In the end, I wanted his approval too.
I can’t explain the power Andrew had over me, for a while.
That’s just what I said to him: — I can’t explain the power you have over me. Rashly — but he made me behave as if there was no point in self-preservation. And he said, — It’s biological. There’s nothing you feminists can do about it. You can tinker around with all the rest but you can’t change the shape of fucking, where you need me to overwhelm you. Don’t you? Unless you want a man to love you like a baby.
This racked me at the time, because it seemed unanswerably true: that you couldn’t reverse the male gesture of possession and penetration which was at the heart of sex. Part of Andrew’s attraction certainly was his huge, lean strength — I thought of his size as a force. I supposed it was what made him able to drink so much without losing himself. He drank wine, mostly; he’d picked up the habit abroad. When he was drunk he wasn’t garrulous. If he was ever sober, he was silent. His need for the drink and the drugs seemed to come out of a narrow concentration in him that was almost puritanical, some exacting demand he made on life that could not otherwise be met.
Andrew’s conscious attention mostly wasn’t on women; he only really warmed to the company of men. He described legendary drinkers, scoffers and fighters he’d met on his wanderings, in Thessaloniki, Chania, Barcelona. He sparred with Neil, sizing him up. And he liked Nicky. Everyone liked Nicky. Nicky talked to Andrew about his work building the bypass: he was a carpenter’s assistant, unloading hot sacks of cement fresh from the factory, putting together the wooden frames into which the mixed cement was poured. Andrew didn’t even mind Baz; he held him in long conversation at our kitchen table once, when Baz came looking for Jude while she hid upstairs. Baz was twitchy from whatever he was taking that had cranked him up so high, he looked harmless and foolish beside Andrew’s uncompromising bulk. All the time they were talking, Andrew was rolling up in his thick, deft fingers — sticking papers, dribbling a line of loose tobacco from his pouch, cooking the dope lump in his lighter flame, chipping into it with his thumbnail. The ritual absorbed Baz and calmed him. I was making supper at the stove and pretended to be taking no notice of them — I could see through the window that Lukie was safe, playing outside in the garden.
— How would you feel, Baz tried to explain (strained, focused on something deep inside which ate him up) — if she was your girl and they wouldn’t let you see her? Wouldn’t you worry? All I want is for her and me to talk. I need to talk to her.
— You’ve got the wrong end of the stick there, Andrew said almost jovially, sweeping up dropped shreds of tobacco into his palm. — The only person not wanting you to talk to Jude is Jude. I’m afraid she doesn’t like you, my friend.
Baz was only hurting himself, Andrew suggested, by chasing after her. He might as well give up and go home, find someone else. (At the time, Baz almost seemed to take it from him.) But Andrew never put on that teasing expansiveness with women. When Jude thanked him for fending off Baz, he only batted away his smoke with his hand, warning that she should be more careful what company she kept. He told me later that he thought her embroideries were the cheapest kind of sensationalist trick. Sheila was tolerated, a comrade left over from the childhood he had abandoned. And he dismissed Daphne’s organising energy, saying she made him think of a lady magistrate; he called her radical feminism ‘politics for girls’. I thought that Andrew must despise me because I was so ignorant and I hadn’t read anything. I never contributed to the kinds of conversation that he liked.
One evening while he was arguing with Neil, I went upstairs to check on Lukie, saying I thought I heard him cry out. Actually I was bored by their argument — about anarchy, which Neil was keen on and Andrew despised. Lukie was fast asleep, his face beautifully clear, emptied of the busy day, cheeks flushed, one arm thrown out across the pillow. I lingered out of reach of the raised voices, moving around in my bare feet between our empty rooms in the half-dark that was never complete because of the street lamps: the windows were all open, it was still summer. Outside it rained steadily and persuasively, drenching the gardens; the smells of wet grass, and rain steaming off the hot tar of the road, mingled with the incense we burned in the house and the musty carpets.
Andrew must have followed me upstairs. I was suddenly aware of him blocking my way when I tried to pass him on the landing; he stopped me clumsily but peremptorily, as though I must know what he wanted. Confused, I wondered if he was angry with me for some reason. Then — buried in the completed blackness against his sour heavy clothes, nose and throat full of new intimacy with the unknown of his body — I was more mystified and gratified than anything. Or, I felt as if I was falling through the lit surface of things, out into a new realm of experience where everything was upside-down, and darker. As soon as I guessed that this darker world existed, I wanted to enter it and try what was there. Honestly, until that moment, I hadn’t even liked him.
Of course, this way of telling the story — this stuff about the darkness — is also a romance, a dangerous romance. And looking back, I understand now that Andrew liked me because he made a mistake about me. Because I’d had a baby and hadn’t gone to university, and because I was shy in those days and painted my eyes and could cook and was wary of joining in the arguments, he misinterpreted my character: which was fair enough, all the signs were pretty misleading. In his mythology women ought to be intuitive and enigmatic and wholesome — a safe place in which the lights of male striving and intellect could heal themselves. Whereas I was hoping: now he’ll listen to what I think. To this man, I thought, I can tell the truth at last.
Each of us wanted the other to be the darkness, listening.
Nicky made drawings of the men he worked with on the bypass — I still have them. They are done in pencil in a notebook when they were taking a break, or whenever he wasn’t busy and the foreman wasn’t looking. He told me the men teased him for it but they gathered round to look at themselves: hunched against vibration, tamping the road surface with a rammer; or hunkered over the nub of a cigarette and a mug of tea, paging a thumbed-soft copy of some porn magazine; or craning, hands on levers, to see out of the cab of an excavator. Pages are torn out of the notebook where he gave sketches away. (These men also called him Blackie and gave him the dirtiest work to do, emptying the portable latrines.)
Nicky had lost his way at the art college; the teachers weren’t interested in his drawings from real life. The paintings he did — his final show was a series of repeated marks in thick acrylic, built into rectangular blocks — were quite striking and seemed to impress people. He took them very seriously and they got him good marks. But I don’t think he really knew why he was painting them or what they meant. He wasn’t clever, not in that way. Although I never said so, I could always see through those paintings to an emptiness behind. I can’t see through the little drawings in that notebook, or the ones in other notebooks which he did of me and Lukie and the others — so exact and sure and graceful. The surface of these drawings has its own interior which I can’t penetrate, no matter how hard I stare. (And I don’t stare, not all that often. All this happened long ago, it’s history now.)