom defiled by unmistakable signs of sexual intercourse.
Having made love once, Edward and Tessa were unable to resist further opportunities that came their way, though each time it happened they solemnly vowed it would not recur. Soon Tessa discovered she was pregnant, and they made arrangements to get married rather sooner than they had planned. Edward was excruciatingly embarrassed by all this, guessing (quite correctly) what everyone would be thinking about the reasons for their haste, but Tessa faced it out serenely and did not for one moment contemplate giving up her white wedding and nuptial mass. She had an Empire line dress made which artfully concealed the very slight swelling of her tummy. Soon afterwards, Edward’s training finished and he was called up into the Army Medical Corps. Tessa went to live with her parents in Norfolk and gave birth to a daughter one night when Edward was sleeping out on Salisbury Plain as part of his officer’s training. In due course he was posted to a military hospital in Aldershot and Tessa moved into digs there. They waited impatiently for his service to end, so that Edward could start his career as a GP. He had forgotten all about his intention of working for two years in the mission fields of Africa.
Miriam’s conversion took longer than Tessa’s. Every now and again she dug her heels in and refused to go any further. She had a quick, sharp mind and she was not, like Tessa, theologically illiterate to start with. Her own religious upbringing had been Low Church Evangelical, and she had already reacted against that form of Christianity, its gloomy Sabbatarianism, its narrow-minded insistence on Faith against Works, its charmless liturgy. Since leaving home to attend the University she had ceased to worship, though still considering herself a kind of Christian. Catholicism, to which Michael introduced her, seemed to be just what she was looking for: it was subtle, it was urbane, it had history, learning, art (especially music) on its side. But there was enough of the Protestant left in Miriam to make a lot of Catholic doctrine difficult to swallow, especially in relation to Mary. She was dismayed to discover that “the Immaculate Conception” did not denote the birth of Christ to a virgin, but the dogma that Mary herself was conceived without the stain of original sin. “It doesn’t say so in Scripture, and how else would anyone know?” she said. Michael, who had been well schooled in apologetics at school, quoted the salutation of the archangel Gabriel, “Hail, full of grace, the Lord is with thee.” Since Mary hadn’t been baptized at that point, she couldn’t have been full of grace unless she had been exempted from the stain of original sin inherited from Adam and Eve. Miriam yielded to the logic of this argument (when the Catholic Jerusalem Bible was published ten years later she found that “full of grace” was translated as “highly favoured”, but the issue no longer seemed important) and shifted her attention to the doctrine of the Assumption of Our Lady into Heaven, which had been defined as an article of faith as recently as 1950 – though, as Michael was quick to emphasize, it had been an important feast of the Church for centuries. “I still don’t see the point of it,” she said. “Christianity is hard enough to believe in without adding all these unnecessary extras.”
Michael himself was uneasy about the Assumption, for which there didn’t seem to be one jot or tittle of Scriptural evidence, and referred Miriam to the College chaplain – no longer Father Brierley, who had been moved to a parish at the end of the Northern Line, but Father Charles Conway, a lively and good-looking young priest with an Oxford degree. He suggested that the doctrine might be looked at as a theological formalization of Mary’s special place in the scheme of salvation, and of her presence in heaven as a source of help and encouragement to souls on earth. But Miriam had her reservations about that too. She didn’t understand why Catholics prayed so much to Mary to “intercede” for them with God. “Do you mean,” she asked, her tulip-cut of glossy copper-coloured hair thrust forward with the urgency of her question, “that if A prays to Jesus via Mary, and B prays direct to Jesus, A has a better chance of being heard than B, other things being equal? And if not, then why bother going through Mary?” Neither Michael nor Father Conway had a satisfactory answer to that one.
When she had got over these doctrinal hurdles, or bypassed them (for they were, after all, peripheral to the main deposit of faith) Miriam got into a panic about making her first confession. To go into that dark, cupboard-like cubicle and whisper your most shameful secrets to a man on the other side of a wire mesh might be tolerable if you were brought up to it from childhood, but for herself it seemed humiliating, a violation, a hideous ordeal. “There’s nothing to it, really,” Michael reassured her, conveniently suppressing the memory of his own agonizing over masturbation not so very long ago. “The priest won’t know who you are. And you can go to one you don’t know, if you like.”
“I certainly shan’t go to Father Charles, I’d simply die.”
“Anyway, you can’t have anything very dreadful to confess,” he said fondly.
“How would you know?” she shot at him, with such anger that he was chastened into silence.
They were queueing, at the time, for gallery seats at the Globe theatre to see Graham Greene’s new play, The Potting Shed. Michael had been looking forward eagerly to seeing the play, which, to judge from the reviews, confirmed that the author’s faith was intact, but he found that he was unable to concentrate on the story of vows, miracles, lost and found belief. Later in life all he could remember about the production was a dog barking off-stage and the peculiarly bilious green of John Gielgud’s cardigan. (Could it possibly have been,
he wondered, a sartorial pun on the author’s name?) For most of the performance he was brooding jealously on Miriam’s hint of grave sin in her past. Though Michael was no longer so helplessly obsessed with sex as in late adolescence, he still thought about it quite a lot. He looked forward to the night of his wedding (provisionally planned for the coming spring) as a feast that would be rendered all the more delicious by the prolonged abstinence that had preceded it. To lie with his beloved in the same bed, free to explore her body at will, above, below, between, to assuage the long ache of unsatisfied desire in total abandonment, without fear or guilt at last – that would surely be a rapture worth waiting for. The thought that Miriam might not, after all, have waited – that she might already have tasted some of the sweets of sex with another boy, or even boys, tormented him. It did not occur to Michael that she might have been referring to masturbation, for he did not know that girls masturbated (his reading in English fiction had not uncovered this fact). But, as it happened, that was not what Miriam was alluding to. Her most shameful secret was that at school she had joined in the persecution of a girl whom nobody liked and who had eventually been driven to attempt suicide. Miriam and her friends had been in great terror as this event was investigated, but the girl in question had nobly declined to tell on them. The worst thing of all was that when the girl returned to school they all hated her more than ever, and after a while her mother took her away.
After The Potting Shed, on the Tube ride back to the little flat in Highbury that Miriam shared with another girl, Michael was silent and morose; and instead of going in for a cup of coffee, as was his custom, he kept Miriam talking in the shadow of a plane tree in the street.
“Did you have any boy friends before me?”
“You know I didn’t, I told you.”
“Nobody at all?”
“Nobody serious.”
“You did have some, then?”
Miriam soon got to the source of his mood, and poured scorn on it. “The trouble with you is that all you think about is sex,” she said. “You can’t imagine people feeling guilty about anything else, can you?”
He admitted it, joyfully. “It’s the Irish Jansenist tradition,” he said.
Soon afterwards, Miriam made her first confession, without telling anybody in advance. She went to Westminster Cathedral, the most anonymous place for the purpose she could think of. Crowds poured in and out of the doors, and sat or kneeled or sauntered about, staring up at the great walls and arches of sooty, unfaced brick. It felt like some huge and holy railway terminus. All along one wall were dozens of confessionals, some offering the facility of a foreign language. Miriam, kneeling in a pew while she got her courage up, considered making her confession in French, a subject in which she had done well at A level, but decided that she would not be able to manage the Act of Contrition. Eventually she plunged into one of the ordinary confessionals at random and gabbled out the formula she had been taught by Father Conway: “Bless me Father for I have sinned this is my first confession.” She added: “And I’m terrified.” She was lucky with her priest and came out feeling wonderful, spiritually laundered. She never told Michael about the girl at school who had been on her conscience until long after they were married, by which time he was no longer curious.
The wedding night to which he had looked forward for so long got off to a bad start when they were shown into a room at their hotel with twin beds. Michael, inexperienced in such matters, had omitted to specify a double. When the porter had withdrawn, he expressed his regret.
“Ask them to give us another room,” Miriam suggested.
Michael imagined himself going downstairs and walking up to the receptionist in a crowded, but silent and attentive lobby, and saying: “Could I have a room with a double bed in it, please?” “You ask them,” he said to Miriam.
“No thanks!”
They giggled and kissed, but the twin beds were decidedly a disappointment. They were narrow and spaced well apart and the headboards were screwed to the wall.
“Oh, well,” said Miriam, “never mind.” She opened her suitcase and began to unpack. A cascade of confetti fell to the floor as she shook out a dress. “That Gwen!” she said, referring to one of her bridesmaids.
“Hold on a minute,” said Michael.
Looking neither to right nor left, he marched out of the room, down the stairs, and up to the reception desk.
“Yes, sir?”
Michael took a deep breath. “Er … what time is dinner?” he said.
“Dinner is served from six-thirty, sir.”
“Ah.” He lingered, squinting at the ceiling as if trying to remember something else.
Michael often recalled that moment of acute embarrassment. He recalled it, for instance, in the summer of 1968, when he was checking into a hotel in Oxford, where he was attending a meeting of GCE examiners, and a young man in a white suit, with blond hair down to his shoulders, came up to the desk and asked the price of a double room. In the background, nonchalantly scanning a newspaper, a girl hovered. “Do you have your luggage with you, sir?” said the clerk, evidently well used to handling such requests from randy undergraduates. The young man didn’t have any luggage and was refused the room; but what struck Michael was that he wasn’t in the least embarrassed or disconcerted by the refusal, departing with a peace sign and a broad grin, squeezing his girl friend’s waist as they left the lobby. “Whereas I,” he said one weekend in February 1975, recalling his honeymoon in 1958, “was legally married. All I wanted was a double bed so that we could consummate it in reasonable comfort. And I was tongue-tied. Beads of perspiration literally stood out on my face.”
“Is there anything else, sir?” said the receptionist in 1958, as Michael stared at the ceiling. Without looking the man in the eye, he mumbled out a request for a room with a double bed, and was given one without fuss. He ran back to Miriam, grasping the key like mythical treasure wrested from a dragon. He felt hugely heroic, masculine, dominant: a true husband. When they got to the new room, he locked the door and carried Miriam across to the double bed. They lay on it and necked, occasionally sitting up to divest themselves of a garment (shades of Polly’s St Valentine’s striptease) until they were both undressed down to their underwear. Solemnly Michael undid the fastener of Miriam’s brassiere and drew it from her shoulders. “Do you mind that they’re so small?” she whispered. “They’re beautiful,” he said, kissing the nipples on her delicate little breasts and feeling them grow hard. “Let’s make love,” he said, scarcely able to draw breath for excitement. “All right,” said Miriam.
She got up off the bed and put on her nightie. Michael put on his pyjamas and drew the curtains against the slanting sunlight (it was about six o’clock in the evening). Then they got into bed, under the bedclothes. Neither of them saw anything odd in this behaviour. It was how they had always envisaged married love.
But then there was a hitch. There seemed to be no way that Michael could get his penis to go in and stay in. In all his long hours of musing on the moment of consummation, he had never anticipated this particular difficulty. They struggled and heaved and muttered “Sorry” and “It’s all right,” but after a while the atmosphere became slightly desperate. Had Miriam grasped Michael’s penis and guided it to its target, there would have been no problem, but it never occurred to her to do so or to him to suggest it. None of our young brides even touched their husbands’ genitals until weeks, months, sometimes years after marriage. All accepted the first nuptial embrace lying on their backs with their arms locked round their spouses’ necks like drowning swimmers being rescued; while these spouses, supporting themselves on tensed arms, tried to steer their way blind into a channel the contours of which they had never previously explored by touch or sight. No wonder most of them found the act both difficult and disappointing.
At last Michael admitted defeat, modestly pulled up his pyjama trousers under the blankets, and got out of bed to find a cigarette. Miriam watched him anxiously. “Perhaps t
here’s something wrong with me,” she said. “Perhaps I’ve got a blockage. I’ll go and see a doctor.” She was only half joking. They dressed and went down for dinner, silent and sad, smiling wanly at each other across the table. Michael contemplated the prospect of a marriage without sex. After so long a wait, did he love Miriam enough to accept that heavy cross? He reached under the table and squeezed her hand, suffused with a Greeneian gloom, “the loyalty we all feel to unhappiness, the sense that this is where we really belong,” as a favourite passage in The Heart of the Matter put it. When they returned to their room, he proposed one more try.
“I’m awfully sore,” said Miriam doubtfully.
“Haven’t you got some ointment, or something?”
She did, as it happened, have some Vaseline with her, which she used for the prevention of chapped lips. Applied to her nether lips it produced almost magical results. Afterwards, Michael put his hands behind his head and smiled beatifically at the ceiling.
“From now on,” he said, “I’m always going to give Vaseline for wedding presents.”
Angela and Dennis were the last of their College set to get married, and had waited the longest. Dennis had wanted to get married as soon as he was offered his first job, with ICI. When he phoned Angela with the news of his successful interview, late in 1956, he said, “Let’s get married at Christmas.” Angela felt panic choking her and was scarcely able to reply. Dennis thought it was a bad connection and rattled on unconcerned. “Easter, if you like,” he said. “Christmas would be short notice for the families.”
When they met the next day, Angela, pale from a sleepless night, told him that she didn’t think she was ready for marriage. “Ready, what d’you mean, ready?” he demanded, bewildered. “We’ve waited five years already, how much longer d’you want?”
Angela found it very difficult to explain. She loved Dennis, she appreciated his loyalty and devotion, she wanted to give herself to him. But the prospect of marriage, a lifetime’s commitment, frightened her, and the portents in marriages she knew depressed her, especially her own parents’ marriage. While she had lived at home she had sentimentalized it, idealized it. The big, warm, happy Catholic family. The house full of noisy bustle and religious zeal. The boys cycling off early in the mornings to serve at mass, priests and nuns dropping in at all hours, family feasts at Christmas and Easter. Now she saw it all differently, aware that her mother’s part in all this had been a lifetime of drudgery, her father’s a lifetime of worry. The family was like the shop – a tyrant that kept them slaving from morning till night, so that they never had a moment to themselves. Their sexual life was unimaginable, not simply because it embarrassed her to think about it, but because they seemed so exhausted, so drained of tenderness to each other, by the clamorous demands of their offspring. When she went home for weekends now, she threw herself into the domestic front line at her mother’s side – washed, ironed, swept and hoovered – but it seemed to make no difference: the dirty washing accumulated as fast as ever, people tramped through the house leaving mud and dirt everywhere, the fire smoked in the back parlour and the shop bell pinged insistently. Always she was guiltily pleased to be gone, to be back in her snug and neat little bed-sitter in Streatham. She had a teaching job in a girls’ grammar school which she found demanding but satisfying, and her career prospects were good. Her eldest brother, Tom, was training to be a priest, and the rest of the children were still at school. She thought it was her duty to work for at least a few years, sending a quarter of her salary home. That was how she put it to Dennis, though the deeper reason was simply that she was frightened of marriage.