My name is Charles Highway, though you wouldn’t think it to look at me. It’s such a rangy, well-travelled, big-cocked name and, to look at, I am none of these. I wear glasses for a start, have done since I was nine. And my medium-length, arseless, waistless figure, corrugated ribcage and bandy legs gang up to dispel any hint of aplomb. (On no account, by the way, should this particular model be confused with the springy frames so popular among my contemporaries. They’re quite different. I remember I used to have to fold the bands of my trousers almost double, and bulk out the seats with shirts intended for grown men. I dress more thoughtfully now, though, not so much with taste as with insight.) But I have got one of those fashionable reedy voices, the ones with the habitual ironic twang, excellent for the promotion of oldster unease. And I imagine there’s something oddly daunting about my face, too. It’s angular, yet delicate; thin long nose, wide thin mouth – and the eyes : richly lashed, dark ochre with a twinkle of singed auburn . . . ah, how inadequate these words seem.
The main thing about me, however, is that I am nineteen years of age, and twenty tomorrow.
Twenty, of course, is the real turning-point. Sixteen, eighteen, twenty-one : these are arbitrary milestones, enabling you only to get arrested for H.P.-payment evasion, get married, buggered, executed, and so on : external things. – Naturally, one avoids like the plague, such mischievous doctrines as ‘you’re as young as you feel’, which have doubtless resulted in so many trim fifty-year-olds flopping down dead in their tracksuits, haggard hippies checking out on overdoses, precarious queers getting their caps and crowns stomped in by bestial hitch-hikers. Twenty may not be the start of maturity but, in all conscience, it’s the end of youth.
To achieve, at once, dramatic edge and thematic symmetry I elect to place my time of birth on the stroke of midnight. In fact, mother’s was a prolix and generally rather inelegant parturition; she went into labour about now (i.e. about seven p.m., December 5th, twenty years ago), not to come out of it again until past twelve, the result being a moist four-pound waif that had to be taken to hospital for a fortnight’s priming. My father had intended – Christ knows why – to watch the whole thing, but got browned off after a couple of hours. I have long been sure that there is great significance in this anecdote, although I have never been able to track it down. Perhaps I’ll find the answer at the moment at which, two decades earlier, I first sniffed the air.
I confess that I’ve been looking forward to tonight for months. I thought when Rachel turned up about half an hour ago that she was going to ruin it all, but she left in time. I need to make the transition decorously, officially, and to re-experience the tail-end of my youth. Because something has definitely happened to me, and I’m very keen to know what it is. So : if I run through, let’s say, the last three months, and if I try to sort out all my precocity and childishness, my sixth-form cleverness and fifth-form nastiness, all the self-consciousness and self-disgust and self-infatuation and self-. . . you name it, perhaps I’ll be able to locate my hamartia and see what kind of grown-up I shall make. Or not, as the case may be. Anyway, it ought to be good fun.
Now it’s – let me see – just gone seven. Five hours of teenage to go. Five hours; then I wander into that noisome Brobdingnagian world the child sees as adulthood.
I snap open my dinky black suitcase and up-end it on the bed; folders, note-pads, files, bulging manilla envelopes, wads of paper trussed in string, letters, carbons, diaries, the marginalia of my youth, cover the patchwork quilt. I jostle the papers into makeshift stacks. Ought they to be arranged chronologically, by subject, or by theme? Patently, some rigorous clerking will have to be done tonight. At random I pick up a diary, cross the room, and lean against the bookcase, which creaks. I sip my wine and turn the page.
* * *
The second weekend of September. At that point I had only a couple more days of home to endure before going down to London. It was on the Thursday that my father, drinking spirits for the first time in years, had wondered why I didn’t ‘have a crack’ at getting into Oxford and I had nodded back at him, wondering why not, too. I was going to have a year off before university anyway. My English master had always impressed upon me how fucking clever I was. I didn’t particularly want to go anywhere else. It seemed logical.
Mother got all bustly the next morning (fixing everything up) but came on vague and spiritual over lunch and resolved to take an afternoon nap. When I asked her what there was left to do she free-associated, until it became clear, as a jigsaw becomes clear, that she had succeeded only in telling my sister that I would be coming to stay and also (one assumes) giving her the usual half-hour rundown on the perils of the late menopause, and other such female smut.
‘So,’ I said, ‘I ring the Oxford Admissions and UGGA and the Tutors.’
Mother left the kitchen with one hand flat on her forehead and the other suspended in the air behind her. ‘Yes, dear,’ she called.
It took about an hour because I am surprisingly ineffective on the telephone. I spoke to key tarts in the University Administration complex and finally got on to the Tutors, where a shifty dotard told me that it wasn’t for him personally to say but he was fairly sure they would be able to fit me in. I realized then that I was half hoping for some insurmountable snag, like entrance dates. Yet it all seemed to be going forward.
I didn’t know why I hoped this. Oxford meant more work, of course, but that was no problem. It meant more exams, but, again, I rather like having definite horizons, foreseeable crunches, to focus my anxieties on. Perhaps, as a person inclined to think structurally about his life, I had planned the next few months with my twentieth birthday in mind. There were several teenage things still to be done : get a job, preferably a menial, egalitarian one; have a first love, or at least sleep with an Older Woman; write a few more callow, brittle poems, thus completing my ‘Adolescent Monologue’ sequence; and, well, just marshal my childhood.
There is a less precious explanation. My family lives near Oxford, so if I went there I should have to spend more time at home. Furthermore, I dislike the town. Sorry : too many butterfly trendies, upper-class cunts, regional yobs with faces like gravy dinners. And the streets there are so affectedly narrow.
It is a Highway tradition that on Sunday afternoons, between the hours of four and five, any family representative can approach its senior member in what he calls his ‘study’ and there discuss matters, or crave assistance, or air grievances. One simply knocks and enters.
A small and rather hunted-looking figure now, my father said hello and asked what he could do for me, leaning over to empty the two-pint jug of real orange-juice, his daily ration, which he usually tucked away before eleven a.m. His eyes bulged warily over the discoloured glass as I told him that everything was fixed. There was a pause, and it occurred to me that he had forgotten the whole thing. But he soon roused himself. His hostile levity went like this :
‘Super. I’m driving down tomorrow morning. I suppose I can take you along without too much trouble, so long as you don’t bring all your worldly goods with you, that is. And don’t worry yourself about Oxford. It’s only the icing on the cake.’
‘Sorry?’
‘I mean it’s just an extra.’
‘Oh, absolutely. Thanks for the offer, by the way, but I think I’ll take the train down. See you at dinner.’
I made myself some coffee in the kitchen and browsed through those Sunday papers that weren’t draped over my mother’s tent-like bulk on the sitting-room sofa. I wore a tired smirk. What did you expect? I thought. Outside, the sky was already beginning to turn shadowy mackerel. How soon would it get dark? I decided to leave for London straightway, while there was still time.
* * *
I suppose I really ought to explain.
The thing is that I am a member of that sad, ever-dwindling minority . . . the child of an unbroken home. I have carried this albatross since the age of eleven, when I started at grammar school. Not a day would pass without somebody I knew turning out to be adopted or illegitimate, or to have mothers who were about to hare off with some bloke, or to have dead fathers and shabby stepfathers. What busy lives they led. How I envied their excuses for introspection, their ear-marked receptacles for every just antagonism and noble loyalty.
Once, last year, when we were all sixth-forming round the school coffee-bar (everyone else had to be in class), I was boringly reproached by a friend for ‘actually hating’ my father, who wasn’t villainous or despotic, after all, merely dismissible. My friend quietly pointed out that he ‘had no feelings of hatred’ for his father, although he (the father) apparently spent most days with one fist down his wife’s throat and the other up the au pair’s bum. Precisely, I thought. I tipped my chair back against the wall and replied (somewhat high-mindedly, having that week read a selection of D. H. Lawrence’s essays) :
‘Not at all, Pete, you miss the point. Hatred is the only emotionally educated reaction to a sterile family environment. It’s a destructive and . . . painful emotion, perhaps, but I think I must not deny it if I am to keep my family alive in my imagination and my viscera, if not in my heart.’
Cor, I thought, and so did they. Pete looked at me now with moody respect, like a sceptic at a successful séance – which, of course, was exactly how I looked; there it was, morally intelligible at last.
Not that there aren’t, in my view, plenty of urgent reasons for hating him; it’s just that he constitutes such a puny objective correlative, never does anything glamorously unpleasant. And, good Lord, in this day and age a kid has to have something to get worked up about, skimpy though his material may be. So the emotion that walks like a burglar through our house trying all the doors has found mine the only one unlocked, indeed wide open : for there are no valuables inside.
Now I kneel, take from the bed the largest stack of papers, and fan it out on the floor.
It’s strange; although my father is probably the most fully documented character in my files, he doesn’t merit a notepad to himself, let alone a folder. Mother, of course, has her own portfolio, and my brothers and sisters each have the usual quarto booklet (excepting the rather inconsequential Samantha, who gets only a 3p Smith’s Memorandum). Why nothing for my father? Is this a way of getting back at him?
At the top left-hand corner of every page in which he features, I write ‘F’.
My father has in all sired six children. I used to suspect that he had had so many just to show the catholicity of his tastes, to bolster his image as tolerant patriarch, to inform the world that his loins were rich in sons. There are in fact four boys, and he has given us progressively trendy names : Mark (twenty-six), Charles himself (pushing twenty), Sebastian (fifteen) and Valentine (nine). As against two girls. I sometimes wish I had been born female, if only to rectify this bias.
The most unattractive thing about him or at any rate one of the most unattractive things about him, is that he gets fitter as he gets older. The minute he started to get rich (a mysterious process this, dating back some eight or nine years) he started also to take an increasingly lively interest in his health. He played tennis at weekends and squash three times a week at the Hurlingham. He gave up smoking and abstained from whisky and other harmful liquors. I correctly took this as a vulgar admission on my father’s part that now he was richer he had every intention of living longer. A few months ago I caught the old turd doing press-ups in his room.
He looks sweaty, too. Due no doubt to delayed shock, his hair began pouring out soon after the money began pouring in. For a while he tried things like combing the seaweed curls forward, practically from the nape of his neck, to form a Brylcreemed cap which any sudden movement would gash with etiolated scalp. But eventually he realized it wasn’t on and let his hair go its own way, which it did, teasing itself into two grey-coloured wiry wings on either side of his else hair-free head. It was a great improvement, I’m sorry to say, combining with his large, pointed face and short-shanked body to give him a certain ferrety sexual presence.
For some time now, his ferrety favours have been the preserve of his mistress, as I was assured at the age of thirteen by my elder brother. Mark was raffishly mature about it and had no patience with my falsetto disgust. Gordon Highway, he explained, was still a healthy and vigorous man; his wife, on the other hand, was – well, look for yourself.
And I looked. What a heap. The skin had shrunken over her skull, to accentuate her jaw and to provide commodious cellarage for the gloomy pools that were her eyes; her breasts had long forsaken their native home and now flanked her navel; and her buttocks, when she wore stretch-slacks, would dance behind her knees like punch-balls. The gnomic literature she was reading empowered her to give up on her appearance. Off came her hair, on came the butch jeans and fisherman’s jerseys. In her gardening clothes she resembled a slightly effeminate, though perfectly lusty, farm labourer.
Anyhow I rampaged enthusiastically about all this, largely I think as a reaction against my brother’s greasy permissiveness. Also, I had never thought of my father as being particularly vigorous nor of mother as being particularly unattractive or of either of them as being anything but quietly, and asexually, content with each other. And I didn’t want to see them this way, in sexual terms. I was too young.
Even this, though, you see, even this failed to put any bite, any real spunk, into family life.
The Highway kitchen, nine o’clock, any Monday morning :
‘Are you off now, dear?’
My father pushes his grapefruit aside, swipes his mouth with a napkin. ‘In a minute.’
‘Shall I be able to reach you at the flat, or at the Kensington number?’
‘Uh, the flat tonight and,’ narrowing his eyes, ‘I think on Wednesday. So the Kensington number Tuesday and probably’ – flexing his forehead – ‘probably Thursday. If in doubt, ring the office.’
I always tried to avoid these exchanges and felt like peeing in my trousers whenever I accidentally witnessed one. But in fairness it wasn’t the sort of thing you could actually get yourself into a state about. If only mother minded more. Surely, I felt, she must spend some time wondering when he would start arriving on Saturday morning instead of Friday night, start leaving on Sunday night instead of Monday morning, when his weekend with the family would suddenly and irreversibly become his day with the children.
I packed – crucial juvenilia, plenty of paperbacks, and some clothes – then looked round the house for people to say goodbye to.
Mother was still asleep, and Samantha had gone to stay with a friend of hers. The study was empty so I wandered through the dusky passages calling out to my father, but there was no reply. Sebastian, being fifteen, was probably making eyes at his bedroom ceiling. There remained one brother.
Valentine was in the attic playroom, knee-deep in a metropolis of Scalextric, dicing model sports-cars. I said I was going and told him to give my love to everyone, but he couldn’t hear me. I left a note on the hall table, and crept off.
Now I look round my room and it seems a companionable place to be – what with the two wine bottles, the subdued lighting, the listless but reassuring presence of paper and books. Highway’s London, one of my note-pads, has it that I found the room ‘oppressive, sulky with the past, crouching in wan defiance as I turned to look at it’ on that September Sunday. My word. I suppose I was just moodier then, or more respectful of my moods, more inclined to think they were worth anything.
Of course, if Philip Larkin is anyone to go by, we all hate home and having to be there.
It was certainly nice to get out of the house and, come to think of it, I did feel quite braced and manly walking the nut-strewn lane to the village. The Oxford bus wasn’t due to leave for another quarter of an hour, so I had a well-earned half at the pub and chatted with the landlord and his wrecky wife, Mr and Mrs Bladderby. (Interestingly, Mrs Bladderby had an even wreckier mother, who was eighty and had, moreover, during a recent outing, got her left leg slurped into a dreadful piece of agricultural machinery; she was far too ga-ga to die of shock, had indeed never mentioned the fateful picnic since. Now Mrs Lockhart resided in the room above the saloon, clubbing the floor with a warped bar-billiards cue whenever she needed attention.) As Mrs Bladderby disappeared to answer just such a summons, Mr Bladderby wagged his head at my suitcases and asked whether I was off on holiday again.
I stalled until the lady returned and then settled down to making it clear that, chinless elitist and bratty whey-faced lordling that I most unquestionably was, my move to London had nothing to do with any antipathy towards themselves, nor towards the village – far less did it symptomize a disillusionment with the rustic pieties, etc., etc. I gave two reasons. The first was ‘to study’, earning a look of grim approval from Mr Bladderby; the second was ‘to see my sister’, earning a glare of congeniality from his wife. When I finished my drink and glanced at my wristwatch they appeared to be really sorry to see me go, and two of the unemployable old locals looked up and said goodbye. Carefully closing the door after me, I was in no doubt whatever that one of them would now be saying : ‘That Charles, you know – he’s a fucking nice boy’; and then : ‘Yes, I agree – a fucking nice boy.’
And quite right too. Thinking back, actually, ‘self-infatuation’ strikes me as a rather ill-chosen word. It isn’t so much that I like or love myself. Rather, I’m sentimental about myself. (I say, is this normal for someone my age?) What do I think of Charles Highway? I think : ‘Charles Highway? Oh, I like him. Yes, I’ve got a soft spot for old Charles. He’s all right is Charlie. Chuck’s . . . okay.’
The bus was good, too. I sat up the front, to admire the chubby, unsmiling driver, whose combination of snake-eyed intentness and natural flair made quite good viewing. Elation was gathering on me like a drug – I smiled at my fellow-passengers, gazed uninterestedly out of the window, and was polite and deferential to the transport operative, producing the correct money and enunciating my destination clearly.
Nor was it as if this was an obviously epoch-making journey. Perhaps it was simply that I had rung this girl Gloria before I left.
At any rate, Oxford station, recently modernized so as to resemble a complex of Wimpy Bars, was sobering enough. The newsagent’s was closed so I looked out a paperback from my suitcase. Seated appropriately far from the window, A Room with a View lay unopened beside me all the way there.
London is where people go in order to come back from it sadder and wiser. But I had already been there – returned from it only three weeks before, in fact.
When my A-level results came through my father beefily gave me seventy-five pounds with which to ‘get the hell out of England and have a good time’. It was suggested that I go to a warm healthy country, and stay there some while; otherwise I was given a free hand. A boy I knew was going to Spain the next week so I gave him a newsy letter addressed to my parents for him to post when he got there. Then, with Geoffrey (a like-minded friend), I headed for Fat City.
We holed up for a month in the Belsize Park flat of a Miss Lizzie Lewis, Geoffrey’s actress sister, who was away doing a summer season of panto at a holiday camp in Port Talbot. It was a month I always think of with a certain pimply lyricism. It was a month of plonk and coffee-bars, pinball arcades and party-hunts, of looking for girls and wet daydreams, white smell of sweat and dusty afternoons, of getting burnt by ghoulish hippies, of such mind-expanding drug experiences as pork-chop vomiting and consommé diarrhoea. It ended one mid-August morning when I happened to glance down at the undulating area between my stomach and the stomach of a girl I just so happened to be poking at the time (in a sweaty, hungover state, I might add). What I saw there were worms of dirt – as when a working man, his day done, strides home rubbing his toil-hardened hands together, causing the excess grit to wriggle up into tiny black strings, which he soon brushes impatiently from his palms. Only these were on our stomachs and therefore much bigger : like baby eels.
I was back in Oxford for lunch that same day, with feverish stories about its having been Spain’s worst summer since the war – hence the pallor. My parents informed me, however, that I had ‘been seen’ on the Portobello Road in the last week of July. I denied this and silenced them by pretending to be far iller than I was, not that they need much silencing. (There was also the question of a little going-away present from the young lady – my partner in grime – which is another story.)
The train got into Paddington about eight thirty. The station, empty for what was a Bank Holiday weekend, seemed vast, echoic, etc., and I hoped that it wasn’t going to come on all uncanny and Hemingway-esque on me. Curious (no?) how clearly I remember this : far more clearly than the events of the last couple of weeks.
I decided in the end to take a cab, arguing that it was an indirect economy because I then couldn’t afford to take Gloria out and the evening would cost no more than a level teaspoonful of my sister’s instant coffee. Furthermore, it was far, far too late to go on the tube without getting denounced by drunkards or, alternatively, castrated by skinheads. As the taxi swept up the ramp into the city, I unwound in the back, quietly rehearsing lower-middle-class accents for the benefit of my brother-in-law. Behind the darkened windows I peered at the many purple-T-shirted and Afghan-fur-waistcoated girls who lined the throughways of Paddington and Notting Hill Gate.
I had met Norman Entwistle, my sister’s terrifying husband, only on two occasions. I saw him now, for the third time, as I walked up the sloping approach to his Campden Hill Square home. If it hadn’t been for all the noise he was making I might have missed him altogether.
Norman was up in the tree that stood alone in the middle of the slender front garden. He looked rather as though he were trying to saw himself in half – an activity that on his previous showings I wouldn’t have put past him. Both his legs and one of his arms were wrapped round a branch. Using his free hand in a piston-like action, he was attempting to sever it at its base. The branch, which was obviously dead, hung about six feet from the ground.
I halted. ‘When you cut through the branch,’ I pointed out to him, ‘you’ll fall down.’ Norman ignored me. I could just make out some of his face; it was stretched in murderous concentration.
‘To the ground,’ I explained.
I went on watching him for a few seconds, then walked up to the front door and rang the bell. The door was about to open when I heard a wrenching noise – as of the splitting of wood – followed by a loud crash. I turned round. Norman was already on his feet, brushing himself down like someone covered in lice.
‘Christmas,’ said Jennifer Entwistle, my sister.
We kissed, blushing, as we always did when we kissed, and on the way into the kitchen Jenny gave me a formulaic ballocking for not alerting her of my premature arrival.
‘What’s Norman up to?’ I then asked.
‘Oh, just sawing down a dead branch.’
I assumed I was interrupting the denouement of some kind of row. Probably Jenny had wondered out loud when Norman was going to get round to cutting down the dead branch and Norman had raced out and cut it down straightway, thus putting her in the wrong. There you go.
I sat not being a nuisance at the kitchen table, put on my glasses and watched her make tea. She looked all right. In the role of elder sister she had seemed to me merely graceless and sulky. None of my friends (for instance) had ever asked to be told what her tits were like. Even on her vacation visits from Bristol, when I was especially sensitive to this sort of thing, I never masturbated about her once. However, I did masturbate about her – electrically – all through last Christmas holidays. That voluptuous languor, those invigorating, slow, easy movements : what a transformation, real physical deliverance. To quote my elder brother Mark, who sports-carred up on Christmas Eve and down again on Boxing Day, she looked ‘spunk-drunk’. And it was evidently Norman’s she was carousing on, because she never went back to Bristol to complete her B.Litt., and by April they were married.
Now, she seemed somewhat hungover, but wholesome enough. In particular, her hair was long, shiny, and quite thick for a Highway; and, remarkably, even though she was mousy-blonde, big-boned, full-breasted, wide-hipped and generally slightly sallow, there was no reason to believe that with her clothes off she would smell of boiled eggs and dead babies.
Norman himself came in now. He nodded in my direction and sat down opposite me at the table, briskly flattening a dog-eared Sunday Mirror on to its artificial surface. He read with concentration, his nose perhaps six inches above the page, mouthwashing with tea from a pint-sized mug which Jenny had time and again to refill. She stood by her husband, one hand resting awkwardly on his shoulder, as she and I chatted about home, and my plans.
Norman spoke only once on that occasion. I mentioned that Gloria would probably be stopping by later on.
Jenny had asked, ‘Will she be wanting dinner?’
‘Oh no,’ I said, ‘she won’t be here till about nine, nine thirty.’
Norman looked up from his paper and said, with scorn but without disapproval :
‘Fuck and coffee, is it? Just fuck and coffee.’
After tea I went to unpack. My bedroom was in the front basement, commanding a view of the dustbins and redundant coalshed. Jen had clearly done some work on it : matching curtain and bedcover, Expo ’59 coffee-table, serviceable desk and chair. I lowered myself on to the bed before starting to unpack. The room wouldn’t, after all, need much preparation for Gloria – record-sleeves scattered negligently about the room, certain low-brow paperbacks displayed advantageously on table and desk, and the colour supplements, open at suitable pages, on the floor. Gloria probably had no very fixed conception of me so there wasn’t much point in going into detail.
I wondered if there were any important lies I had told her which it would be worth reacquainting myself with, but could think of none. But . . . ah yes, I was twenty-three and an adopted orphan, that was all. (She was an undemanding girl.) Instead, I got out a note-pad and drafted a short list of topics with which to amuse her for the duration of the walk back from the station and the pre-pass half-hour. I could enlarge on my guardians busting me about last summer, which she would enjoy, and thereby explain why I hadn’t contacted her for a month. Also, there was the continuing story of Gloria’s driving lessons (given by her father, a twenty-stone carpet-layer), of which she would certainly welcome the chance to keep me abreast. Otherwise, there was always pop-music. – Which reminded me; there was another lie : I was friendly with Mick Jagger. But before I did anything else I went upstairs to make a telephone call. Not to Gloria; to Rachel.
In fact I lost my nerve after six digits, hung up, took deep breaths, redialled; her Continental mother answered, I hung up again.
On my way to the bathroom I glimpsed Jenny and Norman standing by the cooker. They were enjoying a kiss – well, more of a snog really. It didn’t look half as extraordinary as one might have thought.
But you should have seen my parents, when they got the news.
The Highway breakfast-table, once again, the Saturday before Easter :
‘My God,’ cries mother, ‘Jenny’s going to be married.’
Gordon Highway : ‘Jenny?’
‘Jennifer. To a businessman. Thirtyish. “Norman Entwistle”.’
‘What kind of businessman?’
‘Household “appliances”.’ She reads on, ‘Second-hand appliances.’
‘My God.’
‘In a fortnight. She’s giving up Bristol.’
My father leans over. ‘To whom is that letter addressed?’
‘Both of us. I opened it because—’
‘I see. Well, she’s twenty-four’ (actually she’s twenty-three), ‘legally an adult. I see no point in forcing the issue.’ He sighs. ‘There’ll be some sort of reception to arrange . . .?’
‘Jenny says she realizes it’s short notice. She says she rather thinks a small dinner-party. At his house.’
My father looks up meanly from his newspaper. ‘Well. That’s something.’
The following weekend the young couple motored down for tea. I diluted it. My Valium-ed mother fluttered between them on the sofa. My father paced the hearth. When Norman gave voice to such idioms as ‘settee’, ‘pardon?’, and at one point ‘toilet’, my father could be seen to wince as a man who is in pain will wince. He was a bit thrown by the opulence of Norman’s car and accoutrements – but he wasn’t a man to be gulled by the mere tokens of privilege. (Furthermore, my father was so very much shorter than Norman that Norman had had to go down practically on his haunches to be introduced.)
While my mother and sister convened their teach-in on babies, honeymoons and pre-menstrual tension, I gave Norman a game of backgammon – later abandoned for pontoon. We seemed to get on quite well.
‘It could conceivably be worse, I suppose,’ my father supposed when they’d gone.
Gloria and I had just reached an impasse on the subject of is there, or is there not – excluding, for the purposes of argument, the Tamla-Motown genre – a legitimate place for brass accompaniment in the current pop scene, when I counted down from ten in my head and glided forward in her direction, eyes half closed, lips pursed, arms spread wide.
Sitting comfortably? In fact, that was a direct quote from Conquests and Techniques : a Synthesis, a folder of mine. Most of the stuff here is in note form, with the odd diagram; but when I get a good idea, or a detail worth elaborating on, then I turn it into a full-dress sentence (and circle it with red ink). The section entitled, simply, ‘Gloria’, I now see, is done in a rather pompous mock-heroic style, like Fielding’s descriptions of pub brawls – the sort of writing I usually have little time for. But there is a sense in which this style is suited to the subject, so I’ll let it pass. That evening had something inimitably teenage about it and, after all, I shall never see its like again.
Firstly, I assume I’m right in saying that teenage sex is quite different from post-teenage sex? It’s not something you do, just something you get done. The over-twenties, I grant you, must see it largely as a matter of obligation, too : but obligation to the partner, not to oneself, like us. Take a look at the scaly witches round your local shopping centre, many of them with children. Grim enough with their clothes on. Imagine them naked! Snatches that yo-yo between their knees, breasts so flaccid you could tie them in a knot. One would have to be literally galvanized on Spanish Fly even to consider it. Yet it gets done somehow. Look at the kids. – The teenager may be more spontaneous, doglike, etc., but it’s generally only another name on the list, only another notch on the cock . . . Perhaps there’s some kind of plateau during one’s twenties and very early thirties. I might well give statistical weight to these filthy speculations by going down to the village tomorrow morning, twenty years of age, and finding out. (I could easily pull the village idiotess, who in any case, one windless summer night, had wanked Geoffrey and me off through the school railings, simultaneously; we stood there clutching the bars, like prisoners.)
Anyway : Gloria. I imagine that the older man thinks it’s going to be hell and is often agreeably surprised to find that it’s not quite, not quite, as bad as he had such excellent reasons to fear. With the youngster the very reverse is true. Gloria and I undressed like lifeguards, and without actually separating. I always forgot the full drama of the change that came over her the minute she was underway. In normal circumstances, with her embarrassment in any kind of pre-coital conversation, her unassumingly pretty face, the stiff-limbed movements : you were a plaything of her unease. Once underway, though, Gloria would have been able to detect few noteworthy points of contrast between sexual arousal and rabies.
It wasn’t that bad, as I remember, not significantly worse than usual. Fifteen, maybe twenty minutes trying not to come, with a beady dread of what was going to happen when I did; a decent (i.e. perceptible) orgasm; a further two or three minutes in garrotted detumescence. Cock attains regulation minimum and is supplanted by well-manicured thumb; Gloria has another . . . five? orgasms; and so it ends. I roll over. My thumb looks as though it has been for a four-hour swim : grey, puffy, dappled where I’ve eaten bits of it in the past. My alarm clock claims it’s only ten fifteen. I wish I were back in Oxford.
A remarkable phenomenon, students of the human condition gather round. While thinking about this, while leafing through my notes, I have a shirty erection. I am jealous of myself. If Gloria came through the door now – I’d do it again. She is a fine-looking girl, certainly : excellent middleweight figure, costly red hair, huge mouth, a judicious number of freckles, and, paradoxically, she does look very becoming with her clothes off. But such attractions shouldn’t becloud (let alone obliterate) an elementary correlation of pleasure and pain. Can it just be experience we’re after?
Restored by a cigarette, Gloria beguiled the following hour in an attempt to actualize my full nineteen-year-old potential. Conquests and Techniques : a Synthesis : ‘Now she wheedled and tugged at my snaily genitalia, now scoured my ears with her tongue, now patrolled my ankles and shoulder-blades for uncharted erogenous zones. After our second coupling I go as far as faking a third orgasm. My gurgles of pain are taken for cries of virile delight.’ That sort of thing.
‘Wow,’ I then said. ‘That really was something. Well – have you got enough pillow there? – night night, sleep well. Until the morning.’
Gloria looked at me oddly.
Front to the wall I feigned sleep . . . the odd incoherent murmur . . . two or three tentative snores . . . a certain amount of involuntary twitching. But the sheets whispered beside me. I felt a hand traverse the lower areas of my back. In seconds – radar-tracked by my whisker-sensitive pubic hairs – it was treading air above my groin. And my groin, in its youthful way, said : ‘I’m game.’
During the long pre-copulative session I glanced downwards – and what should I see but Gloria, practising the perversion known as fellatio. Unaccountably, she was doing this with great rigour and enthusiasm, circling her head so that her long plush hair skimmed and glided over my hips, thighs and stomach. Visually, it was most appealing, but all I could feel was a remote, irrelevant numbness – plus, in my legs, cramp and pins-and-needles respectively. Have I come already, perhaps? I asked myself.
Gloria didn’t think so. She swooped up, said ‘I only do that for boys I like,’ planted a fizzy kiss in my mouth, and hoisted me on top of her.
I recall turning at one point from the section of wallpaper I was perusing to check on Gloria’s face (just for the files) : and impressively atavistic it was too. Accordingly, her orgasm came with clenched teeth, bull-whip shuddering, yelps of dismay; mine came (or did it?) with back pains, bronchitic gasping, with everything all caving in. When I withdrew, it occurred to me, I shall surely get blood over Jenny’s nice room.
Gloria lay back, her race run. After a while she folded up and went to sleep. And I watched the ceiling, breathless with envy.
On average I get through seven diaries a year; no matter how big the pages are, and no matter how pithy and austere I try to be, my days always run into weeks. These early sections are embarrassingly full of teenage largesse. But now I glance down the closely written columns and I smile, dear Charles, at your past holidays.
‘I see. So you’ve already got in.’
‘To Sussex, yes, but not Oxford.’
‘I see. Then you’ll be wanting to take the scholarship exam this – November?’
‘Yes’ (you stupid bitch, you dull clit), I said. ‘And I’ll need Use of English and General Paper.’ Shouldn’t she know all this? ‘And Latin O Level.’ I grinned across the table at my future Directress of Studies. She was most unpleasant to look at. I won’t go into it, but she was about thirty-five, had eyebrows as big as teddy-boy quiffs, and her teeth bucked out from her gums at right-angles.
‘I see. So you’ll only be taking the three subjects with us and they are . . .?’
I repeated them. ‘And Oxford Entrance,’ I added, as if it were not necessarily relevant but perhaps of interest in its own right.
Glancing again at my newly compiled dossier she read out in an incantatory honk : ‘A-level passes : English, grade A, Biology, grade A, Logic, grade A.’ Her chins settled on her throat. ‘Curious subjects . . . but, yes, I don’t think we’ll have much trouble getting you through your . . . O Levels. Um . . .’ She cocked her head in decorous misgiving. ‘You’re a bit old to be going up to Cambridge, aren’t you?’
‘Oxford. Only nineteen,’ I said.
When I awoke that morning the bedroom was a rhino pen, the sheets hot straitjackets. Gloria had insisted on sealing the window and keeping the gas fire on – for the purpose, one imagines, of simulating jungle conditions. There appeared to be a seam of sweaty mist all over the floor, as in student productions of Macbeth. My head came up like a periscope, on the look-out for air.
I inched out of the bed, without waking Gloria, and stalked upstairs dressed only in my duffle-coat. No one seemed to be up. I made two cups of tea and – for the lady – two slices of energy-giving Hovis, after some thought spreading them with Marmite, which I hoped would help create a Bacchic after-breakfast atmosphere.
‘Good morning,’ I said, putting the tray down beside Gloria’s cracked smile. I drew the curtains back an inch or two. A gash of sunlight fell athwart the bed, causing a token shriek from the compromised Gloria, who was sitting up and well into her second round of toast. I watched her finish. She wiped her mouth with freckly knuckles, lay back with a grunt and lit a cigarette. Her breasts were exposed; they looked very white now. What did I feel for her? Ambiguous lust, genial condescension, and gratitude. It didn’t seem enough.
She was so much better in the morning – in fact there was no comparison – because one knew that it couldn’t go on all night. I slipped in beside her, tricked out with a bladder-filled erection. Why, the reechiness of the bed began to strike me as rather stimulating. Gloria was evidently bucked by her breakfast, and we rolled about hugging and tickling each other, and laughing, in an evasive cross-fire of bad breath, before coming together cautiously for the first kiss of the day. In my limited experience, this is nearly always tolerable if one is wholehearted about it and almost invariably emetic if one isn’t. I was wholehearted about it, what with adulthood pending.
Tragically, though, Gloria was ‘too sore’. Normally, of course, I would have been greatly relieved. Normally, of course, this would have been one of the most bewitching things she could possibly be : too sore.
Gloria looked actually ashamed. ‘Don’t worry,’ I told her. ‘It’s quite flattering really.’
I went into a long routine of being good about being good myOw