by Ray Connolly
‘I’m Church of England.’
‘Ah, they used to tell the daughters of Albion to lie back and think of England in such moments. I wasn’t thinking of England yesterday. I was worrying about all you lot taking your blue movies with that X-ray machine. Shouldn’t be surprised to find myself on the bill in some Underground picture-palace. Special premiere tonight: The Barium Enema of Benedict M Kelly—a film by Andy Warhol. You didn’t notice a pale-looking bloke with fair hair and sunglasses hanging about round there yesterday, did you?’
‘Have your legs always been so hairy?’
‘It’s the werewolf in me, my love. Couldn’t keep mother away from them during a full moon. There was a shortage of manpower during the war.’
I parked the car just over the southern crest of Waterloo Bridge and led Clare down the steps on to the South Bank’s artistic complex: ‘Anyway when they get the report back they’ll just tell me to double my dose of valium or librium and take it easy for a while. And that’ll be that. You wait and see.’
But I wondered whether she would wait and see, as we strolled in the dark across the flagged open spaces and along the elevated walkways that sprout like bent saplings between the concrete halls. And later, standing queueing with the other couples, and searching out maggots from a bag of roasted chestnuts, I noticed that even now she did not stand too close, nor say too much. Silence is probably the best policy, I allowed her eventually, overhearing the esoteric celluloid sophisticates juggling for effect in the surrounding queue, as they sheltered cosily under the arch of the bridge. At one point earlier a tourist cruiser had paddled its way up-river towards Westminster, all lit up, and I’d started to explain about the watermen who for centuries had piloted on the river and who have to have certain licences and pass certain tests, but I knew Clare wasn’t listening—watching, smiling occasionally, perhaps even hearing, but not listening. Probably I was boring her, and for a while I just looked at her and, wondering about her aloofness, swallowed my pain. It’s like trying to tell a stranger about rock and roll, I thought miserably to myself.
The National Film Theatre is no place for courting, that’s for sure. It’s far too self-conscious, and I should have remembered that. Not like when I was going out with Heather Alty from Scarisbrick. Those double seats they had at the Scala were the very craftsmanship of love. It’s a pity they don’t make them any more. A whole generation of cinema addicts was probably conceived on the double seats of the back row of the Scala. And there we all were, lads in our best Saturday-night suits, girls buffeted by layers of paper-nylon underskirts that crackled like fireworks when the tussling got hot. Very earthy times they were, and who cared about the lousy projectionist? He could get his oats, too, up there in his little box, so long as he gave us enough light to eat our ice creams and got us out in time for the last bus at half past ten. And wasn’t it there that I first felt that clammy fleshy gap in the armoury at the top of a girl’s stockings? Oh Scala, how could they have turned you into a supermarket?
Clare didn’t say much during the interval between the two films. All through the third reel of The Cranes Are Flying I’d been fighting a losing battle with my tear ducts, a battle often fought at the pictures and always lost, but Clare had remained impassive. So what do you see in the hard-faced get? I wondered to myself, but not coming up with any decent answer, I settled back to surrender myself to a wallowing in sentiment.
At last the lights came on again, and amid some general sniffling and nose-blowing we made our way out with the red-eyed audience, and back onto Waterloo Bridge, where the busy after-theatre traffic was rushing out towards south London and the suburbs.
In the car I waited for a few minutes while the engine warmed up, and watched the cars, red brake-lights aflame, as they slowed down to take the roundabout at the end of the bridge. At last Clare spoke.
‘Do you always cry in the pictures, Benedict?’ she asked.
‘Mostly.’ I already felt a complete twit, and was wishing we’d gone to see a Carry On farce. ‘Don’t you ever?’
‘No. I don’t think so. But I think it’s very nice that you do.’
And then, almost so tenderly that I wasn’t sure if it was really happening to me or not, I felt her lean slowly across the car seat, slide an arm around my neck, and pulling my head carefully to one side begin to kiss me very softly and warmly, while I blinked back butterfly kisses into her cheeks, and stroked her hair, and the rain began to spatter on the windscreen of the car.
Dinner was quiet, in Covent Garden, and we sat close together, closer than we’d been all day, and she admitted that she’d been shy at the NFT because it was the first time she’d been there and everyone seemed so sophisticated. And I said I’d like to see her again, and she said that would be nice. And later I took her home and parked off Cromwell Road, around the corner from the hostel, and I kissed her a bit, and all that kind of thing, and we made some plans of what we were going to do together. And before she went in I think I must have told her that I loved her, although I admit it was a bit early in the day to be making such pronouncements, but anyway she smiled and looked at me happily and said ‘yes’ as though she thought as much. And then she kissed me goodnight.
Chapter Five
Sunday, and the sun shone with a late afternoon autumn filter, comforting and soft, turning London into a city of blushing stucco cosiness. In Holland Park we walked and rustled through the dried and withered horsechestnut leaves, or watched them cartwheeling down like great five-finger exercises, studied the kites struggling to escape from the tethers which anchored them to aggressive fathers, and waited in vain while the peacocks decided that no amount of teasing was going to get them to open their tails. And after an hour we hand-in-handed home, pulling our coats closer around us, and hiding our chins a bit behind our polo necks as the sun got lower. And without bothering for the tea which we’d promised ourselves we somehow found ourselves lying close together, just talking, and watching the trees from my bedroom window. And now and then I kissed her, while she lay back and waited and looked at the pictures and posters and blown-up photographs of children that scrambled for space on the walls. A white room: white carpet and white bedspread, and a girl with fair straight hair, blue jeans and a blue polo-neck jumper, boots left at the foot of the bed, who must have been wondering why everywhere she went in this bachelor’s house she found children’s paintings of clowns and horses and mermaids and lions.
‘I would have thought you’d have had photographs of girls everywhere.’ She was prying.
I turned on one side and studied a pen and ink grouping of a herd of zebra: ‘I never met any girls I particularly wanted to look at all day. I took these photographs myself —in the adventure playground up the road.’
‘Who’s the talented child?’
‘You mean the pictures? Talented children. I have a friend who runs an orphanage and I send him a pound for every picture he sends me. Then I frame the best of them. I’ll soon have to buy a bigger house, he’s sending me so many. When I was at school all I ever learnt was to keep my paint box neat and clean or else you got the cane, and to draw everything as though you were putting it onto a postage stamp. I envy the creative range of these children so much. I could never draw a zebra like that. I like children’s art. I don’t want their stuff after they’ve had all their originality and fantasies knocked out of them at some bloody art school. One day I’m going to have children to paint just for me.’
‘Was that why you bought such a big house?’
‘I’m not thinking of turning it into an orphanage, if that’s what you’re thinking.’
‘But you really don’t need it. It’s half empty. I’d be terrified to live here alone.’
‘Who said I was always alone?’
‘Do you have lots of girls … I mean do you bring them back … up here?’
‘Just the pretty ones … and the pretty easy ones.’
‘Which do you think I am?’
Clare, you’re so s
erious. So challenging. ‘You’re a pretty nice one, Clare.’ And now I’m kissing her, and I’m not teasing now: a knee to gently part your legs, a hand under you to pull you towards me. See how we fit. Peppering your pretty, clean face with nibbles, and nuzzling down behind your ears. And now it’s quite dark, and only the glow of the street lamp lights our room. And round my neck your arms are pulling, while you lift and arch your body off the bed, and push into me. And now I can feel you smiling under me, enjoying my hardness and flexing the muscles of your thighs, while adolescently my hand searches under your sweater, and wanders over your body, hardly daring to touch your neat small breasts, then up and over them and around and down, and unzipping your fly, snapping loose the top button—Levi Strauss & Co., S. F. Calif.—and down beneath the soft cotton of your panties, into the roughness and round the corner into the warmth and moistness of your excitement. So smooth. And away back to your breasts, pulling high your sweater that I might see and hide my face in them, impertinent little pixies that they are, and quickly now sliding both hands under you, edging down the rough denim of your jeans, hands cupping your bottom under me so tight, bursting at my zip, hot around my neck, and see how free your body is, jeans and pants caught in a tangle around your knees, your dark triangle neat between your thighs, crowning last summer’s bikini tan lines. Let me kiss your breasts, and push my hand deep under you. Yet still you make no move towards me. But no, don’t say no…
‘No, Benedict. Please no more.’ Pulling at panties. I’m sorry.’
And now kiss you again. And hold you tight, and help you down with your sweater. And now I think of it, you’re not wearing a bra. Now there’s a thought.
‘No need to be sorry for anything.’ It sounds peevish, but I mean it.
‘No, I am sorry. Benedict—I’m a virgin. I really am.’ Is she blushing in the dark at that word?
‘Is that something to apologise for?’ Hand gently tracing the orange tram-line stitching under the zip of her jeans again. ‘I knew you were a virgin when we met. Well, I hoped you were. Clare I love you. And I want you to stay a virgin. I want you to stay as you are until you decide that you don’t want to be.’
‘I know I’m old-fashioned, but I can’t help it …’
‘Shut up.’
Lying across you again, feeling you rise under me. Don’t deny it, Clare, is this not a fine way to spend a Sunday evening in October in London?
‘Benedict, I must go.’
Of course, and now my hands under you again, the smoothness and firmness of you exciting me, and you now gripping me tighter, hands around my waist, under my sweater, nails digging a little into my flesh …
‘Benedict. No. I want to go.’
‘And I want to come. Please.’
And tighter we pull together. And now Fm hiding my head over her shoulder and into her hair while she arches and heaves. And momentarily there’s that inevitably familiar welling and bursting feeling, before in a rush the waterfall cascades warmly into the tightness of my clothing. So long and so slow it seemed, and there’s me still stretched across her thighs, bleeding the last drops. And when Fm still she holds me in her arms and tells me soon. Very soon. And I say maybe. We’ll see.
Chapter Six
Lunch had been arranged for one o’clock at The Eye. I’d never wanted to go but there was a limit to the number of times I could stand up that flotsam of people I grudgingly and inaccurately called friends, and another limit to the variety of excuses I could find for never being available for midday bonhomie. And then, to be honest, the prospect of Stella Levigne’s promised presence had intrigued me sufficiently to induce more than one-bath-time fantasy. But then that was before a Clareful of barium. Anyhow there was no way out of it. Monday was here, and before I’d had a chance to think of an excuse the telephone was insisting its reminders, two to the bar.
‘Hello.’
‘Benedict—I’ve been calling you all weekend, but your line has always been busy. You been up to your disappearing tricks again?’ The pussy-smooth gently whispering voice of Paul was unmistakable. Telephone cables were turning to miles of slime all over London. Should have left the bloody thing off the hook.
‘I haven’t been well. I didn’t want to be disturbed.’
‘But why don’t you get an answering service like I keep telling you? Or at least a machine.’ Paul never let up.
‘Because if I did I’d feel morally obliged to answer all the fucking silly buggers who appear to have nothing better to do than to ring me up and ruin my weekend.’
Pause.
‘So! Well, I’m glad to see you have quite recovered your vicious little spirits. You did remember that we’re having lunch today, didn’t you, or did your little malaise affect your memory too?’
No I hadn’t remembered, but for the sake of peace and quiet yes I had—of course, I said. ‘How could I forget? Been looking forward to it since Christmas 1953.’
Wasted sledgehammer irony.
‘Oh good, because Stella is just longing to meet you. She thinks you look like a fragile fawn.’
‘God save me from my fawning fragility. See you at one …’
‘… in The Eye. Right in the pupil. You know? The centre table.’
‘Yes, yes. I know. Bye, bye …’
‘… Sure you’re all right? I’ve been really worried about you recently. You haven’t been looking well. You’re not going to have one of your funny turns, are you?’
‘I’m great. Bye bye …’
‘Okay.’ And now a whisper: ‘Bye, darling.’
Click. Left hand chopping down on the telephone and bringing to an end the inanities. With a bit of luck Paul would have heard himself cut off before he’d been able to get the telephone away from his ear. That’d teach the silly sod. ‘Darling,’ he’d said. God’s teeth that creeping faggot swings more ways than a pendulum. They should string him up by his Renaissance hair and market him as Paul the Transvestite Human Mobile. Turnaround, turnaround. Catch him at the front, catch him at the back, what does it matter as long as you have the knack. Who’s that flying up there? Is it a boy? Is it a girl? ‘No, it’s Superfag.’ Hello sailor.
Twenty careless minutes late for lunch. For an hour and a half I’d tried futilely to track down Mrs Shirley Temple Black, reputed to be staying in London, and, I was sure, easy fodder for a quick no-nonsense bitchy column, but the good lady’s guardian angel must have been with her and successfully endeavouring to keep me at bay. Eventually at five past one I telephoned a memo into the office.
TO: Features Editor
FROM: Benedict Kelly
As all attempts to see Winston Churchill, Joseph Stalin, Robespierre, Mary Jo Kopechne, Edward Heath, Doris Day, Lassie, Buster Keaton, Greta Garbo and Shirley Temple have been unsuccessful, my column this week will be devoted to a lady called Mary Jane Tinhorn, who I understand has some very provoking ideas upon marriage in the seventies. Hope this is okay? Will advise later about photographs.
And, promising the telephone copytaker a hairy-fairy autograph or two for his children, I left by taxi for lunch.
The Eye is not a big restaurant. It doesn’t need to be. With an exclusive club membership of a hundred guineas a year and possibly the most extortionate prices in the whole of London, Jerome Acacia, the proprietor, and his everloving, everlaughing, everoverpricing wife, have achieved, for the moment, what we were once told was impossible. They can, and they do, fool all the people all the time. The Eye exists to soak the rich, and this year it’s doing it very well. Next year it may be somewhere else, who knows, but the odds are that the Acacias will have a finger in that not so metaphorical pie too. Fashion is like money. A commodity to be enjoyed only by the few. ‘You’re a fraud and a cheat,’ I’d told Jerome Acacia once, shortly after watching a film about starvation in Biafra, and slightly appalled at the bill facing my host. Yes, he was, agreed loveable and smiling Jerome, looting the rich for all they were worth and wouldn’t I like another glass of champagne? Thank you, how k
ind, you thieving bastard, no wonder the place is always half empty. Of course it’s half empty. Jerome was inscrutable. Half as many people paying three times as much as they would anywhere else, meant half the cost on staff wages, a considerable reduction in the amount of wasted food, and enormous profits. What better way to maximise on one’s investment? Why, if he had his way, he wouldn’t bother cooking anything ever for anybody, but simply provide a comfortable meeting place where the privileged few might meet in congenial surroundings the other few who were so privileged, and where he might sting them just for the chance of being able to see each other and be seen by each other.
‘Benedict, love … at last.’ Paul was on his feet. The two girls looked up. I recognised Stella. The other one was new. All Paul’s girlfriends were always new. It didn’t take them long to discover that there wasn’t too much carnal fun to be found in tokenism. The pretty anonymity of her face, the beautiful blankness, gave her away as a model right away. And those little press-stud breasts pricking out from behind her mauve cotton vest clinched it. At once Paul was leaning forward, a motherly hand guiding me into a chair. He looked today (and Paul usually assumed a different persona for every new day) like a rather angelic Marquis de Sade, nigger-brown satin suit over ruffled cream blouse, and trousers tucked into knee-high riding boots. A leather riding crop swung from his belt. Momentarily I considered the absurd beach buggy parked outside in the street, with the rain dripping through the hood and onto the seats, and wondered whether Paul used his crop to lash the side panels when in need of more acceleration.
‘Are you better?’ asked Miss Press-Studs.
‘Are you a model?’
‘How did you guess?’
‘How long have you known Paul?’
‘We met yesterday.’
‘He’s a wolf. Watch him!’ And she was dismissed.
‘Wooooooowwww.’