Love Read online

  I wondered if the woman married to a pig had read this story. She must have been awfully disappointed if she had. And what about my Uncle Bill? He was horrible, and hairy, and looking at the picture, transformed princes aren’t meant to be hairy at all.

  Slowly I closed the book. It was clear that I had stumbled on a terrible conspiracy.

  There are women in the world.

  There are men in the world.

  And there are beasts.

  What do you do if you marry a beast?

  Kissing them didn’t always help. And beasts are crafty. They disguise themselves like you and I.

  Like the wolf in ‘Little Red Riding Hood’.

  Why had no one told me? Did that mean no one else knew?

  Did that mean that all over the globe, in all innocence, women were marrying beasts?

  I reassured myself as best I could. The minister was a man, but he wore a skirt, so that made him special. There must be others, but were there enough? That was the worry. There were a lot of women, and most of them got married. If they couldn’t marry each other, and I didn’t think they could, because of having babies, some of them would inevitably have to marry beasts.

  My own family had done quite badly, I thought.

  If only there was some way of telling, then we could operate a ration system. It wasn’t fair that a whole street should be full of beasts.

  That night, we had to go to my auntie’s to play Beetle. She was in the team at church, and needed to practise. As she dealt the cards, I asked her, ‘Why are so many men really beasts?’

  She laughed. ‘You’re too young for that.’

  My uncle had overheard. He came over to me, and put his face close.

  ‘You wouldn’t love us any other way,’ he said, and rubbed his spiky chin against my face. I hated him.

  ‘Leave off, Bill,’ my auntie pushed him away. ‘Don’t worry, love,’ she soothed, ‘you’ll get used to it. When I married, I laughed for a week, cried for a month, and settled down for life. It’s different, that’s all, they have their little ways.’ I looked at my uncle, who was now sunk in the pools coupon.

  ‘You hurt me,’ I accused.

  ‘No I didn’t,’ he grinned. ‘It was just a bit of love.’

  ‘That’s what you always say,’ my auntie retorted, ‘now shut up or go out.’

  He slunk off. I half expected him to have a tail.

  She spread the cards. ‘There’s time enough for you to get a boy.’

  ‘I don’t think I want one.’

  ‘There’s what we want,’ she said, putting down a jack, ‘and there’s what we get, remember that.’

  Was she trying to tell me she knew about the beasts? I got very depressed and started putting the Beetle legs on the wrong way round, and generally making a mess. Eventually my auntie stood up and sighed. ‘You might as well go home,’ she said.

  I went to fetch my mother, who was in the parlour listening to Johnny Cash.

  ‘Come on, we’re finished.’

  Slowly she put on her coat, and picked up her little Bible, the travel-size one. We set off together down the street.

  ‘I’ve got to talk to you, have you got time?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘let’s have an orange.’

  I tried to explain my dream, and the beast theory, and how much I hated Uncle Bill. All the time my mother walked along humming ‘What a Friend We Have in Jesus’, and peeling me an orange. She stopped peeling and I stopped talking about the same time. I had one last question.

  ‘Why did you marry my dad?’

  She looked at me closely.

  ‘Don’t be silly.’

  ‘I’m not being silly.’

  ‘We had to have something for you, and besides, he’s a good man, though I know he’s not one to push himself. But don’t you worry, you’re dedicated to the Lord, I put you down for missionary school as soon as we got you. Remember Jane Eyre and St John Rivers.’ A faraway look came into her eye.

  I did remember, but what my mother didn’t know was that I now knew she had rewritten the ending. Jane Eyre was her favourite non-Bible book, and she read it to me over and over again, when I was very small. I couldn’t read it, but I knew where the pages turned. Later, literate and curious, I had decided to read it for myself. A sort of nostalgic pilgrimage. I found out, that dreadful day in a back corner of the library, that Jane doesn’t marry St John at all, that she goes back to Mr Rochester. It was like the day I discovered my adoption papers while searching for a pack of playing cards. I have never since played cards, and I have never since read Jane Eyre.

  We continued our walk in silence. She thought I was satisfied, but I was wondering about her, and wondering where I would go to find out what I wanted to know.

  When it was washday I hid in the dustbin to hear what the women said. Nellie came out with her bit of rope and strung it up nail to nail across the back alley. She waved to Doreen who was struggling up the hill with her shopping, offering her a cup of tea and a talk. Each Wednesday Doreen queued up at the butcher’s for the special offer mince. It always put her in a bad mood because she was a member of the Labour party and believed in equal shares and equal rights. She started to tell Nellie about the woman in front buying steak. Nellie shook her head which was small and tufted, and said it had been hard for her too since Bert died.

  ‘Bert,’ spat Doreen, ‘he were dead ten years before they laid him out.’ Then she offered Nellie a wine gum.

  ‘Well I don’t like to speak ill of the dead,’ said Nellie uneasily, ‘you never know.’

  Doreen snorted and squatted painfully on the back step. Her skirt was too tight, but she always pretended it had shrunk.

  ‘What about speaking ill of the living? My Frank’s up to no good.’

  Nellie took a deep breath and another wine gum. She asked if it was the woman who served pie and peas in the pub; Doreen didn’t know, but now that she thought of it that would explain why he always smelled of gravy when he came home late.

  ‘You should never have married him,’ scolded Nellie.

  ‘I didn’t know what he was when I married him, did I?’ And she told Nellie about the war and how her dad had liked him, and how it seemed sensible. ‘I should have guessed though, what kind of a man comes round to court you and ends up drinking with your dad instead? I used to sit all done up playing whist with his mother and one of her friends.’

  ‘Did he not take you anywhere then?’

  ‘Oh yes,’ said Doreen, ‘we used to go down the dog track every Saturday afternoon.’

  The two of them sat in silence for a while then Doreen went on, ‘Course the children helped. I ignored him for fifteen years.’

  ‘Still,’ Nellie reassured her, ‘you’re not as bad as Hilda across the road, her one drinks every penny, and she daren’t go to the police.’

  ‘If mine touched me I’d have him put away,’ said Doreen grimly.

  ‘Would you?’

  Doreen paused and scratched in the dirt with her shoe.

  ‘Let’s have a smoke,’ offered Nellie, ‘and you tell me about Jane.’

  Jane was Doreen’s daughter, just turned seventeen and very studious.

  ‘If she don’t get a boyfriend folks will talk. She spends all her time at that Susan’s doing her homework, or so she tells me.’

  Nellie thought that Jane might be seeing a boy on the quiet, pretending to be at Susan’s. Doreen shook her head. ‘She’s there all right, I check with Susan’s mother. If they’re not careful folk will think they’re like them two at the paper shop.’

  ‘I like them two,’ said Nellie firmly, ‘and who’s to say they do anything?’

  ‘Mrs Fergeson across saw them getting a new bed, a double bed.’

  ‘Well what does that prove? Me and Bert had one bed but we did nothing in it.’

  Doreen said that was all very well, but two women were different.

  Different from what? I wondered from inside the dustbin.

  ‘Well
your Jane can go to university and move away, she’s clever.’

  ‘Frank won’t put up with that, he wants grandchildren, and if I don’t get a move on there’ll be no dinner for him and he’ll be back with pie and peas in the pub. I don’t want to give him an excuse.’

  She struggled to her feet as Nellie started to peg out the washing. When it was safe, I crept out of the dustbin, as confused as ever and covered in soot.

  It was a good thing I was destined to become a missionary. For some time after this I put aside the problem of men and concentrated on reading the Bible. Eventually, I thought, I’ll fall in love like everybody else. Then some years later, quite by mistake, I did.

  ‘By mistake …’ Does love always happen by chance? That’s one of the questions of this first book of mine and many that followed. I still haven’t found the answer but the question has become more problematic to me. I like the idea of free will but the ancients knew a thing or two about Fate.

  I WOULDN’T HAVE noticed Melanie if I hadn’t gone round the other side of the stall to look at the aquarium.

  She was boning kippers on a big marble slab. She used a thin stained knife, throwing the gut into a tin bucket. The clean fish she laid on greaseproof paper. Every fourth fish had a sprig of parsley.

  ‘I’d like to do that,’ I said.

  She smiled and carried on.

  ‘Do you like doing it?’

  Still she said nothing, so I slid, as discreetly as a person in a pink plastic mac can, to the other side of the tank. I couldn’t see very well because of the hood over my eyes.

  ‘Can I have some fish-bait?’ I said.

  She looked up, and I noticed that her eyes were a lovely grey, like the cat Next Door.

  ‘I’m not supposed to have friends at work.’

  ‘But I’m not your friend.’

  ‘No, but they’ll think you are.’

  ‘Well … I might as well be then …’

  What follows in Oranges is the unfolding of this relationship – how it moves from an unexpected friendship to an unexpected love affair. The girls I am writing about are not savvy, not sophisticated. There was no internet back then. They don’t know anyone like themselves. They are both going to church and reading the Bible and they feel happy there, and happy together. And then the thing deepens, because the body can’t lie.

  WHEN I REACHED Melanie’s it was getting dark. I had to cut through the churchyard to get to her. Sometimes I’d steal her a bunch of flowers from the new graves. She was always pleased but I never told her where they came from. She asked me if I wanted to stay overnight because her mum was away and she didn’t like being in the house on her own. I said I’d ring a neighbour, and after a lot of trouble finally got an agreement from my mother, who had to be fetched from her lettuces. We read the Bible as usual, and we told each other how glad we were that the Lord had brought us together. She stroked my head for a long time, and then we hugged, and it felt like drowning. Then I was frightened but couldn’t stop. There was something crawling in my belly. I had an octopus inside me …

  ‘Do you think this is Unnatural Passions?’

  HERE IS A table set at feast and the guests are arguing about the best recipe for goose. A tremor shakes the chandelier, dropping tiny flakes of plaster into the sherbet. The guests look up, more in interest than alarm. It’s cold in here. So cold. The women suffer most. Their shoulders bared and white like hard-boiled eggs. Outside, under the snow, the river sleeps embalmed. These are the elect, and in the hall, an army sleeps on straw.

  Outside, a rush of torches.

  Laughter drifts through the hall. The elect have always been this way.

  Getting old. Dying. Starting again. Not noticing.

  Father and Son. Father and Son.

  It has always been this way. Nothing can intrude.

  Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.

  Outside, the rebels storm the Winter Palace.

  Love, the naturaliser of everything artificial, and at the same time the ultimate artifice, the elaborate construct, the mind’s narrative of the body’s desire. Love, the destroyer.

  The change in Jeanette (me and not me) is noticed by her mother, who at first concludes that her daughter has fallen for a good-looking lad at church. As the Chief of the Sex Police, Mother feels the time is right for the story of Pierre …

  ‘THERE’S A BOY at church I think you’re keen on.’

  ‘What?’ I said, completely mystified.

  She meant Graham, a newish convert, who’d moved over to our town from Stockport. I was teaching him to play the guitar, and trying to make him understand the importance of regular Bible study.

  ‘It’s time,’ she went on, very solemn, ‘that I told you about Pierre and how I nearly came to a bad end.’ Then she poured us both a cup of tea and opened a packet of Royal Scot. I was enthralled.

  ‘It’s not something I’m proud of, and I’ll only say it once.’

  My mother had been headstrong, and had got a job teaching in Paris, which was a very daring thing to do at the time. She had lived off the Rue St Germain, eaten croissants and lived a clean life. She wasn’t with the Lord then, but she had high standards. Then, one sunny day, without warning, she had been walking towards the river when she met Pierre, or rather Pierre had jumped from his bicycle, offered her his onions, and named her the most beautiful woman he had ever seen.

  ‘Naturally, I was flattered.’

  They exchanged addresses, and began to court one another. It was then that my mother experienced a feeling she had never known before: a fizzing and a buzzing and a certain giddiness. Not only with Pierre, but anywhere, at any time.

  ‘Well, I thought it must be love.’

  But this puzzled her because Pierre wasn’t very clever, and didn’t have much to say, except to exclaim how beautiful she was. Perhaps he was handsome? But no, looking in the magazines, she realised he wasn’t that either. But the feeling wouldn’t go away. Then, on a quiet night, after a quiet supper, Pierre had seized her and begged her to stay with him that night. The fizzing began, and as he clutched her to him, she felt sure she would never love another, and yes she would stay and after that, they would marry.

  ‘Lord forgive me, but I did it.’

  My mother stopped, overcome with emotion. I begged her to finish the story, proffering the Royal Scots.

  ‘The worst is still to come.’

  I speculated on the worst, while she chewed her biscuit. Perhaps I wasn’t a child of God at all, but the daughter of a Frenchman.

  A couple of days afterward, my mother had gone to see the doctor in a fit of guilty anxiety. She lay on the couch while the doctor prodded her stomach and chest, asking if she ever felt giddy, or fizzy in the belly. My mother coyly explained that she was in love, and that she often felt strange, but that wasn’t the reason for her visit.

  ‘You may well be in love,’ said the doctor, ‘but you also have a stomach ulcer.’

  Imagine my mother’s horror. She had given away her all for an ailment. She took the tablets, followed the diet, and refused Pierre’s entreaties to visit her. Needless to say, the next time they met, and again by chance, she felt nothing, nothing at all, and shortly fled the country to avoid him.

  ‘Then am I …?’ I began.

  ‘There was no issue,’ she said quickly.

  For a few moments we sat silent, then:

  ‘So just you take care, what you think is the heart might well be another organ.’ It might, Mother, it might, I thought. She got up and told me to go and find something to do. I decided to go and see Melanie, but just as I reached the door she called me back with a word of warning.

  ‘Don’t let anyone touch you Down There,’ and she pointed to somewhere at the level of her apron pocket.

  ‘No Mother,’ I said meekly, and fled.

  I TRACED THE outline of her marvellous bones and the triangle of muscle in her stomach. What is it about intimacy that makes it so disturbing?

  Love ends, of course.
I mean, the love affair ends badly, because the church calls it a sin and the girls are separated. Melanie believes her love for Jeanette was a perversion, and she’s glad to start dating boys, and eventually to marry. For Jeanette, things are more complicated. She can’t lie about her feelings.

  There’s a further relationship with another girl – eventually discovered, and that’s it – she’s out of house and home, living what kind of a patched-together life she can until she leaves for university.

  During her first Christmas holiday she returns to find her mother has bought an electronic organ and built a CB radio to broadcast the gospel to the Heathen – mainly the Heathen living in Manchester.

  I MISS GOD. I miss the company of someone loyal. I don’t think of God as my betrayer. I miss God who was my friend. I don’t know if God exists but I know that if God is your emotional role model, few human relationships will match up. I have an idea that it might be possible. I thought once it had become possible, and that glimpse of something has sent me wandering, trying to find the balance between earth and sky.

  I can’t settle. I want someone who is fierce and who will love me unto death and know that love is as strong as death and be on my side for ever and ever. I want someone who will destroy and be destroyed by me. There are many forms of love and affection; some people can spend their whole lives together without knowing each other’s names. Naming is difficult and time-consuming; it concerns essences and it means power.

  On the wild nights, who can call you home? Only the one who knows your name.

  Romantic love has been diluted into paperback form and has sold thousands and millions of copies. Somewhere it is still in the original, written on tablets of stone …

  The unknownness of my needs frightens me. I do not know how huge they are or how high they are. I only know that they are not being met …

  One thing I am certain of – I do not want to be betrayed, but that’s quite hard to say, casually, at the beginning of a relationship. There are different kinds of infidelity but betrayal is betrayal wherever you find it. By betrayal I mean promising to be on your side, then being on someone else’s.