The Only Story(6)

‘You’ll be dead before I will,’ I informed him, and then dawdled off as irritatingly as I could manage.

So, now that I am older, I realize that this is one of my human functions: to allow the young to believe that I envy them. Well, obviously I do in the brute matter of being dead first; but otherwise not. And when I see pairs of young lovers, vertically entwined on street corners, or horizontally entwined on a blanket in the park, the main feeling it arouses in me is a kind of protectiveness. No, not pity: protectiveness. Not that they would want my protection. And yet – and this is curious – the more bravado they show in their behaviour, the stronger my response. I want to protect them from what the world is probably going to do to them, and from what they will probably do to one another. But of course, this isn’t possible. My care is not required, and their confidence insane.

It was a matter of some pride to me that I seemed to have landed on exactly the relationship of which my parents would most disapprove. I have no wish – certainly not at this late stage – to demonise them. They were products of their time and age and class and genes – just as I am. They were hard-working, truthful and wanted what they thought was the best for their only child. The faults I found in them were, in a different light, virtues. But at the time …

‘Hi, Mum and Dad, I’ve something to tell you. I’m actually gay, which you probably guessed, and I’m going on holiday next week with Pedro. Yes, Mum, that Pedro, the one who does your hair in the Village. Well, he asked me where I was going for my holidays, and I just said “Any suggestions?” and we took it from there. So we’re off to a Greek island together.’

I imagine my parents being upset, and wondering what the neighbours would say, and going to ground for a while, and talking behind closed doors, and theorising difficulties ahead for me which would only be a projection of their own confused feelings. But then they would decide that times were changing, and find a little quiet heroism in their ability to accommodate this unanticipated situation, and my mother would wonder how socially appropriate it would be to let Pedro carry on cutting her hair, and then – worst stage of all – she would award herself a badge of honour for her new-found tolerance, all the while giving thanks to the God in whom she did not believe that her father hadn’t lived to see the day …

Yes, that would have been all right, eventually. As would another scenario then popular in the newspapers.

‘Hi, Parents, this is Cindy, she’s my girlfriend, well, actually a little bit more than that, as you can see, she’s going to be a “gymslip mum” in a few months’ time. Don’t worry, she was dead legal when I swooped at the school gates, but I guess the clock’s ticking on this one, so you’d better meet her parents and book the registry office.’

Yes, they could have coped with that too. Of course, their best-case scenario, as previously noted, was that down at the tennis club I would meet a nice Christine or Virginia whose emollient and optimistic nature would have been to their taste. And then there could have been a proper engagement followed by a proper wedding and a proper honeymoon, leading to proper grandchildren. But instead I had gone to the tennis club and come back with Mrs Susan Macleod, a married woman of the parish with two daughters, both older than me. And – until such time as I shrugged off this foolish case of calf love – there would be no engagement or wedding, let alone patter of tiny feet. There would only be embarrassment and humiliation and shame, and prim looks from neighbours and sly allusions to cradle-snatching. So I had managed to present them with a case so far beyond the pale that it could not even be admitted, much less sensibly discussed. And by now, my mother’s original idea of inviting the Macleods round for sherry had been definitively junked.

This thing with parents. All my friends at university – Eric, Barney, Ian and Sam – had it in varying amounts. And we were hardly a pack of stoned hippies in shaggy Afghan coats. We were normal – normalish – middle-class boys feeling the irritable rub of growing up. We all had our stories, most of them interchangeable, though Barney’s were always the best. Not least because he gave his parents so much lip.

‘So,’ Barney told us, as we reassembled for another term, and were exchanging dismal tales of Life at Home. ‘I’d been back about three weeks, and it’s ten in the morning and I’m still in bed. Well, there’s nothing to get up for in Pinner, is there? Then I hear the bedroom door open, and my mum and dad come in. They sit on the end of my bed, and Mum starts asking me if I know what time it is.’

‘Why can’t they learn to knock?’ asked Sam. ‘You might have been in mid-wank.’

‘So, naturally I said that it was probably morning by my reckoning. And then they asked what I was planning to do that day, and I said I wasn’t going to think about it till after breakfast. My dad gave this sort of dry cough – it’s always a sign that he’s starting to boil up. Then my mum suggests I might get a holiday job to earn a little pin money. So I admit that it hadn’t exactly crossed my mind to apply for temporary employment in some menial trade.’

‘Nice one, Barney,’ we chorused.

‘And then my mum asked if I was planning to idle away my whole life, and you know, I was beginning to get annoyed – I’m like my father in that, slow burn, except I don’t give that little warning cough. Anyway, my dad suddenly loses it, stands up, rips open the curtains and shouts,