‘No, I told you, grammars and crammers. And no I haven’t been saying it every night. And how d’you mean, poncy?’
‘You know…’ She shrugged. ‘Poncy. And yes you have. Every night since that time I got back from Germany.’
‘Okay, yes, I said it then. Because I thought you’d be pleased to see me.’
‘And I was pleased to see you.’
‘But not pleased enough.’
And this was what he was going on about. On average (he had recently paged through two pocket diaries), just under 85 per cent of their dates were anticlimactic in at least two senses.
She said, ‘But it works, doesn’t it. Come on, concede. It works.’
He gave no answer. Tonight, on this special occasion, there’d been an exchange of gifts and an unprecedented dinner for two, by candlelight, at Hereford Mansions (a cold collation from the corner deli – but those candles were mounted and torched by Phoebe alone…). And tonight, too, had been chaste. She said,
‘The ingratitude. It’s extraordinary, it’s absolutely extraordinary. Here you are, still snivelling with lechery after how long? When was the last time you felt like that after a whole year? And do I get any credit?…Own up, Martin. It works.’
With a silent sigh he said, ‘It works.’
‘There. Finally…And as you know, it isn’t that I’m not tempted. Give me your hand.’ He obeyed. Then she whispered, ‘See? No – listen. You can hear it…I suppose you think’, she said (slowly unsticking his fingers), ‘that this is just an extra tease, but I’m trying to instruct you, Martin. Mind over matter.’
‘Mm. Is that what it says on your Buddhist symbol?’
‘Stop whining.’ She settled herself. Contented grunts punctuated the silence. A silence that lasted till she said, pensively, sleepily, half yawning as she turned over on her side, ‘An entire year. This is madness.’ Her voice again became a whisper. ‘One of the things is, sex terrifies me. Haven’t you noticed? It’d be fine if I didn’t enjoy it.’ She turned away again and her tone renormalised. ‘This comes under the heading of religion, Mart, so I’m not going to labour the point. I just keep feeling there must be repercussions. For me enjoying it. There.’ Yawning now without restraint she said, ‘Anyway. It might a good idea to move on to a different regime. Sexually. And you’ll have to meet my parents at last.’
‘…Different in what way?’
‘Less permissive. That’s right, Martin – less permissive. But not yet. Well it’s a logical step. Just think of it as the next thing.’
The eleven developments
So what else surfaced, in the course of that first year? The main developments are listed below – in no particular order, and certainly not in order of importance. He didn’t know what was important, at that stage, and he didn’t discover the core truth about Phoebe till July 15/16, 1978 – thereafter iconically known as the Night of Shame…
(1.) ‘Marry me!’ he cried out one night, at a very dire moment. And this was pitifully early on – just two weeks after he sped to the airport to meet her Lufthansa flight. ‘Please. Marry me.’ ‘Nope,’ she said distinctly in the dark. ‘I don’t want a husband. Let alone a child. Ever…This subject is now closed.’
(2.) Her age. Phoebe had always dismissed with a flip of her hand his occasional enquiries (as if finding them simply very dull); but in the spring of 1977 she accompanied him to the south of France,*7 and at the little hotel she looked on with apparent unconcern as he paged through her passport. Phoebe was born (in Dublin) in 1942. Which made her seven years the elder – thirty-five. He approved. The older the better, he thought, within sane limits. Older women impressed him and moved him with their greater share of lived life, of time and experience.
(3.) She wasn’t metropolitan middle class, as he’d assumed, but something more exotic. Phoebe spent her childhood in South Africa, and her youth in the London dormitory belt (where her parents remained). Twice Phoebe had got him in the car to go to Sunday lunch at the Phelpses’, and twice the mission was aborted (‘I suddenly don’t feel like it, okay?’). On the other hand, Phoebe was often made welcome at the huge freestanding house in London NW3, shared by Martin’s father and his second wife – the award-winning novelist Elizabeth Jane Howard…
Phoebe had two much older sisters, Siobhan (pron. Shuvawn), and Aisling (pron. Ashlin). Her dad, Graeme, was Scottish-English, and her mum, Dallen, was Irish. Phoebe idealised Graeme and demonised Dallen; she gave the impression, too, that the family had known better days, much better days – and that it was all Dallen’s fault.
(4.) Oh yeah. He had glimpsed it regularly enough, but four months passed before Phoebe let him take a proper look at it (under a reading lamp): the tattoo on the taut slope of her left buttock. Jungle Book and Kama Sutra colours (bluey-green with dots of garnet), roughly rectangular, and about the size of a folded butterfly. A mandala, she said, a cosmic Buddhist symbol – the lone vestige of her brief spiritual period (c.1960). Tattoos, to him, only looked nice on non-white flesh; and Phoebe’s looked nice, louchely nice on her Amerindian glaze; it had a tiny rubric in an unfamiliar alphabet; she had forgotten what the words were supposed to mean.
(5.) Lightfooted Phoebe had the gift of silence, of equable silence. She occupied herself for hours and hours while he read or wrote. She banged about in the kitchen and squirted out fizzy drinks at the bar, but she was otherwise silent. After a while she repaired to the phone in her bedroom and got on with her vendettas. She hounded office-furniture suppliers, accountants, utilities bureaucrats, and the owners or managers of betting shops (this last point will be clarified)…He couldn’t hear the words but he sometimes attended to her tone: either sarcastic, incensed, haughty, or quietly spiteful. She had an ever-shifting
