by Maeve Binchy
“Did they tell you he hasn’t slept with her for years, but he can’t leave her because of the children or her health?” I asked sourly. I was feeling very annoyed with this childishness, and hated being part of it. I also wondered whether Clive was worried about me. Maybe I should have rung him.
The small blonde came back, shrugging her shoulders at her friends. “Nobody there apparently,” she said. “The phone was dead.”
“It is her,” said Frankie in amazement.
“Now, Frankie,” I begged. “Don’t go up to that woman and start one of your explanations, you know how people misunderstand your way of talking. It’s always happening if you think about it. Why do you have to do it today? Let it go for a day or two. Please, Frankie?”
It was, of course, useless. I hadn’t even finished speaking when Frankie had bounded over to the blonde’s side.
I was too embarrassed to do anything except stare into my drink, and wish I were a million miles away, or about three miles away, at home with Clive, the row over, forgiven, forgotten, the two of us sitting there listening to records, laughing over it all, and making great plans about how we would see the world eventually. It all seemed so safe, and so much what I wanted compared to standing in this awful place with terrible things going on a few feet away.
I hardly dared look over for fear of what was happening. The small blond woman was hauntingly familiar. Was she on a telly programme? Was she a film star? How did I know her face so well? Frankie had said something about her being a producer, you don’t see producers’ faces.
I knew it, I knew it, I was summoned over and introduced. Everyone seemed to be quite happy and relaxed, they always do with Frankie…initially.
“Is it your first day in the BBC too?” asked the blonde kindly.
“No, I’m not here, I mean I’m only here because Frankie asked me to have a drink with her after work. I’m just going off to my Italian lesson,” I said, wondering why did I always sound like someone who had never learned English but was trying to pick it up as I went along.
“I’m a teacher actually, in a dreary old school, nothing bright and glittery like this,” I said, wondering why I said it. I preferred the school a million times with its familiarity and chalk and noise to this strange place where you might be standing next to a newsreader and anything could happen.
The blonde seemed nice. Frankie had obviously told her some cock-and-bull story about being lonely and nervous in her job and wanting to get to know colleagues in the corporation. This had endeared her to all of them. They said that it was only too rare that people admitted to knowing nobody, most people went around and knew nobody for ages because of this English trait of reticence.
One of the men bought us a drink, we were part of a group.
Frankie was making a great effort to convince the blonde that she was a serious, steady person interested only in her job.
“I’m not at all like my teacher friend, always flitting around,” she said. I didn’t think anyone could have believed her. There was I in a jumper and skirt, while Frankie looked as if she was about to do a gypsy dance, and strip in the middle of it. They couldn’t have believed her, could they? But it was important for Frankie’s purpose that they did, so I went along with it.
“Yes, Frankie is always trying to get me to settle down. I couldn’t give two pins for my work, just the holidays and the hours are all I could care about. Frankie likes to live and breathe her job, she puts in endless hours of overtime, silly I call it.”
Frankie smiled, the blonde frowned at me.
“You shouldn’t stay in teaching, if you don’t like it, it’s bad for you and the children. I really do think it’s a vocation, half my family are teachers, and the other half used to be. Those of us that didn’t do it well got out,” she said.
Inside I agreed with her, but I had to go on, no use in being converted too easily. I’d never see this woman again, and she wouldn’t judge Frankie by her hopeless, feckless friend, surely. I’d better make myself a really bad case, whom Frankie was trying to reform.
“Oh I don’t know, it’s a job the same as any other. Worse paid than a lot, but then you can always read the paper when the kids are doing a test, and our Head is a bit soft about things like doctors’ certs. If I want to earn a few quid, real money I mean, in some other job, I just don’t turn up for a few days. I get paid just the same.”
Never in my life had I done anything of the sort. One teacher had once, and we were all appalled and shocked. The principal was a kind man who thought I was a bit flighty sometimes, but only because I did play with the children so much, even after school. His only real grievance was that my classes were too exuberant.
“I’m always trying to make her grow up, to tell her the joys of living and breathing her work,” said Frankie in a goody-goody voice.
“Is it seven?” said the blonde. “Damn it, I was having a lot of fun. Martin will be around in front of the building in his car, I must run.” She gave Frankie a warm good-bye, and wished her well, hoped to see her again. Barely glancing at me, she said she hoped I’d find a happier job soon.
“I’m really sorry to run,” she said to the others. “It’s just that we have to be home to change, we’re going out tonight. My brother’s having a little dinner.”
It was only as I saw her side-face on that I realized why she was so familiar. She was like a twin of my principal. My nice kind idealistic headmaster, who had, now that I remembered it, a sister who used to be a teacher but who was now a senior producer in the BBC.
Tottenham Court Road
* * *
A lot of the books seemed to be about lesbians, which wasn’t what she wanted, however uninhibited and daring they might be according to the jacket descriptions, and then there were a sizeable number for gay men, with pictures of very beautiful muscled men on the covers, but this again wouldn’t be any help. In horrified fascination she saw the section where Alsatian dogs and horses seemed to be people’s partners, and about five shelves where people weren’t naked at all but clad from head to toe in black leather and brandishing whips.
What she wanted and couldn’t find was a book that would tell her how to be an enormous success as a woman in bed with a man. They didn’t have any books for twenty-nine-year-old virgins. Such things weren’t meant to exist…they were an embarrassment to society.
Oh the world was full of books telling twelve-year-olds not to be afraid of menstruation, and telling eight-year-olds about little eggs growing inside mummy’s tummy, and assuring seventeen-year-olds that they would go neither blind nor mad from masturbation but that it wasn’t as good as a healthy, meaningful, one-to-one sexual relationship. Julia was worn out reading helpful letters to people who complained of being frigid, advising them to relax and to be loving and to specify what they wanted. Who would tell her what she should want, and how to do it at her age without making an utter fool of herself? Twelve, even ten, years ago, she could have put herself at the mercy of her seducer, virginity would have been an honor then, something to be treated with respect and awe and tenderness. Nowadays she couldn’t possibly tell any would-be seducer that this had never happened before. If it weren’t so sad, it would be laughable.
There were no men in raincoats in the shop, no sinister figures with moustaches and sunglasses salivating over pictures in filthy books. In fact Julia found it very hard to find a book to salivate over herself. They all seemed to be wrapped in cellophane. She wondered how you knew what to buy. There was no way she was going to ask for assistance either from that man who looked as if he should have been a head gardener in a stately home or from the tired, aging woman at the cash desk. She would have to hope that the blurbs, and the overwritten sentences about the material being uncensored, and straight from Scandinavia, would put her on the right trail.
The worst bit was over really, the walking into the shop and settling down with the browsers. She wore a head scarf, which she normally didn’t do, in some mad wish to look diffe
rent, to put on a different personality for this reckless, sinful venture. She had given herself two hours to look for the right book, or maybe books. She had five pounds in her handbag. If it worked it would be an investment well made, and perhaps there was an additional gain, in courage. She would never have believed herself capable of setting off deliberately and examining the outside of pornographic bookshops. She had finally settled on the one which looked as if it had the biggest selection. Really, you could get used to anything, Julia decided. She had now stopped worrying about what the other people in the shop thought about her, and was no longer afraid that they were all going to jump on her and rape her because she had shown herself mad for it by going into a sex shop anyway.
She moved unhappily from the Oral Love section to a small specialist area called Domination. Mainly women in thigh-high boots with evil smiles, and men cowering behind sofas. Disconsolately she leafed through one of the magazines which was open—they had to leave something for you to browse through in that kind of shops—and saw sadly that it was Party Games, and that you would need colouring pencils to work out whose limb belonged to whom.
It was very depressing not to be able to find what she wanted when she had got herself as far as this. Julia had thought that the hard part would be making the decision to find the shop, and going in, and perhaps even understanding the terminology of the book without anyone to practise with, like you could with yoga or wrestling. She didn’t know that her specific requirement would be uncatered for. And it wasn’t as if it was easy to know where to go either. She had thought that Soho was the right area to hunt, but fortunately she had been able to ask people at work in a jokey way where they bought sexy magazines, and a knowing guy had said anywhere on Charing Cross Road, in the small places. Much better than Soho, because not priced for tourists. “Get out at Tottenham Court Road tube station, and you’ll be fine then, Julia,” he had said, and the others in the travel agency had laughed. Because you just didn’t associate Julia with poking around in a porn shop. She looked too clean and wholesome and well brought up.
But they probably assumed that she had at least some kind of sex life, Julia thought in a troubled way. She didn’t talk about having one, true, but then neither did anyone else. They were fairly sophisticated there, or even distant about things like that. Katy was married, and Daphne was divorced, and Lorna wasn’t married but seemed to have a regular chap called Clive who was mentioned casually in dispatches. They probably thought that Julia met people at weekends, and maybe went to bed with them. If they knew she didn’t, and hadn’t, they would have been mildly embarrassed and sorry for her rather than shocked. It was that kind of office.
But her two friends Milly and Paula would have been shocked, and horrified. They were heavily into going to bed with people. Milly regularly with the same, very unavailable man, whom she said she didn’t love, but was irresistibly drawn to, and Paula with somebody new and hopeful-sounding every couple of weeks. Julia invented the odd holiday sexual happening, and would feel very trapped when Paula would ask, “But was he good? I mean, you know, did he satisfy you?” Julia would say that some had and some hadn’t and this kept Paula happy, and reflective about the differing abilities of men in this field.
Everyone plays games, even with friends, and Julia felt that she would have been breaking all the rules of the game if she had suddenly confessed that she had not known the experience and would they please tell her what it was like from start to finish. Paula and Milly would assume that she was having an early menopause, an unexpected nervous break-down, or had developed unhealthy voyeuristic tendencies that she wanted to indulge. They would never actually believe that such a thing could be true.
And really it was only too easy. Julia had been adamant about not going to bed with Joe, her first and long-lasting boyfriend. She was full of the kind of thought that said in letters of fire that you lost them if you gave in to them. She had this firm belief that if she and Joe made love outside marriage he would never trust her again, and that he would assume she would be lifting her skirts for all and sundry. She didn’t know from where she got this expression “lifting her skirts,” it was coarse and unlikely and had nothing to do with love. She must have heard her aunt use it about some serving girl. Her aunt was like that.
Joe had gone to university and found a nice girl there. When he told Julia that their unofficial engagement had now better be forgotten, Julia had asked in a pained way, “Does she…er…sleep with you?” and Joe had laughed lightly and said that there wasn’t much chance of actually sleeping with someone at university but they did make love of course.
So Julia, who was now twenty, decided that there must be other standards than her own, but for the next five years the only people who offered her the initiation rights were drunken people, or people who had been stood up or let down by some other girl, and who were using her as a substitute. And suddenly the years were passing, and she never knew what it was like to have the earth move, or to hear wild cries of ecstasy mingling with her own, and she felt frowningly that this was bad news…. Still, there had been so much else to think about, borrowing the money, setting up a different kind of travel agency to anyone else’s in a different kind of partnership, going abroad three times a year to investigate things like they all did, and there was getting a flat and doing it up, and keeping her aunt and her father happy by visiting them regularly with lots of cheery stories and bright dismissals of all their ills and complaints. And there was going to the theatre, and meeting Paula and Milly in each other’s flats for great meals with lots of wine, and really it was hard to know how the years went by without going to bed with people.
But now it was important. Julia had met a very nice man indeed. He was in publishing and she had met him one evening last year when she was touring the nightclubs of a foreign resort with a notebook, writing down details of atmosphere for next season’s brochure. Michael had been sitting in one of the clubs and had seen what she was doing. He offered her a bit of advice about excluding it, because the drinks were too dear and the floor show was too touristy. Together they roamed several other clubs and at the end of along night he suggested she come back to his room for a drink. Julia was about to agree when she suddenly realized with a horrible shock that she literally didn’t know how to do it. There she was, twenty-eight years old, and she didn’t know whether she was meant to lie down on the bed naked and wait for him to do everything, or if she should undress him, or if she should move up and down when it was happening or round and round, and it was all very well to say that she’d learn in time, but who could learn in two minutes what they should have been learning over the last ten years?
Lightly she said no, and refused for the rest of the week also, on the grounds that she didn’t go in for holiday things. This sounded, she hoped, as if she went in for real-life things very seriously, and Michael seemed to think that this was reasonable enough. He didn’t live in London, but he came to see her for half a dozen weekends, and for three of those she pretended she had someone staying in the flat and couldn’t ask him to stay. Then twice she said she had too much work to do, and didn’t want to ask him back. Finally, the last time, she had asked him to the flat for a meal, and when she was getting the usual excuses ready he had held her hand very gently.
“We get on well together,” he had said.
“Sure, very well,” she admitted, almost grudgingly.
“Then why do you close me out?” he asked. He had been so gentle and understanding that if she had said at that very moment what was worrying her she knew it would have been all right. Why couldn’t she? Because she felt foolish. She felt that she was grown-up and intelligent in every way except this. She couldn’t bear the vulnerability, it would show. She was even afraid that the whole thing might be messy and might hurt her. Because she was such an ancient virgin, it might be impossible to pierce her virginity. Think how appalling that would be.
She had bought time.
“The next time you come t
o London you can stay here for the whole week-end,” she said. “I’d like that. It’s just that, well, I’m not ready for it now, and I don’t think people who are grown-up and equal should have to make excuses to each other, do you?”
He had agreed, and they had talked of other things, and he had his hand on her neck as they talked, and occasionally he kissed her and told her she was very dear to him. And deep down she thought that it would be possible to lose her virginity before he came back in a few weeks, and it would all be fine from then on.
It’s harder than you think to find somebody to sleep with you, in a limited time, and for a limited time and with no strings, and with no buildup. Julia went to a party and behaved outrageously with a businessman who was in London for a few days, having what he said was a whale of a time. She even managed to get him home to her flat. Staring at herself in the bathroom mirror, she wondered whether it could ever have been so terrible for anyone as it was going to be for her. He was very silly and he kept laughing at his own jokes, and he was rather drunk. His idea of romance was to plunge his hand unexpectedly and painfully down the front of her dress. But Julia thought, brushing her gritted teeth in order to be nice and inoffensive for the beautiful act, it was better to learn on someone awful.
When she went back to the sitting room he was asleep on the sofa, and no amount of cooing or even shouting could revive him. Eventually she took off his shoes, threw a rug over him, and went to bed in a rage. Next morning she had to make him breakfast, assure him that his wife wouldn’t be hurt in any way, and kind of hint that it had all been rather wonderful. She went to the office in a rage also.
In the next ten days she got two more men back to her flat. One was a friend of Lorna’s and Clive’s who told her eighteen times about his wife having upped and left with a teenager. She promised him consolation and a shoulder, even a whole body, to cry on. First though, there was the story of the wife, over and over, what he had done wrong, what he hadn’t done wrong, how he couldn’t blame her, how he’d like to throttle her, how he hoped she’d be happy, how he hoped she’d rot in hell. When it was bedtime and Julia got herself into and out of the state of self-pity and self-disgust about making love to such an unlovable man, he said that he would like to lie beside her all night, but that they couldn’t make love as he hadn’t been able to do that for a long time now. It was quite normal. Apparently the doctor had told him that thousands of men had the same problem.