— It’s your business, was all Fred said. — If you think he’s a good thing. He’s not what I expected. Isn’t he very square?
— He’s grown-up, I said, bristling. — If that’s what you mean. He’s a man with responsibilities in the real world.
— Oh, the real world. I see.
— He makes real things that help sick people. Do you disapprove?
— You know why he didn’t like me, don’t you? Because he doesn’t like queers.
Blushing and furious, I said Mac wasn’t like that, he was open-minded, and it was just Fred’s own prejudice because Mac was a businessman. But actually I wasn’t sure, when I thought about it. Mac had asked once whether Fred brought his boyfriends back to the bed where we were so happy together; when I said ‘not to my knowledge’ Mac seemed relieved, not having to imagine it. He was never vindictive towards what didn’t fit his moral compass; he wiped it out, rather, as if it didn’t exist. I’d never told Fred that we used his bed, and of course I always changed the sheets afterwards, but I suppose he’d guessed at it (he must have noticed all those clean sheets). Once Fred and Mac had actually met and disliked each other, our beautiful bed was impossible for us and we had nowhere else to go. Mac said that on my narrow mattress in the boys’ room he felt as if he was suffocating.
We went to a hotel in the city centre but it made us both miserable; I knew how out of place I looked at reception in my black jeans, with my scrap of chiffon tied in my hair and my cheap silver earrings. Mac said it was the only time he worried that people would think I was his daughter, and when I asked him what he’d be doing taking his daughter to a hotel room in the afternoon, he didn’t find it funny. Showing off, I paraded around naked on the thick carpets, behind stiff brocade drapes five flights up, with a view through nylon curtains over the misty city blown with rain. I insisted he get in the shower with me and soap me, though this wasn’t his kind of thing – nor mine really, though I did love the endless hot water and the thick towels (there was no shower in Fred’s flat, only a bath and a quirky gas geyser). I performed like the tart Mac might have picked up in a bar at lunchtime if he’d been different. But he wasn’t different, and there was something fake and self-conscious that afternoon in our love-making.
And then I met Barbara out shopping – she smiled as if she recognised me but couldn’t remember where she’d seen me. I was on my way home from my morning shift at the gallery, with an hour to spare before I picked up Rowan (Luke had started at secondary school; he came home on his own on the bus). Winter had come round again and she was wearing the same black coat, with the astrakhan collar turned up; her wide pleasant face was rosy and roughened with cold and hard lines showed up in her cheeks; her nose was red. She was only a few years younger than my mother. I followed her to the delicatessen then stood outside and pretended to be looking at the packets of sponge fingers and tins of cooked chestnuts and pimientos in the window. Inside, the shop assistant sliced and cut according to Barbara’s orders, I saw them laughing and chatting; she put out her gloved hand for packets of ham and salami and cheese, stowing them in the basket on her arm. I realised that I’d fallen into the wrong kind of love with Mac, a daylit, sensible love inappropriate to our circumstances. I felt shame, as keen as the scream of the meat slicer. Mac wouldn’t talk to me much about his family but I knew their house was big and Victorian, outside the city at Sea Mills, with fifteen acres of land where his daughters kept their horses. I knew that Barbara volunteered for the Citizens’ Advice Bureau.
I crossed the road to the supermarket and by the time I came out again Barbara had gone. I went into the delicatessen and bought expensive chocolate although I couldn’t afford it; at home I ate it piece by piece until I felt sick, standing at the kitchen table without even taking my coat off. Then I hurried out to wait among the other mothers in the school playground; nausea made a sweat break out on my forehead. Rowan was one of the last to appear, bad-tempered, struggling with his coat hanging off his shoulder, sugar-paper pictures unrolling under his arm, dragging his gym daps by the laces. I crouched on the asphalt to help him put on his coat – my hands were shaking too much at first to join the zip at the bottom. — What’s the matter with you? he asked suspiciously. — You look funny.
— It’s all right. I ate too much chocolate.
After school Rowan was always angry and empty, with pale smudges under his eyes against his brown skin; he wouldn’t ever eat his packed lunch, only the crisps. He was popular at school and he did well, but it took a great effort because he was naturally guarded and sceptical. Fumbling with his zip, leaning close into his restlessness and boy-smell, I was desolate suddenly because I would never pick up his brother from school again. From now on Luke would always arrive home under his own steam, jaunty and faintly feverish with the import of what he’d seen and couldn’t any longer tell me. I had hardly registered the momentous change, I had let it slide past on the surface of my life as a mere practicality, because my selfish dream of Mac had suffused me from hour to hour. Next it would be Rowan’s turn to go. My eyes filled with stupid tears and I was drenched in regret. (— What are you doing? Rowan protested, shifting aside indignantly from my kisses.) I recognised the whole sequence of my reactions to meeting Mac’s wife as a stock guilt that could have come out of one of my Victorian novels. But what if the novels were right? What if sentimentality was closer to the truth of life and cynicism was the evasion?
That evening I telephoned Mac at home (I looked the number up in the directory), and when Barbara answered I asked to speak to Mr Beresford. She said he was watching the rugby. I heard her rather musical voice, wholly unsuspicious, calling for him through the house I couldn’t see and couldn’t enter. (— Mac! It’s for you!) All I had to go on was the painting with the blue horses. I imagined golden lamplight pooled on the walls, fitted carpets, fat-stuffed comfortable fringed sofas and armchairs, the teenage daughters attending with religious seriousness to their split ends (Mac had never shown me a photograph, but I guessed they both had long hair). Perhaps I could hear a far-off television. Long before Mac picked up the receiver, I seemed to sense his approach through the invisible rooms – a dissenting male shadow cast against their brightness. He barked his name into the phone. I told him I’d seen Barbara at the shops, I said I thought we should stop doing what we were doing, it was too awful. — I’ll have a think about it and talk to you tomorrow, Mac responded, calmly but with suppressed distaste, as if I’d bothered him at home with a query about office paper clips. Of course he had to sound calm, because his wife was listening. (He told her I’d rung because there were some new paintings in the gallery I’d thought they’d like. I couldn’t believe that she’d believed this. — They must be desperate for trade, apparently she’d said.) When he spoke to me from his office the next day, at least I couldn’t hear the distaste.
Those calls didn’t end our affair immediately, but they were the beginning of the end. Mac sent me a letter where he copied out a Yeats poem about love’s impossibility: ‘Until the axle break / That keeps the stars in their round . . . / Your breast will not lie by the breast / Of your beloved in sleep’. He added a PS at the bottom of the page, pointing out that Yeats had had some pretty crazy millenarian ideas and probably believed all this might actually happen in real time, the axle breaking and the girdle of light being unbound and so on. So it wasn’t such a despairing poem as it first seemed.
I was on holiday in Somerset with the boys and Madeleine. We were climbing up a steep incline where there had once been a railway line transporting iron ore eight hundred feet down from the Brendon Hills to the valley bottom below: the weight of the ore going down had hauled up the empty trucks. Luke found a rusted iron bolt but most of the evidence of the railway was long gone, apart from the winding house at the top and the incline itself, descending through thick woods, cut in places into the red sandstone. Rowan had been dragging his feet ever since we left the rented cottage, complaining that he was bored, tired, thirsty; now h
e was revived by the tough scramble and out in front, bare-chested and lithe, pulling himself up by hanging on to the saplings that colonised the stony slope. Luke was climbing more slowly behind him, scanning the ground for trophies.
I was talking to Madeleine intently, whenever I could catch my breath and the boys were out of earshot, about my affair with Mac, which had been over for months. I knew that I sounded fanatical and was boring even Madeleine, who was an absorbent listener, questioning and commenting dutifully. My fixation was unworthy of the fresh summer sky and the tranquil wood, where we hadn’t encountered any other walkers – but I was shut out from loveliness, my grievance twisted and turned in its small space. Madeleine was the only one of my friends apart from Fred who knew about Mac; she’d met him once when I went with her to the theatre in London, on a day I’d arranged to coincide with Mac having dinner there with clients. After his dinner he had come to meet us in a pub near the theatre. (That had been the only other time he and I went to a hotel, and the only time we spent a whole night together.)
Picking over Mac’s character and behaviour, I was full of scorn. I claimed I couldn’t see now why I’d ever succumbed to him. He wasn’t even good-looking, he was middle-aged; for goodness’ sake, he read the Financial Times! He had contracts with the Ministry of Defence! I pretended to analyse dispassionately the flaws in both of us, which had made a fatal combination – had I fallen for a father figure because I’d never had a father of my own? My neediness, I said, was worse because I hadn’t been prepared for it, because I’d thought that as a feminist I’d seen through all that mechanism of power in attraction. There was some truth in all of this. But it was also true that I couldn’t help returning compulsively to talk about Mac, shucking off every other subject with a shudder of impatience or a few perfunctory words. Even my contempt, licking around his edges, connected me to him, gave me the illusion that an electric current went sparking and surging between us. At night in the holiday cottage, in my damp bed with its sagging middle, I wrote him passionate letters on a pad of lined file paper which by the end of the week was also damp – indicting him or imploring him, it didn’t matter which, page after page. I tore the letters up in the morning.
— But I liked him, Madeleine said. — He was nice.
We had paused to rest halfway up the slope, while the boys forged ahead. Tendrils of Madeleine’s wiry yellow hair, darkened with sweat, were stuck to her forehead. We were both in cut-off jeans and sleeveless vests; she was rounded everywhere I was angular.
— Nice, really? I doubted.
She shrugged. — He seemed nice to me. There was something about him . . . She searched for the word, uneasy under my scrutiny but determined. — When he came into the pub that time, I thought he was – nice. Because I wasn’t expecting him to be, from your description; even though you liked him then. I was thinking I’d better hurry off as soon as he arrived, and leave you two alone together, but – do you remember? He persuaded me to sit down again and bought me a glass of wine. He made them open a new bottle, of something better. I mean, when he might have had (she put on a mocking voice here, fooling in her embarrassment) ‘eyes only for you’.
— I don’t remember.
— I got the impression he was kind. I could imagine you two together.
I lay back, thinking of the old railway with its inferno of noise and dirt, trucks wheezing up and clanking down, miners suffering underground, the earth ripped open, effort and ingenuity on a scale that seemed so disproportionate to its ends – the iron ore? the money? Now the tree trunks rose in peace, like pillars, into their leafy tops blotched against a sky mildly blue. There was shrill birdsong: goldcrest, Madeleine surprisingly knew. She told me they liked the tops of the Douglas firs in mixed woodland. I floated above my loss of Mac for the first time, as if it was poignantly sad but it was finished, as if there were other possibilities. A spring burbled and trickled among ferns nearby, into a pool lined with pebbles the clear colours of humbugs, bedded in red silt. Fred said that people threw coins into water for luck because in primitive religions water sources were believed to be openings between the upper and lower worlds. I had no money on me, so I threw a satisfactory small stone – black, shaped like a fat nub of charcoal. When the pool dimpled glassily and swallowed it, I made a wish: the choice presented itself as if it had been lying in wait all along. Men, or books?
With relief, I chose books.
I let something go and I felt very empty without it, and very clear.
I enrolled in evening classes in September and did my A levels (English Literature, History, French) in a year. I got As in all of them and also grade ones at S level, which was a supplementary exam in the same subjects, for good candidates. With these good grades I applied to the university, and although this was in the days before the big rush of mature students, I got in to study English Literature. I was thirty at the beginning of my first year, the oldest in my cohort. This age difference didn’t matter, in fact it was a kind of convenience, because it set me apart from the other students’ chaos of self-discovery, their hungry interest in one another. Compared to them, I felt my motivations purely: for all the three years of my degree, I seemed to see myself clearly as if from a distance, through a thick lens. It was such a relief to be clever at last. For years I had had to keep my cleverness cramped and concealed – not because it was dangerous or forbidden, but because it had no useful function in my daily life. In the wrong contexts, cleverness is just an inhibiting clumsiness.
At first I didn’t try to make friends with the other students. I was shy as well as aloof. I took against the girls and boys with glossy hair and loudly assured voices who’d been to private school; I despised their pretence of slumming it for the three years of their degree. I sat pointedly alone in the high-ceilinged, white-painted classrooms; the faculty was housed in spacious red-brick Victorian houses along a tree-lined street. My hair was dyed orange or rusty black and screwed up in a studiedly careless knot, my eyes were thickly painted with black kohl; I retreated behind the mask of my difference. I didn’t have the money some of those girls spent on their clothes, but I didn’t want their kind of clothes anyway; I wore tight jeans and men’s shirts and suit waistcoats bought from the junk stalls in St Nicholas Market. When they found out that I was a mother too, that made a gulf between us; they didn’t know how to talk to me about the children so they didn’t talk to me at all. Meanwhile I was scathing, at least inwardly, when they didn’t bother to read the books in preparation for classes – what else did they have to do with their long hours of leisure? I had plenty to do (apart from home and the children, I was still working three mornings a week in the gallery, for the extra cash), but I was zealous – my ignorance ached in me and spurred me on, I made the time somehow to read everything.
All this was at first. As time passed I relaxed, and they got used to me; I made some friends among them. But I wasn’t there for the other students. I was there to find my way into another, higher order of meaning, behind the obvious one that lay around me every day. I worshipped my lecturers because they seemed to move at ease in this other world of light – when one of the younger ones made a pass at me in my second year I was startled and disappointed; I only wanted him to see my disembodied intelligence. I spent every hour I could, when the boys were at school, in the university library with its ordered monkish hush. The long desks were sectioned off into individual cells, each with its own light and leather inlay; arranging my books, I felt myself chosen, dedicated. If the weather outside the high windows was grey and indistinct, so much the better for my rich inward journey. Sometimes when I was looking into a page of text it seemed transparent, all its meaning and ironies and metaphorical thickness and musical arrangement showing themselves to me easily. What I wrote about the texts in my essays seemed almost obvious, it was just there – except that not everyone saw it. Excitedly, and with a new competitive zest, I took in that some of the critics who’d published books didn’t see it as clearly as I did. Nor
did some of my lecturers.
When I lifted my head from my absorption – roused to a pitch of excitement, breathless and dizzy, because I’d been reading Oedipus the King or Adonais or Donne’s Holy Sonnets – I couldn’t believe that everything was going on unchanged around me in that quiet library, so muted and still that I could hear the pages turning and biros scribbling. In winter the daylight would even have drained away behind the windows without my noticing, and then I felt a niggling unease as if I’d missed something – although all I could have missed was my ordinary life with its prosaic clock-time, trundling from hour to hour.
There was upheaval during my second year because we had to move out of Fred’s flat. He and his wife Lizzie were trying to make a go of it again: he was moving back into the family home.
— Of course there won’t be any sex, Lizzie said to me. — But I mean, who cares? Who still wants boring old sex after they’ve been married to the same person for twenty years? I’d rather read a book in bed any day. Or just fall asleep, even better. (Fred had a French name for their arrangement, a mariage blanc, making it sound sophisticated.)
Lizzie was one of those miniature women who go on looking like a child well into middle age: pretty, with brown eyes and russet colouring and an injured expression. She and I hadn’t always got on well, there had been some awful scenes in the past. The first time I moved in with Fred she thought I was his mistress and brought her disgruntled children round once in the middle of the night in their pyjamas, flaunting them to me like a tableau of wronged virtue. And later, when I moved back into the flat after Nicky died – even though she’d got the hang of Fred’s sexuality by that time, she was convinced I was after Fred’s money or his property. She insisted he make a will listing all the antiques he’d inherited from his mother, and she couldn’t bear it that I didn’t pay him rent. If the children were allowed to visit Fred they came with supplies of her home-made wholemeal bread because she believed shop bread was poison, along with crisps and sweets. She didn’t want their minds contaminated by watching television or reading comics. When I talked about them to my friends, I called them the Holy Family. She nagged in her regretful sing-song voice, explaining how much better it was for the children to be outdoors, learning the names of plants and birds. Piers and Frances exchanged looks; they seemed to communicate in coded ironies. They were sullen and secretive even when they were small, ungainly beside their tiny mother; they looked more like Fred, with big, pale, definite faces.
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