on in your trousers without ever mentioning it. And that was all, for quite a while. Some girls allowed more: you heard of those who went in for mutual masturbation, others who permitted ‘full sex’, as it was known. You couldn’t appreciate the gravity of that ‘full’ unless you’d had a lot of the half-empty kind. And then, as the relationship continued, there were certain implicit trade-offs, some based on whim, others on promise and commitment—up to what the poet called ‘a wrangle for a ring’.
Subsequent generations might be inclined to put all this down to religion or prudery. But the girls—or women—with whom I had what might be called infra-sex (yes, it wasn’t only Veronica) were at ease with their bodies. And, if certain criteria obtained, with mine. I don’t mean to suggest, by the way, that infra-sex was unexciting, or even, except in the obvious way, frustrating. Besides, these girls were allowing far more than their mothers had, and I was getting far more than my father had done. At least, so I presumed. And anything was better than nothing. Except that, in the meantime, Colin and Alex had fixed themselves up with girlfriends who didn’t have any exclusion-zone policies—or so their hints implied. But then, no one told the whole truth about sex. And in that respect, nothing has changed.
I wasn’t exactly a virgin, just in case you were wondering. Between school and university I had a couple of instructive episodes, whose excitements were greater than the mark they left. So what happened subsequently made me feel all the odder: the more you liked a girl, and the better matched you were, the less your chance of sex, it seemed. Unless, of course—and this is a thought I didn’t articulate until later—something in me was attracted to women who said no. But can such a perverse instinct exist?
‘Why not?’ you would ask, as a restraining hand was clamped to your wrist.
‘It doesn’t feel right.’
This was an exchange heard in front of many a breathy gas fire, counterpointed by many a whistling kettle. And there was no arguing against ‘feelings’, because women were experts in them, men coarse beginners. So ‘It doesn’t feel right’ had far more persuasive force and irrefutability than any appeal to church doctrine or a mother’s advice. You may say, But wasn’t this the Sixties? Yes, but only for some people, only in certain parts of the country.
My bookshelves were more successful with Veronica than my record collection. In those days, paperbacks came in their traditional liveries: orange Penguins for fiction, blue Pelicans for non-fiction. To have more blue than orange on your shelf was proof of seriousness. And overall, I had enough of the right titles: Richard Hoggart, Steven Runciman, Huizinga, Eysenck, Empson… plus Bishop John Robinson’s
Her own shelves held a lot of poetry, in volume and pamphlet form: Eliot, Auden, MacNeice, Stevie Smith, Thom Gunn, Ted Hughes. There were Left Book Club editions of Orwell and Koestler, some calf-bound nineteenth- century novels, a couple of childhood Arthur Rackhams, and her comfort book,
‘Of course, everyone’s wondering what Ted Hughes will do when he runs out of animals.’
‘Are they?’
‘So I’ve been told,’ I said feebly. In Dixon’s mouth, the line had seemed witty and sophisticated; in mine, merely facetious.
‘Poets don’t run out of material the way novelists do,’ she instructed me. ‘Because they don’t depend on material in the same way. And you’re treating him like a sort of zoologist, aren’t you? But even zoologists don’t tire of animals, do they?’
She was looking at me with one eyebrow raised above the frame of her glasses. She was five months older than me and sometimes made it feel like five years.
‘It was just something my English master said.’
‘Well, now you’re at university we must get you to think for yourself, mustn’t we?’
There was something about the ‘we’ that made me suspect I hadn’t got everything wrong. She was just trying to improve me—and who was I to object to that? One of the first things she asked me was why I wore my watch on the inside of my wrist. I couldn’t justify it, so I turned the face round, and put time on the outside, as normal, grown-up people did.
I settled into a contented routine of working, spending my free time with Veronica and, back in my student room, wanking explosively to fantasies of her splayed beneath me or arched above me. Daily intimacy made me proud of knowing about make-up, clothes policy, the feminine razor, and the mystery and consequences of a woman’s periods. I found myself envying this regular reminder of something so wholly female and defining, so connected to the great cycle of nature. I may have put it as badly as this when I tried to explain the feeling.
‘You’re just romanticising what you haven’t got. The only point of it is to tell you you’re not pregnant.’
Given our relationship, this struck me as a bit cheeky.
‘Well, I hope we’re not living in Nazareth.’
There followed one of those pauses when couples tacitly agree not to discuss something. And what was there to discuss? Only, perhaps, the unwritten terms of the trade-off. From my point of view, the fact that we weren’t having sex exonerated me from thinking about the relationship other than as a close complicity with a woman who, as her part of the bargain, wasn’t going to ask the man where the relationship was heading. At least, that’s what I thought the deal was. But I was wrong about most things, then as now. For instance, why did I assume she was a virgin? I never asked her, and she never told me. I assumed she was because she wouldn’t sleep with me: and where is the logic in that?
One weekend in the vacation, I was invited to meet her family. They lived in Kent, out on the Orpington line, in one of those suburbs which had stopped concreting over nature at the very last minute, and ever since smugly claimed rural status. On the train down from Charing Cross, I worried that my suitcase—the only one I owned—was so large it made me look like a potential burglar. At the station, Veronica introduced me to her father, who opened the boot of his car, took the suitcase from my hand, and laughed.
‘Looks like you’re planning to move in, young man.’
He was large, fleshy and red-faced; he struck me as gross. Was that beer on his breath? At this time of day? How could this man have fathered such an elfin daughter?
He drove his Humber Super Snipe with a sighing impatience at the folly of others. I sat in the back, alone. Occasionally, he would point things out, presumably to me, though I couldn’t tell if I was meant to reply. ‘St Michael’s, brick and flint, much improved by Victorian restorers.’ ‘Our very own Cafe Royal—
They lived in a detached, red-brick, tile-hung house with a strip of gravel in front of it. Mr Ford opened the front door and shouted to no one in particular,
‘The boy’s come for a month.’
I noticed the heavy shine on the dark furniture, and the heavy shine on the leaves of an extravagant pot plant. Veronica’s father seized my case as if responding to the distant laws of hospitality and, farcically exaggerating its weight, carried it up to an attic room and threw it on the bed. He pointed to a small plumbed-in basin.
‘Pee in there in the night if you want to.’
I nodded in reply. I couldn’t tell if he was being all matily male, or treating me as lower-class scum.
Veronica’s brother, Jack, was easier to read: one of those healthy, sporting young men who laughed at most things and teased his younger sister. He behaved towards me as if I were an object of mild curiosity, and by no means the first to be exhibited for his appreciation. Veronica’s mother ignored all the by-play around her, asked me about my studies, and disappeared into the kitchen a lot. I suppose she must have been in her early forties, though of course she appeared to me deep into middle age, as did her husband. She didn’t look much like Veronica: a broader face, hair tied off her high forehead with a ribbon, a bit more than average height. She had a somewhat
