The Only Story(15)

If I was uneasy with girls generally, I was the more so with ones who were a bit older than me, let alone ones whose mother I was in love with. This awkwardness of mine seemed to emphasize the insouciance with which they moved about their own house, appeared, disappeared, spoke or failed to speak. My reaction to this was possibly a bit crude, but I decided to be no more interested in them than they were in me. This seemed to amount to less than a passing five per cent. Which was fine by me, because more than ninety-five per cent of my interest was in Susan.

Since Martha disapproved of me the more, it was to her, in a spirit of either challenge or perversity, that I said:

‘I think I should explain. Susan’s a kind of mother-substitute for me.’

No, it wasn’t very good, in any way. It probably sounded false, a slimy attempt at ingratiation. Martha took her time about replying, and her tone was acerbic.

‘I don’t need one, I’ve already got a mother.’

Did I mean any part of my lie? I can’t believe that I did. Strange as it may seem, I never reflected on our age difference. Age felt as irrelevant as money. Susan never seemed a member of my parents’ generation – ‘played-out’ or not. She never pulled any sort of rank on me, never said, ‘Ah, when you’re a bit older, you’ll understand’ and stuff like that. It was only my parents who harped on about my immaturity.

Aha, you might say, but surely the fact that you told her own daughter that for you she was a mother-substitute is a complete giveaway? You may claim it was insincere, but don’t we all make jokes to allay our inner fears? She was almost exactly the same age as your mother, and you went to bed with her. So?

So. I see where you’re going – bus number 27 to a crossroads near Delphi. Look, I did not want, at any point, on any level, to kill my own father and sleep with my own mother. It’s true that I wanted to sleep with Susan – and did so many times – and for a number of years thought of killing Gordon Macleod, but that is another part of the story. Not to put too fine a point on it, I think the Oedipus myth is precisely what it started off as: melodrama rather than psychology. In all my years of life I’ve never met anyone to whom it might apply.

You think I’m being naive? You wish to point out that human motivation is deviously buried, and hides its mysterious workings from those who blindly submit to it? Perhaps so. But even – especially – Oedipus didn’t want to kill his father and sleep with his mother, did he? Oh yes he did! Oh no he didn’t! Yes, let’s just leave it as a pantomime exchange.

Not that pre-history doesn’t matter. Indeed, I think pre-history is central to all relationships.

But I’d much rather tell you about her ears. I missed my first sight of them at the tennis club, when she had her hair pulled back by that green ribbon which matched the piping and buttons of her dress. And normally, she wore her hair down, curling over her ears and descending to mid-neck. So it wasn’t until we were in bed and I was rummaging and rootling around her body, into every nook and cranny, every over-examined and under-examined part of her, that, crouched above, I swept back her hair and discovered her ears.

I’d never thought much about ears before, except as comic excrescences. Good ears were ears you didn’t notice; bad ears stuck out like batwings, or were cauliflowered from a boxer’s punch, or – like those of that furious driver at the zebra crossing – were coarse and red and hairy. But her ears, ah, her ears … from the discreet, almost absent lobe they set off northwards at a gentle angle, but then at the mid-point turned back at the same angle to return to her skull. It was as if they had been designed according to aesthetic principle rather than the rules of auditory practicality.

When I point this out to her, she says, ‘It’s probably so all that rubbish scoots past them and doesn’t go inside.’

But there was more. As I explored them with the tips of my fingers, I discovered the delicacy of their outer rim: thin, warm, gentle, almost translucent. Do you know the word for that outermost whorl of the ear? It’s called the helix. Plural: helices. Her ears were part of her absolute distinctiveness, expressions of her DNA. The double helix of her double helices.

Later, turning my mind to what she might have meant by the ‘rubbish’ that scooted past her astonishing ears, I thought: well, being accused of frigidity, that’s a major piece of rubbish. Except that this word had gone straight into her ears and thence her brain and was lodged there, permanently.

As I said, money had no more relevance to our relationship than age. So it didn’t matter that she paid for things. I had none of that foolish masculine pride in such circumstances. Perhaps I even felt my lack of money made my love for Susan the more virtuous.

After a few months – maybe longer – she announces that I need a running-away fund.

‘What for?’

‘For running away. Everyone should have a running-away fund.’ Just as every young man should have a reputation. Where had this latest idea come from? A Nancy Mitford novel?

‘But I don’t want to run away. Who from? My parents? I’ve more or less left them anyway. Mentally. You? Why should I want to run away from you? I want you to be in my life for ever.’

‘That’s very sweet of you, Paul. But it’s not a specific fund, you see. It’s a sort of general fund. Because at some point everyone wants to run away from their life. It’s about the only thing human beings have in common.’