The Rotters' Club (47 page)

mystery,
yes, that’s the word, the mystery of what Cicely showed to me this morning and what I reached out to touch, because after slipping out of those absurd pyjamas, I reached out to touch her and when I did, when my amazed fingertips made their first contact with that place, Paradise Place, her face changed, I was watching her face, and she smiled, and made a noise, a tiny noise, something like a whisper, and she stirred among the bedclothes but I was looking at her smile, and it wasn’t that she was smiling with pleasure, or happiness, it was a smile that went somehow beyond these things, and oh, I’m not saying that I’m the world’s greatest lover, far from it, just ask Jennifer Hawkins, for one thing, I’m not saying that I can transport a woman to the pitch of ecstasy with one touch of my fingers, but with Cicely this morning there was something about our feelings for each other, something about the things that had passed between us, over the years, something about the time it had taken us to reach this point, that made it very different, I mean different for her, because this was really my first time but it wasn’t her first time and yet afterwards she said to me that it was, in one sense, she said that it was her first time with somebody that she loved, and perhaps that’s why she smiled so mysteriously, that word again, I keep coming back to it, when I touched her, touched her between the legs, and then crouched over her, and smelled her, and then tasted her, tasted her with the very tip of my tongue, and I can taste her still, yes, the taste of Cicely is still on my tongue, not alone now, not unmixed, I can taste Cicely and Guinness, and oh, I hope the taste of her never goes away, but I shall stop now, think of something else, come back later to my first taste of her, it is too good to think about only the once, and now I am going to imagine Cicely again, walking across Victoria Square as she must be at this moment, yes, imagination and memory, that’s it, those are my two weapons in the fight against time, my pitch for infinity, as long as I have those I have nothing to fear, she is thinking about me now, I know she is, unless of course she is thinking about Helen, which is possible, that after all is the reason she wanted to go home so quickly, she phoned her mother just now, about fifteen minutes ago, and her mother told her there was a letter from America for her, a letter from Helen, so perhaps Cicely is thinking about Helen but I don’t believe she is, I believe she is thinking about me, but is she imagining me or remembering me?, I shall never know, but here’s an idea, I could imagine her remembering me, or I could remember her imagining me, and that way it could go on forever – which of course is exactly what I want! – like a hall of mirrors or indeed a Hall of Memory, yes, I like that phrase, I could use that, I could put it in a poem or use it as the title of a chapter or a tune or something, and what makes it so perfect is that I am looking at the Hall of Memory right now, because I am sitting in The Grapevine which I have noticed, only this morning, I never noticed it before, but it is situated in a square called Paradise Place, and straight through the window I can see through to the civic square, with the Masonic Hall and Municipal Bank on one side, to the left, and Baskerville House to the right, and between them is the Hall of Memory, built of Portland stone and Cornish granite, and topped with a handsome white dome (I only know about the stone and the granite because Philip told me, when he came home for the holidays and we were walking around here, he was full of information about all these buildings, seemed to have been making a proper study of them, I was chastened, as usual, because I am quite capable of living for years in a city without noticing a thing about its architecture, without even thinking that the buildings around me have been designed like works of art and have histories to them, but Philip is becoming quite a specialist in all this, and so he was telling me, for instance, about the Hall of Memory and how it was meant to be much grander than the one they finally built, in 1925, after the Great War most of the money they had set aside for it had to go towards housing instead, and in the end it only cost #35,000, and the figures are by a Birmingham sculptor called Albert Toft, and the day that it was opened more than 30,000 people queued outside to file through and pay their respects to the men who had died in the war, yes, Philip knew all of this, and it was wonderful, to walk around Birmingham with him that day and to see these familiar places as if for the first time, made new again by his knowledge and enthusiasm), and so today everything about my life seems to be changing, even the city is transforming itself around me, I am sitting in Paradise Place and looking into the Hall of Memory and suddenly it’s as if everything refers to me and Cicely, everything is a metaphor for the way we feel, somehow the entire city has become nothing less than a life-size diagram of our hearts, and I could almost shout with the joy of it, I want to run out into the square and shout to anyone who will listen,
I LOVE THIS CITY!, I LOVE THIS CITY!,
but as you might have guessed I’m not going to do that, it’s not exactly in character, and besides I don’t have to move yet, I’m still locked into my moment and Cicely is still walking somewhere through Victoria Square, thinking of me, remembering, yes, I’ve decided what it is that she’ll be remembering now, she’s remembering the day, eight days ago, when I drove down to Heathrow to pick her up, and I have to imagine what she would have thought, or felt (felt, Benjamin,
felt,
concentrate on feelings for a change) when she came through the gate into the Arrivals hall and saw me waiting there, picked out my face from among the crowd, how anxious I must have looked, how transparent, my yearning and my nervousness, but all of that dissolved when I saw her eyes light up in recognition and her face break into a smile and she came towards me and put her bag down and brushed her hair away from her eyes, it is always falling across her eyes, and then she hugged me, she was wearing a suede jacket, I remember the texture of her suede jacket, it had things dangling from it, what are they called, tassles or something, like a cowboy, how on earth am I ever going to be a writer if I can’t describe clothes properly, perhaps I should be a composer after all, so we hugged and then she brought her lips up to mine, it was like everything was in slow motion, I wonder if everybody was looking at us, it felt as though they were, and, oh, to be kissing her again, I could hardly believe it, it was three months since we had seen each other, I had tried not to doubt her during that time, but once or twice, it’s inevitable I suppose, you find yourself wondering, not about other men, I was never worried about that, but feelings fade, it happens all the time, or so I’m told, so I’ve read, but when she kissed me that afternoon I knew that everything was all right, she is true, my Cicely is true, true to the promises she made last summer, up on the headland, the headland at Rhîw, I am so lucky, and then we drove home, it was a long drive, the longest I have ever done in fact, and what did we talk about?, we had been writing letters, long letters, so we’d heard each other’s news, anyway I didn’t have much news, there is not much to say about my job, it is just a job in a bank, something to tide me over until I go to Oxford this autumn, although lately it has become more interesting, I’ll admit that, now that I’ve been moved out of the branch and into the regional office, but Cicely first of all wanted to know about the strikes, people in America had been telling her about the strikes, they had been reading about them in the newspapers, she had heard it all second-hand, I don’t believe Cicely herself has ever read a newspaper in her life, but from what her friends had been saying she had formed the impression that the whole country was on the point of collapse, the British papers were calling it the winter of discontent and it’s true that the weather had been incredibly bad and almost everyone in the country had been on strike, at some point, but this picture they were painting, rubbish piled high in the streets and corpses rotting in the back rooms of funeral parlours because there was nobody to bury them, I told her it was all an exaggeration, it wasn’t nearly as bad as that, but the Americans had been full of it, apparently, they were convinced that Britain was turning into a Communist state and we were on the verge of economic disaster and the army was going to have to be brought in and there was practically going to be a civil war, and Cicely had believed all of this, I could see now why Doug had sometimes been irritated by her, she is the very opposite of him, naive, credulous in some ways, but that is one of the things I love about her, she has the capacity, still, to be endlessly astonished by the world, and Doug has lost that capacity, if he ever had it, whereas I can play Cicely a piece of music, say (although not one of mine, no, I don’t think I will be doing that again, not for a while), and she is invariably overwhelmed by it, taken over, and then hungry for information about the composer, hungry for the things that only I can tell her, which I suppose is flattering to me, I mustn’t pretend that that’s not part of the attraction, but as an example, while I think of it, of her naivety, is that really the word, ignorance Doug would call it, but then that misses the innocent quality of it, the wide-eyed wonderment, whatever, the example that comes to mind is when I went to visit her in New York and I asked her one day whether Carter was still popular with the Americans, and she didn’t understand me, she had no idea who I was talking about, she had been living in this country for four months and she didn’t know the name of the President, or at least she
knew
it, she had heard it, but it had made no impression on her, it would not automatically have occurred to her, hearing the name Carter, that people were talking about the President, and she did not know that James Callaghan was the Prime Minister of Britain, either, but what does it matter, that’s what I want to know, what does it really matter if you don’t know what’s going on in the world around you, what difference does it make, we can’t change things anyway, nothing that Cicely does or I do or even Doug for that matter is ever going to change the world, unless of course I write something that alters the course of musical history, or Cicely’s poetry touches the hearts of a whole generation of women and changes their lives and makes her incredibly famous, because she’s writing poetry, now, she only confessed this to me a few weeks ago, in one of her letters, and then I asked her to send me some of them, and she said that most of them weren’t finished but then she did send me three, or two and a half, anyway, and they are good, really good, I am not just saying that because I am in love with her, she has an ear for rhythm and she uses words well and carefully, she is very exacting, very tough with herself when she writes, which makes her much better at writing than she ever was at acting, and makes me think that perhaps who knows one of these days we might both get something published or recorded, and we could become one of those famous artistic couples, except that I don’t want to be famous, I don’t want either of us to be famous, I just want us to live together and work together and be good at what we do, so that in forty years’ time (yes, I am going to think about the future now, it is not just by visiting the past that I can escape the present, I can use the future as well, because as Eliot said,
Time present and time past/Are both perhaps present in time future,/And time future contained in time past,
and thank you Mr Serkis for teaching me that, thank you King William’s for introducing me to so much that now echoes and rebounds inside my head, and sustains me, I am grateful, really I am, whatever I might have said and thought about you in less charitable moods), in forty years’ time we shall be living – where shall we be living? – oh, in a cottage, of course, or actually what I have always fancied is a converted mill, a watermill, down by the riverbank, somewhere in the country, not far from here, the Cotswolds perhaps or maybe Shropshire, less of a cliché, although the other possibility of course is that we have inherited Plas Cadlan, Glyn and Beatrice will surely have popped off in forty years’ time and who else are they going to leave it to?, that’s a nice thought, certainly, but I have got the watermill in my mind’s eye now so let’s run with that one, yes, there we both are, getting on for sixty I suppose, and have we got children?, God, it’s a bit early to start thinking about that, but yes, of course we’ve got children, or have had children, rather, because they will have left home by now and we are living alone again, quite alone, but even after forty years we are so untired of each other, so hungry to discover more about each other, that it’s actually a relief that the kids have gone at last, and besides, it gives me more time to work on the new symphony, because where am I in the cycle at this point, number seven or eight I should think, the works of my late maturity, it was the ‘Birmingham Symphony’ that made my name and reputation but these quieter, more reflective, more dissonant and complex works are the ones that people will recognize, in the years to come, as the real masterpieces, and of course my settings of Cicely’s poetry!, because that’s the great thing about her starting to write, now we can collaborate, so this is going to be a true partnership, a true partnership of equals, and as well as working together at the watermill, during the daytimes, when evening falls we shall entertain, we shall give the kind of dinners that people will never forget, people will spend evenings at our house that will become treasured memories (well done, Benjamin, you’re really going for it here, you are imagining the future of the future, and what people will remember when they get there, back in their potential pasts, my God, time present doesn’t stand a chance against this kind of opposition, it doesn’t have an earthly), and just to take one evening, for instance, who are the guests, well, obviously, there will be Philip and his wife, and Doug and his wife, and Claire and her husband, and Emily and her husband, which makes eight, plus me and Cicely makes ten, a good number, but should we have invited Steve?, why have we not invited Steve?, is it because his future seems so uncertain, after what happened last year, and I just cannot envisage where he is going to be in forty years’ time, or is there another reason, a nastier reason, for excluding Steve from my little fantasy, you can never tell, these things go very deep, and when Cicely and I went to visit him the other day there was certainly an element of hostility, I thought, of bitterness, even though he didn’t hold me to blame personally, a gulf had opened up between us, a little gulf, if there can be such a thing, but I shall be optimistic about this, I am full of hope today, convinced that everything will be for the best, so of course Steve will be there, Steve and his wife, which makes twelve in all, which is an even better number, but do we have enough bedrooms to put everybody up in?, I don’t see why not, we are talking about a bloody watermill here, for Christ’s sake, we ought to be able to run to six bedrooms, so everyone is staying the night, and it gets to be about two o’clock in the morning, and we’ve finished the last of the wine and decided to leave the clearing up for now, so Cicely and I are upstairs in our bedroom, which is right next to the river, we can hear the noise of running water as we get undressed together, and then we fall into bed, very tired but happy, so happy, and not so tired either that we don’t want to reach out and touch each other, it is not that we are at it like rabbits every hour God sends at the age of sixty-odd, no, but desire hasn’t faded, yet, not by any means, we still sleep naked, for one thing (no pyjamas!, absolutely not!, no old man’s stripey pyjamas for me at this age), and it only takes a second or two for Cicely to climb on top of me, tonight, I am hard and ready for her, just like this morning, and she takes hold of me and eases me inside her, yes, Oh God, yes, just like this morning, this morning in my brother’s bedroom, that was exactly what she did, after I had raised my head from between her legs, from Paradise Place, where I had learned so many things, uncovered so many secrets, oh, Cicely, the taste of you, will it still be the same, will everything still be the same between us in forty years’ time?, always, Cicely, always be new to me, that’s all we must ask of each other, new like this morning, new like your body which I had never seen before but today I saw all of it, you gave me all of it, your beautiful young tall pale slender body, when you sat astride me I reached up and began to kiss your breasts and your hair fell across my face, the hair which you made me cut off all those years ago and I still have it, oh yes, I shall never throw that bag away, and this morning your blonde hair fell across my face, so that I had not just your nipple but some of your hair in my mouth too as you reached down and touched me and pulled me towards you and squeezed me inside you and then with your other hand you touched my cheek, drew my face up towards you again so that we could kiss, the softest kiss, the gentlest kiss you would ever believe, and in all the years I have spent trying to imagine how it would feel to be inside a woman, this was nothing like it, no, I had never even been close, because it wasn’t just the sensation, it wasn’t just the clinging of your skin against my skin, no, it was the generosity of you, the givingness of what you were doing with your body (that’s it, yes!