4
MADELEINE AND I ARE WAITING AT the bus stop at the bottom of Beech Grove in our summer school uniform: green print dresses, short white socks and sandals, blazer. In the summer we are allowed to leave off our hated green felt hats. Summer is thick everywhere, a sleepy, viscous, sensuous emanation; hot blasts of air, opaque with pollen from the overblown suburban gardens, ripe with wafts from bins and dog mess. We are mad with summer, chafing and irritable with sex. We’re in the fourth year, studying for our O levels; we have breasts (small in my case — luscious in Madeleine’s) and pubic hair and periods. A breeze, stirring the dust in the gutter sluggishly, tickles up round our thighs, floats our dresses — we can hardly bear it.
Our talk is rococo with insincerity, drawling, lascivious. We sound at that age huskier from smoking than we ever do later when we smoke much more. We say that the pods in the gardens are bursting with seeds, and that we like to eat ripe melons, and that the cars are covered with sticky stuff dropped off the trees — everything seems obscene with double significance, even though it’s only quarter past eight in the morning and behind us in our homes our mothers are clearing the breakfast tables, scraping soggy Rice Krispies and burnt toast crusts into the bin, wiping the plastic tablecloths. My mother is bending over Philip in his high chair, playing pat-a-cake to trick him into letting her wipe his face and hands, making his mouth spill open in delighted laughter, his eyes roll up. She lifts up his little shirt and kisses his belly; I might be jealous except that I haven’t got time to crane that way, backwards towards home and the cramped circle of old loves. My attention is all thrusting forward, onward, out of there. I’ve burned my boats, I can’t go back — or rather, I do go back, dutifully, every evening after school, and do my homework still at the same table in the same stale olive-green dining room, and still get the best marks in the class for everything, nearly everything (I even manage not to fail in physics). But it’s provisional, while I wait for my real life to begin. I feel like an overgrown giant in that house, bumping up against the ceiling like Alice in Wonderland after she’s found the cake labelled ‘Eat Me’: head swollen with knowledge and imagination, body swollen with sensation and longing.
Madeleine and I have never even kissed boys: at fifteen we don’t have any actual sexual experience whatever except a few things we’ve done with each other, experimentally, and out of desperation. (Not shamefaced afterwards — flaunting and wicked; it is the 1970s, after all. But it’s boys we want.) At an all-girls school we don’t get many chances to meet boys, although there are usually some on the bus, going in to the Grammar School. This is a part of our excitement, at quarter past eight. There are certain boys we are expecting to see, and we may even pluck up the crazy courage to speak to them, a word or two; any exchange will be dissected afterwards between Madeleine and myself in an analysis more nuanced and determined than anything we ever do to poems in English lessons. (‘What do you think he really meant when he said that his friend had said yesterday that you weren’t bad?’)
Anything can happen in the bus in the next half an hour; even something with the power to obliterate and reduce to dust the double maths, scripture, double Latin and (worst) games which lie in wait at the end of the journey — a doom of tedium, infinitely long, impossible to bear. After games, the nasty underground shower room with its concentrated citrus-rot stink of female sweat, its fleshly angsts, tinpot team spirit, gloom of girls passed over, games teacher’s ogling, trodden soaking towels.
Something has to happen.
Into our heat that morning came Valentine.
He walked down to join us at the bus stop. We’d never seen him before: into the torpor of the suburb his footsteps broke like a signal for adventure on a jaunty trumpet. I loved his swaggering walk immediately without reserve (and never stopped loving it). His glancing, eagerly amused look around him — drinking everything in, shaking the long hair back from around his face — was like a symbol for morning itself. (His energy was no doubt partly the effect of the Dodos — caffeine pills — he’d have swallowed in the bathroom as soon as his mother got him out of bed. Soon we were all taking them.) A Grammar School blazer, hooked by its loop around one nicotine-stained finger, was slung over his shoulder, his cigarette cocked up cheekily between lips curved as improbably, generously wide as a faun’s. The pointed chin was like a faun’s too, and the flaunting Caravaggio cheekbones, pushing up the thick flesh under his eyes, making them slanted and mischievous. He was tall, but not too tall; his school trousers slid down his impossibly narrow waist and hips, he tucked his shirt half in with a careless hand. The school tie others wore resentfully as a strangled knot became under his touch somehow cravat-like, flowing. The top two buttons of his shirt were undone. He was sixteen (a year older than we were).
He grinned at Madeleine and me.
At me first, then at Madeleine, which was not usual. Madeleine in her lazy indifference had bloomed, she was willowy and languorous, sex had dusted a glitter into her long curls and kitten-face, her pink cheeks. I was too small, too plump and shapeless, and my eyes, I knew, were blackly expressive pits in a too-white face. Madeleine, trying kindly to advise me on my sex appeal (I asked her), had said I might be ‘too intense’ — but I didn’t know how to disguise that. Valentine stopped at the bus stop and offered us his cigarette, me first. It was not any ordinary cigarette, oh no! (we went to school stoned for the first time, but not the last).
— Hello girls, he said, beaming. — Does this bus go into town? Do you catch it every day? That’s good. I like the look of you.
We looked at each other and giggled and asked him what he liked about us. Thinking about it, surveying us up and down, he said we looked sceptical.
What did he mean, sceptical?
Thank God we weren’t wearing our hats.
I longed for the bus not to come. Proximity to his body — a glimpse via his half-untucked shirt of hollowed, golden, masculine stomach, its line of dark hairs draining down from the belly button — licked at me like a flame while we waited. His family, he explained, had just moved into one of the posher streets behind Beech Grove. When the bus did come he sat on the back seat and took Beckett out of his rucksack: End Game. The very title, even the look of the title — its stark indiscreet white capitals on a jazzy orange cover — was a door swinging suddenly open into a new world. I’d never heard of Beckett; I think I was ploughing then through The Forsyte Saga. None of the other boys on the bus read books. Val smiled at us encouragingly, extravagantly, over the top of his.
— He was gorgeous, I liked him, Madeleine conceded as we trudged in a tide of other green-gowned inmates up the purgatorial hill from our stop to where school loomed, the old house frowning in the sunlight as a prison. — But I couldn’t actually fancy him, could you? There was something weird.
I was disappointed in her; I was already wondering if I’d find Beckett in the local library. (The librarian, warmly supportive of my forays into Edwardian belles-lettres, would startle and flinch at my betrayal.) And my heart raced at the idea that Valentine might not be at the bus stop the next day. (But he was — and was there most days, right through to the middle of the upper sixth.) Madeleine didn’t insist on her doubt, she never insisted — and I closed a door on an early intimation of danger. I wanted Val because he was different — as I was different. What I felt at my first sight of him that summer morning was more than ordinary love: more like recognition. When I read later in Plato about whole souls divided at birth into two separated halves, which move around in the world ever afterwards mourning one another and longing for a lost completion, I thought I was reading about myself and Valentine.