by David Lodge
That would have been about a year after I first spoke to her. We advanced in physical intimacy slowly, and by infinitesimal degrees, for several reasons: my inexperience, Maureen’s innocence, her parents’ suspicious surveillance. Mr and Mrs Kavanagh were very strict, even by the standards of those days. They couldn’t stop us meeting at the youth club, and they could hardly object to my escorting her home afterwards, but they forbade her to go out with me alone, to the pictures or anywhere else. On Saturday evenings she was required to babysit while they went to an Irish Club in Peckham, but she wasn’t allowed to have me in the house while they were out, and she wasn’t allowed to visit me at home. We continued to meet every morning at the tram stop, of course (except that it was a bus stop, now: the London trams were being phased out, and the tracks ripped up and tarmacked over – my Dad was given a desk job in the depot, and didn’t complain) and we left our respective houses early to have more time to chat. I used to hand Maureen love letters to read on her way to school – she told me never to post them because her parents would have been sure to intercept one sooner or later. I asked her to post hers to me because it seemed grown-up to be receiving private correspondence, especially in mauve envelopes smelling of lavender, driving my young brother frantic with frustrated curiosity. There was little danger that my parents would pry into their contents, which were in any case totally innocuous. The letters were written on mauve lavender-scented notepaper in a big round hand, with the little circles over the is. I think she got the idea from the advertisements for Biro pens. She used to get told off for it at school. Apart from the brief morning encounters at the tram stop, we could only meet in the context of youth-club activities – the socials, the games nights, the football matches, and occasional rambles in the Kent and Surrey green belt in the summer months.
Perhaps these restrictions helped to keep us devoted to each other for so long. We never had time to become bored with each other’s company, and in defying Maureen’s parents’ disapproval we felt as if we were enacting some deeply romantic drama. Nat King Cole said it all for us in “Too Young”, rolling the vowels round in his mouth like boiled sweets, to a background of syrupy strings and plangent piano chords:
They try to tell us we’re too young,
Too young to really be in love.
They say that love’s a word,
A word we’ve only heard
But can’t begin to know the meaning of.
And yet we’re not too young to know,
This love will last though years may go …
It was our favourite tune, and I would always make sure that Maureen was my partner when somebody put it on the turntable.
Almost the only time we had alone together was when I walked her home from the youth-club socials on Sunday nights. At first, awkward and unsure of how to comport myself in this novel situation, I used to slouch along with my hands in my pockets, a yard apart from Maureen. But one cold night, to my intense delight, she drew close to me as if for warmth, and slipped her arm through mine. I swelled with the pride of possession. Now she was truly my girlfriend. She chattered on my arm like a canary in a cage – about the people at the youth club, about her schoolfriends and teachers, about her family, with its huge network of relations in Ireland and even America. Maureen was always brimming over with news, gossip, anecdotes, whenever we met. It was trivial stuff, but enchanting to me. I tried to forget about my own school when I was out of it, and my family seemed less interesting than Maureen’s, so I was content to let her make most of the conversational running. But occasionally she would question me about my parents and my early life, and she loved me to tell her how for so long I used to look out for her every morning at the corner of Hatchford Five Ways without ever daring to speak to her.
Even after she took my arm on the way home from the youth club, weeks passed before I ventured to kiss her goodnight outside her house. It was a clumsy, botched kiss, half on her mouth, half on her cheek, which took her by surprise, but it was returned with warmth. She broke away immediately with a murmured “Goodnight,” and ran up the steps to her front door; but the next morning at the tram stop there was a dazed glow in her eyes, a new softness in her smile, and I knew that the kiss had been as momentous for her as for me.
I had to learn to kiss as I had learned to dance. In our male-dominated household there was almost a taboo on touching of any kind, whereas in Maureen’s family, she told me, it was customary for all the children, even the boys, to kiss their parents goodnight. That was a very different matter from kissing me, of course, but it explained how naturally Maureen lifted her face to mine, how comfortable and relaxed she felt in my arms. Oh the rapture of those first embraces! What is it about kissing in adolescence? I suppose it gives you an intuitive sense of what sex will be like, the girl’s lips and mouth being like the secret inside flesh of her body: pink, wet, tender. Certainly what we used to call French kissing, pushing your tongues into each other’s mouths, is a kind of mimic intercourse. But it was a long time before Maureen and I went as far as that. For many months it seemed quite intoxicating enough to simply kiss, clasped in each other’s arms, lips to lips, eyes closed, holding our breath for minutes at a time.
We used to do it in the shadows of the basement area of Maureen’s house, putting up with the smell from the nearby dustbins for the sake of privacy. We stood there in all weathers. If it was raining, Maureen would hold her umbrella over both of us as we embraced. In cold weather I would undo the toggles of my duffelcoat (a proud new acquisition for weekend wear) and open the front of her raincoat to create a kind of tent in which to draw her close. One night I found the rose-patterned dress had a button missing at the back and slid my hand through the gap and felt her bare skin between her shoulder-blades. She shuddered and opened her lips a little more as she pressed them against mine. Weeks later I found my way through the front of her blouse, and caressed her stomach over a slippery satin slip. So it went on. Inch by inch I extended my exploration of her body, virgin territory in every sense of the word. Maureen was tender and yielding in my arms, wanting to be loved, loving to be caressed, but quite without sexual self-consciousness. She must have often felt my erect penis through our clothing as we embraced, but she never remarked on it, nor gave any sign of being embarrassed by it. Perhaps she thought mature widdlers were permanently hard as bones. Erections were more of a problem for me. When we had to part (it was dangerous to linger in the area for more than ten or fifteen minutes, for Mr Kavanagh knew when the youth-club socials ended and would sometimes come out on to the front porch to look down the road, while we cowered, half-frightened, half-amused, just underneath him) I would wait till Maureen had run up the steps and let herself into the house before walking off stiffly and bent slightly forward, like a man on stilts.
I suppose Maureen must have experienced her own symptoms of sexual arousal, but I doubt whether she recognized them as such. She had a naturally pure mind, pure without being prudish. Dirty jokes left her looking genuinely blank. She talked about wanting to get married and have children when she grew up, but she didn’t seem to connect this with sexuality. Yet she loved to be kissed and cuddled. She purred in my arms like a kitten. Such sensuality and innocence could hardly co-exist nowadays, I believe, when teenagers are exposed to so much sexual information and imagery. Never mind the soft-porn videos and magazines available from any High Street video store or newsagent – your average 15-certificate movie contains scenes and language that would have had half the audience ejaculating into their trousers forty years ago, and have sent the makers and distributors to gaol. No wonder kids today want to have sex as soon as they’re able. I wonder if they even bother with kissing at all, now, before they get their kit off and jump into bed.
I was less pure-minded than Maureen, but not much more knowing. Though I indulged in vague fantasies of having sex with her, especially just before falling asleep, and had frequent wet dreams in consequence, I had no intention of seducing her, and would certainly h
ave made a terrible hash of it if I had tried. I set my sights no higher than getting to feel her naked breasts. But that was a kind of seduction when I accomplished it.
I had got as far as cupping one breast gently, inside her blouse, as we kissed, feeling the stitching of her brassière like Braille on my fingertips, when her Catholic conscience kicked in. In retrospect, it’s surprising that it hadn’t done so before. The trigger was a “retreat” at her school – a funny name, it seemed for me, for the event as she described it, three days of sermons, devotions and periods of compulsory silence, though the military associations were appropriate enough to its immediate effect on our relationship. It was a Dunkirk of the flesh. The visiting priest running the retreat (Maureen described him as big and grey-bearded, like pictures of God the Father, with piercing eyes that seemed to look right into your soul) had addressed the Fifth-Form girls in the presence of a grimly nodding Mother Superior on the subject of Holy Purity, and frightened them all silly with the awful consequences of desecrating their Temples of the Holy Ghost, as he designated their bodies. “If any girl here,” he thundered, and Maureen claimed that he looked especially at her as he spoke, “should cause a boy to commit a sin of impurity in thought, word or deed, by the way she dresses or behaves, she is as guilty of that sin as he. More guilty, because the male of our species is less able to control licentious desires than the female.” Afterwards the girls had to go to confession to him, and he winkled out of them the details of such liberties as they had allowed boys to take with their Temples of the Holy Ghost. It seems very obvious to me now that he was a dirty old man who got his kicks out of prying into the sexual feelings and experiences of vulnerable adolescent girls, and making them cry. He certainly made Maureen cry. So did I, when she told me I mustn’t touch her “there” any more.
If there was one element of the Catholic religion above all others that made me determined to remain a Protestant, or an atheist (I wasn’t quite sure what I really believed), it was Confession. From time to time Maureen made efforts to interest me in her faith, and I knew without having to be told that her dearest wish was to be the agent of my conversion. I thought it prudent to put in the occasional appearance at Benediction on Sunday evenings, to keep her happy and justify my membership of the youth club, but I steered clear of Mass after giving it a couple of tries. It was mostly in Latin (a subject that made my life particularly miserable at school until I was allowed to drop it and substitute Art) mumbled inaudibly by a priest with his back turned, and seemed to bore the rest of the congregation almost as much as it bored me, since many of them were saying their rosaries while it went on – though, God knows, the Rosary was even more boring, and unfortunately was an official part of Benediction. No wonder Catholics burst out of the church in such high spirits after these services, talking and laughing and breaking out packets of cigarettes: it was sheer relief from the almost unendurable boredom inside. The only exception was the Midnight Mass at Christmas, which was jollied up by carol-singing and the excitement of staying out late. Other aspects of the Catholic religion, like the startlingly realistic paintings and sculptures of the Crucifixion inside the church, the terraces of guttering votive candles, not eating meat on Fridays, giving up sweets for Lent, praying to Saint Anthony if you lost something, and acquiring “indulgences” as a kind of insurance policy for the afterlife, seemed merely quaintly superstitious. But Confession was in a different class.
One day when we were in the church on our own for some reason – I think Maureen was lighting a candle for some “intention” or other, perhaps my conversion – I peeped into one of the cupboard-like confessionals built against the side of the church. On one side was a door with the priest’s name on it; on the other side a curtain. I drew back the curtain and saw the padded kneeler and the small square of wire mesh, like a flattened meat-cover, through which you whispered your sins to the priest. The mere idea made my flesh creep. Ironic, really, considering how dependent I became on psychotherapy later in life, but in adolescence nothing is more repugnant than the idea of sharing your most secret and shaming thoughts with a grown-up.
Maureen tried to rid me of my prejudice. Religious Instruction was her best subject at school. She had got to the convent and held her own there by conscientious hard work rather than natural brilliance, and the rote-learning of R.I. suited her abilities. “It’s not the priest you’re telling, it’s God.” “Why not just tell God, then, in a prayer?” “Because it wouldn’t be a sacrament.” Out of my theological depth, I grunted sceptically. “Anyway,” Maureen went on, “the priest doesn’t know who you are. It’s dark.” “Suppose he recognizes your voice?” I said. Maureen conceded that she usually avoided going to Father Jerome for that very reason, but insisted that even if the priest did recognize your voice he wasn’t allowed to let on, and he would never under any circumstances reveal what you confessed to anybody else, because of the seal of confession. “Even if you’d committed murder?” Even then, she assured me, though there was a catch: “He wouldn’t give you absolution unless you promised to give yourself up.” And what was absolution, I enquired, pronouncing it “ablution” by mistake and making Maureen giggle, before she launched into a long rigmarole about forgiveness and grace and penance and purgatory and temporal punishment, that made about as much sense to me as if she had recited the rules of contract bridge. I asked her once, early in our relationship, what sins she confessed herself and not surprisingly she wouldn’t tell me. But she did tell me about her Confession on the school retreat, and how the priest had said it was a sin for me to touch her as I had been doing and that I mustn’t do it any more and that to avoid “the occasion of sin” we mustn’t go down into the area and cuddle when I saw her home but just shake hands or perhaps exchange a single chaste kiss.
Dismayed by this turn of events, I concentrated all my resources on reversing it. I protested, I argued, I wheedled; I was eloquent, I was pathetic, I was cunning. And of course, in the end, I won. The boy always does win such struggles, if the girl can’t bear to risk losing him, and Maureen couldn’t. No doubt she had given me her heart because I was the first to ask for it. But I was also quite good-looking at that stage of my life. I hadn’t yet acquired the nickname Tubby, and I still had my hair – rather gorgeous blond hair, as a matter of fact, which I combed back in a billowing wave petrified with Brylcreem. Also I was the best dancer in the youth club and star of the football team. Such things matter to young girls more than exam results and career prospects. We both took our O-Level exams that year. Maureen achieved five lowish passes, enough to proceed to the sixth form; I failed everything except English Literature and Art, and left school to work in the office of a big theatrical impresario in the West End, having responded to an advertisement in the Evening Standard. was only a glorified office-boy, to tell the truth, franking mail, taking it to the Post Office, fetching sandwiches for the staff, and so on, but something of the glamour of the business rubbed off on me. Famous actors and actresses passed through our dingy office above a Shaftesbury Avenue theatre on the way to the boss’s inner sanctum, and they would smile and say a word to me as I took their coats or fetched them cups of coffee. I quickly picked up the language of show business and responded to its febrile excitements, the highs and lows of hits and flops. I suppose Maureen recognized that I was maturing rapidly in this sophisticated milieu, and in danger of growing away from her. I was sometimes given complimentary tickets to shows, but there was no hope that Mr and Mrs Kavanagh would let her go to them with me. We no longer met every morning at the tram stop, because I now took a Southern Electric train from Hatchford Station to Charing Cross. Our meetings on Sundays and our walks home from the youth-club socials therefore became all the more precious. She could not deny me her kisses for long. I coaxed her into the shadows at the bottom of the area steps and slowly I inched my way back to the state of intimacy that had existed before.
I don’t know what compact she made with God or her conscience – I thought it prudent not t
o enquire. I knew that she went to confession once a month, and to communion every week, and that her parents would get suspicious if she deviated from this routine; and I knew, because she had explained it to me once, that you couldn’t get absolution for a sin unless you promised not to do it again, and that to swallow the consecrated host in a state of sin was another sin, worse than the first. There was some kind of distinction between big sins and little sins she may have used as a loophole. Big sins were called mortal sins. I can’t remember what the little ones were called, but you could go to communion without being absolved of them. I’m very much afraid, though, that the poor girl thought breast-touching was a mortal sin, and believed she was in serious danger of going to hell if she should die without warning.