The Golden Notebook (25 page)

supposing that is why you'll ultimately turn out to be unnecessary- because you haven't got any faith in what you are...' His face is now startled and sad, but she is in full flood and doesn't care. 'You've never understood one simple thing-it's so simple and ordinary that I don't know why you don't understand. Everything with you has been happy and easy and joyful, and you talk about women putting ice on their ovaries. Ice. Ovaries. What does it mean? Well, if you want to sign yourselves off the face of the earth then do it, I don't care.' At which he says, opening his arms. 'Ella. Ella! Come here.' She goes to him, he holds her, but in a moment he teases her: 'But you see, I was right-when it comes to the point you openly admit it, you'd push us all off the edge of the earth and laugh.' Sex. The difficulty of writing about sex, for women, is that sex is best when not thought about, not analysed. Women deliberately choose not to think about technical sex. They get irritable when men talk technically, it's out of self-preservation: they want to preserve the spontaneous emotion that is essential for their satisfaction. Sex is essentially emotional for women. How many times has that been written? And yet there's always a point even with the most perceptive and intelligent man, when a woman looks at him across a gulf: he hasn't understood; she suddenly feels alone; hastens to forget the moment, because if she doesn't she would have to think. Julia, myself and Bob sitting in her kitchen gossiping. Bob telling a story about the breakup of a marriage. He says: 'The trouble was sex. Poor bastard, he's got a prick the size of a needle.' Julia: 'I always thought she didn't love him.' Bob, thinking she hadn't heard: 'No, it's always worried him stiff, he's just got a small one.' Julia: 'But she never did love him, anyone could see that just by looking at them together.' Bob, a bit impatient now: 'It's not their fault, poor idiots, nature was against the whole thing from the start.' Julia: 'Of course it's her fault. She should never have married him if she didn't love him.' Bob, irritated because of her stupidity, begins a long technical explanation, while she looks at me, sighs, smiles, and shrugs. A few minutes later, as he persists, she cuts him off short with a bad-tempered joke, won't let him go on. As for me, Anna, it was a remarkable fact that until I sat down to write about it, I had never analysed how sex was between myself and Michael. Yet there was a perfectly clear development during the five years, which shows in my memory like a curving line on a graph. When Ella first made love with Paul, during the first few months, what set the seal on the fact she loved him, and made it possible for her to use the word, was that she immediately experienced orgasm. Vaginal orgasm that is. And she could not have experienced it if she had not loved him. It is the orgasm that is created by the man's need for a woman, and his confidence in that need. As time went on, he began to use mechanical means. (I look at the word mechanical-a man wouldn't use it.) Paul began to rely on manipulating her externally, on giving Ella clitoral orgasms. Very exciting. Yet there was always a part of her that resented it. Because she felt that the fact he wanted to was an expression of his instinctive desire not to commit himself to her. She felt that without knowing it or being conscious of it (though perhaps he was conscious of it) he was afraid of the emotion. A vaginal orgasm is emotion and nothing else, felt as emotion and expressed in sensations that are indistinguishable from emotion. The vaginal orgasm is a dissolving in a vague, dark generalised sensation like being swirled in a warm whirlpool. There are several different sorts of clitoral orgasms, and they are more powerful (that is a male word) than the vaginal orgasm. There can be a thousand thrills, sensations, etc., but there is only one real female orgasm and that is when a man, from the whole of his need and desire, takes a woman and wants all her response. Everything else is a substitute and a fake, and the most inexperienced woman feels this instinctively. Ella had never experienced clitoral orgasm before Paul, and she told him so, and he was delighted. 'Well, you are a virgin in something, Ella, at least.' But when she told him she had never experienced what she insisted on calling 'a real orgasm' to anything like the same depth before him, he involuntarily frowned, and remarked: 'Do you know that there are eminent physiologists who say women have no physical basis for vaginal orgasm?' 'Then they don't know much, do they?' And so, as time went on, the emphasis shifted in their love-making from the real orgasm to the clitoral orgasm, and there came a point when Ella realised (and quickly refused to think about it) that she was no longer having real orgasms. That was just before the end, when Paul left her. In short, she knew emotionally what the truth was when her mind would not admit it. It was just before the end, too, that Paul told her something which (since in bed he preferred her having clitoral orgasm) she simply shrugged away as another symptom of this man's divided personality-since the tone of the story, his way of telling it, contradicted what she in fact was experiencing with him. 'Something happened at the hospital today that would have amused you,' he said. They were sitting in the dark parked car outside Julia's. She slid across to be near him, and he put his arm around her. She could feel his body shaking with laughter. 'As you know, our august hospital gives lectures every fortnight for the benefit of the staff. Yesterday it was announced that Professor Bloodrot would lecture us on the orgasm in the female swan.' Ella instinctively moved away, and he pulled her back, and said: 'I knew you were going to do that. Sit still and listen. The hall was full-I don't have to tell you. The professor stood up, all six foot three of him, like a buckled foot-rule, with his little white beard wagging, and said he had conclusively proved that female swans do not have an orgasm. He would use this useful scientific discovery as a basis for a short discussion on the nature of the female orgasm in general.' Ella laughed. 'Yes, and I knew you would laugh at just that point. But I haven't finished. It was noticeable that at this point there was a disturbance in the hall. People were getting up to leave. The venerable professor, looking annoyed, said that he trusted that this subject would not be found offensive to anyone. After all, research into sexuality, as distinct from superstition about sex, was being conducted in all hospitals of this type throughout the world. But still, people were leaving. Who was leaving? All the women. There were about fifty men, and about fifteen women. And every one of those lady doctors had got up and were going out as if they had been given an order. Our professor was very put out. He stuck out his little beard in front of him, and said that he was surprised his lady colleagues, for whom he had such a respect, were capable of such prudery. But it was no use, there wasn't a woman in sight. At which our professor cleared his throat and announced he would continue his lecture, despite the deplorable attitude of the female doctors. It was his opinion, he said, based on his researches into the nature of the female swan, that there was no physiological basis for a vaginal orgasm in women... no, don't move away, Ella, really women are most extraordinarily predictable. I was sitting next to Dr Penworthy, father of five, and he whispered to me that it was very strange- usually the professor's wife, being a lady of great public-mindedness, was present at her husband's little talks, but she had not come that day. At this point I committed an act of disloyalty to my sex. I followed the women out of the hall. They had all vanished. Very strange, not a woman in sight. But at last I found my old friend Stephanie, drinking coffee in the canteen. I sat down beside her. She was definitely very withdrawn from me. I said: 'Stephanie, why have you all left our great professor's definitive lecture on sex?" She smiled at me very hostile and with great sweetness and said: "But my dear Paul, women of any sense know better, after all these centuries, than to interrupt when men start telling them how they feel about sex." It took me half an hour's hard work and three cups of coffee to make my friend Stephanie like me again.' He was laughing again, holding her inside his arm. He turned to look at her face, and said: 'Yes. Well don't be angry with me too, just because I am the same sex as the professor-that's what I said to Stephanie too.' Ella's anger dissolved and she laughed with him. She was thinking: Tonight he'll come up with me. Whereas until recently he had spent nearly every night with her, now he went home two or three nights a week. He said, apparently at random: 'Ella, you're the least jealous woman I've ever known.' Ella felt a sudden chill, then panic, then the protective mechanism worked fast: She simply did not hear what he had said, and asked: 'Are you coming up with me?' He said: 'I'd decided not to. But if I had really decided I wouldn't be sitting here, would I?' They went upstairs, holding hands. He remarked: 'I wonder how you and Stephanie would get on?' She thought that his look at her was strange, 'as if he's testing something.' Again the small panic, while she thought, he talks a great deal about Stephanie these days, I wonder if... Then her mind went dim, and she said: 'I've got some supper ready if you'd like it.' They ate, and he looked over at her and said: 'And you're such a good cook too. What am I going to do with you, Ella?' 'What you are doing now,' she said. He was watching her, with a look of desperate, despairing humour that she saw very often now. 'And I've not succeeded in changing you in the slightest. Not even your clothes or the way you do your hair.' This was a recurrent battle between them. He would move her hair this way and that about her head, pull the stuff of her dress into a different line, and say: 'Ella, why do you insist on looking like a rather severe school-mistress? God knows, you're not remotely like that.' He would bring her a blouse cut low, or show her a dress in a shop window, and say: 'Why don't you buy a dress like that?' But Ella continued to wear her black hair tied back, and refused the startling clothes he liked. At the back of her mind was the thought: He complains now that I'm not satisfied with him and I want another man. What would he think if I started to wear sexy clothes? If I made myself very glamorous he'd not be able to bear it. It's bad enough as it is. She once said, laughing at him: 'But Paul, you bought me that red blouse. It's cut to show the top of my breasts. But when I put it on, you came into the room, and came right over and buttoned it up-you did it instinctively.' Tonight he came over to her and untied her hair and let it fall loose. Gazing close into her face, frowning, he teased out fronds of hair over her forehead, and arranged it around her neck. She allowed him to do as he liked, remaining quiet under the warmth of his hands, smiling at him. Suddenly she thought: He's comparing me with someone, he's not seeing me at all. She moved away from him, quickly, and he said: 'Ella, you could be a really beautiful woman if you would let yourself be.' She said: 'So you don't think I'm beautiful then?' He half-groaned, half-laughed, and pulled her down on to the bed. 'Obviously not,' he said. 'Well then,' she said, smiling and confident. It was that night that he remarked, almost casually, that he had been offered a job in Nigeria, and was thinking of going. Ella heard him, but almost absentmindedly; accepting the off-hand tone he imposed on the situation. Then she realised a pit of dismay had opened in her stomach and that something final was happening. Yet she insisted on thinking, Well it will solve everything. I can go with him. There's nothing to keep me here. Michael could go to some kind of school there. And what have I here to keep me? It was true. Lying in the darkness, inside Paul's arms, she thought that those arms had slowly, over the years, shut out everyone else. She went out very little, because she did not enjoy going out by herself, and because she had accepted, very early on, that to go out together into company meant more trouble than it was worth. Either Paul was jealous, or he said he was odd-man-out among her literary friends. At which Ella would say: 'They aren't friends, they are acquaintances.' She had no vital connection with anyone but her son, Paul, and Julia. Julia would keep, it was a friendship for life. So now she said: 'I can come with you, can't I?' He hesitated, and said, laughing: 'But you don't want to give up all your exciting literary goings-on in London?' She told him he was quite crazy, and began making plans to go. One day she went with him to his home. His wife and children were away on holiday. It was after a film they had just seen together, and he had said he wanted to pick up a clean shirt. He pulled his car up outside a small house, in a row of identical houses in a suburb off to the north of Shepherd's Bush. Children's toys lay abandoned over a small patch of neat garden. 'I keep telling Muriel about the kids,' he said, irritated. They really can't leave their things lying about like this.' This was the moment that she understood this was his home. 'Well, come in a moment,' he said. She did not want to go inside, but she followed him. The hall had a conventional flowered wallpaper and a dark sideboard and a strip of pretty carpet. For some reason it comforted Ella. The living-room came from a different epoch of taste: it had three different wallpapers and discordant curtains and cushions. Evidently it had just been done up; it still had the look of being on show. It was depressing, and Ella followed Paul into the kitchen on his search for the clean shirt, on this occasion a medical journal he needed. The kitchen was the used room of the house, and was shabby. But one wall had been covered with red wallpaper, so it seemed that this room, too, was in the process of being transformed. On the kitchen table were stacked dozens of copies of Women at Home. Ella felt she had been delivered a direct blow; but told herself that after all she worked for this nasty snobbish magazine, and what right had she to sneer at people who read it? She told herself that she knew no one who was absorbed heart and soul in the work they did; everyone seemed to work reluctantly, or with cynicism, or with a divided mind, so she was no worse than everyone else. But it was no use; there was a small television set in a corner of the kitchen, and she imagined the wife sitting here, night after night, reading Women at Home or looking at the television set and listening for the