Boys and Girls Read online

  In a way, it might be said that I rescued him. We both of us pretended otherwise at the time, of course (if we were already pretending, then … it maybe hadn’t yet come to it: no, I have to suppose that right at the very beginning it wouldn’t have, really). I had this small but terribly attractive flat in the very best part of Chelsea, thanks to my darling father (heaven knows I miss it, and I miss him too). I never had a job, not really, never really wanted one. I knew that I always had needed a man to look after me (cherish, spoil, adore and ravish me would all have been lovely, but just looking after, I could have coped with that). Because I am so beautiful and clever – and no, there is no point at all in talking down or gigglingly blushing over the very evident truth of the matter: I have always possessed this luscious and almost liquid ability to raise or reduce any man at all to the level at which he clearly belongs. And so because of this, I suppose that my Daddy was simply assuming that someone maybe even as wonderful as he would some day come along (not possible, as we both of us knew) and that until that day he’d be happy to keep me warm and safe, and gently ticking over. And there were men, of course there were – I soon grew weary of their constant and really quite overwhelming attentions. If I had ever to slip out quickly to a supermarket for some soup cartons or a quiche, say, I took to consciously making myself as hideous as a beauty can ever be – headscarf, flats, no make-up – simply to avoid some or other hopeful, oh God – boulevardier utterly revelling in his own ready wit, in his cool audacity – and canvassing my views on this or that bouillon, asking me constantly if I lived around here, suggesting that we could do worse than to pool the fruits of our trolley and basket, add much burgundy and hie away to rustle up something impromptu, somewhere nearby. Always they thought their approach so original – either brash and very cocksure, which I hate, just hate (unlike assurance and a true and manly confidence, which I am not sure I have ever encountered, except in my father), or else there would be a coy and stuttering attempt at boyishness, so pink and appealing in a puppydog way, and this of course I loathe even more – as I do puppydogs, as a matter of fact. Kittens too – they make me squirm. It is not that I wish any animal harm – and nor, I suppose, was I ever moved to react with violence to the endless strings of young and old men who perpetually were annoying me; I just never wanted to touch, that’s all, not have them brushing against me, neither licking nor purring. And then suddenly – and how and why on earth in the world do these things happen? – suddenly, there was Alan. Who for reasons now very much lost to me, I evidently imagined would do.

  He lived at the time in a … what shall we call it? Run-down apartment in a not very nice part of London? No – it hardly does it justice: hellhole is what we were dealing with here (it’s always just as well to be frank about things). I invited him remarkably swiftly to share my beautiful little Chelsea home – part one of the rescue, I suppose, though I am sure that at the time I was unaware of being party to the launch of any such thing. At first I did not notice the ugliness of his shoes, say, one of them on its side on my pale-pink Chinese rug. Did not gag at the hair in the washbasin. I even chipped away gamely at the caked-on cornflakes in a long-abandoned bowl. I must have loved him, or else why would I? I did love him, of course I did – I remember the fact of it, if even the merest tingle of engulfment has utterly departed. And I still do, really – love him, if only in a rather residual sort of a way. But I am done with trying to boost and reinforce him: his battlements are stormed, he has no longer any defences. And this is why he must now be supplemented – I am helping him by bringing in another strength (and one day, my Alan, my sweet, he will see it).

  He was sort of a jobbing journalist at the time I first met him: of course, he had failed at a clutch of other quite airy occupations prior to failing at jobbing journalism – and this was before he came to fail in advertising and close on a decade away from his ultimate and staining failure amid all the silliness of hardware. Some or other paper you will by no means have heard of had given him an agony column, which neither of us considered to be even a little bit comical, rather bewilderingly. At the outset, he made a sort of an effort with the solving of all these personal problems (at the outset, he generally will – and the Lord only knows how many utterly blameless lives he devastated as a consequence), but soon he was had up by the editor for replying in print to every single letter with something along the lines of ‘It rather depends, really’ or ‘Well yes and no, if you see what I mean’. He was moved to a ‘handy hints’ sort of a column – I seem to recall, you know, that its title might have been actually Handy Hints – though of course because my poor dear Alan has not an iota of practical knowledge of any single thing on God’s earth, this was never going to be the most dizzying success. He grew angry, I think, with his ignorance, his own incapability – this was some time before the internet, you see, so there were so few ways even to cheat at it effectively. They finally fired him when he printed the following … I saved it … it’s rather wonderful, in its way … I’m just now calling it up … yes yes – this is it: ‘Here’s a hot tip for the winter months ahead – get hold of an old pair of tights, and then just ram your bloody old legs into them!’ Dear dear. But you see, where others abandon him, my inclination is always to keep him on, help him where I can. I have to admit, of course, that we have now reached the point where I am no longer willing or capable of doing it on my own – I need a big strong man to help me. But I would never just let him go … how could I? And marriage, it is after all a contract, you know: so many seem to forget that.

  When Amanda was still a little girl, Alan, believe it or not, he was actually faring really rather well. He had just pulled off his McVitie’s thing for the agency, and we had moved to a rather larger, quite fine, but not nearly so pretty new home – still in Chelsea though – and more or less solely on the strength of it. The trouble, of course – as it always is with him, I’m afraid to say – was that here was no sort of a launching pad for a new and soaring lucrative career, but rather its acme. He came up with a new slogan for a very fashionable spirit of the time, white rum it might well have been (please listen to this): ‘It’s Intoxicating!’ They thought he was joking, so he just barely got away with it. Ho ho Alan, they went: highly amusing. But now seriously, mate – what have you got …? Poor Alan, poor sugar: he had nothing, did he? Nothing at all. In order to have come up with this slogan, he had stayed up for nights on end, endlessly downing just pints of the damn white rum, if white rum it was (maybe for inspiration, more likely because it was free), and had been, he told me, juggling concepts concerning its clarity, utter purity – its heavenly grace, I’m afraid is what he said to me. This, I think, led him to choirs and angels and then the thin and rarefied air, way up amid a clouded sunlight in Paradise. ‘It’s Intoxicating!’ became his eureka moment: it assailed him at 4.15 in the morning of a Tuesday – he passed out on the floor, the crashing of bottles awakening Amanda.

  They gave him another chance, though – working on the premise, I think, that no one could really be quite so sincerely idiotic. They put him on to something less contentious, and far lower-profile – some sort of dog biscuit, I seem to recall. ‘Dogs like to eat it’ was the gist of his proposal, so irresistible a pitch made to the background of hugely expensive and animated storyboards, not to say a barbershop quintet; it was received into a sea of unwavering eyes. Then, of course, the anger took over: they tried him on an uplift bra whose manufacturers were seeking to break the stranglehold of the unquestioned market leader. ‘Makes Your Tits Stick Out’ was Alan’s nearly spat-out response, and well – that was the end of things, really. Rather oddly (and I’ve often thought this), just maybe five or so years later, they might actually have used it: it could have been huge.

  Sex. That sort of rather quietly expired, you know. According to these terribly forthright magazine articles that are forced into all our faces these days – Sunday supplements and so on (things that used to be for all the family) – this is hardly unusual, a number of
years on. I can’t say I even remarked upon it at the time. I just didn’t seem to care for it any more, as simple as that … though it had never been a priority with me – all the touching, the licking, and then any purring. I did not care any more to be a supine receptacle – and not just the intake either, but the outlet for an appetite. Alan said I was spurning him because he was no longer an employed and productive member of society – he said I was unmanning him; I told him to stop at once being quite so utterly ridiculous, and that he had achieved all that under his own volition, needing no sort of help from me – which may, I suppose, have been unkind, but look: we cannot, can we, squander the allotted time remaining to us just in scanning and analysing all our past remarks, assessing each one of them for sensitivity, or else an unnatural bluntness. I doubt anyway he even remembers. It is just as well though, really, that Amanda came along very early in what we might quite happily term the proceedings; Alan had been predictably amazed (mouth open, gaping like a fish) – he imagined, I think, that it was quite unplanned, as so many men, I’m told, will do. She’s sweet, Amanda – so very beautiful, and nearly a young lady, as I simply can’t ignore. She has a way of looking, though, you know – at me, I mean: I couldn’t even begin to tell you, whenever she does it, what it is she might be thinking. I ask her outright, from time to time: Amanda, my darling – whatever are you thinking? What is going on behind those dark and big blue eyes of yours? Well – you put it to a child like that, you can’t expect it, can you? An answer. No, not really.

  And then he started going rather funny. Little things, you know, that only I would notice (for who else, please tell me, would even frankly care?). One day, for instance – not really long ago – I went into the kitchen after work, and there he was at the table, quietly shelling peas. He likes, you see, to be seen to be helping me out – having a sort of dinner (he is, though, no maestro of cuisine) at least in preparation if not actually on the table, for whenever it is I can get in from my work. Sweet, really – as well as, on the other hand, the very least he could do. Anyway – there he is in the kitchen, and wearing a pinny that had Come And Get It written across the bib part of it in signal red (heaven only knows where such things come from) – shelling his peas and dropping them singly into a Pyrex bowl. I said to him gaily … oh, I don’t know – something or other, and he was most irate. What on earth has got into you this time, Alan, I asked him then – and I suppose quite petulantly. It’s you! It’s you! – he was seething (and his eyes were white with an unaccustomed fury): You’ve gone and made me lose count now! And so I’ll have to start again …! Well – not normal, is it? Not by any standards, I shouldn’t have said. And then there was the time he spent the better part of an evening attempting to fold a napkin into six – I think it was six – because he had read somewhere that it couldn’t be done. I became just slightly more concerned, though, when I found him in the spare bedroom, which we had decided to redecorate. The dust sheets were down, the room was stripped and there was Alan with an open can of paint (Apricot Blush, I think – although it might have been Aurora Dawn) and in his hand was a brand-new paintbrush, at which he was staring very warily, as if it were a rattlesnake that could at any moment strike. What, Alan, I gently enquired, do you imagine you are doing, in fact? He slowly emerged from what could have been the very deepest of trances, as he revolved his hooded eyes to meet me. I have to be sure, he said quite steadily, of just which end of this thing it is that I should actually be submerging into the depths of this rather thick and heady paint – and then I must have flinched, I think, as he suddenly barked out at me: Because if I get it wrong, then what we have on our hands here is very little better than a bloody dog’s breakfast! If … he added more quietly, you take my meaning, Susan. Mm, yes well, I was thinking. And soon after that I thought I had to have him seen to. He still goes once a week – I think the analysis calms him. I do so hope. Heaven knows it costs enough. And the spare room now he’s decided isn’t, in fact, the spare room at all – not any longer, no no no: it is formally now his private, um – ‘den’, I think is currently the favoured term. He dallied with ‘lair’ for a considerable while, our both having rejected ‘study’ as frankly just too laughable for words. I suggested all sorts of variations on the theme of bunker, burrow, sett or even simple hole, none of which he appeared to care for. The Lord knows what he gets up to in there – there’s seldom any noise, and the door, he always keeps it locked. If he were a normal man, Alan, I would imagine it had something to do with a murky obsession with on-line filth of some colour or other (though in Alan’s case, heaven knows what) – but he isn’t, is he? Normal. I shouldn’t have said so. It keeps him out of the way, though – and it must be plain that I don’t frankly care. If I do come to, however – mind what it is, what is going in there – well then I’ll fetch up one day with an axe and just bloody break the door down, I suppose.

  It’s complicated, our relationship – which is strange in a way because we are, the two of us, really very simple people, though in markedly different ways. I am simple in the sense of knowing who I am and what I want and feeling comfortable about it. Alan, well – I think he’s maybe just a little bit simple, really. My discontentment springs from knowing that I am currently being forced to behave in a way that just isn’t me. I never wanted a job, and now I have one – because all I needed was a big strong man to take good care of me, and all that I’m left with is Alan. I have to say, though, I quite like the job, the job I have now – not the job I started out with, but the job I have now – and of course I excel at it, just as I told them I would (when still I had the job I didn’t like). It’s having to do it, that’s what I object to – but then of course without it, I never would have run into him, would I? Black. It was getting to know Black that gave me the idea. Of course, he had ideas, other ideas, quite of his own – but then they will, won’t they? Men. They always will. I let him go on – it was amusing to to see him imagining himself to be so very suave, so flirtily seductive, but to me such butterfly tactics were no more than oafish and predictable (because I’ve seen it all before, so very many times). But he’s almost quite acceptable to look at, Black: no Adonis. Old, though. But better than any of that, he owns nearly all of the company. There are a few shares, not many, in trust for the son and daughter from his fairly brief and firmly obliterated marriage, and 11 per cent, oddly, seems to be held by some sort of transport union, or a pension fund, something of that kind. I know, because I looked it all up. As far as I was concerned, throughout our initial dalliances, Black was no more than my interviewee. I simply sat there, seriously considering him as a candidate for bigamy – and yes, he might well have been a good deal less twinkly, had he had the merest notion. Well I’m pleased to say that he passed the audition, but in truth there was never another even in the running. His actual name is Martin Leather, and Black, I can only suppose, has evolved over the years into a whimsical nickname. Black Leather, you see – which is, yes I agree, just a little puerile. You can see how much it pleases him, though – because men, you see, they’re all like that. Some are docile, endearing up to a point, and incapable of holding down a job – even one so simple as selling nuts and bolts – while others are, if a mite overbearing, able and willing to spend on you the money they have accumulated. There are slight and rarely interesting variations along the way, but all of these creatures are united by a cord – the rope of manliness, they would love to hear it called, but in reality it is sadly no more than a childish thread, over the years grown plump.

  And later, this very evening as a matter of fact, I have decided that the moment has come for me to put it to him. It is not before time, because Black, he has already made it quite cringingly clear to me that over the course of this dinner, somewhere divine, he is to put to me a proposition himself. But that is not the way it must be. A proposition – and I know that’s how he sees me (for how else should we have come this far?) – is, to a woman such as I, altogether different from a proposal of marriage, the heart of
my pledge, my offering to him. Which I know (of course I know) will never be utterly legal, exactly – but I have conjured an avenue whereby the bonding might be marked and made formal. For it is a waste, you know, and a mark of foolishness, to be a beautiful woman and fail to have realised that you can so very easily, with persistence and by means of the carefully eked out bestowal of precious and intimate gifts, be far more than merely the mistress; why settle for that, when you can be lord and master? The level and balance is all, of course – the timing and warmth of one’s favours – or else you risk the danger of his anger or his cooling (I know all this because I am a sensualist). But even if ultimately you do just everything for a man, he can and will find another who is willing to do anything at all, the distinction being clear. And so tonight I shall ask him the question – wondering, of course, that when there can no longer be truth, whether it is folly even to look for an honest answer.

  This psychiatrist that Susan sent me to, he really is a piece of work. Needn’t actually even be a psychiatrist, now I come to … psycho-something, anyway, so who the hell cares? They’re all of them bats as they come, just everybody knows it. The joke is, he actually seems to believe that I’m a simpleton or something, so I really must be doing rather well. It’s the way that he nods when I’m speaking that really just does it for me – and he’ll half close his eyes and tap his upper lip with the pommel of a shiny black and gold and fucking expensive pen unwittingly paid for by how many legions of loonies who have all clubbed together over so many years in order to furnish this sententious bastard with, oh – Christ knows what else. He wears glasses, it need hardly be said (thick, black) and don’t, just please don’t, all right? Get me on to his bleeding moustache. I am given to understand that seated beside me (because I do, I lie on a couch) is the omniscient sage, and whenever he nods – and he’s always nodding – I am not meant in any way to take succour in the spirit of encouragement, no no, but rather the intention is to signal his intense absorption, his wisdom in drinking it in. His name is Doctor Atherby, and he’s the sort of person that you really ought to be able to damage, or even slay at will, but they just won’t let you, you know. Well you can, of course, but you’re going to get yourself into all the sort of bother that’ll follow.