‘So which of the daughters have you fallen in love with?’ Eric asked.
‘No, not one of the daughters, the mother.’
‘Ah, the mother,’ he said. ‘We like that,’ he added, giving me marks for originality.
One day, I notice a dark bruise on her upper arm, just below where the sleeve of her dress ends. It is the size of a large thumbprint.
‘What’s that?’ I ask.
‘Oh,’ she says carelessly, ‘I must have knocked it against something. I bruise easily.’
Of course she does, I think. Because she’s sensitive, like me. Of course the world can hurt us. That’s why we must look after one another.
‘You don’t bruise when I hold your wrists.’
‘I don’t think the wrists bruise, do they?’
‘Not if I’m holding you.’
The fact that she was ‘old enough to be my mother’ did not go down well with my mother. Nor my father; nor her husband; nor her daughters; nor the Archbishop of Canterbury – not that he was a family friend. I cared no more about approval than I did about money. Though disapproval, whether active or theoretical, ignorant or informed, did nothing but inflame, corroborate and justify my love.
I had no new definition of love. I didn’t really examine what it was, and what it might entail. I merely submitted to first love in all its aspects, from butterfly kisses to absolutism. Nothing else mattered. Of course there was ‘the rest of my life’, both present (my degree course) and future (job, salary, social position, retirement, pension, death). You could say that I put this part of my life on hold. Except that’s not right: she was my life, and the rest wasn’t. Everything else could and must be sacrificed, with or without thought, as and when necessary. Though ‘sacrifice’ implies loss. I never felt a sense of loss. Church and state, they say, church and state. No difficulty there. Church first, church always – though not in a sense the Archbishop of Canterbury would have understood it.
I wasn’t so much constructing my own idea of love as first doing the necessary rubble-clearance. Most of what I’d read, or been taught, about love, didn’t seem to apply, from playground rumour to high-minded literary speculation. ‘Man’s love is of man’s life a thing apart/’Tis woman’s whole existence.’ How wrong – how gender-biased, as we might now say – was that? And then, at the other end of the spectrum, came the earthy sex-wisdom exchanged between profoundly ignorant if yearningly lustful schoolboys. ‘You don’t look at the mantlepiece while poking the fire.’ Where had that come from? Some bestial dystopia full of nocturnal, myopic grunting?
But I wanted her face there all the time: her eyes, her mouth, her precious ears with their elegant helices, her smile, her whispered words. So: I would be flat on my back, she would be lying on top of me, her feet slipped between mine, and she would place the tip of her nose against the tip of mine, and say,
‘Now we see eye to eye.’
Put it another way. I was nineteen, and I knew that love was incorruptible, proof against both time and tarnish.
I have a sudden attack of – what? – fear, propriety, unselfishness? I say to her, thinking she will know more,
‘You see, I haven’t been in love before, so I don’t understand about love. What I’m worried about is that, if you love me, it will leave you less for the other people you love.’
I don’t name them. I meant her daughters; and perhaps even her husband.
‘It’s not like that,’ she answers at once, as if it is something she too has thought about, and has solved. ‘Love’s elastic. It’s not a question of watering down. It adds on. It doesn’t take away. So there’s no need to worry about that.’
So I didn’t.
‘There’s something I need to explain,’ she begins. ‘E.P.’s father was a very nice man. He was a doctor. He collected furniture. Some of these things were his.’ She points vaguely at a heavy oak coffer and a grandfather clock I have never yet heard strike the hour. ‘He actually hoped E.P. would become a painter, so he gave him the middle name of Rubens. Which was a bit unfortunate because some of the boys at school assumed he must be Jewish. Anyway, he did the usual schoolboy sketches, which everyone said were promising. But he never became more than promising, so was a disappointment to his father in that department. Jack – the father – was always very kind to me. He used to twinkle at me.’
‘I can’t say I blame him for that.’ I wonder what might be coming next. Surely not some intergenerational imbroglio?
‘We’d only been married a couple of years when Jack got cancer. I’d always thought he would be someone I could go to if I got in any trouble, and now he was going to be taken from me. I used to go and sit with him, but I would get so upset that it usually ended up with him consoling me rather than the other way round. I asked him once what he thought about it all, and he said, “Of course I’d prefer it otherwise, but I can’t complain that I haven’t had a fair crack of the whip.” He liked me being with him, maybe because I was young and didn’t know very much, and so I stayed there till the end.
‘That day – the last day – the doctor – the one looking after him, who was a good friend as well – came in and said quietly, “It’s time to put you under, Jack.” “You’re right,” came the reply. He’d been in terrible pain for too long, you see. Then Jack turned to me and said, “I’m sorry our acquaintance has been so brief, my dear. It’s been wonderful knowing you. I’m aware that Gordon can be a difficult row to hoe, but I’ll die happy knowing that I leave him in your safe and capable hands.” And then I kissed him and left the room.’
‘You mean, the doctor killed him?’
‘He gave him enough morphine to put him to sleep, yes.’
‘But he didn’t wake up?’
‘No. Doctors used to do that in the old days, especially among themselves. Or with a patient they’d known a long time, where there was trust. Easing the suffering is a good idea. It’s a terrible disease.’
‘Even so. I’m not sure I’d want to be killed.’
‘Well, wait and see, Paul. But that’s not the point of the story.’
‘Sorry.’
‘The point of the story is “safe and capable”.’
I think about this for a while. ‘Yes, I see.’ But I’m not sure that I did.
‘Where do you usually go for your holidays?’ I ask.
‘Paul, that’s such a hairdresser’s question.’
In reply, I lean over and tuck her hair behind her ears, stroking the helices gently.
‘Oh dear,’ she goes on. ‘All these conventional expectations people have of one. No, not you, Casey Paul. I mean, why does everyone have to be the same? We did have a few holidays once, when the girls were young. About as successful as the Dieppe Raid, I’d say. E.P. was not at his best on holidays. I don’t see what they’re for, really.’
I wonder if I shouldn’t press any further. Perhaps something catastrophic had happened on one of their holidays.
‘So what do you say when hairdressers ask you that question?’
‘I say, “We’re still going to the usual place.” And that makes them think we’ve talked about it before and they’ve forgotten, so they usually let me off after that.’
‘Maybe you and I should have a holiday.’
‘You might have to teach me what they’re for.’
‘What they’re for,’ I say firmly, ‘is for being with someone you love a few hundred miles away from this sodding Village where we both live. Being with them all the time. Going to bed with them and waking up with them.’
‘Well, put like that, Casey…’
So you see, there were some things I knew and she didn’t.