The Only Story(19)

‘Things aren’t what they look like, Paul. That’s about the only lesson I can teach you.’

I wonder if she is talking about the sham of respectability, the sham of marriage, the sham of suburbia, or … but she carries on.

‘Winston Churchill, did I tell you about seeing him?’

‘You mean, you went to Number Ten?’

‘Silly, no. I saw him in a back street in Aylesbury. What was I doing there? Not that it matters. He was sitting in the rear seat of an open-topped car. And his face was all covered in make-up. Red lips, bright pink face. He looked bizarre.’

‘You’re sure it was Churchill? I didn’t realize he was …’

‘… one of them? No, it’s nothing like that, Paul, You see, they were waiting to drive him through the city centre – it was after we won the war, or maybe it was the General Election, and he was made up for the cameras. Pathé News and all that.’

‘How weird.’

‘It was. So quite a few people saw this strange painted mannequin in the flesh, but far more saw him on the newsreels, when he looked like they expected him to.’

I think about this for a while. It strikes me as a comic incident, rather than a general principle of life. Anyway, my interests are elsewhere.

‘But you’re what you look like, aren’t you? You’re exactly what you look like?’

She kisses me. ‘I hope so, my fine and feathered friend. I hope so for both our sakes.’

I used to prowl the Macleod house, part anthropologist, part sociologist, wholly lover. At first I naturally compared it to my parents’ house, which I therefore found wanting. Here there was style, and ease, and none of that absurd house-pride. My parents had better, more up-to-date kitchen equipment, but I gave them no credit for this; nor for the fact that their car was cleaner, their gutters recently sluiced, their soffits regularly painted, their bathroom taps buffed to a shine, their lavatory seats hygienically plastic rather than warmingly wooden. In our house, the television was taken seriously, and stood centrally; at the Macleods’, they called it the goggle-box and hid it behind a firescreen. They owned no such thing as a fitted carpet or a fitted kitchen, let alone a three-piece suite or a bathroom set in matching colours. Their garage was so full of tools, discarded sports equipment, gardening implements, old motor mowers (one working) and unwanted furniture that there was no room in it for the Austin. At first all this seemed stylish and idiosyncratic. I was initially seduced, then slowly disenchanted. My soul no more belonged in a place like this than in my parents’ house.

And, more importantly, I believed that Susan didn’t belong here either. It was something I felt instinctively, and only understood much later, over time. Nowadays, when more than half the country’s children are born out of wedlock (wedlock: I’ve never noticed the two parts of that term before), it’s not so much marriage that ties couples together as the shared occupation of property. A house or a flat can be as beguiling a trap as a wedding certificate; sometimes more so. Property announces a way of life, with a subtle insistence on that way of life continuing. Property also demands constant attention and maintenance: it’s like a physical manifestation of the marriage that exists within it.

But I could see, all too well, that Susan had not been the recipient of constant attention and maintenance. And I’m not talking about sex. Or not just.

Here’s something I need to explain. In all the time Susan and I were lovers, I never thought that we were ‘deceiving’ Gordon Macleod, Mr E.P. I never thought of him as being represented by that peculiar old word ‘cuckold’. Obviously, I didn’t want him to know. But I thought that what took place between Susan and me had nothing to do with him; he was irrelevant to it all. Nor did I have any contempt for him, any young-buck superiority because I was sexually active with his wife and he wasn’t. You may think this is just a normal lover’s normal self-delusion; but I don’t agree. Even when things … changed, and I felt differently about him, this aspect didn’t change. He had nothing to do with us, do you see?

Susan, perhaps thinking that I was undervaluing her friend Joan, had told me, in a gently admonitory tone, that everyone had their own love story. I was happy to accept this, happy for everyone else to be or have been blessed, even if confident that they couldn’t possibly be as blessed as I was. But at the same time, I didn’t want Susan to tell me whether she had had her love story with Gerald, or with Gordon, or was having it with me. Whether there were one, two or three stories to her life.

I am round at the Macleods’ one evening. It is getting late. Macleod has already gone to bed, and is snoring away his flagons and his gallons. She and I are on the sofa; we have been listening to some music we recently heard at the Festival Hall. I look at her in a way which makes my attentions and desires plain.

‘No, Casey. Kiss me hardly.’

So I kiss her hardly, just a brush on the lips, nothing to raise her colour. We hold hands instead.

‘I wish I didn’t have to go home,’ I say self-pityingly. ‘I hate home.’

‘Then why do you call it home?’

I haven’t thought of this.

‘Anyway, I wish I could stay here.’

‘You could always pitch a tent in the garden. I’m sure there’s some spare tarpaulin in the garage.’

‘You know what I mean.’