An important craft fair was coming up. I heard about it weeks beforehand from Jo. It was to be on a Sunday, and on the morning of that Sunday a Volvo station wagon came in to the cottage drive. A woman I didn’t know was driving. I took this to be Marian. Jo was sitting beside her. They had come to take away some of the art work they had left for my father to get used to. Jo came out first and, very much the woman who knew her way around, let herself into the cottage. She came out shortly afterwards with my father who, overdoing the dodderiness, leading Jo on (but only in this matter of art work), was helping ineffectually to bring various awkwardly shaped pieces (big frames, big mounts) out to the porch.
My room was at the other end of the cottage, near the entrance gateway, at the beginning of the small semi-circular drive. So when Marian came out, to greet my father, I saw her from the back. Her black, too loose, elastic pants, part of a black outfit, had slipped far down. And that energetic getting out of the Volvo, using the steering wheel to lever herself out, had pulled it askew and even lower.
She said to my father, “I’ve been admiring your lovely house. I’ve heard so much about it from Jo.”
I had worked out a character for her, but, as had been happening more and more in my work in recent years, I had got it wrong. Such directness, such social grace wasn’t at all what I was expecting. Nor was the big Volvo, handled with a matching grace as, sitting high, she eased it into the tight, awkward curve of our drive. For years afterwards I could recall that moment. She was tall, a further surprise, not plebeian or council-estate in figure, and exercised and slender. The glimpse of her lower body, the black coarse material contrasting with the lovely skin, fixed the moment in my mind. With a quick right hand she straightened the back of her pants, pulling it out and down a little more before pulling it up and straight. I doubt whether she knew what she had done. But the moment was ever with me. When, later, we were together it could bring about immediate desire for her, or it could put life into a lagging performance.
I watched them put their pieces in the station wagon and drive away. I was too nervous to call out to Jo. And so it happened that for a week I was obsessed by a woman whose face I hadn’t even seen. Ideas of comedy or crime fell away.
On Saturday I asked Jo how the fair had gone. She said it hadn’t gone at all. She and Marian had sat all day at their stall (the rent was twenty-five pounds) and nothing had happened. Towards the end of the afternoon some men had appeared to be interested, but they were only trying to pick them up.
I said, “I saw Marian last Sunday morning when she came here.”
I had tried to speak as neutrally as possible. But the look on Jo’s face told me that I had given myself away. Women are sharp about sexual attraction, even when they themselves are not involved. All their senses are trained to detect the beginnings of interest and inclination, a man’s loss of neutrality. Women may say that for them there is an important self beyond sexuality. We allow ourselves to see what they mean, but then we come across women’s autobiographies that are boastful chronicles of screwing; and often in the biography of a dead woman writer, say, very sensitive and serious in her time, the life presented for our admiration (now that the books have faded) is principally the life of screwing.
Jo’s bright eyes became shaded with roguishness and complicity. She herself was displaying a new character, as if to match what she had seen in me.
I asked, “What does Marian do?”
“She is a swimmer. She works at the baths.” The municipal baths in our market town.
That explained the exercised body. I had never been to the municipal baths and I imagined myself in a biggish pool, with barefooted Marian in her swimsuit doing her round of the pool, walking a foot or two above the level of my head. (Though I knew it wouldn’t be like that: she would more probably be in a synthetic shell suit of some sort, sitting in a chair beside the sun-bleached and water-stained plywood tea counter, having bad coffee or tea, and reading a magazine.)
Jo, as if reading my thoughts, said, “She’s lovely, isn’t she?” Generous as always about her friend, but still with the new complicit look, as though she was ready for any adventure with me that might include her friend.
I thought of the exercised and relaxed body stretched out in her bed, clean body in clean sheets, smelling of chlorine and water and cleanliness, and I was deeply stirred.
Jo said, “She’s made a couple of mistakes. Like the rest of us.”
Jo’s language was like that, with strange old-fashioned echoes: the mistakes were no doubt children by unsuitable men.
She said, “She’s been living with someone for ages.”
She began to tell me what this man did, but I stopped her. I didn’t want to know any more. I didn’t want to get a picture of him. It would have been unbearable.
MY PURSUIT OF Marian (Roger said) was the most humiliating thing I had ever exposed myself to. And at the end, to add to my humiliation, I discovered that council-estate women of Marian’s age thought of sex in the most matter-of-fact way, in the crudest way, you might say, or the simplest, the most natural, almost as something they had to go shopping for, and in the same spirit of sport with which they went shopping for cut-price groceries (on certain evenings, when the supermarkets marked down certain perishable items).
Marian told me later (when my pursuit was done, and our weekend relationship was more or less established) that groups of young women in her area would make a party on Thursday or Friday or Saturday and go out to the pubs and clubs, trawling for sex with men they fancied on sight. Fancied: that was the word: “I fancy him.” No woman wanted not to have a man she fancied. These occasions could turn very rough. The fancied men were also matter-of-fact about women and sex, and a woman could be easily knocked about. If a woman objected too loudly or with too many obscenities she could be given a “beer shampoo”: she could have a bottle of beer emptied over her head. It was all part of the sex game, part of the weekend clubbing. Almost every woman who did this kind of clubbing had at one time had her beer shampoo. At the end there was sex for everyone, however fat, however plain.
Marian was telling me one day about someone on her street, a young woman, who lived on crisps and very sweet chocolate bars and pizzas and burgers, and was immensely fat. This woman had three children, also very fat, by three different fathers. I thought this was a critical story from Marian, the swimmer, about bad diet and fatness. But I was wrong. Most of the women in Marian’s area were fat. Fatness by itself wasn’t a story. This was a story about the fat woman’s sexual appetite and sexual success. The moral tone I thought I detected wasn’t there. Marian was speaking in her gossipy way only of the presumption and absurdity of the fat woman. She said, “It’s like a Chinese laundry in that house, with men. In and out fast.”
That was Marian’s language style. Sharp. It went with everything else about her. To me it all made a whole.
Even if I had all or some of this knowledge about Marian’s background I don’t think it would have helped me in my courtship, to use that inappropriate word. I couldn’t have adopted the attitude of the fancied men of the pubs. I wouldn’t have known how to knock a woman about in a pub or give her a beer shampoo. I could only be myself, and depend on such arts of seduction as I possessed. These arts hardly existed. Perdita and a few other women like Perdita had, as the saying was, thrown themselves at me. They didn’t do so for flagrant sexual purposes. They did it only for marriage. Sex hardly entered into it. I was okay, as a partner or husband, and that was all. So I never had to seek women out or win them. They were simply there, and I discovered now that, in the winning of Marian, I had no talents of seduction at all.