Bad Blood (29 page)

While Michael Price served and Gail savoured his grace, I listened spellbound. Vic's father was promptly dismissed from his job and it suddenly became clear to the family doctor that he was unhinged. He was hospitalised and diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic. Psychiatrists were very sure of themselves then, once they'd decided you were insane, and in any
case his symptoms were classic: he had, it turned out, been receiving secret messages for some while, he was an NCO in some alien Command. At the hospital they gave him a lot of electric-shock treatment and some downers, and sent him home months later without having changed his world picture much.

This would have been around 1956 or 1957, not long before I'd first met Vic at the school dance. They had not been living in the council house for long, in fact, they'd rented bigger and better places before, but now there was no chance of his father returning to work they couldn't afford it. Cyril, who found and lost jobs with lightning speed, wasn't much help and anyway wouldn't live under the same roof, and Vic, his mother insisted, must stay at school – he was her last hope, he must
get on
despite the wreckage. So there they were on Thompson Drive in a house with the same living-room as The Arowry, although already Vic's mum, a loving gardener, was hiding the chain-link fence with rambling roses and filling the borders with hardy annuals. His father had a huge head, a long white beard and glared like an Old Testament prophet. He sat in his carpet slippers in front of the television most of the day, sometimes watching the programmes, at others communing with Channel 13, which was empty buzz and snow to most people, but had orders for him that he listened to with attention.

He wasn't better, just subdued, and still at intervals he made a run for it: cleaned out the joint account, shaved and set out in his good suit with a flower in his buttonhole to Windsor, Sandringham or Balmoral. He kept a very creased picture of the young Queen trooping the colour under his pillow or in his pocket, and from time to time was sent to see her, his not to reason why. Each time he'd be picked up by the Special Branch and returned to Thompson Drive, after a brief spell in hospital. Vic's mother hated what had become of him, but took
him back again and again. He'd been so self-confident and dapper when they'd met and married before the war that she felt she couldn't desert him now, although from the lofty perspective of his lunacy he despised her patience and self-sacrifice. He felt her job was beneath him, even though it paid for his keep and the little extras he enjoyed, like the roll-ups whose stray sparks burned holes down the front of his cardigan.

Vic's mum was so stoical and self-effacing, wanted so much to just have an ordinary, decent life, that he too found himself sometimes furious with her. She came from a family of small farmers and took hard work for granted. It was horrible bearing all her hopes; he couldn't resist behaving badly. She praised him to his face, whereas my mother and father were only ever proud of me in public, but both of us had to do well at school. That in itself set us apart, since most of our peers were merely expected to maintain the middle-class status quo: trying too hard was in Whitchurch a sign that you were an outsider and socially shifty. And so our families unwittingly brought us together, although the last thing either of us needed in their view was a boyfriend or girlfriend, certainly not one in the same boat. But it was too late. By the time the sun set on the courts that day and Gail whacked a last lonely practice stroke into the net, he and I had begun to see ourselves as magically alike. Even the trick of inheriting the wrong set of teeth ran in our genes: he'd only had a few second teeth, whereas his cousin Sheila had lots to spare; and I could confess to the same, now my braces were gone.

He was more like me than Gail was – chronically unsure of himself, desperate to grow up and extricate himself from humiliating dependence. His picture of the future was more realistic than mine, although that didn't help him to believe in it, for he was looking forward with incredulity to the job in a
bank or the Civil Service that would delight his mother and make him feel honest or at least less guilty. Whereas I was selfishly dreaming simply of running away, probably to university, where I'd meet some fairy godfather who'd teach me everything and make me a woman of the world.

So it didn't occur to either of us that the other was the answer to our problems, it was more a matter of pooling our predicaments, but whatever it was, for the time being we were inseparable. The autumn before the move to Sunnyside, when I was fifteen and he was sixteen, he'd walk me (often Gail too) to the bus, wheeling his bike, we'd go to the pictures on Saturdays and wrestle in the back row, and we'd hold hands. He taught me to tell the time one November day, on the clock in the windy bus station. I persuaded him to resign from the Combined Cadet Force at the grammar school because that was playing into the hands of the past (how could he bear to be
like his father
?) and I scorned to be seen with him in battledress.

I kept the future out of focus. Although I didn't have the blank misgivings I'd felt when I'd passed the eleven-plus, the move into the sixth form and to Sunnyside surprised me with useless regret for Hanmer's patched lanes and spongy fields. Not the pretty bits, but the ground under your feet. I'd wedge myself moodily into a tree and read Wordsworth trying to convince himself that growing away from nature was bearable. Nature at Hanmer wasn't sublime, my solitary childhood tramps hadn't stirred the exultation Wordsworth recalled. However, I thought I recognised his fall into self-consciousness, finding yourself at a loss in a landscape you know intimately, as though it's in a picture and you can't step over the frame. Wordsworth pressed his nose against the picture glass and envied the rural dead like Lucy:

No motion has she now, no force,
She neither hears nor sees,
Rolled round in earth's diurnal course
With rocks and stones and trees.

Reading lines like these I'd grow uneasy, spooked by the sense that the book in my hands was an anti-book. The more you read about Lucy or Betty Foy and her idiot boy or the solitary reaper or the old Cumberland beggar, and the nearer to them you felt, the more being literate seemed a mistake. On the other hand I suspected that in Wordsworth's world I probably
would
have been a lump in the landscape – not quite dead, but not exactly alive either, certainly not doing Wordsworth's anti-book as a set text.

‘Nature never did betray the heart that loved her,' wrote Wordsworth. Or rather, ‘Nature never did betray / The heart that loved her.' It was thanks to him that I discovered that I had a photographic memory, because no one else in the class could recall where the breaks in his blank verse came, although the line's break was the life-threatening hiccup in its heartbeat. All I had to do was consult my inner eye and I could conjure up the words on the page, which was doubtless why I was an adept at exams.

My perceptions of the real, physical world were less exact, noises and smells and other people's voices broke in, so the present was a blur, like the future. I couldn't make out where I was going. For instance, you were supposed to choose between boys and books, because for girls sex was entirely preoccupying, your sex was
more of you
than a boy's appendage, you
were
your sex, so you had to do without if you were to have enough energy, self-possession and brains left over to do anything else. On this logic County Education Committees would stop a girl's
university grant if she cohabited, married, or became pregnant, because it was a waste of public money, although it had probably been a waste of public money all along (many people thought) because the girls would marry when they got their degrees, have families and only work part-time, if that, at jobs they were overqualified for. There were women who didn't marry, but they were unfeminine, unfulfilled, sexless by nature or, the next-worst thing, lesbian, and in any case were only compensating for the fact that no one ever fancied them. Give them half a chance and they'd melt down like those dragon career women in the movies, who purred when our hero took off their spectacles and loosened their scraped-back hair.

Perhaps with this mythology in mind my form mistress would leave a neat pile of hairgrips on my desk as a hint. My hair was long again and all over the place, and I didn't need glasses, either, so I just didn't look the part. I was letting my hair down too early in the plot. But I thought my true notion of myself could stay invisible if I didn't meet people's eyes. Everything said about sex at the time was about separate spheres. We thought Shakespeare's idolatrous sonnets were addressed to a girl, we did
Lady Chatterley's Lover
for A-level in the expurgated edition – but even if we'd had the full text I don't think we'd have worked out that the most sacred and searching act of intimacy between Connie and Mellors was buggery, so loud were the rallying cries of nature and realism that cloaked what people actually did. Difference was ineluctable. Even if you thought you were a free spirit or a bohemian, your female nature meant you were programmed to go round again with the rocks and stones and trees. Our heroes the Beats reinvented the same world. Joyce Johnson, Jack Kerouac's lover, has described how she was typecast:

Could he ever include a woman in his journeys . . . ? Whenever I tried to raise the question, he'd stop me by saying that what I really wanted were babies. That was what all women wanted and what I wanted too, even though I said I didn't. Even more than I wanted to be a great woman writer, I wanted to bring life into the world, become a link in the chain of suffering and death.

It took Joyce almost thirty years to write out this claptrap so coolly. It's galling to realise that you were a creature of mythology: girls were the enemies of promise, a trap for boys, although with the wisdom of hindsight you can see that the opposite was the case. In those seductive yarns about freedom girls' wants are foreknown. Like Lucy, you are meant to stay put in one spot of time.

I recall a flattened patch in the long grass going to seed on the bank of the towpath along the Shropshire Union Canal. It's a hot, bright afternoon in summer, a year on from the time we pooled families, and Vic and I are semi-hidden from the surrounding fields, not from walkers on the towpath or canal boats, although they're very few and far between. It's not safe to undress, we'd be more secure in the dark, but what we're doing isn't part of the timetable for lovemaking, it doesn't count. We're trying to get inside each other's skins, but without taking our clothes off, and the parts that touch are swaddled in stringy rucked-up shirts, jeans, pants. There are no leisurely caresses, no long looks, it's a bruising kind of bliss mostly made of aches. Motes of pollen seethe around us, along with a myriad of tiny moths and flies whose patch this was. We're dissolving, eyes half shut, holding each other's hands at arm's length, crucified on each other, butting and squirming. Our kisses are like mouth-to-mouth resuscitation – you'd think we
were dying it's so urgent, this childish mathematics of two into one won't go.

Spots of time. One day when my parents are out we're lying on the edge of the old tennis lawn at Sunnyside, in the weeds, and there's a rapping on the window. Grandma peers out, too short-sighted to register details, but she can see that I'm horizontal and hugging a boy, that's enough. Rat-tat-tat, wake up. I opened my eyes wide and looked at us, and saw that my breasts and his chest were covered in little worms of dirt rolled out of sweat and dust by our friction. That particular day sticks in my memory.

Most days in the summer holidays merge into each other, though. Every morning I sat in the kitchen, in a fireside chair lined with old newspapers (because it was where my father sat in his filthy overalls to take off his boots when he came in from work) and I translated two or three hundred lines of Virgil's
Aeneid
, without using a dictionary, guessing at words I didn't know. Latin was still my favourite subject; despite
Lady C.
and Mrs Davies, it was almost a kind of licensed laziness to sit there scribbling out Rome's epic with old
Daily Mail
s crackling under me. In the afternoons I played tennis on Whitchurch courts with Gail, or we wandered from Edwards's to coffee bar to milk bar, or listened to records, or I went for a walk down the canal with Vic to make a nest in the grass. One day Gail told me that Vic had told a friend who'd told his girlfriend, who'd told her, that we'd gone all the way and that he had a trophy, a smear or spatter of blood on his washed-out jeans, to prove it. She was shocked that something so momentous had happened and I hadn't confided in her. But it hadn't, I protested, truly, or I would have – and he and I had an angry and reproachful conversation about loyalty, betrayal and boasting, because after all, we
hadn't
, had we?

It was so unthinkable that when I felt ill, bloated, headachy, nauseous and, oh yes, my period hadn't come, I stayed in bed and we called out our new doctor, a pale, prim man in his thirties, Dr Clayton. After taking my temperature, asking about bowel movements and looking at my tongue, he looked out of the window at the copper beech tree, cleared his throat and asked could I be – um – pregnant? No, I said, feeling hot suddenly, No. He recommended a urine test anyway. Meanwhile I took aspirins for my aches, but they didn't go away and, although school had started and I'd finished Virgil, I spent days at home. On one of them Dr Clayton turned up again, embarrassed and puzzled. How old was I? Sixteen. He'd heard I was a clever girl, doing well at school, didn't we ever have biology lessons? I must have known what I was up to . . . From his first words and his tone, which had weariness and contempt in it, I knew it was true, just as absolutely as until that moment I knew it couldn't be.

I'd been caught out, I would have to pay. I was in trouble, I'd have no secrets any longer, I'd be exposed as a fraud, my fate wasn't my own, my treacherous body had somehow delivered me into other people's hands. Dr Clayton asked if he should tell my mother, but he wasn't really asking. I sat there in my new Sunnyside bedroom, everything falling into place in my aching head, thud, thud, thud. My mother came upstairs and opened the door, her face red and puffed up with outrage, her eyes blazing with tears. She'll tell, this time, no question. For a minute she says nothing and then it comes out in a wail,
What have you done to me?
Over and over again. I've spoiled everything, now this house will be a shameful place like the vicarage. I've soiled and insulted her with my promiscuity, my sly, grubby lusts . . . I've done it now, I've made my mother pregnant.