IN THE FIFTIES, everyone was waiting to get married, some longer than others. Dennis lost track of the weddings he and Angela attended in that decade – weddings in churches and chapels of every size and shape, and receptions of all sorts, from a champagne and smoked salmon buffet on a Thames riverboat to a cheap sit-down lunch of rectilinear sliced ham and limp salad, with tinned peaches and ice cream to follow, in a dismal school hall in Watford. But somehow the weddings were all the same – organ music, hats, speeches, hilarity, indigestion; and they always ended in the same way, with Dennis and Angela standing on the edge of a crowd, waving goodbye to some grinning couple off to the scarcely imaginable pleasures of the marriage bed. Once, they went to two weddings on the same Saturday, one in the morning and one in the afternoon, on opposite sides of London, and the second one was like a nightmare, having to eat cold chicken and sausages on sticks and wedding cake, and drink sweet sparkling wine, all over again, and listen to what sounded like the same speeches and telegrams, and exchange small talk with what looked very much like the same two sets of relatives.
As for themselves, there was Dennis’s degree to be got, and Angela’s degree to be got and his National Service to be done and her postgraduate certificate of education to be obtained and jobs to be found and money to be saved. Some of these time-consuming operations would overlap, but collectively they would account for at least five years and in fact it turned out to be rather longer before they were married. At a well-wined dinner party in 1974 Dennis was to describe their courtship as the most drawn-out foreplay session in the annals of human sexuality. He was alluding to the infinitely slow extension of licence to touch which Angela granted him over the years, as slow as history itself. By November 1952, when The Mousetrap opened in the West End, he was allowed to rest one hand on a breast, outside her blouse. In 1953, Coronation Year, while Hilary and Tenzing were scaling Everest, Dennis was persuading Angela to let him stroke her leg, when she sat on his lap, up to stocking-top height. In 1954 food rationing came to an end, Roger Bannister ran the four-minute mile and Dennis got his hand inside Angela’s blouse and on to a brassiere cup. Then there was a setback. One day Angela emerged weeping from the confessional of the parish priest of Our Lady and St Jude’s, and for a long time there was no touching of legs or breasts in any circumstances. The Comet was grounded and a link established between smoking and lung cancer.
1954 was the year most of the regular Thursday mass-goers sat their Final examinations. They had stopped going to the New Testament Study Group for lack of time, but to have given up the mass as well would have been inviting bad luck. Adrian, indeed, broke his tight-packed revision schedule to go on Student Cross with Edward (whose medical Finals were some years off) reasoning that the loss of preparation time would be more than compensated for by the spiritual merit earned on the pilgrimage. Student Cross, in case you haven’t read about it before, consisted of about fifty young men carrying a large, heavy, wooden cross from London to the shrine of Our Lady at Walsingham in half a dozen stages, reciting prayers and singing hymns from time to time, as an act of penance for the sins of students everywhere (no light undertaking) and for the edification of the general public. The general public stared, looked embarrassed or incredulous, sometimes pretended not to see the pilgrims at all. An old lady on the pavement of Enfield’s main shopping street inquired, as they were halted at traffic lights, if they were advertising something. Adrian said, “Yes, madam, the Crucifixion.” Edward murmured: “And foot-powder.” All suffered from blisters, especially Adrian. An experienced walker, he had the misfortune to lose his boots just before the pilgrimage and was obliged to wear new ones, not properly broken in. Soon his feet were covered in blisters, his boots seemed filled with molten fire. Every step was agony, and to ease the pain he tried to walk on the sides of his feet with his legs unnaturally bowed, which gave him cramp. His face was creased with pain, his eyes were glazed. Edward urged him to drop out, but Adrian refused to acknowledge defeat until he keeled over in the middle of the A10 just south of Cambridge and they had to phone for an ambulance. He was sent home in a wheelchair, sitting in the guard’s van amid bales of returned newspapers and crates of disgruntled chickens. He tried to console himself with the thought that he had done his best, but it did not seem a good omen for his Finals.
All worked hard in the weeks preceding their examinations, though, as is the habit of students, when they met they pretended otherwise. Violet, however, really wasn’t working, or pretending. She found herself incapable of revising, and more incapable the nearer the time of Finals approached. She would go to the Library each morning, open a book and stare at it for hours, turning the pages out of habit, but not taking in a single word; then she would go home to her digs, open another book and stare at that for hours in the same way. She lived mostly on Lucozade and cigarettes, and her hands shook when she lit the cigarettes and poured the Lucozade. She went regularly to the Thursday masses, but when she remarked in the Lyons cafeteria afterwards that she wasn’t doing any work the others thought that it was the usual kind of precaution against hubris and paid no attention. They could see that she didn’t look very well, but then none of them did. The girls’ hair was lank and greasy from neglect, and the boys looked pale and scurfy from lack of exercise and fresh air.
Violet herself came to the conclusion that she was under some kind of spell or curse, that God was punishing her for her sins. She began to go to Confession compulsively, once a day, then more than once, in different churches all over London, hoping to lift the curse. She did not go at the advertised times: there was usually a bellpush somewhere in a Catholic church by which you could summon a priest to hear your confession at any hour of the day or night. She liked to go into some strange, empty church, in the middle of the morning or afternoon, let the door swing shut behind her, muffling the everyday sounds from the street, and walk with echoing footsteps down the aisle to push the bell button for Confession; then kneel beside the confessional wondering what kind of priest her action would pluck from his hiding-place, and whether he would be the one to break the spell. Always she said she wanted to make a general confession for all the sins of her past life. She confessed the same sins to different priests and compared the penances they gave her. Some were lengthier than others, but none of her confessors seemed particularly shocked by what she told them, so she began, at first subtly, then more and more extravagantly, to embellish her sins and to invent totally fictitious ones: she had corrupted her little sister, she had sold herself as a child to an American soldier for chewing gum, she had masturbated with a statuette of the Sacred Heart. These revelations produced a gratifying reaction from the priests – sighs and stunned silences from the other side of the grille, heavy penances and earnest exhortations, until one day a sceptical Franciscan began to question her sharply about details, and reminded her that it was sacrilege to tell anything other than the strict truth in Confession. This threw Violet into a worse state than before, because she was frightened to admit that she had made all the false confessions. She was less able than ever to do any revision and felt certain that she would fail her examinations. She would have tried to kill herself if that hadn’t been a surer way than any of going to Hell. When, one Thursday morning at breakfast in Lyons, someone made a flippant remark about Violet’s exaggerations, she suddenly burst into uncontrollable hysterics and began throwing crockery at the wall. Edward took her round to the Outpatients Department of the College Hospital, where she was given a sedative and put in a cubicle to rest until her parents could be contacted to take her home to Swindon. Edward explained to the others that it was a nervous breakdown.
Later, Violet wrote to Edward from the West of Ireland, where she was recuperating on her uncle’s farm, to thank him for looking after her, and to say that she would not be taking the exams that summer, but was hoping to return to College in due course to do her final year again. The others were very sorry for Violet, but too preoccupied with their own anxieties about Finals to spare much thought for her. Besides, they did not really understand about nervous breakdowns, they did not quite see how a nervous breakdown fitted into the theological framework of sin and grace, spiritual snakes and ladders. Was it your own fault if you had a nervous breakdown, or was it a cross that God had asked you to bear, like TB? They did not know. For most of them Violet’s nervous breakdown was the first they had come into contact with, though it would not be the last.
When the examination results were published, Miles got a First in History, Michael got a very good Upper Second and Polly a Third in English, Dennis an Upper Second in Chemistry and Angela a Lower Second in French, Ruth an Upper Second in Botany and Adrian (to his great disappointment, for he had secretly hoped for a First) a Lower Second in Economics. On the whole these results corresponded to the intelligence and/or industry of each of them respectively, rather than to their virtue.
Miles went to Cambridge (where he would have gone as an undergraduate if he hadn’t been undergoing a spiritual crisis at the time of the college entrance examinations) to do a PhD, and Ruth went into a convent as a postulant. You are not going to hear much about these two in this chapter because they did not lose their virginities (unless you count mutual masturbation between schoolboys, in which case Miles had lost his already). Ruth did, however, have a kind of wedding when she took her first vows at the end of her novitiate.
She was led into the convent chapel, clothed in a long white dress and veil and carrying a bouquet of white roses, accompanied by two matrons of honour. Angela, who was one of them, thought poor Ruth looked ridiculous in this get-up, and found the whole ceremony faintly morbid. She couldn’t get used, either, to Ruth’s being called Sister Mary Joseph of the Precious Blood. Together they moved in procession to the altar where the bishop waited.
“What do you ask?”
“The mercy of God and the holy veil.”
“Do you ask it with your whole mind and heart?”
“I do.”
Here the two matrons of honour had to remove Ruth’s headdress, and with a little pair of gold scissors the bishop cut off one lock of her hair.
“Oh Lord, keep thy handmaid, our sister, always modest, sincere and faithful to thy service.”
Then Ruth withdrew into a small room, attended by the Mother Superior and two sisters. The matrons of honour had to wait outside, but they knew what was happening behind the door. So did Ruth’s mother, who was sobbing audibly in the congregation. Her father had refused to come.
The two sisters helped Ruth off with her bridal dress, and she put on a plain shift of coarsely woven linen and heavy black shoes and stockings. Then she sat on a stool with a towel round her shoulders, and the Mother Superior ran a pair of electric clippers over her scalp until she was cropped like a convict. Then Ruth put on the black habit, the scapular, the cincture and crown, the coif, the band and the veil, reciting a special prayer with each article of dress. When she returned to the chapel for the rest of the ceremony, she was hardly recognizable as the bride in white – and looked much prettier, Angela thought. All you could see of Ruth now was her face from cheekbone to cheekbone and from forehead to chin, which happened to be by far the most attractive part of her. Everything else was concealed by the graceful folds and starched linen of the habit, which had been modelled on the dress of the bourgeoises of Bordeaux in the late seventeenth century, when the Order was founded.
Afterwards there was a kind of wedding breakfast, with an iced cake, but of course no sparkling wine or any other kind of alcoholic beverage, though the sisters seemed to get distinctly tipsy on the cake alone, being unused to such rich ingredients in their food. Later, on the pavement outside the convent gates, Ruth’s mother clutched Angela’s arm and declared that if she didn’t have a stiff drink in the next five minutes she would die.
“Don’t you think it’s a shame, a terrible waste?” she said, when they were seated in the corner of a saloon bar (Angela felt strange, never having been in a pub without Dennis before) and she had drained her first gin-and-lime.
“Well, she’ll still be able to use her qualifications,” said Angela loyally. “The Order runs a lot of schools.” But she could not rouse much enthusiasm, having herself steadfastly resisted years of propaganda for the nun’s life at school. She fingered Dennis’s ring on her left hand, and felt particularly glad at that moment that she was engaged to be married. That was nearly three years after they took Finals.
Immediately after the examinations were over, and before the results were known, Polly and her fiancé of the moment (she had had a different one in each academic year) invited Dennis and Angela to join them for a camping holiday in Brittany. Polly and Rex would provide the car, borrowed from Rex’s father, and all the gear. Angela was a little surprised by this invitation, for she had never been a really close friend of Polly’s, but she and Dennis accepted readily enough, and not until it was too late to withdraw did they realize that they were being asked along as chaperones – Polly’s parents having agreed to the trip only on condition that they took with them a reliable Catholic couple. Rex was not a Catholic, and frankly suggested to Dennis, as they lay in their tent on their first night in France, that as soon as possible they should aim to pair off with the girls in the two tents. He was rather put out by Dennis’s uncooperative response, and offered to lend him some French letters if that was the problem. (It was not – that problem was still in the future for Dennis.) So Polly preserved her virginity on that holiday, but only just.
They finally pitched their tents in the south of Brittany, on the far side of the Loire estuary. It was too hot to lie out on the beach in the afternoons, so they took their siestas in the tents that were shaded by pine trees, and it seemed absurd not to do that as couples. But those sultry afternoons were occasions of sin if anything was, lolling on air mattresses in their swimsuits, for it was too hot to wear anything else, sensually drowsy from the lunchtime wine, and looking, as they all did, amazingly handsome and beautiful from the sunshine and exercise. Every day Dennis and Angela lay side by side, holding hands across the space that separated them, and listening to the scuffles and giggles and sighs emanating from the neighbouring tent. By the end of the second week, Polly and Rex had reached the stage of petting to climax, as Polly intimated to Angela, asking her if she thought it was possible to get pregnant that way. Angela was shocked and unhappy. She wanted to return home, she told Dennis the next afternoon, or at least stop pairing off in the two tents. When he wheedled out of her the reason in full detail, he became uncontrollably excited. He rolled over on to her mattress and whispered breathlessly in her ear, “Let’s do it, let us do it.”
“What?”
“What they do, what Polly said, oh please let’s Ange!”
After a pause, she said: “Why not do it properly, then?”
Dennis sat up and stared at her. Was she serious?
She was. Angela was suddenly fed up with acting as a moral referee over their endearments, blowing the whistle at every petty infringement and quibbling endlessly over the interpretation of the rules. Besides, she felt erotically excited herself by Dennis’s strong, brown body, bathed in the orange light of the tent’s interior. She lifted her arms slightly and, half closing her eyes, pushed out her lips in the shape of a kiss. He had never seen her look so seductive, but instead of increasing his desire, it frightened him.
“No,” he said, “we’d better not.”
By the following day he had changed his mind, but so had Angela, and she was not to be wooed into offering herself a second time. He had plenty of leisure in which to brood on his missed opportunity (if that was what it was), his victory over selfishness or his failure of manhood (whichever it was) in the next two years, most of which he spent in a desolate barracks in northern Germany. His Upper Second was not quite good enough to win him a postgraduate scholarship with further deferment of his National Service, and he was called up into the Royal Signals.
Basic training seemed like some sort of punishment for a crime he hadn’t committed: shouts, oaths, farts, bruising drill, nauseating food, monotonous obscenity, fucking this fucking that, from shivering morning to red-eyed, boot-polishing night. I have described it in detail elsewhere. So have others. It is always the same. When the Catholic Chaplain came round to talk to the RCs in Dennis’s intake, he had an impulse to cry, “Help us! Get us out of here!” and listened with dismay as the priest told them they were soldiers of Christ and should try to set an example to the other lads. He tried for a commission and failed his War Office Selection Board (they told him he lacked enthusiasm). Eventually he was trained as a wireless operator and posted to an artillery regiment stationed near Bremen. On his pre-posting leave he and Angela got engaged. Travelling to Germany after that leave, sitting up through the night in a railway carriage foetid with the breath and perspiration of seven other soldiers, remembering Angela’s pale, gold-fringed face held up to the train window for a last kiss, feeling the collar of his battledress blouse chafing his neck, and knowing that he would have to wear it for another fourteen months, he tried to comfort himself with the thought that, whatever happened, life couldn’t possibly hold greater misery for him than he felt at that moment. (He was wrong, of course.)
Dennis wrote every other day to Angela and she almost as frequently to him. She refused many invitations to go out with other young men, and he kept himself chaste. To fill the intolerable tedium of his days and nights, and in a determined effort to wrest some material advantage from his servitude, he studied furiously electronics and information theory by correspondence course, passed every trade test for which he was eligible, and rose to the rank of corporal.
Polly broke off her engagement to Rex shortly after they all returned from Brittany – a morose, ill-tempered journey in which everybody quarrelled in turn with all the others. She was dashed to find that she had only got a Third and went to see her tutor about it. She had a little cry in his room, then she cheered up. She met Michael nervously combing his hair in the corridor outside the Head of Department’s room, waiting for an interview. He had got a scholarship to do postgraduate research, and was thinking of doing his thesis on the novels of Graham Greene. “I don’t know how you can bear the thought of another year in this place,” said Polly, and made up her mind that, instant to go abroad. She went to Italy to be a kind of au pair girl with an aristocratic Catholic family in Rome, a connection of one of the nuns at her old school. The head of the family was a count, a handsome, charming man who deflowered Polly quite quickly and skilfully on what was supposed to be her afternoon off. Afterwards she cried a little, but then she cheered up. The count gave her a present of money to buy clothes, telling her not to spend it all at once in case it would be noticed. A couple of months later she had an affair with the young Italian teacher from whom she took language lessons. After she slept with him the first time he said he would have offered to marry her if she had been a virgin, but as she wasn’t, he wouldn’t. Polly said she didn’t want to marry him anyway, upon which he sulked.
She came home to England for Christmas, and at a New Year’s party got very drunk and went upstairs with a young man whose name she could not afterwards remember. They found an empty bedroom and thrashed about on the bed by the blue light of streetlamps shining through the windows. When the young man pulled off Polly’s knickers she crouched on all fours and presented her broad bottom to him, greatly to his astonishment. Both her Italian lovers had taken her in this position and she had assumed it was the usual one. Either this surprise, or the drink he had taken, unmanned the youth, for he was unable to perform, and Polly went back to Italy with a poor opinion of Englishmen. The trouble with Italians, on the other hand, was that they took no contraceptive precautions, and she had had a bad scare when her period was a week overdue once. However, with the help of a girl-friend who worked in the US Embassy, she got herself fitted with a diaphragm by an American doctor, and was therefore well prepared for her next love affair, this time with a photographer who threatened to kill himself if she didn’t yield to his passion. She didn’t believe him for a moment, but it was an exciting fiction.
By this time Polly had stopped going to mass except for form’s sake. She had come to the conclusion that religion was all form and no content. She had watched the count who had seduced her receive Communion the following Sunday, and even if he had been to Confession in the meantime (which she doubted) he certainly hadn’t made a Firm Purpose of Amendment, for he made another pass at her on her very next afternoon off. He was a pillar of the Church, with some important function in the Vatican, yet everyone, even his wife, knew that he had a mistress established in a flat on the other side of the Tiber. At first Polly was shocked by the hypocrisy of Roman life, but gradually she got used to it. The trouble with English Catholics, she decided, was that they took everything so seriously. They tried to keep all the rules really and truly, not just outwardly. Of course that was impossible, it was against human nature, especially where sex was concerned.
Polly explained all this to Michael in a coffee bar near the British Museum after her return to England in the autumn of 1955. Coffee bars, equipped with glittering Italian coffee machines that hissed like locomotives, were all the rage in London at this time. Polly impressed Michael immediately by asking the waiter for “uno capuccino” instead of just a white coffee. She had certainly acquired, he thought, a certain worldly wisdom as a result of her year abroad.
“Italians tolerate adultery and brothels because they’re not allowed to divorce,” she said. “English Catholics have the worst of both worlds. No wonder they’re so repressed.”
Michael nodded, causing his Brylcreemed forelock to fall forward across his eyes. “It’s the Irish Jansenist tradition,” he said.
“What’s that?”
“In penal days, Irish priests used to be trained in France, by the Jansenists, so that over-scrupulous, puritanical kind of Catholicism got into their bloodstream – and ours too, because, let’s face it, English Catholicism is largely Irish Catholicism.”
Michael had long ago overcome his own scruples and resumed the full practice of his religion. A sensible priest, to whom he had unburdened himself, had assured him that his was a common problem, no more than a venial sin, as long as he was sorry for having given way to temptation. Since Michael always felt melancholy after masturbating, this was a satisfactory solution. Anyway, he had shed the habit since falling in love with a student of music called Miriam, whom he met at an NUS farm camp, picking strawberries. She was extremely pretty, with green eyes and copper-coloured hair, though, ironically enough, almost flat-chested. It was in fact because she had no bosom worth looking at that Michael had looked more closely than usual at her face and into her eyes, and discovered there a person whom he very much liked. When Polly rang up out of the blue and proposed a meeting, some instinct had warned him against bringing Miriam along, and he was glad he hadn’t when Polly began to hold forth about sex.
“So you’ve got a girl friend at last, Michael,” she said, when he made some allusion to Miriam. “Is she a Catholic?”
“She’s taking instructions.”
“Goodness, it must be serious.”
“We’re thinking of getting engaged, actually.”
“D’you really want to settle down so soon, Michael? Don’t you want to have some fun, first?” Polly’s expression made it fairly clear what kind of fun she had in mind.
“How can you, if you’re a Catholic, Polly? I mean, either you are or you aren’t. I am. I often wish I wasn’t – life would be more fun, agreed. But I am, and there it is.”
“Oh, Michael! Just like a Graham Greene character.”
“Have you read his new one?”
“No, what’s it like?”
“It’s about the war in Indo-China. Not like the others, really.” Michael had been impressed by The Quiet American, but slightly disturbed too. It seemed morally and theologically confused – there was not the same stark contrast between the Church and the secular world that you got in the earlier novels. Michael’s interest was more than academic: in some oblique way the credibility of the Catholic faith was underwritten for him by the existence of distinguished literary converts like Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh, so any sign of their having Doubts was unsettling. Polly, however, didn’t want to talk about Graham Greene, but about her love affairs.
Michael listened, fascinated and appalled. Here was sin incarnate. If Polly were to walk out of the coffee bar now, and under a bus, there was not much hope for her immortal soul. For dissolute agnostics there might be some mercy, but Polly had been instructed in the True Faith. She knew the rules and the penalties for not keeping them, whatever she might say about the instinctive passion of the Italians.
“It’s the sun, you see, Michael. It makes everything seem so different.” She drained her transparent Pyrex cup, leaving a large red mouth-shape on the rim. Michael, who was practised in eking out a cup of espresso for an hour and a half, watched her with dismay. “Would you like another?” he asked.
“Please, and perhaps just a tiny piece of that chocolate gâteau.”
Polly had grown plumper, Michael thought, she looked almost fat, and under the heavy makeup her complexion was not good. By middle age she would be bloated and raddled. He thought of his own lean, lissome sweetheart with complacency.
“Italian men are an awful nuisance,” said Polly, “pinching you and ogling you all the time on the street and on buses. But at least they notice you.” She looked around the coffee bar at the unnoticing young men, clerks in pin-stripe suits and students in fisherman’s knit sweaters and Harris tweed sports jackets. “God!” she sighed. “England is so boring.”
That same autumn, Violet went back to College to begin her final year all over again. She had quite recovered from her nervous breakdown, her eczema had cleared up, and she looked very pretty. The Professor in charge of the Department declared that he would personally undertake tutorial responsibility for her work. He was a short man who looked quite tall sitting behind his desk because of his large, handsome head and luxuriant silver-grey beard. He reminded Violet of pictures of God the Father speaking out of clouds. She felt his interest in her progress was a great honour and was determined to prove worthy of it.
The Professor appointed four o’clock on a Tuesday afternoon for her tutorial, which allowed it to overrun the statutory hour. At five o’clock his secretary would knock discreetly and come into the room with letters to be signed. Then, after she had gone, as the corridors of the Department fell gradually silent, and the winter dusk turned to darkness outside the window, he would draw the curtains, and light a single standard lamp for her, shining down on her notebook, leaving him behind his desk in shadow, and bring out a bottle of sherry and two glasses, and then discourse about the classical world to Violet, about things he never alluded to in his lectures, about pagan fertility rites, phallus worship, Dionysian orgies and sacred prostitutes. “I hope I do not shock you, Violet,” he would murmur, stroking his beard as if soothing a pet, and she would shake her head vigorously, though in truth she often thought she would have been shocked if he had not been her professor and it had not been a tutorial.
Then, one day, as he was holding forth in his melodious cadences, she knocked over her sherry glass and, jumping to her feet in reflex response, saw to her horror and amazement that he had his fly open and was playing with himself under the desk. She stared at him for a moment, then dropped to her knees and began scrubbing furiously at the carpet with a handkerchief. He rose from his place and came round the desk to stand over her. “Violet,” he said, after several minutes had passed. “Get up.”
She rose to her feet. “I’ve got to go,” she said.
“Violet,” he said. “Have pity on an old man.” He tugged and gnawed at his beard as he spoke.
“You’re not old,” she said, pointlessly.
“I am fifty-five years old and have been impotent for the last fifteen.
My wife has left me. Sometimes I can coax a little juice to flow. It does no harm to anyone, does it?”
Violet went home in a trance, twice nearly being run over, and tossed and turned in bed, wondering what to do. The Professor’s appeal had not fallen on deaf ears. She did indeed pity this great man, the distinguished scholar of whom the entire Department stood in awe, so starved of love that he was reduced to the ignoble expedient in which she had surprised him. Violet had a strong impulse to sacrifice herself, to become a sacred prostitute, to heal his broken sex. It would be a sin, technically; but also, she thought, a corporal work of mercy.
She went back into College with this purpose vaguely in mind, and was dismayed to discover a note in her pigeonhole stating that she had been transferred to another tutor. With some difficulty, she managed to obtain an interview with the Professor. He looked at her with fear in his eyes, tugging and gnawing at his beard.
“You realize,” he said, “that if you make a complaint I shall deny everything.”
Violet was unable to speak.
“In any case,” he said, “my conscience is clear. No genuinely innocent girl would have sat there all these weeks listening to what I told you without a flicker of protest.”
Instead of being outraged by this insinuation, Violet was completely convinced of its justice. It revived and confirmed her old feelings of guilt. There must be something about her, she thought, that brought out the worst in people: there was her cousin in the attic, and the tramp in the shelter, and now the Professor. And she had to admit that she had derived a certain thrill from the Professor’s stories of pagan filthiness. She went back to her digs and opened a book and stared at it for several hours without taking in a word. Then she got a letter from her new tutor asking why she hadn’t been to see him. He was a young man, recently appointed to the Department. She went into College to tell him that she was going to withdraw from the course, this time for good, for she could feel another nervous breakdown coming on.
“What will you do?” asked the tutor, who invited her to call him by his first name, Robin.
“I don’t know,” said Violet. “I might become a nun.”
Robin laughed, but not unkindly. He was intrigued by Violet, and besides, she was pretty.
“What was the problem with the Old Man?” he asked casually. “Made a pass at you, did he?”
It was a bold but happy gambit. To Violet it came as a huge relief that this stranger spontaneously assumed that the Professor and not herself might have been responsible for what had happened. She did not tell Robin what that was, but she agreed to carry on with her studies under his supervision. His tutorials also overran the statutory hour, but they were exclusively academic in content. Violet had a lot of work to make up, and he was determined to prove his prowess as a teacher by getting her through Finals.
One day he proposed taking her to see Donald Wolfit in Oedipus Rex, as it would help her with her tragedy paper. Robin found her an agreeable companion, deferential but not sycophantic, and full of quaint opinion and anecdote deriving from her Irish Catholic background. (Her parents had emigrated from the West of Ireland to England when she was only three, but for most of the war years she had been educated at a convent boarding school in Ireland, and she returned to the West frequently for holidays.)
“Which of the six sins against the Holy Ghost do you think is the worst?” she said in the Tube, à propos of nothing in particular.
“I don’t even know what they are, Violet.”
She rattled them off, parrot-fashion, like a child in school: “Presumption, Despair, Resisting the Known Truth, Envy of Another’s Spiritual Good, Obstinacy in Sin, and Final Impenitence.”
He considered. “Resisting the Known Truth,” he said at length.
“Isn’t that just typical of a university lecturer! I think the worst is Final Impenitence. Imagine, at the moment of death, when you’ve everything to gain and nothing to lose by being sorry for your sins … Final Impenitence.” She gave a faint shudder that was not entirely affected. “I had an uncle in Limerick, they say he died raving against the Holy Ghost. ‘Get that damned bird out of here!’ he kept shouting, on his deathbed. Of course, he was delirious. But it wasn’t very nice for Aunty Maeve. It naturally made her wonder about the state of his soul.”
Subsequently Robin took Violet out to other plays and films that had no obvious relevance to her course. When he escorted her home afterwards she did not invite him in because, she said, her landlady would not like it (in fact, because her room was like a pigsty and she was ashamed to let him see it). They said goodbye on the porch and shook hands. On the third such occasion, he leaned forward and kissed her on the cheek, and the time after that on the lips. It seemed to Violet that they must be courting; and though Robin never initiated any discussion of their feelings for each other, he did impress upon her the importance of concealing from the rest of the Department the fact that they were meeting outside tutorials. This threw a romantic aura of the clandestine over their relationship. Violet could hardly believe her good fortune. Robin’s slim, dark good looks, his soft, supple clothes of velvet corduroy, suede and cavalry twill, his cool self-assurance and his dry, understated conversation, were to her the quintessence of Englishness, the culture which her family affected to despise but secretly admired.
Violet was very happy that spring, and sailed through her exams in June without stress. After she had sat her last paper, Robin took her to an Italian restaurant in Soho for dinner. Between the chicken alla cacciatore and the zabaglione he reached across the table and covered her hand with his.
“Violet, darling,” he said, and her heart thumped, because he had never called her darling before, “you know I care for you very much, don’t you?” She nodded. “And I think you care for me?”
“Oh, Robin,” she said. “You know I do.”
So this was it. She had often wondered what it would be like to be proposed to, and her imaginings had been surprisingly close to reality: soft lights, a bottle of wine, cosy intimacy. It took her some time to realize that it was not exactly marriage that Robin was proposing, at least not yet. He wanted her to spend a weekend away with him somewhere, “To see how we suit each other physically.”
“Oh, no,” she said, taking her hand away. “I couldn’t do that, Robin. Isn’t that what they call a trial marriage? Catholics aren’t allowed.”
But Robin was a very persuasive young man, and played cannily on Catholic belief in his arguments. Wouldn’t it, he asked rhetorically, be madness for two people to contract an indissoluble marriage without knowing whether they were sexually compatible?
“But if they loved each other, wouldn’t it be bound to come right in the end?” Violet pleaded.
“Unfortunately there are case histories which prove otherwise.”
After a few bouts of this kind of discussion, Violet gave in. Robin borrowed a friend’s car and took her to a hotel in the country for a weekend.
“For heaven’s sake, drive carefully,” she said, chain-smoking in the passenger seat. “I’m in a state of mortal sin, you know.”
He laughed and glanced sideways at her. “But you haven’t done anything yet.”
“No, but I mean to, and that’s just as bad. Worse, in a way.”
“Worse?”
“I couldn’t say I was carried away by the impulse of the moment, could I?”
“No,” he said gleefully, “you couldn’t say that.” Robin never knew how seriously to take Violet’s religious scruples, but overcoming them certainly gave the adventure an extra frisson of excitement.
“Suppose I get pregnant?” she said after a while.
“You needn’t worry about that. I shall take the necessary precautions.”
“That’s another mortal sin on top,” she said gloomily.
After they had checked into the hotel, Violet refused to leave their room because, she claimed, everyone in the lobby had immediately guessed they weren’t really married; so Robin had to have dinner sent up at considerable extra cost and trouble. Still, he was willing to indulge her on this occasion. When the waiter had cleared away the dishes, Robin knocked on the door of the bathroom, where Violet was hiding, and said: “Time for bed.”
“I’m going to have a bath,” she said.
He pushed the door hopefully, but it was locked. When she came from the bathroom half an hour later, Violet was swathed in a dressing-gown from her chin to her feet and insisted on total darkness before she would get into bed. Robin found it difficult to fit his contraceptive sheath in these conditions, particularly as it was not an operation he had performed all that often. Violet also kept his erotic drive in check by her continual chatter.
“You’ve done this before haven’t you Robin how many times I mean how many girls were they not compatible or were you not thinking of marrying them anyway did you just want their bodies for a night?”
“For heaven’s sake, Violet, do be quiet.”
“I’m sorry, Robin, it’s just that I’m so nervous.”
“Just try and relax.”
In the pitch darkness, impeded by the heavy quilt on the bed, he pushed his index finger in and out of Violet’s vagina, hoping that he was stimulating her clitoris. The manual of sexual technique that he had studied rather more frequently than he had actually practised intercourse had laid great stress upon this item of foreplay.
“I’m sorry, darling, but that’s hurting,” Violet said after a while.
He pulled his finger away as though it had been burned.
“It doesn’t mean that we’re incompatible, Robin,” she said anxiously. “It’s just that you were rubbing in the wrong place.”
“I’m sorry,” he said huffily, “to be so clumsy.”
“Shall I show you the right place?” she whispered.
This was better. She took his long index finger, that had so often pointed out to her the syllabic pattern of Latin verse, and gently guided it on to her favourite spot. As he rubbed, he felt her pelvis heave like a swimmer lifted by a wave, and her legs opened wide and his own member stiffened in response.
They made love four times that weekend, and on each occasion Violet had an orgasm under digital stimulation, but not during the act itself, when Robin had his. This worried him somewhat in the light of the textbook, so that when Violet asked him if he thought they were compatible he said he thought they both needed time to think over the experience of the weekend. She looked crestfallen. “Let’s sleep on it,” he said. “We’ve already slept on it,” she said, “we’ve done nothing else all weekend.” He kissed her and said, “You’re lovely and I love you, but there’s no need to rush into anything.” This was as they were preparing to go home.
“I’m not going away with you for another of these weekends, you know,” she said.
“Do you have to say it like that?” he said, pained by her lack of tact.
“Yes, because I’m going to Confession at the very first church we come to and I must have a firm purpose of amendment or it won’t be any good.”
As soon as they returned to London, Robin was buried in examination scripts – not university exams, but “O” and “A” level papers which he marked to enhance his meagre salary. Violet helped him check the marks and fill in the mark sheets. One day as they were doing this she said, “Robin, I think I’m pregnant.”
“What? You can’t be.”
“Those things don’t always work, do they? I’m three weeks overdue, and this morning I felt sick when I got up.”
“My God.” He stared at her, appalled. It was, he supposed, possible that fumbling with his sheaths in the dark he had nicked one with a fingernail or otherwise mismanaged the business.
“I’m not trying to blackmail you into marrying me,” said Violet. “But I thought you ought to know.”
“If it’s true,” he said heavily, “you’ll just have to get rid of it.”
“You mean, have it adopted?”
“I mean have an operation. It can be arranged, I believe, at a price.” He looked miserably at the pile of scripts.
“I couldn’t do that, it would be murder,” said Violet. “I’ll just go away somewhere to a Home for Unmarried Mothers and have it adopted and never trouble you again.”
“Don’t be absurd, Violet,” he said irritably. “It’s not that I don’t want to marry you, it’s just that I don’t want to rush into it. And I certainly didn’t intend starting a family straight away.”
But in the end he did marry Violet, and in a Catholic church. His doubts about the wisdom of this step were mitigated by her being awarded an Upper Second class degree – a rare achievement by girls doing Classics. The Professor sent them a handsome present, and they went to Sicily for their honeymoon and looked at antiquities. In the fourth month of her pregnancy, late in 1956, Violet had a miscarriage, and fell subsequently into a deep depression.
England was less boring in 1956 than it had seemed to Polly in the coffee bar with Michael the year before. At Easter there was the first CND march. The Outsider and Look Back in Anger made a great stir and the newspapers were full of articles about Britain’s Angry Young Men. In the autumn there was the Suez crisis and the Hungarian uprising.
Only the last of these events touched off an unequivocal response in our young Catholics. They were not, on the whole, a politically conscious group. Their childhood had been dominated by the Second World War, which their religious education had imbued with a mythic simplicity, the forces of good contending with the power of evil, Hitler being identified with Satan, and Churchill, more tentatively, with the Archangel Michael. After that apocalyptic struggle, mere party politics seemed an anticlimax, no doubt – anyway, few of them took an informed interest in such things, or bothered to think how they would cast their votes when they were twenty-one. Their politics in adolescence were international Cold War politics. The betrayal of the glorious Allied cause by Soviet Russia, the enslavement of Eastern Europe with its millions of Catholics, the inexorable advance of atheistic communism in the Far East – all showed that Satan was as active in the world as ever. Their hero was Cardinal Mindszenty, who had been imprisoned by the Communists in Hungary, and was released by the new provisional government in October 1956. When the Russian Army moved in to crush the rising with its tanks, the widespread feelings of outrage and impotence in Britain were felt especially keenly by Catholics.
One Sunday, while the Hungarian patriots were fighting for their lives in Budapest, a huge march and rally in Hyde Park was organized by students of London University, at which Dennis and Angela were present with Michael and Miriam. Dennis had recently been released from the Army, and was camping in Michael’s bedsitter while he looked for a job. Angela was teaching in a school in South London. Miriam was just starting her final year in Music. Michael had finished his MA thesis on the novels of Graham Greene, and was just beginning a Postgraduate Certificate of Education course: though he would have preferred to try for a university post, schoolteaching was the only way of avoiding National Service.
They stood on the trampled grass in the middle of a large, excited crowd, the two girls hanging on to the arms of their fiancés, and listened to the speeches. The announcement that a group of students were forming a volunteer force to join the freedom fighters of Hungary was received with great enthusiasm. “We want volunteers,” declared the speaker, a very young man, pale with sleeplessness and the strain of historic decision, “but only if you know how to use a gun.”
Of the four of them, only Dennis knew how to use a gun. For a moment or two he contemplated a heroic gesture, for he was genuinely moved by the plight of the Hungarians and the atmosphere of the meeting was heady. He had a brief glimpse of himself, as though through a rift in cloud, manning a barricade, gripping a rifle, hurling a grenade – converting at one stroke all the tedium and futility of his military training into something positive and transcendent. But then he saw himself falling dead across the bodies of Hungarian partisans, or flattened by a Russian tank like a hedgehog on a bypass, and the rift closed. He did not want to die. Especially he did not want to die without having possessed Angela.
Angela, at that moment, was thinking that if Dennis stepped forward to volunteer, she would ask him to make love to her that night without the slightest hesitation or guilt. She saw herself standing before him in the posture of a statue of Our Lady, her arms slightly lifted, her clothes slipping from her like melting snow.
None of them said anything. When somebody came round with a collecting box, Dennis put in more than he could really afford. Later he read in the paper that the volunteers – there were only about twenty of them – had been turned back at the Austrian border.
If Adrian had been present in Hyde Park, he would certainly have volunteered, but at that time he was still doing his military service, as a Second Lieutenant in the Royal Army Service Corps. He had signed on for three years as a Regular in the hope of getting a commission in the prestigious cavalry regiment into which he had been conscripted as a National Serviceman, but he ended up in the despised RASC, in which he could probably have been commissioned anyway. At the time of the Hungarian uprising, which was also the time of the Suez crisis, he was a transport officer in Cyprus, and his frustration and disgust at the turn of events was extreme. His country, instead of flying to the assistance of the gallant Hungarians and Cardinal Mindszenty, was committing itself to a dubious adventure in wog-bashing – that was how Adrian saw it. The actual invasion was so badly organized, however, that he doubted whether the British Army would have been much help to the Hungarians anyway. On the quayside at Limassol, prior to embarkation, one French truck was grouped with every three British trucks, and as the British vehicles had been sprayed with yellow desert camouflage and the French ones had not, this pattern gave away the presence of the trucks to aerial reconnaisance as clearly as could be. When Adrian pointed this out to his CO, he was brusquely told that there was a political reason for it. In Suez, the convoys lost their way, ran out of water, and their wireless equipment broke down. It was a shambles, and an immoral shambles. When Anthony Eden was forced to resign soon afterwards, broken by ill-health, Adrian felt that some kind of justice had been done in Old Testament style. He determined to vote Socialist at the next election. (He had to wait till October 1959 and the Tories won by a hundred seats.)
After his release from the Army, Adrian took a job in Local Government in his home town, Derby. He lived with his parents because they would have been hurt if he had done otherwise, but it was cramped and inconvenient, for they were a large family with several children still at school. It was time, he decided, that he got married. He took dancing lessons and went to parish socials, but the girls he met were afraid of his severe, intense manner. He joined a tennis club, but the girls there found him stiff and priggish. He was not very good, either, at dancing or tennis. In the end he met Dorothy at a weekend conference on Catechetic. Adrian no longer did public speaking for the Catholic Evidence Guild, but he helped with a Sunday School in his parish for children attending non-Catholic schools. Dorothy was doing teacher-training in Religious Education, but she was quite willing to give up her course to marry Adrian, who had a good job and was suddenly very impatient to have sexual intercourse after so many years of continence in the interests of holiness and self-advancement.
Though he knew much more about sex, in a second-hand way, than when he was a student, from barrack and mess-room conversation, from reading the manual of military law, and from censoring the mail of other ranks in the Suez crisis, Adrian was shy of talking about it to Dorothy during their short engagement. She was a virgin, of course – so much so that when, prior to retiring to bed on their wedding night, he kissed her attired only in a dressing-gown, she inquired what hard object he was concealing in his pocket. Under the bedclothes she snuggled up to him happily enough, but when he tried to enter her she went rigid with fear and then grew hysterical. It transpired that she knew almost nothing about how a marriage was consummated. Adrian turned on the bedside lamp, sat up in bed, and lectured her on the facts of life. He was a good lecturer, having benefited by his training in the Army and the Catholic Evidence Guild, though he spoke rather more loudly than was necessary and after a while somebody banged on the wall of the adjoining room (they were spending their honeymoon in a small hotel in the Lake District). Adrian continued his lecture in a lower tone, making three-dimensional diagrams in the air with his fingers. Dorothy watched him wonderingly, with the bedclothes drawn up to her chin.
“Didn’t your mother tell you anything?” he said.
“Sex was never mentioned at home, Adie.”
“Well, but you must have picked up something from somewhere. How did you suppose babies were conceived?”
Dorothy blushed and shifted uneasily beneath the sheets. “I thought it was enough if the man just touched the woman with his … I didn’t think he actually had to … to ….”
Adrian sighed. “Would you like to have another try, now I’ve explained?”
“If you like, dear.”
Adrian lay on top of his bride and butted at her dry crotch while she winced and gasped faintly beneath him. When at last he succeeded in penetrating her, he ejaculated immediately. “That wasn’t right,” he said. “With practice I’ll be able to last longer than that.”
“It was long enough for me, dear,” said Dorothy, and fell fast asleep.
Adrian lay awake for quite a long while. Undoubtedly it had been a disappointment, the sexual act. But then, so had most things in his life – his degree class, his army career – always falling a little short of his ambition, his ideal. And now marriage. Dorothy was a good, kind-hearted girl, utterly devoted to him, but she didn’t scintillate, there was no doubt about that, and though she had nice eyes and pretty hair, she was no beauty, her nose was decidedly half-an-inch too long, and her body rather awkward and angular. Adrian had a sudden recall of Angela, whom he not seen for years. Angela in her pink angora jumper – still, it seemed to him, the prettiest girl he had ever met in his life, and he wondered what she was doing now. Married to that chap, no doubt, what was his name, Dennis. Adrian grew gloomier and gloomier. He went through a dark wedding night of the soul. It seemed to him that God had always mocked his efforts. He had always tried to do his best, to do what was right, but always there was this bitter rebuff to his hopes and ambitions. Meanwhile other people, less good, less dutiful, indeed positively mischievous – fornicators, adulterers, unbelievers – prospered and enjoyed themselves. Of course all would get their just deserts in the next world, but he couldn’t help feeling some resentment about the lack of justice in this one. He knew for a fact that men who hadn’t worked half as hard as himself had got Upper Seconds in Finals, whereas he himself had only got a Lower Second, and sacrificed the chance of winning Angela to boot.
The disloyalty of this train of thought to the young woman sleeping peacefully beside him shocked Adrian out of his melancholy mood. Lying on his back, he made the Sign of the Cross, and said his usual night prayers, which he had omitted in the excitement of going to bed – an Our Father, a Hail Mary and a Glory Be, an Act of Contrition; then he turned over and settled himself to sleep. Tomorrow he would take Dorothy to Great Gable and teach her a few basic rock-climbing skills.
Because he was doing medicine, Edward was still a student of a kind long after his contemporaries had left the University. His main leisure activities were playing rugby and taking part in the College Gilbert and Sullivan Society’s productions until, the season before he qualified, someone trampled on him in a loose scrum and damaged a couple of vertebrae, putting an end to his athletic career and bequeathing to him a lifetime of intermittent backache. For recreation that left him with just Gilbert and Sullivan – and girls, for whom he had not previously had much time. The teaching hospital was of course teeming with pretty nurses looking for doctors to marry, and Edward met one of them, Tessa, at the beginning of his houseman’s year, when they were on night duty together. Tessa wasn’t a Catholic – her family were vaguely C of E – but she was quite happy about getting married in a Catholic church, and bringing their children up as Catholics. This was established long before Edward formally proposed, for after he had taken her out a few times he said, putting on the expression of exaggerated gravity that used to disconcert Father Brierley, that he thought it was only fair to make clear, before they got seriously attached to each other, what the implications were.
“You’d have to take instructions from a priest,” he said. “Of course, it makes everything much simpler if the non-Catholic partner converts, but it’s not essential.”
“Well, I might, you never can tell,” Tessa said brightly, her smooth brown cheeks dimpling, and her dark eyes glancing in all directions. They were in the Brasserie of a Lyons Cornerhouse at the time; Tessa had never been to one before and thought that the gay check tablecloths and the gipsy music and the tangy smells of Continental cooking were heaven. At that moment she would cheerfully have agreed to marry a Hindoo if his name had been Edward.
“And there’s another thing,” said Edward, looking more solemn than ever. “You know about the Catholic teaching on birth control, don’t you?” His big ears glowed red with embarrassment, for in spite of his training in anatomy and gynaecology, and the obscene songs that he sang as lustily as anyone else after rugger matches, Edward was remarkably pure-minded and assumed that girls were even more so.
“Well, I believe in large families, anyway,” said Tessa, with a giggle, glancing to right and left.
“It doesn’t mean,” he hastened to assure her, “that the Church is against family planning as such. It’s just a question of the method. It’s quite all right to use the Rhythm method.”
“Much nicer than the other methods, anyway, I should think,” Tessa said, and then wondered if perhaps she had revealed a little too much knowledge. She was still technically a virgin, but had had a fairly passionate heavy petting affair the previous year with a postgraduate dentistry student who had hopefully explained to her on several occasions the various means of contraception.
Tessa decided to become a Catholic as soon as she discovered that, if she didn’t, they wouldn’t be able to have a nuptial mass. She liked the idea of being the focus of attention for a full hour in her bridal dress, kneeling up on the altar (it was the only time in her life, Edward explained, that a woman was allowed into the sanctuary, except of course for cleaning and polishing and arranging the flowers) with organ music, choir-singing, Latin prayers and glowing vestments swirling around her. Most weddings she had been to seemed to her to be over far to quickly, and the Catholic service for a mixed marriage was almost as short and bleak as a Registry Office ceremony – no candles, flowers or even music being permitted.
“You do understand what you’re doing, darling?” Edward said anxiously the day before she was received. “You’re quite happy about it?”
“Oh yes, darling, quite happy.” In truth Tessa found a lot of the doctrine inherently implausible, but she could see that it all fitted together, and if Edward believed it, who was she to quibble?
Shortly afterwards, Edward took her to a weekend conference for Catholic engaged couples. There would be talks by priests, doctors and counsellors on such subjects as The Sacrament of Marriage, Getting On Together, and The Rhythm Method, plus Mass and Benediction each day and times for private recollection. Edward had the idea that this experience would help Tessa to feel fully assimilated into her new faith. It was held at a retreat house and conference centre run by nuns, on the northern outskirts of London.
They arrived on a Friday night, late because Edward had been delayed by an emergency at the hospital. An aged and irritable nun admitted them and said that they were not expected until the following morning. “There’ll be extra to pay,” she grumbled. “What’s your name?”
“O’Brien,” said Edward.
The nun peered myopically at a list of names pinned to a noticeboard. “Come with me,” she said, plucking at Tessa’s sleeve like a crone in a fairy-tale.
“Shall I wait here?” Edward said.
“You can if you like,” said the nun. “But you’ll get nothing to eat. The kitchen’s all shut up.”
“Goodnight then, darling,” said Edward, smiling encouragingly at Tessa, and gave her a peck on the cheek. He could see that she was a bit downcast by this chilly reception. The hall was cold and ill-lit, and smelled faintly of boiled cabbage and carbolic soap. Dark oil paintings depicting martyrdoms and miracles loomed from the walls.
“Goodnight,” Tessa replied in a small voice.
Afterwards they both recalled that the nun had looked puzzled by this exchange.
Edward waited while Tessa was shown to her room. It was deathly quiet. After a couple of minutes the nun slowly descended the stairs and shuffled across the lobby as if he weren’t there. Just as she was about to disappear through a green baize door, Edward called out: “Excuse me, sister, but where is my room, please?”
The old nun looked balefully at him across the black and white flags of the hall. “Number twenty-nine, up the stairs and turn right,” she said.
Edward located the room and walked in to find Tessa in her slip, brushing her hair. She dropped the brush in fright, and clasped her arms across her bosom.
“Oh, heavens, Teddy, you did scare me, this place is so spooky, what do you want? Have you come to kiss me goodnight? What will the nuns think?”
Edward explained about the nun’s mistake, but gave her a goodnight kiss anyway, a proper one which went on for some time. There were two beds in the room and they made some jokes about that, which aroused them both. They had a common feeling of being back at school, riskily breaking the rules. Eventually Edward went back downstairs to try and find out about his room. He checked the noticeboard in the lobby. On a list he found: “Mr and Mrs O’Brien – room 29.” All the names on the list were married couples. The sheet was indeed headed, Conference for Married Couples, and the programme included talks on The Holy Family, Beating The Seven-Year Itch, and Problems with Teenage Children.
Tessa had locked her door and Edward had to knock for admittance. When he explained that they had come on the wrong weekend, she collapsed on to one of the beds in hysterical giggles. Like many people who are good at stage comedy, Edward did not like to appear ridiculous unintentionally, but after a while he saw the funny side of his mistake too. It was too late to leave and travel back to Town, and although the house was undoubtedly full of empty bedrooms, he didn’t want to go prowling around looking for one in case he made another embarrassing mistake. “You’d better sleep here,” said Tessa. “And tomorrow morning we’ll creep away early.”
“All right, then,” said Edward.
They undressed very decorously with the light off, but then they collided with each other in the dark and one thing led to another and before long they were in, or on, the same bed, and Tessa’s nightdress was up round her armpits and she was moaning and writhing with pleasure in his arms. It was a long time since the dentist had petted her and she had missed such comforts in Edward’s chaste courtship. Edward himself was quite out of his depth. Feeling the pressure of an imminent and unstoppable orgasm, he was filled with shame and panic at the thought of spilling his seed all over Tessa and the bedclothes. In his perturbation it seemed to him that their sin would be less, certainly his own humiliation would be less, if they performed the act properly. Desperately he rolled on top of Tessa and, with a fluke thrust at the right place and angle, entered her in a single movement. Tessa uttered a loud cry that, if it was heard in that house, was probably not recognized; and Edward, groaning into the pillow, pumped rivers of semen into her willing womb.
Afterwards he was aghast at what he had done, but Tessa covered his face with kisses and told him it had been wonderful, and he was moved with grateful pride. Tessa herself was delighted: she felt finally absolved from guilt on account of the freedoms she had allowed the dentist (which she had confessed in the vaguest terms on her reception into the Church) and finally sure of Edward’s love. The next day they rose while it was still dark and let themselves stealthily out of the house. Their feet crunched resoundingly on the gravel of the drive, and looking back over her shoulder Tessa thought she saw the old nun watching them from a high, lighted window. Outside the gates they hitched a lift from a lorry taking vegetables to Covent Garden. “Not eloping, are you?” quipped the driver, looking at their overnight bags. They often wondered afterwards what the other, the real Mr and Mrs O’Brien thought when they arrived at the convent later that morning to find their bedroom defiled by unmistakable signs of sexual intercourse.
Having made love once, Edward and Tessa were unable to resist further opportunities that came their way, though each time it happened they solemnly vowed it would not recur. Soon Tessa discovered she was pregnant, and they made arrangements to get married rather sooner than they had planned. Edward was excruciatingly embarrassed by all this, guessing (quite correctly) what everyone would be thinking about the reasons for their haste, but Tessa faced it out serenely and did not for one moment contemplate giving up her white wedding and nuptial mass. She had an Empire line dress made which artfully concealed the very slight swelling of her tummy. Soon afterwards, Edward’s training finished and he was called up into the Army Medical Corps. Tessa went to live with her parents in Norfolk and gave birth to a daughter one night when Edward was sleeping out on Salisbury Plain as part of his officer’s training. In due course he was posted to a military hospital in Aldershot and Tessa moved into digs there. They waited impatiently for his service to end, so that Edward could start his career as a GP. He had forgotten all about his intention of working for two years in the mission fields of Africa.
Miriam’s conversion took longer than Tessa’s. Every now and again she dug her heels in and refused to go any further. She had a quick, sharp mind and she was not, like Tessa, theologically illiterate to start with. Her own religious upbringing had been Low Church Evangelical, and she had already reacted against that form of Christianity, its gloomy Sabbatarianism, its narrow-minded insistence on Faith against Works, its charmless liturgy. Since leaving home to attend the University she had ceased to worship, though still considering herself a kind of Christian. Catholicism, to which Michael introduced her, seemed to be just what she was looking for: it was subtle, it was urbane, it had history, learning, art (especially music) on its side. But there was enough of the Protestant left in Miriam to make a lot of Catholic doctrine difficult to swallow, especially in relation to Mary. She was dismayed to discover that “the Immaculate Conception” did not denote the birth of Christ to a virgin, but the dogma that Mary herself was conceived without the stain of original sin. “It doesn’t say so in Scripture, and how else would anyone know?” she said. Michael, who had been well schooled in apologetics at school, quoted the salutation of the archangel Gabriel, “Hail, full of grace, the Lord is with thee.” Since Mary hadn’t been baptized at that point, she couldn’t have been full of grace unless she had been exempted from the stain of original sin inherited from Adam and Eve. Miriam yielded to the logic of this argument (when the Catholic Jerusalem Bible was published ten years later she found that “full of grace” was translated as “highly favoured”, but the issue no longer seemed important) and shifted her attention to the doctrine of the Assumption of Our Lady into Heaven, which had been defined as an article of faith as recently as 1950 – though, as Michael was quick to emphasize, it had been an important feast of the Church for centuries. “I still don’t see the point of it,” she said. “Christianity is hard enough to believe in without adding all these unnecessary extras.”
Michael himself was uneasy about the Assumption, for which there didn’t seem to be one jot or tittle of Scriptural evidence, and referred Miriam to the College chaplain – no longer Father Brierley, who had been moved to a parish at the end of the Northern Line, but Father Charles Conway, a lively and good-looking young priest with an Oxford degree. He suggested that the doctrine might be looked at as a theological formalization of Mary’s special place in the scheme of salvation, and of her presence in heaven as a source of help and encouragement to souls on earth. But Miriam had her reservations about that too. She didn’t understand why Catholics prayed so much to Mary to “intercede” for them with God. “Do you mean,” she asked, her tulip-cut of glossy copper-coloured hair thrust forward with the urgency of her question, “that if A prays to Jesus via Mary, and B prays direct to Jesus, A has a better chance of being heard than B, other things being equal? And if not, then why bother going through Mary?” Neither Michael nor Father Conway had a satisfactory answer to that one.
When she had got over these doctrinal hurdles, or bypassed them (for they were, after all, peripheral to the main deposit of faith) Miriam got into a panic about making her first confession. To go into that dark, cupboard-like cubicle and whisper your most shameful secrets to a man on the other side of a wire mesh might be tolerable if you were brought up to it from childhood, but for herself it seemed humiliating, a violation, a hideous ordeal. “There’s nothing to it, really,” Michael reassured her, conveniently suppressing the memory of his own agonizing over masturbation not so very long ago. “The priest won’t know who you are. And you can go to one you don’t know, if you like.”
“I certainly shan’t go to Father Charles, I’d simply die.”
“Anyway, you can’t have anything very dreadful to confess,” he said fondly.
“How would you know?” she shot at him, with such anger that he was chastened into silence.
They were queueing, at the time, for gallery seats at the Globe theatre to see Graham Greene’s new play, The Potting Shed. Michael had been looking forward eagerly to seeing the play, which, to judge from the reviews, confirmed that the author’s faith was intact, but he found that he was unable to concentrate on the story of vows, miracles, lost and found belief. Later in life all he could remember about the production was a dog barking off-stage and the peculiarly bilious green of John Gielgud’s cardigan. (Could it possibly have been, he wondered, a sartorial pun on the author’s name?) For most of the performance he was brooding jealously on Miriam’s hint of grave sin in her past. Though Michael was no longer so helplessly obsessed with sex as in late adolescence, he still thought about it quite a lot. He looked forward to the night of his wedding (provisionally planned for the coming spring) as a feast that would be rendered all the more delicious by the prolonged abstinence that had preceded it. To lie with his beloved in the same bed, free to explore her body at will, above, below, between, to assuage the long ache of unsatisfied desire in total abandonment, without fear or guilt at last – that would surely be a rapture worth waiting for. The thought that Miriam might not, after all, have waited – that she might already have tasted some of the sweets of sex with another boy, or even boys, tormented him. It did not occur to Michael that she might have been referring to masturbation, for he did not know that girls masturbated (his reading in English fiction had not uncovered this fact). But, as it happened, that was not what Miriam was alluding to. Her most shameful secret was that at school she had joined in the persecution of a girl whom nobody liked and who had eventually been driven to attempt suicide. Miriam and her friends had been in great terror as this event was investigated, but the girl in question had nobly declined to tell on them. The worst thing of all was that when the girl returned to school they all hated her more than ever, and after a while her mother took her away.
After The Potting Shed, on the Tube ride back to the little flat in Highbury that Miriam shared with another girl, Michael was silent and morose; and instead of going in for a cup of coffee, as was his custom, he kept Miriam talking in the shadow of a plane tree in the street.
“Did you have any boy friends before me?”
“You know I didn’t, I told you.”
“Nobody at all?”
“Nobody serious.”
“You did have some, then?”
Miriam soon got to the source of his mood, and poured scorn on it. “The trouble with you is that all you think about is sex,” she said. “You can’t imagine people feeling guilty about anything else, can you?”
He admitted it, joyfully. “It’s the Irish Jansenist tradition,” he said.
Soon afterwards, Miriam made her first confession, without telling anybody in advance. She went to Westminster Cathedral, the most anonymous place for the purpose she could think of. Crowds poured in and out of the doors, and sat or kneeled or sauntered about, staring up at the great walls and arches of sooty, unfaced brick. It felt like some huge and holy railway terminus. All along one wall were dozens of confessionals, some offering the facility of a foreign language. Miriam, kneeling in a pew while she got her courage up, considered making her confession in French, a subject in which she had done well at A level, but decided that she would not be able to manage the Act of Contrition. Eventually she plunged into one of the ordinary confessionals at random and gabbled out the formula she had been taught by Father Conway: “Bless me Father for I have sinned this is my first confession.” She added: “And I’m terrified.” She was lucky with her priest and came out feeling wonderful, spiritually laundered. She never told Michael about the girl at school who had been on her conscience until long after they were married, by which time he was no longer curious.
The wedding night to which he had looked forward for so long got off to a bad start when they were shown into a room at their hotel with twin beds. Michael, inexperienced in such matters, had omitted to specify a double. When the porter had withdrawn, he expressed his regret.
“Ask them to give us another room,” Miriam suggested.
Michael imagined himself going downstairs and walking up to the receptionist in a crowded, but silent and attentive lobby, and saying: “Could I have a room with a double bed in it, please?” “You ask them,” he said to Miriam.
“No thanks!”
They giggled and kissed, but the twin beds were decidedly a disappointment. They were narrow and spaced well apart and the headboards were screwed to the wall.
“Oh, well,” said Miriam, “never mind.” She opened her suitcase and began to unpack. A cascade of confetti fell to the floor as she shook out a dress. “That Gwen!” she said, referring to one of her bridesmaids.
“Hold on a minute,” said Michael.
Looking neither to right nor left, he marched out of the room, down the stairs, and up to the reception desk.
“Yes, sir?”
Michael took a deep breath. “Er … what time is dinner?” he said.
“Dinner is served from six-thirty, sir.”
“Ah.” He lingered, squinting at the ceiling as if trying to remember something else.
Michael often recalled that moment of acute embarrassment. He recalled it, for instance, in the summer of 1968, when he was checking into a hotel in Oxford, where he was attending a meeting of GCE examiners, and a young man in a white suit, with blond hair down to his shoulders, came up to the desk and asked the price of a double room. In the background, nonchalantly scanning a newspaper, a girl hovered. “Do you have your luggage with you, sir?” said the clerk, evidently well used to handling such requests from randy undergraduates. The young man didn’t have any luggage and was refused the room; but what struck Michael was that he wasn’t in the least embarrassed or disconcerted by the refusal, departing with a peace sign and a broad grin, squeezing his girl friend’s waist as they left the lobby. “Whereas I,” he said one weekend in February 1975, recalling his honeymoon in 1958, “was legally married. All I wanted was a double bed so that we could consummate it in reasonable comfort. And I was tongue-tied. Beads of perspiration literally stood out on my face.”
“Is there anything else, sir?” said the receptionist in 1958, as Michael stared at the ceiling. Without looking the man in the eye, he mumbled out a request for a room with a double bed, and was given one without fuss. He ran back to Miriam, grasping the key like mythical treasure wrested from a dragon. He felt hugely heroic, masculine, dominant: a true husband. When they got to the new room, he locked the door and carried Miriam across to the double bed. They lay on it and necked, occasionally sitting up to divest themselves of a garment (shades of Polly’s St Valentine’s striptease) until they were both undressed down to their underwear. Solemnly Michael undid the fastener of Miriam’s brassiere and drew it from her shoulders. “Do you mind that they’re so small?” she whispered. “They’re beautiful,” he said, kissing the nipples on her delicate little breasts and feeling them grow hard. “Let’s make love,” he said, scarcely able to draw breath for excitement. “All right,” said Miriam.
She got up off the bed and put on her nightie. Michael put on his pyjamas and drew the curtains against the slanting sunlight (it was about six o’clock in the evening). Then they got into bed, under the bedclothes. Neither of them saw anything odd in this behaviour. It was how they had always envisaged married love.
But then there was a hitch. There seemed to be no way that Michael could get his penis to go in and stay in. In all his long hours of musing on the moment of consummation, he had never anticipated this particular difficulty. They struggled and heaved and muttered “Sorry” and “It’s all right,” but after a while the atmosphere became slightly desperate. Had Miriam grasped Michael’s penis and guided it to its target, there would have been no problem, but it never occurred to her to do so or to him to suggest it. None of our young brides even touched their husbands’ genitals until weeks, months, sometimes years after marriage. All accepted the first nuptial embrace lying on their backs with their arms locked round their spouses’ necks like drowning swimmers being rescued; while these spouses, supporting themselves on tensed arms, tried to steer their way blind into a channel the contours of which they had never previously explored by touch or sight. No wonder most of them found the act both difficult and disappointing.
At last Michael admitted defeat, modestly pulled up his pyjama trousers under the blankets, and got out of bed to find a cigarette. Miriam watched him anxiously. “Perhaps there’s something wrong with me,” she said. “Perhaps I’ve got a blockage. I’ll go and see a doctor.” She was only half joking. They dressed and went down for dinner, silent and sad, smiling wanly at each other across the table. Michael contemplated the prospect of a marriage without sex. After so long a wait, did he love Miriam enough to accept that heavy cross? He reached under the table and squeezed her hand, suffused with a Greeneian gloom, “the loyalty we all feel to unhappiness, the sense that this is where we really belong,” as a favourite passage in The Heart of the Matter put it. When they returned to their room, he proposed one more try.
“I’m awfully sore,” said Miriam doubtfully.
“Haven’t you got some ointment, or something?”
She did, as it happened, have some Vaseline with her, which she used for the prevention of chapped lips. Applied to her nether lips it produced almost magical results. Afterwards, Michael put his hands behind his head and smiled beatifically at the ceiling.
“From now on,” he said, “I’m always going to give Vaseline for wedding presents.”
Angela and Dennis were the last of their College set to get married, and had waited the longest. Dennis had wanted to get married as soon as he was offered his first job, with ICI. When he phoned Angela with the news of his successful interview, late in 1956, he said, “Let’s get married at Christmas.” Angela felt panic choking her and was scarcely able to reply. Dennis thought it was a bad connection and rattled on unconcerned. “Easter, if you like,” he said. “Christmas would be short notice for the families.”
When they met the next day, Angela, pale from a sleepless night, told him that she didn’t think she was ready for marriage. “Ready, what d’you mean, ready?” he demanded, bewildered. “We’ve waited five years already, how much longer d’you want?”
Angela found it very difficult to explain. She loved Dennis, she appreciated his loyalty and devotion, she wanted to give herself to him. But the prospect of marriage, a lifetime’s commitment, frightened her, and the portents in marriages she knew depressed her, especially her own parents’ marriage. While she had lived at home she had sentimentalized it, idealized it. The big, warm, happy Catholic family. The house full of noisy bustle and religious zeal. The boys cycling off early in the mornings to serve at mass, priests and nuns dropping in at all hours, family feasts at Christmas and Easter. Now she saw it all differently, aware that her mother’s part in all this had been a lifetime of drudgery, her father’s a lifetime of worry. The family was like the shop – a tyrant that kept them slaving from morning till night, so that they never had a moment to themselves. Their sexual life was unimaginable, not simply because it embarrassed her to think about it, but because they seemed so exhausted, so drained of tenderness to each other, by the clamorous demands of their offspring. When she went home for weekends now, she threw herself into the domestic front line at her mother’s side – washed, ironed, swept and hoovered – but it seemed to make no difference: the dirty washing accumulated as fast as ever, people tramped through the house leaving mud and dirt everywhere, the fire smoked in the back parlour and the shop bell pinged insistently. Always she was guiltily pleased to be gone, to be back in her snug and neat little bed-sitter in Streatham. She had a teaching job in a girls’ grammar school which she found demanding but satisfying, and her career prospects were good. Her eldest brother, Tom, was training to be a priest, and the rest of the children were still at school. She thought it was her duty to work for at least a few years, sending a quarter of her salary home. That was how she put it to Dennis, though the deeper reason was simply that she was frightened of marriage.
“You can go on working after we’re married,” Dennis said. “You can go on giving part of your earnings to your Mum and Dad.”
“For how long? We’ll have children, won’t we?”
“Not immediately. We’ll use the whatdyoucallit, rhythm method.”
“Suppose it doesn’t work?”
“Why shouldn’t it work? It’s scientifically sound.”
“Oh, scientifically.…”
She jeered at his trust in science, uttered wounding remarks about his complacency, his self-centredness. She tried to make herself as unpleasant as possible, to provoke him into breaking their engagement; but he simply sat there, absorbing all her venom, and at last wore her out. All right, he sighed, when she had talked herself out, and was sitting red-faced and dumb, wanting to cry but unable to; all right, he would not press her, they could wait until she was ready. He came over to the divan where she was sitting and put his arm round her shoulders. Why me, she thought, why does it have to be me? Why can’t he leave me in peace and find another girl, someone who really wants to get married?
Dennis gave up the post he had been offered with ICI, which would have meant moving to Northumberland, and took a job with an electronics firm in London, on the production side, relying on his Army qualifications for the relevant technical knowledge. This job he saw as a temporary expedient, but in fact it turned out rather well for Dennis, for it was a lively firm in what turned out to be a buoyant market in the sixties. At the time, however, it seemed a waste of his chemistry degree. Dennis’s parents were quietly reproachful towards Angela when she visited them in Hastings. They thought Angela was a nice girl, “a lovely girl”, but they couldn’t understand her hesitation to marry their son and they couldn’t forgive her for keeping him waiting against his wishes. As for her own parents, they were thoroughly in favour of Dennis, a good Catholic, a steady chap with good prospects; and since Angela made it clear that in no circumstances would she allow them to pay for her wedding, they were quite eager to see it come off. Eventually Angela capitulated to all this gentle pressure, and not unwillingly; she felt she had put up a creditable fight for … whatever it was that had made her hesitate: independence, conscience, realism. I have made no promises I cannot keep, she told herself, when at last she named the day (it was being matron of honour to Ruth that tipped the balance in favour of marriage), I have warned him, I have warned them all. And then, she did love Dennis, wanted to make love to him properly after all these years of the tiresome game of How Far Can You Go. When they lay on the divan bed in her bedsitter now, she did not resist the advances of his exploring hands over her body and under her dress, and she felt the quickening excitement of his breathing and the hardness of his male parts pressed against her thigh. He gave her a book to read, written by a doctor, about the facts of sex, and she learned from it many things she had not known before, her cheeks burning as she read, and felt additional impatience to be wed, for it seemed to her indecent to have such knowledge without the experience.
As they were arranging their own wedding, and their families lived so far apart, North and South, Angela and Dennis decided to have it in London, at the University church. This was not the church of Our Lady and St Jude’s, of course, but a much more venerable structure in the City. They did, however, ask Father Brierley to officiate as they did not know the current University Chaplain; and Father Brierley, still a curate in the parish at the end of the Northern Line, was touched by the request, and agreed gladly. This gave Dennis and Angela the idea of inviting all the regular members of the group that used to attend the Thursday masses. There was no rational reason for this, really – for though some, like Michael and Miriam, were close friends whom they would have invited anyway, others were not and had been out of touch for years, except for the occasional Christmas card. However, they both agreed that Father Brierley would appreciate a reunion, and in some obscure, inarticulate way they both felt a kind of sentimental nostalgia for those dark, cold, Thursday mornings of their first love, when they trekked in from the suburbs for early mass. “Imagine,” said Angela, “travelling all that distance without a cup of tea first. Not even a glass of water. How did we do it?” For by this date, autumn 1958, the Eucharistic fast had been considerably relaxed, and one was permitted to drink any non-alcoholic beverage up to one hour before receiving Communion – a concession particularly appreciated by brides preparing for their nuptial mass.
Everyone agreed that it was a very nice wedding. It took place on a fine October day. Angela looked beautiful and Dennis looked like the cat who was finally certain of getting the cream. Miriam played the organ expertly, and Michael was an efficient best man. Angela’s brother Tom, who was a year away from ordination, assisted Father Brierley as deacon, and read the Epistle in a fine clear voice:
“Brethren: let women be subject to their husbands as to the Lord, for the husband is the head of the wife, as Christ is the head of the Church. He is the saviour of his body. Therefore, as the Church is subject to Christ, so also let the wives be to their husbands in all things. Husbands, love your wives as Christ also loved the Church.…”
Father Brierley’s sermon was a little on the heavy side, some thought, but it was sincere, and carefully prepared. This couple, he told the assembled congregation (who scarcely needed to be reminded of the fact) had not rushed into holy matrimony, like so many young people these days. They had tested their feelings for each other over a long period, they had prepared themselves prudently for the great responsibilities of the married state, and now they were calling down God’s blessing on their union by this nuptial mass. As St Paul’s epistle had reminded them all, the relationship between man and wife was analogous to that between Christ and His Church. (“What’s analogous?” Angela’s mother whispered to her husband, who shook his head.) Both were founded on Faith, Hope and Love. Dennis and Angela, poised on the threshold of a new life together, did not know exactly what the future held for them: great joys and happiness, certainly, but also trials and tribulations, for such was human life. (Dennis’s father stirred restlessly in his pew; it seemed a rather gloomy sermon for a wedding, he thought – more suitable for a funeral.) The Church also at this time stood on the threshold of a new era. A great Pope, Pius XII, had just died, a Pope who had steered the bark of Peter through the stormy seas of the Second World War, who had defended the right of Catholics to practice their faith in the teeth of Communist persecution, a Pope who had never hesitated to stand up for Christian values against the rampant materialism of the modern world. Even as he spoke to them now, the cardinals of all the nations of the world were gathering in Rome to elect a new Pope in secret conclave. No one knew who he would be, or what problems he would have to grapple with. What they did know was that the Holy Spirit would guide the Conclave’s choice, that the man who was chosen would be equal to whatever challenge lay before him, because of Christ’s promise that he would be with His Church all days, even to the consummation of the world. Likewise, Dennis and Angela knew that Christ would be with them, too, all days, sharing in their joys and supporting them in their sorrows, until death did them part.
Afterwards, at the reception, there were excited reunions between old friends, many of whom had not seen each other for years. Not everyone had been able to come. Sister Mary Joseph of the Precious Blood wrote to Angela to say that the Rule of the Order forbade attendance at weddings, but she wished them both joy and would remember them in her prayers. Adrian wrote excusing himself and Dorothy on the grounds that Dorothy was pregnant and had been ordered to rest. It didn’t sound terribly convincing, but Dennis, anyway, was more relieved than sorry at Adrian’s absence. All the others, rather to his surprise, turned up. Edward was there, in his Lieutenant’s uniform of the RAMC, which made Dennis feel a little queasy, and Tessa, proudly wielding her new baby. Polly came and wept copiously through the wedding service, making the mascara run down her cheeks in black rivulets, so that she had to retire for an interval afterwards to re-do her face. She was twenty-six and was beginning to want very much to be married herself and have babies like Tessa, and like Miriam, who was four months pregnant and looked blooming in a green maternity dress which she scarcely needed yet. Polly now worked for the BBC as a research assistant, and knew lots of young men, but not one of them had asked her to marry him, as she had the reputation of being a bit of a tart. This was hardly fair to Polly, who had had only two affairs in the last two years, but coming back into contact with all these good Catholics, hearing mass for the first time in ages, looking at radiant Angela and proud Dennis, and feeling sure that, incredible as it might seem, they were going to the nuptial bed as genuine virgins, she herself felt distinctly Magdalenish, and began to wonder whether she should start going to mass again, perhaps even to Confession, and try to make a fresh start. But after her second glass of white wine at the reception she cheered up and began to flirt with all the men at the reception, even Father Brierley.
“I don’t suppose you remember me, do you, Father? The Salome of Cath. Soc?”
“Of course I do, Polly, yes indeed, how are you after all these years?” said Father Brierley nervously.
“That was a beautiful sermon, Father.”
“Thank you, most kind,” Father Brierley murmured, blushing with pleasure.
“Isn’t it exciting about the Conclave! Who d’you think will win?”
“‘Win’ isn’t perhaps the most appropriate –”
“Don’t you think it would be fun to have a Yank for a change? Good heavens, there’s Miles! Excuse me, Father.”
Polly turned aside and began to push her way through the crush, leaving a heavy smell of perfume lingering on the air in her wake. Austin Brierley was relieved to see her go, for her presence had stirred embarrassing memories and a still-vivid mental image of her silk-stockinged leg.
Polly greeted Miles with a faint shriek, to which he responded with expressions of surprise and rapture. They embraced with a great deal of physical flourish but little actual contact, since Polly did not want to have to repair her make-up again, and Miles did not want her lipstick all over his face and shirt collar. A little circle of the bride’s relations watched this performance respectfully, recognizing a code of manners more sophisticated and complex than their own. Michael, observing from further off, realized for the first time that Miles was homosexual, something that had never occurred to him in his innocent undergraduate days. What, he wondered, did a Catholic homosexual do? Sublimate, he supposed. It seemed rather hard. On other the hand it was difficult, not being a homosexual oneself, to believe that what homosexuals did with each other would be difficult to give up. It was always a mystery, other people’s experience of sex. Even Miriam, though she enjoyed making love, could not explain to him what it felt like, and became evasive and finally frigid if he questioned her too closely.
A little later, Michael chatted with Miles and learned that he had finished his PhD thesis, which was likely to be published, and had recently been elected to a Fellowship at one of the Cambridge colleges. Miles spoke eloquently of the pleasures of Cambridge, dropped a few great names, and enquired kindly, but a shade patronizingly, about Michael’s career.
“I’m schoolteaching to stay out of the Army,” Michael explained. “How did you get out of it?”
“I failed the medical,” said Miles.
“Lucky sod,” said Michael, unthinkingly. He added hastily, “I’d like to go into university teaching myself, but I can’t afford to be called up, now I’m married and with a baby on the way.”
“Really? My congratulations.”
“Thanks. We didn’t really want to start a family right away, but well, you know how it is.…”
“Not from experience,” Miles smiled suavely.
“I mean for Catholics. Birth control and so on.”
“Oh yes, well, I do sympathize, but on the other hand there is something rather fine about the Church’s refusal to compromise on that issue, don’t you think? Unlike the Anglicans, poor dears.”
It’s all very well for you, Michael thought; but said nothing.
The reception was nearly over, the telegrams had been read, and speeches made, and the wedding cake cut and consumed. Angela was beginning to think of retiring to change into her going-away clothes when Violet made a very late and somewhat disturbing appearance at the feast. She looked very ill and anxious, very much as she had looked just before her nervous breakdown in her Final year. Her clothes were dark and heavy and distinctly unfestive, and she carried a large paper carrier bag. She went up to Angela and apologized for being late, giving some complicated explanation of how she had lost her way on the Tube. “I’ve brought you a present,” she said, and produced from the bag a rather untidy parcel tied up in crumpled brown paper. As she seemed to want Angela to open it, Angela did so, and was disconcerted to find inside a complete baby’s layette.
“It was for the baby I lost,” Violet said. “I’m sure you’ll have a use for it one day.”
The guests, who had gathered round to see the present, turned away in embarrassment.
“But, Violet,” said Angela gently, “you mustn’t give me this. You may need it yourself another time.”
“No, Robin and I are separated. Anyway, he wouldn’t have any more children, he didn’t mean us to have that one, it was a mistake, he wanted me to have an abortion, but I wouldn’t. He’s not a Catholic, you know.”
“Angela,” said Miriam, seeing that Violet had to be stopped from spoiling Angela’s day, “if you don’t go and get changed immediately, you’re going to miss that train. I’ll get Violet something to eat.” And with a slightly worried frown, Angela went off to get changed.
“Well, well, poor old Violet,” said Michael later, when he and Miriam were alone together, walking back to the Tube station arm-in-arm.
“Was she like that as a student?”
“A bit inclined. She had a sort of nervous breakdown in her last year, had to take a year off.”
“It’s a shame her losing her baby,” Miriam said, covertly feeling her own tummy, like someone touching wood.
“Mmm. Her husband’s a bit of a cold fish, too. I met him once.”
“She said they were separated.”
“A typical Violet overstatement. I gather he’s gone to the States for a term. Some kind of exchange.”
“But he didn’t take her with him.”
“Expect he wanted to get away from her for a while. Can’t say I blame him. Did you see how she got Father Brierley into a corner? He didn’t look as if he was enjoying it one bit.”
They walked in silence for a while, thinking their own thoughts.
“Well,” said Michael, “it all went off very nicely, in spite of Violet. The organ sounded fantastic in that church.”
“And you were a super best man. It was a very funny speech.” She squeezed his hand.
“All the same,” he said, “I shan’t complain if I don’t have to go to another wedding for a few years. I’ve just about had enough.”
“From now on,” said Miriam, “it’s going to be christenings.”
Dennis and Angela’s honeymoon was, of course, no freer from awkwardness and disappointment than any of the others, though these feelings were mostly on Angela’s side. The book Dennis had lent her had not prepared her for the physical messiness of the act of love, and the orgasms she had read about in its pages eluded her. On the honeymoon Dennis was ravenous for her, begged her to make love twice, three times a night, he groaned and swore in his rapture, said over and over again, I love you, I love you, but always he reached his climax as soon as he entered her, and she felt little except the unpleasant aftertrickle between her legs, staining her new nighties and the hotel sheets. When they got home to their little two-roomed flat, she changed the bedlinen so often that their laundry bill became astronomical (there was nowhere to hang out sheets) and caused their first quarrel; after which she spread towels on the bed when the occasion required it. Then, after a couple of months, she missed her period and felt nauseous in the mornings and knew that she must be pregnant. She told her headmistress that she would be resigning at the following Easter.