‘Yeah, as if it’s “only human”. I wouldn’t want to even if it wasn’t against the law.’
‘You don’t like them till they’re eighteen.’
‘I like them older than eighteen. Twice as old. You, for instance, Phoebe.’
‘Youth is pretty, you claim, but it’s not interesting. Oh yes it is. It commands plenty of interest. Haven’t you noticed? Look around.’
‘I’m not just saying it, I mean it, I feel it. I don’t like schoolgirls, not in your sense.’
‘Mm. I don’t like schoolboys. What do men like about schoolgirls – those who do? What is it they like the idea of?’
These days, when it came up, they talked about paedophilia ‘normally’, as if it was just a subject like any other. He found himself saying,
‘There was a schoolgirl Dad had a crush on.’ They were waiting at a red light – parkland on one side, gabled and churchy Victorian houses on the other…Martin now recalled Kingsley’s puzzled and diffident late-night confession. In some semi-rustic earlier life – Eynsham, perhaps – a pretty fourteen-year-old in the market square gave him a smile that he went on thinking about all day. And there might have been another smile or two. Anyway, the last time he saw her their eyes met and she looked straight past him; and for a whole month he despaired. ‘Yeah, my dad liked a schoolgirl,’ he said. ‘Though of course he never did anything about it.’
‘Father Gabriel liked a schoolgirl,’ said Phoebe, and said nothing more.
Poets can pull
‘The US edition of High Windows is out,’ wrote Larkin in 1974, ‘with a photograph of me that cries out for the headline, FAITH HEALER? OR HEARTLESS FRAUD?’ In common with all PL’s self-descriptions, this was unsparingly apt: ‘And then my sagging face, an egg sculpted in lard, with goggles on.’ He looked antique, stranded in time; his was one of those forgotten figures from the 1930s (a minor politician, a senior civil servant). Then there was his figure, which was also ovoid – tall, cumbrous, and unhappily heavy. ‘None of my clothes fit either: when I sit down my tongue comes out.’ As he headed off for one of his pseudo-holidays in Eigg or the Isle of Mull (‘one couldn’t call this spot anything but desolate, or the weather anything but wet’), Larkin’s bathroom scales would be stowed in his luggage…
Phoebe and I used the lift then went within. Conquest’s sitting room and contiguous dining area contained about three dozen people (some of them faintly familiar, a poet, a knighted journalist), and the Hermit of Hull was over in the far corner, his head bent forward as he listened to the kind of man who, to paraphrase Kingsley (also present), looked like the kind of woman who played Sir Toby Belch in sorority productions of Twelfth Night. I said,
‘That geezer seems to be slipping away. I’ll slip away too after I’ve introduced you.’
‘No,’ she said, ‘slip away now. I’ll do it.’
‘Okay, but don’t scare him, Phoebe.’
With a twirl and a glide she was there in front of him and brightly saying, ‘Dr Larkin, good evening. I’m Phoebe, I’m Martin’s girlfriend.’
He politely inclined his head and took her offered hand.
‘I’m a big fan.’
‘Are you now. Everyone’s saying that, suddenly. “I’m a big fan.” Making me wonder, Where are all the medium-sized fans? Where are all the little fans?’
‘Yes, where are all the dear little fans? But I’m not a little fan. I’m a big fan.’
He was smiling. ‘All right. Quote me a line.’
‘All right. When I see a couple of kids / And guess he’s…No, that won’t do. Uh, He married a woman to stop her getting away / Now she’s there all day, // And the money he gets for wasting his life on work / She takes as her perk / To pay for the kiddies’ clobber and the drier / And the electric fire…’
‘That is quite impressive.’
‘Paying for the kiddies’ clobber and the electric fire – it’s hardly her perk, is it? I mean, the kiddies can’t go around naked, and the husband gets warm too. But that just makes it funnier somehow. Why are you so funny, Dr Larkin?’
‘…Why?’
Their duologue was now lost in ambient murmurs, and I moved off to get a drink and say hello to Bob and find my dad. This I did, without losing sight of Phoebe; and from this distance, in this company, she looked like a peacock let loose in a senior common room.
Kingsley said, ‘What’s the point of that get-up?’
I shrugged. ‘She wanted to give him a thrill.’
‘No harm in that I suppose.’
‘In which case,’ said Bob (b. 1917), ‘she should’ve worn one of her business suits.’
Within its staid limits the party was getting thicker and louder. After a few minutes I got hold of another drink and went and attached myself to an elderly and unvoluble foursome to Larkin’s rear, and Phoebe (who still held his full attention) was saying,
‘…and you’re famous. As well as being funny and the rest of it. So you might as well have some fun along the way. Because poets can pull, you know.’
Larkin straightened up. ‘Now how is it that this evident truth has passed me by?’
‘Perhaps you haven’t chanced your arm enough. Poets can pull. I’ve seen it, mate.’
‘Ah. You’re referring to rugged brutes like Ted Hughes and Ian Hamilton.’
‘No. When I was a little girl we had a so-called poet living across the street. And he looked like Quasimodo – you know, one eye here, one eye there. I don’t think he’d ever published a line – all he did was say he was a poet. And he had this permanent gaggle of bints lining up to muck out his bedsit and bring him his pale ales and his hot dinners. That was in the bungalow belt. And as for what I’ve seen in town…It’s one of those laws of nature. Women like poets.’
‘Mm, I’ve heard rumours to that effect. Women like poets. Why d’you think the ones that do do? Is it because
