The Rotters' Club (46 page)

‘I don’t know,’ he admitted to Cicely. ‘I don’t know whether I agree with Grandpa or not.’

‘Christianity isn’t for me,’ she said decisively. ‘I think the Eastern religions have a lot to teach us, don’t you? And anyway, I believe the same God is probably at the bottom of every religion. What does that make me – a pantheist?’

‘A pantheist is someone who sees God in everything. I think my grandfather may be a pantheist, actually.’ Poor Grandpa. He was bedridden now, and in constant pain. Benjamin shook off the morbid thoughts that were beginning to press in on him. ‘All I know,’ he said, ‘is that I love this place very much, and that it feels very much bound up with… my future.’ Cicely looked curiously at him, not understanding. He didn’t understand either. ‘My story will end here,’ he said, slowly, but that was no better. ‘Sorry: that sounds so portentous.’

She leaned her head on his shoulder and for a while they said nothing. But she was thinking about his last words. ‘Where on earth will
my
story end?’ she wondered aloud. ‘I don’t really have a home. I don’t feel at home in Birmingham; or anywhere else, to tell the truth. Perhaps it’ll be America.’

‘Why America?’ Benjamin asked.

Her voice faltered. ‘Because that’s where I’m going next.’ She felt Benjamin tense rigid beside her, and turned to him with eyes full of sorrow for the pain she was about to cause him. ‘Oh, it’s not for ever, Ben. Just for a few months.’

‘A few
months?’

‘Just while my mother’s doing this play in New York. It’s an off-Broadway thing, it might even close after a week or two. I miss her terribly, Benjamin. It’s a good opportunity. We’ll stay in Manhattan, and have weekends on Long Island…’

‘What about your exams? I thought you were going back to school.’

‘Not until after Christmas.’ She stood up, and drew Benjamin with her. She pressed her body tightly into his and he could feel her quick breath, her beating heart. ‘Look, Ben, I’ve made lots of stupid mistakes with men in the past. You’re not a mistake. You’re the first one. The first and the last and the only. What’s happened between us here, it’s just the beginning, don’t you see? We’re going to have fabulous times together, you and me. Fabulous, unbelievable times. We’re
so
lucky, so very very lucky, to have found each other. We’re so
young,
Ben, we’re so young and already we
know!
We’re the luckiest people in the world, you and I! I’m not going to throw that away. Nothing on earth is going to make me throw that away. What’s a few months, a few months apart, compared to what we’ve got ahead of us? It’s nothing, Benjamin. Nothing at all.’

He smoothed back the hair from her forehead, and said, ‘Will you write to me?’, and she said, ‘Every day,’ and in her eyes he could see two oceans reflected, and in his eyes she could see the swelling of tears, but even through his tears Benjamin felt a monstrous, divine happiness consume him, knowing at last what it was to love and be loved.

28

When Benjamin let himself into his parents’ empty house the following afternoon, the first thing he saw lying on the doormat was a letter containing his exam results. He opened it up and found that he had achieved the highest possible grades in every subject.

The telephone rang. It was his grandmother.

‘Where have you been? We’ve been calling you non-stop.’

‘Sorry, Grandma. I’ve been out a lot. How’s Grandpa?’

‘A bit better. Sitting up today. He sends his love.’

Benjamin told her about his grades. He was glad to have somebody to tell. After he had told his grandmother he phoned Philip and told him. Philip himself had done almost as well. He would be able to go to Bristol in the autumn, no problem.

‘What about Steve?’ Benjamin asked.

Philip sighed. ‘He failed physics. Failed it outright. And he only got a D and C on the others.’

‘So what does that mean?’

‘It means no university’ll take him to do physics now. He’ll have to sit them all again next year.’

‘And Culpepper?’

‘One A, one B and one C. But the A was in physics, so basically, he got what he needed. He’ll scrape through.’ They were both glumly silent. ‘Life stinks, doesn’t it?’

After what seemed to be a decent interval, Benjamin said: ‘Well, anyway,
we
should celebrate. You and me.’

‘Yes – and Claire. And Emily. How about tonight?’

‘Not tonight: tomorrow,’ said Benjamin. ‘Tonight, I’ve got some dirty work to do.’

He hung up and looked through the rest of the post. Most of it was pretty boring stuff, but there was one thing that made him laugh. Apparently the strike at the Grunwick factory was over at last. The strikers had been defeated, according to the newspapers: but at least his father’s holiday photos from Skagen had arrived, finally, almost two years after he had sent them off to be developed.

*

Benjamin’s dirty work consisted of taking Jennifer for their last drink at The Grapevine. He told her the story of his family’s catastrophic trip to Wales and she laughed a lot. She had a throaty, slightly salacious laugh and a reliable sense of humour. He realized now that these were among the many things he liked about her. Even so, when they had finished exchanging news about holidays and exam results, he put his Guinness down on the table with careful emphasis and said: ‘Listen, Jennifer. I think we should call it a day, the two of us.’

‘Yes,’ she answered, cheerfully. ‘Of course we should.’

Benjamin was thoroughly taken aback by this. He had expected some weeping at the very least. ‘I just think,’ he explained, wondering if she had really taken in what he was saying, ‘I just think we’ve reached the end of the road.’

‘Come off it, Ben: we never even found the road, did we? We had nothing in common, for one thing. I never learned to tell my Debussy from my Delius or my Beckett from my Baudelaire. I was boring you silly.’

‘No you weren’t.’

‘Be honest with me, Benjamin. We owe each other that, at least.’

‘You might have sounded a
bit
upset,’ he protested.

‘With university to look forward to? According to the prospectus there are a hundred and twenty-six rooms in my hall of residence; and every one of them’s got its own wardrobe. That ought to keep me busy.’ She could tell that he was finding it hard to see the joke, so she admitted, reluctantly: ‘Yes, of course I’m upset. But don’t look so tragic about it. Don’t worry, Tiger – you’ll find somebody else.’

Benjamin saw the chance to regain some of his dignity. ‘I already have, as a matter of fact.’

‘Oh?’ said Jennifer, in an offhand way which pleasingly failed to convince. ‘Anyone I know?’

‘Yes, actually: it’s Cicely.’

Her reaction, again, was the last he had been expecting: there was a sudden gasp, and then her face drew itself into an expression he had never seen before, in all the months he had known her. She was looking at him with fondness and reproach and, above all, solicitude.

‘Oh, Ben…
no,’
she pleaded. ‘Not her. Not you and Cicely, for goodness’ sake.’

‘Whyever not?’ he asked. (Almost wanting to add: ‘Everyone else has been out with her.’)

‘Hasn’t anyone ever warned you about Cicely? Haven’t you noticed what she does to people? The way she chews them up and spits them out?’

He shook his head. ‘You don’t know her. You don’t know her the way I do.’

‘That,’ said Jennifer, after a short laugh, ‘is the stupidest thing I ever heard.’

But she was never going to convince him. Benjamin wasn’t in the market for common sense any more. The door had finally been flung open, the door that would take him out of his old life and into an infinitely richer one. Nothing that Jennifer could say would prevent him from stepping through. And nothing that anybody could say would ever unmake those moments he had shared with Cicely yesterday, as they had stood together on the headland and she had made her promise and he had looked into her eyes: eyes in which he saw reflected, twice over, the clear blue waters and gaping jaws of Forth Neigwl; Hell’s Mouth; the very maws of doom.

Green Coaster

But are there moments in life worth purchasing with worlds, and moments so charged, so full of emotion that they become somehow timeless, like the moment when Inger and Emil sat on that bench in the rose garden and smiled at the camera, or when Inger’s mother raised the Venetian blind to the very top of her high sittingrroom window, or when Malcolm opened up his jeweller’s box and was about to ask my sister to marry him (because he never did ask her, I know that now), and is this one of those moments, as I raise this glass of Guinness to my lips and think to myself that surely life can’t get any better, it can only be downhill from here, so how can I prolong this moment, how can I stretch it, how can I make it last for ever, because I have been to Paradise Place and nothing else can ever compare with that,
et in Arcadia ego,
as somebody once said, I forget who, but perhaps it can be done, perhaps if I don’t move, if I just hold the glass here, two inches from my mouth, and don’t even look across at the bar, where Sam is buying me another, then it will last, and no, I won’t even turn my head to look out of the window, either, to look at Cicely, my beautiful Cicely, my beautiful girlfriend – it’s true, I know it sounds incredible, but it’s true, that’s what she is – because I don’t need to look at her now, I know that I will see her again in a few hours, and in the meantime I can imagine her, I can imagine her walking away from Paradise Place and through the concrete precincts of the library buildings and across Chamberlain Square and into Victoria Square, the sway of her long back, the air of thoughtful distraction, slight other-worldliness, the way that she is never aware how other people are looking at her, turning towards her irresistibly, magnetized, how can she doubt herself when other people look at her this way, how can she believe that she is anything other than a very extraordinary person, but she doesn’t even notice it, her thoughts are elsewhere, I don’t know where most of the time, but I will find that out, it is one of the many things I will find out in the years of knowing and loving her that I have to look forward to, and then of course if my imagination fails me I always have memory to fall back on, because I have memories of Cicely now as well, amazing memories, and none more amazing than what happened between us this morning, but I will come to that carefully, slowly, every detail must be savoured, and it starts, well, I suppose it starts with the very first thing I was thinking this morning, can I remember what it was, yes, I was thinking about Dickie’s bag, bizarrely enough, but wait a minute, there is something that comes before that, the thing I was dreaming about, as is the way with dreams I can’t really remember it, it slipped away just as I was waking up, but I can remember the policemen, there were rows and rows of policemen in this dream, and I have nothing against policemen as a rule but the sight of these men filled me with dread, or filled the person in the dream with dread, am I the same person that I dream about?, that is one of the great unanswerables, but I can remember this feeling of dread, and it was to do with the fact that I couldn’t see the policemen’s faces, though I’m not sure if this was because they didn’t have faces, or because their faces were hidden by their helmets as they stood there, heads bowed, ready to charge, hundreds and hundreds of them now I come to picture it, or am I simply making that up, I don’t know, the clarity of it is fading, anyway, but it was a sinister image, I think they were about to charge into a crowd, truncheons in hand, to break up some demonstration or other, in fact of course that is where the image comes from, it’s because I was reading Doug’s article this week, Doug’s article for the
NME
about Blair Peach and what happened in Southall, that would explain it, good, and it was a terrible article, by which I don’t mean it was badly written, it was brilliant from that point of view, like all of Doug’s writing, but the things it described were terrible, unimaginable really, I wonder if he was exaggerating, somehow I can’t help hoping that he was exaggerating, although it would reflect badly on him, so anyway, getting back to this morning, that was when I woke up, in the middle of this dream, something must have woken me, I think it may have been Mum shutting the door on her way out to the school, she teaches there now, what is it, four mornings a week, she is always happier when she is working, it matters to me that everybody should be as happy as I am, even though that is scarcely possible because I am after all the luckiest person in the world, and then, as soon as I woke up, something irrelevant popped into my mind, quite irrelevant, the way it often does, and within less than the fragment of a fraction of a splinter of a second, less time even than the moment I am trying to stretch now, I had forgotten about the policemen and I was thinking about Dickie’s bag, which I haven’t thought about for years, two or three years at least, and come to that I haven’t thought about Dickie either, since he left school last summer, and by that time we weren’t calling him Dickie, of course, any more than we were calling Steve Rastus, his name was Richard Campbell, but in the fourth form, I think it was, we used to call him Dickie, it must have been meant rudely, we were somehow implying that he was fey or effeminate or something, though I don’t know why he should have been singled out in that respect, we all used to camp it up in those days, pretend to be queer or gay or whatever you want to call it, but so much of what we did now seems inexplicable, including picking on Richard Campbell, but the even stranger thing was how we all used to make a big joke out of Dickie’s bag, who started it, I wonder, well, I would guess it was Harding, that always seems to be the safest assumption, though from what corner of his twisted mind he retrieved this one I shall never know, but let’s assume it was Harding, at any rate, who decided that Dickie’s bag should become not so much an object of derision but – and it sounds crazy, I’m fully aware of that – an object of sexual desire, a sex object if you like, and the way it worked was this, Dickie would arrive in the form room every morning, carrying his bag, which was an ordinary Adidas sports bag, in black vinyl, a bit battered, but almost identical to a hundred other bags which people brought into school every morning, and then the first person who saw him would shout out ‘Dickie’s bag! Dickie’s bag!’, like a sort of hunting cry, and then everybody in the room would run towards Dickie and grab hold of his bag and snatch it away from him, and then they would fall upon it (why do I say they? I took part in this as well, so
we
snatched it away from him,
we
fell upon it) and what followed I can only describe as a kind of gang-rape, as the bag used to disappear beneath a sea of bodies and there would be a collective orgasmic groan and we would all take it in turns to hump Dickie’s bag, there is no other word for it, while its owner looked on despairingly, resigned by now to this obscene daily insult to which he alone, for reasons which he could probably never fathom, seemed to be condemned, and I thought about this little ritual in bed this morning and I have to confess that a smile came to my face, more than a smile, actually, I found myself laughing, chuckling to myself in bed, laughing at the sheer vindictive, childish fun of it, and I also found myself wondering, as I wonder about so many of my schoolfriends these days, what Richard Campbell is doing now and how he is getting on at university and whether he will look back on what we used to do to his bag in twenty years’ time and laugh about it himself, because the alternative, I suppose, is that it will have marked his character forever and turned him into a friendless sociopath or perhaps even a murderer or at the very least ensured that he will never be able to have a normal sex life, but that’s all in the future and don’t think I’m not going to come to that, don’t think I’m going to be neglecting the future, but right now I’m thinking about this morning, the feeling I had when I woke up and I forgot about my dream and I allowed those memories of Dickie’s bag to shimmer through my head, and then it suddenly occurred to me what a strange, expectant atmosphere there was in the house, how quiet everything was, because it was after nine o’clock, and Mum had gone to work and Dad had gone to work and Lois had gone to work and Paul would be at school, although he hadn’t even been sleeping there the night before, now I came to think of it, he was staying over at a friend’s house, which meant that his bedroom was empty, except that it wasn’t empty at all, and I should have been going to work as well, but there was a good reason why I wasn’t, which was Cicely, needless to say, Cicely had stayed the night with us last night, she had slept in Paul’s bedroom and it was the second time she had done this, but there was a crucial difference this time, namely that
there was no one else in the house with us this morning,
we had the house
entirely to ourselves,
so no wonder it felt strange and expectant, and no wonder I had decided that I was going to phone in sick and tell Martin that I’d be taking the morning off, but even so there was no time to lose, every second we had alone together was priceless, so I had to think what I was going to do, I had to think how I was going to handle this situation, because we’ve been apart a long time, Cicely and I, eight months, eight long desolate months she’s been in New York with her mother, whose play was a huge success, unfortunately for me, and although we wrote to each other every week and I flew over there to be with them for a few days in January, it’s still been difficult, being back together again, I can see that she is finding it hard to adjust, and perhaps I have been making it too obvious, at times, that I am aware of this, perhaps I have been too solicitous, too tentative, it’s part of my character, after all, oh yes, I am developing a tiny little element of self-awareness at last, and not before time some people might say (like Doug, for instance), but it meant that I was not at all sure how to proceed this morning, at first, so I ended up taking what some people (like Doug, for instance) might have regarded as the safest route, I went downstairs and made a cup of tea and took it up to her, yes, tea!, I’m sure Uncle Glyn would have had something to say about that, the multiplicity of uses which the English have found for the humble cup of tea, how many emotions we manage to hide behind it, how many subterfuges we manage to disguise with it, and I suppose tea is a legacy of colonialism as well so he would really have had a field day with that one, I’m sure, but who cares, who cares what Uncle Glyn might have said, I was not thinking about him, as I carried our two mugs up the creaking stairs, it’s the eleventh, the eleventh one that creaks most loudly, how well you get to know your own house after eighteen years, I suppose it’s not so surprising, and I was thinking about what I was going to say to Cicely when I woke her up, I was thinking about words, as usual, I am a great man for my words, I have come to believe that you can do almost anything with words but I am also beginning to learn, at least God, I hope so, it would not be before time, beginning to learn that there are some situations in which words are not the most important thing, there are some situations which call for something beyond words, and those are the situations that tend to confound me, as a rule, and so it was this morning, when I pushed open the door of Paul’s bedroom and came in backwards with my two mugs of tea and set them down on his bedside table and I was still trying to think of what I would say to Cicely after I had woken her up, trying to get the words right, and I can’t even remember what they were, now, because it turned out that she was awake already, I soon found that out, she was wide awake and the first thing she did when I sat down on the bed beside her was to sit up, and she was naked, oh, God! she was completely naked, I was wearing my pyjamas, I must have looked ridiculous, there is nothing alluring about pyjamas, but this didn’t seem to bother her, because she sat up slowly, sleepily, and she draped her arms around my neck, her bare arms, her wonderful bare arms, I could think about those for a while, couldn’t I, but I can’t, my mind is racing on, and her mouth was half open and she planted her lips against mine and I could feel the touch of her breasts against my chest and in all the years I have known Cicely because, my God, we have known each other for more than two years now, nobody could accuse us of rushing things, it had taken us long enough to get to this point, but we were there now, we were on the very threshold of Paradise Place, and in all the years I have known Cicely this was the first time I had seen her body let alone touched it, and I put my hand to her breast and the softness and the smoothness of it were indescribable, and meanwhile this kiss, she was kissing me so tenderly, we have kissed before, many times, there was no shortage of kissing when I went to see her in New York, that’s for sure, but there was something new about this one, as if all the kisses we had had before were leading up to this one, as if all the moments we had spent together, and how many have there been? – another of the unanswerables, nobody knows what a moment is, how long it lasts, you can’t measure it, can’t talk about it, an infinite number, I suppose, we are in the realms of infinity – as if all those moments, anyway, were suddenly rushing together, converging, fusing into this one great explosive moment, which began with her draping her arms around my neck and lasted for how long, I don’t know, I have no idea at all how long we were in that bedroom together, in Paul’s bed, beneath his stupid posters, one of them a big picture of one of those girls from
Charlie’s Angels,
wearing a bikini and grinning blankly, and the other, unbelievably, a picture of Margaret Thatcher with the slogan ‘Vote Conservative!’ underneath it, yes!, I lost my virginity twice, in effect, once with an item of luggage and once beneath a poster of Mrs Thatcher, not the most auspicious start to a sexual career, I must admit, but I can’t say that I gave her much attention this morning, during those ten minutes or three hours or however long it was because I swear to you that I have never in my life seen, and never will see again, I’m convinced, anything as beautiful as what Cicely showed to me when she lay back in the bed and pulled away the duvet and held out her arms to me, there are simply no words to describe it, well, all right, there are, but they belong somewhere else, they have been claimed by Culpepper’s magazines, they don’t convey the loveliness, let alone the