Nonetheless the thought came involuntarily into her head as she prowled, that tonight she had her enemy sleeping under her roof. Of all things: as if instead of a respectable middle-aged PA living in suburban Cardiff she was some kind of Anglo-Saxon thane, sharpening her sword and thinking of blood. Just as the thane might have, she felt divided between an anxious hostility towards her guest and an absolute requirement to protect him and watch over his head.
In May 1968 Caro had turned up for a meeting of the Revolutionary Socialist Student Federation at her university wearing a new trouser suit: green corduroy bell-bottoms with a flower-patterned jacket lining and Sergeant Pepper-style military buttons. The meeting was to organise participation in a revolutionary festival in London the following month, generating support for the Vietnamese struggle for national liberation. The festival was already provoking all kinds of ideological dissent: the Trotskyists thought the whole project was ‘reformist’, and the Communist Party were nervous at the use of the word ‘revolutionary’. The Young Communists were going to appear riding a fleet of white bicycles which they had collected and were donating to the Vietnamese.
Caro had bought the trouser suit because her godmother (whom she had adored as a little girl but had stopped visiting recently because of her views on trade unions and immigration) had sent her twenty-one pounds for her twenty-first birthday. She could have put it aside to help eke out the end of her grant, but instead, on impulse, she had gone shopping and spent it in a trendy boutique in town that she had never dared to go inside before. It was months since she had had any new clothes; and she had never possessed anything quite so joyous, so up to the minute and striking, as this trouser suit. She knew that it expressed perfectly on the outside the person she wanted to be from within. With her long hair and tall lean figure it made her look sexy, defiant, capable (in skirts she often only looked gawky and mannish).
The meeting was in a basement room in the History Department as usual. As usual, it was mostly men, though there were three or four girls, bright history and politics students, friends of Caro’s, who came regularly. The girls really did get asked to make the tea, and really did make it. They sat at desks arranged in a square under a bleak light bulb with an institutional-type glass shade, surrounded by maps on the walls that were of course nothing to do with them — Europe after the Congress of Vienna, the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1914 — but nonetheless gave the place an air they all rather enjoyed of being a command centre in some essential world-changing operation. By the time Caro arrived the usual thick fug of cigarette smoke was already building up (she smoked too, in those days). She was greeted, because of the trouser suit, with a couple of wolf whistles, and everyone looked up. It was complicated to remember truthfully now just how one had felt about that whistling. A decade later it became obligatory for women to be indignant at it and find it degrading; at the time, however, she would probably have felt without it that her trouser suit had failed of its effect. You met the whistle without making eye contact but with a little warm curl of an acknowledging smile, a gleam of response.
Two men had come from Agit Prop, to talk to the meeting about the festival (Agit Prop was a loose association of activists and artists named after Trotsky’s propaganda train and dedicated to promoting revolutionary messages through aesthetic means). That was how Caro met Keith Reid for the first time: when she arrived he had already taken his place in a chair at the centre of things, commanding the whole room. Keith was a very attractive man — it was the first thing you needed to know about him, to get any idea of who he was, then. Not handsome, exactly: off-centre quirky features held together by a fluid energy, fragile hooked nose, hollow cheeks, a lean loose strong body, a shoulder-length mess of slightly greasy dark curls. He had a Welsh accent: it was a Valleys accent in fact — he was from Cwmbach near Aberdare — but in those days Caro had never been to Wales and couldn’t tell one accent from another. At a time when Left politics was saturated in the romance of the workers, this accent was in itself enough to melt most of the women (and the men).
He looked at Caro in her trouser suit.
— Don’t you find, he said, — that dressing up like that puts off the working classes?
She thought about this now with stupefaction. Had she really once inhabited a world where such absurdities were a currency? She should have laughed in his face. She should have turned round and walked out of the meeting and never gone back.
— No, she said, calmly taking a place directly in Keith’s line of sight, so that he could get his eyeful of the offending item, — I find it gives them something good to look at.
Of course she wasn’t really calm. She was raging, and humiliated, and struggling with a muddled and not yet confident sense of something fundamentally flawed and unfair to do with men and women in what he had said and all that lay behind it: everything that was going overflow into the flood of feminism in the next couple of decades. And no doubt at the same time she was scalding with shame at her bourgeois depraved frivolity in the face of decent suffering working-class sobriety, just as Keith meant her to be. And she was thinking how she would make him pay for that.
They had such energy, then, for all the battles.
After the meeting the visitors from Agit Prop had needed a floor to stay on and Caro had taken them back to the disintegrating old mock-Tudor house, its garden overgrown as a jungle, which she shared with a motley collection of students and friends and politicos. (Later she had had trouble with that house; it was rented in her name, and some of the people using it refused to pay their share. She had to hassle them for it, and came home once to find ‘Rachman bitch’ scrawled in red paint on her bedroom wall.) They sat up until late smoking pot and sparring; Caro and Keith arguing not about the trouser suit, which wasn’t mentioned again, but about the dockers’ support for Enoch Powell and its implications for the alliance between left alternative politics and the working-class movement. Caro had been on the anti-racist march to Transport House: Keith thought she was overstating the problem in a way that was typical of bourgeois squeamishness in the face of the realities of working-class culture.
The way Keith dominated a room and laid down the law and didn’t seriously countenance anybody else’s opinions should have made him obnoxious; but his ironic delivery in that accent of his made it seem as though there was something teasing in his most exaggerated assertions. Everyone was willing to listen to him because he was older and his pedigree was impeccable: a miner’s son, kicked out of Hornsey Art College for his political activities, he had been working on building sites ever since. In any case, that sheer imperturbable male certainty was intriguing to women in those days. They felt in the face of it a complex mix of thrilled abjection with a desire to batter at it with their fists; also, probably strongest, they believed that given the chance they would be able to find out through their feminine sexuality the weaknesses and vulnerable places behind the imperturbable male front. (This last intuition was all too often accurate.)
Eventually Caro found sleeping bags for everybody and they distributed themselves around mattresses and sofas and floors in the high-ceilinged damp-smelling rooms of the house. And then at some point in the night Keith must have got up again and wandered about until he found, not Caro, who had half expected him, but her sister Penny, who happened to be staying with her for a few days. Penny was a year older than Caro but didn’t look it: most people took her to be the younger sister. She was smaller, softer-seeming, prettier. Caro found them in the morning twined around one another in their zipped-together sleeping bags. All she could make out at first was the mess of Keith’s dark curls and his naked young shoulders, tanned and muscular from the work he did; and then she saw how down inside the bag Penny’s head with its swirl of auburn hair like a fox’s brush was wrapped in his brown arms against his chest.