The Only Story(9)

This is how she tells me about herself, in oblique observations which don’t require a response. Sometimes, one leads on to another; sometimes, she lets drop a single statement, as if clueing me in to life.

‘The thing you have to understand, Paul, is that we’re a played-out generation.’

I laugh. My parents’ generation don’t seem at all played out to me: they still have all the power and money and self-assurance. I wish they were played out. Instead, they seem a major obstacle to my growing up. What’s that term they use in hospitals? Yes, bed-blockers. They were spiritual bed-blockers.

I ask Susan to explain.

‘We went through the war,’ she says. ‘It took a lot out of us. We aren’t much good for anything any more. It’s time your lot took charge. Look at our politicians.’

‘You aren’t suggesting I go into politics?’ I am incredulous. I despise politicians, who all strike me as self-important creeps and smoothies. Not that I’ve ever met a politician, of course.

‘It’s exactly because people like you don’t go into politics that we’re in the mess we are,’ Susan insists.

Again, I am baffled. I’m not even sure who ‘people like me’ might be. For my school and university friends, it seemed like a badge of honour not to be interested in all the matters which politicians endlessly discussed. And then their grand anxieties – the Soviet threat, the End of Empire, tax rates, death duties, the housing crisis, trade union power – would be endlessly regurgitated at the family hearth.

My parents enjoyed television sit-coms, but were made uneasy by satire. You couldn’t buy Private Eye in the Village, but I would bring it back from university and leave it provocatively around the house. I remember one issue whose cover had a floppy 33 rpm disc loosely attached to it. Peeling off the record revealed the photo of a man sitting on the lavatory, trousers and pants round his ankles, shirt-tails keeping him decent. On to the neck of this anonymous squatter was montaged the head of the Prime Minister, Sir Alec Douglas-Home, with a bubble coming out of his mouth saying, ‘Put that record back at once!’ I found it supremely funny, and showed it to my mother; she judged it stupid and puerile. Then I showed it to Susan, who was overcome with laughter. So that was everything decided, in one go: me, my mother, Susan and politics.

She laughs at life, this is part of her essence. And no one else in her played-out generation does the same. She laughs at what I laugh at. She also laughs at hitting me on the head with a tennis ball; at the idea of having sherry with my parents; she laughs at her husband, just as she does when crashing the gears of the Austin shooting brake. Naturally, I assume that she laughs at life because she has seen a great deal of it, and understands it. ‘By the way,’ I say, ‘What’s “whatski”?’

‘What do you mean, “What’s whatski?”’

‘I mean, what’s “Whatski”?’

‘Oh, do you mean, “Whatski’s whatski”?’

‘If you like.’

‘It’s what Russian spies say to one another, silly,’ she replies.

The first time we were together – sexually, I mean – we each told the necessary lies, then drove across to the middle of Hampshire and found two rooms in a hotel.

As we stand looking down at an acreage of magenta candlewick bedspread, she says,

‘Which side do you prefer? Forehand or backhand?’

I have never slept in a double bed before. I have never slept a whole night with someone before. The bed looks enormous, the lighting bleak, and from the bathroom comes a smell of disinfectant.

‘I love you,’ I tell her.

‘That’s a terrible thing to say to a girl,’ she replies and takes my arm. ‘We’d best have dinner first, before we love one another.’

I already have an erection, and there is nothing generalised about this one. It is very, very specific.

She has a shyness to her. She never undresses in front of me; she is always in bed with her nightdress on by the time I come into the room. And the light would be out. I couldn’t care less about any of this. I feel I can see in the dark, anyway.

Nor does she ‘teach me the arts of love’, that phrase you read in books. We are both inexperienced, as I said. And she comes from a generation in which the assumption is made that on the wedding night the man ‘will know what to do’ – a social excuse to legitimize any previous sexual experience, however squalid, the man might have had. I don’t want to go into the specifics in her case, though she does occasionally drop hints.

One afternoon, we are in bed at their house, and I suggest I ought to be going before ‘Someone’ comes home.

‘Of course,’ she replies musingly. ‘You know, when he was at school, he always preferred the front half of the elephant, if you catch my meaning. And maybe after school. Who knows? Everyone’s got a secret, haven’t they?’

‘What’s yours?’

‘Mine? Oh, he told me I was frigid. Not at the time. But later, after we’d stopped. When it was too late to do anything about anything.’

‘I don’t think you’re remotely frigid,’ I say, with a mixture of outrage and possessiveness. ‘I think you’re … very warm-blooded.’

She pats my chest in reply. I know little about the female orgasm, and somehow assume that if you manage to keep going long enough, it will at some point be automatically triggered in the woman. Like breaking the sound barrier, perhaps. As I am unable to take the discussion further, I start to get dressed. Later, I think: she is warm, she is affectionate, she loves me, she encourages me into bed, we stay there a long time, I don’t think she’s frigid, what’s the problem?