Perfectly Ordinary People(106)

You mentioned Irene again. Did you stay friends with her?

Ethel did, right up until when Irene died. But she was always more Ethel’s friend than mine. For obvious reasons, I did my best to keep to the shadows.

Because Irene never knew you were a couple?

Oh, I think she probably suspected. But in that kind of way where you know something without really knowing it. I don’t think she would have been surprised, but that doesn’t mean she would have approved. I’m not sure how Quakers were about that sort of thing, back then . . . But you know, in those days, it just wasn’t done to put people in that position. What we were doing was criminalised, and frowned upon, and putting friends in a position where they had to go against society to support you felt bad. That’s just how things were in the forties and fifties. In the sixties, too, really. Everyone was very careful. You had to be.

And Christophe? Did he have a boyfriend? Or boyfriends plural, perhaps?

<Laughs> Christophe had lots of boyfriends. Mostly they were just ten-minute affairs, but occasionally he’d fall in love and it would last longer.

Did you ever meet any of them?

A few, but only ever once or twice before they vanished. There was a Didier with sad eyes – he was French. And Thomas – he was fun. But they never lasted more than a few weeks, I don’t think. Not until much later on.

Is there a reason for that, do you think?

Well, relationships are hard, aren’t they? Even nowadays, even straight relationships, where everyone approves – they’re hard. Which is why so many marriages end in divorce.

But when the very essence of who you loved was illegal . . . when you could be thrown in prison just for loving another man . . . when your families would almost certainly disown you – or in Pierre’s case, already had disowned him – and you’d lose your job and be kicked out of your lodgings if you got caught . . . Well, that’s a hell of a lot of pressure to heap on any relationship. Especially on top of all the normal stuff.

So I think that made it easy – very easy really – to decide that your momentarily annoying boyfriend wasn’t worth it . . . wasn’t worth all that fear, and risk, and rejection and shame . . . Do you see what I’m getting at?

I do.

It’s why Christophe and most of his peers struggled to have proper relationships. That’s my theory, anyway. Plus, he was officially married to me. He lived with me. We shared a bed. We had a child. None of that made things any easier for him.

You still shared a bed?

Well, it was two singles side by side, but yes, we were officially still a married couple.

Can you explain to me how that worked?

Sure. Well, we had two bedrooms. So Christophe and I slept in one, and Guillaume shared the other room with Ethel.

Oh gosh. That must have been frustrating, wasn’t it?

Yes, it was. But when Guillaume was little he used to sleep like a log. So I’d carry him to Christophe’s bed and slip in for a night with Ethel. The problem was that Pierre had terrible nightmares. He still has them these days, though I don’t think they’re quite as frequent. At the beginning, in Le Mas, they used to be every single night. He used to scream and scream in his sleep.

Did he ever tell you what they were about?

He didn’t like to talk about them much, but I gather they were about being tortured by the Germans. And about Johann, too. I think he spent a lot of nights imagining what they’d done to him.

Poor Johann. And poor Pierre! Losing his first love, like that. It’s all so sad.

I know. It’s awful. It never stops being awful, that’s the thing. Anyway, in ’49, when we had enough money coming in, we rented the bedsit upstairs, officially for Ethel. So from that point on, Guillaume had his own bedroom, and I could slip upstairs to join my sleeping beauty.

That sounds really complicated.

I know it sounds it, but other than having to rush back downstairs whenever Pierre had a nightmare, it really wasn’t that bad.

And how long did you live that way?

Oh, for years! Until ’59, when Guillaume got married and moved out.

Gosh, he got married at nineteen, then?

Yes, nineteen. It was just after his birthday. He fell madly in love with Patricia, a lovely Irish girl out in Walthamstow, and her uncle, who was quite well off and in property, rented them a place out there. He gave Guillaume a job, too, redecorating the apartments he rented out. Once Guillaume was gone, we swapped around right away.

How do you mean, swapped around?

Well, Christophe moved upstairs to the bedsit, and Ethel moved in with me.

How did you explain that to Guillaume? Or did you just tell him the truth?

No! No, we never told him the truth.

Would that still not have been socially acceptable?

It was absolutely not acceptable. Lesbianism wasn’t illegal per se, purportedly because Queen Victoria refused to imagine such a thing. Only sex between men was illegal, I think, though any kind of same-sex relationship was certainly frowned upon. But Ethel was my cousin, remember? So we were just two old maids – little old divorced me and my cousin, living together.

How did Guillaume react to all of that? What was his understanding of the situation?

We just told him that we were sick of each other – Christophe and me, that is. But I think he was a bit confused by it all, especially because we visibly remained on such good terms. We still used to take him and his wife out to restaurants as a threesome – stuff like that – and he’d say, ‘I’ll never understand why you divorced,’ and I’d reply with something light-hearted like, ‘Your father snores too much,’ or ‘farts too much’, and make a joke of it.