Until she met Roland, she had never heard of psychoanalysis, a six-syllable word you could get completely lost in and trip over the consonants and mangle them in the wrong order, but it was to psychoanalysis that Roland said he went (without expecting any surprise or disapproval) twice a week. To do what? To sit in a room in Swiss Cottage and just talk about himself. When she asked him to explain what he said, and he spoke about trauma, loss, inhibition, transference, she was even more in the dark. ‘But what on earth do you have to be troubled about?’ she asked him, for she was only ever upset about trivial wounds and slights and disappointment.
‘Oh, just listen to you, who pays far too much attention to hats and backchat,’ he said, smiling for once, looking at her almost fondly, as if he was envious of her superficiality. ‘That’s a quote, by the way, from a poem I quite like, and I always wanted a girl who could live up to it, and now I suppose I do. But when you’ve a father like mine, you’re born to trouble. I started out with bad dreams, now I have full-blown nightmares, but that’s progress, apparently. I’ll take her word for it. I don’t have much choice, for I do believe in the process, you know; I think she’ll get to the bottom of it all in time, it’s just a matter of patience.’
‘She? It’s a female? A woman doctor?’
‘She’s not exactly a doctor, unless you count doctors of souls. Is that an expression and why am I asking you of all people? How would you know? Don’t worry, she’s just a grey shape in a chair. Grey hair, grey dress, grey shoes. All designed to soothe, I suppose. Soothe me into a state of relaxation so I can be startled back out of it by the contents of my unconscious. Your uncle, by the way, thinks psychoanalysis is a bourgeois deviation, not that he really understands it, he just toes the line.’
The father sounded an absolute fright. She guessed that Roland had been beaten as a child, which was something she had heard about, an act of cruelty and sadism like attaching tin cans to the tails of cats. No one at home used their fists; it was goyish, common, beastly. But when she asked Roland if he had been hit, he said, ‘Oh, you know, if only it had been that easy. No, he never laid a finger on me in that way. It was more what you would call psychological warfare. Except I was not the opposing army, I was the battlefield. Do your parents love you?’
‘Yes. Obviously. I’m their princess.’
‘Well, good for you. Bully for you.’ His mouth looked very mean, like a slit of a post box, wide, narrow, empty.
Her face must have fallen into the preparation for tears because now he relaxed, reached out his hand. ‘No, don’t be sorry, no need at all. I’m just jealous of you, come here.’
In her defence, she later thought, shuddering at her innocence, everything was a novelty in those days. She had no way of making judgements or comparisons. This exchange took place in a café on Frith Street, where Roland had just introduced her to a type of Italian coffee with an airy hat of foam on the top and a dusting of cinnamon, said to be good for the digestion. When he asked her if she liked the cappuccino, she said yes, but knew she had no informed opinion about anything, not even knowing what she did not know. The cup of coffee was delicious, strong, foreign, that was the most she could say about it. Unordinary life was being lobbed towards her too fast to take it all in. One could only catch so much. So Italian coffee was digested, Roland’s trips to Swiss Cottage went unexamined.
For there seemed to be such huge tracts of ignorance in her upbringing. And it was not just intellectual matters – plays, films, novels. It was a whole mass of daily rights and wrongs and that was before one had even got into politics, a subject which Roland said was terra incognita for her, two words she could not even find in the dictionary. Not being able to say what station was on which tube line, or the merits of different ways of dressing a Christmas tree when she had never had one. The lights on Oxford Street, the Father Christmas grotto at Selfridges, the pantomime at the Palladium – everyone had an opinion. ‘Oh, I hear Aladdin wasn’t as good this year; I really prefer Puss in Boots, anyway. Don’t you?’ The list of things she had no idea about was inexhaustible.
What was Roland doing with her? Or not exactly doing with her, but phoning her, taking her out, to pubs and restaurants, finding her a job.
I think, she said to herself, he just wants to deflower a virgin. Perhaps they aren’t two a penny here in London, at least not when you’re his age. All the girls have gone off the rails already or are married. That must be it.
His flat was in Primrose Hill. He could walk to work through Regent’s Park. This afternoon the sun was lowering in the December sky as if it were being dragged by winches and ropes and cables down into the earth itself, where it would be imprisoned. A green mound ascended into the murky grey sunset. She ran a gloved finger across the windowpane. ‘You should get a window cleaner in,’ she said. ‘They’re absolutely filthy, you can hardly see out of them.’
‘What’s to see? What should I be looking it? Just other people. A street, a lamp-post, a bench, a car, a motorbike, a line of trees. I have seen enough.’
‘Well, I’d never be bored looking out of a London window, though mine is just the sight of roofs and chimneys.’
‘You will, I promise you; you’ll be completely fed up by spring. I really have got to get out of this fucking place, though where to, I’ve no idea. Would New York suit me, do you think?’
‘I think New York would suit anyone. My uncle’s father-in-law is in the Bronx, or was; I’ve never met him, but he’s a kind of presence. What could have been. We should have gone to America, you know. My mother said we got stuck. What a strange arrangement you have here.’
‘That’s quite the non-sequitur.’
‘Oh, there you go again, another bloody word I don’t know.’
‘How your mind runs about; it’s the lack of education, I suppose.’
‘And does the lack of a duster and a broom account for this?’
It was not mess and untidiness that fazed her. At home in Liverpool the house was loaded with upholstered furniture from Waring & Gillow, antimacassars, ornaments, decorative pelmets, dinner services for milk and meat dishes, silver candlesticks, Wedgwood ashtrays, willow-pattern serving dishes, canteens of Sheffield steel cutlery: everything it seemed to Mina and Louis that a suburban home must have if it was to survive inspection by the authorities, and only the mezuzah on the door frames and the menorah in the cupboard the giveaway. Roland’s place was nothing like that. He called it a flat, but it was, she thought, just a jumped-up bedsit, for the bed was the first thing one saw when one came in, or it was the first thing Paula saw; she could not avoid its attention-seeking presence. It was a curious arrangement without blankets or eiderdown, only a great down-stuffed quilt which he had purchased at a Scandinavian shop in South Kensington. ‘You’ll like this,’ he said, pointing a narrow finger at it, ‘it’s almost weightless, as if you’re lying under a warm snowdrift.’
‘What on earth is it?’
‘It’s a duvet.’
‘A duvet.’ She felt like a child learning to talk, repeating new words as she heard them.
He applied a match to a thin brown stick which flamed yellow, then smoked and smouldered, emitting a strange strong scent like a box of spices. There were many things Paula encountered for the first time in Roland’s flat, years before anyone else she knew had heard of them. In the sixties, she said to her daughter, ‘Oh, a joss stick, I haven’t seen one of those since nineteen forty-nine.’
She wondered if there were to be any preliminaries or if they were to be straight to it.
‘Aren’t you going to offer me a cup of tea?’
‘Or something stronger? I have a few bottles in.’
She considered the choices. Alcohol would release her inhibitions. They must be unchecked or she wouldn’t be able to go through with it. And did she actually have to? No, she did not. She could preserve her virginity. But what exactly for? For what and for whom? Your wedding night, her father would say, as Bernice had saved herself for Lionel, and had made him wait until that room at the Adelphi when they were both half dead with stress and too much champagne and her girdle must be digging into her soft stomach and his erection by now at half-mast.
‘Tea or whisky, which is it?’ he said. ‘Oh, for God’s sake, you sit there like a great alabaster monument brooding on your fate, but it’s just sex, that’s all. Just do it, or don’t do it, but spare me your provincial excuses. Or are you a suburban prick-tease?’
If I cry, she thought, then it will be over, then he would probably bundle me out of the room and tell me to get lost. She would not see him again; there was a test she would have failed, had not prepared for, didn’t understand the questions. She was too proud to cry, to fail.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘that was hurtful, I didn’t mean it. You’re a terrific girl, you just need not to be so damned uncertain about everything.’
‘You don’t know what it’s like being me.’
‘Well, of course I don’t, how could I? I mean, you’re an exotic, like a cheetah at the zoo.’
‘A cheetah?’
‘Something like that. I do find you quite out of the ordinary, you know.’
She thought, I must have it out with him. He has to know, I can’t keep up this façade much longer. He might understand.
‘Roland, listen, I’m not what you think at all. I’m not one of your nice middle-class girls you probably went to tennis parties with. I’ve never been to a tennis party in my life; the private courts, the clubs, won’t admit us, we’d have to start our own. And nobody in my family talks like me, certainly not my brothers, you’d think them terribly common and loud, uncouth. My father tried to teach them how to be young gentlemen but it didn’t take at all, they have a lot of energy but they express it in rather strident ways. They’re opinionated and rough, and my father tried to make sure I didn’t go the same way because if you’re a girl then you couldn’t make a good marriage. My mother didn’t know how to help me because she’s an immigrant, so I learned how to speak from the wireless and how to dress and how to do Pitman shorthand and I thought I would come to London and my polish, which Daddy calls it, would mean I’d fit in, but I don’t, because I’ve no idea what a duvet is, even though I just stopped working in bedding. So when you call me a cheetah, when you say I’m out of the ordinary … well, yes, but not that way.’
‘So you’re working class? How exciting.’
‘How dare you? We aren’t working class, we’re Jewish.’
‘That’s very funny. I don’t understand but it doesn’t matter. You’re sui generis, one of a kind, doesn’t that count for something? And I’ll confess, I find what you just said slightly thrilling, to be able to pass like that, to spy on us, learn all our secrets, you really are a secret agent, aren’t you? I mean, you don’t look particularly Jewish – that’s a compliment, by the way – and I would never have known if your uncle hadn’t introduced us. Don’t you understand? You can be anyone you like. Most of us have no choice, we can’t escape from our destiny of minor public school and a gruesome nanny. I envy you, actually. What a lucky girl you are. Now look, the sheets are clean, fresh on this morning. I know you must be fussy about bed linen.’
‘Not especially. It was just a job.’
But she was still digesting his observation about her being a spy. It was the first time she had considered this unique position, which, when she thought about it, she did actually have, and the idea came over her like a newly found power, such as being able to see in the dark or render herself invisible or vault over high walls like Spring-Heeled Jack.
Roland had evidently lost interest in her personality and had turned to seduction. ‘Come here.’ He gestured her to come and sit on his knee in the leather armchair. This is it, she thought. This is actually it. ‘And now you’re here, properly here, not a stretch away. I’d like to undress you myself, do you mind? Slowly.’
‘Like a striptease?’ Her voice trembled slightly.
‘In a way. Now how does this bloody frock unfasten?’
She turned her back to him. He eased the buttons through their eyelets.
Her skin flinched then relaxed against his touch. Now he was undoing her bra.
‘Nice nylons and nice knickers. You really are a lady, aren’t you? Some arty girls don’t bother with lingerie at all. Not anything pretty, anyway. Now let’s be having you, as the common folk say.’
In bed, a few minutes later, she made small plosive sounds with her lips which increased in force and volume. Her body seemed to gather itself up then lose control, like a sneeze. It was all very surprising, not that she hadn’t found ways to practise in advance, using the handle of her hairbrush which she soaped and thoroughly rinsed afterwards. But the weight of a man on top of her, kissing her, licking her, lightly biting her earlobe, his stubble grating the cheeks of her face, his hands now cupping her bottom, her breast in his mouth – all of these sensations aroused her in different ways.
And the only thing she found unsatisfactory was the smell of the slimy rubber thing that lay on the bedside table, limp, wet, full, safe.
‘I can see,’ he said, ‘that this is right up your street. I’m sorry about the first bit, you did bleed a little, I wasn’t honestly sure whether to expect that or not. I couldn’t quite believe that it was going to be your first time, you see. I suppose I should have asked, to make sure, and when you took to it with such enthusiasm it would have been hard to have made that assumption. You have a bit of a rash on your face, by the way, that’s always a good sign.’
She did not suppose he would tell her that he loved her but he had cried out ‘Darling!’ at one point. And finally, he had kissed her, pushing his tongue into her mouth which tasted of cigarettes. Darling, she dared to call him back and he smiled at her. ‘Oh, I’m your darling now, am I? About time. One might have thought you were emotionally frigid, as my Swiss Cottage woman would put it. She finds it fairly surprising that I’m not. Now for a smoke, darling.’
Which this time sounded sarcastic. She wouldn’t be surprised if he never said it again, that they had crossed an unseen boundary and she was in another place, even more unfamiliar than the last.
‘Watch this.’
He took a cigarette from a packet, and neither offered her one nor put one in his own lips but started to peel the thin paper away, using his long thumbnail to score down its length.
‘What are you doing?’
He began conducting a reassembly with a packet of cigarette papers and a dark brown smelly resiny lump he took from a Swan Vesta matchbox.
‘Now here we are,’ he said. ‘We’ll share it, half is quite enough. You must inhale, though, no blowing smoke about, take it right down into your lungs to get the benefit. Worlds will open up to you.’
‘What is this?’
‘You’ll see.’
Ten minutes later she said, ‘I don’t feel any different.’
‘Yes you do, you’re staring at things. You’ve been staring at the same spot on the wall for ages.’
‘Oh.’
‘Darling.’