Unfaithfully Yours (18 page)

For a while I thought if there was anyone you really loved it might have been your father, that most elegant of estate agents, whose speech at our wedding still remains, for me, a masterpiece of the calculated insult. He managed to stay just inside the limits, didn’t he?

‘We have had a lot of problems with John’s skiing!’ he began – well, he had won medals for bloody skiing. ‘But we are gradually getting him in order! We have had problems with his time-keeping and his handwriting, a doctor’s privilege, and if any of us is ill he has promised not to try to look after us!’ So your hoary old jokes about medicine and me are really a re-run of Elliot’s wedding speech. I remember at the end he seemed to be threatening me physically if I ever dared to look at another woman.

And, yes, I have done that. There is simply no more to say on that subject. I’m sorry. I don’t think any man on the planet has apologized for a single marital indiscretion as much as I have. It wasn’t an apology, Barbara. It was ten years of crawling round the kitchen on my hands and knees. I’m sure you’re telling the truth when you say you’ve never looked at another man all the years of our married life but then, by your own analysis, I am the most dumb, unobservant, emotionally stunted creep who ever crawled out of medical school so how would I ever have noticed if you
had
cheated on me? You could probably have fucked half of Putney and I would still have been so busy apologizing I wouldn’t have noticed.

As for Jas and Josh – I don’t know what to say, but I will say it.

You were always jealous of my relationship with them. You resented the fact that you had never given birth to a girl. That was my fault too, of course. A chance to publicly criticize my sperm! A chance you took with great enthusiasm. ‘All John ever wanted was a football team!’ was your line, and I was supposed to look rueful and apologetic over having produced two strong, good-looking boys, who were not unlike me. If you had ever really bothered to notice them, instead of simply calibrating how far they conformed to your negative view of males in general, you might have noticed that they are a couple of intelligent, reasonably sensitive, hard-working young men, who occasionally make farting jokes. For God’s sake, Barbara!

Images from our married life keep coming back to me. You lying in bed with Jas in that hospital, looking up at me as you held him in your arms and saying, in such a sweet, unabrasive voice, ‘What shall we call him?’ You and I stepping out on the dance floor at our twentieth wedding anniversary, held in the tennis club because I am a conventional man and do things like that. You and I kissing in the back of that MG I had, on a summer night, down by the river. You and I sitting by your mother’s bed in the hospice as she looked at us, so pale and wan, and held my hand and thanked me for taking care of you. What would she say if she could see us now? How has this happened so quickly?

All these once precious images now seem sinister and unreal. It is as if I merely dreamed them. As if they were some trick played on me by my own sentimentality. I am, of course, a sentimental person. You always told me I was full of false feeling. The fact that I imagined my emotions were real was of no account. And now, of course, you are proved right and I am proved utterly, utterly wrong about what I thought and felt. A ludicrous middle-class stereotype (rather like your picture of me in that awful novel), who doesn’t really have an independent existence of his own. Who was wrong, wrong, wrong about politics, about class, about his chosen profession and, most especially, about the woman he thought he loved and who, he was foolish enough to imagine, loved him.

You always called my job, with that slight sneer you do so well, one of the ‘caring professions’, putting inverted commas round those words as if to make it clear that nobody ever really cares about anyone else, least of all the people who say they do. Heroism and decency are not options for the human race. At least, not in a comfortable middle-class suburb. So you, who have a comfortable position in what I might call one of the ‘uncaring professions’, felt justified in being totally and utterly selfish. Because that was how we all were. Really.

I don’t believe people are like that. I believe the large mass of people are decent, caring individuals who want to help others. I have spent much of my life trying to help people who are afraid or in pain. I am not under any illusions about why I do what I do. I am sure it is as self-interested as the pursuit of women or money or power. There is, of course, a great deal of rational selfishness about the quest to be good. It makes it much less likely that people will be nasty to you for a start. It has worked that way for me throughout much of my life. But it does not seem to have been much of a success as far as my wife is concerned.

What is really going on, Barbara? Are you having a nervous breakdown? Are you having an affair with someone? And, if so, can I be allowed to know who it is? I might, then, be able to make a more coherent defence of my position than this letter, which, now I have read through it, sounds rather pathetic. The work of a man whose ‘major speciality is reassurance’ but can’t quite manage to reassure himself. Who is ‘very good indeed at convincing people there is nothing wrong with them’ but not quite good enough at convincing himself he is an adequate human being. Who, even in the profession he loves and worked so hard to join, is ‘almost bound to be wrong’.

I don’t think I can bear to be in the same house as you. I am going to stay with one of the boys. We can all cock our legs up and make farting noises.

John

From:

Hell

Gerry

Writing this by hand on

30 October at 9 p.m.

To:

Darling Barbara,

I am writing this in my car. I am parked about twenty-five yards down the street from you.

If I had the nerve I would get out my cock and trace its outline on this piece of paper, like that convict did in the Genet novel when writing to his boyfriend back home. If it would fit on the paper. Ha ha ha ha. Such a funny guy, Gerry. Always full of laughs. Really good down the pub. Doesn’t funk his tackles. Tough guy. ‘Hello, mate!’ That’s me! Big bloke. Not afraid of anything. Fantastically big penis. Yowzers! Girls? Shagged them all. Look, mate. Look! I mean . . . look!

And what a chopper on him. Practically smoking with suppressed power. Betcha he fishes it out right now and amazes the neighbours. Just the kind of thing old Gezza would do, eh? His todger’s knocking at the old denim trousers like the NKVD making a midnight call in 1930s Russia. That’s the general idea with Gerald. The Beastly Barrister, or whatever they call me.

Except, of course, that isn’t me. You know that. I know that. But no one else knows that. Which is why I love you. Have always loved you. Have loved you since the first day I saw you walking across the Oriel quad on your way to see some other lucky bastard. Your dress was only just below your crotch and your black hair was halfway down your back and, yes, you did actually have flowers in it. Because it was 1968 and people did things like that then. Not me, I hasten to say. But I rather liked people who did. I was always the unstraight straight man. The buttoned-down lawyer with a crazy hooligan locked up inside him.

I loved you but I did nothing about it. There was nothing to be done. I can’t remember who you were with then. Some idiot in a kaftan, I think. People did wear such things in 1968. Dominic Barker-Wentworth did. Of course I knew his name. I know the name of every man who has ever touched you or tried to touch you. Which, taken together, probably amounts to about half the population of Wiltshire. But I love you more than all or any of them. I love you as salt loves meat. I love you as the river loves the sea. I love you as F sharp loves G major. I love you as water loves whisky and gin loves tonic and the French love abstract nouns. I love you the way flowers love the rain, Welshmen singing and sailors a following wind.

Some people, Barbara, see me as a crude person. They can go and fuck themselves up the arsehole with a baseball bat, as far as I’m concerned. There is a great delicacy in me, Barbara. There fucking is.

No one has a clue about us, do they? I don’t think my delicacy has ever been so beautifully expressed as in the way I have concealed our affair from the prying eyes of the women of Putney. I have done such a good job that there have been times when I have wondered whether we were actually having an affair. I have done such a good job on my own memories of the times we have made love – which have been so few and so hedged about with difficult circumstances – that I can’t remember now whether we actually kissed in that ridiculous summerhouse in the garden of the villa in Corsica or whether I did agree to meet you by the bus stop opposite the old Putney Hospital and waited for an hour in the rain but still you did not come.

What I really remember is that first kiss. That one kiss.

Yes. ‘Affair’ suggests all the things people usually associate with Gerald Price, i.e. being wanked off in the back of a hired car on the way to St-Martin-sous-le-Bois. We didn’t actually do that. I mean, I know we didn’t do that. Which isn’t to say I haven’t often fantasized about our doing it but, unusually for Gerry, I had the delicacy, with you, not to suggest it at an inappropriate moment simply because it had always been something I would have liked to achieve. All that being said because, although there is great delicacy in me, Barbara, waiting to emerge from fifteen and a half stone of muscle and this neck that I have not been able to move since my last rugby injury, I do, from time to time, find myself entertained by the image of you folding your fingers neatly over my cock, pulling it with the skill of a housewife polishing a kitchen table until my sperm jets out of the vas deferens, heads for the steering wheel and, perhaps, oops, my white linen trousers, which, as you may remember, I wore almost every day in that ghastly place in Brittany.

Am I being crude? Me? Gerald Price? Gerry fucking Price crude? Carm off of it. I should fucking coco.

Behind these cold, narrow, heartless eyes, which have been telling whoppers for profit ever since the day I was called to the bar, there is a soul that only you have seen. Fuck off, you know you have. Inside, I am a thing of gossamer, old bean, as finely spun as sugar in the hands of Raymond Blanc, as yielding as the grass in a Japanese movie.

Perhaps.

If there is an ounce of sensitivity in me, you are the only one to know it, Barbara.

Although – since we are being honest here – let us admit that Elizabeth knows it. She knows it and she uses it against me. Which you don’t. You understand me completely. You are the only person who has ever done so. With you, I am not the person the world knows as Gerald Price QC. Thanks be to God! He is an appalling person. I don’t want to be him any more.

If we had decided not to be delicate, I suppose I might, just possibly, have fucked you from behind in those woods behind Santa Maria della Rucola – or whatever the place was called. I might, in this alternative world in which we had the courage of our convictions, have ground my knees into the pine needles, with my trousers rucked up round my shoes, and, mesmerized by the one really dirty bit of you, poked at your extraordinary arse like a conductor in the middle of the slow movement of Bruckner’s Fourth. Which, of course, I never did. I am not sure, even, that there were any pine trees near Santa Maria della Rucola or that, during that holiday, or, indeed, any of the others, you and I ever did anything but look at each other in that dangerous way people do when they want something from one another that isn’t friendship or hatred, exactly, and yet has a little in common with both of those things, that is need, probably, of a kind neither of them really understands and don’t, in one sense, want, but cannot do without.

We didn’t do any of those things because we knew the damage it would cause. We both wanted to but we didn’t. Not in forty-odd years, Barbara. Not really. Which is why that one kiss seems to mean so much. Of course, I hear you say, there were a lot of other things as well; and I suppose you could say that there were. I see I used the words ‘made love’ back there and that is as good a way as any other to describe what has been going on between us for the last forty years.

Yes, there was more than one kiss. But there is only that one kiss that I remember. That’s it. And it was as if, with that kiss, we had both admitted how much we needed each other. And how much that scared us. Maybe that was it. Maybe we’ve just been frightened all this time.

So – were we being moral? Is that it? I’m not sure. I was – I still am – terrified of Elizabeth. Her virtue scares the pants off me. She is like the RSM at my old public school urging me over the assault course. ‘Come on, Price! Go! Go! Go!’ There are things I feel guilty about – such as the children. Of which, more later. Yet I am not entirely sure that we acted the way we did out of morality or respect for the other people in our lives. There are few things more curious than you and me, Barbara, apart, of course, from every other fucked-up relationship between human beings on this planet. It is a story of abstinence and indulgence that makes Jane Austen seem extreme.

Do you remember that conversation we had in the Duke’s Head by Putney Bridge, just before the whole team shipped out for Corsica? A risky place to meet, of course, but we were good at that. If anyone had come in we would have had our stories straight. We were just a mummy and a daddy from St Jude’s discussing the sponsored cycle ride or the school quiz night or – even better – hey, we’d just run into each other as you do if you’ve lived in the same suburb for twenty or thirty years.

It seemed to me, at the time, that that was when we said our goodbyes. It wasn’t, of course. We had more farewells than an elderly diva. But I think of it as our last meeting because it was the moment when we realized how much we loved each other and how we didn’t want to become another of those couples who met furtively, for a while, and then parted because what they were doing made them feel dirty and ashamed. We did not want to be the kind of illicit couple who drop the kids at judo with the perverted Mr Wallington and then sprint back to whoever’s house is empty to screw on the carpet just before the retreat home in all innocence for tea with the children and a drink with the wife and the nightly tussle over the TV remote.