ALL MY EVERLASTING LOVE
HE SPENT THE morning shooting at daffodils with his air rifle. To be more exact, he was trying to shoot through the stalks so that they keeled over. He would not have tried shooting through the flower heads, since he was not insensitive to their beauty, and, in any case, that would have wrecked his mission. His mother Joan had sent him out to pick daffodils for a dinner party that she was having in the evening.
When she had asked him, he had grimaced and his heart had sunk. This was a girl’s job. His jobs were to empty the waste-paper baskets and burn the rubbish, chop wood, prune the fruit trees, rescue birds and mice from the cats, walk the dog, scoop up pet vomit, dig trenches, cut the hedge, go up ladders to clean out the gutters and roam around the countryside with his catapult and air rifle. The only girl’s task he ever did was to make the coffee after supper. His sisters had to clean and tidy inside the house, activities from which he was exempt, apart from emergencies that required the use of the Hoover. His father washed up after supper and also hoovered in emergencies. It was an enlightened household, in which it seemed as though the women did all the work, but in which anything very unpleasant or strenuous always fell to the men.
Peter would not have had it any other way. He had just turned thirteen and had only recently left behind his shorts and become eligible for jeans. He loved his jeans, as the whole country loved jeans. They were the epitome of comfort and modernity, without being either modern or comfortable. It was the late sixties; disreputable people had taken to wearing them. They were raffish and daring and they proclaimed the beginning of a more casual age, when the platoons of commuters walking to the station suddenly gave up wearing bowler hats. Even his father, the Major, had taken to wearing jeans at weekends, and even the Major’s hair had become fractionally longer owing to the subversive influence of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. The Major and Joan disapproved strongly of the Beatles and the Stones, even though they had once had a soft spot for Elvis, and so it had been Granny who had taken all the children to see Help! and A Hard Day’s Night. Granny thought that George and Paul were sweet. The Major used to say that those bloody pop stars (who couldn’t even sing, with or without a fake American accent) should serve some time in the forces; that would straighten their ideas out. It was discipline they were short of. What he really wanted was to tie them down, gag them, cut their hair off and then shoot the lot of them, along with George Brown and Harold Wilson. But his hair became longer nonetheless. One day, perhaps five years hence, he would even sport sideburns in the wake of his wife’s crush on Engelbert Humperdinck, and he would wear, briefly, a kipper tie with paisley swirls. But he would never sink so low as to wear brown shoes with a black suit.
Just now, however, young Peter had been told to go and pick daffodils, at the very time when hormones were bursting to life in his body and there was nothing more important in life than not being a girl.
Adolescence had already damaged him. Nowadays his psyche had degenerated into a whirlpool of resentments, longings and animal impulse, but a couple of years before he had been so bright and intelligent that he had been able to memorise a poem in three readings. At Guildford Grammar he had regularly achieved 100 per cent in several subjects during end-of-term exams. He had won double-plus marks for his French composition. Joan used to boast that he had got his brains from her side of the family, from her father, a mathematician who even understood relativity and could calculate the dimensions of circles in his head, using pi to three decimal places.
Above all, the twelve-year-old Peter had been happy. His mind had buzzed with energy, his religious faith had been instinctive, and he had lived unquestioningly in his little universe of Latin verbs, punch-ups at school, edifying parables, catapults, yo-yos and marbles.
Like everyone else he had eagerly awaited the arrival of his first pubic hairs, without realising how much they would hurt him. He had thought that the first one was a stray hair floating on the surface of the bathwater, and had not realised that it was his until he had plucked at it in order to drop it over the side of the bath. That sharp and astonishing twinge, however, was as nothing compared to all the psychological agonies that followed.
Peter started to wonder why life was meaningless. Given his Anglican inoculation, it was perhaps strange that this should have happened. But it wasn’t that he knew life was meaningless; it was that, deep in his bowels, he began to experience it. His bones and blood began to tell him that one day they would be nothing but earth or ash.
What was it that would make the world seem like the fresh, uncomplicated place it had always been before? What was it that would restore the purpose in life that puberty had removed? He began to feel unhappy. Fits of horrible violence came over him and he wanted to go out and kill. He felt that he wanted to fight, and not stop until he was dead or victorious. He began to play furious games of football with his friends that would go on for three hours or more, because afterwards he felt purged enough to be equable for a while, to sleep peacefully. Recently he had been unable to turn his mind off at night, sweating in his sheets, tormented by everything in general and nothing in particular, a detainee and plaything of his own whirling brain and dissatisfied heart.
Nothing would have sorted Peter out except for the arrival of a large platoon of indulgent nymphomaniacs, an eventuality of little likelihood in Notwithstanding. It might at least have quietened the canker of physical longing that gnawed in his throat and guts. Even that would not have been enough, for Pandora’s box had opened more completely than that. Not only did he crave incessantly a satisfaction he could barely imagine and could not have, but he had fallen in love.
He had been in love as a child, it is true: with his hamster, with a little blonde girl at primary school, with the picture of his father as a young man, with Diana Dors and Valerie Singleton on the television, with the family dog; but these kinds of in-love did not hurt and grieve.
Now he was in love with a friend’s sister, and he was in a state of spiritual pain. She was chestnut-haired and freckled, skinny and bouncy. In the summer her freckles joined up. She was slightly croaky in the voice, and she was a Methodist, which didn’t seem to matter now, because love had made him broad-minded. He knew nothing about Methodists apart from the fact that they didn’t burn people at the stake, were opposed to enjoyment and might not be proper Christians. Because of her voice, everyone called her Froggy. She was twelve, she lived half a mile away up the hill, and she and Peter’s little sister spent much of their time together, giggling a great deal and conspiring in hushed voices. One of their favourite topics was discussing what it might be like to have periods, how big their breasts were likely to grow once they got started, and how relatively ‘developed’ were the various friends they knew. They were fascinated by sex, but knew that it was immoral and that any girl who had it was a tart. Peter knew, contrariwise, that any boy who had it was inconceivably lucky.
Froggy was also in love with Peter, but they hardly ever spoke. They could think of nothing to say, too tongue-tied and awkward to speak to each other at all. They never managed more than ‘hello’, and Peter spent most of his time with his friend Robert, and Froggy’s brothers. They liked to collect conkers or small dead animals, and put them on the railway line, just to see what the trains did to them.