Staring at the Sun (6 page)

“Do you know how many sandwiches Lindbergh took with him when he crossed the Atlantic?”

Michael was taken aback, as much by the sudden tone of authority as by the question. Perhaps it was a riddle. That must be it; so he dutifully replied, “I don’t know. How many sandwiches
did
Lindbergh take with him when he flew the Atlantic?”

“Five,” she said emphatically, “but he only ate one and a half.”

“Oh,” was all he could think of saying.

“Why do you think he only ate one and a half?” she asked.

Maybe it was a riddle after all. “I don’t know. Why
did
he only eat one and a half?”

“I don’t know.”

“Oh.”

“I thought you might know,” she said disappointedly.

“Perhaps he only ate one and a half because they came from
the ABC and were stale.” They both laughed, mainly out of gratitude that the conversation hadn’t entirely gurgled away.

Very quickly Jean supposed that she loved him. She must, mustn’t she? She thought about him all the time; she lay awake and dreamed all kinds of fancies; she liked to look at his face, which struck her as full and interesting and wise, not at all fleshy as she’d first imagined, and those patches of red that flared in his cheeks showed character; she was slightly afraid of displeasing him; and she judged him to be the sort of man who would look after her. If that wasn’t love, what was?

One evening he walked her home under a high, calm sky, a sky empty of clouds and aeroplanes. He sang softly, as if to himself, in the placeless American accent of an international crooner:

Heads we marry, honey,
Tails we take a cruise;
Heads it is so tell your people the news …

Then he just hummed the tune, and she imagined the words repeated. That was all, until they got back to the creosoted gate with the cutout sunrise, where Jean pressed herself hard into the lapel of his jacket before breaking away and running inside. Maybe it was some awful tease, she thought, like one of Uncle Leslie’s pranks. She hummed the tune to herself as if to find out, but it was no real help; it was just a wonderful tune.

The next evening, when they reached the same point in the lane and the sky proved just as tender, she found herself almost panting. Without breaking his stride, Michael resumed the story:

Heads we have six children,
Tails we keep a cat;
Heads it is so whaddya know about that …

She didn’t know what to say. She couldn’t think straight at all.

“Michael, I’ve something to ask.”

“Yes?” They both stopped.

“When you first came along that day … There wasn’t anything wrong with our blackout, was there?”

“No.”

“I thought there wasn’t. And then you told me those fibs about policemen’s feet.”

“Guilty as charged.”

“
And
you didn’t tell me you don’t put sugar in beer.”

“No, ma’am.”

“So why should I marry someone like that?”

She stopped. He put his arm through hers while thinking of an answer. “Well, if I’d called at your house and said, I’d just like to tell you your blackout curtains fit perfectly and by the way my feet are the right way round if you’d care to inspect them, you wouldn’t have looked at me twice.”

“I might not have.” He put his arms round her. “And I’ve something else to ask while we’re sorting things out.” He moved forward slightly as if preparing to kiss her, but she persevered. It was only one of childhood’s questions, but she distantly felt that they ought all to be settled before her adult life began. “Why is the mink tenacious of life?”

“Is that another riddle?”

“No. I just want to know.”

“Why is the mink tenacious of life? What a funny question.” They walked on; he assumed that she didn’t want to be kissed yet. “They’re nasty, vicious little things, minks,” he announced, not entirely happy with this answer.

“Is that why they’re tenacious of life?”

“Probably. Nasty, vicious little things usually do fight for their lives more than big soft things.”

“Hmm.” It wasn’t quite the answer she’d been hoping for. She’d expected something more specific. But that would do for the moment. They walked on. Glancing at the sky, which was high and serene, with just a scatter of light, loose evening clouds, she said, “Well, when are we getting married, then?”

He smiled, nodded, and quietly hummed his tune.

It must be right to love Michael. Or, if it wasn’t right, she must love him. Or, even if she didn’t love him, she must marry him. No, no, of course she loved him, and of course it was right. Michael was the answer, whatever might have been the question.

She hadn’t had many suitors, but didn’t mind. Suitor was such a silly word that the men who were suitors must be silly too. “He pressed his suit.” She had heard that phrase somewhere, or read it, and it always struck her that this was what was wrong with suitors. Were they called suitors because they were always pressing their suits? She liked men smart, but she didn’t like them spivvy.

In her head she lined up for comparison the men she knew. Perhaps men could be divided into suitors and husbands. Leslie and Tommy Prosser were probably good at being suitors, but it might be a mistake to marry them. They were a bit raffish, and their explanations of the world might not be reliable. Whereas Father and Michael were probably good at being husbands; they didn’t look spivvy and kept their feet on the ground. Yes, that was another way of looking at it: men either had their feet on the ground or their heads in the air. Michael, the first time she had met him, had drawn attention to his feet; they were pointing the wrong way, but they were firmly on the ground.

Judged by this new criterion, the four men she knew still divided up in the same way. Suddenly, she pictured herself kissing Tommy Prosser, and the thought of his moustache made her shudder: she had practised once on a toothbrush, and it had confirmed her vividest fears. Michael was taller than any of them and had Prospects of Promotion, a phrase to which her mother always awarded capital letters. He was, Jean admitted, a little shabby beneath his engulfing overcoat, but after the war she could smarten him up. That was what women did in marriage, wasn’t it? They rescued men from their failings and vices. Yes, she thought, smiling:
I
shall press
his
suit.

And that seemed to be it. If this wasn’t love, what was? And
did he love her? Of course. He said so every time they kissed good night. Father said you can always trust a policeman.

There was one subject on which Michael got ratty: that of Tommy Prosser. Perhaps it was her fault. She did rather go on about Tommy, but that was natural, wasn’t it? She was at home all day; Tommy was around some of the time; and when Michael came to collect her and asked what she’d been doing, well, it wasn’t very interesting to go on about blacking the grate and hanging out the washing, was it? So Jean would tell him what Tommy Prosser had said. Once she asked him if he knew what an All Clear sandwich was.

“You’re always asking me about sandwiches,” said Michael. “
Sandwiches
.”

“It’s got dandelions in it.”

“Sounds utterly disgusting.”

“It wasn’t very nice.”

“He’s shifty, that’s what I don’t like about him. Doesn’t look you in the eye. Always turning his head away. I like a man who looks you in the eye.”

“He’s not as tall as you.”

“What’s that got to do with it, stupid?”

“Well, maybe that’s why he doesn’t look you in the eye.”

“That’s got nothing to do with it.”

Oh well. Probably it was a good idea not to tell Michael that Prosser was grounded, even though you shouldn’t have any secrets from your husband. She didn’t say that he was called Sun-Up either.

Prosser didn’t get ratty when she talked about Michael, though he didn’t always join in her enthusiasm.

“He’ll do all right,” was his standard reply.

“You do think it’s a good idea, don’t you, Tommy?”

“Good enough, lass. I’ll tell you this, he’s got a good bargain.”

“But you’re married? And you’re happy?”

“Haven’t been home enough to notice.”

“No, I suppose not. But you do like Michael?”

“He’ll do all right. It’s not me that’s marrying him.”

“Isn’t he tall?”

“He’s tall enough.”

“But you do think he’ll make a wonderful husband?”

“You’ve got to get burnt once. Just try not to get burnt twice.” She didn’t really understand this remark, but she was rather cross with Tommy Prosser about it anyway.

Mrs. Barrett, one of the brisker, more modern wives of the village, called on Jean when everyone was out of the house and gave her a small parcel. “
I
don’t need it any longer, my dear,” was all she said. Later, in bed, Jean unwrapped a maroon cloth-bound book of advice designed for young couples. At the front was a list of the author’s previous works. She had written
The Cretaceous Flora
(in two parts),
Ancient Plants, The Study of Plant Life, A Journal from Japan
, a three-act play called
Our Ostriches
and a dozen books under the heading Sexology. One of these was called
The First Five Thousand
. The first five thousand
what?

Jean wasn’t sure how to read the book, or whether she should be doing so anyway. Wasn’t it better to learn such things from Michael? He was bound to know most of this, wasn’t he? Or was he? It wasn’t an area they had discussed. Men were supposed to know, and women were supposed not to mind how they had found out. Jean didn’t mind: it was silly to worry about Michael’s life before she met him. It seemed so distant anyway—it was all before the war. The word
prostitute
sidled into her mind like a vamp through a door. Men went to prostitutes to rid themselves of their animal desires, then later they married wives—that was what happened, wasn’t it? Did you have to go up to London for prostitutes? She supposed so. Most of the unpleasant things to do with sex took place, she imagined, in London.

The first night she leafed through the book carelessly, skipping whole chapter called Sleep, Children, Society and Appendix. If she did this, it didn’t really count as reading. Even so, phrases dropped
from the page and stuck like burrs to her flannelette nightdress. Some of them made her laugh; some of them made her apprehensive. The word
turgid
kept appearing, as did
crisis;
she didn’t like the sound of those two.
Enlarged and stiffened,
she read;
lubricated by mucus; turgid
again;
soft, small and drooping
(ugh);
maladjustment of the relative shapes and positions of the organs; partial absorption of the man’s secretions; congestion of the womb
.

At the back of the book was an advertisement for the author’s play, the one called
Our Ostriches
, “first produced at the Royal Court Theatre Nov. 14, 1923.”
Punch
said it was “full of humour and irony, admirably interpreted.” The
Sunday Times
said it “begins in excitement and keeps it up all through.” Jean found herself giggling and became suddenly shocked at herself. What a dirty mind. But then she giggled again as she imagined another review that read: “admirably turgid.”

She told Michael that Mrs. Barrett had given her the book. “Good show,” he said, looking away. “I’d been wondering about all that.”

She thought of asking him about prostitutes, but they were approaching that part of the lane where he hummed, and she decided this wasn’t the best time. Still, he clearly thought it a good idea that she was reading the book; so that night she went back to it more purposefully. She was astonished by how often the word
sex
seemed to be married to some other word:
sex-attraction, sex-ignorance, sex-tide, sex-life, sex-function
. Lots of hyphens everywhere. Sex-hyphens, she thought.

She tried hard, but couldn’t understand a lot of what was being said. The author made great claims to write plainly and straightforwardly, but Jean got lost almost at once.
Soul structures
, she read, and
the rift within the lute
, which she didn’t much want to think about.
The clitoris corresponds morphologically to the man’s penis
. What could that mean? And there weren’t many jokes around.
The Queen of Aragon ordained that six times a day was the proper rule in legitimate marriage. So abnormally sexed a woman would today probably succeed in killing by exhaustion a succession of husbands …
That was the nearest.

Even the parts she could understand without difficulty didn’t seem to correspond to her experience.
The opportunities for peaceful, romantic dalliance
, she read,
are less today in a city with its tubes and cinema shows than in woods and gardens where the pulling of rosemary or lavender may be the sweet excuse for the slow and profound mutual rousing of passion
. Admittedly it was wartime, but Michael and she might as well live in the city for all the pulling of lavender he had proposed. She couldn’t offhand think of where it might grow locally. And why was it herbs that were suggested? What was wrong with flowers?

Then there was something called the Periodicity of Recurrence, a sort of graph showing how a woman’s desire came and went throughout the month. There were two charts, one showing the Curve of Normal Desire in Healthy Women, the second showing the Feeble and Transient Up-Welling in Women Suffering from Fatigue and Overwork. At the end of the second graph the Level of Potential Desire suddenly shot up and down like a Ping-Pong ball on a water fountain. A caption explained: “Shortly before and during the time of the crest
d
Alpine air restored the vitality of the subject.”

Finally, there was a piece of advice she noted in the section called Modesty and Romance.
Be always escaping. Escape the lower, the trivial, the sordid. So far as possible ensure that you allow your husband to come upon you only when there is delight in the meeting. Whenever the finances allow, the husband and wife should have separate bedrooms, failing that they should have a curtain which can at will be drawn so as to divide the room they share.