daughter of an Italian car manufacturer in 1985. At any rate, from our house party that only left Terry for me and I wasn’t sorry. From then, somehow, as the night progressed it all seemed to become inevitable, in the way these things can and do. We jigged away while the music was brisk, but when the lights lowered at around one in the morning, and the DJ put on Honey, a sickeningly sentimental hit of the day, one of those ballads about dead loved ones, we moved into each other’s arms without a question and began the slow, rhythmic clinch that passed for dancing in the last phase of these events.
In a way those mordant, melodic dirges were one of the hallmarks of the period, although the fashion for them has entirely faded long before now. It was an odd phenomenon, when you think of it, songs about husbands, wives, girlfriends, boyfriends, all being killed in car crashes and train smashes, by cancer and, above all, on motorbikes, the last scenario combining several pet crazes of the time. I suppose there must have been something in their facile, tear-soaked emotionalism that chimed with our largely false sense of trailblazing and ‘release.’ They ranged from the tuneful and robust Tell Laura I Love Her to those like Terry or Teenangel and, while we’re on the subject, Honey, which were soppy beyond endurance, but the stand-out example, the exception that proved the rule, a song which, like the more recent Dancing Queen, must have been performed in more bathrooms than any other hit of the day, was definitely The Leader of the Pack by the Shangri Las. There is a verse in it, which has always fascinated me: ‘One day my Dad said “find someone new”/ I had to tell my Jimmie we’re through/ He stood there and he asked me why/ All I could do was cry/ I’m sorry I hurt you, the Leader of the Pack.’ No prize for guessing who’s in charge here: Dad. This tough leather biker boy with his shining wheels, this girl in the grip of passion, both know better than to argue when Dad puts his foot down. ‘Find someone new! Now!’ ‘OK, Dad. Whatever you say.’ What would the lyric be changed to were it rerecorded today? ‘I had to tell my Dad to get stuffed’? I cannot think of another vignette that tells of the collapse of our family structure and our discipline as a society more economically yet more vividly. No wonder so much of the world laughs at us.
At any rate on that evening the sad refrain did its work, and by the time Terry and I were helping ourselves to breakfast in the large marquee, rather imaginatively decorated with farming tools and sheaves of corn, we both knew where we were headed and I was glad of it. As most of us can remember, there is something sweet, during the early, hunting years particularly, in the knowledge that one’s next amorous partner has been located and is willing.
I drove us back to the Mainwarings’ house in my car, drunk as I was, with Terry nudging me to keep my mind on the business, and we let ourselves in through the unlocked front door as we had been directed. How would such arrangements work in these more fearful days? The answer, I suppose, is that they wouldn’t. Then we climbed the stairs, attempting to make as little noise as possible. I do not think we even hesitated for form’s sake as we approached our separate chambers. I am pretty sure that I just followed Terry into her bedroom without either explanation or permission, closed the door gently and began.
Of course, one of the problems of being male, which I suspect has never changed nor will it, is that young men tend to operate on an Exocet-type imperative to seek bed larks no matter what. This was perhaps especially true in those days, when a great many of our female contemporaries were having no such thing, with the result that the moment there was a possibility of scoring, the faintest breach in the wall of virtue, one simply went for it without pausing to consider whether this was something one really wanted to do. Unfortunately, that realisation, that questioning of purpose, sometimes came later. Usually, when you were already in bed and it was far too late to back out. My generation was not, including the men (whatever the ageing trendies like to imply), nearly as promiscuous as those who came after us, even before we reached the complete sexual mayhem of today. But it was beginning. The male in his early twenties who was still a virgin, a comparatively normal type for my father’s generation, had become strange to us and the goal of achieving as many conquests as we could was fairly standard. And so from time to time, inevitably, any man would find himself in bed with a woman who might be termed unlikely.
Usually when this happened he would just bang on, and the dazed query, What was I thinking of? did not surface in the front of his brain until the following morning. But inevitably there were occasions when a Damascene moment would suddenly strike mid-action. The scales would fall from your eyes and the whole event would be rendered completely and indefensively insane as you lay there, naked, with another, unwanted, body in your arms. So it was that night with me and Terry Vitkov. The truth was I was not in the least attracted to her; I didn’t even like her all that much in the normal way of things, and without the Mainwarings’ battles and the near hysteria of the evening we had lived through I would never have been in this position. If events had not created a sense of artificial closeness in our hearts I would have gone to sleep, happily alone. But now that I was in bed with her, now that I could smell the faintly acrid scent of her body and feel her wiry hair and spongy waist, and handle the rather pendulous breasts, I knew with an awful clarity that I wanted to be anywhere but there. I rolled back on to the pillow, heaving my body off hers as I did so.
‘What’s the matter?’ said Terry in her now grating voice.
‘Nothing,’ I said.
‘There’d better not be.’
Which, naturally, sealed my fate. I had a momentary vision of becoming a funny story, a fake who couldn’t deliver, a joke to be sniggered over with the other girls as they wiggled their little fingers derisively, all of which I knew Terry was perfectly capable of delivering. ‘Everything’s fine,’ I said. ‘Come here.’ And with as much resolution as I could muster on the instant I did my duty.
The dinner was not going particularly well. Gary had almost given up on us and Terry was, by this stage, airborne. We were staring at the menus for pudding and when Terry started to heckle over the ingredients of some sort of strudel it was clear from Gary’s expression that we had reached the city limits. ‘I’ll just have a cup of coffee,’ I said in a feeble attempt to push Terry forward to the next part of the evening. Inevitably, this gave her ideas.
‘Come to my place for coffee. You wanna see where I live, don’t you?’ Her drawl was beginning to stretch out to positively Southern proportions. Inexplicably, really, since I knew she came from the Midwest. It reminded me of Dorothy Parker’s description of her motherin-law as the only woman who could get three syllables out of ‘egg.’
‘Shall I bring the check?’ volunteered Gary eagerly, seizing at the chance of ridding himself of this potential troublemaker before the real storm broke. Not many minutes later we were standing in the car park.
Here we faced a dilemma. I had drunk little, knowing I would be driving back, but Terry had sunk the best part of three bottles. ‘Let me drive you,’ I suggested. ‘You can send someone for your car in the morning.’
‘Don’t be so boring.’ She laughed as if we were engaged on a teenage prank, as opposed to committing an offence that might very possibly include manslaughter. ‘Follow me!’ We then began one of the most hair-raising experiences of my entire life, shooting first up towards Beverly Hills, then skidding round the wide curves of the LA mountain roads, until we had somehow – don’t ask me how – reached Mulholland Drive, that wide ridge, the spine that divides Los Angeles proper from the San Fernando Valley. There is a thriller, A Portrait in Black, a Lana Turner vehicle I think, which involves a woman who cannot drive being told nevertheless to get behind the wheel and follow her lover,
