Life: An Exploded Diagram (16 page)

Astonishingly, the Russians managed to do all this without the Americans catching on. It was an incredible feat. In all, eighty-five ships carried two hundred and thirty thousand tons of stuff from the Soviet Union to Cuba: trucks, bulldozers, prefabricated missile shelters, cranes, planes, food, petrol — the raw materials of war. American high-altitude reconnaissance aircraft — known as U-2s — regularly took photographs of Cuba, but it took months for the CIA to realize the significance of those funny little clearings and the barnlike structures taking shape around them. American naval patrols and American aircraft monitored the sea traffic in and out of Havana but could not see the thousands of men packed, like African slaves, in the unbearably hot and fetid spaces belowdecks. Relying on intercepted Soviet messages, U.S. intelligence agencies concluded that the
Omsk
was carrying barrels of oil. (Understandable, really, since the Russians didn’t transmit useful messages such as: “Greetings, comrade. I hope the ballistic missiles aren’t rolling around too much in that rough weather.”) CIA agents in Cuba reported the swelling numbers of “agricultural advisers.” Kennedy and his military chiefs strongly suspected that these agronomists were Russian troops, but they hugely underestimated their numbers. The awesome truth was that by the third week of October 1962, there were forty thousand Soviet personnel in Cuba. And they had enough nuclear-capable missiles and planes to obliterate a good half of the United States.

The stage was set for what would become known as the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Frankie and I had no idea, of course, that all this was going on. And if we had known, we probably wouldn’t have cared. We had other things on our minds.

T
HEY HAD RELUCTANTLY
concluded their second assignation beneath the beeches. Frankie was tingling all over from what they had done: she’d let him put his hand
inside
the bra! Clem had been positively beside himself. The fluttering low inside her had been almost unbearably delicious.

Clem, followed by Frankie leading Marron, was about to step out onto the bridleway when he heard voices, laughter, from the direction of the lane. He held his hand up, signaling halt, and peered through the trees. Oh, God. Cushie Luckett and a girl. Susan Parsons! Oh, double God. Behind him, Frankie was calming the fretful horse. She looked over her shoulder.

“What?”

“People I know. They’ll see us.”

She bit her lower lip. It was what she did when she was thinking.

“Okay,” she said. “You go back. I’ll wait until they’re gone.”

Crouching in the undergrowth, he heard her
chut-chutting
Marron onto the track. Then silence, apart from late and busy birdsong.

She reassured Marron and pretended to busy herself with the buckle of his girth strap. The couple drew level with her. The boy had fair hair and a smirk. The girl was plump and had put on a sullen face.

“Orright, then, Miss Mortimer?” the boy said.

It was a horrible surprise that he knew who she was. She tried not to show it.

“Yes, thanks. Lovely evening, isn’t it?”

“Yeah.”

His gaze slid down Frankie’s body, then back up again, unhurriedly.

“Nice ’orse,” he said, not looking at it.

‘Thank you.”

“I daresay you’d sooner be ridun aroun on him than workun in them ole strorbry fields an that.”

The plump girl pushed his arm.

“Leave orf, Cushie. Come on.”

He gave Frankie a sort of salute.

“Nice meetun yer, Miss Mortimer. Mind how you go.”

They walked away. The boy said something. The girl pushed him again and looked back, laughing.

Frankie leaned her head against Marron’s flank. After a while she said, “They’ve gone.”

Clem emerged from cover. Frankie made a gesture that included everything. The huge countryside her father owned. “You’d think,” she said, “that in a place like this a person could get a little privacy.”

She made the remark lightly, but it acknowledged the heavy thing, the need, that was like a third presence when they should have been alone.
Privacy
wasn’t the word, though. All young couples sought that and usually found it hard to come by. What Clem and Frankie needed, what was absolutely necessary, was
secrecy.
They knew that for them discovery would not be an embarrassment; it would be a calamity. During brief respites between kisses and caresses, they had whispered of it, giggling at the awfulness of the thought. Reducing peril to a thrilling riskiness. In truth, they were very afraid, particularly when they were apart.

What would her father do, Frankie wondered, when his rage (which she feared less than her mother’s frigid disdain) had subsided? Put her under permanent guard, maybe? Lock her up? No, he’d send her away — that’s what he’d do. To her ghastly grandparents in Quebec. She’d never see Clem again, that was for sure. She would almost certainly die of misery. She pictured it. Her deathbed in the gloomy old house in Montreal. The life draining from her wasted body. His murmured name on her dying breath.

Clem brooded homeward on his bike. Try as he might, he could not restrict his thoughts to her and what they had done, what she had let him do. His hands remembered it; his head was full of disaster. If his parents — let alone his gran, for God’s sake — found out that he’d been doing dirty things in the woods with
any
girl, there’d be hell to pay. His family had a fantastic capacity for disgust. But with
Gerard Mortimer’s daughter
? It would be like . . . He couldn’t think of an analogy. A bomb going off or something. The real horror, though, was what might happen if Mortimer found out. He’d come around to the house with a horsewhip or a shotgun. Or both. And he’d give his dad the sack. Definitely. And then . . . well, there was no “then” after that. Clem could not picture a life after that. He’d have to run away, though he had no idea what running away involved, where you might run away to. He imagined himself dying in a ditch, wearing rags, halfway to Moscow.

He gripped the handlebars more tightly and swung the bike left at Black Cat corner.

The sky was as pink as melon flesh. The shadow of the old air-raid siren fell across the road, and he passed through it. His family, sitting in the false moonlight of the television, would be silently asking themselves where he was.

B
EFORE HE MET
Frankie, Clem’s ideas about sex were a greasy tangle woven from very unreliable materials: dirty rhymes and bawdy songs, smutty jokes, anatomically inaccurate drawings on lavatory walls, the lies of boastful older boys, the reported activities of someone’s sister. No adult, no one who’d actually had sex, had ever told him anything about it, except to expressly forbid masturbation and warn of its crippling consequences. He had joined sniggering huddles with other boys, talking dirty, but their imaginings, like his, lived in fingery darkness, like wood lice under a brick. (Goz usually excluded himself from these lubricious debates. If he spoke of sexual matters at all, he did so with a casual dismissiveness, as if he knew all about them but they were beyond the horizon of his interest.)

Naturally, Clem had spent countless hours trying to imagine what a naked girl might look like, but he lacked certain key items of information. In his fourth year at Newgate, a boy called Taplock had circulated (for sixpence a loan) a nudist magazine with the strangely irrelevant title
Health and Efficiency.
It featured black-and-white photographs of robust and plain young women engaged in wholesome outdoor activities, such as netball and gardening. None of them wore any clothes, but when Clem’s eyes zeroed in on the really important part of their anatomies, there was nothing there; their lower bellies tapered into a blur, a cloudy vacancy. He found this puzzling. Surely something so talked about, something for which there were so many forbidden names, must have some sort of substance.

(He had never heard, then, of doctoring photos with an airbrush. Later in life he would become an expert at it.)

Very occasionally, and with a warning glare, Jiffy would project painted nudes onto the art-room wall. During the Renaissance, it seemed, naked ladies were often to be found in the Italian countryside, sometimes in large numbers. Invariably, though, their Important Parts were obscured by wisps of gauzy stuff or annoying bits of foliage. Besides, Clem was not stirred by these women; they were a bit on the old side, and hefty-bottomed. Later, the class had looked at nudes by Picasso, but these were of no help at all.

Clem had, of course, studied the anatomical atlas kept on the top shelf of the art-room bookcase, paying particular attention to the chapter “The Reproductive Organs of the Female.” The cross-sectional drawing, all interfolding tubes and hollows, labeled in vaguely religious-sounding Latin, revealed nothing to him about the dark magic of sex. In fact, it made him think, queasily, of a slice through a crustacean or some other form of marine life. He wondered and worried about how his own increasingly restless reproductive organ could possibly get involved in this complex and messy-looking arrangement.

Then, in October 1960, when Clem was in his first term in the fifth form, Penguin Books was taken to court for publishing an “obscene” novel that was “likely to deprave and corrupt” anyone unfortunate enough to read it. It was a modest paperback, costing three shillings and sixpence, entitled
Lady Chatterley’s Lover.
The author was D. H. Lawrence, who had been dead for thirty years. It told the story of a supercharged love affair between Connie, the wife of a paralyzed aristocrat, and her husband’s gamekeeper, Mellors. The trial (which was very comical and in all the papers) ensured that thousands of people who normally took little interest in books were very keen to read it. A copy was passed from hand to eager hand in the fifth-form locker room at Newgate. By the time it reached Clem, it was close to exhaustion. Its spine was done in. It fell open brokenly at the really dirty bits.

Even though Clem was astonished and thrilled to see the two rudest words in the English language printed in a proper book, he found the story heavy going. A lot of it was posh people conversing about life and the “spirit”: the kind of talk his mum would dismiss as “squit.” He couldn’t relate in any way to the characters. (Although Mellors reminded him slightly of his dad, which was disturbing.) The sex didn’t really get going until about halfway through. After that, Clem skipped the narrative and read the dog-eared juicy sequences, avidly and with mounting bafflement. Mellors didn’t have a penis; he had a “
phallos,
” which he called John Thomas. It seemed to have mesmeric and magical powers that, as far as he knew, Clem’s own unruly member sadly lacked. Lady Chatterley didn’t like sex very much at first, as far as he could tell, but then she liked it a lot. As far as he could tell. Clem was keenly interested, suddenly, in why. In what girls felt, doing it. What, exactly, they liked about it. If, as he had been led to believe, sex was the hostile pronging of female flesh, why would they encourage it? How could they possibly enjoy it? But D. H. Lawrence’s excited, turgid prose failed to enlighten him. Rather, it confused him. All sorts of things went on in Lady Chatterley’s insides when she and the gamekeeper were at it. Bells rang, soft flames were ignited, feathers melted (there was a great deal of melting, generally), whirlpools swirled, waves swelled and billowed onto a distant shore, sea anemones clamored with their tendrils.

Clem couldn’t quite believe it. He was fairly certain that he wouldn’t like to be the cause of such a hubbub. What’s more, it seemed to go on not only in Lady C’s womb, which was fair enough, Clem supposed, but also in her bowels. This was surprising and deeply worrying. He hadn’t imagined that
they
were involved.

He handed the book on to Clive Lines, who’d been pestering him for a week, and eventually succeeded in forgetting about it. But he would recall its troubling imagery — and the questions it left unanswered — when he rustled and wrestled with Frankie beneath the beech trees.

Clem’s yearning curiosity was more encoiled by fear than it was for most other boys. This was because he belonged to a family that lived in dread of the very mention of sex, or anything remotely associated with it.

Win, of course, was long past thinking about you-know-what in personal terms. But it was out there. Everywhere. The young women in the laundry canteen, smoking cigarettes, sniggering about it. The young strumpets on the estate giving boys the come-on. That rock ’n’ roll music all about what they called love. Now that Win was a member of the Brethren, the Saved, it was vital that she not be tainted by any of it. That its filthiness not come near her, lest she be infected and denied her place by the throne; that it cost her the cleansing bath in the blood of the Lamb. It was essential that the house she lived in was not sinful. And it wasn’t. It was solace to her that the only nocturnal sound that came from the bedroom her daughter shared with George Ackroyd was snoring. Clem was a danger, being a young male and good-looking with it. He reminded Win of Percy. But he was a good boy. Hardworking. With any luck, he’d escape the snares of carnal sin until the Apocalypse. Nightly she prayed for him on the floor beside her bed, the rim of the chamber pot cold against her knees.

Ruth and George knew that the sexlessness of their marriage was unnatural. They were quietly ashamed of it, as other couples might be ashamed of a perversion. It was their closely guarded secret, and shared secrets are, of course, what keep people together. All the same, they were embarrassed by it. Hurt by it. They coped by pretending that sex simply didn’t exist. They wouldn’t hear of it. Which was as difficult as Eskimos refusing to admit there is such a thing as snow.

Most evenings they would watch the television. Clem sat at the table, paying intermittent attention to the homework spread in front of him. Ruth and George sat on the new mock-leather sofa, George’s ashtray between them. Win sat on an uncomfortable wooden stool because it was small punishment of her flesh.

Sometimes (with increasing frequency, it seemed to them) there would be a program in which love raised its ugly head. A couple would confess it, and then their faces would come close together, a slow, ghastly prelude to the inevitable kiss and the fade-out that suggested they were Doing It. At these awful moments, the dread entered the living room of 11 Lovelace Road like a chilling fog. In response to it, Win would look down, muttering, and accelerate her knitting. George would frown and light another Player. Ruth’s plump neck would redden, and she would get to her feet.

“I can’t put up with this soppy old squit,” she’d say. “I’ll go an put the kettle on.”

And Clem returned to his homework until the embarrassing scene was over. Before, that is, Frankie happened to him. After, he gazed furtively at the screen from the shelter of his hand, afraid of the fear in the room, his poor heart tumbling to the memory of her parted lips and busy tongue.