I don’t know what these schools had done to their new old boys, but they emerged blinking into the world (or at least into Cambridge) almost wholly estranged from their own impulses, their emotions not even distinct enough to be called confused. I began to recognise the tribe. Undergraduates, often physically big and actively sporty, who hadn’t been keen to take me on my little trips to the lavatory found it in some strange way liberating. They would come back from our little expedition quietly thrilled, and would settle next to me, holding my hand and mooning at me with a blush of joy.
I seemed to be a specific trigger, like the music that ‘makes people cry’. It doesn’t make you cry, it lets you cry. But what was stopping you from crying in the first place, if you had some crying that needed doing?
I suppose it was no more than the famous ‘grounding’, a rush of reconnection with the species after being called upon to help a fellow being on a basic errand. Looking down at those big hands tenderly squeezing mine, their huge paws all warm, it was a shock to realise the fullness of their surrender. They were putty in my hands. For the time being they were under a spell. I began to see how much further I could take it. Under my ever-expanding cloak of invisibility a remarkable amount could be accomplished. I was a naughty Frodo Baggins who didn’t need to fear the searing eye of Sauron on him.
At some point it became hard to tell my advantages from my disadvantages. They tended to blend. It helps that in these matters keeping my distance has never been an option. Anyone who has dealings with me must get close, and physical proximity puts many of my countrymen into a light trance. By the time either party is fully aware of it, foreplay may have begun.
It’s true I never managed to coax a startled penis out into the open, while sitting in a pub or college bar, but I wasn’t far off. It was lack of dexterity that stopped me rather than a failure of nerve, but I didn’t deeply mind. An exhibitionist doesn’t really thrive in a setting where the most lurid transgressions attract no attention whatever.
Geoff. Keith. Simon. Charles. Hugh. It was surprising how many young men were interested in having a lie down at some stage, and a little genteel exploration. I would try to persuade them to leave the door open or at least unlocked. I was always keen to have a witness. I don’t think I ever actually made a dive at a person’s cock, but I’m sure I startled a few folk. When you’re dealing with someone whose very identity is supposed to be the Limited-Mobility Man, then the last thing you expect is a surge of randy purpose.
I can reach my cock when I really want to. It isn’t comfortable — if God had meant me to lean over, he wouldn’t have given me infantile rheumatoid arthritis — but I can certainly do it. If my organ of pleasure was as remote as my toes I’d be in a bad way, very much in need of acts of corporal charity. It’s just that, all things considered, if I’m going to make the effort, I’d rather touch someone else’s than my own. So it makes sense to wait for some susceptible person to have a kindly impulse and put his hand on my groin. Then I return the favour, groping happily away.
Perhaps some of these young men felt sorry for me. I felt sorry for them, come to that, if they needed to go to such lengths to gather up the scattered parts of their personalities. Obviously they weren’t virgins, but they had managed to become sexually experienced without developing the slightest emotional expressiveness. D. H. Lawrence would have understood perfectly. They were Gerald Criches to a man, even if one or two of them had probably read every word Lawrence ever wrote. As a minor university Birkin, I sometimes seemed to have my work cut out to make them whole.
After our little bit of fumbling, my playmates couldn’t wait to be gone, babbling excuses as they beat their retreat. It was sweet that they imagined I wanted them to stay.
Mother of plastic
Once and only once I was able to play out a romantic scene in full, though it was necessarily of an unorthodox sort. I was sitting sideways in this young man’s lap, and both of us were cradled by the Parker-Knoll in its lowered configuration. In itself this didn’t count as an especially intimate position. It was comfortable. Geoff and I had been discussing (in anticipation of the Tragedy paper) the idea of dual determination, whereby people freely choose what has been laid down for them, so that there is no conflict between fate and free will. I had been wondering whether to mention my own conviction (gleaned from The Tibetan Book of the Dead, an otherwise unenlightening read) that I had chosen Mum’s womb in the endless moment of clarity between lives, so that I had accepted in advance what I would freely choose. It seemed better to keep quiet about that, both during the exam and in casual conversation.
I was paying a lot of attention to Geoff’s shirt, though no more than it deserved. It was made of cheesecloth, in a pattern of tiny blue houndstooth checks. It was cut loosely, in emulation of a peasant smock. The collar was soft, and softly rounded. The material was held together under his Adam’s apple by a row of little buttons, miniature discs with a granular shine — not so much mother-of-pearl as mother-of-plastic. They were set so closely that each disc almost touched the next.
I fiddled with his buttons, those many buttons, and I talked as I fiddled. He watched me with a warm wariness through glasses that made his eyes seem oddly defenceless behind that corrective barrier. I could smell his long hair, no longer clean but faintly musky.
I had time to consider the buttons closely. They fastened the shirt not by going through a buttonhole but by being lassoed instead, with a little noose of thread. That was what my fingers were trying to do, to slip the little cotton nooses from round the buttons and release them. ‘Do you know which is older,’ I murmured, ‘buttons or buttonholes?’
‘How do you mean?’ he said, after a pause. ‘Is it a riddle?’
‘Well, it’s not like chickens and eggs. We come to university in search of knowledge, but how rarely do we get it, eh? There’s a definite answer here, and the answer is this: buttons are thousands of years older than buttonholes.’
‘Thousands of years? How is that possible? I don’t get it.’
Buttons and buttonholes seem so obviously designed for each other that Geoff can’t really be blamed for being puzzled. It must have sounded as if I was saying there was a time when there were men and no women. ‘It’s a fact of textile history. There’s no serious disagreement among the experts.’ I’d listened to enough second-rate lecturers doing their stuff to be able to assume their flatly intense manner. ‘The button comes relatively early in the history of clothing. The first button was probably a piece of bone. Buttons don’t have to be regular in shape, you know. The wooden toggles on a duffel coat work perfectly well without being symmetrical. In fact you could say that the toggle is the most atavistic form of button, the fastening that keeps alive the deep memory of clothing, all the way back to the Ur-button. The primordial toggle.’
All this time I was working away at the ridiculous task of undoing the numberless buttons on his shirt. For me it was an enterprise on the scale of a fairy-tale task, counting all the leaves in the forest, say, plucking a scale from every fish in the sea.
He didn’t reply immediately, and his voice was oddly thick when he did. It had changed in character and also somehow in texture — no longer single cream, now double and potentially even clotted. ‘And how … how did buttons work before there were buttonholes?’ My personality magnet had mysteriously come into play.
‘That’s what makes the shirt you’re wearing so educational. It’s a history lesson in itself. The first buttonhole wasn’t a buttonhole as we understand it at all, merely a slit in an animal skin, then (with the invention of sewing) a loop at the edge of a piece of cloth. To make an actual buttonhole requires a much higher level of needle-work, as I’m sure you understand. Nowadays buttonholes are sewn by machines, but your garment with these excessively numerous loops — which are giving me a lot of trouble, incidentally — is a throwback in its own way. Just as cheesecloth is a peasant fabric enjoying a vogue among those who are not peasants, so these button-loops, sewn perhaps by small children, represent for the customer the dream of escaping from an industrialised present.’