That’s how it was for Valerie and me. It’s not an excuse. Trouble was, the sex wasn’t great to start with; we married because we met at school, because my parents knew her parents, because…well, it was easy, if truth be told. There were no fireworks when we kissed, no music played when we touched, no invisible orchestra chased us when we walked back from dances.
When I went up to university, she took her tennis career on the road, and was hailed as the young English hope. She was good, very good, and she certainly didn’t lack the drive she needed, but after three gruelling years, she was still at the bottom of the ladder, frantic for success, dogged by injury, and her family’s savings were just about drained. We hardly saw each other during those years; we had rare dates around Wimbledon or Queen’s, and one season when, during the summer holidays, I trailed after her around America for four weeks, impressed by her stamina but bored with the circuit, her friends, and the constant talk of nothing but tennis.
We kept our relationship alive with letters. Letters can be a dangerous and deadly illusion; instead of plain old Ed, I could be someone exciting, someone with a future, someone who lived in a more interesting world than one inhabited by logarithms and pi. When she wasn’t training, playing, or working in the gym, she would read constantly. Austen, Eliot, Brontë and other such literary luminaries. She’d fill her letters with her thoughts on the themes and descriptions of times gone by. Maybe it was because her life was so regimented, so sterile, that she wanted something that was not possible. She certainly didn’t seem to see what a gift she had, that her life was one that many people would covet. Looking back at what I thought was nothing more than a mild deception, I see that I was attempting to be the man she wanted me to be…attempting to fit someone else’s mould, even back then.
I didn’t read those books. I had enough books to be reading; my head was filled with binary and tables. So I cheated. I bought the help notes from the university library, cribbed quotes, ideas and themes, and spilled them all out in our correspondence. It worked like a charm; suddenly I was no longer “dear old Ed,” who was studying “something stuffy” at Christ Church, I was a crossover soul. Someone, to her perception, who was trapped beneath a mountain of numbers, but under the equations and tweed, I was Lochinvar and Darcy a warrior-in-hiding, someone that would rescue her from the slavery of the circuit, and someone who understood her utterly.
I should never have done it. She deserved better. The summer I came down from university, she drove her tatty little Citroen 2CV all the way from Wales, where she was playing, to my parents’ house in London. My jaw dropped when I saw her, slender and frantic, her eyes burning with something I didn’t understand. She launched herself at me with heartbreaking sobs and all I could do was take her in my arms. In my room we fell together with awkward kisses and teenage-like fumblings. She was as innocent as me, but she knew the mechanics at least enough to get us started. When instinct took over, we “confirmed our love,” or that’s what she called it. It was hot and hasty, as well as unpleasant (probably for both of us), and not at all what I expected. I doubt she did either. I remember it didn’t take very long, and I lay for a long while afterwards on her immobile body, wondering what the fuss was about. I assumed that it seemed wrong and sordid because we didn’t have the time to dedicate to it, that the fear of discovery was taking away the pleasure that I should have been feeling.
Valerie gave up her professional career the next year. It was a particularly unpleasant time; I had just started in the City, and her parents (quite rightly, for all of Valerie’s protestations to the contrary) blamed me for ruining their daughter’s career. They tried everything to dissuade her, telling her that she could combine the tennis with married life, but she, in a hard-nosed fashion that startled me then but I soon became accustomed to, refused to budge. I think she truly believed that life with me was going to be better.
We married in the autumn, and children, suburbia and boredom followed close afterwards. I never liked to discuss Valerie with Alex, as the bed-time frigidity seemed a life time away from what he offered, what we had. Married sex didn’t improve, for all that I assumed it would when we had our own home, our own bed. It wasn’t her fault, I suppose; she hadn’t been a slut before our marriage—she hadn’t any more experience than I. Maybe with another lover she would have enjoyed the experience, but she didn’t with me, I’m certain of that. It was cold, mechanical. She never touched me intimately and, in return, it didn’t occur to me to do something for her that she was incapable of doing for me. It was all so…methodical, and what I thought was very English. Very traditional.
When Phil came along, we had just about stopped altogether—partly because I didn’t want any more children and, on my side at least, mostly with relief that the unlovely performance could be dispensed with.
Phil and Claire moved in, and life changed almost at once. We were both starved for affectionate company, and we absorbed the new neighbours gratefully. They seemed bright and warm, outwardly similar to us in many ways, but they had a casual ease with
