The Only Story(4)

‘Have you come across the Macleods, Andy?’

‘There’s a Macleod at the golf club,’ he answered. ‘Short, fat guy. Hits the ball as if he hates it.’

‘Maybe we should ask them round for sherry.’

As I winced at the prospect, my father replied, ‘There isn’t enough call for that, is there?’

‘Anyway,’ continued my mother, tenacious of subject, ‘I thought she had a bicycle.’

‘You suddenly seem to know a lot about her,’ I replied.

‘Don’t you start getting pert with me, Paul.’ Her colour was rising.

‘Leave The Lad alone, Bets,’ said my father quietly.

‘It’s not me who should be leaving him alone.’

‘Please may I get down now, Mummy?’ I asked with an eight-year-old’s whine. Well, if they were going to treat me like a child …

‘Maybe we should ask them round for sherry.’ I couldn’t tell if my father was being dense, or whimsically ironic.

‘Don’t you start as well,’ my mother said sharply. ‘He doesn’t get it from me.’

I went to the tennis club the next afternoon, and the next. As I started hacking away with two Carolines and a Hugo I noticed Susan in play on the court beyond. It was fine while I had my back to her game. But when I looked past my opponents and saw her rocking gently sideways on the balls of her feet as she prepared to receive serve, I lost immediate interest in the next point.

Later, I offer her a lift.

‘Only if you’ve got a car.’

I mumble something in reply.

‘Whatski, Mr Casey?’

We are facing one another. I feel at the same time baffled and at ease. She is wearing her usual tennis dress, and I find myself wondering if its green buttons undo, or are merely ornamental. I have never met anyone like her before. Our faces are at exactly the same height, nose to nose, mouth to mouth, ear to ear. She is clearly noticing the same.

‘If I were wearing heels, I could see over the net,’ she says. ‘As it is, we’re seeing eye to eye.’

I can’t work out if she is confident or nervous; if she is always like this, or just with me. Her words look flirty, but didn’t feel so at the time.

I have put the hood of my Morris Minor convertible down. If I am operating a bloody taxi service, then I don’t see why the bloody Village shouldn’t see who the bloody passengers are. Or rather, who the passenger is.

‘By the way,’ I say, as I slow and put the car into second. ‘My parents might be asking you and your husband round for sherry.’

‘Lordy-Lordy,’ she replies, putting her hand in front of her mouth. ‘But I never take Mr Elephant Pants anywhere.’

‘Why do you call him that?’

‘It just came to me one day. I was hanging up his clothes, and he’s got these grey flannel trousers, several pairs of them, with an 84-inch waistline, and I held up one pair and thought to myself, that looks just like the back half of a pantomime elephant.’

‘My dad says he hits a golf ball as if he hates it.’

‘Yes, well. What else do they say?’

‘My mother says you’ll be getting fat, what with all the lifts I’m giving you.’

She doesn’t reply. I stop the car at the end of her driveway and look across. She is anxious, almost solemn.

‘Sometimes I forget about other people. About them existing. People I’ve never met, I mean. I’m sorry, Casey, maybe I should have … I mean, it isn’t as if … oh dear.’

‘Nonsense,’ I say firmly. ‘You said a young man like me should have a reputation. It seems I’ve now got a reputation for operating a taxi service. That’ll do me for the summer.’

She remains downcast. Then says quietly, ‘Oh Casey, don’t give up on me just yet.’

But why would I, when I was falling smack into love?

So what words might you reach for, nowadays, to describe a relationship between a nineteen-year-old boy, or nearly-man, and a forty-eight-year-old woman? Perhaps those tabloid terms ‘cougar’ and ‘toy boy’? But such words weren’t around then, even if people behaved like that in advance of their naming. Or you might think: French novels, older woman teaching ‘the arts of love’ to younger man, ooh la la. But there was nothing French about our relationship, or about us. We were English, and so had only those morally laden English words to deal with: words like scarlet woman, and adulteress. But there was never anyone less scarlet than Susan; and, as she once told me, when she first heard people talking about adultery, she thought it referred to the watering-down of milk.

Nowadays we talk about transactional sex, and recreational sex. No one, back then, had recreational sex. Well, they might have done, but they didn’t call it that. Back then, back there, there was love, and there was sex, and there was a commingling of the two, sometimes awkward, sometimes seamless, which sometimes worked out, and sometimes didn’t.

An exchange between my parents (read: my mother) and me, one of those English exchanges which condenses paragraphs of animosity into a pair of phrases.

‘But I’m nineteen.’

‘Exactly – you’re only nineteen.’

We were each other’s second lover: quasi-virgins, in effect. I had had my sexual induction – the usual bout of tender, anxious scuffle-and-blunder – with a girl at university, towards the end of my third term; while Susan, despite having two children and being married for a quarter of a century, was no more experienced than me. In retrospect, perhaps it would have been different if one of us had known more. But who, in love, looks forward to retrospect? And anyway, do I mean ‘more experienced in sex’ or ‘more experienced in love’?