At the start, the back seat of the Grays’ old station wagon—it was the colour of elephant-hide, I can see it clear—or even the front seat on those occasions when my desire would brook no delay, was a commodious enough bower of bliss for a daemon lover and her lad. I do not say it was comfortable, but what is comfort to a boy when his blood is up? It was on that last day of April that we next met, although I did not know it was her birthday until she told me. Had I been more observant and less impatient to get going on the main business I might have noticed how quiet she was, how thoughtful, how gently sad, even, in contrast to her briskness and gaiety that other, first, time when we had lain down together. Then she told me what day it was, and said she was feeling her age, and gave a great sigh. ‘Thirty-five,’ she said, ‘—think of that!’
The station wagon was parked up the same woodland track where we had stopped that other evening, and she lay asprawl on the back seat, head and shoulders propped awkwardly against a folded picnic-blanket, with her dress pulled up to her armpits and me lying over her, spent for the moment, my left hand paddling in the sopping hot hollow between her thighs. The evening sun was weakly shining but it was raining, too, and big drops from the overhanging trees were plopping in tinny-sounding syncopation on the metal roof above us. She lit a cigarette—she favoured Sweet Afton, in their nice custard-coloured packet—and when I asked her for one she widened her eyes in feigned shock and said certainly not, and then blew smoke in my face and laughed.
She was not a native of our town—have I said that?—and neither was her husband. They had come from somewhere else, when they were married first and before Billy was born, and Mr Gray had leased a premises on the corner of the Haymarket and set up his spectacle shop there. The circumstances of her other, ordinary, life, her life away from the two of us and what we were to and in each other, composed a subject I found by turns boring and sorely painful, and when she spoke of them, as she often did, I would give an impatient sigh and attempt to steer her on to other things, to steer her into other things. Lying in her arms like this I could make myself forget that she was Mr Gray’s wife, or Billy’s mother—I could even forget the cat-like Kitty—and did not wish to be reminded that she had a family firmly in place and that I was, despite all, an interloper.
The town where the Grays had come from—I cannot remember where it was, if I ever bothered to ask—was much bigger and grander than ours, or so she insisted. She liked to tease me by describing its broad streets and fine shops and wealthy suburbs; the people, too, she said, were worldly and polished, not like the people here, where she felt trapped and bitterly discontent. Trapped? Discontent? When she had me? She saw my look and leaned forwards and took my face between her hands and drew me to her and kissed me, breathing laughter and smoke into my mouth. ‘I never got a better birthday present,’ she whispered huskily. ‘My lovely boy!’
Her lovely boy. I do think she thought of me, or made herself think of me, as somehow a sort of long-lost son, a prodigal delightfully returned, feral from his sojourn among the swine and in need of her womanly, indeed matronly, attentions to soothe and civilise him. She indulged me, of course, indulged me beyond an adolescent’s maddest imaginings, but she kept a monitoring eye on me, too. She made me promise to bathe more often and more thoroughly and to brush my teeth regularly. I was to wear a clean pair of socks every day, and to ask my mother, though without rousing her suspicions, to buy me some presentable underwear. One afternoon at Cotter’s place she produced a suede folder tied in the middle with a leather thong and unwrapped it and laid it out on the mattress to reveal a gleaming set of barber’s implements, pairs of scissors and a straight razor and tortoise-shell combs and gleaming silver shears with a superimposed double set of tiny and very sharp teeth. The thing was a sort of older sibling of the manicure set Billy had given me for Christmas. She had once done a hairdressing course, she told me, and at home she cut everyone’s hair, even her own. Despite my whines of complaint—how was I to explain this to my mother?—she made me sit on an old cane chair in the sunny doorway and went at my tussocky mop with professional dispatch, singing to herself while she worked. When she was done she let me see myself in the miniature mirror of her powder compact; I looked like Billy. As to my mother, by the way, I need not have worried, for in her usual foggy way she did not even notice my unexplained shorn hair—that was my mother, all over.
I remember suddenly where these things came from, the manicure set and the barber’s tool-kit and probably that compact, too: Mr Gray sold them, in his shop, of course!—how could I forget? So they were got at cost price. The thought of my beloved as a cheapskate is something of a let-down, I must say. How harshly I judge her, even yet.
But no, no, she was generosity itself; I have said that already and I say it again. Certainly she granted me full freedom of her body, that opulent pleasure garden where I sipped and sucked, dazed as a bumble-bee in full-blown summer. Elsewhere there were limits, though, beyond which I was forbidden to stray. For instance, I could talk all I liked about Billy, make fun of him, if I wished, betray his secrets—to these tales told of her suddenly strangered son she listened with unblinking attention as though I were a traveller of old returned with news from fabulous Cathay—but of her delicate Kitty no scathing mention was permitted, or, especially, of her pathetically short-sighted husband. Need I say this made me itch to pour mockery and scorn upon them both in her hearing, though I did not, since I knew what was good for me. Oh, yes, I knew what was good for me, all right.
Looking back now I am surprised at how little I learned about her and her life. Is it that I was not listening? For certainly she loved to talk. There were times when I suspected that a sudden intensification of passion on her part—a rake of her nails across my shoulder-blades, a hot word panted in my ear—was merely a manoeuvre to make me have done more quickly so that she might lie back and set to chatting at her blissful ease. Her mind was littered with all sorts of odds and ends of arcane and curious information, gleaned from her wide reading in Tit-Bits and the ‘Ripley’s Believe It or Not!’ column in the newspapers. She knew about the dance that bees do when they are harvesting honey. She could tell me what the scribes of old made their ink from. One afternoon at Cotter’s place with the sun angling down on us through a high-up cracked pane she explained to me the principle of a householder’s right to ancient light—the sky must be visible at the top of a window viewed from the base of the opposite wall, if memory serves—for she had once worked as a clerk in the offices of a company of chartered surveyors. She knew the definition of mortmain, could rattle off the signs of the Zodiac in their order. What are glacé cherries made from? Seaweed! What is the longest word that can be typed on the top row of the keys of a typewriter? Typewriter! ‘You didn’t know that, did you, smarty-pants?’ she would cry, and laugh for delight, and dig me in the ribs with her elbow. But of herself, of what the popular psychologists would have called her inner life, what things did she tell me? Gone, all gone.