The Sense of an Ending

consciously press their breasts against you as long as there were about five layers of clothing between flesh and flesh. They would be perfectly aware of what was going on in your trousers without ever mentioning it. And that was all, for quite a while. Some girls allowed more: you heard of those who went in for mutual masturbation, others who permitted ‘full sex’, as it was known. You couldn’t appreciate the gravity of that ‘full’ unless you’d had a lot of the half-empty kind. And then, as the relationship continued, there were certain implicit trade-offs, some based on whim, others on promise and commitment – up to what the poet called ‘a wrangle for a ring’.
    Subsequent generations might be inclined to put all this down to religion or prudery. But the girls – or women – with whom I had what might be called infra-sex (yes, it wasn’t only Veronica) were at ease with their bodies. And, if certain criteria obtained, with mine. I don’t mean to suggest, by the way, that infra-sex was unexciting, or even, except in the obvious way, frustrating. Besides, these girls were allowing far more than their mothers had, and I was getting far more than my father had done. At least, so I presumed. And anything was better than nothing. Except that, in the meantime, Colin and Alex had fixed themselves up with girlfriends who didn’t have any exclusion-zone policies – or so their hints implied. But then, no one told the whole truth about sex. And in that respect, nothing has changed.
    I wasn’t exactly a virgin, just in case you were wondering. Between school and university I had a couple of instructive episodes, whose excitements were greater than the mark they left. So what happened subsequently made me feel all the odder: the more you liked a girl, and the better matched you were, the less your chance of sex, it seemed. Unless, of course – and this is a thought I didn’t articulate until later – something in me was attracted to women who said no. But can such a perverse instinct exist?
    ‘Why not?’ you would ask, as a restraining hand was clamped to your wrist.
    ‘It doesn’t feel right.’
    This was an exchange heard in front of many a breathy gas fire, counterpointed by many a whistling kettle. And there was no arguing against ‘feelings’, because women were experts in them, men coarse beginners. So ‘It doesn’t feel right’ had far more persuasive force and irrefutability than any appeal to church doctrine or a mother’s advice. You may say, But wasn’t this the Sixties? Yes, but only for some people, only in certain parts of the country.
    My bookshelves were more successful with Veronica than my record collection. In those days, paperbacks came in their traditional liveries: orange Penguins for fiction, blue Pelicans for non-fiction. To have more blue than orange on your shelf was proof of seriousness. And overall, I had enough of the right titles: Richard Hoggart, Steven Runciman, Huizinga, Eysenck, Empson … plus Bishop John Robinson’s
Honest to God
next to my Larry cartoon books. Veronica paid me the compliment of assuming I’d read them all, and didn’t suspect that the most worn titles had been bought second-hand.
    Her own shelves held a lot of poetry, in volume and pamphlet form: Eliot, Auden, MacNeice, Stevie Smith, Thom Gunn, Ted Hughes. There were Left Book Club editions of Orwell and Koestler, some calf-bound nineteenth-century novels, a couple of childhood Arthur Rackhams, and her comfort book,
I Capture the Castle
. I didn’t for a moment doubt that she had read them all, or that they were the right books to own. Further, they seemed to be an organic continuation of her mind and personality, whereas mine struck me as functionally separate, straining to describe a character I hoped to grow into. This disparity threw me into a slight panic, and as I looked along her poetry shelf I fell back on a line of Phil Dixon’s.
    ‘Of course, everyone’s wondering what Ted Hughes will do when he runs out of animals.’
    ‘Are they?’
    ‘So I’ve been told,’ I said feebly. In Dixon’s mouth, the line had seemed witty and sophisticated; in mine, merely facetious.
    ‘Poets don’t run out of material the way novelists do,’ she instructed me. ‘Because they don’t depend on material in the same way. And you’re treating him like a sort of zoologist, aren’t you? But even zoologists don’t tire of animals, do they?’
    She was looking at me with one eyebrow