The Treasures, page 23
He could not tell her that he was hopelessly in love with her, that he had been since her sister’s eighteenth birthday party, that he had to go into public conveniences sometimes to fumble with himself if he accidentally thought of her, that he was disgusting, that she drove him mad, that he had written poetry for her but couldn’t show it to her, that he had dreamed of falling in love but never thought it would be like this. As Celia undressed and got into the narrow bed in the tiny room with the sloping eaves, Tom hurriedly removed his jumper and his shirt, but turned his back to do so. He could not look at her; he was worried he would get too excited and the whole thing would be even more of a disaster than he was certain it was going to be. The thing was, he loved Celia; he wanted to marry her; he had everything planned out; he was going to be a sketch writer for a revue, something jolly witty like That Was the Week that Was and he would make pots of money – vulgar but necessary, to be able to tell Sir Hugh Mannering that he was a serious person. They would move to a flat in Pimlico to start with – he wasn’t sure he could afford Eaton Square, like her parents, at first – and she could carry on with her career; she’d probably have to give up being a lawyer after they had some children; he’d be an awfully good dad, just like his father, but he’d be a proper family man, white stucco house with a front garden, holidays in Cornwall with the family, cricket with Guy, and lovely, lovely Celia to come home to, Celia in her thin nylon nightdress with her remarkable, sweet, round breasts he could see through the lace trim and the shiny material – oh, God. He would hold her hand in church and she would – oh, God, she was kissing him. With difficulty, Tom pulled off his shorts over his erection, and his Y-fronts. He hopped under the covers, squashing her legs so that she yelped. The sensation of her smooth, bare skin underneath him was overwhelming, and he shuddered.
‘Dear lord,’ said Celia. ‘Tom darling, calm down, won’t you.’
‘Oh, absolutely.’
He rested himself between her legs and began to kiss her – her milky shoulder bone, her neck, and was encouraged that she moved against him, and then he put one hand on her soft, plump right breast, gently but firmly, and she murmured. Tom breathed in, and then gave a huge sigh, adjusting himself, so aroused he was rather uncomfortable, but unbelievably happy. Sometimes he stopped and asked her if it was right. After a few minutes, Celia said:
‘It’s all fine. Time to get going, darling.’
She took his jutting, hard penis in her hand. ‘Hello,’ she said softly and smiled at him, just for him. ‘I thought so.’
‘Thought what?’ he said, breathing carefully.
‘Doesn’t matter,’ she said, and he heard her breathe in sharply, as she slid the rubber johnny he had purchased from the chemist’s behind Victoria Station that summer over his penis. Tom held his breath. He followed Antoine’s advice, which was to distract himself, and thought of Mr Carter, Mr Tonks, of the shops on Portobello, of the stops on the No. 23 bus. He breathed deeply. He set his knees between her thighs and, holding his penis in one hand, slowly pushed it in. It was incredible. Nothing like doing it himself. She gave a little cry.
‘All right?’ he whispered, hopelessly unsure as to what to do next. She moved his hand to between her legs. ‘I’m not – is this all right, Celia?’
‘Yes. I like it. Bit big. I want you to go on, though. Move inside me, darling. Now – touch me here.’ She bit her lip, her cheeks flushed, and, guiding his trembling, sweaty hand, she made him stroke her. They moved together.
He was inside her. It was very – very – unexpected. It was tight, and rather terrifying. He wasn’t sure if he was hurting her. She didn’t seem to mind. One hand was flung out above her head, her neat, curved breasts splayed across her body, the dark nipples pointed and tight. He kissed them, tasting her on his lips, and she moaned, and thanked him, which he found incredibly endearing. Her other hand was on his bottom, pushing him into her. After a moment he stopped and looked at her, and she smiled at him encouragingly, wrapping her legs more tightly round him. It was the kindness, the sense of unity, that he found unbelievably arousing – it was just them, the two of them.
‘Bit harder, Tom. Don’t stop. Do it like that, yes –’
She shifted, and tightened around him, and her eyes opened in surprise, and then he saw a flush spreading from her clavicle outwards across her breasts, the dark pink nipples hard like little berries – it was all like fruit, all of it – and suddenly, without meaning to, he thrust hard and came, collapsing on to her in a silent roar, head against hers. Sensation exploded across him, turning his body rigid with ecstasy, his hands gripping on to her, wanting to stay inside her, to keep this moment going for as long as possible – life! He was alive! It was blissful! Evening sun poured in through the round window, reminding him of the world outside, how this was usual, how other people knew this feeling, how wonderful everything was. He could scarcely believe it.
‘Sorry,’ he said after a moment, panting. He could not see; his good eye seemed to have blurred over, his body seemed to radiate heat. He blinked, and grinned. ‘Sorry, Celia – I didn’t –’
She was staring at him. ‘Tom, that was really not bad. I expect great things from you.’
He rolled off her carefully and clumsily pulled the condom off himself, still light-headed, but at the same time astonished at how depressing it was, the slime, the retreat, the mundanity of it. Slowly, joyfully, he scooted back against her and they stared out of the window.
‘Look,’ she said, kissing his head, half mumbling with sleep. ‘On the hills over there. That’s a white horse, isn’t it?’
He nodded, stroking her thick, soft hair, wondering if, thousands of years ago, people had, in this same spot, in this same way, come together. Sunshine blazed over them, and she turned towards it, like a cat, letting it bathe her face, and he gazed at her, astonished.
Then she fell asleep. Tom dozed too, wondering if everyone felt this happy, wondering how he would tell his two best friends he had done it, wondering how soon he and Celia could do it again, and knowing, without a doubt, that this, finally, was love.
24
1967 Four years later
Alone in his room, Tom slumped to the floor, pulling his bow tie from his neck and, without realizing it, gave a low, animal moan of pain that grew louder and louder, until his throat hurt, and his neighbour, Richardson, banged on the walls.
‘You made an utter idiot of yourself in front of everyone, Raven. You’re drunk – go to bed, old chap. Think about what the hell you’ve done.’
Outside, June’s sweet, frothing scenery tapped at the windows, the night scent from the honeysuckle in the gardens drifting over the mullioned casements and into his room. He could hear the shouts of laughter, of drunken merrymaking coming from the quad, the thud of various feet dashing up and down the stairs. Someone was playing the Stones. (Someone was always playing the Stones.) It was 5 a.m. and they should absolutely not be, but everything was topsy-turvy.
Tom lay on the floor. He did not think he could move. He swallowed, his throat hurting: he was so thirsty. He’d drunk nothing but champagne for hours. Memory kept assaulting him. His voice echoing around the sweltering marquee. The uncomprehending faces, expressions of stilted embarrassment turning to open contempt as he stuttered on. Try as he might to block them out, images from the evening unfurled across the room as though they were playing on a big screen: Celia, in a black satin minidress, her dark pixie haircut and flushed cheeks, her incredible silver shoes, her slim tanned fingers entwined round his, clutching his arm as they set off from his room towards the sound of the ball. And, as always, the utter pride and joy he felt when she was by his side, a longing to shout to the world: Look! Look at my wonderful, darling girlfriend! I’m in love!
It had been four years since their first summer meeting, and while he was in his final year at Westminster and Celia was still at Edinburgh, at her suggestion they had put the thing on a shelf, and Tom reluctantly tried seeing other girls. There was someone nice called Judith who lived around the corner from him and went to St Paul’s, but it turned out she would meet him only if her sister came along too. When he tried to put his arm around her during Goldfinger, Judith had screamed as though he were trying to abduct her; then, while her sister hit him with her handbag, she had twisted his hand so hard he hadn’t been able to hold a pen, or anything else, for several days. Judith was swiftly rechristened the Scream Queen. Then there was the Jazz Girl, someone he met at a gig at the 100 Club with Guy, who, oblivious to his best friend’s deep, great love for his sister, blithely kept asking him whether he liked any girls and, if so, which girls and what did it feel like, worrying at him like someone with a hangnail. Jane, or the Jazz Girl, was the other extreme – she was gone, man, she drank too much, she did a little too much pot, she went with anyone and everyone, and word was she had a father who took too much interest in her and it had screwed her up. When she turned up at Montpelier Crescent at 2 a.m. one night, screaming and banging on the door to be let in, Tom didn’t know what to do. But Henry, succinct for once, did. ‘Tell that little bitch if she comes back here in the middle of the night I’ll call the police,’ he’d said as the three of them met on the landing, moonlight coating them in silver stripes.
‘Oughtn’t we to let her in?’ Jenny asked anxiously, actually holding a candle, like something from a nursery tale. ‘She sounds terribly distressed.’
‘’Course not. I’m going back to bed. Tom, stay away from girls like her, I’m warning you. Trouble.’ Henry had turned, slamming the door to his bedroom behind him, prompting more hammering on the front door.
Then Shirley, a girl he knew from various Calypso scenes with Gordon, who finished with him because she only went with Black men, then Jazz Girl again, more and more unhappily, then Frances, the doe-eyed daughter of an MP who was dull as ditchwater and kept a drawer full of lichen samples in her bedroom. Tom wouldn’t have minded that, but she wouldn’t show them to him. It spoke to a meanness of spirit that he couldn’t abide.
None of them was Celia. None had her body, and her funny droll ways, her quick intelligence, her eyes, her body again, because it really was remarkable, her smile, the way she smiled at him, knew things, held his hand, his heart. Tom was astonished at how unhappy he was, how love consumed him. It was like the time he and his father had been caught in a fog out on the hills, and you couldn’t feel it but it surrounded and enveloped you. He was weary of school, of the boys and their smells, their wild enthusiasms for the same three records, their pranks, their ridiculous sporting jokes, their mortifying jingoism and arrogance, their lack of finesse. Celia, in one smooth fingernail – her fingernails were so beautiful, the pale crescent like a delicate moon – had more sensitivity, class, maturity – oh maturity, it meant so many things – than all the people he had known in the last year combined. He wanted her; he pined for her. He felt he was wasting away. He sent her poems, copied out in his tiny, difficult handwriting: ‘A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning’ and ‘They Flee From Me’; and a curated selection of what he solemnly told her he considered the best of Shakespeare’s Sonnets. And she would reply, postcards scrawled in her unique hand: So clichéd, darling, try harder / Did you write this? / You are a poppet. / And the last, which he kept close by at all times: See you at Sevenstones?
The following summer, 1964, they met again and it was different. He had left school and travelled around Spain, and could speak a little Spanish. He had stayed at the foothills of the Alhambra Palace, and camped by the Alcázar, sailed across to Fez, swum off the coast of Africa. Lying with her on the sweat-soaked sheets of the little bedroom with its view looking out to the white horse, he did not tell her he had done all these things to make himself seem more interesting, to show he was nothing like her brother, that he was becoming his own man, someone worthy of her. In the end they were alone for three days; they had sex almost continuously, parting sore and happy and with their stomachs empty but both their hearts full, so full. She had kissed him at the station, panting into his ear as she held his head, furiously, in her hands. ‘I thought it was just fun, it’s not fun, it’s it, isn’t it? It’s it –’
‘Yes,’ he’d whispered, unable to believe she felt the same way, but she did.
The following autumn he went up to Pembroke College, Oxford, to read History, and they took the train between Edinburgh and Oxford when they could, but mostly they wrote and telephoned. Everything was working towards his graduation and hers, when they would move to London together – it was all about that for him. He fell into life at Oxford within days, finding a group of friends akin to Guy and Antoine: clever, amusing, thoughtful, kind young men with a detached, amused approach to life, and he thought – oh, yes, he thought – he was himself.
For his second year at Oxford he and Celia agreed on another period of time apart. She was busy, studying abroad, and working out what she wanted to do after, be a barrister or a solicitor. She was older than him, and she wanted him to experience everything Oxford had to offer. He took her up on this suggestion, telling himself he must not lose her by being too intense, that he must step back and let her think he was fine. So he enjoyed himself, and saw some other girls – but that summer, back at Sevenstones, Celia came over for a week this time, and they realized they were as much in love as ever, and for their final year they tried to see each other as much as possible. Their relationship was always easy. No drama. She did not turn up at midnight, with eyeliner around her eyes, torn tights and broken heels, having had a huge row and stormed off, then changed her mind, like Foley’s girlfriend. She did not write him intense letters detailing their future life together or send him a pair of baby’s booties she had knitted, like a girl at St Hilda’s whom Richardson had gone out with, albeit extremely briefly. She was just enormous fun, enormously sexy – God, he wanted her all the damn time – and she was far, far out of his league. Guy, and Sir Hugh and Lady Mannering, were hugely welcoming, and he grew to love family evenings at Eaton Square, and Christmases in London with them, and even, once or twice, to understand what Sir Hugh meant when, on a Boxing Day walk in Hyde Park, he suddenly began talking about ‘the future’ with long pauses and a waggle of his eyebrows.
Even Guy, who at first had coped with the news his best friend was going out with his elder sister by playing the trumpet whenever he saw Tom at home to avoid having to talk to him, had got used to the idea and was happy about it. Everyone was happy about it.
One incident made him uneasy, but he brushed it out of sight, told himself it meant nothing.
Back in London, after his first Michaelmas term, Tom was hurrying to post his father’s Christmas present. It was sleeting so thickly he could hardly see a thing, and, as he was passing by the café that had been Totobags – the Caribbean place where he and Gordon used to go and that had been succeeded by Mike’s Café, where some chilly-looking hippies stood looking forlornly out into the wintry storm – someone stepped out and he ran straight into them.
‘Tom!’ The stranger gripped his arm. Tom, staring into his face, gave a shout of joy.
‘Gordon! How the devil are you!’
Gordon slapped him on the back, grinning so widely Tom felt moved to tears. He gestured with his thumb to the straggly dressed men and women in the café, and to the Dog Shop, next door, Tom’s favourite shop. It sold water beds, jewellery, candles, psychedelic posters, records, dope stuff – chillums and pipes – and was packed to the gills every weekend with young men and women who’d travelled from miles around to visit.
‘What on earth is happening to this neighbourhood?’ said Gordon, his eyes shining. ‘Talk about bringing the place down!’
They both laughed, and then were silent. Standing on Blenheim Crescent, hands on each other’s shoulders. Tom couldn’t get over how delighted he was to see him, and couldn’t remember now why he hadn’t caught up with him for so long.
‘Dad – I’m bored,’ said a little Cockney voice below them. Tom looked down. Gordon had a little girl with him, and she stood next to her father in glistening yellow wellingtons, her hands in her shiny blue mackintosh coat pockets, staring at Tom curiously.
Gordon had married a white woman called Beryl, and they had moved out towards Acton and had two children, Robert, who was five, and Angela, who was just three. Gordon had brought Angela with him to buy a Christmas present for her mother, but in general he still came here to go to the café up on Ladbroke Grove that he said did proper goat curry, to see his friends, to hear about the plans for the new Carnival, to keep in touch. He continued to work for London Transport, now overseeing the hiring of new bus drivers and training them. He had even been back to Trinidad, and gone to Jamaica too, on a couple of recruitment drives.
It was very cold as they stood there chatting, the wind whistling along the crowded streets. Gordon tucked Tom’s large Pembroke scarf back around his neck.
‘I’m forty next year, boy!’ Gordon had said with great amusement when he noticed Tom glancing at his grizzled grey temples. ‘I’m an old man, like all the old men round here. I’ll be on the allotment complaining about the weather … you’ll see. I’ve got an apple tree,’ he said, proudly. ‘Full crop this year, two boxes.’
‘You always loved apples,’ Tom said. ‘I’m so glad, Gordon.’
‘I love them, my boy. And one day you’ll come to Trinidad with me, and you’ll try a cocorite.’
‘Yes, please.’ Tom smiled but suddenly gripped Gordon’s wrist tightly. He remembered that first dreadful day, when he’d run away from the bomb site. Gordon had picked him up, hugged him. ‘It’s good to see you,’ he said suddenly.
‘You too, boy. Be good to know what you do next,’ said Gordon, inclining his head as if he wasn’t sure about something.
‘Can I write to you?’ Tom said suddenly, taking a small pencil and a scrap of paper from his jacket pocket and thrusting them at Gordon.
