The Sense of an Ending

My girlfriend was called Veronica Mary Elizabeth Ford, information (by which I mean her middle names) it took me two months to extract. She was reading Spanish, she liked poetry, and her father was a civil servant. About five foot two with rounded, muscular calves, mid-brown hair to her shoulders, blue-grey eyes behind blue-framed spectacles, and a quick yet withholding smile. I thought she was nice. Well, I probably would have found any girl who didn’t shy away from me nice. I didn’t try telling her I felt sad because I didn’t. She owned a Black Box record player to my Dansette, and had better musical taste: that’s to say, she despised Dvořák and Tchaikovsky, whom I adored, and owned some choral and lieder LPs. She looked through my record collection with an occasional flickering smile and a more frequent frown. The fact that I’d hidden both the 1812 Overture and the soundtrack to Un Homme et Une Femme didn’t spare me. There was enough dubious material even before she reached my extensive pop section: Elvis, the Beatles, the Stones (not that anyone could object to them, surely), but also the Hollies, the Animals, the Moody Blues and a two-disc boxed set of Donovan called (in lower case) a gift from a flower to a garden.

‘You like this stuff?’ she asked neutrally.

‘Good to dance to,’ I replied, a little defensively.

‘Do you dance to it? Here? In your room? By yourself?’

‘No, not really.’ Though of course I did.

‘I don’t dance,’ she said, part anthropologist, part layer-down of rules for any relationship we might have, were we to go out together.

I’d better explain what the concept of ‘going out’ with someone meant back then, because time has changed it. I was talking recently to a woman friend whose daughter had come to her in a state of distress. She was in her second term at university, and had been sleeping with a boy who had — openly, and to her knowledge — been sleeping with several other girls at the same time. What he was doing was auditioning them all before deciding which to ‘go out’ with. The daughter was upset, not so much by the system — though she half-perceived its injustice — as by the fact that she hadn’t been the one finally chosen.

This made me feel like a survivor from some antique, bypassed culture whose members were still using carved turnips as a form of monetary exchange. Back in ‘my day’ — though I didn’t claim ownership of it at the time, still less do I now — this is what used to happen: you met a girl, you were attracted to her, you tried to ingratiate yourself, you would invite her to a couple of social events — for instance, the pub — then ask her out on her own, then again, and after a goodnight kiss of variable heat, you were somehow, officially, ‘going out’ with her. Only when you were semi-publicly committed did you discover what her sexual policy might be. And sometimes this meant her body would be as tightly guarded as a fisheries exclusion zone.

Veronica wasn’t very different from other girls of the time. They were physically comfortable with you, took your arm in public, kissed you until the colour rose, and might consciously press their breasts against you as long as there were about five layers of clothing between flesh and flesh. They would be perfectly aware of what was going 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.