The Only Story(16)

This is all way above my head. The only running away I might contemplate is running away with her rather than from her.

A few days later, she gives me a cheque for ￡500. My car had cost me ￡25; I lived for a term at university on under ￡100. The sum seemed both very large and also meaningless. I didn’t even think it ‘generous’. I had no principles about money, either for or against. And it was entirely irrelevant to our relationship – that much I knew. So when I got back to Sussex, I went into town, opened a deposit account at the first bank I came to, handed over the cheque and forgot about it.

There’s something I probably should have clarified earlier. I may be making my relationship with Susan sound like a sweet summer interlude. That’s what the stereotype insists, after all. There is a sexual and emotional initiation, a lush passage of treats and pleasures and spoilings, then the woman, with a pang but also a sense of honour, releases the young man back into the wider world and younger bodies of his own generation. But I’ve already told you that it wasn’t like this.

We were together – and I mean together – for ten or a dozen years, depending on where you start and stop counting. And those years happened to coincide with what the newspapers liked to call the Sexual Revolution: a time of omni-fucking – or so we were led to believe – of instant pleasures, and loose, guilt-free liaisons, when deep lust and emotional lightness became the order of the day. So you could say that my relationship with Susan proved as offensive to the new norms as to the old ones.

I remember her, one afternoon, wearing a print dress with flowers on it, going over to a chintz sofa and plumping herself down on it.

‘Look, Casey Paul! I’m disappearing! I’m doing my disappearing act! There’s nobody here!’

I look. It is half-true. Her stockinged legs show clearly, as do her head and neck, but all the middle parts are suddenly camouflaged.

‘Wouldn’t you like that, Casey Paul? If we could just disappear and nobody could see us?’

I don’t know how serious, or how merely skittish, she is being. So I don’t know how to react. Looking back, I think I was a very literal young man.

I told Eric that I had met this family and fallen in love. I described the Macleods, their house and their way of life, relishing my characterizations. It was the first grown-up thing that had happened to me, I told him.

‘So which of the daughters have you fallen in love with?’ Eric asked.

‘No, not one of the daughters, the mother.’

‘Ah, the mother,’ he said. ‘We like that,’ he added, giving me marks for originality.

One day, I notice a dark bruise on her upper arm, just below where the sleeve of her dress ends. It is the size of a large thumbprint.

‘What’s that?’ I ask.

‘Oh,’ she says carelessly, ‘I must have knocked it against something. I bruise easily.’

Of course she does, I think. Because she’s sensitive, like me. Of course the world can hurt us. That’s why we must look after one another.

‘You don’t bruise when I hold your wrists.’

‘I don’t think the wrists bruise, do they?’

‘Not if I’m holding you.’

The fact that she was ‘old enough to be my mother’ did not go down well with my mother. Nor my father; nor her husband; nor her daughters; nor the Archbishop of Canterbury – not that he was a family friend. I cared no more about approval than I did about money. Though disapproval, whether active or theoretical, ignorant or informed, did nothing but inflame, corroborate and justify my love.

I had no new definition of love. I didn’t really examine what it was, and what it might entail. I merely submitted to first love in all its aspects, from butterfly kisses to absolutism. Nothing else mattered. Of course there was ‘the rest of my life’, both present (my degree course) and future (job, salary, social position, retirement, pension, death). You could say that I put this part of my life on hold. Except that’s not right: she was my life, and the rest wasn’t. Everything else could and must be sacrificed, with or without thought, as and when necessary. Though ‘sacrifice’ implies loss. I never felt a sense of loss. Church and state, they say, church and state. No difficulty there. Church first, church always – though not in a sense the Archbishop of Canterbury would have understood it.

I wasn’t so much constructing my own idea of love as first doing the necessary rubble-clearance. Most of what I’d read, or been taught, about love, didn’t seem to apply, from playground rumour to high-minded literary speculation. ‘Man’s love is of man’s life a thing apart/’Tis woman’s whole existence.’ How wrong – how gender-biased, as we might now say – was that? And then, at the other end of the spectrum, came the earthy sex-wisdom exchanged between profoundly ignorant if yearningly lustful schoolboys. ‘You don’t look at the mantlepiece while poking the fire.’ Where had that come from? Some bestial dystopia full of nocturnal, myopic grunting?

But I wanted her face there all the time: her eyes, her mouth, her precious ears with their elegant helices, her smile, her whispered words. So: I would be flat on my back, she would be lying on top of me, her feet slipped between mine, and she would place the tip of her nose against the tip of mine, and say,

‘Now we see eye to eye.’

Put it another way. I was nineteen, and I knew that love was incorruptible, proof against both time and tarnish.