The hardest thing to accept is change. Heraclitus said all is flux, but Ancient Greece was a lot more stable than twentieth-century London. My gift is never to change, and that makes it sadder, harder, when people I love die. Every hour George and Lizzie travel further into the kingdom of death. In the Natural History Museum there’s a cross-section of an ancient redwood tree. Inside it, concentric circles mark historical events that took place in Europe as the massive tree silently grew in its American forest: while Vikings invaded, while Shakespeare wrote his plays, while Napoleon rampaged. My internal life, in cross-section, would look like that tree: too much experience, too many events and memories. I long for you, Leo, because it’s only with you that I don’t have to pretend. They all go into the dark, all the others.
At work with the other girls I lurk in the shadows as Lou Reed gasps for heroin and the customers blink at our white, staring faces, trying to adjust their eyes to the fashionable gloom. You can’t see the colour of the clothes you try on here, let alone the size or price. If you manage to squirm in front of the other half-naked women to see yourself in the mirror in the collective changing-room, you have only the haziest idea what you look like. But the boss insists that all this mystery is good for business, and she seems to be right, as women are flocking to buy her dramatic clothes.
So this is how to be young. No more elocution lessons, no more panics over which knife and fork to use. Cockney accents are fashionable now. I’m trying to recover the one I so carefully lost. These girls are sharp-witted, uneducated, enterprising, ambitious; they remind me of the chorus girls I once worked with, hoping their face – or some other part of their anatomy – will be their fortune. I understand their daydreams because they used to be mine: a millionaire will walk in and buy up the shop and me; a film producer will spot me walking down the street and sign me up. If Leo came here tomorrow and offered them all contracts not one of them would turn him down, and who could blame them? The souls of the poor have always been cheap.
We’re in our summer uniform: tiny, sleeveless, low-backed dresses. Most of us look better than the customers, even in the dark, and we know it. Occasionally a woman comes in who is young, good-looking and rich, and a sigh of collective longing rustles through the racks of clothes. We’re all on the make, but these girls are free. They’ve risen above their biology.
When I first heard them talking about the pill I thought it was a fantasy. My early life was dominated by fear of pregnancy. Ma never stopped telling us how having children had ruined her life. It was never clear what it was, this glorious career we’d robbed her of. Probably just a richer husband. Anyway I got the message that babies were bad news and still feel sick and torn remembering those two furtive abortions I had in my late teens. Blood and stench and pain. You paid, although, you said, those long-dead babies couldn’t be yours. And I didn’t ask why – I didn’t ask nearly enough questions about you in those days. I didn’t think of pregnancy in terms of fathers, mothers or even children. It was just a nuisance, an obstacle to my ambition, which required me to have a lot of sex with a lot of different men. With you there was passion, with George there was tenderness. But with dozens of others, can’t even remember how many, it was business. Fondled and groped and shoved on to couches in seedy, locked, backstage rooms, my body was an ace in a game that was played for quite low stakes, for a job in a chorus line or a bottle of perfume.
I go along to a family-planning clinic and tell the doctor I’m engaged – which makes me respectable, it seems. He gives me a discreet brown-paper bag full of mauve cardboard wallets, each containing twenty-eight tiny pills labelled with the days of the week. I take one on the way home; it tastes of nothing. Those pills are in my brown suede shoulder-bag now, and whenever I open it I stare at them, amazed that these sweets have changed the destiny of women. In fourteen days I’ll be impregnable, and I’ll celebrate by finally seducing David. Yummy-yum. Fairy-tales become science so quickly nowadays. One day I suppose eternal youth will be just a matter of turning up at a clinic with a large cheque, and you, Leo, will be redundant.
I’m alone again in my little room overlooking West Kensington Station, with its lurid-pink floral wallpaper, gas fire and meter, three-legged wardrobe and decaying carpet. It’s no better than the one I used to share with Lizzie, except that here I have my bed to myself. A privilege I’m getting rather tired of.
I’m filthy after a day at work and the long walk home. I’ll have to venture into the ingeniously uncomfortable bathroom where an explosive Ascot heater fails to heat water for the scabbed and blistered bath. Pubic hairs, grease and dead skin seem to be growing on the sides of this bath like lichen on a wall. Tried to clean it with Vim and a rag, but I only made the blisters bigger. The bath is on claws that dig into the archaeological strata of linoleum. I always leave the bathroom feeling dirtier than when I entered it and try not to remember the creamy marble luxury of my bathroom in Rapallo. Usually I just heat water in my kettle and wash in a bowl in front of a fire, a childhood ritual I enjoy invoking, like the flavour of bread and milk and coconut Ma used to make for our supper when we were little.
After all this time I belong nowhere, own almost nothing. I stare at my Vuitton wardrobe trunk, plastered with Cunard labels and the names of prehistoric grand hotels. Inside it’s papered like a little room, a claustrophobic pattern of brown-and-white diamonds. There are several pairs of suede and leather gloves, an ermine muff, a black-beaded evening bag, a coffee-coloured lace parasol with an ivory handle in the shape of a parrot’s head, a black-and-white caricature of a young woman with enormous dark eyes, her impossibly big head surrounded by a forest of black Beardsleyesque hair, inscribed ‘For Jenny Mere, Love from Max, 1952’. I breathe in the nostalgic fragrance of dried lavender and rosemary and old leather, then open a black-lacquer box inlaid with mother-of-pearl full of bundles of letters neatly tied with ribbon. The colour has faded from the ribbon and the ink. Once I gobbled those love letters from George and Binkie and my other admirers, but now their brownish insect tracks seem remote. My only other possessions are a few books, cheap clothes and cosmetics.
The Boy Who’d Never Had His Ticket Punched Before. Molly said I could eat ten Davids before breakfast; instead, I meet one for supper.
Who am I tonight? A young woman meeting a man I know is in love with me? A lecherous old hag lusting after a handsome boy? If I were a man of seventy – even if I looked my age – I’d be considered a sexual hero for pursuing a girl of twenty-two. In the tarnished mirror behind our table in the shabby Italian restaurant I catch sight of our reflection, the only reality I choose to acknowledge: a lovely young couple. Our conversation is friendly, almost brotherly—sisterly, with an exciting undercurrent of sensuality.
As we walk slowly back to my room sunset floods the dismal streets with patches of gold and diamonds. We stand outside my house and David looks shy, an expression I’m so unused to that I have to peer at his face to interpret it. He looks about fifteen. I kiss him lightly on both cheeks.
The touch of his skin and the taste of youth on his lips sharpen my desire. I can’t stop kissing him, standing in the dirty street. Pull him into the house and up to my room, which is transformed by our naked bodies and our delight in each other.
David whispers, ‘Am I the first man you’ve slept with?’
I try not to laugh. My face is buried in his pubic hair, so it’s easy to disguise my amusement. I wonder what on earth virgins get up to nowadays. ‘Would you like to be?’
‘I don’t mind if I’m not. I just want to know all about you.’
‘Well – it’s a long story. How about you? Have you slept with lots of women?’
‘Two,’ he says proudly. ‘A girl at a dance a couple of years ago and one of the secretaries at work. But that was lust, not love.’
‘Can’t you have both?’
‘I think when you’re really in love – ahhh – no – yes …’
The beauty of his young, pale, strong body. Why is the wo
rld full of images of naked women and not of naked men? The curve where his neck meets his shoulders and the long, slim line of his furry golden legs are as perfect as I can bear. Before I made love to him I thought David was just the relic of George, but now I see an entirely different man, perhaps because George and I were young together. Oscar Wilde was right. Youth is wasted on the young, but it’s not wasted on me: it’s only now that I can see how desirable and glorious his 22-year-old body is.
Afterwards we fall asleep intertwined on the narrow bed and wake up to find the room is dark.
‘Great place for a trainspotter,’ David says.
‘Can’t sleep because of the noise of the trains.’
‘I don’t like the flat I’m in either. I hate living with men. Why don’t we move in together?’
‘What would your grandmother say?’
‘Nothing, probably. It’s none of her business.’
‘Let’s see how it goes.’
It goes smoothly and sweetly. Whenever the desire for you becomes irresistible I phone David, as an alcoholic might grab a bottle of mineral water when the longing for booze becomes too strong.
In bed with David, the rigor mortis that has petrified my too-experienced heart softens so that at last I feel as young inside as I look outside. He renews me, as vampires are renewed by the blood of their lover-victims. It isn’t possible to quarrel with David, who’s so happy that he has no temper at all. Every time we meet I’m freshly amazed that he loves and wants me so much. I’ve considered telling him that I was forty-nine when he was born – but he wouldn’t believe me; he hasn’t a scrap of imagination. I turn back into his beautiful arms, licking the place where the golden hairs grow.
I wonder if vampires also suffer from post-coital depression. All this succulent youth and vitality are intoxicating, but they leave me with a hangover. I can’t love David without deceiving him, and I’m weary of my own dishonesty.
On weekdays David has to work late and is too tired to do anything but go straight home to his shared flat in Chiswick, so we can only meet at weekends.
How beautiful these summer evenings are. I can’t bear to go straight home, so I buy a sandwich and go to Holland Park where, on the lawn behind the burnt-out house that was once the social centre of London, a party happens spontaneously every sunny evening. Not a traditional English garden party with hats and strawberries but something new: young people celebrate their youth, sitting on the grass with flutes and guitars and joints. They, we, wear bright cheesecloth clothes, beads and bells and long hair. They, we, are like a court made up entirely of jesters entertaining each other. Friendships and love affairs develop out of these picnics on the grass, and we’re all as enchanted by our own attractiveness as the peacocks screaming with narcissism on the other side of the fence.
At first I was an outsider here. I used to sit on the grass a few yards away, pretending to read as I admired the bright circles of decorative young people, trying to convince myself I had the right to be here, too. Everything is permitted now, but I can still hear those authoritarian voices from my first youth: you can’t do that, Jenny; you can’t afford it; you mustn’t wear that; you’re not allowed; who do you think you are, Lady Muck?
One evening I fall asleep on the lawn, worn out by my long day in the shop, and wake to find the sunset painting the young faces. They’re all either drunk or stoned, a combination of innocence and sophistication that fascinates me. This is Arcadia but with shepherds and nymphs exchanging roles. Zeus would have loved it. Perhaps he’s here each night, disguised as a rabbit or a bird, preparing to ravish these androgynous nymphs.
I’m sitting cross-legged on the grass next to a boy called Matt who, five minutes after we’ve exchanged names, lies down and puts his head in my lap like a dog. I stroke his thick chestnut hair, smoke the joint, drink from the wine bottle that is being passed around and eat the marijuana cookies – made to Mrs Beaton’s recipe, the girl who baked them says proudly. There isn’t much conversation but there’s a lot of touching and cuddling going on, and suddenly I decide this is what I want. I’ll take Matt home with me tonight.
But my impulse to sleep is stronger than my lust. I fall asleep again, and when I open my eyes they’ve all vanished, as if they really were the stuff that dreams are made of. It’s nearly dark, that hour when the park fights back at the city and becomes genuinely wild. Trees and bushes seem denser, older, noisier, and the perfume rising from the warm earth is as heady as wine fumes. It’s the moment when the earth cracked open to reveal Pluto before he dragged Persephone away from her endless summer. Not wanting to visit the Underworld just now – or, more prosaically, get locked in the park – I jump up and cross the deserted lawn.
Then I catch sight of a tall figure in a white suit loping through the trees ahead, where the last of the sun dazzles trickily. I can’t see your face, but your wolfish walk is so familiar that I run after you, following you down the broad path to High Street Kensington.
I could easily catch up with you, but some instinct warns me to remain unseen. You move very fast, with a curious rhythm, as if you might break out into a dance at any minute. At the traffic lights, waiting to cross Cromwell Road, you hop with impatience. I’m close enough to see that your suit, which looked brilliantly white from the distance, is grubby and crumpled. You cross Cromwell Road, then I lose sight of you and feel so desolate that I almost run between the thundering juggernauts. The wait at the lights seems agonizingly long, as if the vast ugly street is a conjuring trick designed to frustrate me. At last the lights change and I run across the road, but there’s no sign of you.
Then I glimpse the white suit darting down stone steps to a basement. I feel a surge of relief and my eyes fill with tears. I don’t even need to see your face, I know you by the way you move, your atmosphere of nonchalance and danger and your power over me.
I follow you down to a concrete yard full of dustbins. On my right is a grimy bay window covered with black bars and in front of me a door with no bell or knocker. There are no lights down here, only the jaundiced reflections of street lamps. I bang on the door with my knuckles, but nobody comes. The curtains at the window beside me are drawn, and I can hear loud music. The dark cumbersome house throbs with hostility.
The Metaphysical Bank
You open the door, and I feel energy flow back into my veins as your dark-blue eyes stare at me again. ‘Hello, Pantoffsky, you old fraud.’
‘My darling Jenny. You took your time.’
‘I’ve been searching for you for months.’
‘I knew you’d be all right with old George.’
‘Yes, but he wasn’t. He’s dead. You bumped him off that day we saw you in the park.’
‘What an outrageous accusation! I didn’t touch him.’
‘You didn’t have to. If looks could kill, and yours can …’
‘You burst into my house after more than twenty years and immediately start accusing me …’
‘We haven’t changed, have we? You said we wouldn’t.’ I stare at you. ‘No, I was wrong. You have changed, Leo. You wouldn’t have got away with that pony-tail in the RAF.’
‘Got to look the part, my dear.’
‘What is the part? Pop star?’
‘Several pop stars are my clients, as a matter of fact. I provide a service. Now tell me why you followed me.’
‘I couldn’t help it.’
‘You should be more careful, Jenny. I might have been a mass murderer.’
‘You are.’
‘There you go again, making wild allegations. What do you want?’
‘You.’
You lead me into the vast front room. It must once have been the kitchen; there are traces of grim domesticity in the disused food lift and the dusty row of coloured bells on the wall. There are four sofas, at right-angles to each other as if to discourage conversation. On one of them is sprawled a tall girl with long fair hair wearing an ankle-length blue cheesecloth dress who stares at me blankly. Is that tran
quillized jealousy in her eyes? On the other couch is a beautiful boy in white silk pyjamas. ‘Nat, this is Jenny, one of my oldest friends. And, Jenny, this is Hari.’
The big glass-topped round table is cluttered with ashtrays, wine, beer, Coca-Cola and transparent plastic bags. I watch, bewildered, as you pour the white powder out of one of the plastic bags and slice it with a razor blade. A bored, nasal, decadent voice sings, ‘I’m waiting for my man.’ The ‘I’ expands into a universe of egotism. The room is dark except for the Anglepoise lamp illuminating you as you chop, weigh and package. Nat and Hari are even younger than the illusory youth you have given me. Nat suddenly opens her eyes, gets up and wraps herself around you on her way to the door. Hari helps himself to the powder, which he snorts up his nose through a rolled-up pound note, then droops back on to his couch.
I want to talk, but talking has gone out of fashion. Anxious not to be out of date, I look around for clues as to how I should dress and behave. There are no books in this room, only shelves of records and brilliantly coloured abstract posters on the walls. The carpet and walls are decayed, but there’s a pile of five-pound notes on the table. You count the money in your circle of light, carefully roll up a pound note, stick it up one nostril and inhale some of the powder. Then you gasp with pleasure and leap up, dancing towards me.
‘Still here, Jenny? I’ll give you a free snort, if you like.’
‘What is it?’
‘Coke. Surely you’ve had it?’
‘Now let me guess. I can remember when coke was a fuel, then it became a fizzy drink, then – cocaine?’
‘Help yourself. I’ve got some great stuff here. Pure, uncut, just off the plane from Colombia.’ You hand me a rolled-up note.
Loving Mephistopeles Page 11