Roger was what my mother called a ‘character’. This was largely because he laced his shoes with string. As time went on and she began to suspect that he would never buy me an engagement ring, she became rather hostile to him and conceived the idea that he laced his shoes with string to annoy her, and also that he was slightly unhinged.
‘I don’t deny that he’s very clever,’ she said, ‘but clever people are very delicately balanced.’ The implication, intended to be flattering to myself, was, of course, that I was not clever and therefore quite sane. Cleverness was not something she hoped for in her daughter. Prettiness was what girls required, and I was quite pretty enough, though I became less and less so in her eyes as I strove to please Roger, who let it be known that he disliked the clink of silver bracelets on the wrist and preferred unpainted faces.
Roger laced his shoes with string because he couldn’t bring himself to go to Selfridges like other people when he needed anything. He almost never bought anything new. He was like Jane in this respect. When Jane or Roger needed anything they went to the Oxfam shop. They went to jumble sales, auction sales, and shops selling the leftovers of deceased estates. Roger, who had never, for instance, been a Sea Scout, went about for a long time in a cast-off Sea Scout jumper which he occasionally wore inside out. It bore a Cash’s name-tape which said ‘John Venables’. He wore what must have been one of the first calligraphically emblazoned T-shirts. It said ‘Mark’ across the front, which caused his father to remark wittily (to Roger’s annoyance) that he had ‘a mark on his shirt’. I found myself once wondering morbidly in the face of Roger’s recycled size fourteen shirts whether size fourteen necks were mysteriously more vulnerable than most to deaths on the road or untimely terminal illness. How was it otherwise that the shops he frequented were so full of them?
Being a believer in works of reference, Roger had duly acquired us an antiquated sex manual by this process of ferreting in yesterday’s meat. We found that it said, among other uproarious bullshit, that the semen of the young Aryan male was sweet-smelling, like chestnuts, and that the aureola surrounding the female virgin nipple was rose pink, but darkened to brown with increasing sexual experience. This wonderful book proved to be an endearing ice-breaker for us in a potentially awkward area, since it detailed various love positions so excessive in their rococo extravagance that we fell giggling into trying them out, zipped up as we were in our chaste corduroy jeans. Most of them involved unlikely entanglements with chairs and overhanging table tops. It allowed us to believe, by contrast, in our own urbane suavity in these matters.
Roger and I, let me confess it, never altogether got it right in bed, though we enjoyed the comforting proximity of flesh on flesh. It was never much different from PE classes at school, I found, and left me similarly sweaty, exhausted and sneaking glances at my watch to see how much longer it could possibly go on. Roger once caught me in the act of looking at my watch and took offence, being an arrogant and insecure young man. I had not yet realised that somebody as beautiful and clever as Roger could be as morbidly riddled with inadequacies as the next man. I was a rather hesitant person myself with a different collection of self-doubts. Thinking back, I realise that I had instinctively built my inadequacies into my public persona, in the hope that thereby I could bestow upon them the dignity of a presence. Roger was different. Readers of Pogo may remember that Pogo’s friend Albert kept a ‘Down with the Gummint’ shout in a bag in the cupboard. When you opened the bag it said ‘Up with the Gummint’ because the shout was heavily disguised. Roger kept his inadequacies in the cupboard and when you got at the bag it issued forth statements of withering omnipotence.
‘Sex ought to be no more than a routine and necessary function,’ Roger said later that day, as he scratched his dandruff over his mathematical hieroglyphics. He had such a beautiful neck. ‘Like blowing one’s nose,’ he said. Roger, in his fierce instinct to protect himself from criticism, could leave one feeling like a dropped nose-rag.
We made each other very happy sometimes, I think. Because I was always a little in awe of Roger, I often cast myself in the role of entertainer for him, talked a lot and told stories against myself to make him laugh, never dreaming that he would store these up as ammunition against me. Roger quite often made me feel like the yokel in Shakespeare who concludes, in the presence of eminent personages, that ‘remuneration’ is the Latin for three farthings. I played the part for him, regaling him with slices of my non-U childhood, my delicious orgies of Enid Blyton, my unrelieved childhood diet of the Bobbsey twins and the frivolous Mam’zelle in her curl-papers, who quailed at the sight of mice. Of bad golliwogs and whimsical spankings, of lacrosse sticks gathering in the hall as the hols came to an end. I painted disloyal portraits for him of my mother in her emerald Crimplene trouser-suit, reclining in her fringed garden seat with the latest Nevil Shute. I told him that my uncle collected George Formby records. I meant thereby more, I think, to indulge a comic sense than to ingratiate myself, but that, ultimately, was its effect. I had, after all, read books as a child, unlike his sister Rosie who, like a lovely barbarian, did nothing but jump and run.