Friday Afternoon — Dan
Coming home early had been a mistake. I had not expected Charlotte to be there but had half hoped. I hated the house to be empty, it was lifeless and cold when she was not there, which, to be fair, did not happen very often. A smile, a kiss, the smell of supper cooking, things you noticed only by their absence.
Damn her for not being home now, although that was not very fair either as I normally stayed late at the office on Fridays. It was no longer necessary but had become a habit, a ritual, and the staff expected to see me there, still at my desk as they all went home for the weekend; silly really, but part of the pattern of everyday life, secure and unchanging, until this Friday when I had come home early, the first Friday in months I could have used the extra time working.
It had been one of those days when everyone you telephone is out and all your letters have to be typed twice because there are silly little mistakes which you’d like to ignore but can’t, and then have to plead with a disgruntled secretary who thinks you’re making a fuss. I should have got rid of her but she had been with me too long and it would be difficult. She might take the firm to an industrial tribunal which would be bad for us and for her — raking up all her shortcomings in public — terrible; but she was the sort to take it all the way. She might even leave of her own accord and still take us to task, pleading constructive dismissal because I had asked her to retype the letters. The wretched woman was always so defensive, snapping and snarling at the slightest criticism; perhaps she had problems at home, an unhappy marriage. Poor woman.
I went upstairs to take off the dark suit and change into my weekend clothes; surely Charlotte would not be too late, although she had not said when she would be back. She had been rather vague about it — rather vague about the whole thing.
I could understand that she needed to get away sometimes, although not so much now Vicky was at school. The difficult time had been when Vicky was a toddler; it would have driven me mad being at home with her all day. That was when Charlotte should have seen more of Frances but she had been in America those first couple of years. There were letters and postcards. Charlotte kept them all, the only correspondence she did keep, as if one day Frances might become famous. I knew that Frances did not like me, she never had. Oh, it was not obvious, she was too intelligent for that, always very civil and witty, but there was an underlying resentment. We would not have had anything to do with one another if it hadn’t been for Charlotte, yet it was Lottie that caused the strain.
There was a time when I suspected a lesbian tendency in Frances but to say anything to Charlotte would have been cruel and insulting, and she would probably have told Frances. A seed might have been sown that had not been there after all. Pure, bloody-minded defiance, and a battle I did not want to risk.
Telephoning Frances last night was another mistake, like coming home early. It had broken the pattern. I had never phoned before when Charlotte was there, but I wanted to speak to her last night, as if there was a chance we could really say something to one another over the telephone. It was a sort of reverse logic, perhaps we could talk at a distance, in the way we had not at home for some time.
But Frances was there to bar the way. ‘Dan, how are you!’
‘Fine. And you?’
‘Oh, not too bad you know.’ And so it had gone on. Superficial niceties before I could ask to speak to Charlotte.
‘Is it urgent, only she’s having a long soak in the bath before we go out to eat.’
‘No, not urgent,’ I said, unable to put the lie to the test because I knew that Frances was lying, knew it and yet didn’t want to know.
The telephone call, coming home early, they were both part of the same thing and yet there had been nothing to make me feel the way I did now, nothing Charlotte had said, no real change in the way she was. And she did seem much happier, although that was probably because she was working again. If only she had rung back.
I sat down on the side of the bed, facing Charlotte’s dressing table. The mirror was tilted down and I caught sight of myself. I looked worried, more than I wanted to admit; and my hair, why hadn’t I noticed before how grey it had become? But that was not the worst: I was looking distinctly overweight, not fat and it didn’t show when I was standing up, but there was a spare tyre around my midriff. I looked ridiculous sitting there, dejected and flabby in my socks and pants. Why hadn’t Charlotte said anything, she always used to: perhaps she had not noticed either. She had been almost detached lately, bright and breezy and detached. Amazing that she still fancied me but she seemed to. Sex had been better than ever recently; she had become totally uninhibited, even noisy, but she no longer talked afterwards the way she had in the early years. All that had changed. The first time she had cried.
I got up and changed the tilt of the mirror and then sat back on the bed, looking into the past rather than the present. It was almost painful to think about Charlotte but I could not do anything else, waiting, waiting in the silent house, alert for the sound of her coming home but knowing that the more I listened the longer it would be.
I wanted to see her more than ever in spite of all the years we had been together, the familiarity, and careless assumption that she was at home waiting for me. We had known one another so well. She had always been there, part of my life, even in childhood. But Charlotte as herself and not just one of the children who came to my parents’ home to play upstairs while the adults talked, that had started just after the Christmas her father died.
Our families had been friends for years. Charlotte’s father and mine were at school together and during the war the two couples shared a house. Afterwards they had each moved into their own homes, my parents into Lakeside when my grandfather died, and Charlotte’s to a flat in London. But they had kept up the friendship, weekends in the summer when the sun always shone and in the winter, snow and log fires. Those weekends were always special: perfect moments suspended in time and memory. They carried on year after year until Charlotte’s father became ill and died and everything changed although her mother continued to come with Charlotte.
There was a lot of sadness in the house the first few times, quite torturous really but inescapable because my parents felt it their duty to carry on as before and Charlotte’s mother could not bring herself to reject their kindness.
Charlotte was sad too but there was a new kind of defiance about her. I felt sorry for her because of her father. She was fifteen but still seemed like a child to me, four years older and working as an articled clerk, whereas she was still at school.
And then the summer after that Christmas it all started to happen. The thin, pale schoolgirl had changed overnight into a leather and metal-clad monster who came to stay with us for a week while her mother was in hospital.
‘At least she doesn’t smell,’ my mother, normally so tolerant and charitable about everyone, murmured after Charlotte had gone jangling and clanking up the stairs to her room.
‘Poor Dorothy, it must be a trial for her,’ she said when my father came in and she hurriedly explained the metamorphosis before he saw our guest.
‘It must be that new school she goes to. Dorothy said it was “progressive” which I think means they can do what they like. It’s very expensive,’ she added with oblique justification.
During dinner, most of which she declined to eat, Charlotte talked non-stop while the rest of us sat silent and amazed, shocked and embarrassed.
‘We went to Margate at Easter. It was great. Hundreds of Mods had to go to hospital. You should have seen them on the beach trying to run away from the Rockers. The best fight I’ve ever been in.’
‘Do they allow you to wear your hair like that at school, dear?’ my mother asked, as if she had not heard the bit about Margate.
‘That shit heap!’ Charlotte spat out.
My father coughed as if to clear the air and my mother got up to collect the dishes although none of us had finished eating. I stared at Charlotte, unable to take my eyes off the extraordinary sight she had become, her hair long and straggly and dyed jet black like her leather jacket with its silver studs and chains, her eyes with great thick black lines drawn round the lids and her mouth bright red. She caught my stare and suddenly opened her eyes as wide as she could in an overt glare. I looked away, acutely embarrassed and angry; how dare she come into our home like this and swear in front of my mother.
My father had already followed Mother out to the kitchen and I got up to join them, picking up the mustard pot as an excuse to leave the room. Charlotte, of course, was making no attempt to help.
‘What does “shit” mean?’ I heard my mother ask my father as I walked into the kitchen. He mumbled and coughed again, turning away from her as he saw me come in.
‘Terrible. Terrible shame,’ he muttered and then asked crossly: ‘How long have we got to put up with her?’
‘Now, dear, it’s not long since she lost her father. We have to make allowances,’ my mother replied, sounding anxious and conciliatory. ‘Poor Dorothy, though. It must be difficult for her.’
‘Um,’ my father grunted, ill at ease in the kitchen where he rarely put in an appearance, but unwilling to relinquish the refuge and go back to the dining room.
After dinner I went up to my room to study, a nightly ritual which had started when I became articled and would continue for the next five years until I had taken my finals. Wednesday was the only night I had off, the night I went to Young Conservatives.
I had been reading for about an hour when my door burst open and Charlotte came in.
‘Busy?’ she said, quite obviously unconcerned as to whether I was or not.
‘As a matter of fact, yes,’ I replied, curtly. ‘So be a good girl and go away.’
‘So be a good girl and go away,’ she mimicked, flopping down into the armchair on the other side of the room.
I ignored her, keeping my head down over my books but now quite unable to concentrate.
‘Don’t you find it a drag stuck up here working all the time?’ she asked.
‘No, not if I’m left in peace to get on with it,’ I said, still without looking up.
She started to wander round the room. I could hear her picking up and putting down my things, making small bumps and bangs to disturb me and humming to herself, then a sigh and the twitchy little noises of boredom.
‘D’you like my chains?’ she said next, rattling the links together, deliberately trying to irritate.
‘Not particularly. In fact not at all,’ I replied pompously.
‘I pinched them from a bog,’ she went on. ‘Anything to buck the cistern.’ At this she went into paroxysms of laughter, rolling off the chair on to the floor.
‘Do you enjoy behaving like this, trying to shock everybody?’ I said, rounding on her as I gave up the pretence of studying. ‘You’re ridiculous. Do you know that! Just a silly little girl.’
She stopped in mid roll, blinked the big, black-rimmed eyes and stared at me. For a moment I thought she was going to burst into tears but instead she started to laugh again, a hard, coarse laughter which I wished she would stop before my parents heard.
‘Me ridiculous!’ she said after gulping for breath. ‘Me! You should look at yourself. You’re so straight and stiff you’re ready for your coffin.’
‘Oh get out and leave me alone,’ I said, more nastily than I had intended. ‘I’d rather be dead than like you. I don’t know what your father would have said if he could see you now.’
I regretted the words as soon as I had said them.
‘But he can’t, can he, so it doesn’t matter,’ she said quietly, and getting up left me to my books.
I did not see her the next morning, a Wednesday, but all day at the office I kept thinking about her and wishing I had not said what I had about her father. Before his illness the relationship between them had been very close, much more so than she’d ever had with her mother. Once I had heard my parents talking about it: they thought Dorothy had been jealous of her daughter although they were too loyal to put it in so many words.
When I got home my mother cornered me in the kitchen.
‘Dan, I know you won’t like this but do you think you might take Charlotte with you tonight?’ She hurried on before I could protest. ‘She’s been very subdued all day. I don’t think she’s really as bad as she likes to appear and she might enjoy meeting some of your friends.’
Guilt made me agree to my mother’s request and I was thankful that the YC’s were going ten-pin bowling that evening — a setting in which Charlotte would not seem too out of place. Subdued she may have been but I could see that she thought it a huge joke when I asked her, as casually as I could manage, if she wanted to go.
‘Super!’ she said with heavy affectation. ‘Absolutely super. Thanks awfully.’
‘Don’t mention it,’ I replied acidly, wishing I had not let my conscience get the better of me.
‘This is jolly, old bean,’ she kept saying as we walked to the war memorial where the YC’s were due to meet.
‘Oh, do shut up!’ I snapped at her just before the others were in earshot. I cursed my mother for inveigling me into this agonizingly embarrassing situation as one by one I saw my friends turn and glance at us, a ripple of astonishment and curiosity running through the group of sports jackets, floral-print summer frocks and white cardigans.
I was saved having to make any introductions by the arrival of the small coach we’d hired to take us to the bowling alley. Charlotte, hands thrust into her leather pockets, smiled gleefully at anyone who looked her way. The evening was going to be a nightmare, I just knew it.
As I had been at boarding school until the previous summer and had started going to YC’s only in the last three or four months I didn’t know the others that well, but there was a girl called Helen who I thought quite liked me and whom I had been thinking about asking out for a drink, on a Sunday maybe, after church, because I’d seen her at Evensong a couple of times. If Charlotte had not been with me I probably would have contrived to sit next to Helen on the coach; but now that she had seen me with the leather-clad monster I doubted whether she would be interested in me at all, which was another source of irritation.
Charlotte, idly playing with her chains, was, of course, totally unaware of the Helen possibility she had just destroyed. Neither of us spoke during the journey to the bowling alley but my resentment seemed to grow by the mile as I thought about Helen and how pleasant it would have been to spend the evening with her.
The plan was to split up into four groups for the bowling with the idea that the winner from each group would play in a final at the end of the evening. At first this seemed the ideal opportunity to off-load Charlotte but then I decided I couldn’t risk letting her loose on the others in case of what she might say. She’d had no compunction about using bad language in front of my mother so there was no reason to suppose she would bother to temper her tongue with my erstwhile friends.
The four groups had already been sorted out before we got there and Helen and I were to be in the same one, which in any other circumstances I would have viewed as a piece of good luck, but not tonight with Charlotte beaming facetiously at everyone I spoke to.
We changed our shoes for the special bowling pumps and went to select the bowls. Several times I tried to catch Helen’s eye in the vain hope of retrieving the situation, if there had ever been anything to retrieve in the first place, but each time she seemed to look away until I was convinced she had decided to ignore me. Helen was a serious girl who had joined the YC’s because she was interested in politics, or so I thought. She was not like most of the other girls I’d met who seemed preoccupied with less weighty matters. Helen was not silly or empty-headed and not a bit like Charlotte in any way. She was also a year older than me which made her even more attractive.
The match began with Helen bowling first although her initial attempts missed the pins altogether, trundling off into the sides of the lane.
‘Bad luck,’ I said, over-heartily as she turned back to the group, but she was determined to ignore me.
The next two in the group did a little better but not much, and then it was Charlotte’s turn. She needed only the first bowl to knock down all the pins: a clean, straight run down the centre of the lane, delivered with a great sweep of her leather-bound arm, chains flailing.
The same performance was repeated each time it was her turn, making her the clear winner from our group. Now I knew the reason for the gleeful smile but to be fair to her she was a worthy winner and, of course, went on to wipe the floor with the winners from the other groups in the final.
Suddenly she was the star of the evening with all the other chaps crowding round her.
At last Helen spoke to me: ‘Your friend seems to be a very keen player. Personally I find this sort of thing rather mindless, don’t you?’ I had not noticed then what a tight, thin-lipped mouth she had.
I was about to agree with her but something stopped me and instead I heard myself saying: ‘No, not really, I think it’s jolly skilful.’
Helen turned and walked away without another word, leaving me slightly disappointed about the possibility that had never been there after all.
The next evening, after dinner, Charlotte again came to my room.
‘Thanks for taking me last night,’ she said breezily after she had flung herself into the armchair. This time I looked up from my books.
‘That’s all right. You were quite a hit with the others,’ I said. ‘I mean, they seemed to like you.’
‘You mean you didn’t expect them to. You thought I’d be an embarrassment.’
‘No, not at all,’ I said, not very convincingly.
‘I don’t think the girls liked me. Very stuck-up some of them, aren’t they, especially that Helen. You fancy her, don’t you?’
I turned back to my books.
‘No, as a matter of fact I don’t.’
‘No, as a matter of fact I don’t,’ she mimicked.
‘I wish you’d stop that,’ I said.
‘I wish you’d stop that,’ she continued, affecting the sort of plummy voice she’d had herself until six months ago.
I ignored her and wished she would go away although another part of me wanted her to stay. Irritating as she was, the room came to life with her there, breaking the monotony of endless study, although so far that evening I had been unable to concentrate properly on the law tomes piled around my desk.
‘Is there anyone you fancy?’ she asked next.
‘There may be,’ I replied, ‘but it’s none of your business.’
There was a pause.
‘Are you still a virgin?’ she asked loudly. ‘I mean, have you ever fucked anybody?’
I could feel blood rushing to my face, hot and red.
‘I think you had better go to your own room,’ I said, a little hoarsely.
‘Go on. Have you?’ she persisted lasciviously.
‘As I said, it’s none of your business.’
‘I bet you never have,’ she went on. ‘You should, you know. It’s great.’ She got up then and left the room. After she had gone I tried to find some concentration but failed and went to bed early; but I couldn’t sleep: my mind was full of her — resentment, distaste, she really was the most beastly girl.
She was due to remain with us at Lakeside until the Sunday evening and after lunch that day my mother, worried that Charlotte might tell Dorothy she had not had a good time now that my father was totally ignoring her, made another of her ‘suggestions’, this time that I should take Charlotte for a walk across the fields which stretched over the horizon behind our house.
‘It’s a lovely day and the fresh air will do you both good,’ she said encouragingly. ‘Tea will be at five, in time for Evensong.’ I didn’t know how she had the nerve to add the last bit as there seemed nothing very Christian about her scheme to lumber me with Charlotte for the afternoon.
We set out under a blazing sun. I strode ahead, tramping through the thick undergrowth which threatened to overrun the footpaths skirting the fields. It was mid-August and most of the fields were still bulging with their harvest, the stiff, ripe crops rustling and sighing in the afternoon breeze. We continued for about an hour, Charlotte a few paces behind and unusually silent, although I could feel her presence like a knife in my back. And then she called out to me to stop. Her feet were aching and she was hot, and couldn’t we find a nice shady tree to sit under?
I ploughed on for a further five or ten minutes, obstinately passing several shady trees and then we came to Gadders Wood, a dense little patch of limes and elders two or three miles from Lakeside.
‘Well I’m stopping even if you’re not,’ I heard her call petulantly, and turning, saw that she had flopped down under the first tree, her leather jacket discarded on the grass beside her.
Reluctantly I walked back to the spot she had chosen and sat down. I suppose I was almost afraid of her — of what she might say or do to embarrass me. She stretched out, lying on her back, her eyes closed. She had a thin white blouse on, peaked over her breasts by the dreadful pointed bra she wore, sticking up like a pair of cones.
Her legs were long and thin in black stockings, but the rest of her looked a terrible mess although, in a way, I envied her. Her’s was a sort of uniform just as my tweed jacket and grey flannels were, but she could get away with whatever she liked — clothes, behaviour: she challenged the world to expect anything of her. It was a freedom I would have liked, although expressed in a different way, of course: but freedom to catapult the constricting expectations created by my upbringing, expensive education and worthy parents. And yet Charlotte’s conditioning had not been that different so it had to be something in her, something I did not have. I envied her whatever it was but at the same time thought how badly she had used it.
Her eyes opened and saw that I had been watching her.
‘It’s so hot,’ she said, and sitting up began to fumble for her suspenders under the tight black skirt. She rolled down the stockings and pulled them off.
‘Why don’t you take off your jacket?’ she asked and then, as if seizing upon a sudden idea, added: ‘I tell you what, for everything you take off I’ll do the same.’
I had already begun to remove my jacket before she had said the second bit and felt if I tried to put it on again this would only incur the adolescent derision I had come to expect from her. So I threw down the jacket and pretending I had not heard, loosened my tie, my eyes fixed in a concentrated stare on the wheatfield in front of us.
We remained like that for five minutes or so. I could hear her idly plucking at bits of grass and then she rolled over on to her front and said: ‘Come on, Danny boy, haven’t you ever played this game before, what’s the matter, afraid you might lose?’ She began to laugh and suddenly I was pulling at my tie, wrenching at the knot, but the force just made it tighter. She laughed more and if only to shut her up I rolled over towards her, pulled her up against my chest and clamped my mouth over hers in a clumsy demonstration of emotionless, animal lust that was completely overplayed in the attempt to cover up my total lack of experience.
It all happened very quickly after that. I was on top of her, pushing her skirt up and then grappling with the belt and zip on my grey flannels. Hopelessly nervous and angry I blundered on, hardly aware of Charlotte’s trembling body until instinct told me that it was the first time for both of us, but by then, of course, it was all over, a brief, overwhelming sensation full of guilt and confusion.
I rolled away from her, pulling my clothes together, scrambled up and wandered a little way into the trees, leaving her still and silent on the grass. I felt dreadful, a contemptible wretch, and then I heard a soft whimpering sound which halted me in my tracks. I ran back to her.
‘Why didn’t you tell me? Why did you have to pretend?’ I demanded accusingly.
She did not answer. I heard her sniff and then a great sob shook her body. I knelt down on the grass beside her and touched her shoulder.
‘Charlotte?’ I murmured in bewilderment.
‘Go away,’ she pleaded, her voice a pathetic whisper. ‘It’s your turn to leave me alone.’
I think there was probably a note of conscious drama in the desolate little utterance, but at the time I was too full of remorse and the conviction that I had behaved like a cad to allow myself any leniency in attaching the smallest degree of blame to Charlotte. She lay there, the innocent victim of my despicable lack of control, and I couldn’t wonder at her wanting nothing more to do with me. I am surprised only that the word ‘rapist’ did not enter my head.
We went home the way we had come, in stunned silence at what we had done, me in front, Charlotte a few yards behind, home for tea in time for Evensong.
*
It was two years before I saw her again. Two years of law books pored over in a dull room. The weekends continued but Dorothy came alone and the possibility that Charlotte may have told her mother what had happened in Gadders Wood kept me closeted away with my studies while she was there. This meant that any news tended to be scant and rather watered down by the time it reached me, Charlotte having become an unmentionable subject in our house since her stay. Whenever her name did crop up it would be followed by ‘Terrible shame’ from my father and ‘Poor Dorothy’ from my mother.
For the first few weeks after she had gone I worried that there might be a letter or something, Dorothy confronting my parents with the news that her daughter was pregnant, but the weeks went by and nothing happened.
In spite of the tight-lipped episode at the bowling alley I did start taking Helen to the pub after Evensong, although it was all quite different to the way I had expected: Charlotte had changed things even if I had not yet realized how. Neither of us mentioned her but she was there, between us, somehow, making a space.
We went to the YC’s annual weekend conference at Eastbourne and made love in Helen’s hotel room. She was a good sort really, patient and instructive in bed if a little dull out of it, but then I did not consider myself to be such stimulating company.
And then Charlotte got a place at the art college in the town near us. Mother felt duty-bound to ask Dorothy if Charlotte would like to stay with us during term time but to everyone’s relief a place had already been reserved at the students’ hostel, and Charlotte had spent half a term at the college before I saw her again and the second metamorphosis.
*
Boar Park Country Club was the ‘in’ place that autumn. It was a vast old house three miles outside the town, set in acres of woodland and meadow, part of which had been turned over to a golf course. My father was a member and spent most afternoons on the links, but it was Monday nights that people my age went to the club. Part of the labyrinth of cellars had been converted into a sort of nightclub and on Mondays there was a discotheque with drinks half price.
Helen and I had drifted away from the Young Conservative crowd. Her interest in politics had turned out to be less committed than I had at first imagined and although I had vague longer-term ambitions, the YC’s had begun to seem a somewhat tortuous route to achieving them. Prejudice and intolerance combined with a priggish assumption of shared ‘right thinking’ had become more pronounced with the Wilson government in power and something to slam against; so Monday night had taken over from Wednesday and I had started taking Helen to Boar Park.
We didn’t dance much, Helen suffered from asthma and never liked getting out of breath, although her dancing consisted of shifting her weight from one foot to the other while the rest of her body appeared to remain stiff. My own efforts seemed similarly inhibited amidst the fluid swaying movements of the other dancers and there were moments when under the influence of the flashing lights and pulsating music I longed for some sort of release, to break into wild contortions, to be loud and crazy. But, of course, I never did and after a couple of records Helen and I would retreat to some dark corner, to sip tepid drinks.
Why we kept going there I can’t think except that it was an easy, mindless break from study and the music was loud enough for neither of us to feel it necessary to talk. We clung on to the relationship because it was better than nothing and there was nobody else.
And then one Monday night a crowd of students turned up and took over the tiny dance floor, spinning and weaving round each other in a dazzling display of over-the-top athleticism. It was late in the evening, about the time Helen and I normally left to find a quiet spot to park the battered Austin Cambridge I had acquired and go through the weekly ritual of groping one another in the back seat.
I glanced at Helen but she had not finished her drink. It was not often that I really looked at her any more. We saw each other twice, three times a week and yet I was avoiding her. After two years together the subject of marriage had crept up insidiously and with increasing regularity. We had been to three or four weddings, always invited as a couple: ‘Your turn next,’ well-wishers would say to us. I felt it creeping over me like a great convolvulus weed, taking hold, pulling down. I liked Helen, she was nice, but I could not bring myself even to contemplate the prospect of a lifetime together. Why did everything have to move on and change; couldn’t things be left as they were, of the moment, without all the eternal strings? Perhaps I was being unreasonable to want the ease of familiarity combined with the stimulation of transience. Yes, I definitely was being unreasonable although the pressures from without seemed more so. Stubborn, that’s what I was too, stubborn and unaccommodating, Helen had said so, weeping, when I failed to wear the signet ring she bought me; but quite simply, I did not like rings; my hands were not suitable.
I found it difficult to understand why Helen wanted to marry me. I had no money then, she did not seem to enjoy sex all that much any more and I felt sure she was no more in love with me than I with her. But there again it did not seem to me that the couples whose weddings we attended were very different: marriages not made in heaven but connived at in the ladies’ lavatory at the Conservative Club, or so I supposed, with unkind cynicism.
Jaded thoughts such as these plagued me more and more as the convolvulus grew, stronger and more overwhelming as each week went by. I sipped my tepid lager in the Boar Park discotheque and waited for it all to get worse.
The Tamla Motown music the students had been dancing to came to an end and Roy Orbison began to sing. A tall girl with close-cropped hair, a polo neck jumper, mini skirt and long boots strode past the table where Helen and I sat, and then she stopped and turned back.
‘Hello, Dan.’ It was Charlotte.
She sat down and I introduced her to Helen.
‘Yes, we’ve met before, about two years ago,’ Charlotte said.
Helen looked nonplussed.
‘It’s all right, I don’t suppose you remember me. I was a bit different then,’ Charlotte added, glancing at me, a wicked little smile crossing her lips.
‘You could say that,’ I said, taking in the amazing transformation. Charlotte looked almost ordinary now.
Helen, who had mumbled some sort of hello, got up then and went to the cloakroom to fetch her coat.
‘It is nice to see you again, Dan,’ Charlotte said when she had gone. ‘Shall we have a quick dance before you go?’ She had not changed completely, still the forthright manner.
‘Yes,’ I said, as if I couldn’t find any reason to refuse. ‘Why not?’
We got up and went on to the dance floor. The tempo was still slow and Charlotte put her arms round my neck and moved up to me.
We swayed to the music, our heads ear to ear.
‘What happened to the chains?’ I asked.
‘They went rusty. What happened to the law books?’
‘Oh, I’m still in bondage, I’m afraid,’ I said. Charlotte laughed.
We danced on into the next record.
‘I think Helen’s waiting for you,’ Charlotte said. I glanced over to the table. Helen, her coat on, was sitting there watching us.
‘I’d better go,’ I said.
‘Yes, you had.’
‘Thank you for the dance.’
‘Why don’t we do it again next week?’
I hesitated: ‘Yes, possibly. Good night.’
‘Bye, Dan.’
‘Enjoying yourself,’ Helen said, icily, when I went back to the table.
‘Are you ready?’ I asked, pretending not to notice her mood.
She got up and went towards the exit.
‘I think it was rather bad the way you just went off with that girl as soon as I wasn’t there,’ she said peevishly.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘She’s an old family friend.’
‘I bet!’ she scoffed unpleasantly.
Outside the night had gone cold. There was a clear sky and the moon shone brightly on the cars parked round the front of the old house. Helen shivered and as we walked towards the Austin put her arm through mine, clinging on.
‘Is she really an old friend?’ she asked.
‘Yes.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘It’s all right,’ I said, wishing she would still be angry.
We got in the car and drove off. I wanted to take her straight home but it did not seem possible and nothing more was said as I drove to the heath and took the Austin up the bumpy track to the highest point. When we got there I switched off the engine and turned to her.
‘Not tonight, Dan,’ she said, ‘I want to talk.’ I could see her face clearly in the moonlight. Her expression was intense, her eyes searching.
‘Do you think we ought to call it a day?’ she said.
‘You’re not still worrying about Charlotte, are you?’ I said leaning back in the seat and staring out over the lights of the town spread out below.
‘No. It’s us.’
‘We’re all right, aren’t we?’ I said, reaching for her hand, knowing she was after reassurance.
‘You don’t love me, though, do you?’ she persisted.
‘Of course I do.’
‘But you never say it.’
Stubborn and unaccommodating, I could not say it.
‘There you are, you can’t because you don’t!’
She began to cry and I felt wretched for making her unhappy. I started the car and backed down the track. I had a sense of urgency, to get away before I began to weaken, before pity got the better of me and I retreated back into a sort of sloth that seemed to have dulled everything for as long as I could remember.
We reached Helen’s house. My heart was beating furiously but remorse was catching up with me.
‘Look, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it,’ I said.
‘Yes you did,’ she said miserably.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said again, rather lamely. She was already half out of the car. She pushed the door to and walked away. I let a moment go by and then leant across and wound down the window to call after her. But what was the point? I saw her standing by her front door, waiting, her back, slightly hunched, pathetic and accusing.
‘I’m sorry, Helen,’ I murmured to myself and wound the window back up.
I drove home with a marvellous sense of freedom but nevertheless suffered terrible pangs of guilt. I did not like myself very much for the way I had treated Helen, but retribution was waiting in the form of Charlotte.
Six months later Helen married the chairman of the YC’s, a big buffoon who is now an MP. Magnanimously she invited me to the wedding, but I was in France with Charlotte, heading for Paris in the battered Austin.
The convolvulus had been uprooted but was growing again and I was the cultivator. Why one thinks in such fanciful analogy (secretly — to oneself because to say it aloud would sound insane) I can only think is a way of softening reality: metaphysical comfort for the raw emotions that take over your life. To fit the mould cast for me it seemed I had to be a down to earth, a realistic plodder, solid middle-class, middle-of-the-road articled clerk, brought up to fulfil expectations of moderacy in all things. Not ‘rocking the boat’ seemed to be the main thing. Parting from Helen had been a small bit of rebellion but after the first flush of freedom I had to acknowledge that nobody really changes. We are what we have always been and six months with Charlotte should have proved it to me. I don’t think she expected or wanted me to be any different, and it seemed not to matter to her that I didn’t fit in with her crowd at the college, although I envied them in much the same way I had Charlotte two years earlier. It was an illogical envy I did not fully understand, although I think it was something to do with freedom of spirit.
I suppose I had looked to Charlotte to share it a little but instead she had looked to me for what she needed; she saw me as stable, reliable and uncomplicated. I was to be an ‘always there’ person for her, listener, mentor and lover; although at times it concerned me that the first two roles were more important to her than the third. I had to be patient I thought, even though that was not how I felt. Sometimes I would reach a pitch of frustration that became a physical burning sensation in my chest: the old feeling of wanting to break out even though I was the willing victim of Charlotte’s expectations.
Taking her to Paris was an act of desperation. It goes without saying that I went back to Boar Park the Monday a week after finishing with Helen, although I very nearly did not, which seems incredible now. I had a law exam coming up and felt I ought to study more, possibly also because there seemed to be something cleansing and virtuous about sitting alone in my room, a sort of penance for Helen. But this had begun to fade by Friday, helped by frequent speculation as to how much Charlotte had really changed. Perhaps curiosity was the motive although I find it difficult to remember now, all the other emotions having long since made it impossible to think about Charlotte in objective terms.
She was there, that Monday night, with her friends from the college, girls and boys of varying ages and a lecturer, Chad, who was much older, grey-haired and balding, and inexplicably attractive to the college girls he taught, among them, Charlotte.
Chad, I found out later, had been a commercial artist who dropped out when he was thirty and, abandoning his wife and three children, went off to South America to paint pure art. Why he had returned to England was never fully explained, but he had come back and taken up a teaching post at the college, making himself a romantic figure with his stories about life in ‘uncivilized parts’ where you could get caught up in a revolution just by standing in a bus queue. Chad had a talent for telling stories and an eager audience in the anarchy-inclined students.
At first I told myself that the Charlotte crowd were an amusing lot. I felt as if I was standing back, as an observer, with a mild sense of superiority and condescension excusable by the conditioning process I had unwittingly succumbed to under the influence of the Conservative Club. But there was an ingenuous affectation about the students which was irritating and attractive at the same time. They were like a breath of fresh air after the stuffy young Tories. And then I began to realize that they were standing back from me. I was the odd one out; far more so than Chad, whose seniority lent him enchantment.
I thought about how I might change without appearing to emulate the students, but my role within the group had already been determined: the outsider tolerated because of Charlotte.
As a group we did all sorts of wild things, ‘japing’ it was called. ‘Let’s go on a jape,’ they would say halfway through an evening, and we would all bundle into Chad’s Dormobile and head for the coast to light an illegal bonfire on the shingle at Aldeburgh or Southwold and prance round it in sea-soaked clothes, or sit staring out over the night tide smoking shared reefers, but getting more of a lift from the salty sea air. There were indoor parties as well; impromptu gatherings after the pubs had closed when everyone would gravitate to an unknown house and dance till they collapsed or listen to Chad holding court on the concept of eternity or the sexuality of Peruvian peasant girls.
It was a very vivid period, almost unreal, and lasted only a matter of three or four months although it stands out in memory as having been much longer. And then it all began to change. Chad, who generally appeared to prefer group relationships and the privileged position he held within ours, as opposed to individual friendships, turned his attention to Charlotte. It seemed to me that the students had made him almost guru-like and responding to this he found it necessary to discourage other attachments such as the still tenuous one between Charlotte and myself.
He was clever about it, using little slights, smiling denigration. He started referring to me as ‘the lad’, accurately perceiving that his appeal for Charlotte was due considerably to his age. And there was nothing I could say or do that would not worsen the situation; I just had to ride it out and hope Charlotte would not succumb. I started smoking a pipe, even thought about growing a beard, without realizing what I was trying to do.
The group lost its appeal. It had become like a dreadful amorphous mass, suffocating and somehow inescapable, although why seems hardly to make sense except that I suppose I felt I couldn’t leave it myself in case Charlotte did not come with me. Chad was relentless, and Charlotte seemed flattered and excited by his attention.
I waited for the Easter holiday, hoping and praying that there would be no drastic changes before the end of term. I thought that once the holiday came and the group split up for two or three weeks there would be a breathing space to consolidate things with Charlotte, who so far had shown no sign of wanting to get rid of me. The last day of term came and in the evening the group met in its favourite pub. Chad was there, drunk from the staff party at lunchtime. I had never seen him so full of booze. It had a strange effect on him, he was maudlin, morose. Silently I rejoiced and offered to buy him a drink.
‘Gin. I’m on gin, lad.’
‘No wonder you’re so depressed,’ Charlotte said.
‘It’s necessary to plummet to the depths sometimes in order to get a different perspective on life,’ he said mawkishly. ‘We have to suffer to perceive our souls.’
I laughed but Chad did not appear to notice. He had taken Charlotte’s hand in his and was staring into her eyes.
‘You do understand, don’t you?’ he said. ‘You of all people must understand.’ His voice was quite slurred but the moment was a sober one, and I could not mistake its meaning as Charlotte gazed back at him.
Later that night I suggested the Paris trip: ‘You’ve always wanted to see Montmartre. I’ll take you. We’ll go over Easter.’
‘Yes … yes, if you say so,’ she had replied, her manner hesitant and vaguely distracted.
We arrived in Paris on Easter Saturday night and went straight to Montmartre. I parked the Austin some little way away and we climbed the steep streets to the small square where seedy second-rate artists parade their bohemianism to the tourists who buy their paintings. Some were doing portraits, reasonably skilful charcoal impressions of undistinguished people flattered into posing for a few minutes.
Charlotte said it was all quite magical and wanted us to buy a painting from a row of daubings pegged on a line of string under the trees in the centre of the square. They were too expensive really and more than I could afford but I bought one to please her.
We wandered around a bit longer and then went into one of the dark cafés which face out on to the square. It was crowded but we managed to find two seats in a corner next to a couple who were passionately kissing. There was a pianist on the other side of the room playing Edith Piaf tunes and an aproned waiter darting about with a tray of glasses balanced on one hand.
‘Isn’t it all wonderfully how it ought to be?’ Charlotte said. ‘I mean, it could have been spoilt, like everything else, by tourism and all that, but it’s just as I imagined it would be — how I wanted it to be.’
I wondered how much of it had been orchestrated, whether after all the café was no more than a facade cleverly preserved by some big conglomerate which had long since taken over from ‘le patron’, but I didn’t want to spoil the enchantment for either of us, and Charlotte enchanted was at her most enchanting.
The couple sitting next to us were still locked together, oblivious to everyone else, but their mood catching. I put my arm round Charlotte and she moved closer to me, resting her head against my shoulder.
‘I think I could stay here for ever,’ she murmured. I bent my head and kissed her, completely caught up in the atmosphere of the place.
We drew apart and I glanced round but nobody had taken any notice. The pianist started to play Piaf s greatest song, regretting nothing, and an old crone in a dirty blue dress and with socks rolled round her ankles began to sing the words, her voice amazingly similar to the original.
More people came in, drawn by the sound of the singer: the smell of French cigarettes mingled with something cooked in garlic, became stronger.
‘Would you like something to eat?’ I asked Charlotte.
‘No, but you have something,’ she said dreamily. I noticed that she had not touched her wine.
‘Are you feeling okay?’
‘Yes, just a bit queasy.’
‘You should have said. We’ll go if you like.’
‘No. I’m all right. It’ll pass. Usually it’s in the mornings.’
The significance of this registered immediately. I stared at her but she looked away.
‘Let’s not talk about it now. It’ll only spoil things,’ she said, her eyes fixed on the ravaged singer.
My mind raced, thoughts tripping over each other, dismay, anxiety and a strange sense of relief — even, perhaps, triumph.
‘We’ll get married,’ I said, quietly but firmly. ‘As soon as we get back.’
‘No. I don’t want to,’ she said, still looking away from me towards the singer. ‘And besides, it might not be yours.’
That moment seems sharper now than it did at the time. It was numbing then, like a huge physical blow, so big you don’t feel it at first but then when it does start to hurt gets worse before it gets better. It was years ago. Ten? It is something I will not think about for a long time and then I remember it, that moment and those words, recalled to mind when they can do the most damage.