‘Seems to me,’ I began, ‘you’re hardly. .’ But Mother caught the sound of the rotary sprinkler in the next garden and rushed out to pull in the washing. She preferred this to inviting our new neighbour, a vanguard of gentrification, to adjust the thing. No sooner was she out than Peggy leaned across the table towards me, her breasts swinging heavily: ‘What’s got into you, George?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘For heaven’s sake! You seem to be doing your best to ruin a happy situation and start an argument. Relax. Please.’ She was wearing earrings the size of saucers, punk dark lipstick.
I said: ‘I’m sorry, Peggy, but I thought I was trying to prevent an unhappy situation from developing.’
And when Mother came back in I told her I was off. I’d take the coach back to Leicester that night. I had a lot of studying to do. At the door she thanked me, as if it had been me had worked the miracle. She embraced me and kissed me. In the background Grandfather was complaining to the TV about the influx of Kenyan Asians.
I wash my hands of you all, I thought.
Lucky Stars
What was it I liked so much about Shirley? Why did we become so rapidly and permanently attached? I can’t rightly remember. At seventeen, eighteen, one is so much immersed in life. One likes without noticing quite what or why, in a whirl of vanity and self-gratification.
We met at a retreat intended to promote church unity. There must be an irony there. The well-to-do Anglo Caths in Chiswick High Street were dallying with the Shepherd’s Bush Congregationalists and Park Royal Methodists, and the youth of the three churches were lured off to an Easter Week of Prayer in a boarding school outside High Wickham. Shirley and I were drawn together in the second round of the table-tennis tournament.
Thin as a rake, poignantly flat-chested, sinewy, imperious, athletic, dynamic, she bounced and swayed threateningly at the other end of the table, four or five bracelets rattling on each wrist, be-ringed fingers lifted to cover her laughter, long copper hair falling away from a cocked cheek. One of the Anglo Caths, I thought, even before she spoke. I had to sweat blood to beat her.
Perhaps it was the freedom and assurance she had which attracted me first, a strength of character and cheerfulness that meant you could never feel you were hurting her. And naturally I was impressed that someone from a higher class was interested in me. I liked the fact that her father was a lawyer, that the family was well-off, respectable, moneyed, and that my mother, with the way she always confuses respectability with morality, wholeheartedly approved of them. I was overwhelmed by all the contact of skin on skin, the way she shivered and melted when I kissed her ear, as I soon learnt to, the way she put a hand in my shirt as we walked across Gunnersbury Park. She liked to touch me. She wore a green silk scarf over her hair the way gipsies do, which somehow made me feel unspeakably tender, it gave her face such a bright, bird-like look, all eyes. But it was the sudden and complete intimacy that was most extraordinary. From the very first days together Shirley and I could talk about anything, everything. And amazingly we always agreed. She with me and I with her. It was uncanny. Had we not thrown religion and all its imponderables very promptly out of the window, we would have said we were made for each other.
So that on arrival back in Leicester that evening, I immediately turned to Shirley for support. Hadn’t I been right? Hadn’t I? One sounded mean saying certain things, but the fact was they had to be said. We talked it over. Shirley agreed wholeheartedly; it was a case, she decided, where the older generation, my mother, and the sixties aberration that had followed it, my sister, were both erring in sentimentality and romanticism, were refusing to look long and hard at future reality, future practicality.
Our room-mates Gregory and Jill were there, another solid sensible couple, and I was surprised, as we talked, how rapidly, on the basis of just a smattering of information, they came to the same conclusions I had. It was reassuring. Gregory said he found it extraordinary that people were even allowed to go on making the same old mistakes you read about in every novel, newspaper and social study, as if the centuries past had never been and the race had learnt absolutely nothing.
We cooked ourselves omelettes with green peppers and ate, unusually, in front of the TV, since BBC 2 was kindly interrupting the snooker to show somebody’s version of Carmen (both Jill and Shirley came from the right class to be opera buffs). We drank some decent wine Gregory had tracked down that Sainsbury’s had started importing from Friuli, and toasted to high-paying jobs and plenty of nights at the opera. ‘But no running off with gipsy girls,’ Jill frowned. ‘Nor army boys,’ Gregory replied.
We really were a happy foursome in that house. There were no overbearing characters, no martyrs, no one was even particularly idiosyncratic. We shared the housework and the bills. We studied quietly and helped each other. We all knew what we wanted and how to go about getting it. We were young, cheerful, optimistic.
In bed later that evening, Shirley said, ‘Poor Peggy. Really.’ And she said: ‘Praise be to God for Reckitt & Colman though. A pink one a day keeps the gynaecologist away. Or the shotgun at bay. And you still can make hay. And have a damn good lay. Oh yea!’ ‘Oh shut up,’ I laughed, trying as always to be serious. Though one of the best things about bed with Shirley was, not just the excitement, but the fact that this was when she was at her merriest. Sometimes we’d be reduced to such helpless laughter we’d have to give up and start all over again when we’d got over the giggles. ‘Maybe,’ she said, ‘if Peggy’s so anti hormone-juggling and all that, you could tell her to get a bedside book of jokes. Excellent contraceptive.’ ‘Just,’ I said, ‘that you’d always be worried she might miss the punchline.’ ‘She does seem,’ Shirley agreed, ‘a rather inattentive creature.’
Still, appreciating that sometimes I’m too quickly irascible and categorical, and because I really do love Mother and Peggy and wish them well, and since I felt I might yet influence the situation for the good somehow, I decided not to overreact and cut myself off from them. A few days after getting back to Leicester, I wrote Peggy the following letter:
Dear Peg,
Sorry if I seemed like a bit of a bull in a china shop when I came down Tuesday. The fact is I’m really seriously worried about you and Mum, I mean about how you will cope if things start going wrong. Perhaps the best thing I can do is just list my fears, which I think you’ll have to agree are not far fetched:
a) What if your actor man doesn’t marry you and won’t or can’t support the baby?
b) What if you don’t have enough money and have to go back to Gorst Road to bring him/her up amongst the mad and the senile?
c) What if Mother breaks down under the strain? Who will look after Grandfather and Mavis then?
Of course if either Mother or I or even yourself were well-off none of the above would be a problem, but even after I get out of university and hopefully get a job, it will be some years before I’ll be able to spread any of the proceeds about, since Shirley and I will have to save for a home of our own. We can’t rely entirely on her parents. My one thought is, and this is the last time I shall mention it, that it might be better to have an abortion now, get yourself safely married, save up a bit and then have the baby. That’s all.
Hope you are well otherwise. Shirley and I are both gearing up for finals and making job applications. Fingers crossed.