Unfaithfully Yours (15 page)

I am not afraid of leprosy. I am not afraid of anything.

The boat was rocking and swaying through the waves and yet nothing seemed to put me off my stroke. As I tasted the essence of Sam, as his salty masculinity began to course through me, like blood through the veins of a newborn child, we laughed for sheer joy. What did it matter where his semen went? In my ear, on my hair, across my windcheater? It can go up my arse for all I care!

And, yes, Barbara, love makes you ready to do the work you have to do in the world. I left the BBC nine years ago, driven out by petty in-fighting and John Birt – never a man who understood wild animals since they showed a remarkable lack of interest in focus groups and all the other management bollocks he introduced to the Beeb. A bloke called Bleistein, who accused me of fiddling my expenses and being ‘unproductive’, cruelly persecuted me. Oh. Sorry, Mr Bleistein, but filming gudgeon just doesn’t come cheap!!! And since I left I have watched public-service broadcasting degenerate into a ragbag of food programmes and ludicrous reality shows. No names, no pack drill, but David Attenborough is not the only man on the planet who understands it.

Yes, I was bitter. But I am no longer bitter. I know what I have to do and know it is going to be very important work. No one has tried to do it because it is hard. It is going to be hard. I will be spat on and accused of prejudice when, of course, my detractors will be hiding behind their prejudices.

Homosexuality in the Animal Kingdom
will be a massive landmark series following gay animals, literally, from the very smallest to the enormous – and deservedly celebrated – gay rhinos of northern Botswana. We will film extensively in communities of the homosexual ant species
Pheidilliata macerata
and shine light – at last – on bisexuality among the British earwigs. We will explore, for the first time, the vivid and sometimes painful homosexual life of the Cypriot viper and study the explosion of gay behaviour in captive animals, including Gus, the justly celebrated masturbating polar bear in Central Park Zoo. The great apes, of course, will feature heavily and we will penetrate into the heart of the Borneo jungle to report on homosexual courtship in the lesser orangutan and we will expose the anti-gay prejudice rife in the heron colonies of Twickenham. It is going to be very, very exciting. At last I have a purpose in life.

Thanks, Barbara, for your wake-up call. It was as refreshing as a double espresso. We all needed to hear it. I only hope the rest of the sad sixsome, who spent so many summers pretending to feel things they did not really feel, will listen to you and find themselves, in the way that Sam Dimmock and I have done.

Right on, Barbie. We all need a good bitch and you are a Good Bitch!

Who was the man you truly loved? Or was it a woman???? I somehow suspect it was!!!!

Your friend in gayness,

Micky Larner

PS We are sure that Pamela’s death was murder. We do not yet know for certain who killed her. Though we have our suspicions. And Sam and I are going to find out. I am hiring a brilliant private detective.

From:

Elizabeth Price

112 Heathland Avenue

Putney, SW15 3LE

30 October

To:

Barbara Goldsmith

101 Fellen Road

Putney

Dear Barbara,

My letter arrived at the same time as Gerald’s. I am assuming they are exactly the same but would never, of course, think of opening one of his letters any more than he would open mine. We have all sorts of ways of abusing each other but that is not one of them. Oh, marriage marriage marriage. We have all been married too long – you are quite right, Barbara. We are too frightened to change but we need to change, nonetheless.

We neither of us have discussed it; I know he will be hurt by it. He is more vulnerable than most people think. I don’t even know if he has opened his. Would he recognize your handwriting on the envelope? I did, of course. How could I ever forget it after our memorable exchange of letters back in the nineties? We were so good at hurting each other, I still want to say hurtful things to you but I am simply not as good at it as you are. The beret, by the way, is to hide the fact that I have developed alopecia. But you had probably spotted that.

So – as he almost certainly won’t tell you – perhaps I should start by letting you know how Gerald is bearing up under the complicated burden of becoming a sixtysomething.

He is rather distracted at the moment. He is defending a surgeon who, it is alleged, went out to telephone his bookmaker in the middle of a heart operation. Gerald seems rather vague about whether the patient survived, from which I deduce that he or she is almost certainly dead. He is also recovering from the avalanche of insincerity that greeted his perf in the geriatric version of
Hamlet
. Apart from your contribution, of course – and, by the way, as usual, I find myself in complete agreement with your artistic judgement. The Putney Thesps are always saying they are looking for ‘young blood’, but if they are doing so, it is only in the hopes of drinking it. They are a band of classic baby boomers, all utterly convinced that no one apart from them ever had the experience of being young.

Yes, wasn’t it a shocker? I thought it bid fair to be the worst ever, almost eclipsing the 2003 open-air production of
King Lear
. Putney Heath is not an ideal place to do Shakespeare, and if you are going to use it, it would probably be better not to choose a venue quite so near to the bus depot. I have never forgotten Gerry’s rendition of the ‘Plate sin with gold’ speech. Just as he got to the bit about a Pygmy’s straw piercing it, a number seventy-three got into serious difficulties with its clutch and Gerald abandoned ship, going off into some improvised blank-verse ramble about how ‘great machines did murder sleep hereabouts’. The tragic thing was that nobody seemed to notice.

Why was it, by the way, that everyone turned up the other night? We have not seen each other for twenty years and, for some reason, there we all were, horrified at what age has done to us and unable to recognize each other’s children. Yes, the weird-looking boy in the long coat was indeed Conrad. He has been living at home throughout his twenties, writing an immense novel about the Spanish Civil War. I have not read any of it but I know as surely as I know that summer follows spring that nobody will publish it. All he will say about it is that the central character is called Juan – which is not a promising sign.

He will never recover from having Gerald as a father. That is all there is to it.

But I did not write to complain about my marriage, although there is plenty to complain about on that front. It is as much my fault as Gerald’s. I picked up my pen in the hope that the two of us might, perhaps, one day, manage to be friends again. Perhaps my scrawl will remind you of happier times we spent together, chatting about literature in those curious villas we all used to hire.

I want to say, first, how sorry I was to hear about you and John. I had rather gathered, way back in the year we all went to Spain, that things between you were not quite as they should be. I think it was when you described him to me as ‘an incorrigible meathead’. At first I thought this was just one of those things that wives say about their husbands. We are much ruder about them than they are about us, aren’t we? But as you talked on I realized this was a more permanent conviction.

I am not sure it is a completely fair description of Dr Goldsmith.

I know about meatheads, Barbara. I am married to a man who, though highly intelligent, spends his life pretending to be one. And John is not, by any stretch of the imagination, a meathead. He is an averagely intelligent, averagely decent person stuck, like many of us, in the wrong job and cursed with a range of expressions that make him look as if he is more intelligent and sensitive than he actually is. Those wonderful blue eyes of his could make any woman believe he is thinking only of her when, in fact, he is actually agonizing about the prospects for Arsenal Football Club.

I suspect your real problem with him is that you will never be able to have him completely to yourself. Men as good looking as John Goldsmith are, quite simply, public property. I had always assumed he was having an affair with the desperately needy Pamela Larner.

Not that Pamela was the only one obviously drawn to your husband. Poor Mary Dimmock made her passion for him so pathetically obvious. Do you remember that night she ‘got something in her eye’? I can still see her proffering her great moon of a face for John’s inspection; somebody should tell dear Mary that when you are thirteen stone you shouldn’t try to do girlish.

As for Pamela, what can I say?

There were moments during one of our villa holidays when I was sure that John and she were having an affair. But maybe I am wrong. He certainly did try very hard to look uninterested in her, didn’t he? Even to the extent of not passing her the milk at breakfast – most unusual for such a punctiliously polite person as your husband. I suspect we both disliked her simply because she was one of those women who manage to keep their figures after having had children – in her case three, although she always managed to make it sound as if there were four of them. She was a great one for the trouser suit, wasn’t she? Never a successful outfit, I feel. It always makes women look as if they are a salesperson in the perfume department of some upmarket store.

And, Jesus, was she competitive! Even about her own education, or the lack of it. She stubbornly insisted to both you and me, Oxford and Cambridge both, that she had been to Oxford when we suspected she was at the ghastly secretarial college that my contemporaries always called the Ox and Cow. I am sure there was something similar at Cambridge. Someone told me she couldn’t even get her typing speeds up, which was why the scissors and the shampoo started calling to her. Oh, the hairdressing! Oh, the hairdressing of her! God! Do you remember the day she offered to do John and Gerald’s hair? And kept going on about the shape of their heads? I don’t think I have ever paid any attention to the shape of Gerald’s head, except to notice that it is vaguely square.

Gerald told me that Mike Larner had told him he thought dear Pamela was murdered. I can think of at least five women in Putney who would have been delighted to do the deed. I am afraid I would number myself among the women of Putney who can’t really mourn Pamela. That laugh! She laughed as a way of marking territory, didn’t she? And, oh, dear God, she was so brisk! Unbearably brisk.

We hadn’t really seen each other for nearly twenty years. There was something that happened with Milly (or was it Molly?), who, for some unknown reason, ended up at Dame Veronica’s for a brief period. She had absolutely no aptitude for academic study and I am afraid I told her mother so.

I was supposed to dislike you, of course. Everyone always assumed I did; but I didn’t. We are far too similar. Which is, as I think I said, why I am writing this letter. I really do want your marriage to succeed.

Together you were such a handsome couple. Him with his tennis and his golf and his running and his wonderful profile, and you with that amazing figure and the long, striking black hair and the smile, like a cat’s, so private and sensual and mocking. And he was genuinely in love with you. I can still see the two of you at that table on the terrace in the villa in Corsica – you filling up his silences with such craft and energy, and him looking at you with such quiet adoration.

You say in your letter that we all have to take control of our lives and dare to do something new and unusual and that our marriages are stale and frightened. But I suspect, Barbara, that the really serious adventure, for people like us, is growing old together. Is not keeping faith with the feelings that brought us together in the first place the only way to give meaning to our lives? There is, as you point out so vividly, not much of them left. Should we not try to be happy with what we have? How else can we ever possibly hope to do good?

I am sorry you seem to dislike your children – even if the pair of them did once land on my head in one of those swimming pools we all shared. I am sure they have given you plenty of reasons to do so. Certainly Conrad, in what Gerald and I still talk of as the Cider Years, was unspeakable. I lay most of the blame on his tutor at Oxford, although Jacques Derrida, the French phoney to whom his tutor introduced him, must take some of the responsibility.

By the way – something rather interesting was happening between the Boy and Elaine at
Hamlet
the other night. Did you notice? You were so busy looking at no one in particular I expect you did not, but my unemployed son looked to me as if he was chatting up his former primary-school playmate. I do recall them both at Barnaby Larner’s eighth chasing each other round that peculiar little hall near the bus station. I am almost sure Elaine Dimmock said she was going to marry him.

Her Indian friend didn’t look too pleased, did he? Sulky little beast he was, I thought. Somebody told me he was trying to convert the Dimmock girl to Islam, a religion even more pointlessly simple than Christianity I’ve always thought, and from what I heard of their conversation Conrad was doing a rather good demolition job on the
hadith
of the Prophet – blessings be upon his camel. It’s funny, he never shows any sign of wit or originality around us, but if ever I eavesdrop on him in mixed company, I think, What a clever and original son I have produced!

So – children do change. I am sure Jas and Josh do not always show you their sensitive sides and I am sure their wives seem dull. What mother of sons can ever really like the women they marry? They can do a good job of pretending to but if they really give them their hearts there is likely to be some sinister motive, in my view. And it may be that your view of John will change as he changes. Why do we always have to change partners instead of trying to effect change
in
our partners?

I really do feel there is hope for the two of us, at least in regard to the men we have chosen for ourselves. We both married The Other, didn’t we? In my view both our relationships are living proof of Blake’s idea that in opposition is true friendship. If one can ever say that Blake has ideas. I don’t suppose he does. Crazy convictions, more like. I must say, I sometimes wonder if Gerald isn’t The Alien rather than The Other but there is a side to him that very few people, apart from Julia and I, ever see. I know I haven’t talked about Julia much but there is never anything much to say about her, is there? Did you ever realize that Gerry is addicted to the music of Bruckner? Or rather good at knitting? He reads medieval French poetry for pleasure and can recite by heart most of the work of Ronsard.