The Sense of an Ending

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 Honest to God next to my Larry cartoon books. Veronica paid me the compliment of assuming I’d read them all, and didn’t suspect that the most worn titles had been bought second-hand.

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, I Capture the Castle. I didn’t for a moment doubt that she had read them all, or that they were the right books to own. Further, they seemed to be an organic continuation of her mind and personality, whereas mine struck me as functionally separate, straining to describe a character I hoped to grow into. This disparity threw me into a slight panic, and as I looked along her poetry shelf I fell back on a line of Phil Dixon’s.

‘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?