The Only Story(23)

Oh, and another thing. The way, doubtless through some atavistic terror of admitting to real feelings, they ironised the emotional life, turning the relationship between the sexes into a silly running joke. The way men implied that women ran everything really; the way women implied that men didn’t really understand what was going on. The way men pretended they were the strong, and women had to be petted and indulged and taken care of; the way women pretended that, regardless of the accumulated sexual folklore, they were the ones who had the common sense and practicality. The way each sex blubbingly admitted that, for all the other’s faults, they still needed one another. Can’t live with ’em, can’t live without ’em. And they lived with ’em in marriage, which, as one wit put it, was an institution in the sense of mental institution. Who first said that, a man or a woman?

Unsurprisingly, I looked forward to none of this. Or rather, hoped it would never apply to me; indeed, believed I could make it not apply to me.

So, actually, when I said, ‘I’m nineteen!’ and my parents triumphantly replied, ‘Yes, you’re only nineteen!’ the triumph was also mine. Thank God I’m ‘only’ nineteen, I thought.

First love fixes a life for ever: this much I have discovered over the years. It may not outrank subsequent loves, but they will always be affected by its existence. It may serve as model, or as counterexample. It may overshadow subsequent loves; on the other hand, it can make them easier, better. Though sometimes, first love cauterizes the heart, and all any searcher will find thereafter is scar tissue.

‘We were chosen by lot.’ I don’t believe in destiny, as I may have said. But I do believe now that when two lovers meet, there is already so much pre-history that only certain outcomes are possible. Whereas the lovers themselves imagine that the world is being reset, and that the possibilities are both new and infinite.

And first love always happens in the overwhelming first person. How can it not? Also, in the overwhelming present tense. It takes us time to realize that there are other persons, and other tenses.

So (and this would have happened earlier, but I am only remembering it now): I am visiting her one afternoon. I know that at three o’clock, by which time her thieving daily will have left and there will be three-and-a-half hours before Mr E.P. returns, she will be waiting in bed for me. I drive to the Village, park, and set off along Duckers Lane. I am not in the least self-conscious. The more disapproval, real or imagined, from ‘the neighbours’, the better. I do not approach the Macleod house via the back gate and the garden. I turn down their driveway, walking openly and crunching the gravel, rather than discreetly, adulterously, on the grass edge alongside. The house is red-brick, symmetrical, with a central porch, above which is Susan’s narrow little bedroom. On each side of the porch, as a decorative feature, every fourth course of brick has been laid to jut out half a brick’s width. A couple of tempting inches, I now see, of handhold and foothold.

The lover as cat-burglar? Why not? The back door has been left open for me. But as I walk towards the porch, a lover’s confidence infuses me, and I decide that if I go at it with enough initial speed, I might be able to scoot up the ten feet or so of wall, which will get me to the flat, leaded roof on top of the porch. I take a run at it, filled with bravado, ardour and decent hand-eye coordination. Easy-peasy – and here I am, suddenly crouched on the leading. I have made enough noise to bring Susan to the window, first in alarm, then in surprised glee. Someone else would have rebuked me for my folly, told me I might have broken my skull, expressed all their fear and protectiveness: in short, made me feel a foolish and guilty boy. All Susan does is yank up the window and pull me in.

‘I could always get out the same way if Trouble Comes,’ I say pantingly.

‘That would be a lark.’

‘I’ll just go down and lock the back door.’

‘Ever the thoughtful one,’ says Susan, getting back into her single bed.

And that’s true, too. I am the thoughtful one. That’s part of my pre-history, I suppose. But it’s also about what I could have said to Joan: that I am prepared to be grown-up if it will help Susan.

I am a boy; she is a married woman of middle years. I have the cynicism, and the purported understanding of life; though I am the idealist as well as the cynic, convinced that I have both the will and the power to mend things.

And she? She is neither cynical nor idealistic; she lives without the mental clutter of theorising, and takes each circumstance and situation as it comes. She laughs at things, and sometimes that laughter is a way of not thinking, of avoiding obvious, painful truths. But at the same time I feel that she is closer to life than I am.

We don’t talk about our love; we merely know that it is there, unarguably; that it is what it is, and that everything will flow, inevitably and justly, from this fact. Do we constantly repeat ‘I love you’ in confirmation? At this distance, I can’t be sure. Though I do remember that when, after locking the back door, I climb into bed with her, she whispers,

‘Never forget, the most vulnerable spot is down the middle.’

Then there’s that word Joan dropped into our conversation like a concrete fence-post into a fishpool: practicality. Over my life I’ve seen friends fail to leave their marriages, fail to continue affairs, fail even to start them sometimes, all for the same expressed reason. ‘It just isn’t practical,’ they say wearily. The distances are too great, the train schedules unfavourable, the work hours mismatched; then there’s the mortgage, and the children, and the dog; also, the joint ownership of things. ‘I just couldn’t face sorting out the record collection,’ a non-leaving wife once told me. In the first thrill of love, the couple had amalgamated their records, throwing away duplicates. How was it feasible to unpick all that? And so she stayed; and after a while the temptation to leave passed, and the record collection breathed a sigh of relief.