Semi-Detached (29 page)

Blimey,
I was reading Nietzsche, ‘taking it in easy stages because I’m not sure whether
it’s deceptively easy or deceptively difficult’. We were always in the library
or the pensione reading for a couple of hours before heading off to visit
museums and churches. We are behaving like a louche version of
Room with a
View.
We seek out the restaurant recommended by my school friend Douglas
Adams. (I was dogging his footsteps.) A meal is described in detail and
followed by a short sentence: ‘Was a bit ill in the night.’ I recount the
prices of food and the lecture on Raphael (‘very interesting’) and the story
of the chair: ‘I sat down rather heavily on a chair.’ (I jumped on it actually.
The leg broke off, and the ‘old dame’ made us take it to get it mended amongst
the fakers of the old quarter.) ‘We went to see
A Funny Thing Happened on
the Way to the Forum;
well, we watched very hard, but we didn’t see that
funny thing happen.’ Great. Not only that. By 28 March I am solemnly recording
that I had received six letters in one day.

13. Jill

I can’t take the Canadian
letters. But I must. I must sit and piece this together.

The
smell, the stamps, the addresses on the back, the photographs, the washed-out
snaps of tiny girls in tartan trousers with long hair, the shame. I led them
on. I led them on. Oh, Dale, Jill, Karen and Bev! On the back of Jill’s
envelope in bold writing it says, ‘6, Cod Road, Nova Scotia, Canada’. Cod Road?
A cold, exotic, fishy place it sounds. Near Halifax. Halifax? I shall have to
get an atlas. I have never even checked whether this was west or east Canada. I
must have guessed it was near the water. ‘Read this page last.’ The growing
confidence still stings. ‘I miss you.’ She didn’t want to send a photo, but I
pressed her, and she obliged me.

‘Read
this last,’ so I did. ‘Well, you asked for it! Here it is —          my
passport photo which was taken two years ago —
1970.’
But it isn’t
there. I go through the box, but I haven’t hidden it in any other envelope. The
other photos all survived with their letters. There’s Bev and Dale and Karen. I
must have taken Jill’s and put it somewhere safe. But Bev was writing in
April: ‘Remember that I’m thinking of you every day’ So I had hardly settled my
attentions on Jill. Or perhaps I had, but I hadn’t told Bev, or Karen, or Dale.

It
takes me time to sort the letters out, because the handwriting looks so
similar. What did I write to them? To get them going. To encourage them. To
lure them in. ‘You sound a slob,’ Dale writes chidingly Did I duplicate? Did I
reinvent? What doodles did I send? Why did I write about the ‘gippos’ quite so
much? (All of them write back asking to know what I mean.)

Karen
was still writing in May. She was still walking the dog and doing badly at her
exams. I have got the atlas out, by the way Toronto is hundreds of miles from
Halifax. I had lumped them all together, but they had come to the boat from
different parts of Canada, as remote from each other as I would be from Germany
Whew. They weren’t likely to have met at a party and compared letters, anyway.

And who
was Margot from Bowman? My goodness, turning the pile over, I discover another
girl altogether. Dale was jolly — full of news and practicality. Karen was
wistful. Bev and Jill chatty and direct. Margot got straight to business: acid
and speed and a story of the OPD (the Ontario Police Department) raiding her
house at six in the morning. Her face ‘was redder than my hair’. She was
planning to travel across North America on her ten-speed bike. ‘But most of all
I want to see you.’ Oh, Margot. What would have happened if you had bicycled
over the Atlantic? There isn’t any photograph of Margot.

Did I
churn it up? Did I urge them on? Jill’s first letter is a largely formal one. ‘Which
one was she?’ I must have thought, ungallantly.

‘The
page is running out unlike my thoughts,’ she writes but she goes on to mention
that she is planning to come to England in August — in that very first letter.
I must have planned it all. By March she was writing again, having apparently
got my postcard — from Florence (spelled like her middle name). ‘After reading
your postcard I wished that I was in Rome and about to go to Florence … and
most of all to see you.’ Heavens, I don’t suppose we even danced together. Oh,
Jill, did you know that I was writing to all the girls?

She had
a photograph of that last night on the boat — the last night of a mere thirteen
days. In the photograph she has her hand in my pocket, so she tells me. She had
gone to work in the movie theatre and in a small boutique for
$1.50
an
hour. By June she had saved $135 and was ‘almost there’.

This is
horrible, reading all these letters — the innocence, the trust. The hard work
she went to, based on thirteen days and that hand in my pocket and all those
long replies I must have sent. By now she’s telling me to eat properly and wear
galoshes in the rain.

Could
my mother write to her mother
(49)
and formally invite Jill to our
house?

As I
read these letters the sound I can hear is me making groaning noises. What do
they mean? Her reaction to a photo that I sent … I can’t repeat it. It’s too
intimate and trusting. And the letters have got ten pages long. She writes so
cautiously, dropping her little hints and indications, venturing into
possibilities of intimacy. Her emotional state seems such a fragile thing.

Suddenly
I wonder what would happen if I tried to get in touch today If I wrote to Cod
Road, would someone pass it on, would she answer? Unlike all my school friends,
these girls couldn’t know anything about me. It could be an anonymous trip. I
would just be this guy from the past. I could visit them all. I could see if
any parents still live at those addresses, in their eighties now, I suppose. Is
it possible? ‘Dale and Brian live near Calgary now and have three children.’

The
letters are so potent. All those junior excitements. All that promise of, well,
let’s face it, sex.

I
finish sorting them out. They lie in front of me in bundles. Margot stopped
writing first. Why? She only sent me three in total, but then she was the acid
queen, so that’s understandable. Dale’s practical, chatty ones finish in
mid-correspondence — mid-endearment, almost — but some time in the summer they
all stopped, even, eventually, Jill’s.

There
isn’t a letter in the pile, though, that asks, ‘What happened? Why did you stop
writing?’ By June I must have settled on poor Jill. Did I simply just stop
sending letters to the others? I suppose I did.

I have
identified the last letter, I think, from Jill herself. I can hardly bear to
read it. It is sent from Hampshire, in England, on her way to stay The one
before it is full of excitement. ‘See you Friday,’ she ends.

Now I
am in a forties thriller, feeling through the envelopes, double-checking,
turning them over, searching in the box. Surely there is more. Where’s the next
letter? Where is the one that forgives me? Where is the one that pours hate on
me for treating her so badly? Where is the conclusion to this? My only
personal memory is the slight icing of recollected shame. I have completely
lost the cause, erased it. I cannot remember any real details, how she packed,
how we must have taken her back to the airport. Did my mother commiserate with
her? Was I even courageous enough to discuss this with her? I doubt it. All
that remains is the electrical charge of a residual negative emotion. (Of
course it would have been tidier if I had gone there. I like the notion of
those frozen places. ‘We have the best climate in the world,’ Dale wrote with
all that enviable Canadian pride. I could have gone and visited them all one by
one. Instead, I waited for Jill to come to me.)

I came
home from that first adventure in Italy by car with the Haydens, our local
doctors from Epping. It wasn’t late in the season. It can’t have been, because
I had finished the month in Florence and headed north to Val-d’Isère by a
sequence of trains that left me confused and cold at a small station high in
the Alps. I got down from a powerful express which I’d boarded with an illegal
ticket and transferred to a branch line.

I came
out of the station and walked through the town to the practice slopes, where I
finally spotted my doctor, his family and my sister learning to ski on the
crowded hill. It felt like a miracle of personal organization to make these
connections.

I had
never been skiing. I had no clothes and no money to buy them, so I spent the weekend
in flared denim jeans and a reefer jacket, falling over until the wet froze
them like cardboard, and my legs became ready for amputation.

So it
was after a second tour of duty on the boat that Jill came. I must have taken
the Baltic trip and then headed south. Yes, I remember we passed through the
Channel on an upper deck in bright early-evening light. One of the assistants
danced for joy in his platform-heeled boots, and we all gave an impromptu
exhibition of cod Fred Astaire. A junior cadet was sent up from the bridge
directly below to scream at us. We had disturbed the captain at a crucial
moment as he tried to steer the
Uganda
through the Straits of Dover. On
to La Rochelle and La Coruña, then Lisbon, where we went to the brothel by
mistake, then down to North Africa and Carthage, and then home for the rest of
the summer, which was when Jill came to stay.

Of all
my regular correspondents, Jill was the cleverest and most passionate. I had
studied her lost photograph closely. Remembering that photograph now and
comparing it with my own from
1970,
I see she also had the dubious
accolade of looking almost exactly like me. Her hair was parted tin the middle,
black and wiry. She wore flared jeans and sweaters. She was of average height.
It was a unisex thing. We could tell the difference, even if the
Daily
Telegraph
couldn’t. We were very excited by the difference. She seemingly
as much as me. She was a sweet, intelligent girl and I treated her abominably.

For a
start, when she announced that she was coming to England, I decided that this
was quite probably the opportunity to lose my virginity. She was coming a long
distance and would be staying with us, in my home, which would furnish the
opportunity (though quite where and how might need to be carefully addressed) .
She was Canadian. That seemed to augur well. American girls were notoriously
loose. Essentially, Canadian girls were American girls in pullovers, weren’t
they? ‘Love, love, love, warbled the Beatles. Jill seemed bright enough to
understand the ethos of the era and the unworthiness of my intentions.

I hoped
I would recognize her. I did. She was, as girls so often are, polite and
considerate. I gabbled ceaselessly. My mother’s eyes were shining, as mothers’
eyes do when their male offspring bring girls home. I know from my own experience
that dads want to grunt and get on with the previously undisturbed tax returns,
but mothers look to the companionship, they like to poke their noses in and
they like the hint of nookie. Or at least my mother seemed to.

There
is no doubt that I was in love, by my own standards. I knew the beating heart
and the state of excitement that led to lingering gazes. I was pleased that she
was a better, more considerate person than me, and that everybody else
immediately recognized it. This all helps enormously at the beginning of any
relationship. It can become something of a problem near the end, though. Other
people will grow attached to nice, friendly girls.

Of
course, there was no sex in White Lodge. This may have been the tail of the
swinging sixties, but my parents were born in the twenties. Jill enjoyed the
cooking and was happy to be quizzed exhaustively by my mother and help with the
washing-up, but there was a granny lurking about. My mother and father never seemed
to go out. I had never noticed before that my family came and went with such
noisy regularity; in and out of every room in our house. Then at night Jill
went to one end of the upstairs corridor, and I went to the other.

I lost
my virginity on the boat. You might imagine that a twenty-nine-foot yacht was a
less promising boudoir than a large detached house, but somehow, at the time,
it seemed a better opportunity.

I went
sailing without my parents. How did that happen? My father must have been ‘on
duty’ at the hospital. My brother was certainly aboard, though, and my sister
too, I seem to remember.

Jill
was given ‘the cabin’, and after lights out I rustled up there to join her. It
was my first experience of wearing a condom. We can’t have managed that with
the lights out. Perhaps we used a torch. The ‘cabin’ was separated from the
rest of the boat by a small, bright-blue curtain. It was a cupboard. If you
slept in it, the centreboard casing formed one side, the hull the other, and
your legs went into a sort of cubby hole. There was barely enough room for one
person to scramble up there. It must have been a challenge to accommodate two.
A novice couple engaged in screwing must have been highly audible in the utter
blackness of this tiny boat. It was probably made worse by extreme caution. A
long zip of a zip-fastening on a sleeping bag being unzipped, followed by a
circumspect pause during which only breathing could be heard, followed, after
enough time had elapsed to allow the false assumption that the other occupants
of the boat were now asleep, by a rustling noise and a squeak.