Pulse

moment – the moment of passionate taste – that we are after. Few of us have telescopes and harbours available, and in the rewinding of memory we may discover that even the deepest and longest love relationships rarely start with full recognition, with ‘you must be mine’ pronounced in a foreign tongue. The moment itself may be disguised as something else: admiration, pity, office camaraderie, shared danger, a common sense of justice. Perhaps it is too alarming a moment to be looked in the face at the time; so perhaps the English language is right to avoid Gallic flamboyance. I once asked a man who had been long and happily married where he had met his wife. ‘At an office party,’ he replied. And what had been his first impression of her? ‘I thought she was very nice,’ he replied.
    So how do we know to trust that moment of passionate taste, however camouflaged? We don’t, even if we feel we must, that this is all we have to go on. A woman friend once told me, ‘If you took me into a crowded room and there was one man with “Nutter” tattooed on his forehead, I’d walk straight across to him.’ Another, twice-married friend confided, ‘I’ve thought of leaving my marriage, but I’m so bad at choosing that I wouldn’t have any confidence I’d dobetter next time, and that would be a depressing thing to learn.’ Who or what can help us in the moment that sets the wild echoes flying? What do we trust: the sight of a woman’s feet in walking boots, the novelty of a foreign accent, a loss of blood to the fingertips followed by exasperated self-criticism? I once went to visit a young married couple whose new house was astonishingly empty of furniture. ‘The problem,’ the wife explained, ‘is that he’s got no taste at all and I’ve only got bad taste.’ I suppose that to accuse yourself of bad taste implies the latent presence of some sort of good taste. But in our love choices, few of us know whether or not we are going to end up in that house without furniture.
    When I first became part of a couple, I began to examine with more self-interest the progress and fate of other couples. By now I was in my early thirties, and some of my contemporaries who had met a decade earlier were already beginning to break up. I realised that the two couples whose relationships seemed to resist time, whose partners continued to show joyful interest in one another, were both – all four – gay men in their sixties. This may have been just a statistical oddity; but I used to wonder if there was a reason. Was it because they had avoided the long travail of parenthood, which often grinds down heterosexual relationships? Possibly. Was it something essential to their gayness? Probably not, judging from gay couples of my own generation. One thing separating these two couples from the rest was that for many years and in many countries their relationship would have been illegal. A bond made in such circumstances may well run deeper: I am committing my safety into your hands, every day of our lives together. Perhaps there is a literary comparison: books written under oppressive regimes are often more highly valued than books written in societies where everything ispermitted. Not that a writer should therefore pray for oppression, or a lover for illegality.
    ‘I just wanted to marry her as some people want to go to Carcassonne.’ The first couple, T and H, met during the 1930s. T was from the English upper-middle classes, handsome, talented and modest. H came from a Jewish family in Vienna, who were so hard up that when he was a small boy (and his father at the First World War), his mother gave him away to the poorhouse for several years. Later, as a young man, he met the daughter of an English textile magnate, who helped get him out of Austria before the Second World War. In England, H worked for the family firm, and became engaged to the daughter. Then H met T under circumstances which T, rather coyly, refused to specify, but which were life-changing from the start. ‘Of course,’ T told me after H’s death, ‘all this was very new to me – I hadn’t been to bed with anybody at all.’
    What, you might ask, about H’s deserted fiancée? But this is a happy story: T told me that she had ‘a very good instinct’ for what was going on; that in due course she fell in love with someone else; and that the four of them became close and lifelong friends. H went on to become a successful clothes designer for a