Intimacy (3 page)

My young gay friend Ian liked to stand with me outside tube stations where I would watch the flocks of girls in the summer, after I had finished work for the day, around lunch time. There were certain locations that guaranteed more interest than others. ‘A picture of impotence,’ he called it. With him, looks would be exchanged and off he would go, while I waited, having coffee somewhere. Sometimes he fucked five people in a day, shoving his arm up to the elbow into men whose faces he never saw. Every night of the week there were orgies he might attend.

‘I’ve never understood all the fuss you straights make about infidelity,’ he’d say. ‘It’s only fucking.’

‘Fucking means something,’ I’d reply. But what? I’d add, ‘Surely, for there to be beauty there must be mystery too.’

‘When there are other people there is always mystery,’ was his answer.

Susan has already laid the table. I open the wine and pour it. The man in the off-licence said it is an easy wine to drink. These days I find anything easy to drink.

Susan brings the food in and sets it down. I glance over the newspaper. As she eats, she turns on the TV, puts on her glasses and leans forward to watch a soap opera.

‘Oh my God,’ she says, as something happens.

The noise presses into my head. You’d think, if she wanted domestic drama, she could look across the table.

But I am looking away, at a tree in the garden, at a print on the wall, longing for something beautiful or made with care. I have begun to hate television as well as the other media. I was young when the rock-‘n’-roll world – the apotheosis of the defiantly shallow – represented the new. It was rebellious and stood against the conventional and dead. Television, too, remained a novelty throughout my youth – all those flickering worlds admitted to one room, Father making me hold the aerial up at the window on tiptoe. Every few months something new and shiny arrived: a car, a fridge, a washing machine, a telephone. And for a time each new thing amazed us. We touched and stared at it for at least a fortnight. We were like everybody else, and ahead of some people. We thought – I don’t know why – that things would be enough.

Now I resent being bombarded by vulgarity, emptiness and repetition. I have friends in television. They talk constantly of their jobs and salaries, of the politics in which they’re enmeshed, and of the public, whom they never meet. But if you turn on the TV and sit down hoping to see something sustaining, you’re going to be disappointed – outraged, in fact, by bullying, aggression and the forcible democratization of the intellect. I am turning off; rebelling against rebellion.

A nerve in my eye is throbbing. My hands seem to be shaking. I feel hollow and my nerves raw, as if I have been pierced by something fatal. My body knows what is going on. If I am frightened now I will feel worse tomorrow, and the day after, and the day after that. All this, in the name of some kind of liberation. But terrible feelings go away after a time – that is one of the terrible things about them.

At university I met a woman as sad as me, if not sadder. For six years, before I met Susan, we lived together. To me now, that seems a long time. But then I imagined there would be time for everything. We slept in the same bed every night, and cooked and ate together. Our friends took it for granted that we were
one, though at times we had other lovers. About once a month we would have sex. It was the late seventies, and relationships were nonchalant and easy, as if it had been agreed that the confinement of regularity made people mentally sick. I think I believed that if you didn’t have children monogamy was unnecessary.

I want to say the smell of mimosa reminds me of her. I want to say she will always be with me in some way. But it has gone, and she is an unmourned true love.

But Nina has not gone from my mind. I am unable to let her go, yet.

I force myself to eat. I will need strength in the next few days. But no tomato has ever tasted so intransigent. Suddenly Susan touches my face with her fingertips.

‘You,’ she says.

‘Yes?’

Maybe she can sense the velocity and turmoil of my thoughts.

‘Just you, Jay. It’s all right. Only that’

I stare at her. The kindness of the gesture shocks me. I wonder if she does somehow, somewhere, love
me. And if one is fortunate enough to be loved one should, surely, appreciate it. I have been anticipating an argument. That would certainly get me out of the house tonight. But I know I must do this sane and sober, and not run out of the door with my hair on fire, or while hallucinating, or while wanting to murder someone.

Tonight I want to be only as mad as I choose; not more mad than that, please.

This is not my first flight. You see, I have run away before. As a boy I would sit in my bedroom with my hands over my ears while my parents raged at one another downstairs, convinced that one would kill the other and then commit suicide. I imagined myself walking away like Dick Whittington, with a spotted handkerchief tied to a stick over my shoulder. But I could never decide on a destination. I did consider going up north, but
Billy
Liar
was one of my favourite films and I knew that northern malcontents, when they could, were fleeing down south.

A few years later, one dreary afternoon, a friend and I walked out of the house and took the train from Waterloo to the coast, and then a ferry to the Isle of
Wight, where we expected to catch Bob Dylan performing ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’. All night we lay out in the drizzle in our tie-dyed T-shirts and frayed jeans, returning home the next day, disappointed and afraid. My mother was crying ‘What have you done?’ as I stepped back into the house. I was muttering, ‘Never the same again, never the same again.’

I was right. My excursion was all round the school. It increased my standing with the hippies who had previously scorned me. They invited me to a party where I met their group – girls and boys from the local area, aged from thirteen to seventeen, who spent most evenings and all weekends together. They smoked pot, or ‘shit’ as it was called, and took LSD, even during classes. In the houses of absent parents, the parties were orgies, with girls and boys openly copulating and exchanging partners. Most of the children were, like me, fleeing something: their homes. I learned it wasn’t necessary to keep one’s parents company. You could get out. A decent teacher had shown me a Thorn Gunn poem, ‘On the Move’, which I tore from the book and carried in the back pocket of my Levis. At parties I would lie on the floor and
declaim it. ‘One is always nearer by not keeping still.’

You gotta go.

Again.

After we have cleared up, Susan sits at the table writing invitations for the boys’ party. Then, making a shopping list for next week, she says, ‘What meals do you fancy?’

‘I don’t want to think about it now.’

‘What’s your favourite ice-cream flavour at the moment? Is it the nut crunch or the vanilla?’

‘I don’t know.’

She says, ‘It’s not like you to be unable to think of food.’

‘No.’

I am considering how well I know her. The way she puts her head to one side, and the grimace she makes when concentrating. She looks as she must have as an eleven-year-old taking an exam. No doubt she will have a similar look at seventy, her gestures and movements unchanged, writing a letter to one of our sons.

How would I describe her? A characteristic image would be of her as a young teenager, getting up early
to study in her bedroom, bent over a table as she is now. She would prepare for school, make her sandwiches, and leave the house, while her parents slept. She got herself into Cambridge, where she ensured she knew the most luminous people. She is as deliberate in her friendships as she is in everything else.

Though we exist at all ages at once, I can’t say that I have ever seen her girlish. She is an effective, organized woman. Our fridges and freezers are full of soup, vegetables, wine, cheese and ice-cream; the flowers and bushes in the garden are labelled; the children’s clothes are washed, ironed and folded. Every day there are deliveries of newspapers, books, alcohol, food and, often, of furniture. Our front path is a kind of thoroughfare for the service industries.

There are also people who come to clean the house, iron our shirts, tend the garden and cut the trees, as well as nannies, baby-sitters, child-minders and au pairs, not to mention masseurs, decorators, acupuncturists, financial advisers, piano teachers, accountants, the occasional drug dealer and people to organize all of the above and some of the below. When the numerous gadgets stop working, men come to mend them, one for each. Chalked on a board
are instructions for the week, with several underlinings. Susan is always thinking of how to improve things here. She will, too, have strong, considered opinions on the latest films and music. In bed she reads cookbooks.

Being lower-middle class and from the suburbs, where poverty and pretension go together, I can see how good the middle class have it, and what a separate, sealed world they inhabit. They keep quiet about it, with reason; they feel guilty, too, but they ensure they have the best of everything, oh yes.

As with any other business, in marriage there soon develops an accepted division of labour, and a code of rules. But couples are never quite sure if they are both playing by the same ones, or whether they might have changed overnight, without the other having been informed.

It wasn’t her wit or beauty that fascinated me. There was never great passion – perhaps that was the point. But there was enjoyment. Mostly I liked her humdrum dexterity and ability to cope. She wasn’t helpless before the world, as I felt myself to be. She was straightforward and firm; she knew how to get things done. I envy her capability, and wish I had half
of it. At the expense of feeling weak, I enable her to feel strong. If I were too strong and capable, I wouldn’t need her, and we would have to part.

Susan is too prudent to want much power, but at the office she is clear and articulate. It is not difficult for her to make less confident people feel ineffectual. She doesn’t know how to protect them from her stretch and vigour, and can’t understand how I might see the other side. After all, she is cleverer than her colleagues, and has worked harder. Like many girls brought up to be good and well-behaved, she likes to please. Perhaps that is why young women are so suitable for the contemporary working world. They are welcome to it. Not that Susan cannot be ruthless, intent, as she has to be, on concealing her more sympathetic aspect. However, ambition without imagination is always clumsy.

Unlike me she doesn’t constantly lucubrate on the splendours and depths of her mind. She finds even interesting self-awareness self-indulgent. The range of her feeling is narrow; she would consider it shameful to give way to her moods. Therefore she keeps most of herself out of view, for fear of what others, and she herself in particular, would think. I would say this odd thing. Because she has never been disillusioned
or disappointed – her life has never appalled her, and she would never lapse into inner chaos – she hasn’t changed.

But to keep everything going she can be bullying and strict, with a hard, charmless carapace. You have to take care with her: she will rarely cry, but she could burst into flames.

She does, too, have a curious attachment to the minor and, when permitted, major aristocracy. I don’t mind a little snobbery, just as one cannot object to the more poignant vanities; they are amusing. But she does have a penchant for anyone titled, as some girls will only go out with drummers, rather than, say, bass players. I find it a puzzling attachment to a class that is not even rotting, but which is completely uninteresting. Clearly one must tolerate all kinds of irritating tendencies in others, but what of the occasions when one cannot grasp the other person at all?

I can, when I am in the mood, make her laugh, particularly at herself, which is a kind of love, because something in her has been recognized. She envies my insouciance, I think. What other function I serve I am not sure, though I have always been urgently required by her. Having had a mother who had little
use for me, a woman I could neither cure nor distract, I have liked being a necessity.

But I have been pushed and shoved because I haven’t known my own mind, because I have become accustomed to going along with things, and tomorrow morning we will kiss and part.

Actually, forget the kiss.

I fear loneliness, and I fear other people, I fear –

‘Sorry?’ I say.

Susan is speaking – asking me to get my diary.

‘Why?’ I say.

‘Why? Just do it, if you don’t mind. Just do it!’

‘Don’t speak to me like that. You are so harsh.’

‘I’m too tired for a negotiation about diaries. The children wake at six. I have to spend the day at work. What do you do in the afternoons? I expect you sleep then!’

I say, ‘You’re not too tired to raise your voice.’

‘It’s the only way I can get you to do anything.’

‘No, it’s not.’

‘You exhaust me.’

‘And you me.’

I could strike her. She would know then. But at home we are necessarily politicians. Yet I am about to
say, ‘Susan, don’t you understand, can’t you see, that of all the nights we have spent together, this is the last one – the last one of all?’

My anger, usually contained, can be cruel and vengeful. I would willingly spill my intentions at a time like this, to achieve an easy satisfaction.

However, I should be satisfied. It is not as if I want to discover tonight that Susan and I really are suited.

I murmur, ‘All right, all right, I’ll do it.’

‘At last.’

I shake my head at her.

Sometimes I go along with what Susan wants, but in an absurd parodic way, hoping she will see how foolish I find her. But she doesn’t see it and, much to my annoyance, my co-operation pleases her.

I sit in front of her with my diary, flipping through the pages. After today the pages are blank. I have left space for the rest of my life.

‘The children look beautiful at the moment, don’t they?’ she says.

‘They are healthy and happy.’

‘You love them, don’t you?’

‘Passionately.’

She snorts. ‘I can’t imagine you being passionate about anything.’

She says how much she is looking forward to the weekend away that we have planned. We will stay at the country hotel we visited several years ago, when she was first pregnant. The weather was warm. I rowed her on a lake. We ate mussels and read the papers on the beach. It will be just us, without the children, and the opportunity to talk.

‘What books should we read?’ she asks.

‘I’ll find something in my study later‚’ I say.

‘The rest will do us good. I know things have been getting fraught here.’

‘Do you think so?’

‘You are gloomy and don’t try. But … we can discuss things.’

‘What things?’

She says, ‘All this.’ Her hands flail. ‘I think we need to.’

She controls herself. ‘You used to be such an affectionate man. You still are, with the children.’ She reminds me that there are historic walks and castles in the vicinity of the country hotel. ‘And please,’ she says, ‘will you remember to take your camera this time?’

‘I’ll try to’

‘It’s not only that you’re completely useless, but that you don’t want any photographs of me, do you?’

‘Sometimes I do.’

She says, ‘No you don’t. You never offer.’

‘No, I don’t offer.’

‘That’s horrible. You should have one on your desk, as I do, of you.’

I say, ‘I’m not interested in photography. And you’re not as vain as I am.’

‘That’s true.’

I pace up and down with my drink, in an agitated state. She takes no notice. For her it is just another evening.

Fear is something I recognize. My childhood still tastes of fear; of hours, days and months of fear. Fear of parents, aunts and uncles, of vicars, police and teachers, and of being kicked, abused and insulted by other children. The fear of getting into trouble, of being discovered, and the fear of being castigated, smacked, ignored, locked in, locked out, as well as the numerous other punishments that surrounded everything you attempted. There is, too, the fear of what you wanted, hated and desired; the fear of your
own anger, the fear of retaliation and of annihilation. There is habit, convention and morality, as well as the fear of who you might become. It isn’t surprising that you become accustomed to doing what you are told while making a safe place inside yourself, and living a secret life. Perhaps that is why stories of spies and double lives are so compelling. It is, surely, a miracle that anyone ever does anything original.

I notice that she is speaking to me again.

‘By the way, Victor rang.’

‘Oh yes? Any message?’

‘He wanted to know when you are coming.’

She looks at me.

‘Okay,’ I say. ‘Thank you.’

After a bit she says, ‘Why don’t you see more people? I mean proper people, not just Victor.’

‘I can’t bear the distraction,’ I say. ‘My internal life is too busy.’

I should add: I have enough voices to attend to, within.

‘I can’t imagine what you have to think about,’ she says. Then she laughs. ‘You didn’t eat much. Your trousers are baggy. They’re always falling down. You look like a builder.’

‘Sorry.’

‘Sorry? Don’t say sorry. You sound pathetic.’

‘Sometimes I am.’

She grunts. After a few moments she gets up.

‘Put the dishes in the machine,’ she says. ‘Don’t just leave them on the side for me to clear up.’

‘I’ll put them in the machine when I’m ready.’

‘That means never.’ Then she says, ‘Are you coming upstairs?’

I look at her searchingly and with interest, wondering if she means sex – it must be more than a month since we’ve fucked – or whether she intends us to read. I like books but I don’t want to get undressed for one.

‘In a while,’ I say.

‘You are so restless.’

‘Am I?’

‘It is your age.’

‘It must be that.’

Adults used to say that to me as a child. ‘It’s only a phase.’

For some people – Buddhists, I believe – life is only a phase.

Asif relishes the weekends. Occasionally I see the family on the towpath on Sunday mornings, the kids in yellow helmets on the back of the adults’ bikes, on their way to a picnic. At university he was the brightest of our year, and was considered something of a martyr for becoming a teacher.

But he never wanted anything else. Soon after finals he and Najma married. One of his children has spent months in hospital and was lucky to survive. Asif nearly lost his mind over it. The child seems to have recovered, but Asif never forgets what he almost lost.

He doesn’t often come into the city; the rush and uproar make his head whirl. But when he and I have an ‘old-friends’ lunch I insist he meets me in the centre of town. From the station I take him to clamorous places where there will be fashionable young women in close-fitting items.

‘What a picture gallery you have brought me to!’ he says, rubbing his hands. ‘Is this how you spend your life?’

‘Oh yes.’

I indicate their attributes and inform him that they prefer mature men.

‘Does such a thing exist?’ he says. ‘And are you sure? Have you tried them all?’

‘I’m going to. Champagne?’

‘Just the one.’

‘I’ll have to order a bottle.’

Our talk is of books and politics, and of mutual university friends. I have had him confess that he wonders what another body might feel like. But then he imagines his wife putting out flowers as she waits for him. He says he sees her across the bed in her negligée, three children sleeping between them.

I recall him describing how much he enjoys sucking her cunt. Apparently he’s grunting and slurping down there for hours, after all this time, and wonders whether his soul will only emerge through her ears. They massage one another’s feet with coconut oil. In the conservatory their chairs face one another. When they are not discussing their children or important questions of the day, they read Christina Rossetti aloud.

‘In five years,’ he says, ‘we will move house!’

When he yearns – he is not a fool – he yearns for what he has already, to play in the same cricket team as his son, for a garden pond with frogs, and a trip to
the Grand Canyon. It is easy to laugh at bourgeois happiness. What other kinds are there? Asif is a rare man, unafraid of admitting his joy.

One afternoon I went to his house to pick up my children. While they played in the garden, Najma was drawing with crayons at the kitchen table. I love looking at crayons, and scrawling with them on big sheets of coloured paper. But the serenity made me uncomfortable, I don’t know why. I couldn’t sit still because I wanted to kiss her and push her into the bedroom, thereby, it seemed to me, smashing everything up, or testing it, or trying to see what was there, what the secret was.