I pointed out that a whore was paid for being fucked; she had fucked me rather than vice versa and had refused my offer of money. She said, “I told you I don’t want your money.”
“Then you aren’t a whore,” I said. She said, “Aye, alright, but I’m still a bad girl. I’ve done things, I do things that are utterly wrong, completely rotten. You see I —”
Not wanting to be horrified I firmly interrupted saying, “Say no more. I hold myself to be indifferent honest, but know such things of me it were better my mother had never bore me.”
She stopped sobbing and asked what the hell did that mean? I said I was quoting Hamlet by William Shakespeare, and in Shakespeare’s time “indifferent” meant “ordinary”, so Hamlet meant he was as honest as most folk, but had still done things that meant the world would be better if he had never existed. She said, “Does that mean everybody is as bad as me?”
“That’s what Hamlet meant.”
“Even you?”
“Certainly,” I said, though doubting it. I was a fair kind of school teacher and never needed to use the belt in any class I had charge of, though until 1986 in Britain it was legal to do so. Even in primary schools a well-dressed, confident male teacher could torture the hand of a little girl in districts where working class parents thought that commonplace. When headmaster I told my staff not to use it, but to send troublemakers they could not handle to me, and every week four or five came to my door, usually the same four or five. Most were very active kids incapable of sitting still, or had bad manners learned at home which teachers had no time to correct. I am now ashamed of having belted these kids, but had I not done so my staff would have felt unsupported, insecure, so I tortured small children at least four times a week. Too disgusted to work out how many times a year, how often in a lifetime of teaching I said in a firmer voice, “Yes, perhaps even worse than you, though not as bad as Eichman.”
Zoe, highly interested, said, “Tell me about it.”
I said, “No. I will not tell you how rotten I have been if you don’t tell me how bad you are. Let us please just be good to each other.” She said thoughtfully, “That’s an idea. Do you want us to do the other thing again?”
I said yes, if we did it slowly this time. She said, “I thought men like it quick.”
I said a lot of men learned about sex in ways that stopped them doing it slowly, but I was too old to be quick twice a night. We cuddled. She began weeping again in a different, less stormy way and at last I may or may not have ejaculated and we fell asleep with my male part comfortable inside her.
Which I hope often happens. This morning I awoke greatly refreshed, kissed her awake, said “Breakfast!” and rushed downstairs to make it, dressing as I went. She followed soon after, not realising I would have brought it to her in bed. Facing this bossy, confident woman across the kitchen table, drinking coffee with her and eating poached eggs on toast with grilled tomatoes felt familiar because the last time I had felt that way was with Aunt Nan before illness confined her to bed. Well, if Zoe stays long enough I’ll die long before she does, hooray hooray. And it’s wonderful that she doesn’t expect me to serve her hand and foot. After the meal she said, “Mind if I smoke?” and rolled and smoked a thin cigarette, watching while I washed, dried and put away breakfast things. She said, “You’re a very queer kind of man.”
I told her it would be a bad world if men were all the same and now I must work. She said, “So will I as soon as the pub’s open, but I thought you’d retired from teaching.”
I told her I was a writer. She asked what stuff I wrote and could she get it from the library. I said I hadn’t been published yet and my field was historical sociology. She said, obviously disappointed, “O very highbrow,” but came into the sitting room and sat smoking, being careful not to scatter the cigarette ash while I scribbled in this notebook. She showed no interest in what I scribbled, probably thinking it was historical sociology. Perhaps it is, but I am also coming to terms with the new adventure my life has become. At intervals I put on rolls of Bach, Joplin, Stravinsky, Souza, Verdi, varying the music as much as possible and asking after each piece if she liked it. She always said, “Just you carry on playing it.”
Shortly before noon she stood up saying, “I’m for offski.”
I gave her a key so she could return when she liked. That was ten minutes ago. This house feels like a home again.
The miracle of Zoe makes me astonishingly happy. I now know why bad sex is a big part of life and good sex a small part — it lets me enjoy so many other things. Each morning I waken refreshed for the adventure of a new day and our breakfast together tastes as good as breakfasts in childhood. I kiss her goodbye, scoot to the library, immerse myself in exciting new researches. Building a scientific Scottish history on its geological foundation is certainly essential to making us a nation again, but a chore good research students could finish if they continued on lines I have laid down. My masterpiece should draw readers into a real life as free and romantic as my own — need I first steep them in their present miseries by showing how these evolved? I am studying the historical vision of Goethe’s Faust, Ibsen’s Emperor and Galilean, Tolstoy’s War and Peace, Hardy’s Dynasts. Can I instil the great breadth of these visions into something of my own?
This morning a letter from — commanded me to lunch with her at the Hasta Mañana, because she had information the book she thinks I am writing needs. The worst lunch of my life. She began by asking what extraordinary rendition meant. I did not know. She said, “It is American jargon for disappearing people — the C.I.A. secretly kidnap them, usually on foreign soil, with or without the secret connivance of the local police, because they are suspected of being or knowing active terrorists. They are then taken into U.S.A.-run jails in other countries like Guantanamo in Cuba or Abu Ghraib in Iraq (there are plenty of others), and there they are questioned — which means tortured — and sometimes killed without a trial.” She went on to say that trials held in public according to U.S.A. and European laws prove most folk arrested on mere suspicion are innocent, and when Nazi or Russian dictatorships did these things U.S.A. and British newspapers denounced them as evil. But though Amnesty International and other decent organisations say extraordinary rendition had disappeared hundreds, maybe thousands since Bush announced his War on Terror, the fact that R.A.F. bases in Scotland are being used in these illegal abductions is not mentioned by British newspapers or broadcasting — “which is why you must write about it!” I said I would think about that and tried to leave, which stimulated an even longer diatribe about what she called global money and the international arms trade which she said was responsible for World War 1, the 1930s Depression, the Nazi Party, World War 2 and every war since. She said that after Britain started the industrial arms-race in 1890 every leading politician from Lloyd George to Thatcher and Blair have been secretly enriched by policies whose result in human deaths they openly regret or denounce. “So you believe world history is controlled by a conspiracy?” I managed to interject: she replied, “Of course! An obvious, undisguised conspiracy! Britain has now only seven highly profitable industries and they all sell armaments! Every prosperous bastard has investments in them!” Not me, I told her, because my accountant had invested my savings ethically. She cried, “That’s what the Corporation of London and Manchester and half the other local authorities say and they’re lying, deliberately or through ignorance. The universities, successful trade unions and so-called charities have all invested in them! So has Cancer Research, Care for the Handicapped, Co-operative Insurance, the Boys Brigade. The arms industries produce several things with peaceful uses so brokers and accountants fool folk like you into thinking your money only helps these, but they’re lying. For over a century the names of politicians, newspaper owners, clergymen etcetera enriched by the arms trade have been recorded in stock exchange reports, but the only folk who try to publicise the fact are denounced as Loony Leftists by the media.” She also said Britain’s secret police force has been part of this open conspiracy since 1993 when its headquarters shifted from a drab, inconspicuous building off the Euston Road to a swaggeringly huge structure in the Postmodern or revived Art Deco style, which is now as conspicuous a part of 2004 London as Orwell’s Ministry of Truth in 1984. When she was a student it was an open secret that the head of the Extra-mural department was Glasgow University’s spy for the Ministry of Information. Everyone found that comic. That Ministry is now inviting staff in every British university department to apply for the job of spying for it. Those who apply successfully will not be made known: their extra source of income will not be taxed, and they will earn it by reporting on every student or colleague who questions the wisdom of what our increasingly right-wing government does. An American celebrity law professor is now arguing that the Geneva Conventions are out of date and the U.S.A. government should legalise torture and the assassination of its enemies, even if this causes the death of innocent people in the vicinity. Lawyers who want such things legalised know their government has already started doing them. I said, “How can I put all that into a book?” She said, “It’s your job to find out — you’re the historian.” I told her I would think about it and rushed off leaving her to pay the bill, for she insists on doing that anyway. As a child I saw Viva Zapata in the Hillhead Salon, and since I left her something said in it has been echoing in my head: “Jesus Christ! I’m not the world’s conscience.”