To distract us both from her dismay she busied herself putting on her absurdly dainty shoes, propping an ankle on a knee and using her index finger for a shoehorn, maintaining her balance by holding on tightly to my arm with a hand that trembled from more than merely the effort of keeping herself upright. Affected by her disillusionment I too was disillusioned now, and saw the tumbledown old place for what it was and cursed myself for bringing her there. I freed my arm from her grasp and drew away from her brusquely, and went forwards and gave the mildewed front door a hard, angry push, sending it yawing wildly with a screech on the single hinge that was all that was holding it up, and stepped inside. The walls in places were hardly more than a mesh of laths, stuck in patches here and there with crumbling plaster, and wallpaper most of which hung down in lank strips, like lianas. There was a smell of rotting wood and lime and old soot. The staircase had collapsed, and there were holes in the ceilings, and in the bedroom ceilings above, too, and in the roof above that again, so that when I looked up I could see clear through two storeys and the attic to the sky, glinting in spots through the slates.
Of Cotter I knew nothing except that he must have been long gone, and all the other Cotters with him.
A floorboard creaked behind me. She cleared her throat delicately. Sulking, I refused to turn. We stood there in the dusty hush, amid pallid beams of radiance from above, I facing into the empty house and she at my back. We might have been in church.
‘It’s a grand place,’ she said apologetically, in a softly subdued voice, ‘and you were very clever to find it.’
We walked about, with a sober and thoughtful mien, saying nothing and avoiding each other’s eye, like a pair of newlyweds dubiously pacing the lines of their prospective first home while the bored estate agent loiters outside on the step smoking a cigarette. We did not so much as kiss, that day.
It was she who on a later day found the lumpy, stained old mattress, folded in two and squashed into a dank and reeking cupboard under the stairs. Together we dragged it out, and to air it we set it over two kitchen chairs under the only window that still had glass in it and where we judged the sun would shine in most strongly. ‘It’ll do,’ Mrs Gray said. ‘I’ll bring sheets, next time.’
In fact, over the coming weeks she brought all sorts of things: an oil lamp, never to be lit, with a bulbous chimney of marvellously fine spun glass that made me imagine old Muscovy; a teapot and an unmatched pair of teacups and saucers, also never to be used; soap and a bath towel and a bottle of eau-de-Cologne; various foodstuffs, too, including a jar of potted meat and tinned sardines and packages of crackers, ‘in case,’ she said with a low laugh, ‘you might get peckish.’
She delighted in this parody of home-making. When she was little, she said, she had loved to play house, and indeed as I watched her producing one toy-like goody after another from her shopping basket and arranging them on sagging shelves about the room she seemed of the two of us by far the younger. I pretended to disdain this feeble simulacrum of domestic bliss that she was assembling piece by piece, but there must have been something in me, an enduring strain of childishness, that would not allow me to hold back but led me forwards, as if by the hand, to join her in her happy games.
Some games. Was she guilty of rape, if only in the statutory sense? Can a woman be a rapist, technically? By taking to bed a fifteen-year-old boy, and a virgin, to boot, I imagine she would have been legally culpable to a serious degree. She must have thought of it. Perhaps her capacity to conceive of imminent disaster was blunted by a constant awareness of the possibility—the inevitability, as it happened—that one day a long time off in the future she would be found out and disgraced not only before her family but in the eyes of the entire town, if not the country. There were occasions when she would go silent and turn away from me and seem to be looking at something approaching that was still far off yet not so distant that she could not make it out in all its awfulness. And on those occasions did I offer solace, try to divert her, draw her away from that dreadful vista? I did not. I went into a huff at being neglected, or made a cutting remark and flung myself from that mattress on the rotted floorboards and stamped off to another part of the house. The whitewashed privy in the back garden with its stained and seatless throne and a century’s accumulation of cobwebs in the corners was a favourite perch when I wished to punish her for some misdemeanour by a prolonged and, I trusted, worrying absence. What did I brood on, sitting there in the classic pose with my elbows on my knees and my chin on my hands? We do not need to go to the Greeks, our tragic predicament is written out on rolls of lavatory paper. There was a particular smell from outside, sharp and greenly sour, that came in at the square hole set high up in the wall behind the cistern, that I catch at times still on certain damp days in summer and that makes something struggle to open inside me, a stunted blossom pushing up out of the past.
That she never followed me or tried to coax me back when I had stormed off like this added fuel to my resentment, and when I did return, feigning a cold and stony indifference, I would watch from the corner of my eye for any hint of mockery or amusement—a lip bitten to prevent a smile, or even a gaze too quickly averted, would have sent me marching straight off to the jakes again—but always I would find her waiting with a calm grave gaze and an expression of meek apology, although half the time she must have been bewildered as to what it could be that she was being required to atone for. How tenderly she would hold me, then, and how accommodatingly she would spread herself on that filthy mattress and take inside her all my engorged fury, need and bafflement.
It is extraordinary that we were not lighted upon sooner than we were. We took what precautions we could. At the start we were careful always to make our way to Cotter’s place separately. She would park the station wagon in a leafy lane half a mile away and I would hide my bike under a patch of brambles beside the path along by the hazel wood. It was scarily thrilling to strike off through the trees and make my stealthy way down to the hollow where the house was, stopping now and then and cocking an ear, alert as Leatherstocking, to the woodland’s restive silence.
I could not decide which I preferred, to get there first and have to wait for her, palms wet and my heart hammering—would she come this time or had she been brought to her senses and decided to have done with me forthwith?—or to find her there before me, crouching anxiously outside the front door as always, for she feared rats, she said, and would not venture inside on her own. In the first minute or two a peculiar constraint would settle between us, and we would not speak, or only stiffly, like polite strangers, and would hardly look at each other, awed by what we were to each other and also, and yet again, no doubt, by the enormity of what we had undertaken together. Then she would contrive to touch me casually in some way, brush her hand as if by chance against mine or trail a strand of her hair across my face, and at once, as if a catch had been released, we would fall into each other’s arms, kissing and clawing while she made little moaning sounds of sweet distress.
We became adept at getting out of our clothes, or most of them, without breaking our embrace, and then, her wonderfully cool and slightly granular skin pressed all along mine, we would crabwalk to the makeshift bed and fall over slowly together in a sort of toppling swoon. At first, on the mattress, we would be all knees and hips and elbows, but after a moment or two of desperate scrimmaging all our bones would seem to relax and bend and blend, and she would press her mouth against my shoulder and exhale a long, shuddering sigh, and so we would begin.
But what, you will be asking, of my friend Billy, what was he doing, or not doing, while his mother and I were at our joyous callisthenics? That is a question I myself often asked, with much anxiety. Of course I found it increasingly hard to face him now, to look him in that always relaxed and easy eye of his, for how would he not see the glow of guilt I felt sure I must be giving off? This became less of a difficulty when school ended and the summer holidays began. In the holidays allegiances shifted, fresh interests arose that inevitably involved us with new or at least different sets of companions. There was no question between Billy and me that we were still best friends, only we saw much less of each other now than heretofore, that was all. Away from school, even the best of friends were aware of a slight reserve between them, a shyness, an awkwardness, as if they were afraid, in the new dispensation of endless and untrammelled freedoms, of inadvertently catching each other out in some shaming circumstance, wearing ridiculous bathing-togs, say, or holding hands with a girl. Thus that summer Billy and I, like everyone else, began discreetly to avoid each other, he for the ordinary reasons I have mentioned, and I—well, I for my own, extraordinary reasons.