by Jacky Hyams
We weren’t living in a city that was in any way as attractive as it is nowadays. If you look very closely at photos of ’70s London streets, it’s obvious that much of the city was still drab and shabby with signs of the immediate post-war era still very much in evidence. There were more cars, of course, but nothing like the number you see now. Much of what is now posh, super-expensive inner London was still dominated by peeling stucco and neglected, rundown, huge period houses. Bombsites were still dotted around the city. Yet the day-to-day outward drabness of their city didn’t affect the Londoners’ time-honoured resource: the humour, the laughter, the banter in the street markets, the shops and in the pubs. Who needed serious conversation? Everything got turned into a joke.
As for my emotional life, I’d stopped rewinding the Michael saga in my mind. A couple of months after returning from Lisbon, I’d made a trek to the house in Muswell Hill on the off chance that there was post for me. Sure enough, Marjorie the witch came to the door. Dressed up to the nines with full war paint, although it was early Saturday morning, she reluctantly made me wait on the doorstep while she tottered down to her cave.
‘Only this,’ she said, thrusting at me a very crumpled envelope that had clearly been opened by her and hastily resealed. Then she slammed the door in my face. It was postmarked Scotland, dated the month before. Michael’s sister. She wanted me to know that Michael had left them. ‘He says he’s fine but I don’t know where he is now,’ she wrote. ‘He did ring us once and said he was in Spain, looking for work. But I thought I’d let you know, in case you heard from him.’
I didn’t reply. Maybe she was hoping he’d make his way back to me, but I wasn’t. I never did hear from him. He vanished. There was no way of tracking him down then, unless you were really determined, and if a person wasn’t formally reported missing to the authorities, that was it. In many ways, it was good to have retrieved this letter. Better to have loved and lost, I’d tell myself sometimes. Yet there were too many questions around it all for me to be convinced that what I’d felt or experienced was even the Real Thing. Perhaps it wasn’t, after all. There hadn’t been enough time, anyway, to really be sure.
Part of me had always held back from the significance of the ‘I love you’ thing, the commitment implied by a single phrase. People now constantly use the phrase ‘luv ya’ to finish a conversation. Which isn’t a bad thing at all, openly telling people you care. We’re now much more emotionally honest, or we strive to be. When I’d first hungered for independence, back in the early ’60s, men often believed it was obligatory to utter those words sometimes as a sign of commitment – just to get their end away. It was like pushing a ‘If all else fails, this will release the knickers’ button.
By the early ’70s, thankfully, we’d moved beyond that kind of emotional dishonesty because everyone was aware that having sex didn’t now necessarily imply a long-term commitment. Yet I still wasn’t clear about my own understanding of love or the warmth, the caring I’d felt for Michael. Passion, I knew, could be overwhelming, blind you. And the emotions engendered by really passionate sex, closeness and intimacy could sweep you up in their wake. But love itself? Clear as mud.
Yet while my mind would ponder these questions over and over again, I was now about to encounter something quite different, an emotional state that might disguise itself as intense love of a certain kind, when in reality it was far darker. And potentially damaging. Obsession. A total fixation with one person to the extent that everything in the rest of your life runs secondary, living only for the times when you’re with that person. I hadn’t experienced it to any extent before. I didn’t understand it then. I still don’t. Perhaps it’s something that can happen if there’s a real void in your life and I was by then vulnerable to this, because I was floundering without any focus. But this is how it happened…
I am descending the pub stairs to the street. I’ve left my glass of wine upstairs in the top bar of the Spread and it’s so hot, I am desperate for some fresh air. But I never make it outside. Because he’s there, standing at the bar, nursing a beer. I am immediately, instantly enslaved by this brooding, handsome individual. Tall, broad shouldered, darkish, shoulder-length hair, wine-coloured velvet suit, large-collared shirt, no tie. Beautiful, long-lashed green eyes. Rock star good looks but not young, about 30. Mr Darcy, go home, your time is up. Elvis, you’re so over. This guy is the real deal, the works. The aura is ‘I’m dangerous – but you can’t resist me, anyway.’ Is he English? Foreign? Is he for real, for Christ’s sake? I have never seen such a sexy, gorgeous man before. I do not even hesitate, consider any propriety, deploy any game or tricks. I just walk over and start talking to him. I have to have this stranger. That is exactly what runs through my head at this moment.
As soon as I start talking, his sexy half-smile tells me he knows exactly where I’m at. Of course he does. You can tell he has a string of women, right across the city, all panting for his services: I am poised to become the newest, latest diversion. Yet that balmy June night turns into something so extraordinary to me, so unusual, so unsettling it will send me into a spiral of prolonged confusion and unruly behaviour for many months.
I’m almost right about the foreign bit. He’s a half-French journalist, though he’s never lived there. His mother came to England to marry a doctor she’d met in France in the 1930s. His dad died young. His mother hoped her son too would study medicine, but he dropped out of medical school after six months. He really wanted to act: he certainly had the looks and the presence, but it didn’t happen. To placate his mother, he took a job on a local paper in the north and turned out to have what it took to be a trainee reporter. Now he works as a ‘casual’ (an early word for freelance) for a number of different Fleet Street newspapers. His real name is François, but everyone knows him as Frank.
Once we’re back in his tiny, untidy, postage-stamp-size place in Belsize Park, Frank doesn’t touch me. He pours us drinks and talks, asks me about myself, what I’m doing, where I come from. Then he tells me his own truth. ‘I’m not the faithful type, sunshine,’ he says in his silky, well-modulated voice. ‘I just love women.’
Fine, I think, staring at him, longing to see what’s underneath the velvet suit. I can cope with that ‘loving all women’ stuff. (No I can’t – talk about denial.) Then he delivers the coup de grace. A fiancée called Annette. ‘She was a model, now she’s making good money as a croupier. I keep this flat on for the other girls. She knows what I’m like. But she’s a bit naughty herself sometimes, which is probably why we get along.’
Do I head for the door? Hardly. I can’t even move, so entranced am I by everything about this man: his looks, his voice, his stance. Here is a self-avowed Really Bad Boy. No lying, no pretending – things have certainly moved on in the sexual honesty stakes since the days of Jeff. Frank is throwing me the gauntlet. Not just a lover with loads of women but a Special Woman to boot. Yet he knows full well he’s got me. Later he tells me that it’s always my facial expression that gives my game away. And that, he says, is very endearing.
Think of love games. Consider role reversal scenarios. Think about the power of a sexy voice using exactly the right words at the right time. I won’t give any more detail: suffice to say that until this point I’d considered myself sexually experienced. Really, I knew little. Until this night, a night of love like no other. After that first night with Frank, the kind of lover for whom the dawn means the briefest times of snatched sleep, I am beyond sated. My body is enslaved by him. But Frank is also accomplished, talented in love way beyond the mere physical. He reaches inside my brain, takes me to unknown places in my head. I am totally hooked. He is a powerful and potent drug. The kind of drug that some people should never take – even once.
From that point on, my obsession with being in bed with Frank rules my every waking moment. What makes it even worse is that he’s a constantly moving target. He travels abroad for work sometimes. He works late. He’s never ever in the same place for long. He enc
ourages me to call him at whichever paper he’s working on – ‘Does it matter who calls who?’ – and he’s wryly amused by my very obvious, slavish dedication to our affair. He isn’t just calling the shots, he owns the gun. You could call me a love junkie. But it wasn’t love. It wasn’t sheer lust either. It was simply a physical and mental obsession, a treacherous place to be for a woman who secretly yearned for independence and real freedom. I was trapped.
I go to the office, do the minimum of work, drink heavily virtually every night, try sleeping with other men (to disastrous effect) and live dangerously. I focus intently on my single-minded goal: working my way towards the next time I’m in his bed. For a while that summer, some sort of pattern emerges. We go to see movies like Vanishing Point or Sunday Bloody Sunday (not a great choice to watch with Frank next to me, his hand on my thigh, since the topic is a Londoners’ love triangle: a gay doctor and a divorced career woman, both in love with the same young, handsome, bisexual man). Sunday Bloody Sunday was, in many ways, a movie that reflected the huge changes in what was becoming a much more permissive society: the sight of two men kissing would not have even reached the cinema screen even a few years before.
At one point we make up a foursome with a very good-looking friend of mine from Dalston, Deborah, and another journalist friend of Frank. ‘He didn’t like her, Jacky,’ Frank said afterwards. ‘He said her eyes were dead – and he’s right.’
He’s lazy, can’t be bothered to pick me up or observe any of the normal conventions. He gets me to meet him in Fleet Street or West End pubs. One day he asks me to meet him at one of the newspaper offices he works in. In suede hotpants, I perch in the reception area of the big newspaper building near the Thames, drinking it all in, amazed at how dilapidated and downbeat it all looks, particularly the scruffy-looking men who rush through the lobby, clutching their notebooks, leering openly at my outfit as if they’ve never seen such gear before. The papers are full of photos of leggy women in hotpants: don’t they read their own publications? I’ve never been anywhere near a newspaper office until now. I’d imagined them to be gleaming palaces of modernity, like the chrome and leather sofa posh ad agencies I’d temped in briefly. The glamour of the Street of Dreams looked, close up, like Scruffsville.
I never know when he’s going to be around. One Sunday afternoon, I’m at home in Dalston when he rings from Rome and demands I come out to Heathrow and meet him off the plane. ‘Can you make it, sunshine?’ he entreats. ‘Be great to see your smiling face.’ Several forms of transport, including a cab, later (there was no direct tube or rail line to Heathrow back then; it was a real trek from Dalston) I reach the arrivals hall. He emerges silent, dishevelled and very, very smashed. In the taxi back to his flat, he passes out briefly, then tumbles straight into bed, snoring, when we arrive. I lie there, next to him, not daring to speak. I’m with him. Nothing else matters.
He is a habitual and heavy drinker. There is always a bottle of something, usually beer, by his bed. His place is a tip, even by usual male standards, but then he doesn’t really live there. It’s just a place to screw. Sometimes he drops me off in the morning, telling me he’s en route to the west London flat belonging to Croupier Girl. I tell myself no one has him. But I am very wrong. Obsession equals a permanent state of delusion.
At the end of the summer, I buy a £30 return flight to Ibiza, my first holiday to what is then known as the hippie island and book into a cheap pension in Santa Eulalia. More endless drinking followed by getting into arguments and wine-chucking incidents. Temper tantrums leading to tables overturned in nightclubs. I’m so stroppy, so out of control, it’s a miracle I survive without someone thumping me. Or worse. But I emerge intact. I head straight for a coin box when I get off the plane. Yes, he’s leaving the office, will be at the flat. He’s amused, mocking, when I carry my case through his door. ‘You look good, sunshine. You’ve lost a bit of weight. But you’re not as thin as you think you are.’
The very next day I discover my job is gone. While I’ve been away, the beautiful Deborah, she of the dead eyes, has nicked my job. They don’t need me any more. This is totally my own fault. I’d told Deborah what an easy gig it was, working for the conmen and I suggested she temp there in my absence. The conmen had then taken her to the pub, decided she was prettier – dead eyes or not – and that it was easier to get her to actually do some work, since my obsession with Frank and daily phone calls to him had become a bit of an office joke.
‘What did you expect, sunshine?’ is Frank’s only comment when I ring with my news. ‘You knew they were a nasty bunch.’
Luckily, the temp agency say they have an instant booking for me. ‘They need a temp but it’s a permanent job if you want it,’ the agency woman tells me, handing me the card with the details, eyeing me suspiciously. ‘I’m not sure if it’s your kind of thing.’
It doesn’t matter. One thing is already clear to me. I can’t afford to be out of work and I need to be in an office during the daytime, rather than sitting around in Dalston obsessing over Frank. At least, at work, I’m momentarily distracted and it fills the daylight hours.
The temp job is in Tower House, Southampton Street, off the Strand. A publishing company called IPC. The job is profoundly dull. Two thin, grey, older men, executives in the planning department, are my bosses. A brand new IPC building, housing all the company’s magazines and called King’s Reach Tower, is being built near Waterloo Bridge. Another high rise, though hopefully not another Ronan Point. The men’s job is to help plan the construction of the new building. This means lots of boring architects’ drawings, nothing remotely interesting. ‘The job’s yours if you want it,’ the agency woman tells me when I go to pick up my money after a very dreary week in Tower House. ‘They like you and they’re fed up with temps who can’t spell properly. And the money’s quite good, £22 a week with LVs. Provided you don’t mind joining the clerical workers’ union.’
Union? What union? Had I followed the political events governing all our lives rather than reading women’s magazines or spending my life in the pub, I’d have understood a bit more about unions – and why the more militant ones and their demands were making life nigh impossible for many people all over the country. Strikes. Stoppages. More power cuts. At that point, there were over 300 trade unions and almost half the country’s work force of 23 million belonged to one. But all Miss Opportunist thinks is: where’s the scam? There had to be a benefit to joining a union, didn’t there? ‘I can join, that’s OK,’ I tell her. ‘But what does it mean? Do you get any extra money, overtime or that sort of thing?’
‘No. But if you join, it gives you the right to apply for other jobs in the publishing industry,’ the woman says encouragingly, keen to get me to take the dull job so she can get her commission. ‘Some of the jobs are really interesting – editorial jobs on magazines and papers that you never see advertised because the unions say they have to be advertised internally. All the really good editorial jobs go to people in the union. A few of the jobs do pay overtime. Most girls in those jobs stay in them for years.’
She’s got my attention. The word ‘editorial’ has resonance for me. One big consequence of my obsession with Frank is a total fascination with what seems like an amazingly glamorous, interesting job: the world of newspapers and journalism, being a reporter. He doesn’t talk about it much. But when he does, there’s genuine passion in his voice. ‘It’s all about getting the story, sweetheart. You have to get the story. If you don’t, you don’t survive.’ Frank’s job takes him everywhere around town and off on planes sometimes. To me, restless and hungry for adventure, it seems like a charmed existence. I figure that if taking the boring job means there’s even a chance of working in this exciting newspaper world out there, I’ll do it.
I start at Tower House straight away. I learn that once I join the union, there’s a six-month period before I can apply for any of the internally advertised editorial jobs, usually posted up by the side of the ancient, clanky lift in To
wer House. I’ll just have to wait. Me and my fixation with the green-eyed, long-haired man with the gorgeous voice would have to exercise a bit of patience.
With regular money coming in once more, I can leave Hackney again. I find a bedsit in Garden Road, off Abbey Road, and move myself in there at the end of that autumn, after an outrageously boozy trip with Jeanette to a place called Mojacar, all whitewashed buildings, crazy, rich American expats and bars run by dodgy, drug-smuggling blokes. They’re even shooting Hollywood westerns in the arid, dusty area around Almeria. I have a steamy one-nighter with an English barman, an ex-con who is superbly knowledgeable in bed: a one-man orgasmatron. It’s a flash of distraction from my all-singing, all-dancing Obsession. Have pity for the obsessed who cannot face up to the truth. Because one day, the truth will come up and hit them in the face – and they will not be able to deal with it.
One day in November, I get through to Frank at work. OK, he’ll come round, see my new place. I rush home, tidy up, hopeful. Maybe he’ll stay the night. ‘Are you sure you want to live here, sweetheart?’ he says dismissively, looking round the room which, while larger than the Muswell Hill bedsit, is just as depressing – and even more expensive at £7 a week. And no, he doesn’t want to linger. He wants a drink.