Shuttlecock

[11]

Marian and I make love, on average, three or four times a week. It is rare for her to make excuses; to say that she has the proverbial headache or that she has forgotten her doo-dah as she did recently — and as she attempted again last night, after discovering that I really had returned the television to the shop. She has learnt by now to submit to my demands. There have sometimes passed whole weeks, hectic and fatiguing weeks, in which every night we have striven to cap the passion of the night before. The reason for this intensity is not really mutual ardour, or any excess of appetite on my part — and perhaps passion is the wrong word. It has more to do with my constant dissatisfaction.

You see — (but now I’m going to speak about very intimate things, very private things — never mind, I let myself in for it when I began these pages) — it’s a long time since I’ve experienced with Marian that thing called ‘ecstasy’ or ‘fulfilment’. Believe me, it’s that that I’m looking for — not some mere superficial thrill — when we labour away in the dark, or, more often, with the lights on so we can see what we’re doing when we twist ourselves into some untried, contortionate position. Often, I have spent whole afternoons at the office, ostensibly busy with my paper-work, in reality anticipating, planning in meticulous detail our activities of the night. And when I started to buy certain ‘manuals’, to get Marian to send off for certain articles from catalogues, to visit the sex shops in Charing Cross Road and Leicester Square, all this paraphernalia wasn’t an end in itself, believe me, it was all in the hope of achieving some ultimate thing that always seemed elusive.

Making love ought to be the most natural thing, oughtn’t it? This week, in the full flush of spring, I have been watching the sparrows copulating on our guttering — a mere hop and then it’s over — and the ducks — more rapacious — on the common. It is so simple. Nature prompts them when the season comes, and — I don’t mind admitting it — I often envy their easy contentment, not to be constantly at it, the whole year through. They don’t need any fetishist tricks to urge them on or any shame to restrain them. And sometimes that is just how I see it with Marian and me: a little careless, unadorned instant, like the sparrows; a little flutter of wings and hearts: at one with nature. Perhaps it was like that once, long ago. For Marian and me. For all of us. But now we have to go through the most elaborate charades, the most strenuous performances to receive enlightenment. Because that is the goal, don’t mistake me — enlightenment. All nature’s creatures join to express nature’s purpose. Somewhere in their mounting and mating, rutting and butting is the very secret of nature itself. And when, night after night, I conduct my sexual experiments with Marian, for ever modifying the formula, it’s with the yearning that one day it won’t just be sex, but enlightenment.

Marian sometimes says I’m hurting her; or ‘Can’t we do it another way?’ or ‘Couldn’t we stop now — wait till the morning?’ And sometimes it’s less my physical insistence that wears her than my demands for things she’s quite unable to supply. For example, sometimes I wish Marian had bigger breasts. Her breasts, I may say, are petite and compact, and perfectly lovely in their way. But sometimes I want her to have big, blouse-bursting tits like Maureen’s in the typing pool. Once, so rumour has it, Eric got Maureen into the stationery cupboard and induced her, as part of some bet, to let him see what they were like. And I’m not sure that things stopped at that. Marian can’t be expected to satisfy my fantasies about a girl she hasn’t even seen. But I demand it nonetheless (without mentioning Maureen of course), and I have even given Marian (who worries about her waistline) a complex about the size of her bust.

All in all, I’m surprised how little she resists. (Her wonderful pliancy.) She’s afraid, of course, of what might happen if she did. But then one reason why I think she complies is that she shares the adventure. Yes, adventure — why not use that word? It’s not a misplaced one for what Marian and I get up to in our bedroom. I read somewhere once in a magazine — it was one of Marian’s magazines — that sexual adventure is the only form of adventure left to us in our age. It compensates for all the excitement and initiative we’ve lost in other ways. The only true revolution now is sexual revolution, and that is why everything — look around — is becoming increasingly, visibly oriented to sex. Well, if sex is the only true revolution, I don’t see why Marian and I shouldn’t play our part. I’m not extremist, after all — I’m not a promiscuous man — I’m just an ordinary rebel. Though, sometimes — quite often, of late, to tell you the truth — I have these reactionary moods. Sometimes, coming home on the Tube to Marian, stimulated by the adverts and the proximity of knots of office girls, I wonder: if it’s all so visible and acceptable, and the magazines tell you to do it — what’s so rebellious about it?

All right, so you’ve gathered it by now. My sex-life is really a preposterous, an obsessive, a pathetic affair. A sham, a mockery. Systematically and cold-bloodedly, like a torturer bent on breaking his victim, I am turning my wife into a whore. This same woman who goes, dutifully, to collect our kids from school; who takes them for walks in the sunshine along the Thames. (By the way, Martin gave her the four pounds but she never spent it; and when she came back she said, in Martin’s presence: ‘There’s the money you gave to Martin to give to me.’ Conspirators!)

Tell me, can a man do wrong with his own wife? And are there really crimes, rights and wrongs, in those areas of our lives — you know what I mean — where we are like lost explorers, and right and wrong, with the rest of civilization, have been left behind at the base camp? All my relentless demands on Marian, don’t they all mean, underneath, that I want Marian, that Marian is very dear to me? I’ve never wanted another woman since we married — that’s the honest truth. (All right, bits of other women.) And isn’t it possible that this whole voluntary confession (I never dreamed I would be setting down things like this) is inspired by some upsurge of guilt where guilt should not apply, and that I over-sensitively exaggerate what I suppose to be the shamefulness of my proclivities? What is healthy and normal in this sphere, after all?

Actually, to cut all this shilly-shally, what really fills me with dread is something else. It is the thought that, one day, by some mischance, Martin and Peter might stumble upon me and Marian in some posture impossible to explain, even to a boy who has an inkling (and I’m sure Martin has more than that) of what Mummies and Daddies do after bed-time. And that in an instant whatever trust, whatever shred of faith they had in their father will vanish. What would they say — princes brought up in the security of the castle, suddenly discovering the dungeons? What would I say — groping for the blankets? ‘Now children, all this is normal.’

No. Please.

And it’s an odd thing that I’ve brought the children in at this point. Because all this assault-course sex with Marian, all this feverish searching for erotic illumination — it only began with the kids being born. Or, rather, not with them being born exactly — because do you know what I felt when each of them came into the world? I felt: life is very simple and complete. And there was a time even when the boys were small, when Marian and I used to make love, quite spontaneously, in the open air — in fields, amid ferns, in secluded parts of beaches — when we went out at weekends. Martin nestling close by, asleep in the carry-cot. No, it wasn’t with their being born but with their growing up — with the idea that they will one day be men like me. The older they get, the more persistent, the more desperate I become with Marian. When will their growing, I wonder, outstrip my libido? Or will I have found, before then, what it is I’m seeking?

One day when I go to see Dad I will say to him: Is it wrong, the way I treat Marian? You and Mum were always the fine, confident couple. If you were such a hero, did you always have good, healthy relations with your wife? Even bed-time ones? Tell me, Dad. Enlighten me.