Sunstroke and Other Stories (12 page)

He asked for a pint of Stella in an ordinary accent, not like Patrick’s educated one. When I smiled at him and made some comment about the match, he blushed, and I guessed that he was shy, and maybe not very clever. He probably would have liked to keep the conversation going, but he couldn’t think of what to say to me. And I got a certain pleasure out of the situation. It was like a game; I could play at talking to Patrick, without its really mattering, without being afraid of what he thought of what I said. I chatted while I was handing his change over, before I was called away to serve someone else. When he left the pub, fifteen minutes later, he put his glass on the bar and said goodbye to me in such a way that I knew he’d planned it in advance, hoping that I’d be looking in his direction.

I forgot all about him, I didn’t expect him ever to come in again. But a week later he was back, and after that it was a regular thing. He came with his friends, and I really don’t think it was because I was there; they were just a gang who met up regularly and were going through a phase of drinking in this particular pub. But he did remember me, and looked for me when he came in the door, and blushed if I served him. When his friends saw us chatting together they teased him. They made him go to the bar for every round, and then they whistled and laughed to encourage him.

—Go on, ask her, they said, meaning me to hear.

—Fuck off, he said, red-faced, pretending to be busy with the first mouthful of his pint.

Every time I saw him I’d feel the same shock at his likeness to Patrick. People come in physical types; I’ve seen girls I immediately recognised as belonging to the same type as me: small and round with these deep-lidded frog-eyes. There are dark ones and blonde ones, but the
type is as unmistakable as if we belonged to the same subspecies. And, even though there were specific points on which they didn’t match, this man and Patrick had the same overall effect. The man in the pub was blurred where Patrick was definite. His skin was coarser. His hair wasn’t as black and straight: it was dark brown, with honey-brown curling bits in it. He was a little shorter than Patrick, but more muscular, as if he did physical work. I asked him, and he said he was a gas engineer, which wasn’t all that physical, but presumably more strenuous than lecturing in literature of the Early Modern period. He had a little beer belly like Patrick’s. His jeans hung on his narrow hips in the same way. Actually – oddly, considering how unlike their lives and personalities were – they even dressed the same. They wore tight V-necked sweaters over jeans, without a shirt. They wore black T-shirts with those little cap sleeves. I suppose they had both found the styles that suited them.

And soon something began that I’m shocked to think of now. Something that I initiated. It would never have occurred to him even to speak to me, beyond ordering his drinks, if I hadn’t started it. I didn’t just flirt with him. I went all out to make things go further. I knew this was a risky and demeaning strategy; it certainly wasn’t something I’d ever done before. But with him I was safe because it didn’t matter. It honestly wouldn’t have mattered to me if he’d stopped coming to the pub and I’d never seen him again. So it could do no harm to play my game.

If I wasn’t busy I’d watch him from my vantage point behind the bar. Sooner or later he’d become aware of this, and look up from where he stood or sat with his mates, and then I’d smile at him, a long heated-up smile, and he would redden and look away again, smiling too. When he came to the bar I rushed to serve him, even if one of the other staff was closer. He bought me drinks, and instead of
thanking him and putting the money behind the bar as I usually did, I poured myself a Bacardi and Coke, clinked glasses with him, and asked him about himself. When I gave him his change I made sure our fingers touched. I don’t think that anything like this had happened to him before. He wasn’t a complete innocent. (I found out that he’d been engaged to someone and she had broken up with him a few months before.) But he wasn’t used to being pursued by a stranger.

The shock of his looking so much like Patrick never completely left me. On the one hand, I felt I had the measure of the man he was, pleasant and rather dull. He and his friends talked all evening about cars and football, and teased each other in the explosive foot-shuffling, flaringup way I remembered from the boys at school; from time to time they’d run out of things to say to one another and sit in silence, taking mouthfuls of their beer. On the other hand, his appearance flashed a promise to me, as if Patrick’s qualities must be locked up inside him somewhere, if only I could find the key to release them.

Eventually I got him to the point where he couldn’t help but ask me if he could give me a lift home after work. I felt embarrassed then, as if my game had gone too far. He waited for me while we cleared up, and reassured me that he’d only had one pint and was all right to drive, and then he led me proudly around the corner to his car, which looked very shiny under the street lamps. I hoped that he hadn’t cleaned it for my benefit. I think he felt more confident about his car than about himself, but it was wasted on me, I couldn’t tell one type of car from another.(Was it a Ford Focus? It might have been.) While he was driving me back to the house I shared with some other students, we both turned shy. I nervously asked him about his work, and he told me that he had worked for British Gas for several years and then set up his own business with a friend.
For reasons to do with the VAT they’d recently had to split the business into two, one side dealing with boilers and central-heating systems and the other with gas appliances, although in effect they still worked together. He explained this to me in some detail, and I was bored. I was hoping that none of my housemates would be around when I asked him in for coffee, and they weren’t.

It was always better when he wasn’t talking. I was glad that he didn’t talk much. When he was silent I could recover the illusion I was in pursuit of. I hardly talked to him about myself – about college, about reading, about my plans. I hardly talked to him at all. I turned on my light, which had a pink bulb, so that the room was dim. I kissed him, I touched him, I undid his clothes, I made all the first moves. I don’t think he was quite comfortable with the speed with which these things happened. He was a nice chap, he would have preferred to take things slowly. He would have preferred to have me as his proper girlfriend. On the other hand, he was a man; he didn’t turn me down. Perhaps he felt a bit ashamed of himself afterwards. Or ashamed of me, more likely. I don’t remember him staying long in my room, I don’t remember watching him while he dressed to go home. I think he shared a flat with his brother and another man, but I never went there.

We didn’t ‘go out’ together. We only ever did one thing together. For a couple of months, before I gave up my job at the pub and went home for the summer, we did that every week. Of course I was pretending the whole time that I was with Patrick, that it was Patrick who was making love to me. Only the pretence was never complete. Even in the dim light from the pink bulb, even if I half closed my eyes and didn’t look directly at him, even when I was mixing up together in my mind the physical reality of our bodies grappling and one of my stories about Patrick, the knowledge that he wasn’t Patrick seeped irresistibly in. This
wasn’t the real thing. It was only a second-hand enactment of love.

I have forgotten to give his name. His name was Dave.

It’s only a few years ago but a lot has happened since then. Those are the years when a lot happens; when your life lurches across crucial transitions like a train hurtling across points at speed. It doesn’t always feel like that at the time. At the time you sometimes feel that life has slowed down to a frozen stillness. There’s no tedium like the tedium of twenty. But all the while you are in fact flying fast into a future decided by a couple of accidental encounters or scraps of dreams.

In the end, Patrick Hammett reached out for me. Unbelievably, what he actually said when he did it was something like he had always loved me, he had been fascinated by me from the moment I first walked into the lecture room. Or words to that effect. Which just goes to show how you mustn’t trust a scrupulous realism, that sometimes sloppy fantasy comes nearer the true state of things. I became the person it had been unimaginable for me to be: Patrick’s girlfriend, Patrick’s wife. We had to wait until I wasn’t his student any more before we could tell everyone about this, and those months were the most wonderful months, the secret months, when I had to sit in his classes and engage in discussion as usual, as if there was nothing going on between us.

I love Patrick. I think we’re well matched. But of course I’m not infatuated with him any more, and it’s a kind of relief when all that ends. You can’t go on being infatuated with someone you share toothpaste with, whose crusty inside-out balls of socks you have to put into the washing machine. I haven’t changed my mind about how intelligent and articulate he is; I count on that. But I’m irritated by the gulp of breath he takes before he pours out some
hoarded-up information, and at how he works conversations around to an opportunity for him to be surprised at someone else’s ignorance. When he’s holding forth in an argument he fills any gaps while he searches for words with a loud ‘um’, so that no one else has a chance to break in with a different point of view.

I’ve never told Patrick about Dave. And I’ve never seen him since. I once looked up gas engineers in the Yellow Pages and found a company that might have been his; I couldn’t look him up in the residential phone book because I never knew his surname. In my first few months with Patrick, if I ever thought about Dave I was just embarrassed at what I’d done. But then the idea of him began to preoccupy me, like an unsolved mystery. Why had he lent himself so unquestioningly, so pliably, to my fantasy? How did he explain to himself what was happening between us? I try to remember the details of our lovemaking and I can’t. I can hardly believe that we were pressed naked against one another again and again. I feel as if I wasted something important, longing all the time for him to be someone else. What was he feeling, when he didn’t speak?

There’s no real equivalence, between my situation now and my situation then. I’m genuinely happily married to Patrick and given the chance would not even seriously consider throwing in my luck with a stranger I have nothing in common with. The little hunger of wasted opportunity only gets expressed in my fantasies, which contrive themselves in spite of me. No green lane, no gate into a wood. He’s a gas engineer in the fantasy, of course. He comes to my house to mend the boiler. At first we pretend we don’t recognise each other. I show him the problem and hover discreetly while he takes the front of the boiler off and crouches to look inside. He asks me to hand him a spanner from his toolbox; when he takes it from me he touches my hand with his.

I wish he wasn’t a gas engineer. It sounds too much like a scenario from one of those funny sixties pornographic films, where the milkman or the postman is served up to the bored housewife amid all the conveniences of her own kitchen. But I’ve tried giving him other, outdoor, professions, and I didn’t believe in them, they had no connection with the real man.

When he stands up to tell me there’s a problem with the regulator, he steps towards me and begins to kiss me. It’s then I see that what we did together has had consequences, for him. It has made him rather reckless, sexually. He has learned the audacity to reach across, through all the mess we make with thinking and talking, through to the body and the body’s truth.

I have to be careful not to believe in this. It is only a dream.

TWO FRIENDS ARE
walking together round the new British Galleries at the Victoria and Albert Museum. These women look interesting. One is fine-boned, small, with crinkled black hair pinned up; she’s wearing a green dress and a mohair cardigan. The other is taller and more awkward; her red hair is shoulder-length with a fringe. She has put gold-rimmed glasses on to look at the exhibits, but obviously doesn’t like wearing them, because when they stop to talk she takes them off and dangles them dangerously on her finger. Once she drops them with a clatter but they are OK.

The new galleries are very hands-on; you can make a chair, design a coat of arms, identify porcelain. The women try on a crinoline over their clothes, they take turns to walk up and down in it.

—Oh, it’s
nice
, see how it swings, it’s very light.

—Wouldn’t you just
clear space
?

—You could have a man inside, said one.—Imagine.

The women are at that age which on the outside is ambivalent: young and not-so-young are difficult to disentangle, in good clothes, in a good light, after a good life of the privileged kind of work that doesn’t weather or wizen you. Inside, though, these years register for the women themselves, inexorably and determiningly as a clock ticking. There’s a year when you’re thinking anything could still happen, reproduction-wise (this either makes you hopeful
or cautious, depending on what you want). Then there’s a year when you think you never know (after all, Cherie Blair had one). And then there’s a year when you think it isn’t any way going to happen now, not without an improbable Old Testament miracle or the intervention of some crazed Italian doctor. These women are both, in fact, at this Old Testament stage, although they can both get away with looking as if they might not be.

One of them – Louie, the taller one with red hair – is a mother: she has two daughters. The dark one, Phil, is not. You can’t tell this from looking at their bodies either, not from the outside: both are trim and slender. Perhaps you might guess, though, that Louie is the mother. Although she’s more awkward than Phil, and probably thinks she’s not as attractive, she’s less self-conscious about parading up and down in the crinoline in front of other visitors. That might come from seeing herself reflected in the eyes of her daughters, who will love her or think her absurd however she tries, so that she doesn’t need to try so hard. (In the early days of motherhood, she wouldn’t have put it as positively as that: it felt sometimes as though she’d been taken out of her own possession and become no more than a rag doll for her daughters’ entertainment. But now the girls are fifteen and twelve, and she’s recovered, somewhat.)