(6.) There was a strange disconnection – strangely hard to describe – in her response to humour. When amused by others, she laughed throatily and often. But when others were amused by her, when she made others laugh (his friends, her friends), she never joined in, she never laughed along; her mouth, her eyes, maintained neutrality, as if she was only funny by accident…
(7.) Every now and then her combative buoyancy ebbed away from her: these episodes were called her slumps. She would ring him and postpone the next visit, her voice somnolent and weirdly hollow. This happened patchily. Nothing for months and then once a week. After a day or two her combative buoyancy returned. They were seeing each other about every other night plus most weekends. She went on business trips, and he too had occasional assignments (mainly in America).
(8.) Phoebe’s workplace was in a freshly gilded medium-rise just off Berkeley Square. Quite often he left the New Statesman around midday and rode the Underground westward a couple of stops to Green Park, and collected her in the infinite atrium, and took her to the Fat Maggot, an early gastropub, for an elaborate Ploughman’s Lunch (and three bags of crisps); and then he returned her – to Transworld Financial Services (or TFS), whose HQ was in Threadneedle Street, EC1.
(9.) Once, at the Fat Maggot, the young couple were hurriedly and alarmingly joined by Phoebe’s parents. ‘They’re shopping in town and I asked them along. And by the way,’ said Phoebe, looking at her watch, ‘he likes to be called Sir Graeme.’ ‘Why? For fun?’ ‘No, it’s inherited. So it’s Lady Phelps too, but you can just call Dallen Dallen. Ah here they come.’ Martin went on full alert…Sir Graeme was slim, almost scrawny, with flowing caramel hair and shapely bones – an artistic face, but one ruined by a disgracefully small nose. Bibulous, flat-topped, and tubular, it looked like a scarlet thimble. His voice was ultra-refined (far posher than the Queen’s) and as flowery as he could make it with his lazily pretentious vocabulary (‘And how was it received, Martin – your latest oeuvre?’)…Dallen, being Irish, talked with real fluency, and Martin quickly decided he liked her; she was darkly neurasthenic, but a fairly comfortable valetudinarian by now, despite her hot flushes and her migraines…Phoebe paid, in cash. ‘You must come to Sunday luncheon, dear boy,’ stressed Sir Graeme in parting. ‘Nearly a year, eh? Chapeau!’
(10.) Phoebe was, she said, ‘appalled’ by her own handwriting. When she told him this, one weekend, as they wandered along the Serpentine, he gradually realised that he had never seen any examples of it – her calligraphy, her penwomanship. If she left him a note (get milk, back in an hour) she resorted to her antique typewriter or to toiling block capitals.
(11.) In bed…Time had only deepened and simplified his respect for her body: to him it was something like the hard proof of his own heterosexuality (it was the smoking gun); everything he needed was there. And in bed – on those occasions when she didn’t just get into it and go to sleep and then get out of it – she was both busy and businesslike, energetic, unsqueamish, shockingly inventive, and at the same time curiously detached, conscientious, even painstaking (she left nothing undone)…Never entirely naked, she wore stockings, a sash, a boa, a shirt, a skirt, and once or twice her whole office ensemble, not excluding her shoes – her high-heeled shoes, sliding in over the bottom sheet. But her defining peculiarity, or so it seemed to him, had to do with her hands.
Her peccadilloes, her weaknesses, her friends
As for Phoebe’s little vices (this bulletin is technically datelined April 1977): she was not a serious drinker, not a drinker at all by national standards, and she was an utterly frivolous smoker (she didn’t even inhale; like his mother, Hilly, with her menthol Consulates, Phoebe instantly expelled the smoke over her shoulder or straight up in the air). What she was was a gambler…*8
A gambler, and not a reader. After a year, the only literary development at Hereford Mansions was this: her pile of unread Economists now included two unread New Statesmans and, further down, an unread TLS. In February she paid her maiden visit to his flat off Queensway (14c, Kensington Gardens Square: very small and very cheap but just about presentable in its studently way, sitting room, bedroom, kitchen, bathroom, all clumped together with no passages in between); she came through the door and stood still. ‘Too many books, man,’ she sorrowfully decided.
A couple of weeks later Phoebe primly spent the night, and when he brought her tea in the morning she was propped up in bed with a thin paperback – The Whitsun Weddings (1964). This wasn’t entirely unexpected.*9 As he positioned the cup in her grip he saw she was reading the title poem, but he made no comment and just settled himself beside her. Minutes passed. Every now and then he ventured a peripheral glance: she was moving her lips to the words (which she did not do with newspapers or menus or betting slips), and he clearly saw her mime the phrase: we slowed again. Soon she put the book aside with a lift of her eyebrows.
‘Humph,’ she said.
‘…Humph?’
‘Yeah. Humph.’*10
Later in the morning they performed their first act of love in a week; and for him, as always, it was like the tearsoaked reunion which marks the end of a long romantic melodrama about the Second World War. But the act of love, that morning, was probably a frail coincidence, or so he thought in 1977.
—————
Sometimes she called him Martin, and sometimes she called him Mart. This was useful, because it gave sure notice of her mood: Martin prepared him for a certain solemnity, stringency, and (often) reproach; Mart meant friendliness and high spirits and even on occasion led the way to eros, as Martin never did.
‘Correct me if I’m
