Bad Blood (34 page)

Or was
he
embarrassed? Surely not. The best we can do for Dr Clayton in this narrative is to assume that he was a mere mouthpiece for Whitchurch, with its snobbery, moral paralysis and prurient daydreams. I didn't pursue the question. Although I was still fairly ignorant about kinds of contraception, I had inspected with dismay the diaphragm my mother kept at the bottom of her wardrobe and decided I wouldn't have been able to bring myself to trust the available ones in any case, nor would Vic trust condoms. So instead we gave up sex. Or rather, we gave up sexual intercourse. If collective Whitchurch had known it would have been scandalised, it being an article of faith that a wife shouldn't refuse her husband his ‘rights' (and my offence was worse, because he'd been decent enough to
make an honest woman of me). One way and another, we seemed bound to act against the grain, but this time our sin stayed our secret.

We thought – we hardly spoke about it, hardly needed to – that we'd find a way out of this impasse, but as time went by it was our secret sexlessness that cemented our intimacy. We were brother and sister. We'd regressed to amoeboid caresses – we talked baby talk, and called each other by queasy, furtive nicknames (Creep for him, Crumble for me) that reflected our guilty innocence, and we kept up an endless dialogue of one about other people and ideas and images. Behind it all was a visceral dread that easily defeated common sense. Every month I was convinced, despite our abstinence, that I was by some bad miracle pregnant, and I raged and despaired. Pre-menstrual tension wasn't yet something people took seriously, although many knew it from experience, but even if we'd been able to label my lunacy, I doubt if we'd have tamed it.

Vic bore with me and didn't jeer, for he saw the force of my unreason. The boundaries between us had been breached for good, we gave a new meaning to the notion that man and wife were one flesh. You could track back this kind of alchemy in books: ‘. . . intimately to mix and melt and to be melted together with his beloved, so that one should be made out of two'. This is Shelley translating Plato, who was putting words into the mouth of Aristophanes, who's the only defender of heterosexual sex in the
Symposium
, although he makes it sound perverse.

So we sublimated our wants and that cut us off further from our friends. I'd got Gail back – in truth she had never deserted me, I'd been in hiding – but of course it wasn't the same, our paths had diverged and I had something new to conceal. She'd been more
strange
, more different and more dominating than
Vic, but now he'd supplanted her. He and I acquired each other's friends as a double act: in some ways we seemed older than our contemporaries and more sure of what we wanted; in others we stayed younger, for we'd take our adolescent passion with us wherever we went next. University, we meant, but although our A-level results were good enough we still had to get places and money. In 1960 you applied to as many colleges and universities as you liked, there was no centralised system. All of them, however, required a confidential reference from your school and I could tell from the speech day in September what would be in mine.

Once I'd have jumped at the opportunity not to attend – if you'd left you could do it
in absentia
, they'd simply read out your name – but this time I was determined to go and collect my prize from the previous year. The headmistress seemed prepared: the speaker was her predecessor, Miss Lester, a plump, popular woman who'd gone on to better things, and her chosen text was Charles Kingsley's famous line, ‘Be good, sweet maid, and let who will be clever.' Listening to this sermon, I basked in my pariah status, but I wasn't prepared for what happened next. As I crossed the awful town hall stage behind the banked hydrangeas to receive my book token, the weary applause quickened and my fellow pupils cheered. It was my first and last moment of popularity in six years at Whitchurch Girls' High School and it was as the gym mistress had feared from year one; I was setting a bad example. I shook and blushed as usual, but for different reasons, and was very glad I'd slimmed so Byronically that people could see that I was a sinner in spirit, near-weightless and soon to be out of Whitchurch.

It proved, still, a bumpy ride. Oxbridge women's colleges returned my forms, saying that they were unable to consider an application from me, since they only took mature married
women (mature meant over twenty-three). Otherwise, I was accepted with alacrity and without an interview wherever we applied. Miss Dennis's story of my fall – which, one of those admissions tutors remembered a lot later, began ‘Lorna is attractive and intelligent, but . . .' and warned that my shyness concealed a corrupt character – went down well in English departments. It was Vic who was sometimes summoned to explain himself (academically, that is) and so met William Empson at Sheffield, where we both wanted very much to go and sit at his feet. But it was not to be: the Shropshire Education Authority refused me a grant. They had no problems with Vic, they'd given money to young men who'd come back married from National Service until it was abolished; however, they were still stopping the scholarships of woman who slept with men, married or no – although in another year or two grants would become mandatory and they'd lose their power of ‘discretion', as they must have known, but I didn't.

I couldn't have waited anyway, the suffocating nightmare possessed me, I had no time to lose. If I didn't do it now, the prospect would recede and fade, books would become a hobby and I'd turn into a housewife (which I foresaw not so much as a lifetime of domestic drudgery as one of impotent make-believe). There were state scholarships without strings, but thanks to French I was 15 per cent short. You could qualify by another route, however – some universities had entrance exams of their own devising, with scholarships worth quaint sums like fifty guineas a year, which the state would top up. The first of these, in January 1961, was (a good omen) Durham, and we applied and travelled by train across the Pennines, further north than we'd ever been, into early-afternoon darkness. We stayed in separate colleges and sat our papers in the shadow of the cathedral whose slow bells nagged like toothache.
All the buildings were angular, hard-edged, ill-lit and draughty, with red-hot radiators. It was where you went if you couldn't get into Oxford or Cambridge, but the university premises seemed confusingly cramped and scattered, as if they had been squeezed into the interstices of some other institution, the Church by the looks of things. This was the first time I'd been in a university, but a vicarage ghost lurked in the dark corners and whispered in my ear – ‘Immortal, invisible . . . dilapidations . . .'

My interview dashed my hopes of finding a place there. Professor Clifford Leech sat back behind his desk, welcomed me expansively and handed me over to Nicholas Brooke, a sliver of a man on the edge of the pool of Anglepoised light. He was as thin as a rail, tense, his tone rasping, impatient, ironic. When we talked about Shakespeare (he was riffling through my exam script, looking for something he couldn't find) and I struggled to resay what I'd written, he raised a quizzical eyebrow and returned my ideas to their real authors – L. C. Knights's
How Many Children had Lady Macbeth?
Yes. And that rhapsodic stuff about the late plays and levitating into immortality, wasn't that
Wilson
Knight? I nodded, hot in the face. Answering in person for what I'd written was agonising. On paper I'd been confident, I'd been someone else – a lot of someone elses as it turned out. A fraud.

He asked about contemporary novels and I mentioned the respectable ones I'd read, including C. P. Snow's
The Masters
. Yes? I thought it unconvincing, I didn't think dons would engage in such petty, low-minded intrigue. My interviewers both laughed. They obviously thought me sadly naive. I called my mother from a freezing phone box, reversing the charges. When she answered with seven-month-old Sharon under her arm (she'd become blasé about baby-minding) I told her there was
no chance
.

But I was wrong. The inquisition in that stone study was an ordeal designed to establish that I was scholarship material – and that it was worth changing Durham's conventual college rules on my account. When I met Miss Scott at St Aidan's, she turned out to belong to the same generation as Miss Roberts and shared her no-nonsense view of my offence. In future St Aidan's wouldn't be sending women students down for anything other than intellectual shortcomings. She had set a dangerous precedent, but she took it in her stride, only warning me against the mind-rotting side effects of the washing-up that she'd heard living with a man involved. She was witty and kind, and coolly pocketed the fifty guineas I was awarded each year for unspecified college costs and uneaten lunches of lukewarm macaroni cheese. It didn't matter: my state studentship was assessed on my father's means and so I got a full maintenance grant, as did Vic, who was assessed on his mother's meagre wages. We were well off and able to pay some of our way at Sunnyside, where Sharon would stay during Durham term-times.

She had found her place, too. She and my mother communed in the kitchen: Sharon in her high chair, playing with a horrible wet mixture of toys and rusks on her tray, my mother talking to her about what the cat was up to, or the birds out of the window, or the pretty colours in the fire, or the postman's rattle at the door, or Clive's teatime explosion into the hall – from the boys' grammar school now, but just as violent. She learned to talk back very early and for a while it looked as though she found her life so satisfactory, sitting there giving orders and making polite conversation, her hair in precocious pigtails, that she'd never trouble to learn to walk. She preferred her grandparents to her fly-by-night, insubstantial parents; they were much more like parents were supposed to be, like the
parents in picture books – and she was much more their baby than I'd been.

When Sharon was asleep and my parents tucked up in bed, Vic and I would go out to play at the rugby club with the town's boozers and bohemians. In the months before we went up to Durham we rejoined Whitchurch life, on the louche fringes. That winter he'd played rugby for the Old Boys' team, most of whom were – like their opponents – at least ten years older and eighteen stone, and his courage won him a certain prestige, along with the scars and bruises. Once he was so concussed that he didn't recognise me after the match, although from his fond grin I could tell that he was quite taken with me even as a perfect stranger. The best thing about the Old Boys, though, was their club, a shabby prefab on the edge of town, with tightly closed curtains advertising Guinness, which came to life after the pubs closed at 10.30. There I learned to drink and smoke. Vic had the advantage of me, and to start with I'd have to dash to the Ladies and throw up after a couple of gin and bitter lemons, but I found by experiment that gin on its own stayed down. We both became quite good at darts, too, which was handy in Durham – the other Durham we lived in, that wasn't the university, where you got lectures after hours on dialectical materialism from part-time window-cleaners.

Graduation day, 1964

But we were only part-time outsiders ourselves, moonlighters in bohemia. At Durham we conspired together to work, driven by the desire to get away from Whitchurch for good, and anyway more and more obsessed with words, so that it was a labour of love. When we remet Nicholas Brooke, I couldn't understand why I hadn't recognised him in the first place – the brilliance, the theatricality, the edge of bitterness (he felt trapped in Durham), the cradled cigarette, the flapping black gown . . . this was my first mentor as I'd never known him, in his prime.
We'd be at home at university after all, even though we were well known from the beginning as freaks and had appeared in the local paper with the headline THE SAGES TAKE UP LITERATURE (gazing wide-eyed into an imaginary future), along with a former Congregationalist minister in his forties from Hartlepool. I sent the clipping to my mother, who kept it with my letters, which read like disapproving dispatches from a foreign land (‘Durham is a very Conservative, traditional sort of place, with privileges for men') in a shoebox, along with the picture from the front of the
Mail
that appeared when we graduated in 1964.

We're news once again because we're the first married couple of ordinary student age to graduate in the same subject at the same time, both with Firsts. This time we're pictured with Sharon, though, and that's the real point – she's four by now, and looks very large and very distrustful. This picture stands
instead of a wedding photograph in our story. Sharon is the one looking beyond the ending, nobody seems to know yet that it's the 1960s, except perhaps for her. She's the real future, she tells the world that we broke the rules and got away with it, for better and for worse, we're part of the shape of things to come.