We didn’t mind. It was all we could afford. We even relished the way we scooped out for ourselves a little haven, oblivious of the squalor around us. We were very young; we had only just left school. We were absorbed with each other, and we didn’t think about what we’d do in a month’s time, or two months’, or when the winter came or we had to find somewhere else to live. We made love insatiably, the way very young people in love can. And when that summer arrived, endlessly sunny and hot, we thought of it as a blessing on ourselves, despite the dust and the smells, because it was possible to live quite well in that room, with its scant furniture, draughty windows and twin gas ring, so long as the weather was good. We even saved on the few clothes we had between us, because, most of the time, with the dirty windows up and the hot air swimming in from the street, we wore nothing at all.
We had run away because that was the only way Clancy and I could go on seeing each other without Clancy’s parents stopping us. We hadn’t run far. Clancy’s parents lived in a big, elegant Regency house by the park in Greenwich, and we knew that by going a couple of miles away, into the kind of area they preferred to think didn’t exist, we’d be as safe as if we’d fled to the ends of the country. Clancy’s father was a sort of financial expert who acted in an advisory capacity to the government and knew people in the House of Lords, and her mother came from good, sound pedigreed stock. They were not the kind of people to drag the police into a hunt for their daughter. But it was not beyond them to employ some private agency to track us down. And this was one of the reasons why, despite the scorching weather, we seldom left our third floor room, and when we did we kept a sharp eye open for men in slow-moving cars hugging the kerb, who might suddenly pull up, leap out and bundle Clancy inside.
Clancy’s family was small. There were only Clancy herself, her mother and father and an ageing uncle who lived in seclusion in an old manor house in Suffolk where Clancy had spent summers when she was small. Clancy’s father was obsessively proud of the fact that he was descended from a once noble line which could be traced back to the reign of Henry VIII; and — like Henry VIII himself — he had turned cold, as Clancy grew up, towards his wife and daughter because they were a perpetual reminder that he had no son. There was nothing, apparently, he could do to change this fact; but he was dead-set on preventing the only remaining eligible member of the family from being absorbed into the riff-raff.
I only met Clancy’s mother and father once, and that was by accident one Saturday afternoon when Clancy had promised me her parents wouldn’t be back till late. I had gone to the house in Greenwich. We made love on Clancy’s bed, looked at her photo albums and listened to the Beach Boys. We were sitting under the vine in the conservatory and Clancy was urging me to sample her Dad’s stock of malt whisky, when her parents suddenly turned up, having changed their plans for the evening. Clancy’s father asked me in icy, eloquent tones who the hell I thought I was and told me to get out. It was as if my presence in the house had no connection whatsoever with Clancy, as if I were some random, alien intruder. He was a tall, poised, steel-haired man with an air of having had the way of dealing with such situations bred into him and of merely summoning it automatically when required. I remember thinking that he and Clancy’s mother, and perhaps Clancy too, belonged to some completely foreign world, a world that had ceased to exist long ago or perhaps had only ever existed in people’s minds; so that whenever I thought of Clancy’s parents, looking out from our tenement window, I had to make an effort to believe they were real.
My own parents were no obstacle to us. They had had me late in life, so there was a big gap between our ages, which, oddly enough, smoothed our relations. They did not care what I did with my life. They had a council house in Woolwich and no shining example to set me. I’d gone to a large comprehensive; Clancy had gone to a classy girls’ school in Blackheath; and we might never have known each other if it wasn’t for Eddy, a big, hulking, raw-faced boy, who later joined the Royal Artillery, who told me in his matter-of-fact way that he had robbed two girls from Clancy’s school of their virginity; and urged me to do the same. With rather less swagger, I followed Eddy’s bidding (“Tell them they’ll thank you for it afterwards”), but, unlike Eddy, I found the initial conquest wasn’t an end in itself.
Clancy’s parents soon found out — Clancy had a knack of defiant truthfulness. I don’t know what outraged them more: the knowledge that their daughter was no longer intact and the possible scandal of some schoolgirl pregnancy — or the mere fact that Clancy associated with a boy from a council estate. I knew what I would say to Clancy’s father if I ever had to face him. I would repeat to him something I’d read in the letters of Gauguin (my favourite artist at that time and the only artist I knew anything about). Gauguin says somewhere that the Tahitians believed, unlike Europeans, that young people fall in love with each other because they have made love, not the other way round. I would explain that Clancy and I were good, regular Tahitians. But when the opportunity arose that Saturday afternoon — despite the sun shining through the vine leaves in the conservatory and Clancy’s thin summer dress and the malt whisky in my head — Gauguin’s South Sea paradise, which was only an image for what I felt for Clancy, paled before the cold aplomb of her father.
But Clancy’s uncle did not share the parental disdain. This I discovered in about our third week in the tenement. Clancy had to go out now and then to draw money from her Post Office account, which was our sole source of income at that time. One day she returned with, of all things, a letter from her uncle. Apparently, she had written to him, explaining everything, confident of his trust, immediately after our flight, but for complete security had not given an address and had asked him to reply via a Post Office in New Cross. Clancy showed me the letter. It was written in a shaky hand and was full of fond platitudes and breezy assurances, with a certain wry relish about them, to the effect that Clancy had enough sense now to lead her own life.
I said: “If he’s so much on our side, why don’t we go to him?” And I had a momentary vision, in Bermondsey, of dappled Constable landscapes.
“That’s just where they’ll look for us first.”
“But he won’t tell them that you’ve got in touch.”
“No.”
And then Clancy explained about her uncle.
He had always had a soft spot for her and she for him, since the days when she used to play muddy, rebellious games round his estate in the summer. As she grew up (her uncle lost his wife and his health declined), it became clear that there were strong temperamental differences between him and her parents. He did not care for her father’s sense of dignity or for his precious concern for the family name. He would be quite happy, he said, to sink heirless beneath the Suffolk soil. And he disapproved of the way Clancy was being rigorously groomed for some sort of outmoded high society.
“So you see,” said Clancy, putting away the letter, “I had to tell him, didn’t I? It’s just what he’d want.”
She kissed the folded notepaper.
“And another thing”—she got up, pausing deliberately before she went on. “I know for a fact when Uncle dies I’ll get everything; he won’t leave a thing to Mum and Dad. So you see — we’re all right.”
She said this with a kind of triumph. I realised it was an announcement she must have been saving up till the right moment, in order to make me glad. But I wasn’t glad — though I put on a pleased expression. I’d never really reflected that this was what Clancy’s background meant — the possibility of rich legacies, and I had never seen myself as a story-book adventurer who, having committed a daring elopement, would also gain a fortune. Nevertheless, it wasn’t these things which disturbed me and (for the first time) cast a brief shadow over my life with Clancy. It was something else, something I couldn’t understand. Clancy stood, smiling and pleased, at the window with the sun coming in behind her. She was wearing jeans and one of those tops made from gauzy, flimsy materials which she liked, I think, precisely because when she stood in front of the light you could see through them. It was the first fine weather of the spring, the first time we had been able to lift up our window wide to let some of the stinking air from inside out and some of the less stinking air from outside in. We’d been living together for three weeks, fugitives in a slum. The way happiness comes, I thought, is as important as the happiness itself.