by Simon Mawer
After a while we went through to her bedroom. She left the doors open so that the music would come through from the sitting room, but pretty soon there was just the staccato noise of the pickup going around and around on the inside track —flip-flip, flip-flip, flip-flip, on and on. The Beatles hadn’t yet had the idea of putting something, anything, even gibberish, on that inside, eternal track, and neither of us was planning to go and change the record. In the bedroom she helped me off with my clothes as though I was still young enough to need assistance with the buttons, and perhaps I was. I was shivering, I remember that, shivering as if I was dying of cold. “This is your first time, isn’t it?” she whispered.
I didn’t deny it.
“It’s like riding a bike,” she said.
“A bike?”
She giggled. As though she were sixteen as well. “Once you’ve learned, you never forget.”
We laughed. Her breasts were soft and pink, and there for me to touch.
“And…”
“And?”
“You must keep pedaling. Or else you’ll fall off.”
Laughter blended with extreme tenderness. Laughter and sex is not a bad combination. We lay down on the bed, and she did everything necessary, opening for me and pulling me onto her and showing me how it went inside; and after the storm — my storm, not hers — she stroked my head as though to comfort me, as though she had just done me a great hurt. “I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I’m sorry, Robert, I’m sorry.”
I told her there was nothing to apologize for. Nothing whatever. I made that quite clear to her.
Morning was different. Morning is always different. Morning is for remorse. I woke to find the room bathed in an anemic London daylight.
Caroline was still asleep. She lay amid the knotted sheets, her legs splayed shamelessly: white buttocks and loose flesh, pink-gray creases and folds, a crest of dark hair. Her face was crumpled against the pillow. Her smudged mouth was half open, and there were flakes of lipstick peeling from her lips. I could hear the rasp of air as she breathed. She looked her age, like a fairy-tale character suddenly revealed for what she was, a young girl transformed into a middle-aged woman.
Jamie’s mother, I thought. Christ alive!
Clothes were strewn all over the floor and across a chair: women’s clothes, things of silk and nylon, lace and satin, all the unknown territory of woman spread out here for me to look at; and my own clothes, dull and sordid things that you might see in a Laundromat. Slipping off the bed, I tiptoed to the bathroom. As I stood there peeing, I realized that I reeked of her just as she, presumably, reeked of me. Even our scents were shared. What occurred to me vividly was this sharing, this physical sharing of scent and saliva and semen. I looked at the crumpled thing that was my penis, and as I finished urinating it began to stir again so that when I came back into the room I had an erection once more.
Caroline was awake and sitting up in bed. She had a handful of sheet grabbed up to cover her breasts. Her face was fragmented and rough-edged like the postcard she had sent, the weeping, fractured face of Dora Maar. “Robert, dear,” she said. “I think you’d better give me some time to myself.”
I was naked and erect in front of her, and she just sat there with the sheet clutched against her front, telling me to leave the room. “Please, Robert,” she said. Then she got up from the bed, pulling the sheet with her as a kind of shroud, and went past me into the bathroom. I heard the key turn in the lock.
I was confused of course, aware that barriers had been hastily erected, like the Berlin Wall that they’d hurriedly slammed together out of planks and barbed wire just a few years earlier. I just didn’t want the subsequent consolidation with cement and breeze blocks and arc lamps. I took my things and went downstairs. I could hear her moving about overhead, the shower running, the lavatory flushing. I washed and dressed and went into the kitchen to find some breakfast.
When she finally came down, she barely gave me a glance. She turned to the coffee machine and began spooning grounds into the filter. She was wearing jeans and a brassiere. From behind she looked young, years younger than she had looked lying in bed, years younger than she was. Twenty-five, say. “I hope you don’t mind all this.” She said it almost casually, while facing away from me.
“No.”
She plugged the coffee machine in. Her movements were clumsy, and she missed the connection the first time. “Damn it,” she said, as though the problem resided in the plug or the socket, in the design of things. “I’m sorry, if you do.”
“I said I don’t.”
“Because if you want to go…”
“I don’t.”
She glanced around. “That’s fine, then.” Her smile was hard and sharp, like a knife. “Jamie must never know.”
“Of course not.”
“I knew he wasn’t coming,” she continued in that matter-of-fact tone. “Before you phoned, I knew. Next weekend: he’s coming next weekend. I hoped you wouldn’t contact him…”
I shrugged. I felt a whole mess of things, the sensation that I had somehow betrayed him, for one: a feeling of adolescent guilt that would soon enough drain away through the holes in what moral principles I had. And something else: the acute sensation of focused desire that was, I realized later, sexual love. I wanted her now, again.
“I thought it might be fun, just the two of us together. Like this. You don’t mind?”
“I don’t mind at all,” I assured her.
She smiled. We saw connivance in each other’s eyes. “What would Diana say? What would Diana say if she knew?”
“She’s never going to know, is she?”
“No, she’s not.”
That morning we went to the Tate Gallery. It was like establishing an alibi after a crime, hoping that the prosecution wouldn’t see that the times didn’t quite fit, that there was a whole night that had not been accounted for. We took the 88 bus and sat there up on the top deck, pretending to be mother and son and hoping that somehow this deception would erase the other one. In the gallery she wanted to find the Laurencins. “You remember the portrait in Gilead House?”
I did, vaguely. A portrait of a girl, painted with soft colors, mauve and purple and pink, her eyes like two black coals. She wanted to see the ones in the Tate collection, and eventually we found one and stood in front of it with critical expressions. “What do you think? Is mine an original?”
“What does it matter what I think? You need an expert.”
“Be my expert.”
I shrugged. “Assume the worst.”
She nodded agreement. “Assume the worst. I think that’s what I always do.” We moved on, the question of authenticity unresolved but the worst definitely assumed. That evening we went to the cinema — Billy Liar as promised — and when we came back to the house we went to separate beds in separate rooms. But in the dark, when I was nowhere near asleep, when I was wondering about Jamie and about Caroline, about what had happened and what might happen, and was assuming the worst, the door to the room opened. I could see her standing there in the narrow rectangle of light from the hallway upstairs. Just her silhouette. Rather small. Narrow, naked legs. Narrow, naked hips and flanks. Naked.
“Robert,” she whispered.
“Yes.”
“Can I come in?”
“Of course you can.”
And this time it was quite different, for this time what we did was quiet and soft and thoughtful. “I love you, Caro,” I whispered to her at one point, and in the darkness I felt the small sorrowful birdcall of her laughter in my ear as she denied it: “You’ll fall in love with a beautiful girl of your own age. You’re not in love with me.”
But, with all the mournful insistence of a forsaken lover, the word loveliness comes to my mind when I think of her. Not a word we have much time for these days, loveliness. She was lovely. In my memory she remains lovely. Her face was lovely. Her body was lovely. All was loveliness, a litany of loveliness. The soft, remorseful presence of he
r in my narrow bed that second night, loveliness. That weekend the word itself seemed delimited by her. Nothing that was not her was lovely. It was she who defined the limits and the boundaries of my adolescent aesthetic. I was, quite simply, in love with her. “No, you’re not,” she said.
As Caroline had told me, Jamie was due in London the next weekend. Over the phone he told me there was a party at the house of a friend of his on Saturday. I could go along with him if I liked.
“Have they invited me?”
He laughed at that. “It’s not that kind of party.”
So I traveled up to the city again and made my way through now familiar streets to the mews where the Matthewsons lived, and when I rang Jamie opened the door. It was the first time I had seen him since the day of the slate quarry. He was changed, of course. He was taller and stronger with the hard edge of physical maturity. His chin was rough like a man’s, and his grip, as we shook hands, was tough.
“It’s been a long time,” he said.
“Yes, it has.” We were awkward together, wary of each other, childhood friends who hadn’t yet been proved to have anything in common. He was quietly, sarcastically older than me, smiling at my naïveté and condescending to my ignorance. Not the kid who had swarmed up the vertical cliff face, not the fourteen-year-old who had knelt down in front of the quarry guard in the shadows of the hut, the victim whom I had, in some sense, rescued. This was an adult, with an adult’s armor of confidence. We talked about the party. “Maybe we’ll fix you up with a bird,” he suggested. “Is that what you’d like?”
“I’m okay,” I assured him.
“You mean you’ve got a girl? Or you prefer boys?”
“Oh, piss off. I’ve got a girl. Sort of.”
“Sort of? What the hell’s sort of?”
“There’s a girl at home…”
“Who? Bethan?” He laughed at the memory. “Not Bethan,” I assured him. In the background Caroline smiled at my embarrassment.
We went to the party in Caroline’s car, the battered mini that she used in the city. Jamie drove. From the exalted heights of university, he quizzed me about school, offered me advice, suggested where I might go next, advised me against places that were no good. He talked about the climbing he’d been doing, the Scottish winter routes, the ice climbing that was far ahead of anything anywhere else in the world. He seemed a generation different from me, driving through London like this, in command of the traffic, in command of his own life. After a pause he glanced at me. “How did you get on with my mother last weekend?”
I didn’t know how to answer. I didn’t know how you could deal with a thing like that, your mother opening her legs to a mere kid who was supposed to be some kind of friend of yours. I looked away, out of the window at the passing streets. “All right.” The city was dark and wet and awash with Christmas lights. “Swinging London” they might be calling it, but it was a tawdry place.
“She’s lonely,” he said. “Ever since my father died, I guess. Well, she has boyfriends, of course. But never to substitute him. Sometimes I feel…”
“What?” I dared to look at him and saw in his face contours that I perceived as hints of Caroline — her mouth transformed into something male and hard, her brow given weight and blunt-ness, his eyes, which, in some intangible way, were hers.
“Oh, I don’t know. She’s searching for him all the time.”
“What was he like?”
“My old man? I hardly remember him. He was my father, and I was just a kid.” He smiled. “Anyway, you’re almost in the same boat, aren’t you? How often do you see your father?”
I shrugged. He was somewhere in Scotland, with another wife and three children. “Never. My mother and he are estranged.” Estranged. I’d learned the useful word. I’d even looked it up in the dictionary and found that it fit, almost every meaning that the dictionary gave fit this particular case, including the obsolete ones. “I get a Christmas card from him, that kind of thing. At least I used to.”
The house where the party was taking place was in Hampstead. The front door was open, and there were figures silhouetted against the light. The noise of people and music spilled out into the evening. Someone shouted, “Here’s Jamie!” as we got out of the car, and people came out to see whether it was so. He appeared at ease in all this confusion, at ease and vaguely distracted, as though none of it mattered. I was introduced to people and handed an open bottle of beer. There were bottles littered around the floor inside the house and a pall of cigarette smoke in the sitting room. One of the bedrooms reeked with the exotic scent of marijuana. The bathroom contained a large bath with a similarly large girl asleep in six inches of water. People wandered in and peed and pressed the flush and wandered out without taking any notice of her. “Letitia is cooling down,” someone remarked airily. It seemed ever such a good joke.
I soon lost Jamie, of course. I pushed among the bodies and tried to pretend that I wasn’t a solitary sixteen-year-old among people who all seemed older. The music all around us was the Beatles, but there was something else in the air, a sense that this kind of music, the jangling harmonies, the silly falsettos, was already passé. The harsh rhythms of the Rolling Stones and the Animals were taking its place. Someone had brought an LP by an American folksinger, and in one of the upstairs rooms there were people sitting around listening to a song called “Oxford Town.” The voice of the singer was slurred and rough and tuneless, and he wasn’t singing about Oxford, England. His Oxford was in Mississippi, a place of guns and clubs and tear gas. One of the girls was weeping. A girl in boots and miniskirt said to me, “Oh, fuck, let’s go and listen to some music,” and pushed her way out of the room, pulling me with her. Her name was Eve. She wore pale lipstick and heavy eye shadow and had her hair cut short and sharp in what had once been an Eton crop and was now a Mary Quant. “You’re a friend of Jamie’s aren’t you?” Eve asked me. “You know, I fancy him like mad?” We stepped over people in the corridor, went on a search for beer. “We went out for a while, and then he dumped me.”
Downstairs we began to dance. The music there was something fast, but she put her arms around my neck and swayed from side to side as though it were slow, and I didn’t mind. I thought of Caroline. Eve was bigger and softer, her breasts pushing against the thin stuff of her dress. Her belly pressed against me. “You’re all right,” she said vaguely, as though she wasn’t sure whether I’d asked her opinion or not. “But Jamie’s better.”
“Better how?”
“Looking,” she said bluntly. “And older. How old are you?”
“Eighteen,” I lied.
“You don’t look it.”
We shuffled around each other. At one point she lifted her face to be kissed. There was the taste of tobacco. Her tongue coiled around mine. Slugs mating, I thought. There was much debate about whether a girl should have her eyes closed or open when kissing. Open seemed ill-mannered. Closed seemed as though she might be thinking of someone else. John Lennon, maybe. Like a diver underwater I opened my eyes to look and discovered Eve’s eyes wide open, hard and blue and looking directly back at me. She pulled away and frowned, as though I had done something wrong. “I always keep my eyes on a man,” she said.
“Don’t you trust them?”
“Do you think you’re trustworthy?”
“No.”
“Well then.”
We danced, shuffled a bit more. “You know he tried to take me climbing?” she said.
“Who?”
“Jamie, of course.”
“He took you climbing?”
“He tried. Some grotty place in Sussex, I ask you. He goes on about climbing all the time. All hearty, shinning up rock faces or something. What’s the point? You’ve only got to come down again. Hey, d’you smoke?”
I didn’t.
“Shame,” she said. We kissed again. “You know,” she said, pushing her belly against me, “you should ask a girl before you go getting an erection against her.” And with that she s
lipped her arms from around my neck and wandered off to find a smoke. Later I saw her in another room sitting cross-legged with a joint in her hand and a fatuous expression on her face. She waved. I wandered off among the litter of bodies and bottles and thought of Caroline. In the room upstairs the folksinger with the lousy voice was advising his girl not to think twice; but I just couldn’t help it.
The next day a group of us piled into cars and drove into the country. It was the place that Eve had mentioned during the party — a sandstone escarpment hidden away in some wooded corner of Sussex where climbers from London went if they couldn’t get away to Wales or the Lake District. Eve herself, dressed in a battered pair of jeans and an Arran sweater several sizes too big for her, was one of the group.
“In God’s name, why do I put up with it?” she complained.
“Because you’re chasing Jamie?”
She eyed me thoughtfully through a haze of cigarette smoke. “I don’t chase men; they chase me,” she said.
The climbing crag was no more than a twenty-foot-high shelf of dirty rock buried in a scrappy piece of woodland. The ground beneath it was beaten into hardpan by the passage of thousands of city-bound rock climbers desperate for somewhere to practice near the capital. Harrison’s Rocks. Anyone in the climbing world will tell you. “’Ard, scruffy little climbs,” one world authority has described them. The group of us gathered at the bottom and watched Jamie wander up a few routes where other people struggled. I remembered him in the quarry, the easy flow of his body up the rock. There was laughter and shouts of derision, the competitive banter that he seemed to love.