The Only Story

ONE

Would you rather love the more, and suffer the more; or love the less, and suffer the less? That is, I think, finally, the only real question.

You may point out – correctly – that it isn’t a real question. Because we don’t have the choice. If we had the choice, then there would be a question. But we don’t, so there isn’t. Who can control how much they love? If you can control it, then it isn’t love. I don’t know what you call it instead, but it isn’t love.

Most of us have only one story to tell. I don’t mean that only one thing happens to us in our lives: there are countless events, which we turn into countless stories. But there’s only one that matters, only one finally worth telling. This is mine.

But here’s the first problem. If this is your only story, then it’s the one you have most often told and retold, even if – as is the case here – mainly to yourself. The question then is: do all these retellings bring you closer to the truth of what happened, or move you further away? I’m not sure. One test might be whether, as the years pass, you come out better from your own story, or worse. To come out worse might indicate that you are being more truthful. On the other hand, there is the danger of being retrospectively anti-heroic: making yourself out to have behaved worse than you actually did can be a form of self-praise. So I shall have to be careful. Well, I have learned to become careful over the years. As careful now as I was careless then. Or do I mean carefree? Can a word have two opposites?

The time, the place, the social milieu? I’m not sure how important they are in stories about love. Perhaps in the old days, in the classics, where there are battles between love and duty, love and religion, love and family, love and the state. This isn’t one of those stories. But still, if you insist. The time: more than fifty years ago. The place: about fifteen miles south of London. The milieu: stockbroker belt, as they called it – not that I ever met a stockbroker in all my years there. Detached houses, some half-timbered, some tile-hung. Hedges of privet, laurel and beech. Roads with gutters as yet unencumbered by yellow lines and residents’ parking bays. This was a time when you could drive up to London and park almost anywhere. Our particular zone of suburban sprawl was cutely known as ‘The Village’, and decades previously it might possibly have counted as one. Now it contained a station from which suited men went up to London Monday to Friday, and some for an extra half-day on Saturday. There was a Green Line bus-stop; a zebra crossing with Belisha beacons; a post office; a church unoriginally named after St Michael; a pub, a general store, chemist, hairdresser; a petrol station which did elementary car repairs. In the mornings, you heard the electric whine of milk floats – choose between Express and United Dairies; in the evenings, and at weekends (though never on a Sunday morning) the chug of petrol-driven lawnmowers.

Vocal, incompetent cricket was played on the Village green; there was a golf course and a tennis club. The soil was sandy enough to please gardeners; London clay didn’t reach this far out. Recently, a delicatessen had opened, which some thought subversive in its offerings of European goods: smoked cheeses, and knobbly sausages hanging like donkey cocks in their string webbing. But the Village’s younger wives were beginning to cook more adventurously, and their husbands mainly approved. Of the two available TV channels, BBC was watched more than ITV, while alcohol was generally drunk only at weekends. The chemist would sell verruca plasters and dry shampoo in little puffer bottles, but not contraceptives; the general store sold the narcoleptic local Advertiser & Gazette, but not even the mildest girlie mag. For sexual items, you had to travel up to London. None of this bothered me for most of my time there.

Right, that’s my estate agent’s duties concluded (there was a real one ten miles away). And one other thing: don’t ask me about the weather. I don’t much remember what the weather has been like during my life. True, I can remember how hot sun gave greater impetus to sex; how sudden snow delighted, and how cold, damp days set off those early symptoms that eventually led to a double hip replacement. But nothing significant in my life ever happened during, let alone because of, weather. So if you don’t mind, meteorology will play no part in my story. Though you are free to deduce, when I am found playing grass-court tennis, that it was neither raining nor snowing at the time.

The tennis club: who would have thought it might begin there? Growing up, I regarded the place as merely an outdoor branch of the Young Conservatives. I owned a racket and had played a bit, just as I could bowl a few useful overs of off-spin, and turn out as a goalkeeper of solid yet occasionally reckless temperament. I was competitive at sport without being unduly talented.

At the end of my first year at university, I was at home for three months, visibly and unrepentantly bored. Those of the same age today will find it hard to imagine the laboriousness of communication back then. Most of my friends were far-flung, and – by some unexpressed but clear parental mandate – use of the telephone was discouraged. A letter, and then a letter in reply. It was all slow-paced, and lonely.

My mother, perhaps hoping that I would meet a nice blonde Christine, or a sparky, black-ringleted Virginia – in either case, one of reliable, if not too pronounced, Conservative tendencies – suggested that I might like to join the tennis club. She would even sub me for it. I laughed silently at the motivation: the one thing I was not going to do with my existence was end up in suburbia with a tennis wife and 2.4 children, and watch them in turn find their mates at the club, and so on, down some echoing enfilade of mirrors, into an endless, privet-and-laurel future. When I accepted my mother’s offer, it was in a spirit of nothing but satire.

I went along, and was invited to ‘play in’. This was a test in which not just my tennis game but my general deportment and social suitability would be quietly examined in a decorous English way. If I failed to display negatives, then positives would be assumed: this was how it worked. My mother had ensured that my whites were laundered, and the creases in my shorts both evident and parallel; I reminded myself not to swear, burp or fart on court. My game was wristy, optimistic and largely self-taught; I played as they would have expected me to play, leaving out the shit-shots I most enjoyed, and never hitting straight at an opponent’s body. Serve, in to the net, volley, second volley, drop shot, lob, while quick to show appreciation of the opponent – ‘Too good!’ – and proper concern for the partner – ‘Mine!’ I was modest after a good shot, quietly pleased at the winning of a game, head-shakingly rueful at the ultimate loss of a set. I could feign all that stuff, and so was welcomed as a summer member, joining the year-round Hugos and Carolines.

The Hugos liked to tell me that I had raised the club’s average IQ while lowering its average age; one insisted on calling me Clever Clogs and Herr Professor in deft allusion to my having completed one year at Sussex University. The Carolines were friendly enough, but wary; they knew better where they stood with the Hugos. When I was among this tribe, I felt my natural competitiveness leach away. I tried to play my best shots, but winning didn’t engage me. I even used to practise reverse cheating. If a ball fell a couple of inches out, I would give a running thumbs up to the opponent, and a shout of ‘Too good!’ Similarly, a serve pushed an inch or so too long or too wide would produce a slow nod of assent, and a trudge across to receive the next serve. ‘Decent cove, that Paul fellow,’ I once overheard a Hugo admit to another Hugo. When shaking hands after a defeat, I would deliberately praise some aspect of their game. ‘That kicker of a serve to the backhand – gave me a lot of trouble,’ I would candidly admit. I was only there for a couple of months, and did not want them to know me.

After three weeks or so of my temporary membership, there was a Lucky Dip Mixed Doubles tournament. The pairings were drawn by lot. Later, I remember thinking: lot is another name for destiny, isn’t it? I was paired with Mrs Susan Macleod, who was clearly not a Caroline. She was, I guessed, somewhere in her forties, with her hair pulled back by a ribbon, revealing her ears, which I failed to notice at the time. A white tennis dress with green trim, and a line of green buttons down the front of the bodice. She was almost exactly my height, which is five feet nine if I am lying and adding an inch.

‘Which side do you prefer?’ she asked.

‘Side?’

‘Forehand or backhand?’

‘Sorry. I don’t really mind.’

‘You take the forehand to begin with, then.’

Our first match – the format was single-set knockout – was against one of the thicker Hugos and dumpier Carolines. I scampered around a lot, thinking it my job to take more of the balls; and at first, when at the net, would do a quarter-turn to see how my partner was coping, and if and how the ball was coming back. But it always did come back, with smoothly hit groundstrokes, so I stopped turning, relaxed, and found myself really, really wanting to win. Which we did, 6–2.

As we sat with glasses of lemon barley water, I said,

‘Thanks for saving my arse.’

I was referring to the number of times I had lurched across the net in order to intercept, only to miss the ball and put Mrs Macleod off.

‘The phrase is, “Well played, partner”.’ Her eyes were grey-blue, her smile steady. ‘And try serving from a bit wider. It opens up the angles.’

I nodded, accepting the advice while feeling no jab to my ego, as I would if it had come from a Hugo.

‘Anything else?’

‘The most vulnerable spot in doubles is always down the middle.’

‘Thanks, Mrs Macleod.’

‘Susan.’

‘I’m glad you’re not a Caroline,’ I found myself saying.

She chuckled, as if she knew exactly what I meant. But how could she have?

‘Does your husband play?’

‘My husband? Mr E.P.?’ She laughed. ‘No. Golf’s his game. I think it’s plain unsporting to hit a stationary ball. Don’t you agree?’

There was too much in this answer for me to unpack at once, so I just gave a nod and a quiet grunt.

The second match was harder, against a couple who kept breaking off to have quiet tactical conversations, as if preparing for marriage. At one point, when Mrs Macleod was serving, I tried the cheap ploy of crouching below the level of the net almost on the centre line, aiming to distract the returner. It worked for a couple of points, but then, at 30–15, I rose too quickly on hearing the thwock of the serve, and the ball hit me square in the back of the head. I keeled over melodramatically and rolled into the bottom of the net. Caroline and Hugo raced forward in a show of concern; while from behind me came only a riot of laughter, and a girlish ‘Shall we play a let?’ which our opponents naturally disputed. Still, we squeaked the set 7–5, and were into the quarter-finals.

‘Trouble up next,’ she warned me. ‘County level. On their way down now, but no free gifts.’

And there weren’t any. We were well beaten, for all my intense scurrying. When I tried to protect us down the middle, the ball went wide; when I covered the angles, it was thumped down the centre line. The two games we got were as much as we deserved.

We sat on a bench and fed our rackets into their presses. Mine was a Dunlop Maxply; hers a Gray’s.

‘I’m sorry I let you down,’ I said.

‘No one let anyone down.’

‘I think my problem may be that I’m tactically naive.’

Yes, it was a bit pompous, but even so I was surprised by her giggles.

‘You’re a case,’ she said. ‘I’m going to have to call you Casey.’

I smiled. I liked the idea of being a case.

As we went our separate ways to shower, I said, ‘Would you like a lift? I’ve got a car.’

She looked at me sideways. ‘Well, I wouldn’t want a lift if you haven’t got a car. That would be counterproductive.’ There was something in the way she said it that made it impossible to take offence. ‘But what about your reputation?’

‘My reputation?’ I answered. ‘I don’t think I’ve got one.’

‘Oh dear. We’ll have to get you one then. Every young man should have a reputation.’

Writing all this down, it seems more knowing than it was at the time. And ‘nothing happened’. I drove Mrs Macleod to her house in Duckers Lane, she got out, I went home, and gave an abbreviated account of the afternoon to my parents. Lucky Dip Mixed Doubles. Partners chosen by lot.

‘Quarter-finals, Paul,’ said my mother. ‘I’d have come along and watched if I’d known.’

I realized that this was probably the last thing in the history of the world that I wanted, or would ever want.

Perhaps you’ve understood a little too quickly; I can hardly blame you. We tend to slot any new relationship we come across into a pre-existing category. We see what is general or common about it; whereas the participants see – feel – only what is individual and particular to them. We say: how predictable; they say: what a surprise! One of the things I thought about Susan and me – at the time, and now, again, all these years later – is that there often didn’t seem words for our relationship; at least, none that fitted. But perhaps this is an illusion all lovers have about themselves: that they escape both category and description.

My mother, of course, was never stuck for a phrase.

As I said, I drove Mrs Macleod home, and nothing happened. And again; and again. Except that this depends on what you mean by ‘nothing’. Not a touch, not a kiss, not a word, let alone a scheme or a plan. But there was already, just in the way we sat in the car, before she said a few laughing words and then walked off up her driveway, a complicity between us. Not, I insist, as yet a complicity to do anything. Just a complicity which made me a little more me, and her a little more her.

Had there been any scheme or plan, we would have behaved differently. We might have met secretly, or disguised our intentions. But we were innocent; and so I was taken aback when my mother, over a supper of stultifying boredom, said to me,

‘Operating a taxi service now, are we?’

I looked at her in bewilderment. It was always my mother who policed me. My father was milder, and less given to judgement. He preferred to allow things to blow over, to let sleeping dogs lie, not to stir up mud; whereas my mother preferred facing facts and not brushing things under the carpet. My parents’ marriage, to my unforgiving nineteen-year-old eye, was a car crash of cliché. Though I would have to admit, as the one making the judgement, that a ‘car crash of cliché’ is itself a cliché.

But I refused to be a cliché, at least this early in my life, and so I looked across at my mother with blank belligerence.

‘Mrs Macleod will be putting on weight, the amount you’re ferrying her around,’ was my mother’s unkindly elaboration of her original point.

‘Not with all the tennis she plays,’ I answered casually.

‘Mrs Macleod,’ she went on. ‘What’s her first name?’

‘I don’t actually know,’ I lied.

‘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 nine-teen.’

‘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’?

But I see I’m getting ahead of myself.

That first afternoon, when I had played in with my Dunlop Maxply and laundered whites, there was a huddle in the clubhouse over tea and cakes. The blazers were still assessing me for suitability, I realized. Checking that I was acceptably middle class, with all that this entailed. There was some joshing about the length of my hair, which was mostly contained by my headband. And almost as a follow-on to this, I was asked what I thought about politics.

‘I’m afraid I’m not remotely interested in politics,’ I replied.

‘Well, that means you’re a Conservative,’ said one committee member, and we all laughed.

When I tell her about this exchange, Susan nods and says, ‘I’m Labour, but it’s a secret. Well, it was until now. So what do you make of that, my fine and feathered friend?’

I say that it doesn’t bother me at all.

The first time I went to the Macleod house, Susan told me to come in the back way and walk up through the garden; I approved such informality. I pushed open an unlocked gate, then followed an unsteady brick path alongside compost heaps and bins of leaf mould; there was rhubarb growing up through a chimney pot, a quartet of raggedy fruit trees and a vegetable plot. A dishevelled old gardener was double-digging a square patch of earth. I nodded to him with the authority of a young academic approving a peasant. He nodded back.

As Susan was boiling the kettle, I looked around me. The house was similar to ours, except that everything felt a bit classier; or rather, here the old things looked inherited rather than bought second-hand. There were standard lamps with yellowing parchment shades. There was also – not exactly a carelessness, more an insouciance about things not being orderly. I could see golf clubs in a bag lying in the hallway, and a couple of glasses still not cleared away from lunch – perhaps even the previous night. Nothing went uncleared-away in our house. Everything had to be tidied, washed, swept, polished, in case someone called round unexpectedly. But who might do so? The vicar? The local policeman? Someone wanting to make a phone call? A door-to-door salesman? The truth was that nobody ever arrived without invitation, and all that tidying and wiping was performed out of what struck me as deep social atavism. Whereas here, people like me called round and the place looked, as my mother would no doubt have observed, as if it hadn’t seen a duster for a fortnight.

‘Your gardener’s jolly hard-working,’ I say, for want of a better conversational opener.

Susan looks at me and bursts out laughing. ‘Gardener? That’s the Master of the Establishment, as it happens. His Lordship.’

‘I’m terribly sorry. Please don’t tell him. I just thought…’

‘Still, I’m glad he looks up to snuff. Like a real gardener. Old Adam. Precisely.’ She hands me a cup of tea. ‘Milk? Sugar?’

You understand, I hope, that I’m telling you everything as I remember it? I never kept a diary, and most of the participants in my story – my story! my life! – are either dead or far dispersed. So I’m not necessarily putting it down in the order that it happened. I think there’s a different authenticity to memory, and not an inferior one. Memory sorts and sifts according to the demands made on it by the rememberer. Do we have access to the algorithm of its priorities? Probably not. But I would guess that memory prioritises whatever is most useful to help keep the bearer of those memories going. So there would be a self-interest in bringing happier memories to the surface first. But again, I’m only guessing.

For instance, I remember lying in bed one night, being kept awake by one of those stomach-slapping erections which, when you are young, you carelessly – or carefreely – imagine will last you the rest of your life. But this one was different. You see, it was a kind of generalised erection, unconnected to any person, or dream, or fantasy. It was more about just being joyfully young. Young in brain, heart, cock, soul – and it just happened to be the cock which best articulated that general state.

It seems to me that when you are young, you think about sex most of the time, but you don’t reflect on it much. You are so intent on the who, when, where, how – or rather, more often, the great if – that you think less about the why and the whither. Before you first have sex, you’ve heard all sorts of things about it; nowadays far more, and far earlier, and far more graphically, than when I was young. But it all amounts to the same input: a mixture of sentimentality, pornography and misrepresentation. When I look back at my youth, I see it as a time of cock-vigour so insistent that it forbade examination of what such vigour was for.

Perhaps I don’t understand the young now. I’d like to talk to them and ask how things are for them and their friends – but then a shyness creeps in. And perhaps I didn’t even understand the young when I was young. That could be true too.

But in case you’re wondering, I don’t envy the young. In my days of adolescent rage and insolence, I would ask myself: What are the old for, if not to envy the young? That seemed to me their principal and final purpose before extinction. I was walking to meet Susan one afternoon, and had reached the Village’s zebra crossing. There was a car approaching, but with a lover’s normal eagerness, I started to cross anyway. The car braked, harder than its driver had evidently wanted to, and hooted at me. I stopped where I was, right in line with the car’s bonnet, and stared back at the driver. I admit I was perhaps an annoying sight. Long hair, purple jeans, and young – filthy, fucking young. The driver wound down his window and swore at me. I strolled round to him, smiling, and keen on confrontation. He was old – filthy, fucking old, with an old person’s stupid red ears. You know those sorts of ears, all fleshy, with hairs growing on them inside and out? Thick, bristly ones inside; thin, furry ones outside.

‘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,

‘“We don’t want you treating this place like a fucking hotel!”’

‘Oh, that old one. We’ve all had that. So what did you say?’

‘I said, “If this was a fucking hotel, the fucking management wouldn’t burst into my room at ten in the morning and sit on my fucking bed and bollock me.”’

‘Barney, you ace!’

‘Well, it was very provoking, I thought.’

‘Barney, you ace!’

So the Macleod household consisted of Susan, Mr E.P., and two daughters, both away at university, known as Miss G and Miss NS. There was an old char who came twice a week, Mrs Dyer; she had poor eyesight for cleaning but perfect vision for stealing vegetables and pints of milk. But who else came to the house? No friends were mentioned. Each weekend, Macleod played a round of golf; Susan had the tennis club. In all the times I joined them for supper, I never met anyone else.

I asked Susan who their friends were. She replied, in a casually dismissive tone I hadn’t noted before, ‘Oh, the girls have friends – they bring them home from time to time.’

This hardly seemed an adequate response. But a week or so later, Susan told me we were going to visit Joan.

‘You drive,’ she said, handing me the keys to the Macleods’ Austin. This felt like promotion, and I was fastidious with my gear-changing.

Joan lived about three miles away, and was the surviving sister of Gerald, who donkey’s years previously had been sweet on Susan, but then had died suddenly from leukaemia, which was beastly luck. Joan had looked after their father until his death and had never married; she liked dogs and took an afternoon gin or two.

We parked in front of a squat, half-timbered house behind a beech hedge. Joan had a cigarette on when she answered the door, embraced Susan and looked at me inquisitively.

‘This is Paul. He’s driving me today. I really need my eyes testing, I think it’s time for a new prescription. We met at the tennis club.’

Joan nodded, and said, ‘I’ve shut the yappers up.’

She was a large woman in a pastel-blue trouser suit; she had tight curls, brown lipstick, and was approximately powdered. She led us into the sitting room and collapsed into an armchair with a footstool in front of it. Joan was probably about five years older than Susan, but struck me as a generation ahead. On one arm of her chair was a face-down book of crosswords, on the other a brass ashtray held in place by weights concealed in a leather strap. The ashtray looked precariously full to me. No sooner had Joan sat down than she was up again.

‘Join me in a little one?’

‘Too early for me, darling.’

‘You’re not exactly driving,’ Joan replied grumpily. Then, looking at me, ‘Drink, young sir?’

‘No thank you.’

‘Well, suit yourselves. At least you’ll have a gasper with me.’

Susan, to my surprise, took a cigarette and lit up. It felt to me like a friendship whose hierarchy had been established long ago, with Joan as senior partner and Susan, if not subservient, at any rate the listening one. Joan’s opening monologue told of her life since she’d last seen Susan, which seemed to me largely a catalogue of small annoyances triumphantly overcome, of dog-talk and bridge-talk, which resolved itself into the headline news that she had recently found a place ten miles away where you could get her favourite gin for some trifling sum less than it cost in the Village.

Bored out of my skull, half-disapproving of the cigarette Susan appeared to be enjoying, I found the following words coming out of my mouth:

‘Have you factored in the petrol?’

It was as if my mother had spoken through me.

Joan looked at me with interest verging on approval. ‘Now, how would I do that?’

‘Well, do you know how many mpg you get from your car?’

‘Of course I do,’ Joan replied, as if it were outrageous and spendthrift not to know. ‘Twenty-eight on average around here, a bit over thirty on a longer trip.’

‘And how much do you pay for petrol?’

‘Well, that obviously depends on where I buy it, doesn’t it?’

‘Aha!’ I exclaimed, as if this made the matter even more interesting. ‘Another variable. Have you got a pocket calculator, by any chance?’

‘I’ve got a screwdriver,’ said Joan, laughing.

‘Pencil and paper, at least.’

She fetched some and came to sit next to me on the sofa, reeking of cigarettes. ‘I want to see this in action.’

‘So how many off-licences and how many petrol stations are we talking about?’ I began. ‘I’ll need the full details.’

‘Anyone would think you’re from the Inland Fucking Revenue,’ said Joan with a laugh and a thump on my shoulder.

So I took down prices and locations and distances, identifying one case of spurious false economy, and came up with her two best options.

‘Of course,’ I added brightly, ‘this one would be even more advantageous if you walked into the Village rather than drove.’

Joan gave a mock shriek. ‘But walking’s bad for me!’ Then she took my table of calculations, went back to her chair, lit up another cigarette, and said to Susan, ‘I can see that he’s a very useful young man to have around.’

As we were driving away, Susan said, ‘Casey Paul, I didn’t know you could be so wicked. You had her eating out of your hand by the end of it.’

‘Anything to help the rich save money,’ I replied, carefully shifting gear. ‘I’m your man.’

‘You are my man, strange as it may seem,’ she agreed, slipping her flattened hand beneath my left thigh as I drove.

‘By the way, what’s wrong with your eyes?’

‘My eyes? Nothing, as far as I know.’

‘Then why did you go on about having them tested?’

‘Oh, that? Well, I have to have a form of words to cover you.’

Yes, I could see that. And so I became ‘the young man who drives me’ and ‘my tennis partner’, and later, ‘a friend of Martha’s’ and even – most implausibly – ‘a kind of protégé of Gordon’s’.

I don’t remember when we first kissed. Isn’t that odd? I can remember 6–2; 7–5; 2–6. I can remember that old driver’s ears in foul detail. But I can’t remember when or where we first kissed, or who made the first move, or whether it was both of us at the same time. And whether perhaps it was not so much a move as a drift. Was it in the car or in her house, was it morning, noon or night? And what was the weather like? Well, you certainly won’t expect me to remember that.

All I can tell you is that it was – by the modern speed of things – a long time before we first kissed, and a long time after that before we first went to bed together. And that between the kissing and the bedding I drove her up to London to buy some contraception. For her, not me. We went to John Bell & Croyden in Wigmore Street; I parked round the corner while she went in. She returned with a brown, unbranded bag containing a Dutch cap and some contraceptive jelly.

‘I wonder if there’s a book of instructions,’ she says lightly. ‘I’m a bit out of practice with all this.’

In my mood – a kind of sombre excitement – I’m momentarily unsure if she’s referring to sex, or to putting in the cap.

‘I’ll be there to help,’ I say, thinking that this covers both interpretations.

‘Paul,’ she says, ‘there are some things it’s better for a man not to see. Or to think about.’

‘OK.’ This definitely means the second option.

‘Where will you keep it?’ I ask, imagining the consequences of its discovery.

‘Oh, somewhere-somewhere,’ she replies. None of my business, then.

‘Don’t expect too much of me, Casey,’ she goes on rapidly. ‘Casey. That’s K.C. King’s Cross. You won’t be a crosspatch, will you? You won’t get all ratty and shirty with me, will you?’

I lean across and kiss her, in front of whatever interested pedestrians Wimpole Street contains.

I know already that she and her husband have separate beds, indeed separate rooms, and their marriage has been unconsummated – or rather, sex-free – for almost twenty years; but I haven’t pressed her for reasons or particulars. On the one hand, I am deeply curious about almost everybody’s sex-life, past, present and future. On the other, I don’t fancy the distraction of other images in my head when I am with her.

I am surprised that she needs contraception, that at forty-eight she is still having periods, and that what she refers to as The Dreaded has not yet arrived. But I am rather proud that it hasn’t. This is nothing to do with the possibility that she might get pregnant – nothing could be further from my thoughts or desires; rather it seems a confirmation of her womanliness. I was going to say girlishness; and perhaps that’s more what I mean. Yes, she is older; yes, she knows more about the world. But in terms of – what shall I call it? the age of her spirit, perhaps – we aren’t that far apart.

‘I didn’t know you smoked,’ I say.

‘Oh, just the one, occasionally. To keep Joan company. Or I go out into the garden. Do you disapprove terribly?’

‘No, it just came as a surprise. I don’t disapprove. I just think—’

‘It’s stupid. Yes it is. I just take one of his when I’m fed up. Have you noticed the way he smokes? He lights up and puffs away as if his life depends upon it, and then, when he’s halfway through, he stubs it out in disgust. And that disgust lasts until he lights up the next one. About five minutes later.’

Yes, I have noticed, but I let it go.

‘Still, it’s his drinking that’s more annoying.’

‘But you don’t?’

‘I hate the stuff. Just a glass of sweet sherry at Christmas, so as not to be accused of being a spoilsport. But it changes people. And not for the better.’

I agree. I have no interest in alcohol, or in people getting ‘merry’, or ‘whistled’, or ‘half seas over’ and all the other words and phrases which make them feel better about themselves.

And Mr E.P. was no exemplar of the virtues of drinking. While waiting for his dinner, he would sit at the table surrounded by what Susan called ‘his flagons and his gallons’, pouring from them into his pint mug with an increasingly unsteady hand. In front of him was another mug, stuffed with spring onions, on which he would munch. Then, after a while, he would belch quietly, covering his mouth in a pseudo-genteel manner. As a consequence, I have loathed spring onions for most of my life. And never thought much of beer either.

‘You know, I was thinking the other day that I haven’t seen his eyes for years. Not really. Not for years and years. Isn’t that strange? They’re always hidden behind his glasses. And of course I’m never there when he takes them off at night. Not that I want to see them especially. I’ve seen enough of them. I expect it’s the same for a lot of women.’

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?

We talk about everything: the state of the world (not good), the state of her marriage (not good), the general character and moral standards of the Village (not good) and even Death (not good).

‘Isn’t it strange?’ she muses. ‘My mother died of cancer when I was ten and I only ever think of her when I’m cutting my toenails.’

‘And yourself?’

‘Whatski?’

‘Yourself – dying.’

‘Oh.’ She goes silent for a bit. ‘No, I’m not afraid of dying. My only regret would be missing out on what happens afterwards.’

I misunderstand her. ‘You mean, the afterlife?’

‘Oh, I don’t believe in that,’ she says firmly. ‘It would all cause far too much trouble. All those people who spent their lives getting away from one another, and suddenly there they all are again, like some dreadful bridge party.’

‘I didn’t know you played bridge.’

‘I don’t. That’s not the point, Paul. And then, all those people who did bad things to you. Seeing them again.’

I leave a pause; she fills it. ‘I had an uncle. Uncle Humph. For Humphrey. I used to go and stay with him and Aunt Florence. After my mother died, so I would have been eleven, twelve. My aunt would put me to bed and tuck me in and kiss me and put out the light. And just as I would be getting off to sleep, there was a sudden weight on the side of the bed and it would be Uncle Humph, stinking of brandy and cigars and saying he wanted a goodnight kiss too. And then one time he said, “Do you know what a ‘party kiss’ is?” and before I could reply he rammed his tongue into my mouth and thrashed it around like a live fish. I wish I’d bitten it off. Every summer he did it, till I was about sixteen. Oh, it wasn’t as bad as for some, I know, but maybe that’s what made me frigid.’

‘You’re not,’ I insist. ‘And with a bit of luck the old bastard will be in a very hot place. If there’s any justice.’

‘There isn’t,’ she replies. ‘There isn’t any justice, here or anywhere else. And the afterlife would just be an enormous bridge party with Uncle Humph bidding six no trumps and winning every hand and claiming a party kiss as his reward.’

‘I’m sure you’re the expert,’ I say teasingly.

‘But the thing is, Casey Paul, it would be dreadful, entirely dreadful, if in some way that man was still alive. And what you don’t wish for your enemies, you can hardly expect for yourself.’

I don’t know when the habit developed – early on, I’m sure – but I used to hold her wrists. Maybe it began in a game of seeing if I could encompass them with my middle fingers and thumbs. But it rapidly became something I did. She extends her forearms towards me, fingers making gentle fists, and says, ‘Hold my wrists, Paul.’ I encompass them both, and press as hard as I can. What the exchange was about didn’t need words. It was a gesture to calm her, to pass something from me to her. An infusion, a transfusion of strength. And of love.

My attitude to our love was peculiarly straightforward – though I suspect a peculiar straightforwardness is characteristic of all first love. I simply thought: Well, that’s the certainty of love between us settled, now the rest of life has to fall into place around it. And I was entirely confident that it would. I remembered from some of my school reading that Passion was meant to Thrive on Obstacles; but now that I was experiencing what I had only previously read about, the notion of an Obstacle to it seemed neither necessary nor desirable. But I was very young, emotionally, and perhaps simply blind to the obstacles others would find in plain sight.

Or perhaps I didn’t go by way of previous reading at all. Perhaps my actual thought was more like this: Here we are now, the two of us, and there is where we have to get to; nothing else matters. And though we did in the end get somewhere near to where I dreamed, I had no idea of the cost.

I said I couldn’t remember the weather. And there’s other stuff as well, like what clothes I wore and what food I ate. Clothes were unimportant necessities back then, and food was just fuel. Nor do I remember things I’d expect to, like the colour of the Macleods’ shooting brake. I think it was two-tone. But was it grey and green, or perhaps blue and cream? And though I spent many key hours on its leather seats, I couldn’t tell you their colour. Was the fascia panel made of walnut? Who cares? My memory certainly doesn’t, and it’s memory which is my guide here.

On top of this, there are things I can’t be bothered to tell you. Like what I studied at university, what my room there was like, and how Eric differed from Barney, and Ian from Sam, and which one of them had red hair. Except that Eric was my closest friend, and continued so for many years. He was the gentlest of us, the most thoughtful, the one who put most trust in others. And – perhaps because of these very qualities – he was the one who had most trouble with girls and, later, women. Was there something about his softness, and his inclination to forgive, which almost provoked bad behaviour in others? I wish I knew the answer to that, not least because of the time I let him down badly. I abandoned him when he needed my help; I betrayed him, if you will. But I’ll tell you about this later.

And another thing. When I gave you my estate agent’s sketch of the Village, some of it might not have been strictly accurate. For instance, the Belisha beacons at the zebra crossing. I might have invented them, because nowadays you rarely see a zebra crossing without a dutiful pair of flashing beacons. But back then, in Surrey, on a road with little traffic… I rather doubt it. I suppose I could do some real-life research – look for old postcards in the central library, or hunt out the very few photos I have from that time, and retrofit my story accordingly. But I’m remembering the past, not reconstructing it. So there won’t be much set-dressing. You might prefer more. You might be used to more. But there’s nothing I can do about that. I’m not trying to spin you a story; I’m trying to tell you the truth.

Susan’s tennis game comes back to me. Mine – as I may have said – was largely a self-taught business, relying on wristiness, ill-prepared body position and a deliberate, last-minute change of shot which sometimes bamboozled me as much as my opponent. When playing with her, this structural laziness often compromised my intense desire for victory. Her game had schooling behind it: she got into the correct position, hit fully through her groundstrokes, came to the net only when circumstances were propitious, ran her socks off and yet laughed equally at winning and losing. This had been my first impression of her, and from her tennis I naturally extrapolated her character. I assumed that in life too she would be calm, well ordered and reliable, hitting fully through the ball – the best possible backcourt support for her anxious and impulsive partner at the net.

We entered the mixed doubles in the club’s summer tournament. There were about three people watching our first-round match against a couple of old hackers in their mid-fifties; to my surprise, one of the spectators was Joan. Even when we changed ends and she was out of my eyeline, I could hear her smoker’s cough.

The old hackers hacked us to death, playing like a married couple who could instinctively read one another’s next move, and never needed to speak, let alone shout. Susan played solidly, as ever, whereas my game was stupidly erratic. I went for overambitious interceptions, took balls I should have left, and then fell into a lethargic sulk as the hackers closed out set and match 6–4.

Afterwards, we sat with Joan, two teas and a gin between the three of us.

‘Sorry I let you down,’ I said.

‘That’s all right, Paul, I really don’t mind.’

Her even temper made me more irritated with myself. ‘No, but I do. I was trying all sorts of stupid stuff. I wasn’t any help. And I couldn’t get my first serve in.’

‘You let your left shoulder drop,’ said Joan out of the blue.

‘But I serve right-handed,’ I replied rather petulantly.

‘That’s why the left shoulder has to be kept high. Holds you in balance.’

‘I didn’t know you played.’

‘Played? Ha! I used to win the fucking thing. Until my knees went. You need a few lessons, young Master Paul, that’s all. But you’ve got good hands.’

‘Look – he’s blushing!’ Susan observed unnecessarily. ‘I’ve never seen him do that before.’

Later, in the car, I say, ‘So what’s Joan’s story? Was she really a good player?’

‘Oh yes. She and Gerald won pretty much everything, up to county level. She was a strong singles player, as you can probably imagine, until her knees let her down. But she was even better at doubles. Having someone to support and be supported by.’

‘I like Joan,’ I say. ‘I like the way she swears.’

‘Yes, that’s what people see and hear, and like or don’t like. Her gin, her cigarettes, her bridge game, her dogs. Her swearing. Don’t underestimate Joan.’

‘I wasn’t,’ I protest. ‘Anyway, she said I had good hands.’

‘Don’t always be joking, Paul.’

‘Well, I am only nineteen, as my parents keep reminding me.’

Susan goes quiet for a bit, then, seeing a lay-by, turns into it and stops the car. She looks ahead through the windscreen.

‘When Gerald died, I wasn’t the only one who was hard hit. Joan was devastated. They’d lost their mother when they were little, and their father had to work every day in that insurance company, so they were thrown into depending on one another. And when Gerald died… she went off the rails a bit. Started sleeping with people.’

‘There’s nothing wrong with that.’

‘There is and there isn’t, Casey Paul. Depends on who you are and who they are. And who’s robust enough to survive. Usually, that’s the man.’

‘Joan seems pretty robust to me.’

‘That’s an act. We all have an act. You’ll have an act one day, oh yes you will. So Joan was a bad picker. And at first it didn’t seem to matter, as long as she didn’t get pregnant or anything like that. And she didn’t. Then she fell like a ton of bricks for… his name doesn’t matter. Married of course, rich of course, other girlfriends of course. Set her up at a flat in Kensington.’

‘Good Lord. Joan was… a kept woman? A… mistress?’ These were words, and sexual functions, I’d only come across in books.

‘Whatever you want to call it. The words don’t fit. They rarely do. What do you call you? What do you call me?’ I don’t reply. ‘And Joan was completely gone on the old bastard. Waiting for his visits, believing his promises, going off on the occasional weekend abroad. He strung her along like that for three years. Then at last, as he’d always promised, he divorced his wife. And Joan thought her ship had come home. She’d proved us all wrong, what’s more. “My ship’s coming home,” she kept repeating.’

‘But it hadn’t?’

‘He married another woman instead. Joan read the announcement in the papers. Piled up all the clothes he’d bought her in the sitting room of the flat, poured lighter fuel over them, lit a match, walked out, slammed the door, put the keys through the letterbox, went back to her father. Turned up on his doorstep. Smelt a bit singed, I expect. Her father didn’t say anything or ask any questions, just hugged her. It took her months even to tell him. The only luck – if there was luck – was that she didn’t set the whole block of flats on fire. Just burnt a hole in an expensive carpet. She could have ended up in prison for manslaughter.

‘After that she took care of her father devotedly. Became interested in dogs. Had a go at breeding them. Learnt how to pass the time. That’s one of the things about life. We’re all just looking for a place of safety. And if you don’t find one, then you have to learn how to pass the time.’

I don’t think this will ever be my problem. Life is just too full and always will be.

‘Poor old Joan,’ I say. ‘I’d never have guessed.’

‘She cheats at crosswords.’

This seems a non sequitur to me.

‘What?’

‘She cheats at crosswords. She does them out of books. She once told me that if she gets stuck, she fills in any old word, as long as it’s the right number of letters.’

‘But that defeats the whole purpose… and anyway, all the answers are in the back of those books.’ I am at a loss, so just repeat, ‘Poor old Joan.’

‘Yes and no. Yes and no. But don’t ever forget, young Master Paul. Everyone has their love story. Everyone. It may have been a fiasco, it may have fizzled out, it may never even have got going, it may have been all in the mind, that doesn’t make it any less real. Sometimes, it makes it more real. Sometimes, you see a couple, and they seem bored witless with one another, and you can’t imagine them having anything in common, or why they’re still living together. But it’s not just habit or complacency or convention or anything like that. It’s because once, they had their love story. Everyone does. It’s the only story.’

I don’t answer. I feel rebuked. Not rebuked by Susan. Rebuked by life.

That evening, I looked at my parents and paid attention to everything they said to one another. I tried to imagine that they too had had their love story. Once upon a time. But I couldn’t get anywhere with that. Then I tried imagining that each had had their love story, but separately, either before marriage or perhaps – even more thrillingly – during it. But I couldn’t make that work either, so I gave up. I found myself wondering instead if, like Joan, I would one day have an act of my own, an act designed to deflect curiosity. Who could tell?

Then I went back and tried to imagine how it might have been for my parents in those years before I had existed. I picture them starting off together, side by side, hand in hand, happy, confident, strolling down some gentle, soft, grassy furrow. All is verdant and the view extensive; there seems to be no hurry. Then, as life proceeds, in its normal, daily, unthreatening way, the furrow very slowly deepens, and the green becomes flecked with brown. A little further on – a decade or two – and the earth is heaped higher on either side, and they are unable to see over the top. And now there is no escape, no turning back. There is only the sky above, and ever-higher walls of brown earth, threatening to entomb them.

Whatever happened, I wasn’t going to be a furrow-dweller. Or a breeder of dogs.

‘What you have to understand is this,’ she says. ‘There were three of us. The boys got the education – that’s how it was. Philip’s took him all the way, but the money for Alec ran out when he was fifteen. Alec was the one I was closest to. Everyone adored Alec, he was just the best. Naturally, he joined up as soon as he could, that’s what the best ones did. The Air Force. He ended up flying Sunderlands. They’re flying boats. They used to go out on long patrols over the Atlantic, looking for U-boats. Thirteen hours at a time. They gave them pills to help them keep going. No, that’s nothing to do with it.

‘So, you see, on his last leave, he took me to supper. Nowhere posh, just a Corner House. And he took my hands in his and said, “Sue darling, they’re complicated beasts, those Sunderlands, and I often don’t think I’m up to it. They’re too bloody complicated, and sometimes, when you’re out there over the water, and it all looks the same, hour after hour, you’ve no idea where you are, and sometimes even the navigator doesn’t either. I always say a prayer at take-off and landing. I don’t believe, but I say a prayer nevertheless. And every time I’m just as bloody scared as the time before. Right, I’ve got that off my chest. Corners up from now on. Corners up in the Corner House.”

‘That was the last time I saw him. He was posted missing three weeks later. They never found a trace of his plane. And I always think of him out there, over the water, being scared.’

I put my arm around her. She shakes it loose, frowningly.

‘No, that’s not all. There always seemed to be these men around. It was wartime and you’d think they’d all be off fighting, but there was a jolly lot of them around at home, I can tell you. The lesser men. So there was Gerald, who couldn’t pass the medical, even though he tried twice, and then Gordon, who was in a reserved occupation, as he liked to say. Gerald was sweet-tempered and nice-looking, and Gordon was a bit of a crosspatch, but anyway I just preferred dancing with Gerald. Then we got engaged, because, well, it was wartime and people did things like that then. I don’t think I was in love with Gerald, but he was a kind man, that’s for sure. And then he went and died of leukaemia. I told you that. It was beastly luck. So I thought I might as well marry Gordon. I thought it might make him less of a crosspatch. And that part of things didn’t work out, as you may have observed.’

‘But—’

‘So, you see, we’re a played-out generation. All the best ones went. We were left with the lesser ones. It’s always like that in war. That’s why it’s up to your generation now.’

But I don’t feel part of a generation, for a start; and, moved as I am by her story, her history, her pre-history, I still don’t want to go into politics.

We were driving somewhere in my car, a Morris Minor convertible in a shade of mud-green. Susan said it looked like a very low-level German staff car from the war. We were at the foot of a long hill, with no traffic in sight. I was never a reckless driver, but I pushed hard down on the accelerator pedal to get a good run at the gradient. And after about fifty yards I realized something was seriously wrong. The car was accelerating at full throttle, even though I’d now taken my foot off the pedal. Instinctively, I rammed it on the brake. That didn’t help much. I was doing two things at the same time: panicking, and thinking clearly. Don’t ever believe those two states are incompatible. The engine was roaring, the brakes were screaming, the car was beginning to slew across the road, we were going between forty and fifty. It never occurred to me to ask Susan what to do. I thought, this is my problem, I’ve got to fix it. And then it came to me: take the car out of gear. So I put in the clutch, and moved the gear stick to neutral. The car’s hysteria decreased and we coasted to a halt on the verge.

‘Well done, Casey Paul,’ she says. Giving me both names was usually a sign of approval.

‘I should have thought of that earlier. Actually, I should have just switched off the bloody ignition. That would have done it. But it didn’t cross my mind.’

‘I think there’s a garage over the hill,’ she says, getting out, as if such an event were entirely routine.

‘Were you scared?’

‘No. I knew you’d sort it out, whatever it was. I always feel safe with you.’

I remember her saying that, and me feeling proud. But I also remember the feel of the car as it raced out of control, as it resisted the brakes, as it bucked and slewed across the road.

I must tell you about her teeth. Well, two of them, anyway. The middle front ones at the top. She called them her ‘rabbit teeth’ because they were perhaps a millimetre longer than the strict national average; but that, to me, made them the more special. I used to tap them lightly with my middle finger, checking that they were there, and secure, just as she was. It was a little ritual, as if I was taking an inventory of her.

Everyone in the Village, every grown-up – or rather, every middle-aged person – seemed to do crosswords: my parents, their friends, Joan, Gordon Macleod. Everyone apart from Susan. They did either The Times or the Telegraph; though Joan had those books of hers to fall back on while waiting for the next newspaper. I regarded this traditional British activity with some snootiness. I was keen in those days to find hidden motives – preferably involving hypocrisy – behind the obvious ones. Clearly, this supposedly harmless pastime was about more than solving cryptic clues and filling in the answers. My analysis identified the following elements: 1) the desire to reduce the chaos of the universe to a small, comprehensible grid of black-and-white squares; 2) the underlying belief that everything in life could, in the end, be solved; 3) the confirmation that existence was essentially a ludic activity; and 4) the hope that this activity would keep at bay the existential pain of our brief sublunary transit from birth to death. That seemed to cover it!

One evening, Gordon Macleod looked up from behind a cigarette smokescreen and asked,

‘Town in Somerset, seven letters, ends in N.’

I thought about this for a while. ‘Swindon?’

He made a tolerant tut-tut. ‘Swindon’s in Wiltshire.’

‘Is it really? That’s a surprise. Have you ever been there?’

‘Whether I have or not is hardly relevant to the business in hand,’ he replied. ‘Look at it on the page. That might help.’

I went and sat next to him. Seeing a line-up of six blank spaces followed by an ‘N’ didn’t help me any the more.

‘Taunton,’ he announced, putting in the answer. I noticed the eccentric way he did his capital letters, lifting the pen from the page to make each stroke. Whereas anyone else would produce an N from two applications of pen to paper, he made three.

‘Continue mocking Somerset town. That was the clue.’

I thought about this, not very hard, admittedly.

‘Taunt on – continue mocking. Taunt on – TAUNTON. Get it, young fellermelad?’

‘Oh, I see,’ I said nodding. ‘That’s clever.’

I didn’t mean it, of course. I was also thinking that Macleod must certainly have got the answer before he asked me. So then I added an extra clause to my analysis of the crossword – or, as Macleod preferred to call it, the Puzzle. 3b) false confirmation that you are more intelligent than some give you credit for.

‘Does Mrs Macleod do the crossword?’ I asked, already knowing the answer. Two could play at this game, I thought.

‘The Puzzle,’ he replied with some archness, ‘is not really a female domain.’

‘My mum does the crossword with my dad. Joan does the crossword.’

He lowered his chin and looked at me over his spectacles.

‘Then let us posit, perhaps, that the Puzzle is not the domain of the womanly woman. What do you say to that?’

‘I’d say I don’t have enough experience of life to come to a conclusion on that one.’ Though inwardly I was reflecting on the phrase ‘womanly woman’. Was it uxorious praise, or some kind of disguised insult?

‘So that gives us an O in the middle of 12 down,’ he went on. Suddenly there was an ‘us’ involved.

I gazed at the clue. Something about an arbiter in work and a leaf.

‘TREFOIL,’ Macleod muttered, writing it in, three strokes of his pen on the R, where others would construct it from two. ‘You see, it’s REF – arbiter – in the middle of TOIL – work.’

‘That’s clever too,’ I falsely enthused.

‘Standard. Had it before a few times,’ he added with a touch of complacency.

2b) the further belief that once you have solved something in life, you will be able to solve it again, and the solution will be exactly the same the second time around, thus offering assurance that you have reached a pitch of maturity and wisdom.

Macleod decided, without my asking, to teach me the ins and outs of the Puzzle. Anagrams, and how to spot them; words hidden inside other combinations of words; setters’ shorthand and their favourite tricks; common abbreviations, letters and words drawn from chess annotation, military ranks, and so on; how a word may be written upwards in the solution to a down clue, or backwards in an across clue. ‘“Running west”, you see, that’s the giveaway.’

Correction to 4). To begin: ‘the hope that this arse-bendingly boring activity would keep…’

Later, I tried making an anagram out of WOMANLY WOMAN. I didn’t get anywhere, of course. WANLY MOWN LOOM and other bits of nonsense were all I turned up.

Further addition: 1a) a successful means of taking your mind off the question of love, which is all that counts in the world.

Nonetheless, I continued to keep Macleod company while he puffed away at his Players and filled his grids with strangely mechanical pen strokes. He seemed to enjoy explaining clues to me, and took my occasional half-meant whistles and grunts as applause.

‘We’ll make a Puzzle-solver of him yet,’ he remarked to Susan over supper one evening.

Sometimes, we did things together, he and I. Nothing major, or for a long time, anyway. He asked me for my help with some rope-and-pin instrument in the garden, designed to ensure that the cabbages he was planting out were in regimental lines. A couple of times, we listened to a test match on the radio. Once, he took me with him to fill up the car with what he referred to as ‘petroleum’. I asked which garage he was intending to patronise. The nearest, he told me, unsurprisingly. I told him that I had done an analysis of price versus distance in the matter of Joan’s gin, and what my findings had been.

‘How incredibly boring,’ he commented, and then smiled at me.

I realized that I had seen his eyes on more than one occasion recently. Whereas Susan hadn’t seen them in years. Maybe she was exaggerating. Or maybe she hadn’t been looking too hard in the first place.

NOW ONLY MMWAA… no, that wasn’t any good either.

Here is something I often thought at this time: I’ve been educated at school and university, and yet, in real terms, I know nothing. Susan barely went to school, but she knows so much more. I’ve got the book-learning, she’s got the life-learning.

Not that I always agreed with her. When she was talking about Joan, she’d said: ‘We’re all just looking for a place of safety.’ I pondered these words for a while afterwards. The conclusion I came to was this: maybe so, but I’m young, I’m ‘only nineteen’, and I’m more interested in looking for a place of danger.

Like Susan, I had euphemistic phrases to describe our relationship. We just seem to have this rapport across the generations. She’s my tennis partner. We both like music and go up to London for concerts. Also, art exhibitions. Oh, I don’t know, we just get on somehow. I have no idea who believed what, and who knew what, and how much my pride made it all flauntingly obvious. Nowadays, at the other end of life, I have a rule of thumb about whether or not two people are having an affair: if you think they might be, then they definitely are. But this was decades ago, and perhaps, back then, the couples you thought might be, mainly weren’t.

And then there were the daughters. I wasn’t much at ease with girls at that time of my life, neither the ones I met at university, nor the Carolines at the tennis club. I didn’t understand that they were mostly just as nervous as I was about… the whole caboodle. And while boys were good at coming up with their own, home-made bullshit, girls, in their understanding of the world, often seemed to fall back on The Wisdom of Their Mothers. You could sniff the inauthenticity when a girl – knowing no more than you did about anything – said something like: ‘Everyone’s got twenty–twenty vision with hindsight.’ A line which could have issued word for word from the mouth of my mother. Another piece of appropriated maternal wisdom I remember from this time was this: ‘If you lower your expectations, you can’t be disappointed.’ This struck me as a dismal approach to life, whether for a forty-five-year-old mother or a twenty-year-old daughter.

But anyway: Martha and Clara. Miss G and Miss NS. Miss Grumpy and Miss Not So (Grumpy). Martha was like her mother physically, tall and pretty, but with something of her father’s querulous temperament. Clara was plump and round, but entirely more equable. Miss Grumpy disapproved of me; Miss Not So was friendly, even interested. Miss Grumpy said things like, ‘Haven’t you got a home of your own to go to?’ Miss Not So would ask what I was reading and once, even, showed me some poetry she’d written. But I wasn’t much of a judge of poetry, then or now, so my response probably disappointed her. This was my preliminary assessment, for what it was worth.

If I was uneasy with girls generally, I was the more so with ones who were a bit older than me, let alone ones whose mother I was in love with. This awkwardness of mine seemed to emphasize the insouciance with which they moved about their own house, appeared, disappeared, spoke or failed to speak. My reaction to this was possibly a bit crude, but I decided to be no more interested in them than they were in me. This seemed to amount to less than a passing five per cent. Which was fine by me, because more than ninety-five per cent of my interest was in Susan.

Since Martha disapproved of me the more, it was to her, in a spirit of either challenge or perversity, that I said:

‘I think I should explain. Susan’s a kind of mother-substitute for me.’

No, it wasn’t very good, in any way. It probably sounded false, a slimy attempt at ingratiation. Martha took her time about replying, and her tone was acerbic.

‘I don’t need one, I’ve already got a mother.’

Did I mean any part of my lie? I can’t believe that I did. Strange as it may seem, I never reflected on our age difference. Age felt as irrelevant as money. Susan never seemed a member of my parents’ generation – ‘played-out’ or not. She never pulled any sort of rank on me, never said, ‘Ah, when you’re a bit older, you’ll understand’ and stuff like that. It was only my parents who harped on about my immaturity.

Aha, you might say, but surely the fact that you told her own daughter that for you she was a mother-substitute is a complete giveaway? You may claim it was insincere, but don’t we all make jokes to allay our inner fears? She was almost exactly the same age as your mother, and you went to bed with her. So?

So. I see where you’re going – bus number 27 to a crossroads near Delphi. Look, I did not want, at any point, on any level, to kill my own father and sleep with my own mother. It’s true that I wanted to sleep with Susan – and did so many times – and for a number of years thought of killing Gordon Macleod, but that is another part of the story. Not to put too fine a point on it, I think the Oedipus myth is precisely what it started off as: melodrama rather than psychology. In all my years of life I’ve never met anyone to whom it might apply.

You think I’m being naive? You wish to point out that human motivation is deviously buried, and hides its mysterious workings from those who blindly submit to it? Perhaps so. But even – especially – Oedipus didn’t want to kill his father and sleep with his mother, did he? Oh yes he did! Oh no he didn’t! Yes, let’s just leave it as a pantomime exchange.

Not that pre-history doesn’t matter. Indeed, I think pre-history is central to all relationships.

But I’d much rather tell you about her ears. I missed my first sight of them at the tennis club, when she had her hair pulled back by that green ribbon which matched the piping and buttons of her dress. And normally, she wore her hair down, curling over her ears and descending to mid-neck. So it wasn’t until we were in bed and I was rummaging and rootling around her body, into every nook and cranny, every over-examined and under-examined part of her, that, crouched above, I swept back her hair and discovered her ears.

I’d never thought much about ears before, except as comic excrescences. Good ears were ears you didn’t notice; bad ears stuck out like batwings, or were cauliflowered from a boxer’s punch, or – like those of that furious driver at the zebra crossing – were coarse and red and hairy. But her ears, ah, her ears… from the discreet, almost absent lobe they set off northwards at a gentle angle, but then at the mid-point turned back at the same angle to return to her skull. It was as if they had been designed according to aesthetic principle rather than the rules of auditory practicality.

When I point this out to her, she says, ‘It’s probably so all that rubbish scoots past them and doesn’t go inside.’

But there was more. As I explored them with the tips of my fingers, I discovered the delicacy of their outer rim: thin, warm, gentle, almost translucent. Do you know the word for that outermost whorl of the ear? It’s called the helix. Plural: helices. Her ears were part of her absolute distinctiveness, expressions of her DNA. The double helix of her double helices.

Later, turning my mind to what she might have meant by the ‘rubbish’ that scooted past her astonishing ears, I thought: well, being accused of frigidity, that’s a major piece of rubbish. Except that this word had gone straight into her ears and thence her brain and was lodged there, permanently.

As I said, money had no more relevance to our relationship than age. So it didn’t matter that she paid for things. I had none of that foolish masculine pride in such circumstances. Perhaps I even felt my lack of money made my love for Susan the more virtuous.

After a few months – maybe longer – she announces that I need a running-away fund.

‘What for?’

‘For running away. Everyone should have a running-away fund.’ Just as every young man should have a reputation. Where had this latest idea come from? A Nancy Mitford novel?

‘But I don’t want to run away. Who from? My parents? I’ve more or less left them anyway. Mentally. You? Why should I want to run away from you? I want you to be in my life for ever.’

‘That’s very sweet of you, Paul. But it’s not a specific fund, you see. It’s a sort of general fund. Because at some point everyone wants to run away from their life. It’s about the only thing human beings have in common.’

This is all way above my head. The only running away I might contemplate is running away with her rather than from her.

A few days later, she gives me a cheque for £500. My car had cost me £25; I lived for a term at university on under £100. The sum seemed both very large and also meaningless. I didn’t even think it ‘generous’. I had no principles about money, either for or against. And it was entirely irrelevant to our relationship – that much I knew. So when I got back to Sussex, I went into town, opened a deposit account at the first bank I came to, handed over the cheque and forgot about it.

There’s something I probably should have clarified earlier. I may be making my relationship with Susan sound like a sweet summer interlude. That’s what the stereotype insists, after all. There is a sexual and emotional initiation, a lush passage of treats and pleasures and spoilings, then the woman, with a pang but also a sense of honour, releases the young man back into the wider world and younger bodies of his own generation. But I’ve already told you that it wasn’t like this.

We were together – and I mean together – for ten or a dozen years, depending on where you start and stop counting. And those years happened to coincide with what the newspapers liked to call the Sexual Revolution: a time of omni-fucking – or so we were led to believe – of instant pleasures, and loose, guilt-free liaisons, when deep lust and emotional lightness became the order of the day. So you could say that my relationship with Susan proved as offensive to the new norms as to the old ones.

I remember her, one afternoon, wearing a print dress with flowers on it, going over to a chintz sofa and plumping herself down on it.

‘Look, Casey Paul! I’m disappearing! I’m doing my disappearing act! There’s nobody here!’

I look. It is half-true. Her stockinged legs show clearly, as do her head and neck, but all the middle parts are suddenly camouflaged.

‘Wouldn’t you like that, Casey Paul? If we could just disappear and nobody could see us?’

I don’t know how serious, or how merely skittish, she is being. So I don’t know how to react. Looking back, I think I was a very literal young man.

I told Eric that I had met this family and fallen in love. I described the Macleods, their house and their way of life, relishing my characterizations. It was the first grown-up thing that had happened to me, I told him.

‘So which of the daughters have you fallen in love with?’ Eric asked.

‘No, not one of the daughters, the mother.’

‘Ah, the mother,’ he said. ‘We like that,’ he added, giving me marks for originality.

One day, I notice a dark bruise on her upper arm, just below where the sleeve of her dress ends. It is the size of a large thumbprint.

‘What’s that?’ I ask.

‘Oh,’ she says carelessly, ‘I must have knocked it against something. I bruise easily.’

Of course she does, I think. Because she’s sensitive, like me. Of course the world can hurt us. That’s why we must look after one another.

‘You don’t bruise when I hold your wrists.’

‘I don’t think the wrists bruise, do they?’

‘Not if I’m holding you.’

The fact that she was ‘old enough to be my mother’ did not go down well with my mother. Nor my father; nor her husband; nor her daughters; nor the Archbishop of Canterbury – not that he was a family friend. I cared no more about approval than I did about money. Though disapproval, whether active or theoretical, ignorant or informed, did nothing but inflame, corroborate and justify my love.

I had no new definition of love. I didn’t really examine what it was, and what it might entail. I merely submitted to first love in all its aspects, from butterfly kisses to absolutism. Nothing else mattered. Of course there was ‘the rest of my life’, both present (my degree course) and future (job, salary, social position, retirement, pension, death). You could say that I put this part of my life on hold. Except that’s not right: she was my life, and the rest wasn’t. Everything else could and must be sacrificed, with or without thought, as and when necessary. Though ‘sacrifice’ implies loss. I never felt a sense of loss. Church and state, they say, church and state. No difficulty there. Church first, church always – though not in a sense the Archbishop of Canterbury would have understood it.

I wasn’t so much constructing my own idea of love as first doing the necessary rubble-clearance. Most of what I’d read, or been taught, about love, didn’t seem to apply, from playground rumour to high-minded literary speculation. ‘Man’s love is of man’s life a thing apart/’Tis woman’s whole existence.’ How wrong – how gender-biased, as we might now say – was that? And then, at the other end of the spectrum, came the earthy sex-wisdom exchanged between profoundly ignorant if yearningly lustful schoolboys. ‘You don’t look at the mantlepiece while poking the fire.’ Where had that come from? Some bestial dystopia full of nocturnal, myopic grunting?

But I wanted her face there all the time: her eyes, her mouth, her precious ears with their elegant helices, her smile, her whispered words. So: I would be flat on my back, she would be lying on top of me, her feet slipped between mine, and she would place the tip of her nose against the tip of mine, and say,

‘Now we see eye to eye.’

Put it another way. I was nineteen, and I knew that love was incorruptible, proof against both time and tarnish.

I have a sudden attack of – what? – fear, propriety, unselfishness? I say to her, thinking she will know more,

‘You see, I haven’t been in love before, so I don’t understand about love. What I’m worried about is that, if you love me, it will leave you less for the other people you love.’

I don’t name them. I meant her daughters; and perhaps even her husband.

‘It’s not like that,’ she answers at once, as if it is something she too has thought about, and has solved. ‘Love’s elastic. It’s not a question of watering down. It adds on. It doesn’t take away. So there’s no need to worry about that.’

So I didn’t.

‘There’s something I need to explain,’ she begins. ‘E.P.’s father was a very nice man. He was a doctor. He collected furniture. Some of these things were his.’ She points vaguely at a heavy oak coffer and a grandfather clock I have never yet heard strike the hour. ‘He actually hoped E.P. would become a painter, so he gave him the middle name of Rubens. Which was a bit unfortunate because some of the boys at school assumed he must be Jewish. Anyway, he did the usual schoolboy sketches, which everyone said were promising. But he never became more than promising, so was a disappointment to his father in that department. Jack – the father – was always very kind to me. He used to twinkle at me.’

‘I can’t say I blame him for that.’ I wonder what might be coming next. Surely not some intergenerational imbroglio?

‘We’d only been married a couple of years when Jack got cancer. I’d always thought he would be someone I could go to if I got in any trouble, and now he was going to be taken from me. I used to go and sit with him, but I would get so upset that it usually ended up with him consoling me rather than the other way round. I asked him once what he thought about it all, and he said, “Of course I’d prefer it otherwise, but I can’t complain that I haven’t had a fair crack of the whip.” He liked me being with him, maybe because I was young and didn’t know very much, and so I stayed there till the end.

‘That day – the last day – the doctor – the one looking after him, who was a good friend as well – came in and said quietly, “It’s time to put you under, Jack.” “You’re right,” came the reply. He’d been in terrible pain for too long, you see. Then Jack turned to me and said, “I’m sorry our acquaintance has been so brief, my dear. It’s been wonderful knowing you. I’m aware that Gordon can be a difficult row to hoe, but I’ll die happy knowing that I leave him in your safe and capable hands.” And then I kissed him and left the room.’

‘You mean, the doctor killed him?’

‘He gave him enough morphine to put him to sleep, yes.’

‘But he didn’t wake up?’

‘No. Doctors used to do that in the old days, especially among themselves. Or with a patient they’d known a long time, where there was trust. Easing the suffering is a good idea. It’s a terrible disease.’

‘Even so. I’m not sure I’d want to be killed.’

‘Well, wait and see, Paul. But that’s not the point of the story.’

‘Sorry.’

‘The point of the story is “safe and capable”.’

I think about this for a while. ‘Yes, I see.’ But I’m not sure that I did.

‘Where do you usually go for your holidays?’ I ask.

‘Paul, that’s such a hairdresser’s question.’

In reply, I lean over and tuck her hair behind her ears, stroking the helices gently.

‘Oh dear,’ she goes on. ‘All these conventional expectations people have of one. No, not you, Casey Paul. I mean, why does everyone have to be the same? We did have a few holidays once, when the girls were young. About as successful as the Dieppe Raid, I’d say. E.P. was not at his best on holidays. I don’t see what they’re for, really.’

I wonder if I shouldn’t press any further. Perhaps something catastrophic had happened on one of their holidays.

‘So what do you say when hairdressers ask you that question?’

‘I say, “We’re still going to the usual place.” And that makes them think we’ve talked about it before and they’ve forgotten, so they usually let me off after that.’

‘Maybe you and I should have a holiday.’

‘You might have to teach me what they’re for.’

‘What they’re for,’ I say firmly, ‘is for being with someone you love a few hundred miles away from this sodding Village where we both live. Being with them all the time. Going to bed with them and waking up with them.’

‘Well, put like that, Casey…’

So you see, there were some things I knew and she didn’t.

We are sitting in the cafeteria of the Festival Hall before a concert. Susan has noticed early on that when my blood sugar drops I become, in her words, ‘a bit of a grumpus’, and she is now feeding me up to prevent this. I am probably having a something-and-chips; she will content herself with a cup of coffee and a few biscuits. I love these escapes we make up to London, just for a few hours, being together, away from the Village, from my parents and her husband and all that stuff, in the noise and crush of the city, waiting for the silence and then the sudden floatingness of music.

I am about to say all this when a woman comes and sits at our table without a pretence of asking if we mind. A woman of middle age, by herself; that is all she was, though in memory I might have translated her into some version of my mother – at any rate, a woman who could be counted upon to disapprove of my relationship with Susan. And so, after a couple of minutes, knowing exactly what I am doing, I look across and say to Susan, in a clear, exact voice,

‘Will you marry me?’

She blushes, covers her ears and bites her lower lip. With a bang and a push and a stomp, the invader picks up her cup and makes for another table.

‘Oh, Casey Paul,’ says Susan, ‘you are mighty wicked.’

I was having supper at the Macleods’. Clara was there too, back from university. Macleod was at the head of the table with his flagon of whatever, a mugful of spring onions in front of him like a jar of tulips.

‘You might be aware,’ he said to Clara, ‘that this young man appears to have joined our household. So be it.’

I couldn’t tell from his tone whether he was being pedantically welcoming or slyly indicating his disdain. I looked across at Clara, but got no help with interpretation.

‘Well, we shall see, shan’t we?’ he continued, appearing to contradict his first pronouncement. He took in a mouthful of spring onion and shortly afterwards burped gently.

‘One of the things the young man is kindly, if belatedly, addressing is the question of your mother’s musical education. Or, should I say, lack thereof.’

Then, turning to me: ‘Clara was named after Clara Schumann, which was perhaps a little ambitious on our part. She has never, alas, displayed much aptitude for the pianoforte, has she?’

I couldn’t tell if the question was addressed to mother or daughter. As for me, I had never heard of Clara Schumann, so felt at even more of a disadvantage.

‘Maybe, if your mother had begun her musical education earlier, she might have been able to pass on to you some of her now late-flowering enthusiasm.’

I had never before been in a household in which the male presence was so overbearing and yet so ambiguous. Perhaps this happens when there is only one man around: his understanding of the male role can expand unchallenged. Or perhaps this was just what Gordon Macleod was like.

Still, my inability to grasp tone was a lesser matter that evening. The greater problem was that, at nineteen, I was unskilled at knowing how to behave socially at the table of a man whose wife I was in love with.

Dinner and conversation proceeded. Susan seemed half-absent; Clara was quiet. I asked a few polite questions and answered some rather more direct ones in return. As I had told the tennis club’s high representatives, I had absolutely no interest in politics; though I did follow current events. So this would have been a few years after the Sharpeville massacre, to which I must have alluded; and doubtless my words contained some element of pious condemnation. Well, I did think it was wrong to massacre people.

‘Do you even know where Sharpeville is?’ The Head of the Table had evidently identified me as a mewling pinko.

‘It’s in South Africa,’ I replied. But as I did so, I suddenly wondered if this was a trick question. ‘Or Rhodesia,’ I added; then thought again. ‘No, South Africa.’

‘Very good. And what is your considered judgement on the political scene there?’

I said something about being against shooting people.

‘And what might you advise the police forces of the world to do when confronted with a rioting mob of Communists?’

I hated the way adults asked you questions in a way which implied that they already knew the answer you were going to give, and that it would always be a wrong or stupid one. So I said something, perhaps facetious, to the effect that just because they were dead, this didn’t prove they were Communists.

‘Have you ever been to South Africa?’ Macleod roared at me.

Susan stirred at this point. ‘We’ve none of us been to South Africa.’

‘True, but I think I know more about the situation there than the two of you put together.’ It seemed that Clara was excused from complicity in ignorance. ‘If we were to pile his knowledge on top of your knowledge – Pelion on Ossa, as it were – it still wouldn’t amount to a hill of beans.’

The long silence was broken by Susan asking if anyone wanted any more to eat.

‘Have you got any beans, Mrs Macleod?’

Yes, I could be a cheeky bastard, I now realize. Well, I was only nineteen. I hadn’t a clue who or what Pelion and Ossa might be; I was more struck by the notion of piling my knowledge on top of Susan’s. That was what lovers did, after all: they added to one another’s understanding of the world. Also, to ‘know’ someone, in the Bible anyway, meant to have sex with them. So I had already piled my knowledge on top of hers. Even if it didn’t amount to more than a hill of beans. However tall a hill of beans might be.

She told me that her father had been a Christian Science practitioner with many adoring female acolytes. She told me that her brother who had disappeared in the war had gone to a prostitute a few weeks before his last flight because he wanted to ‘find out what it was all about’. She told me that she couldn’t swim because she had heavy bones. Things like this tumbled out of her in no particular order, and in response to no particular enquiry on my part, other than the tacit one of wanting to know everything about her. So she laid them out, as if expecting me to make sense, to make order, of her life, and of her heart.

‘Things aren’t what they look like, Paul. That’s about the only lesson I can teach you.’

I wonder if she is talking about the sham of respectability, the sham of marriage, the sham of suburbia, or… but she carries on.

‘Winston Churchill, did I tell you about seeing him?’

‘You mean, you went to Number Ten?’

‘Silly, no. I saw him in a back street in Aylesbury. What was I doing there? Not that it matters. He was sitting in the rear seat of an open-topped car. And his face was all covered in make-up. Red lips, bright pink face. He looked bizarre.’

‘You’re sure it was Churchill? I didn’t realize he was…’

‘…one of them? No, it’s nothing like that, Paul, You see, they were waiting to drive him through the city centre – it was after we won the war, or maybe it was the General Election, and he was made up for the cameras. Pathé News and all that.’

‘How weird.’

‘It was. So quite a few people saw this strange painted mannequin in the flesh, but far more saw him on the newsreels, when he looked like they expected him to.’

I think about this for a while. It strikes me as a comic incident, rather than a general principle of life. Anyway, my interests are elsewhere.

‘But you’re what you look like, aren’t you? You’re exactly what you look like?’

She kisses me. ‘I hope so, my fine and feathered friend. I hope so for both our sakes.’

I used to prowl the Macleod house, part anthropologist, part sociologist, wholly lover. At first I naturally compared it to my parents’ house, which I therefore found wanting. Here there was style, and ease, and none of that absurd house-pride. My parents had better, more up-to-date kitchen equipment, but I gave them no credit for this; nor for the fact that their car was cleaner, their gutters recently sluiced, their soffits regularly painted, their bathroom taps buffed to a shine, their lavatory seats hygienically plastic rather than warmingly wooden. In our house, the television was taken seriously, and stood centrally; at the Macleods’, they called it the goggle-box and hid it behind a firescreen. They owned no such thing as a fitted carpet or a fitted kitchen, let alone a three-piece suite or a bathroom set in matching colours. Their garage was so full of tools, discarded sports equipment, gardening implements, old motor mowers (one working) and unwanted furniture that there was no room in it for the Austin. At first all this seemed stylish and idiosyncratic. I was initially seduced, then slowly disenchanted. My soul no more belonged in a place like this than in my parents’ house.

And, more importantly, I believed that Susan didn’t belong here either. It was something I felt instinctively, and only understood much later, over time. Nowadays, when more than half the country’s children are born out of wedlock (wed-lock: I’ve never noticed the two parts of that term before), it’s not so much marriage that ties couples together as the shared occupation of property. A house or a flat can be as beguiling a trap as a wedding certificate; sometimes more so. Property announces a way of life, with a subtle insistence on that way of life continuing. Property also demands constant attention and maintenance: it’s like a physical manifestation of the marriage that exists within it.

But I could see, all too well, that Susan had not been the recipient of constant attention and maintenance. And I’m not talking about sex. Or not just.

Here’s something I need to explain. In all the time Susan and I were lovers, I never thought that we were ‘deceiving’ Gordon Macleod, Mr E.P. I never thought of him as being represented by that peculiar old word ‘cuckold’. Obviously, I didn’t want him to know. But I thought that what took place between Susan and me had nothing to do with him; he was irrelevant to it all. Nor did I have any contempt for him, any young-buck superiority because I was sexually active with his wife and he wasn’t. You may think this is just a normal lover’s normal self-delusion; but I don’t agree. Even when things… changed, and I felt differently about him, this aspect didn’t change. He had nothing to do with us, do you see?

Susan, perhaps thinking that I was undervaluing her friend Joan, had told me, in a gently admonitory tone, that everyone had their own love story. I was happy to accept this, happy for everyone else to be or have been blessed, even if confident that they couldn’t possibly be as blessed as I was. But at the same time, I didn’t want Susan to tell me whether she had had her love story with Gerald, or with Gordon, or was having it with me. Whether there were one, two or three stories to her life.

I am round at the Macleods’ one evening. It is getting late. Macleod has already gone to bed, and is snoring away his flagons and his gallons. She and I are on the sofa; we have been listening to some music we recently heard at the Festival Hall. I look at her in a way which makes my attentions and desires plain.

‘No, Casey. Kiss me hardly.’

So I kiss her hardly, just a brush on the lips, nothing to raise her colour. We hold hands instead.

‘I wish I didn’t have to go home,’ I say self-pityingly. ‘I hate home.’

‘Then why do you call it home?’

I haven’t thought of this.

‘Anyway, I wish I could stay here.’

‘You could always pitch a tent in the garden. I’m sure there’s some spare tarpaulin in the garage.’

‘You know what I mean.’

‘I know exactly what you mean.’

‘I could always climb out of a window afterwards.’

‘And be arrested for burglary by a passing copper? That would land us in the Advertiser & Gazette.’ She paused. ‘I suppose…’

‘Yes?’ I hope she is coming up with a master plan.

‘This thing actually turns into a sofa bed. We could put you up here. If E.P. finds you before he goes to work, we’ll say—’

But just at that moment the phone rings. Susan picks it up, listens, looks at me, says ‘Yes’, pulls a solemn face and places her hand over the mouthpiece.

‘It’s for you.’

It is, of course, my mother, demanding to know where I am, which I find an otiose question, given that my current address would be right next to the number in the phone book which she must have just consulted. Also, she wants to know when I shall be back.

‘I’m a bit tired,’ I say. ‘So I’m staying here on the sofa bed.’

My mother has recently had to put up with a certain amount of insolent lying from me; but insolent truth-telling is pushing things too far.

‘You’ll be doing no such thing. I’ll be outside in six minutes.’ And then she puts the phone down.

‘She’ll be outside in six minutes.’

‘Lawks-a-mercy,’ says Susan. ‘Do you think I should offer her a glass of sherry?’

We giggle away the next five-and-three-quarter minutes until we hear a car out in the road.

‘Off you go now, you dirty stop-out,’ she whispers.

My mother was behind the wheel in her pink dressing gown over her pink nightdress. I didn’t check to see if she was driving in bedroom slippers. She was halfway down a cigarette, and before putting the car into gear, flicked the glowing stub out on to the Macleods’ driveway.

I got in, and as we drove my mood switched from pert indifference to furious humiliation. An English silence – one in which all the unspoken words are perfectly understood by both parties – prevailed. I got into my bed and wept. The matter was never referred to again.

Susan’s innocence was the more surprising because she never tried to hide it. I’m not sure she ever tried to hide anything – it was against her nature. Later – well, what came later, came later.

But, for instance – and I can’t remember how the subject came up – she once said that she wouldn’t necessarily have gone to bed with me if it hadn’t been for the known fact that it was bad for a man not to have ‘sexual release’. This is all that remains of the words spoken between us, that simple phrase.

Perhaps it was more ignorance than innocence. Or call it folk wisdom; or patriarchal propaganda. And it set me wondering. Did this mean that she didn’t desire me as much as I desired her – constantly, naggingly, utterly? That sex for her meant something different? That she was only going to bed with me for therapeutic reasons, because I might explode like a hot-water cylinder or car radiator if I didn’t have this necessary ‘release’? And was there no equivalent of this in female sexual psychology?

Later, I thought: But if that’s how she imagines male sexuality to operate, what about her husband? Did she never wonder about his need for ‘release’? Unless, of course, she had seen him explode and so realized the consequences. Or perhaps E.P. went to prostitutes in London – or to the front half of some pantomime elephant? Who knew? Perhaps this explained his oddity.

His oddity, her innocence. And of course I didn’t tell her in reply that young men – all young men in my experience – when deprived of female company, didn’t have a problem with ‘sexual release’, for the simple reason that they are, were and always would be wanking away like jack-hammers.

Her innocence, my overconfidence; her naivety, my crassness. I was going back to university. I thought it would be funny to buy her a large fat carrot as a farewell present. It would be a joke; she would laugh; she always laughed when I laughed. I went to a greengrocer’s and decided a parsnip would be funnier. We went for a drive and stopped somewhere. I gave her the parsnip. She didn’t laugh at all, just threw it over her shoulder, and I heard it thump against the back seat of the shooting brake. I have remembered this moment all my life, and though I haven’t blushed for many years, I would blush, if I could, about that.

We managed a brief holiday. I can’t remember what lies we told in order to have a few days of truth together. It must have been out of season. We went somewhere near the south coast. I can’t remember a hotel, so perhaps we rented a flat. What we said, thought, discovered about one another – all gone. I do remember a broad, empty beach somewhere. Perhaps it was Camber Sands. We photographed one another with my camera. I did handstands on the beach for her. She is wearing a coat and the wind is whipping her hair back, and her hands, holding her coat closed at the neck, are enclosed in large, black false-fur gloves. Behind her is a distant row of beach huts, and a one-storey, shuttered café. No one else is in sight. You could, if you wanted, look at these photographs and deduce the season; also, no doubt, the weather. At this distance, both are meaningless to me.

I was wearing a tie, that’s another detail. I had taken off my jacket to do handstands for her. The tie falls straight down the middle of my upturned face, obscuring my nose, dividing me into two halves. Backhand and forehand.

I didn’t get much post in those days. Cards from friends, letters from the university reminding me about stuff, bank statements.

‘Local postmark,’ said my mother, handing me an envelope. The address was typed, and there was a heartening ‘Esq.’ after my name.

‘Thanks, Mum.’

‘Aren’t you going to open it?’

‘I shall, Mum.’

She huffed off.

The letter came from the secretary of the tennis club. He was informing me that my temporary membership had been terminated with immediate effect. Further, that ‘due to the circumstances’, none of the membership fee I had paid was refundable. The ‘circumstances’ were not specified.

Susan and I had arranged to meet at the club for a pick-up foursome. So after lunch I took my racket and sports bag and set off as if for the courts.

‘Was the letter interesting?’ my mother asked impedingly.

I waved my racket in its press.

‘Tennis club. Asking if I want to join on a permanent basis.’

‘That’s gratifying, Paul. They must be pleased with your game.’

‘Sounds like it, doesn’t it?’

I drive to Susan’s house.

‘I got one too,’ she says.

Her letter is much the same as mine, except more strongly worded. Instead of her membership being terminated ‘due to the circumstances’ it is terminated ‘due to the evident circumstances of which you will be fully aware’. The adjusted wording is for Jezebels, for scarlet women.

‘How long have you been a member?’

‘Thirty years, I suppose. Give or take.’

‘I’m sorry. It’s my fault.’

She shakes her head in disagreement.

‘Shall we protest?’

No.

‘I could burn the place down.’

No.

‘Do you think we were spotted somewhere?’

‘Stop asking questions, Paul. I’m thinking.’

I sit down beside her on the chintz sofa. What I don’t like to say, or not immediately, is that part of me finds the news exhilarating. I – we – are a cause of scandal! Love persecuted yet again by small-minded petty officialdom! Our expulsion might not have been an Obstacle on which Passion Thrives, but the moral and social condemnation implicit in the phrase ‘due to the circumstances’ act, to my mind, as an authentication of our love. And who does not want their love authenticated?

‘It’s not as if we were caught snogging in the long grass behind the roller.’

‘Oh, do be quiet, Paul.’

So I sit there quietly, my thoughts noisy. I try to remember cases of boys expelled from my school. One for pouring sugar into the petrol tank of a master’s car. One for getting his girlfriend pregnant. One for being drunk after a cricket match, urinating in a train compartment and then pulling the communication cord. At the time, all this seemed pretty impressive stuff. But my own rule-breaking struck me as thrilling, triumphant, and, most of all, grown-up.

‘Well, now look what the cat’s brought in,’ was Joan’s greeting as she answered the door a few afternoons later. I hadn’t warned her of my visit. ‘Just give me a moment to shut up the yappers.’

The door closed again, and I stood by an elderly boot scraper thinking about the distance that had grown between Susan and me since the tennis club’s dismissal of us. I had let my exhilaration show too clearly, which displeased her. She said that she was still ‘thinking’. I couldn’t see what there was to think about. She told me there were complications I didn’t understand. She told me not to come round until the weekend. I felt downcast, like one awaiting judgement even though no crime that I could see had been committed.

‘Sit yourself down,’ Joan instructed as we reached the fag-fogged, gin-scented den that was nominally her sitting room. ‘You’ll have something to put a few hairs on your chest?’

‘Yes, please.’ I didn’t drink gin – I hated the smell of it, and it made me feel even worse than wine or beer did. But I didn’t want to come across as a prig.

‘Good man.’ She handed me a tumblerful. There was a smear of lipstick at its rim.

‘That’s an awful lot,’ I said.

‘We don’t pour fucking pub measures in this establishment,’ she replied.

I sipped at the thick, oily, lukewarm substance which didn’t smell at all like the juniper berries on the bottle.

Joan lit a cigarette and blew the smoke in my direction as if to nudge me.

‘So?’

‘So. Well. Perhaps you’ve heard about the tennis club.’

‘The Village tom-tom speaks of nothing else. The drumheads have been taking a real pasting.’

‘Yes, I thought you—’

‘Two things, young man. One, I don’t want to know any details. Two, how can I help?’

‘Thank you.’ I was genuinely touched, but also puzzled. How could she help if she didn’t know the details? And what counted as a detail? I thought about this.

‘Come on. What are you here to ask me?’

That was the problem. I didn’t know what I’d come to ask. I somehow thought that what I wanted from Joan would become clear to me when I saw her. Or she would know anyway. But it hadn’t, and she apparently didn’t. I tried to explain this, haltingly. Joan nodded, and let me sip my gin and ponder.

Then she said, ‘Try lobbing me the first question that comes into your head.’

I did so without reflecting. ‘Do you think Susan would leave Mr Macleod?’

‘My, my,’ she said quietly. ‘You are aiming high, young man. That’s a pair of balls you’ve got on you. Talk about one step at a time.’

I grinned inanely at what I took to be a compliment.

‘So have you asked her?’

‘Gosh, no.’

‘And, to start at the beginning, what would you do for money?’

‘I don’t care about money,’ I replied.

‘That’s because you’ve never had to.’

This was true; but not in the sense that I was rich. My state education had been free, I received a council grant to attend university, I lived at home in the holidays. But it was also true that I didn’t care about money – indeed, in my world view, to care about money meant deliberately to turn your eyes away from the most important things in life.

‘If you’re going to be a grown-up,’ said Joan, ‘you’ve got to start thinking about grown-up things. And number one is money.’

I remembered what I’d been told about Joan’s early life – her being a ‘kept woman’ or whatever, living no doubt from cash handouts and rent-payings and gifts of clothes and holidays. Is that what she meant by being grown-up?

‘I suppose Susan’s got some.’

‘Have you asked her?’

‘Gosh, no.’

‘Well, maybe you should.’

‘I’ve got a running-away fund,’ I said defensively, without explaining where it had come from.

‘And how much rattles around in your little piggy bank?’

It was odd how I never took offence at anything Joan said. I just assumed that beneath her brusqueness she was kind-hearted and on my side. But then lovers always assume that people are on their side.

‘Five hundred pounds,’ I said proudly.

‘Yes, well, you could certainly run away on that. It’ll keep you for a few weeks in Le Touquet-Paris-Plage as long as you don’t go near the casino. And then you’ll come running back to England.’

‘I suppose so.’ Even if I’d never thought of Le Touquet-Paris-Plage as a destination. Was that where fleeing lovers went?

‘You’re going back to college next month, aren’t you?’

‘Yes.’

‘And you’re going to keep her in a kitchen cupboard there? A wardrobe?’

‘No.’

I felt stupid and hopeless. No wonder Susan was ‘thinking’ about it all. Was I merely entertaining some romantic notion of flight, a ladder with no steps attached?

‘It’s a bit more complicated than working out how to save me on the gin and the petrol.’

I had been brought solidly down to earth, as Joan no doubt intended.

‘Can I ask you something different?’

‘Off you go.’

‘Why do you cheat at crosswords?’

Joan laughed loudly. ‘You cheeky bugger. I suppose Susan told you. Well, it’s a fair question, and one I can answer.’ She took another pull of her gin. ‘You see – I hope you never get there yourself – but some of us get to the point in life where we realize that nothing matters. Nothing fucking matters. And one of the few side-benefits of that is you know you’re not going to go to hell for filling in the wrong answers in the crossword. Because you’ve been to hell and back already and you know all too well what it’s like.’

‘But the answers are in the back of the book.’

‘Ah, but you see, to me that would be cheating.’

I felt absurdly fond of her. ‘Is there anything I can do for you, Joan?’ I found myself asking.

‘Just don’t cause Susan any harm.’

‘I’d rather cut my own throat,’ I replied.

‘Yes, I think you might even mean that.’ She smiled at me. ‘Now, off with you, and mind your driving. I can see you’re not yet hardened to the gin.’

I was about to put the car into gear when there was a tap at the window. I hadn’t heard her behind me. I wound the window down.

‘Don’t ever care what they say about you,’ Joan said, looking at me intently. ‘For instance, some kindly neighbours assume I’m just a ghastly old lezzer living alone with my dogs. So, a failed lezzer at that. Water off a duck’s back. That’s my advice if you want it.’

‘Thank you for the gin,’ I replied, and released the handbrake.

Joan was demanding that I be grown-up. I was prepared to try if it helped Susan; but I still regarded adulthood with some horror. First, I wasn’t sure that it was attainable. Secondly, even if attainable, I wasn’t sure it was desirable. Thirdly, even if desirable, then only by comparison with childhood and adolescence. What did I dislike and distrust about adulthood? Well, to put it briefly: the sense of entitlement, the sense of superiority, the assumption of knowing better if not best, the vast banality of adult opinions, the way women took out compacts and powdered their noses, the way men sat in armchairs with their legs apart and their privates heavily outlined against their trousers, the way they talked about gardens and gardening, the spectacles they wore and the spectacles they made of themselves, the drinking and the smoking, the terrible phlegmy racket when they coughed, the artificial smells they applied to conceal their animal smells, the way men went bald and women shaped their hair with aerosols of glue, the noxious thought that they might still be having sex, their docile obedience to social norms, their snarky disapproval of anything satirical or questioning, their assumption that their children’s success would be measured by how well they imitated their parents, the suffocating noise they made when agreeing with one another, their comments about the food they cooked and the food they ate, their love of stuff I found disgusting (especially olives, pickled onions, chutneys, piccalilli, horseradish sauce, spring onions, sandwich spread, stinky cheese and Marmite), their emotional complacency, their sense of racial superiority, the way they counted their pennies, the way they hunted for food trapped between their teeth, the way they weren’t interested enough in me, and the way they were too interested in me when I didn’t want them to be. This was just a short list, from which Susan was naturally and entirely exempt.

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.

Whereas it seemed to me, back then, in the absolutism of my condition, that love had nothing to do with practicality; indeed, was its polar opposite. And the fact that it showed contempt for such banal considerations was part of its glory. Love was by its very nature disruptive, cataclysmic; and if it was not, then it was not love.

You might ask how deep my understanding of love was at the age of nineteen. A court of law might find it based on a few books and films, conversations with friends, heady dreams, aching fantasies about certain girls on bicycles, and a quarter-relationship with the first woman I went to bed with. But my nineteen-year-old self would correct the court: ‘understanding’ love is for later, ‘understanding’ love verges on practicality, ‘understanding’ love is for when the heart has cooled. The lover, in rapture, doesn’t want to ‘understand’ love, but to experience it, to feel the intensity, the coming-into-focus of things, the acceleration of life, the entirely justifiable egotism, the lustful cockiness, the joyful rant, the calm seriousness, the hot yearning, the certainty, the simplicity, the complexity, the truth, the truth, the truth of love.

Truth and love, that was my credo. I love her, and I see the truth. It must be that simple.

Were we ‘any good’ at sex? I’ve no idea. We didn’t think about it. Partly because any sex then seemed by definition good sex. But also because we rarely talked about it, either before, during, or after; we did it, believed in it as an expression of our mutual love, even if, physically and mentally, it might have given us different satisfactions. After she had mentioned her supposed frigidity, and I had – from my vast sexual experience – airily dismissed it, the matter was not discussed again. Sometimes, she would murmur, ‘Well played, partner,’ afterwards. Sometimes, more seriously, more anxiously, ‘Please don’t give up on me just yet, Casey Paul.’ I didn’t know what to say to that either.

From time to time – and not in bed, I must point out – she would say, ‘Of course you’ll have girlfriends. And that’s only right and proper.’ But it didn’t seem right, or proper, to me, or even relevant.

On another occasion, she mentioned a number. I can’t remember the context, let alone the number; but I slowly realized that she must be talking about how many times we had made love.

‘You’ve been counting?’

She nodded. Again, I was baffled. Was I meant to have been counting too? And if so, what was I meant to count – the number of times we’d been to bed together, or the number of my orgasms? I wasn’t in the least interested, and I wondered why the notion had crossed her mind. There seemed something fatalistic about it – as if she would have something tangible, calculable, to hold on to if I suddenly wasn’t there. But I wasn’t suddenly going to be not there.

When, once again, she made reference to my future girlfriends, I said, very clearly and firmly, that she would always be in my life: whatever happened, there would always be a place for her.

‘But where would you put me, Casey Paul?’

‘At the very worst, in a well-appointed attic.’

I meant it metaphorically, of course.

‘Like a piece of old lumber?’

I was hating this conversation. ‘No,’ I repeated, ‘you’ll always be there.’

‘In your attic?’

‘No, in my heart.’

I meant it, I truly meant it – both the attic and the heart. All my life.

I didn’t realize that there was panic inside her. How could I have guessed? I thought it was just inside me. Now, I realize, rather late in the day, that it is in everyone. It’s a condition of our mortality. We have codes of manners to allay and minimise it, jokes and routines, and so many forms of diversion and distraction. But there is panic and pandemonium waiting to break out inside all of us, of this I am convinced. I’ve seen it roar out among the dying, as a last protest against the human condition and its chronic sadness. But it is there in the most balanced and rational of us. You just need the right circumstances, and it will surely appear. And then you are at its mercy. The panic takes some to God, others to despair, some to charitable works, others to drink, some to emotional oblivion, others to a life where they hope that nothing serious will ever trouble them again.

Though we were cast out of the tennis club like Adam and Eve, the expected scandal failed to break. There was no denunciation from the pulpit of St Michael’s, no exposure in the Advertiser & Gazette. Mr Macleod seemed oblivious; Misses G and NS were abroad at the time. My parents never mentioned the matter. So by a very English combination of ignorance, true or feigned, and embarrassment, no one – apart from Joan, and that at my invitation – acknowledged the story’s existence. The Village tom-tom might have been beating, but not everyone chose to hear its message. I was both relieved by this and disappointed. Where was the merit, and the joy, in scandalous behaviour if the Village declined to be scandalized except behind closed doors?

But I was relieved, because it meant Susan brought her ‘thinking’ period to an end. In other words, we took a deep breath and started going to bed together again, taking as many risks as before. I stroked her ears and tapped her rabbity teeth. Once, to demonstrate that all was still the same, I sprang up the jutting brickwork on to the porch and through her bedroom window.

And, as it turned out, she had a running-away fund too. With more than five hundred pounds in it.

I keep saying that I was nineteen. But sometimes, in what I’ve told you so far, I was twenty or twenty-one. These events happened over a period of two years and more, usually during my student vacations. In term time, Susan would often come and visit me in Sussex, or I would go up and stay at the Macleods’. Six minutes’ drive from my parents, yet I never told them I was there. I would get off the train at a previous station, and Susan would pick me up in the Austin. I slept on the sofa bed, and Mr Macleod seemed to tolerate my presence. I never went into the Village, though I did occasionally think of burning down the tennis club, just for old times’ sake.

Susan got to know my circle of friends at Sussex – Eric, Ian, Barney and Sam – and from time to time one or more of them would also stay at the Macleods’. Perhaps they were another kind of cover story – at this distance, I can’t remember. They all considered my relationship with Susan an excellent thing. We were on one another’s side when it came to relationships – any relationship, really. They also liked the freewheelingness of Susan’s household. She used to cook big meals, and they liked that too. We always seemed to be hungry back then; also, pathetically incapable of making a meal for ourselves.

One Friday – well, it was probably a Friday – Mr Macleod was chomping on his spring onions, I was playing with my knife and fork and Susan was bringing in the food, when he asked, with more than the usual edge of sarcasm,

‘And how many fancy boys are you providing yourself with this weekend, if I may make so bold as to ask?’

‘Let me see,’ Susan replied, holding the stew dish in front of her as she appeared to ponder, ‘I think it’s just Ian and Eric this weekend. And Paul of course. Unless the others turn up as well.’

I thought this amazingly cool of her. And then we ate dinner normally.

But in the car the next day, I asked her, ‘Does he always call me that? Us that?’

‘Yes. You’re my fancy boy.’

‘I’m not that fancy. I’m a bit penny plain at times, I think.’

But the word hurt. Hurt me for her, you understand. For myself, I didn’t care. No, really: perhaps I was even pleased. To be noticed – even to be insulted – was better than to be ignored. And a young man needed a reputation, after all.

I tried to assemble what I knew about Macleod. I could no longer think of him as Mr E.P. than I could as Old Adam or the Head of the Table. He was called Gordon, though Susan only used that name when speaking of the distant past. He looked a few years older than her, so must have been in his mid-fifties. He worked as a civil servant, though I had no idea in which department, nor was I interested. He hadn’t had sex with his wife for many years, though in the old days, when he was Gordon, he had done so, and two daughters were the proof of this. He had declared his wife frigid. He might, or might not, fancy the front half of a pantomime elephant. He believed that rioting mobs of Communists should be shot by the police or army. His wife hadn’t seen his eyes, or not properly, for many years. He played golf, and hit the ball as if he hated it. He liked Gilbert and Sullivan. He was good at disguising himself as a shabby but efficient gardener; though according to his own father he could be a difficult row to hoe. He didn’t like or take holidays. He liked to drink. He didn’t like going to concerts. He was good at crosswords and had pedantic handwriting. He didn’t have any friends in the Village, except, presumably, at the golf club, a place I had never entered, and had no intention of doing so. He didn’t go to church. He read The Times and the Telegraph. He had been friendly and polite with me, but also sarcastic and rude; mainly, I would say, indifferent. He seemed to be cross with life. And was part of what may or may not have been a played-out generation.

But there was another thing about him, which I felt rather than observed. It seemed to me – I’m sure Macleod wasn’t conscious of it, hadn’t given it a thought – but it felt to me as if he – he in particular – was somehow standing in the way of me growing up. He wasn’t at all like my parents or their friends, but he represented even more than they did the adulthood I regarded with some horror.

A few stray thoughts and memories:

– Shortly after the Sharpeville Incident, Susan reported that Macleod had called me ‘a very acceptable young man’. Desperate for praise, like anyone else of my age, I took it at face value. Perhaps more than that: because he had first shouted at me, then later come to sober judgement, I considered the comment all the more valuable.

– I realize that I had absolutely no notion how the Macleods behaved with one another when I was not there. I was probably too absolutist to give it a thought.

– I also realize that, in comparing the two households, I might have made it sound as if at home we ate peas off a knife while scratching our bottoms. No, we were well brought-up. Our standard of table behaviour was on the whole better than that on display at the Macleods’.

– Also, not all my parents’ friends were as passively disapproving of my generation as I may have portrayed them. Some were actively so. One holiday weekend, we all went over to Sutton for dinner with the Spencers. The wife had known my mother since training college days; the husband was a small, aggressive mining engineer, of Belgian origin, who specialized in locating and appropriating the mineral wealth of Africa on behalf of some international company. It must have been a sunny day (though not necessarily) because, peeking from my top pocket, was a recently acquired pair of mirrored sunglasses. I had bought them from Barney, who specialized in the bulk purchase and import of exotic items for resale to those wishing to quietly demonstrate their essential hipsterdom. He had sourced the glasses from somewhere behind the Iron Curtain – Hungary, I think. Anyway, we had scarcely got out of the car when Mine Tiny Host approached me and, ignoring my outstretched hand, ripped the sunglasses from my pocket with the words, ‘These are a piece of shit.’ Unlike, say, his own cable-knit sweater, corduroy trousers, signet ring and deaf aid.

– She makes a big cake for the Fancy Boys. Big in the sense of wide and long. When the mixture is poured into the tin, it is three-quarters of an inch deep. By the time it comes out of the oven, it has risen slightly to a height of about an inch. There is mixed fruit inside, all of which has sunk to the bottom.

Even I, back then, can recognize that it is not, by average baking standards, a success. But she has a way of making it so.

‘What sort of cake is that, Mrs Macleod?’ asks one of the FBs.

‘It’s an upside-down cake,’ she replies, flipping it over on its wire rack. ‘Look how the fruit has all risen to the top.’

Then she cuts us big slices, which we scoff.

She can probably turn base metal into gold, I think.

– I said how my credo was love and truth; I loved her, and I saw the truth. But I must also admit that this coincided with the period when I lied to my parents more often than before or since. And, to a lesser degree, to almost everybody else I knew. Though not to Joan.

– While I do not analyse my love – the whence, why, whither of it – I do sometimes try, when alone, to think about it lucidly. This is difficult; I have no previous experience, and am quite unprepared for the full engagement of heart and soul and body that being with Susan involves – the intensity of the present, the thrill of the unknown future, the discarding of all the mingy preoccupations of the past.

I lie in bed at home, trying to put feelings into words. On the one hand – and this is the part to do with the past – love feels like the vast and sudden easing of a lifelong frown. But simultaneously – this is the part to do with the present and the future – it feels as if the lungs of my soul have been inflated with pure oxygen. I only think like this when alone, of course. When I am with Susan, I’m not thinking what it’s like to love her; I’m just being with her. And maybe that ‘being with her’ is impossible to put into any other words.

Susan never minded my solo visits to Joan; she wasn’t possessive about one of the few friends her marriage seemed to permit. I came to enjoy the mugfuls of cut-price gin; after a while, Joan allowed the yappers in, and I got used to the distraction of Yorkshire terriers grazing on my shoelaces.

‘We’re leaving,’ I told her one July afternoon.

‘We? You and I? Where are we going, young Master Paul? Do you have your belongings tied up in a red-spotted handkerchief on a stick?’

I should have known she wouldn’t let me get away with earnestness.

‘Susan and I. We’re off.’

‘Off where? For how long? A cruise, is it? Send me a postcard.’

‘There’ll be lots of postcards,’ I promised.

It was odd, my relationship with Joan was a kind of flirting. Whereas my relationship with Susan barely had any flirting in it at all. We must have gone through all that preliminary stuff without noticing – smack into love – and so had no need for it. We had our jokes and our teases and our private phrases, of course. But I suppose it all felt – was – too serious for flirting.

‘No,’ I said, ‘You know what I mean.’

‘Yes, I know what you mean. I’ve been wondering about it for some time. Given the circumstances. Half wanting it to happen, half not. But you’ve got guts, the pair of you, I’ll say that.’

I didn’t think of it in terms of guts. I thought of it in terms of inevitability. Also, doing what we both deeply wanted.

‘And how is Gordon taking it all?’

‘He calls me her fancy boy.’

‘I’m surprised he doesn’t call you her fucking fancy boy.’

Yes, well, probably that too.

‘I shan’t say I hope you know what you’re doing because it’s perfectly obvious neither of you has any idea what you’re doing. Now, don’t pull that face at me, Master Paul. No one ever does, not in your position. And I’m not going to say, Look after her, and all that stuff. I’m just going to keep my thumbs bloody hard crossed for you.’

She came out to the car with me. Before getting in, I moved towards her. She raised a palm.

‘No, none of that fucking huggy-huggy stuff. There’s too much of it around, everyone suddenly behaving like foreigners. Be off with you before I shed a tear.’

Later, I went over what she had and hadn’t said to me, and wondered if she’d been spotting parallels I’d missed. No one ever knows what they’re doing, not in your position. Off up to London, eh? Fancy boy, kept woman. And who’s got the money? Yes, Joan was ahead of me.

Except that it wasn’t going to be like that. I could hardly imagine Susan back on the Macleod doorstep in three years’ time, tongue-tied, emotionally blasted, begging silently to be taken in, her life essentially over. I was confident that wasn’t going to happen.

There was no exact Moment of Leaving, neither a surreptitious midnight skedaddle, nor some formal departure with luggage and waving handkerchiefs. (Who would have waved?) It was a long-drawn-out detaching, so that the moment of rupture was never clearly marked. Which didn’t stop me trying to mark it, with a brief letter to my parents:

That seemed to cover it. I thought the ‘as and when’ sounded properly grown-up. Well, so I was. Twenty-one. And ready to fully indulge, fully express, fully live my life. ‘I’m alive! I’m living!’

We were together – under the same roof, that is – for ten or more years. Afterwards, I continued to see her regularly. In later years, less often. When she died, a few years ago, I acknowledged that the most vital part of my life had finally come to a close. I shall always think of her well, I promised myself.

And this is how I would remember it all, if I could. But I can’t.