Peggy blinked. “You needn’t tell me about compromise, Mark.” She bit her lip. She had overstepped the rules. Here, in this game, they were all equals. There could be no rank-pulling. “I’m on about something worse than simple compromise. That’s a day-to-day activity. If you don’t compromise all the time, then you’d have no character, no personality, no body at all. Identifying yourself, specifying yourself is all compromising; of course it is. You put up a good shopfront and flog it for all you’re worth.”
“Hear, hear,” said Iris.
“No, what I’m talking about here is fooling yourself. We’ve just been on about sex, right?”
“Right.” Mark nodded, though he couldn’t remember. He hoped, vaguely, that he hadn’t put his foot in it.
“That moment, think about that moment when you at last succumb to the charms of a new lover, wherever it is, in whatever circumstances.”
Iris and Mark both thought hard.
“What do you feel? Beside all the lust and anxiety and so on? Underneath it all?”
Her audience looked blank. What was it they felt? As persistent and obvious as their own accelerated heartbeats? They both had their own ideas, yet were content for Peggy to vocalise them.
“What you feel then is relief. That’s part of it. Like that ache, like a nostalgic ache; homesickness. It’s a parting grief, right at the start of an alliance. As if you were living your life backwards and the first moment of intimacy is experienced as the last ever. You know that ache? Your chest drum-tight inside? At this particular moment you invest so much that you make your own entire bodily and mental fabric drum-tight. You pull it all together in a vulnerably taut net for the other to fall onto. You feel relief that they are prepared to fall; fear that they’ll rip straight through.
“But the thought I really hate,” said Peggy, and a tear slid down her stoic race, “is that the feeling I’ve called relief or fear is really only gratitude. That we are pitifully glad to make ourselves so vulnerable. We’re only too happy to see someone, anyway, fall in our direction.”
She put down her glass. Mark and Iris put down their own glasses, as if following.
“It’s warm in here,” said Peggy. “We need to take a walk around the block.”
“Go out?” asked Mark.
“We often go out walking at night,” Iris told him.
“In the nude,” Peggy added. “You know we’re nudists?”
Mark knew, but he was still shocked.
“Would you mind awfully, Mark?” asked Iris. “Since Sam’s not here? We’d hate to miss our nightly ritual.”
Dumbly Mark shook his head and Iris, beaming, stood and took off her scarlet cardigan. As Peggy went on talking, her lover removed layer after layer of woollies. Talking, Peggy was undressing too, folding her clothes and putting them neatly on the settee.
“It’s like getting rid, for a little while, of the excess baggage. You’ve really no idea what it feels like, Mark.”
“I’m sure I don’t.” He poured himself the last dribble of gin.
“We all carry so much stuff around with us.”
More shocking than the sight of Peggy’s bare breasts and limbs, to Mark, was Iris’s apparent shrinkage. Beside the messy heap of garments she had rapidly made, Iris was a shadow of her former self. The fat lady had dwindled away before his eyes and Iris herself was quite unaware that this might be surprising.
She can only weigh about seven stone, Mark thought. Both grandmothers were now looking at him with blasé, almost bored expressions. And, despite Iris’s bodily revelations, Mark found nothing shocking about their nudity. They were just another part of the family, and this scene tested that feeling. Their pale flesh was no more alarming than a glimpse of his own bare feet.
“Would you let us out, then?” Peggy smiled.
Mark stood, carefully setting aside his make-up case and his glass, and, also careful, now that he wasn’t embarrassed.
“Mark,” Iris said. “You carry a lot of baggage with you.”
He nearly laughed. “I know I bloody do.”
“Why not, just for an hour or so, drop it?”
Mark found it odd, in a way, speaking to this new, terribly thin Iris. He frowned for clarification.
“Why don’t you join us, out tonight?”
“What about Sally?” he asked immediately.
Peggy waved a hand. “She’s asleep. We won’t be far. And naturally, we’re both witches. So I’ll cast a protective spell.”
Gratefully he said, “I think you already have, Peg.” He gave a brief sniff of a laugh, looked down, then took off his shoes and socks.
He said, “We’ve talked about making yourself vulnerable; and we’ve agreed that we do it all the time. Be we still find it hard to do, don’t we?”
“Yes,” Iris said. “Don’t come out tonight if you don’t want.”
His bare feet could mean equally that he was settled in for the night, or the opposite.
“No,” he said. “I feel warm…and a bit, well, quite a lot pissed. If I can’t take off all my clothes and go for a walk in the middle of the night with two old dykes, what else would I do?”
“That’s the spirit!” Peggy grinned as he pulled his shirt over his head and unstrapped his watch. “Absolutely cynical and absolutely sentimental at the same time. That’s the combination we like.”
Peggy and Iris grasped hands for a moment, almost in pride, as Mark concentrated on stripping off his jeans and underpants. Almost a moment, too, of solidarity in the face of something alien to their nightly ritual; whether alien because his was a naked male body, a sexual other to them, or because his body was thoroughly tattooed, they wouldn’t have been able to say. But when Mark looked at them both with that silly, shy grin, and glanced quickly down as his own, oddly boyish body with its gangling limbs and quite small and sleepy cock, they felt a blush that was
