‘What sort of cake is that, Mrs Macleod?’ asks one of the FBs.
‘It’s an upside-down cake,’ she replies, flipping it over on its wire rack. ‘Look how the fruit has all risen to the top.’
Then she cuts us big slices, which we scoff.
She can probably turn base metal into gold, I think.
– I said how my credo was love and truth; I loved her, and I saw the truth. But I must also admit that this coincided with the period when I lied to my parents more often than before or since. And, to a lesser degree, to almost everybody else I knew. Though not to Joan.
– While I do not analyse my love – the whence, why, whither of it – I do sometimes try, when alone, to think about it lucidly. This is difficult; I have no previous experience, and am quite unprepared for the full engagement of heart and soul and body that being with Susan involves – the intensity of the present, the thrill of the unknown future, the discarding of all the mingy preoccupations of the past.
I lie in bed at home, trying to put feelings into words. On the one hand – and this is the part to do with the past – love feels like the vast and sudden easing of a lifelong frown. But simultaneously – this is the part to do with the present and the future – it feels as if the lungs of my soul have been inflated with pure oxygen. I only think like this when alone, of course. When I am with Susan, I’m not thinking what it’s like to love her; I’m just being with her. And maybe that ‘being with her’ is impossible to put into any other words.
Susan never minded my solo visits to Joan; she wasn’t possessive about one of the few friends her marriage seemed to permit. I came to enjoy the mugfuls of cut-price gin; after a while, Joan allowed the yappers in, and I got used to the distraction of Yorkshire terriers grazing on my shoelaces.
‘We’re leaving,’ I told her one July afternoon.
‘We? You and I? Where are we going, young Master Paul? Do you have your belongings tied up in a red-spotted handkerchief on a stick?’
I should have known she wouldn’t let me get away with earnestness.
‘Susan and I. We’re off.’
‘Off where? For how long? A cruise, is it? Send me a postcard.’
‘There’ll be lots of postcards,’ I promised.
It was odd, my relationship with Joan was a kind of flirting. Whereas my relationship with Susan barely had any flirting in it at all. We must have gone through all that preliminary stuff without noticing – smack into love – and so had no need for it. We had our jokes and our teases and our private phrases, of course. But I suppose it all felt – was – too serious for flirting.
‘No,’ I said, ‘You know what I mean.’
‘Yes, I know what you mean. I’ve been wondering about it for some time. Given the circumstances. Half wanting it to happen, half not. But you’ve got guts, the pair of you, I’ll say that.’
I didn’t think of it in terms of guts. I thought of it in terms of inevitability. Also, doing what we both deeply wanted.
‘And how is Gordon taking it all?’
‘He calls me her fancy boy.’
‘I’m surprised he doesn’t call you her fucking fancy boy.’
Yes, well, probably that too.
‘I shan’t say I hope you know what you’re doing because it’s perfectly obvious neither of you has any idea what you’re doing. Now, don’t pull that face at me, Master Paul. No one ever does, not in your position. And I’m not going to say, Look after her, and all that stuff. I’m just going to keep my thumbs bloody hard crossed for you.’
She came out to the car with me. Before getting in, I moved towards her. She raised a palm.
‘No, none of that fucking huggy-huggy stuff. There’s too much of it around, everyone suddenly behaving like foreigners. Be off with you before I shed a tear.’
Later, I went over what she had and hadn’t said to me, and wondered if she’d been spotting parallels I’d missed. No one ever knows what they’re doing, not in your position. Off up to London, eh? Fancy boy, kept woman. And who’s got the money? Yes, Joan was ahead of me.
Except that it wasn’t going to be like that. I could hardly imagine Susan back on the Macleod doorstep in three years’ time, tongue-tied, emotionally blasted, begging silently to be taken in, her life essentially over. I was confident that wasn’t going to happen.
There was no exact Moment of Leaving, neither a surreptitious midnight skedaddle, nor some formal departure with luggage and waving handkerchiefs. (Who would have waved?) It was a long-drawn-out detaching, so that the moment of rupture was never clearly marked. Which didn’t stop me trying to mark it, with a brief letter to my parents:
Dear Mum and Dad,
I am moving up to London. I shall be living with Mrs Macleod. I shall send you an address as and when.
That seemed to cover it. I thought the ‘as and when’ sounded properly grown-up. Well, so I was. Twenty-one. And ready to fully indulge, fully express, fully live my life. ‘I’m alive! I’m living!’
We were together – under the same roof, that is – for ten or more years. Afterwards, I continued to see her regularly. In later years, less often. When she died, a few years ago, I acknowledged that the most vital part of my life had finally come to a close. I shall always think of her well, I promised myself.
And this is how I would remember it all, if I could. But I can’t.
TWO
Susan’s running-away fund contained enough to buy a small house in Henry Road, SE15. The price was low – gentrification, and juice bars, lay far in the future. The place had been in multi-occupation: a euphemism for locks on every door, asbestos panelling, a squalid kitchenette on a half-landing, personal gas meters and personal stains in every room. Through that late summer and early autumn we stripped it all back, joyfully, the dandruff of distemper in our hair. We threw out most of the old furniture, and slept on a double mattress on the floor. We had a toaster, a kettle, and dined off takeaways from the Cypriot taverna at the end of the road.
We needed a plumber, electrician and gas man, but did the rest ourselves. I was good at rough carpentry. I made myself a desk from two broken-up chests of drawers topped with cut-down wardrobe doors; then sanded, filled and painted it until it stood, immovably heavy, at one end of my study. I cut and laid coconut matting, and tacked carpet up the stairs. Together we ripped off the parchmenty wallpaper, back to the leprous plaster, then roller-painted it in cheery, non-bourgeois colours: turquoise, daffodil, cerise. I painted my study a sombre dark green, after Barney told me that the labour wards of hospitals were that colour, to calm expectant mothers. I hoped it might have the same effect on my own laborious hours.
I had taken to heart Joan’s sceptical ‘And, to start at the beginning, what would you do for money?’ Given that I didn’t care about the stuff, I could have lived off Susan; but, given that our relationship was going to last a lifetime, I acknowledged that at some point I would have to support her rather than the other way round. Not that I knew how much money she had. I never asked about the finances of the Macleod household, nor whether Susan had a traditional Auntie Maud who would conveniently leave her all she had.
So I decided to become a solicitor. I had no exaggerated ambitions for myself; my exaggerated ambitions were all for love. But I thought of the law because I had an orderly mind, and a capacity to apply myself; and every society needs lawyers, doesn’t it? I remember a woman friend once telling me her theory of marriage: that it was something you should ‘dip into and out of as required’. This may sound dismayingly practical, even cynical, but it wasn’t. She loved her husband, and ‘dipping out’ of marriage didn’t mean adultery. Rather, it was a recognition of how marriage worked for her: as a reliable ground bass to life, as something you jogged along with until such time as you needed to ‘dip into’ it, for succour, expressions of love and the rest. I could understand this approach: there is no point demanding more than your temperament requires or provides. But as far as I understood my life at this time, I required the opposite equation. Work would be something I jogged along with; love would be my life.