Staring at the Sun (18 page)

Jean pictured a seesaw, painted municipal green, in a council playground. A fat man in a three-piece suit was sitting on one end, weighing it down. Precariously, Jean climbed on and took the first seat opposite him; but her small weight, placed so close to the
fulcrum, made no impact. Rachel arrived, monkey-crawled to the highest point of the seesaw, way beyond Jean, and there, with no thought for her safety or the asphalt below, began jumping up and down. The fat man in the business suit looked briefly discommoded, then shifted on his haunches and settled himself again; his heels hadn’t even lifted from the ground. After a while, Rachel left in disgust. Later, and more cautiously, Jean in turn slipped down and went away. The fat man didn’t seem in the least upset. Somebody else would be along quite soon. Besides, he owned the playground.

Rachel said: “
Three
wise men—are you serious?” Rachel said: “If they can put one man on the moon, why don’t they put them all there?” Rachel said: “A woman needs a man like a tree needs a dog with a lifted leg.” Rachel had once been given her father’s shoes to clean and instead of using polish had smeared them with toothpaste; she had watched her mother’s intelligence being frittered away on calculations about the price of tinned food; she had watched her father hold her mother in the soft cage of his hands. Rachel said: “A man on a white charger is all very well, but who’s going to clear up the droppings?” Rachel said: “Being born a woman is being born left-handed and forced to write with the other one. No wonder we stammer.” Rachel said: “You think I’m shouting? You don’t know how deaf they are.”

Jean found herself wondering if Rachel’s father had maltreated her, if there had been some scarring first involvement with a man; but Rachel guessed her thought before she had begun it. “Jean,” she said, “that’s a man’s argument. The spanner doesn’t fit the nut.” “I just wondered …” said Jean. “Well, stop. You don’t have to have been raped to be a feminist. You don’t have to look like a garage mechanic. You just have to be normal. You just have to see things as they are. It’s all obvious. It’s all so fucking obvious.” Rachel said: “For a man,
wife
rhymes with
life
. What rhymes with
husband?
Nothing.
Dustbin
, perhaps.” Jean said: “I don’t think you’re giving men much of a chance.” Rachel said: “Now they know how we feel.”

They started going out once a week: the cinema, a meal, conversations
in which each began affectionately to parody the other’s stance. On the third evening Jean insisted on paying for dinner; later, in the car outside Jean’s house, Rachel leaned across and kissed her on the cheek. “Better get in before your dad gets mad at you.”

On the fourth evening, at an Indian restaurant when Jean thought the cook had gone mad with tangerine dye, Rachel suggested that Jean come back to her place. Jean laughed; this time the offer came as less of a surprise.

“But what do they do?” she asked flippantly.

“They?”

“They,” she repeated, meaning
lesbians
, but not bringing herself to say it.

“Well …” Rachel said firmly; and Jean at once held up her hand. “No, I don’t mean it. No.” Suddenly in her mind
they
had become
we;
the image seemed preposterous and embarrassing. “Anyway …”

“Anyway what? Anyway the Festival of Britain?”

“Anyway I don’t think you’re a … a
lesbian
.” She managed to say it this time, her pause disinfecting the word, making it sound distant and theoretical, barely applicable to Rachel. Her small blond companion took her by the wrists, and her fierce brown glare forbade Jean to look away.

“I fuck women,” she said, in a slow, determined voice. “Is that lesbian enough for you?”

“I like you too much for you to be one.”

“Jean, that’s one of your least intelligent remarks.”

“I suppose I mean that isn’t a lot of it just getting back at men? What your generation calls political. It’s about other things; it’s not … not just about sex.”

“When was sex only just about sex?”

Always, Jean wanted to say; but it was clear this would be the wrong answer. Perhaps she didn’t have enough experience to argue with Rachel. Why did she always make people cross? Here was Rachel almost daring her to say something silly. She didn’t dare. Or rather, she dared in another direction.

“Anyway, you see, I don’t want to.”

“Ah. Well, that’s a different argument altogether.”

Jean looked at Rachel, at her jutting chin and fierce brown eyes. How could anyone look so cross; and not cross with disappointment, but cross with desire? All sorts of phrases surfaced in Jean’s mind—
she’s quite a pretty thing; so full of character; I’m really rather fond of her
—but they were, she realized, the clichés with which age defuses youth. She felt sorry for Rachel, still young enough for things to turn out right or wrong; the pride or the guilt still lay ahead. And then, beyond that pride or guilt, an age which Jean almost feared to hope for: an age of detachment, a state as much visceral as cerebral. Nowadays, when she heard a story or watched a film, she cared much less whether the ending was happy or unhappy; she just wanted it to turn out properly, correctly, in accordance with its own logic. It was like this with the film of your life. Her ambitions were no longer specifically for happiness or financial security or freedom from disease (though they included all three), but for something more general: the continuing certainty of things. She needed to know that she would carry on being herself.

She couldn’t explain all this to Rachel, which is why she said,
Anyway, you see, I don’t want to
. But later, lying awake on a warm night, she wasn’t even sure she had meant this. She thought of Prosser in the dispersal hut, rattling the pennies in his pocket. She thought of men in blue uniforms passing the salt more politely than usual and being quiet in corners.

She didn’t surprise herself too much when she agreed to sleep with Rachel. The old need praise just as much as the young, she had said; and desire is a form of praise.

“I’m not so nice to look at anymore,” she said when they reached Rachel’s flat. She thought of her breasts, her upper arms, her stomach. “Can you lend me a nightdress?”

Rachel laughed and said that she didn’t own one, but fetched something that served. Jean went to the bathroom, cleaned her teeth, washed, climbed into bed and turned out the light. She lay facing away from the middle of the bed. She heard Rachel’s steps, then
the weight of a body landing close. Thump. Like Uncle Leslie in the sloping meadow behind the dogleg fourteenth. Jean whispered, “I think you might have to let me off tonight.”

Rachel fitted herself into the angles of Jean’s back. Spoons, Jean thought from her childhood. She and Michael had been like a spoon and a knife. Perhaps this was the answer.

“You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to,” Rachel said. Jean exhaled in a half murmur. But what if you didn’t want to do anything at all? She lay tensely as Rachel stroked her, making sure she didn’t give any inadvertent signal which might be read as pleasure. After a while Rachel stopped. They went to sleep.

Twice more they tried, if try was the word: Jean lay turned away on her side, wearing a borrowed nightdress, holding her breath. She wanted to want to—but the actual achievement of wanting seemed inaccessible. When it seemed that Rachel was asleep, Jean relaxed; she was also struck by how well she then slept. She wondered if they could possibly go on like this. It seemed unlikely. But the idea of anything more brought on thoughts of panic, dryness, age.

“I don’t suppose I have the courage to go to bed with you properly, dear,” she said the next time they met.

“It’s not brave to go to bed with people. It’s usually the opposite.”

“It seems very brave to me. Far too brave. You’ll have to let me off.”

“We haven’t really tried much, you know.”

“I like the sleeping part,” said Jean, instantly regretting the remark. Rachel was frowning. Why did sex always make people cross? Then a worrying thought came to her.

“You remember that story you told me … about not enjoying yourself with someone … a man, in bed?”

“Yes.”

“Was that Gregory?”

Rachel laughed. “No, of course not. If it was, I wouldn’t have told you.” Jean felt relieved: at least there wasn’t some terrible
sexual curse running through her family, which was inevitably visited upon Rachel. Later, though, she began to fret: if Rachel could manage a difficult lie with her body, she could surely manage an easy one with her tongue.

Perhaps, despite what Rachel said, it was brave to go to bed with people. Or at least it could be brave. And perhaps she’d run out of her stock of courage. Like Sun-Up Prosser: windy, got the wind up; yellow; burnt twice. Rachel said it had been brave to leave Michael and brave to bring up Gregory on her own. Jean hadn’t seen these actions as brave, merely obvious. Perhaps bravery was a matter of doing the obvious when other people saw it as unobvious. Like Rachel and going to bed. It seemed obvious, and therefore not at all brave, to Rachel; to Jean, unobvious, and it drained her of all courage. People just get used up, Jean thought; their batteries can’t be recharged, and nothing can be done about it. Oh dear.

Or perhaps it wasn’t really anything to do with courage. Perhaps there should be a different word in peacetime. You shouldn’t be allowed to use the word
brave
unless you were a fireman or a bomb-disposal officer or something. You just did things, or you didn’t do things, that was all.

The news that Uncle Leslie was ill came in a shouted telephone call from his landlady, Mrs. Brooks. Since Leslie’s return from America, late enough after the war’s end for almost nobody to notice, he had sustained himself by a variety of undisclosed jobs, a little gambling, and some astute sponging. He always lived in digs, sometimes moving on rather hurriedly, but in general behaving well. As he grew older his system of barter became more highly developed. “You wouldn’t mind changing this plug for me, would you, Mr. Newby?” “You wouldn’t mind letting me share your spot of lunch, would you, Mrs. Ferris?” That was the first conversation Gregory could remember his great-uncle taking part in. Several times in recent years Leslie had taken Gregory to the pub, but on no occasion had Gregory seen money change hands, except when it was his round. Perhaps as closing time approached Leslie turned into one of
those tame soaks who trundle round the bar collecting glasses in exchange for an evening’s drinks, and who echo in a vowel-stretching parody the publican’s cry of “Time, gentlemen, please!”

“Hello, little Jeanie.” It had been years since he had called her that. She was over sixty, but she didn’t mind at all.

“How are you?”

“I’m going under, that’s how I am. I’m going under.”

“Is that what the doctors say?”

“They don’t say because I don’t ask.” Uncle Leslie looked thin and yellow, his moustache was ragged and his thinning black hair held together by a whirlpool of Brylcreem. “So I’ve got that thing we don’t talk about. I’ve got a dose of if-he-doesn’t-ask-we-won’t-tell-him.”

Jean sat on his bed and took his cold, brittle hand. “You’ve always been such a brave person,” she said. “I don’t think I’d have set foot outside the country if I hadn’t thought of you doing it first. And you sent me to the Pyramids.”

“Well, I don’t advise you to follow me where I’m off to now.” Jean was silent. There wasn’t much to say. “Anyway, I was always a bit windy. You probably thought I was quite a dashing fellow, when you were a little girl. I was just as windy then as I am now. Always running away. Always running. I was never brave.”

“There’s no bravery without fear,” said Jean rather forcefully. She didn’t want Uncle Leslie falling into self-pity. Besides, that was the truth.

“Maybe not,” said Uncle Leslie. His eyes were closed now; he gave a faint yellow smile. “But I can tell you this. You can have the fear without getting the bravery.”

Jean didn’t know what to say, until she remembered a little rustic shelter like an overgrown bird-box.

“Leslie, when we used to go down the Old Green Heaven …”

“Ah, do you think that’s where old golfers go when they
die?” Again, she didn’t know what to say. “No, it’s all right, little Jeanie. Old golfers never die, they only lose their balls.”

“When we went down the Old Green Heaven, you used to do your cigarette trick.”

“Which one was that?”

“You used to smoke a whole cigarette without any of the ash dropping off. You used to bend your head back slowly until all the ash was balanced on top of itself.”

“Did I do that?” Leslie smiled. At least he had some knowledge, some secrets left. Mostly, the only thing people wanted to find out from those in his position was what it was like to die. “And you want to know the trick?”

“Yes, please.”

“The trick is, you put a needle down the middle of the fag. All that business with bending your head back is just to make it look more real. Same reason you don’t do it in a breeze, or outdoors if you can help it, and you get everyone to hold their breath. Make them feel they could wreck it if they don’t behave. Always helps, that. You could probably smoke it pointing downwards in a gale and the ash wouldn’t drop off. Not that I’ve tried. But it’s hardly the best fag you’ll smoke. You keep thinking it tastes of metal.”

“Leslie, you are a clever old thing.”

“Well, you’ve got to keep something up your sleeve, haven’t you?”

On Jean’s second visit Leslie looked weaker, and he asked to see Gregory. Since the age of five—when Leslie officially began to acknowledge his existence—his great-nephew had been the recipient of a riddling series of Christmas presents. When six he had been sent a fretwork pipe rack; at seven, a set of stereoscopic viewing cards without the viewer; at ten, the Lysander kit with the missing undercarriage; at eleven, a bicycle pump; at twelve, three linen handkerchiefs with the initial H. Only one letter out, he had thought. When he was fourteen he was sent some French currency which was twenty years out of date and which got him treated as an
incompetent fraudster when he tried to change it at the bank; and when he was twenty-one, he received a signed photo of Uncle Leslie, taken many years before, possibly in America. After some early disappointment, Gregory had begun to be secretly proud of his presents; to him they didn’t indicate casualness on the part of the giver, but the opposite: a determination to bestow on his great-nephew something entirely characteristic of Uncle Leslie. In this they never failed. Gregory even went for several years in quiet fear that the stereoscopic viewer might turn up, or that his mother might give him one. That would have ruined everything.