IN AMERICA, RUTH travelled from city to city, from convent to convent, like a medieval pilgrim, making notes about the changes that were taking place in the lives of nuns. She had been awarded a six month’s travelling scholarship for this project, but when her time was up she felt that she had only scratched the surface of the subject and wrote home for permission to stay longer. She relied on the religious communities she visited for food and accommodation, repaying their hospitality with whatever work was appropriate. She did substitution teaching in schools, auxiliary nursing in hospitals, helped look after senior citizens and mentally handicapped children. Sometimes she donned her habit and gave talks about the Church in England to parochial groups. Afterwards people would come up to her and shake her hand warmly, sometimes pressing into it a large-denomination dollar bill “to help with your expenses, sister.” At first she was embarrassed by these gifts, but after a while she got used to them, and indeed came to rely on such gratuities for her pocket money.
American nuns, she soon discovered, were in a state of upheaval that made England seem quite tranquil by comparison. In Cleveland, Ohio, she came across a community that had until recently been enclosed, supporting itself precariously by embroidering priests’ vestments, and had suddenly decided to train all its members in chiropody and turned itself into a foot clinic. In Detroit, Michigan, a nun in high boots and a mini-skirt ran a free school for juvenile deliquents and led a successful rent-strike against profiteering landlords. In St Louis, Ruth interviewed a sister who was secretary general of an organization dedicated to opposing male chauvinism in the Church. She wore a trouser suit and scattered words like “crap” and “bullshit” in her conversation. On the wall behind her head a poster depicted Moses telling the Israelites: “And She’s black …” In Texas, Ruth visited a community of nuns who came down to breakfast with their hair in huge plastic curlers. After a hasty grace (“Good food, good meat, good God, let’s eat”) they tucked into hot cakes and bacon; then, immaculately coiffed, and clad in smart clothes, they swept off in huge shiny convertibles to their jobs as personal secretaries in downtown Houston. In the evenings they had dates with priests, who took them out to restaurants and movie shows.
Ruth herself had adventures. Travelling through the night on a Greyhound bus, dressed, as was her custom now, in ordinary clothes, she realized that the man in the next seat had placed his hand on her knee. She froze, wondering what to do. Scream? Cut and run? Stop the bus? After half an hour she dared a look sideways. The man was asleep, his limbs limp, his mouth open. Slowly, carefully, Ruth lifted his hand from her knee and restored it to his own. Eventually she slept herself and woke to find her head on the man’s shoulder. “I didn’t like to waken you,” he said with a smile, chafing his numbed arm. Ruth blushed crimson and muttered her apologies. “You’re welcome,” said the man. At the next rest stop he insisted on buying her coffee and doughnuts and telling her the story of his life. He was a shoe salesman, recently retired, going to spend a vacation with his son and daughter-in-law in Denver. “You’d really like them,” he assured her. “They made a trip to London a few years back. You’d have a lot in common. Why don’t you plan to stay over in Denver a whiles?” When they got back into the bus, Ruth took a seat next to a black woman with a baby on her lap and pretended not to see the hurt and longing looks the shoe salesman sent in her direction across the aisle. At the time, this episode distressed her, but afterwards she was vexed to think how upset she had been, or “uptight” as the feminist nun in St Louis would have put it. When, some time later, an ugly but genial man tried to pick her up at Dallas airport, she didn’t panic, but waited patiently for an opportunity to mention that she was a nun. “No kidding!” he said, staring. “Hey, I wouldn’t have made a pass at you if I’d known. Jesus – sorry – wow! Hey, I went to a parochial school myself, you know? I mean, I was taught by sisters.” He seemed almost afraid that they would rise up out of the past to punish him. He took out his wallet and tried to press a donation on her. Fending off the proffered dollar bills, Ruth glimpsed a woman on a nearby bench observing them with disapproval. “Put your money away, you’re giving scandal,” she said, giggling. She dined off the story more than once.
At last she came to the coast of California, which seemed as far as she could go. Her Mother Superior wrote reluctantly agreeing to a three-month extension of her leave. The letter was fretful and discouraged. One nun had just left the community and another was on the brink. There had been only two new postulants admitted to the mother house that year. By the same post Ruth received a copy of Crux, the COC newsletter: Adrian had put her on the mailing list even though she hadn’t paid a subscription. It contained articles, news items and book reviews, mostly written by Adrian and Dorothy, correspondence with editorial comments by Adrian, and the text of the third Open Letter to the Cardinal.
Michael had been correct in predicting that the governors of his College, who included several members of the clergy he liked to describe as somewhat to the right of Torquemada in the spectrum of ecclesiastical politics, would disapprove of his membership of Catholics for an Open Church. When the second open letter to the Cardinal, bearing his signature, was published in The Times and the Tablet, the Principal suggested that it would be in Michael’s own interest to resign from the group. His professional association offered to take up the case, but Michael was tired of the place anyway, and applied successfully for a more senior post elsewhere. This was another Catholic College of Education, but only recently established, and known to be progressive in its outlook, dedicated to the spirit of Vatican II, with a lay Principal and a largely lay staff. In preparation for the new life they expected to lead there, Michael and Miriam let their hair grow, he to his shoulders and she to her waist. When Miriam thrust her head forward in the excitement of argument now, a shimmering curtain of copper-coloured hair would fall forward over her green eyes, and she would flick it back with an impatient toss of the head. Michael also grew a moustache, hoping it would distract attention from his snouty nose. He gave up smoking, and Miriam started baking her own bread.
They looked forward to seeing more of some old friends in their new location, for the College was situated on the outskirts of the city where Edward had his practice, and was not far, therefore, from Dennis and Angela’s dormitory village. To the same city, in due course, came Father Brierley, to study at the Polytechnic. His dispute with the bishop had been resolved, at least temporarily, like other crises in his priestly life, by sending him on a course – this time for a degree in psychology and sociology.
Father Brierley’s bishop was not, in fact, the ogre that Adrian liked to make him out to be. He did not wish to lose Father Brierley, whom he recognized as a sincere, hardworking priest, especially as the diocese was chronically under strength; nor did he personally have very strong feelings about the issue of birth control. The bishop had successfully sublimated his own sexual urges thirty years ago, and didn’t understand why Catholic couples couldn’t do the same after having a few children. As a young man he would have liked to experience copulation once, just to know what it was like, and to live with that curiosity unsatisfied had been a genuine sacrifice at the time. That people should want to go on doing it, again and again, long after the novelty must have worn off, strained his understanding and sympathy. But he acknowledged that there were a lot of sins worse than spilling the seed, and thought it was very regrettable the way this one issue had come to obsess people.
For the bishop, the controversy was purely a management problem. What Father Brierley said to folk in the confessional was between God and his conscience, but if he was allowed to get away with publicly repudiating HV, all the young tearaway curates in the diocese would soon be doing the same, and the older ones baying for a heresy hunt, and then the fat would be in the fire. The bishop put this to Father Brierley, frankly and freely, one man to another, sitting opposite him in the episcopal study in an easy chair, and offering Irish whiskey and cigarettes. Austin Brierley apologized for causing him so much trouble, but stood his ground. The bishop sighed, lit a Senior Service, and asked Father Brierley if he had a girl friend. Austin Brierley flushed and denied the suggestion indignantly.
“Hold your horses, Father,” said the Bishop, “it was just a shot in the dark. It’s only that every priest I’ve had trouble with in the past few years has turned out to be in love. The poor fools think they’ve got problems of faith and doctrine but subconsciously they’re looking for a way to get out of Holy Orders and into the arms of some woman or other.”
“That isn’t my situation,” said Austin Brierley.
“I’m glad to hear it,” said the Bishop. “But what shall we do with you?”
“Let me go to college,” said Austin Brierley. “I’d like to take a degree in psychology.”
“What in Heaven’s name for?”
“I think it would help me to understand people better. They come to me for advice, but what do I know about ordinary people’s problems? All I know about are priests’ problems.”
The Bishop grunted sceptically. “We’ve managed for nearly two thousand years without degrees in psychology,” he said. But the suggestion had an undeniable appeal. Sending Father Brierley to college would get him out of his parish and out of the limelight for a few years, by which time the controversy over HV would have died down. And it would appear a magnanimous gesture on his own part, which would be one in the eye for Mr Adrian Walsh and his society of busybodies. “You’d have to resign from that Catholics for an Open Church nonsense,” he said. Reluctantly, Austin Brierley agreed to this condition, but he chose his place of study deliberately to be near some of his friends and supporters in COC, and continued to advise them unofficially on matters of theology and ecclesiastical politics.
Michael and Miriam now belonged to a circle of friends, mostly attached to the College in some capacity, who saw themselves as almost a church within the Church. On Sunday mornings they attended mass in the College chapel, where Father Bede Buchanan, a liberal-minded priest who was a lecturer in the Theology Department and chaplain to the student body, tolerated an experimental, avant-garde liturgy that would have lifted the back hairs on the red necks of the local parish priests had they known what was going on in their midst.
Each week the students chose their own readings, bearing on some topical theme, and sometimes these were not taken from Scripture at all, but might be articles from the Guardian about racial discrimination or poems by the Liverpool poets about teenage promiscuity or some blank-verse effusion of their own composition. The music at mass was similarly eclectic in style, accompanied by guitar and perhaps flute, violin, Indian bells, bongo drums – whatever instruments and instrumentalists happened to be around. They sang negro spirituals and gospel songs, Sidney Carter’s modern folk hymns, the calypso setting of the “Our Father”, Protestant favourites like “Amazing Grace” and “Onward Christian Soldiers”, and sometimes pop classics like Simon and Garfunkel’s “Mrs Robinson” (“Jesus loves you more and more each day, hey, hey, hey!”) or the Beatles’ “All You Need Is Love”. At the bidding prayers anyone was free to chip in with a petition, and the congregation might find itself praying for the success of the Viet Cong, or for the recovery of someone’s missing tortoise, as well as for more conventional intentions. At the Offertory, the bread and wine were brought up to the altar by two students, usually a courting couple holding hands and exchanging fond looks, and it wasn’t only married couples who warmly embraced at the Kiss of Peace. Throughout the mass the young children of the college lecturers scampered uncontrolled about the room, chattering and fighting and pushing their Dinky cars up and down the altar steps. At Communion, most of the congregation received the Host in their hands rather than on the tongue, and also took the cup, which was brought round by a layman – all practices still forbidden in public worship in England. At the end of mass there was a discussion period in which the congregation was encouraged to pick holes in the homily they had heard earlier.
This liturgy had one indisputable spiritual edge over the old: it was virtually impossible to lapse into some private, secular day-dream while it was going on, because you could never be sure from one moment to the next what was going to happen. By suspending their sense of irony, Michael and Miriam derived an agreeable sense of uplift and togetherness from the occasion, while their children positively looked forward to Sunday mornings, and groaned when, during the vacations, the College masses were suspended and they were obliged to attend the parish church, where they were penned in narrow pews and made to sit, stand and kneel, like well-drilled troops, in unison with the rest of the congregation, and obliged to sing the doleful hymns of yesteryear, “Soul of My Saviour” and “Sweet Sacrament Divine”. Moving between these two places of worship, and impersonating the two very different styles of deportment that went with them, Michael sometimes felt like a liturgical double agent.
Catholic friends and relatives who came to stay (they now had a large, comfortable old house, with a proper guest room) were taken to the College mass as a kind of treat, or at least novelty. Adrian, who came down with Dorothy one weekend to discuss COC policy (there was a plan afoot to publish a pamphlet demonstrating the fallibility of Humanae Vitae) joined enthusiastically in the College mass and offered a bidding prayer inviting the Lord to open the eyes of those clergy who were resisting the spirit of liturgical renewal. This was apparently an allusion to his own parish priest, with whom he was engaged in a long war of attrition. “You don’t know how lucky you are,” he said afterwards. “Our PP won’t even allow women readers.”
“Why not?” said Miriam.
“Menstruation,” said Dorothy, who liked to advertise the distance she had travelled from her inhibited youth by being very outspoken. “He thinks women are unclean. He probably thinks we bleed all the time.”
“But we’ll nail him eventually,” said Adrian. “Dorothy will read from that pulpit if I have to organize a strike of altar cleaners to do it.”
“Sometimes, at the College mass, we have a woman bring round the cup,” said Miriam.
“Gosh, do you really!” they exclaimed. “How fantastic!”
But the College liturgy did not always please. One Sunday when Michael’s parents were with them, a child taking Communion let the chalice slip and spilled the consecrated wine all over the floor. Michael’s father, a retired civil servant, was deeply upset by this occurrence, and muttered audibly that it ought to be reported to the Bishop. “It’s not right,” he said afterwards, over lunch, still agitated and looking quite grey with shock, “letting the children have the chalice. I don’t hold with it, in any case, not even for adults, there’s always the risk of an accident. But the way they carry on in that chapel, with any Tom, Dick or Harry taking round the chalice, it’s no wonder something like that happens. And all that priest did was mop it up with some old cloth!”
“What did you expect him to do, Dad, eat the carpet?” said Michael. The remark sounded excessively rude when he made it, but his father had irritated and embarrassed him by his public fussing over the incident.
“In my day, the carpet would have been taken up and burned.”
“Burned?” Michael forced a laugh. “What good would that do?”
“To avoid desecration.”
Michael sighed. “You still have a very magical idea of the Eucharist, don’t you Dad?”
“Respectful, I’d call it. Reverent.”
“Even granted that you still believe in the transubstantiation –”
“Oh, don’t you, then?”
“Not in the sense we were taught at school. Substance and accidents and all that.”
Michael’s father shook his head.
“But even granted that you still believe it, surely you don’t think that Christ is trapped in the wine, do you? I mean, you admit that the Real Presence could leave the wine the instant it was spilled, before it hit the carpet?”
“Michael, leave your father alone,” said Miriam.
“Yes, stop it, you two,” said her mother-in-law. “It’s not nice, arguing about religion on a Sunday.”
Michael’s father waved these interventions away impatiently. “Tell me what you do believe, then, son, about Holy Communion, if you don’t believe in transubstantiation. What is it, if it isn’t the changing of bread and wine into the Body and Blood of Our Lord, Jesus Christ?” He gave a reflex nod of the head at the Holy Name, and his wife followed suit.
“Well …”said Michael, more hesitantly, “it’s a commemoration.”
“Pah!” expostulated his father. “That’s what Protestants say.”
“Do this in memory of me,” Michael quoted.
“This is My Body, this is My Blood,” his father countered.
“That’s a metaphor,” said Michael.
“It’s a plain statement of fact.”
“How could it be? A plain statement of fact would be, ‘This bread is bread, this wine is wine.’” He took a slice of Hovis in his fingers and waved it in the air illustratively, exhilarated by the argument, his blood up now, a teacher in full cry. “In ‘This is My Body,’ the verb is can only mean ‘is like’ or ‘is, as it were’ or ‘is analogous to’, because any other sense would be a logical contradiction. God can only speak to men in a language that is humanly intelligible.”
His father snorted angrily, baffled but not beaten. “Are you trying to tell me that what the Church has taught for centuries is wrong, then?”
“Yes. No. Not exactly. Concepts change as knowledge changes. Once everybody believed the earth was flat. Only cranks believe that now.”
“So I’m a crank, am I?”
“I didn’t say that, Dad.”
His father grunted, but offered no further resistance. The adrenalin seeped away and Michael was left feeling slightly ashamed of his facile victory.
Miles, who stayed with them one weekend on his way to a conference in Wales, was as dismayed as Michael’s father. “My dear Michael,” he said, emerging from the College chapel with his hand to his brow, like someone with a migraine, “this is madness. This is anarchy. This is Enthusiasm. Ronnie Knox must be spinning in his grave.” Miles drew an analogy between what he had witnessed and the development of antinomian sects in the seventeenth century. “It won’t be long,” he prophesied, “before you’re dancing naked in front of the altar and sharing your wives and goods in common.”
“Sounds like fun,” said Michael, grinning. “But seriously, Miles, everyone’s antinomian nowadays. Catholics are just catching up with the rest of the world. I mean, the idea of sin is right out. They don’t even teach it in Catholic schools any more.” Michael exaggerated somewhat to tease Miles, who awed him less than of old, perhaps because Miles’s academic career had not really fulfilled its early promise. His thesis had not, after all, been published, whereas Michael was beginning to publish essays here and there about youth culture, the new liturgy and the mass media, and had hopes of gathering them into a book. When Michael visited Miles at his Cambridge college he was surprised how little envy he felt – his rooms seemed cold and damp and smelled of gas, the furniture was ugly, the conversation at High Table boring and superficial. Apart from the beauty of the external architecture, the ambience reminded him faintly of his father’s golf club as it had been in the early fifties. Miles himself, wearing superbly tailored but unfashionably cut three-piece suits, and always carrying his tightly furled umbrella, seemed psychologically arrested in that earlier era.
Miles certainly felt spiritually orphaned by the times. The Catholic Church he had joined was fast disappearing, and he did not like the new one he saw appearing in its place, with its concert-party liturgy, its undiscriminating radicalism, its rather smug air of uxorious sexual liberation. He admitted to himself that there might be an element of envy in his reaction on the last score, for he was himself still hopelessly screwed up over the sexual question. The homosexual subculture of Cambridge was becoming increasingly overt in its behaviour, and beckoning him to join the party, but he held back on the fringe, prim-lipped and buttoned-up. It was at about this time that the word “gay” became widely current in England in the homosexual sense, but to Miles it had a mockingly ironic ring. One summer he arranged to take a holiday in Morocco with a young colleague of apparently similar temperament, and wondered excitedly whether this would be his first affair, whether the exotic and distant setting would allow him to lose his scruples and his virginity at last, but the young man turned out to be paedophile and spent all his time making assignations with young Arab boys in the marketplace of the town where they were staying. One evening Miles himself cruised the narrow streets diffidently in search of a pick-up, but always drew back when accosted, fearful of being robbed, blackmailed or infected. He flew back to England a week early and settled in tourist-ridden Cambridge to make one more assault on the revision of his thesis for publication. By the end of the vacation he had exactly thirteen pages of uncancelled typescript to show for his pains. “You’re blocked because you’re sexually repressed,” said his friend, back from Morocco, bronzed and sated. “How glib can you get?” Miles sneered, but secretly agreed.
At times when his physical frustration became too much to bear, he took from a locked drawer in his bedroom a small collection of homosexual pornography and masturbated. These acts he coldly confessed at the earliest opportunity to his regular confessor, the now ageing Jesuit. “Is it really better to live like this than to have a proper loving relationship with someone?” Miles asked.
“You know very well that if you were doing that I wouldn’t be able to give you absolution. Pray to Almighty God to give you strength.”
Miles sank into a deep depression. He spent long hours taking hot baths and slept as much as possible, drugging himself with Valium and sleeping pills – anything to reduce the hours of consciousness to a minimum. He cancelled his tutorials frequently because he could not face them, and his students began to complain. Colleagues avoided his company. Cambridge, which he had always thought of as one of the most privileged spots on earth, became hideous to him, a claustrophobic little place, crammed with vain, complacent, ruthless people who were constantly signalling to each other by every word and gesture, “Envy me, envy me, I’m clever and successful and I’m having it off every night.”
“Perhaps you should see a psychiatrist,” said his confessor.
“He’ll only tell me to have sex,” said Miles. “That’s what they all say, isn’t it?”
“I know a Catholic one,” said the priest. “A very good man.”
After several consultations the psychiatrist said, “I can do nothing for you. Speaking as a doctor, my advice would be: find yourself a partner. Speaking as a Catholic, I can only say: carry your cross.”
“That’s easily said,” Miles observed.
The psychiatrist shrugged. “I quite agree. With many clients there comes a point when one has to say, your problem is what you are.”
“Like the old joke about the man with an inferiority complex?”
“Precisely. You are homosexual.”
“I knew that already,” said Miles, getting up to go. “But thanks for confirming it.”
Violet also went to a psychiatrist – more than one: she sought them out as she had once sought out confessors, moving restlessly and at random from one to another, hoping to find the one with magic powerful enough to break the spell. She told each one her story and compared their diagnoses. Some said depressive, some schizoid, some prescribed drugs, some group counselling. One prescribed therapeutic sex. When Violet told him about the episode with her professor, he propounded the theory that she had imagined the whole thing. It was clearly a displacement of her desire to have sex with her own father. The guilt generated by this repressed incestuous desire had led her to project it on to other father figures as a violation of her own innocence. She would not be cured until she was able to have a happy, guilt-free relationship with an older man. “I am an older man,” he pointed out. When Violet broke off the consultation, he said, “If you make a complaint, I shall deny everything, of course.”
Ruth wrote home for a further extension. It was refused. Come home, her Mother Superior urged, you are needed. Sixth Form science is suffering. Ruth procrastinated, equivocated. She did not want to go home. She felt that she was in the middle of some spiritual quest that could not be abandoned, though she did not know where or when it would end. As for Sixth Form science suffering, that was all rot. The real reason why Mother Superior wanted her back was because two more nuns had left the convent and morale was low. One of the women concerned had written to Ruth. “I’ll make no bones about it,” she wrote, “I left to get married, and not to anyone in particular. I woke up one morning and realized that I couldn’t face the rest of my life on my own, without a man, without children. I’m going out with a nice fellow now, a widower with two boys, we met through an agency. I’m taking cookery lessons. When I tried to cook a dinner for John and the children he said it was the worst meal he had ever had in his life. I suppose that after a number of years in a convent your taste buds get anaesthetized…”
Ruth herself did not suffer unduly from the pangs of frustrated sexual and maternal longing, but she did feel that there was something missing from her life as a religious, and that she had to find it before she returned home. She wrote back to her Mother Superior: “I am going through a crisis about my vocation. I must see it through over here.” Mother Superior wired: “RETURN IMMEDIATELY.” Ruth ignored the summons. She did not know whether she had been suspended. She did not greatly care.
It was a time of intense political activity in America, and priests and nuns were throwing themselves into the struggle for civil rights, for peace in Vietnam, for the protection of the environment. Ruth marched and demonstrated on behalf of the Berrigan brothers, Jesuit priests jailed for burning draft cards and alleged conspiracy against the State, and was herself arrested and jailed for a night. She hitchhiked to Southern California to support the strike of exploited Chicano grape-pickers. Her picket line was broken up by thugs hired by the employers. Ruth was hit in the chest and pushed to the ground, screaming “You cad!” at her attacker. “Those mothers are mean-looking mothers, ain’t they?” said the worker who picked her up and dusted her down. After that experience, Ruth wore her habit on demos and enjoyed a certain immunity from assault, though an element of risk remained. Thus attired, she stood among a crowd of two thousand on a college campus at the height of the Cambodian crisis, chanting, “Pigs out! Pigs out!” and fled from a charge of police dressed like spacemen, her eyes streaming from tear gas. “Mean-looking mothers, aren’t they?” she gasped to a startled fellow-demonstrator. This term of abuse, which she privately interpreted as a contraction of “Mother Superior”, had rather caught her fancy, and she continued to use it freely until enlightened as to its true derivation by an amused Franciscan friar during a sit-in at a napalm factory.
From these experiences Ruth emerged proud and self-reliant. Her life before America, dull and orderly, seemed like an album of monochrome photographs in her memory. But still she hadn’t found what she was looking for. The euphoria, the inspiring sense of solidarity with one’s brothers and sisters, that was generated by marches and demonstrations, soon evaporated. Eventually the columns dispersed, the marchers went their separate ways. “This is the darnedest time,” said Josephine, a Paulist sister from Iowa, on one such occasion, just after a big peace rally in San Francisco. The two of them were drinking coffee out of paper cups in a bus-station automat in the middle of the night, waiting for their connections. Blue strip lighting bleakly illuminated the Formica tables and the littered floor. “While the rally’s going on, you feel just great, right?” Josephine went on. “Like, people are really digging each other, the barriers are down, and when everybody’s singing ‘We Shall Overcome’, or ‘They’ll Know We Are Christians By Our Love’, you feel it’s really true. You think to yourself, gee, this is really great, this is the New Jerusalem, this is what it’s all about. But it doesn’t last. Soon you’re in some lousy automat, zonked out, and the party’s over.”
“I suppose it couldn’t last, in the nature of things,” said Ruth philosophically. “You couldn’t keep up that intense emotional pitch for long.”
“It’s not just that. The others on the demo, ordinary people, have got homes, real homes to go back to. Husbands, wives, families. Folks waiting to welcome them back, wanting to hear all about it. That must be real nice.” Ruth nodded sympathetically, knowing that Josephine’s community did not approve of her radical activities and would not want to know anything at all about that weekend’s demonstration. “Whereas, for us, it’s just an anticlimax, going back. Anticlimax and loneliness. Gee, I get so depressed after one of these rallies…. D’you know what I do, Ruth?” Josephine looked around, and although the automat was empty apart from themselves and a black soldier asleep in the far corner, lowered her voice. “I buy myself a little miniature bottle of Southern Comfort and then I fill me a big deep tub, very hot, and I have a long, long soak. I lie there for hours, taking a sip of Southern Comfort every now and then, and topping up the hot water in the tub. I usually wind up giving myself another kind of Southern Comfort, you know what I mean?”
“No,” said Ruth, truthfully. Josephine looked at her with a strange expression – quizzical, sceptical, slightly wicked – and suddenly Ruth guessed what she was talking about, and blushed vividly. “Oh,” she said.
“D’you think I’m going crazy, Ruth?” said Josephine. “D’you think I should get out before I’m totally screwed up by this life?”
“I don’t know,” said Ruth. “Don’t ask me. I don’t even know about myself.”
As well as the Sunday masses in the College chapel, Michael and Miriam and their friends held occasional gatherings in their homes on weekday evenings which they called “agapes”, after the common meal or love-feast which accompanied the celebration of the Lord’s Supper in the primitive Church. These occasions did indeed make Michael and Miriam and their circle feel a little bit like the early Christians, gathered together in fellowship behind the curtained windows of suburban houses, while all around them people went about their secular pursuits, sat slumped in front of televisions, or drank beer in pubs, or walked their dogs under the streetlamps, quite indifferent to and ignorant of the little cell of religious spirit pulsing in their midst. About a dozen people would be invited and, when everyone had arrived, sat round a table spread with homely and slightly archaic fare – home-baked bread, butter, cheese, dates, nuts and raisins, and wine. The host and hostess would choose some readings, usually from the new Jerusalem Bible, which had “Yaweh” instead of “God” in the Old Testament, and then, with some made-up prayer referring to the Last Supper, they would break the bread and pour the wine into a large goblet. These would be passed round the table from person to person, each taking a piece of bread and a swig from the goblet. Then everyone’s glass would be filled and the meal would continue with ordinary conversation, serious at first, but getting more lighthearted as the wine flowed.
When Father Brierley came to the city, they naturally invited him to join them at these occasions, and then they would have a Eucharist, but without any vestments or candles, just all sitting round the table as before, with home-made bread and vin ordinaire, broken and blessed and handed round, just like at the Last Supper. A certain theological ambiguity hung over these occasions. Was it a real Eucharist, or wasn’t it? Outwardly, only the presiding presence of an ordained priest significantly distinguished the event from their improvised agapes. To some, this was a crucial difference, to others it was a relic of the old “magical” view of the sacraments which they had renounced. In the earliest days of the Church, the commemoration of the Lord’s Supper was not restricted to a priesthood, and Austin (as they now called Father Brierley) himself declared that the idea of a special caste exclusively empowered to administer the sacraments was rapidly becoming obsolete. He prophesied a time when the whole elaborate structure of bishops and priests and dioceses and parishes would melt away, house-eucharists would replace the huge anonymous crush of the parochial Sunday mass, and mutual counselling and consciousness-raising groups would replace Confession and Confirmation.
So they stood upon the shores of Faith and felt the old dogmas and certainties ebbing away rapidly under their feet and between their toes, sapping the foundations upon which they stood, a sensation both agreeably stimulating and slightly unnerving. For we all like to believe, do we not, if only in stories? People who find religious belief absurd are often upset if a novelist breaks the illusion of reality he has created. Our friends had started life with too many beliefs – the penalty of a Catholic upbringing. They were weighed down with beliefs, useless answers to non-questions. To work their way back to the fundamental ones – what can we know? why is there anything at all? why not nothing? what may we hope? why are we here? what is it all about? – they had to dismantle all that apparatus of superfluous belief and discard it piece by piece. But in matters of belief (as of literary convention) it is a nice question how far you can go in this process without throwing out something vital.
To the agapes came, on occasion, Edward and Tessa and Angela and Dennis. Tessa found the religious part somewhat embarrassing, especially when the bread was passed round in silence and you could hear the sounds of people munching and swallowing; but that was soon over and then it was quite jolly, with plenty of cheap wine, and perhaps after the food was cleared away some music, even dancing if the spirit moved the group that way – free-form spontaneous dancing to recorded music in the folk-rock idiom, with anyone able to join in and no nonsense about partners. It was almost as good as going out to a real party, which Edward was usually reluctant to do, pleading tiredness and backache. So Tessa always jumped at an invitation to an agape. People dressed informally for these occasions, but since Miriam and her friends favoured long skirts and kaftans to wear about the house anyway, Tessa did not feel overdressed in her long Laura Ashley cotton dresses, which she bought from the original little shop in Shrewsbury. As far as Tessa was concerned, that you didn’t have to go to a ball nowadays to wear a long dress, or adjust your dancing style to the limitations of a partner, were the two great social achievements of the nineteen-sixties. (It was by now the nineteen-seventies, but this group of people were having their sixties a little late.)
Though he pretended that Tessa dragged him along to the agapes, Edward went willingly enough. Since joining Catholics for an Open Church he had been cold-shouldered by his Catholic colleagues in the medical profession – an intensely conservative group in whose collective consciousness the pre-war confrontation between Marie Stopes and Dr Halliday Sutherland still exerted the power of myth. Even if they disagreed privately with Humanae Vitae, they saw the pro-contraception lobby as indistinguishable from the pro-abortion and pro-euthanasia lobbies and did not wish to join such undesirable allies in attacking their own religious leaders. Thus Edward found himself pushed, almost involuntarily, into identification with the radical Catholic Underground, though by natural inclination he was far from radical, and at the liturgical gatherings of the Miriam – Michael circle was apt to worry, with a spasm of atavistic superstition, about what happened to the crumbs left over from the bread that Austin had consecrated (or had he?).
And Angela came, as she had come in years gone by to the Thursday masses at Our Lady and St Jude’s, because she was invited, because it was obviously a good thing to join with Catholic friends in prayer and fellowship. She had never had much historical sense or any great interest in metaphysical questions; and since the birth of Nicole and the death of Anne she lived more than ever in the present, attending to the tasks immediately to hand. Looking back into the past was too painful, it filled her with a kind of mental nausea. So Angela rarely reflected on the changes that had taken place in the Catholic Church in her lifetime, and was unperturbed by the variety of liturgical practice and doctrinal interpretation that now flourished in it. Whether one prayed in church or in one’s living-room seemed unimportant to her, as long as one prayed. It worried her that Dennis no longer seemed to believe in the efficacy of prayer – indeed he seemed to have little faith left at all. She did not discuss the matter with him, partly because they had got out of the habit of discussing serious, abstract questions, and partly because she was afraid of what state of unbelief might be revealed if she pressed him. They had both changed a lot since the birth of Nicole.
When she was told about Nicole’s condition, Angela had two quite distinct yet simultaneous reactions, happening, as it were, at different levels of her self. On one level she was shocked and horrified, fought against the truth as long as she could, and, when it could no longer be denied, abandoned herself to grief and self-pity; but on another, deeper level she felt as though she had been waiting all her married life for this, or something like it, to happen. Till now, Dennis had taken all the worries and responsibilities on his shoulders – money, houses, holidays, even the temperature charts – while she had lapsed into a bovine placidity, slowly completing her domestic tasks by day, with a milky-breathed infant invariably in her arms or under her feet, then falling asleep in front of the television in the evenings. It had been a more comfortable and cushioned existence than she had predicted when they were courting, but now Nicole had arrived to confirm her misgivings, and it was almost a relief to know what her cross was to be. When she had cried herself dry, she pulled herself together and resolved to make Nicole the ablest mongol in the land. She read every book on the subject of mental handicap she could lay her hands on, travelled miles to consult specialists, filled the house with educational toys and equipment, joined all the relevant societies, organized playgroups, toy libraries, and fund-raising events.
When, two years after Nicole’s birth, four-year old Anne ran into the road in pursuit of a runaway doll’s pram and was knocked down by a dry-cleaner’s van, Angela was sufficiently hardened and tempered psychologically to cope with the crisis. It was Angela who prevented Anne from being moved from the gutter where she had been thrown, who sent for a blanket to keep her warm, and went with her to the hospital in the ambulance, while all Dennis could do was to crouch over his little daughter’s crumpled form, swearing frightfully and literally tearing his hair, great tufts of it which blew away from his fingers like thistledown. When Anne died that night in hospital, without regaining consciousness, it was Angela who was at her bedside, for Dennis was in shock, under sedation at home. It was Angela who made the necessary arrangements for the funeral and held the family steady through that dreadful time. A great shift of gravity had taken place in the marriage, a transfer of power and will from Dennis to Angela. Anne’s death showed it, but Nicole’s birth had started it.
To Dennis the diagnosis of Nicole’s condition had been a stunning and totally surprising blow. He tried to work out why the possibility of such a thing ever happening had never crossed his mind, and came up with several reasons: Angela’s pregnancies had always been quite free from complications, and the first three babies had arrived safe, sound and on time; he had never known anyone who had produced abnormal offspring nor had he had personal contact with any mentally handicapped person in his life. But the more fundamental reason was that he had always subconsciously assumed that he was favoured by Providence, or in secular terms, lucky. There had been setbacks and disappointments in his life, but invariably he had found that if he was patient and industrious the obstacle gave way eventually; and after eight years of marriage he was well pleased with himself and his beautiful wife and bonny children, his new four-bedroomed detached house and company car, his well-paid job as deputy production manager of a prospering electronics firm. As far as he knew, he was earning more than any other man among their college contemporaries, except perhaps Edward, and was fairly confident that before long he would have overtaken him, too. The only significant flaw in his general contentment was the business of birth control, with its attendant frustration and worry, but he was prepared to put up with that – it seemed to be a small price to pay for his other blessings. Because of his upbringing, you see, Dennis could not help crediting his good fortune to God, who was rewarding him for working hard and obeying the rules of the Catholic Church.
The birth of Nicole had rudely upset this simple confidence. Instead of being rewarded, it seemed that he had been punished – but for what? Why me? What have I done to deserve this? was his first thought (it is probably everyone’s first thought in misfortune, but those with a religious world-view are especially prone) that wet Sunday afternoon in the garage, as Edward, fiddling with the Black and Decker sander, hesitantly described his misgivings about the child (and for ever after the smell of sawdust was associated in Dennis’s mind with bad news, so that when two years later his eldest, Jonathan, rushed into the back garden where he was mowing the lawn and screamed at him to come quickly because Anne had been knocked down in the road, he smelled not grass but sawdust, and felt sick). To Dennis, Nicole’s condition was not like the other setbacks in his life, something that might pass away or be overcome; it was fixed and irrevocable, as unalterable as chemistry. People they spoke to about mongolism – Downs’ Syndrome, as Angela insisted on referring to it – tried to be encouraging: these children were happy, loveable people, they were often good at music, some had even learned to read. But none of this was any comfort to Dennis. His daughter had been defective from the moment of conception, nothing could undo the effect of that extra chromosome at the primal collision of sperm and egg. Nothing except death. In the early days, Dennis wished very much that the child would die, which naturally increased his sense of guilt – indeed, explained to him why he was being punished, since anyone capable of such murderous feelings obviously deserved to be punished.
Outwardly Dennis seemed to share Angela’s determination to make the best of things. He cooperated in the training programme for Nicole – played with her, exercised her, talked to the other children about her, read the literature that Angela brought home and attended some of the public meetings, committees and fund-raising events for the mentally handicapped that she was involved in. But it all seemed to him a vain and futile effort to pretend that the tragedy had not happened, that life could resume its former promise. When he came home from work on her first birthday to find her propped up in her high chair, a lopsided paper hat on her head bearing the legend, “Downs Babies Rule OK”, obviously the work of her older brothers, it seemed to Dennis like a sick joke, an unconscious expression of resentment, not, as Angela obviously felt, a sign of their acceptance of the child, and he had to struggle to raise a smile.
Nicole’s birthdays were always bad days, but after that first one things became a little easier. The little girl began to show that she had a distinctive personality of her own, and she was infatuated with her father, exhibiting signs of excitement and delight as soon as Dennis came in sight. It was impossible to resist such utterly innocent affection. Then Dennis began to realize how many handicapped people there were, most of them much more pathetic cases than Nicole. Through personal contact, anecdote, visits to schools and clinics, watching television programmes he would formerly have avoided, Dennis became aware of a whole world of suffering at the extent of which he had never guessed: children horribly afflicted physically and mentally, by brain damage, spina bifida, hydrocephalus, rubella, epilepsy, muscular dystrophy, cerebral palsy, autism and God knew what else; children suffering from multiple handicap, children doubly incontinent, children so hopelessly paralysed that they would live their whole lives on stretchers, children with cleft palates and deformed bodies and scarcely human faces. Dennis began to feel that perhaps he was lucky after all. He no longer automatically compared Nicole with normal children, but with children more crippled and retarded. His child became for him a lens with which to see more clearly the real vulnerability of human life, and also a talisman against further hurt. He began to feel that he did not need the pity and sympathy of his friends with normal children – it was they that deserved pity, for they had not yet felt the blow of fate that opened a man’s eyes to the true nature of things. He had nothing more to fear. He had, as the Americans put it, paid his dues.
Then Anne was run over and killed and Dennis gave up. He could see no sense at all in the pattern of his life. The idea of a personal God with an interest in his, Dennis’s, personal fortune, became impossible to maintain, unless he was a God who took a personal interest in torturing people. For while Dennis was able to see that there was some meaning, some positive moral gain, in the experience of having Nicole, he could see no point whatsoever in losing Anne, nothing except sterile anguish and futile self-reproach. Perhaps the bitterest, most heart-rending aspect of the whole ghastly business was the impossibility of explaining to Nicole what had happened to Anne. (“Where Anne?” Nicole would say for years afterwards, turning up at their bedside in the middle of the night, tugging gently at Dennis’s pyjama sleeve, “Where Anne?”) If one thing was certain it was that Nicole had done nothing to deserve having Anne taken away from her, and would gain nothing from the experience.
Dennis continued going to mass, for the sake of the family, for the sake of a quiet life, but it had no meaning for him. Nothing had, except small, simple pleasures – a glass of beer at the local, a soccer game on TV – handholds by which he kept moving from hour to hour, from day to day. He worked excessively hard at his job to occupy his mind and tire himself out, staying behind at the office long after everyone else had left and often going in on Saturday mornings to the silent, empty factory. Sunday was the worst day of the week because there were so many hours to fill once they had all got back from church.
When Michael and Miriam invited them to an agape, Dennis found an excuse not to go, and Angela went on her own; but intrigued by her account of the proceedings, he accompanied her on subsequent occasions and derived some entertainment, if not spiritual renewal, from these packed, intense gatherings. It amused him to listen to the conversation, to observe the wildly Utopian ideas that blossomed and bloomed recklessly in the hothouse atmosphere, and to interrupt, with a dry question or two, some confident dismissal of, say, industrial capitalism, by a young lecturer in, say, the philosophy of education, who had never put his nose inside a factory, and whose training and salary ultimately derived from wealth generated by industrial capitalism. Dennis posed his questions mildly and without animus, for he had no ideological commitment to industrial capitalism either – he just couldn’t see that there was a better alternative available, certainly not the models currently on offer from Russia or China, where most of these innocent Christian radicals would have withered away in labour camps long ago if they had had the misfortune to live there. It was the same with questions of religion: he couldn’t understand why they made such a fuss about what they called the authoritarian structure of the Church, why they worked themselves up into furious anger about the conservatism, paternalism, dogmatism of this or that bishop or parish priest. He could see that it would matter to Austin Brierley – after all, it was his job – and with Austin he sympathized; but he couldn’t see why the others didn’t just leave the Church if they found being in it so irksome.
“But why should we leave, Dennis?” they cried. “It’s just as much our Church as theirs.”
“But just as much theirs as yours,” he pointed out. “Why not live and let live? Everybody do their own thing. Latin masses and novenas for the old-fashioned, and this sort of thing –” he gestured at the table, the wholemeal crusts, the empty wine-glasses, the big Jerusalem Bible – “for the avant-garde.”
“Oh, Dennis!” they said, laughing and shaking their heads. “You’re such a cynic. If the Church doesn’t renew itself totally, it’ll just fall apart in the next fifty years.”
“It seems to be falling apart already, to me,” he said.
So Dennis became a kind of court jester, a licensed cynic, to the group. They recognized that his commonsense was a useful check, or at least foil, to their radicalism, and were apt to glance slyly, almost flirtatiously at him when making some particularly extreme remark. It helped him to play this role that he had aged in appearance more than his contemporaries. His hair was thin and grizzled, his face lined and jowly, and he had a paunch. He smoked thirty cigarettes a day, and when people commented on this said, with a shrug, who wants to live for ever?
Angela was still capable of turning heads when, rarely, she took some trouble over her appearance, but her body had thickened, she suffered from varicose veins and her brows were drawn together in a perpetual frown. When Nicole was four she got her into nursery school and herself began to train as a teacher of the educationally sub-normal, not with any serious intention of getting a job, but in order to learn how best to help Nicole’s development. The college was some twenty miles away and their domestic life became one of great logistic complexity, involving the use of two cars and the cooperation of sundry baby-sitters, child-minders and cleaning ladies. They drove fast and rather recklessly along the country lanes around their dormitory village, frequently scraping and denting their vehicles. Angela kept up with her voluntary activities and was frequently going out again when Dennis returned late from work. Once or twice a week, perhaps, if they happened to go to bed at the same time, and Angela was not feeling too tired, they would make love.
It is difficult to do justice to ordinary married sex in a novel. There are too many acts for them all to be described, and usually no particular reason to describe one act rather than another; so the novelist falls back on summary, which sounds dismissive. As a contemporary French critic has pointed out in a treatise on narrative, a novelist can (a) narrate once what happened once or (b) narrate n times what happened once or (c) narrate n times what happened n times or (d) narrate once what happened n times. Seductions, rapes, the taking of new lovers or the breaking of old taboos, are usually narrated according to (a), (b) or (c). Married love in fiction tends to be narrated according to mode (d). Once or twice a week, perhaps, if they happened to go to bed together at the same time, and Angela was not feeling too tired, they would make love. Which is not to say that this was an unimportant part of their married life. Without its solace the marriage would probably have broken down under the successive crises of Nicole and Anne. But they themselves could hardly distinguish in memory one occasion of lovemaking from another. Over the years they had composed an almost unvarying ritual of arousal and release which both knew by heart. Their foreplay was a condensed version of their courtship: first Dennis kissed Angela, then he pushed his tongue between her teeth, then he stroked her breasts, then he slid his hand up between her thighs. They usually reached a reasonably satisfying climax, and afterwards fell into a deep sleep, which did them both good. By the next morning they retained only a vague memory of the previous night’s pleasure.
It was much the same for most of the other couples. Now that they were using birth control, the sexual act had become a more frequent and, inevitably, more routine activity. For they did not take lovers or have casual copulations with strangers met at parties, or in hotels, or in aeroplanes – the kind of thing they read about in novels (even novels by Catholics) and saw in films and on television. Their sex lives were less dramatic, more habitual, and most of them, especially the men, worried about this occasionally. It was true that there was more sex in their lives than there had been – but was it as much as it ought to be? They had lost the fear of Hell, and staked their claim to erotic fulfilment, but had they left it too late? All of them were nearing the age of forty, they had spent more years on earth after leaving University than before going up, they were approaching – perhaps they had already reached – that hump in man’s lifespan after which it is downhill all the way. Death beckoned, however distantly. Their bodies began to exhibit small but unmistakable signs of decay and disrepair: spreading gut, veined legs, failing sight, falling hair, receding gums, missing teeth. The men were aware that their sexual vigour was in decline – indeed it seemed, according to some of the many articles on the subject that began to flood the public prints in the early seventies, that their sexual vigour had begun to decline long before they had ever exercised it, the male’s maximum potency occurring in the years from sixteen to twenty-three. Premature ejaculation, which had afflicted most of them in early married life, was no longer a problem; indeed, it could be a matter of some anxiety whether, after a few drinks or several nights’ lovemaking on the trot, one could ejaculate at all. As for the women, well, according to the same sources of information, their capacity for sexual pleasure was reaching its peak, but they were all well aware that the capacity of their bodies for arousing desire was rapidly diminishing. Making love with the light on was a calculated risk, unless it was very carefully shaded. Meanwhile, their older children were passing into puberty and adolescence and, stripped for the beach, reminded their parents more forcibly with each passing year of the physical lustre they had themselves lost (or perhaps never had).
The permutations of sex are as finite as those of narrative. You can (a) do one thing with one partner or (b) do n things with one partner or (c) do one thing with n partners or (d) do n things with n partners. For practising Catholics faithful to the marriage bond, there was only the possibility of progressing from (a) to (b) in search of a richer sex life.
Michael became an addict of sex instruction films, of which there was a spate in the early seventies, mostly produced in Germany and Scandinavia, ostensibly because he was going to write an article about them, in fact because he enjoyed watching even the most clumsily simulated sexual intercourse, and was prepared to sit patiently through long, tedious conversations between white-coated doctors and bashful clients, and voice-over lectures illustrated by coloured diagrams reminiscent of evening class instruction in motor maintenance, for the sake of a few minutes’ practical demonstration by a reasonably handsome nude couple in full colour. Michael, with his literary education, was the least willing of all our male characters to admit that sex might become just a comfortable habit. He wanted every act to burn with a lyric intensity, and it was as if he thought that by studying it on the screen he might learn the knack of being simultaneously inside and outside his own orgasms, enjoying and appraising, oblivious and remembering. There was also the opportunity to master through these films the repertoire of postural variation by which married love might, the white coats assured him, be given a new zest, if one’s partner were willing to cooperate, which Miriam was not, alas; until one evening when he coaxed her into accompanying him to one of the seedy downtown cinemas that specialized in such films, and she said, afterwards, thoughtfully, as they walked to the bus stop, “I wouldn’t mind trying one or two of those things,” and he leaped ecstatically into the road, shouting “Taxi! Taxi!” Well, that had been a memorable night, to be sure, and for the next few weeks it was like a second honeymoon between them, and much more satisfying than the first. He went about his work in an erotic trance, hollow-eyed with sexual excess, his mind wandering in seminars and committees as he planned what variations they would experiment with at night. But it was not long before they had to settle between them the old question of how far you could go. in due course their erotic life became as habitual as before, if more subtly textured. It seemed to Michael that he was no nearer grasping the fundamental mystery of sex, of knowing for certain that he had experienced its ultimate ecstasy, than he had been twenty years before, staring at the nudes in the Charing Cross Road bookshops. Then he began to shit blood and quickly lost interest in sex altogether.
Adrian sent away for an illustrated book on sexual intercourse, delivered under plain cover, which showed forty-seven positions in which coitus could be contrived. He tried to run through them all in one night, but Dorothy fell asleep on number thirteen. When he woke her up to ask which position she had found the most satisfying, she yawned and said, “I think the first one, Adie.”
“You mean the missionary position?” he said, disappointedly. “But that’s what we always do.”
“Well, I don’t really mind. Which do you like best, Adie?”
“Oh, I like the missionary position best, too,” said Adrian. “It just seems rather unenterprising to do the same thing night after night.”
“Why do they call it that?”
The explanation tickled Dorothy, and afterwards, when Adrian heaved himself on top of her, she would sometimes chuckle and say, “What are you doing, you dirty old missionary, you?”
Edward and Tessa experimented with positions not so much for the sake of erotic variety as to ease the strain on Edward’s back. They found that the most satisfactory arrangement was for Edward to lie supine and for Tessa to squat on top of him, jigging up and down until she brought them both to climax. At first Edward found this very exciting, but the passivity of his own role in the proceedings worried him, and he frightened himself sometimes with the thought that one day he might be incapable of even this style of copulation.
Tessa herself was in a constant fever of vague sexual longing to which she dared not give definition. Her body sent messages which her mind refused to accept. Her body said: you are bored with this clumsy form of intercourse, you want to lie back and close your eyes and be possessed by a strong male force for a change, your body is a garden of unawakened pleasures and time is running out. Her mind said: nonsense, you are a happily married woman with four fine, healthy children and a good, kind, faithful husband. Count your blessings and find something to occupy yourself now that the children are growing up. So Tessa joined keep-fit classes and a tennis club. But the physical wellbeing that accrued only fuelled the fires of her libido. She exulted in the power and grace of her movements across the court or in the gym. In the changing-rooms afterwards she followed the example of the younger women who walked unconcernedly naked from their lockers to the communal shower heads, while the older and less shapely ones waited timidly for the curtained cubicles to become free. The full-length mirrors on the walls reassured her that her body could stand such exposure. From this exercise she returned home, glowing euphorically, to a jaded and weary spouse. Her body said: it would be nice to fuck. Her mind, deaf to the indelicacy, said: he’s tired, he was called out last night, his back is paining him.
Tessa, in short, was classically ripe for having an affair, and in another milieu, or novel, might well have had one. Instead, she bought lots of clothes and changed more times a day than was strictly necessary, collected cookbooks and experimented with complicated recipes, read novels from the library about mature, sensitive women having affairs, and enrolled in the Open University.
In spite of his sardonic remarks about campus permissiveness, Robin was fully conversant with the new polymorphous sexuality from his barbershop reading in Playboy and Penthouse, and anxious to try a few things himself. In this regard he found Violet suprisingly compliant, though unenthusiastic. In her perverse way she had decided that since she was in a state of mortal sin anyway by taking the Pill, it mattered little what else she did in the sexual line – that her best course of action was to let Robin burn out his lust and then repent everything at one go. Robin, for his part, found the listless, whorish impassivity with which she accommodated herself to his whims disconcerting, and it was as difficult as ever to bring her to a climax by penetration, whatever attitude they assumed. He quickly tired of sexual acrobatics. If he was honest, what he enjoyed most was a slow hand-job performed by Violet while he lay back with his eyes closed and listened to Baroque music on a headset. Violet herself was most readily satisfied by lingual stimulation, and gradually this arrangement became customary, each taking turns to service the other. “If we’re just going to do this,” Robin pointed out one night, “there’s no need for you to take the Pill.” “If I wasn’t on the Pill, I wouldn’t be doing it,” she replied. “You’re crazy,” he said. “Tell me something new,” she said.
When Felicity started school, Violet tried to get herself a teaching job, but without success. She lacked a postgraduate certificate, and there was no great demand for women classics teachers. So to occupy herself, she signed on at the local art college to study sculpture. This increased their circle of friends, though Robin did not care for the art college crowd (or their art). Almost every weekend there was a party invitation deriving either from the University or the College. For Violet was socially in demand. She fascinated people, as she had fascinated Robin, by her behavioural volatility. Party hosts invited her because she brought a whiff of dangerous irresponsibility into their rooms, without which no party was truly successful, not the parties of that time and place anyway. Violet rarely disappointed them. Being more or less permanently on Librium or Valium, she was not supposed to drink alcohol, but when she arrived at the house, wherever it was, thrumming from cellar to attic with the bass notes of heavy rock and thronged with people chatting and eyeing each other in dimly lit rooms, she felt herself shaking with excitement and social terror and was unable to resist the offer of a glass of wine. Before long she would get intoxicated, and make a set at this or that man, dragging him on to the dance floor, where she would either attempt to shake herself to pieces in frenzied jiving or, draped amorously round his neck, twitch negligently to the beat of some languorous soul ballad. Occasionally she would disappear with her partner into the dark recesses of the house or garden and allow him to grope her while they kissed with open mouths – sometimes, if she was feeling very abandoned, groping him back, but never allowing proper sex. The men she led on in this way sometimes turned nasty, but she usually had some ready lie to get herself out of the tightest corner: it was her period, she was pregnant and fearful of a miscarriage, she had cystitis, she had forgotten to take her pill.… Then the man, with good or ill grace, would desist, and having adjusted their dress, they would return to the party as nonchalantly as they could manage, and studiously ignore each other for the rest of the evening, commencing new flirtations in due course. At about two o’clock in the morning Violet would nearly, or actually, pass out from drink or exhaustion, and Robin would take her home, stumbling over other supine bodies in the hall and perhaps the front garden, and put her to bed. The next day she would drag herself off to mass with Felicity, speechless with hangover and guilt; but the next time they got an invitation to such a party, and Robin tried to refuse it, she would accuse him of being snobbish and of trying to deprive her of a normal social life. He did not know what to do. Sometimes he even thought of writing to Ann Field.
Polly wasn’t Ann Field any more. Now she wrote a weekly column under her own name on the women’s page of a quality newspaper, a column in which radical and progressive ideas were put forward in a subtly ironic style that undermined them even as it expressed them, an effect which perfectly suited the paper’s readership, mostly middle-class professionals and their wives, with leftish views and bad consciences about their affluent life-styles.
Polly herself, who had been an early apostle of the sexual revolution, was beginning to wonder whether things hadn’t gone too far. She had of course been happily doing n things with Jeremy for years, but when he showed signs of wanting to do them with n partners, she jibbed. They received an invitation to a swinging party at a country house owned by a film producer Jeremy knew; he pressed her to go, and sulked when she refused. Anxiously she strove to show more gusto in their lovemaking, proposing games and variations that she knew he liked, though she herself found them a little tedious, bondage and dressing up in kinky clothes and acting out little scenarios – The Massage Parlour, The Call Girl, and Blue Lagoon. These efforts diverted Jeremy for a while, but eventually he began pressing her again about going to swinging parties.
“Why do you want to go?” she said.
“I’m just curious.”
“You want to have another woman.”
He shrugged. “All right, perhaps I do. But I don’t want to do it behind your back.”
“Why do you want to? Don’t we have fun in bed?”
“Of course we do, darling. But let’s face it, we’ve been right through the book together, there’s nothing new we can do, just the two of us. It’ time to introduce another element. you know, sometimes when we’re fucking, my mind wanders completely off the subject, I find myself thinking about shooting schedules or audience ratings. That worries me. And you needn’t look at me like that. It’s nothing personal. It’s the nature of the beast.”
“Beast is the word.” Polly felt a cold dread at her heart. Was it possible that the flame of sex could be kept burning only by the breaking of more taboos? After group sex and orgies, what then? Rubber fetishism? Fladge? Child porn? Snuff movies? “Where does it end?” she said.
“It ends with old age,” said Jeremy. “Impotence. Death. But I don’t intend to give in until I absolutely have to.”
“You don’t think there’s anything after death?”
“You know I don’t.”
“I do.”
“That’s just your Catholic upbringing.”
“I don’t know what’s more frightening, the idea that there’s life after death or the idea that there isn’t,” said Polly. She thought about death a lot these days – had done so ever since her father died the previous winter. It was a sudden death, a heart attack brought on by shovelling snow. She and Jeremy were skiing in Austria at the time and she was delayed getting back to England by blizzards, arriving barely in time for the funeral. So she never saw her father dead, and in consequence was never quite able to believe that he was dead; it was as if he had faded away like the Cheshire Cat, leaving the memory of him, his chuckle, the smell of his pipe tobacco, lingering in the mind, and might rematerialize when one least expected it. Polly decided to make death the subject of her next article, and cheered up immediately. That was in the summer of 1973.