For I had begun at last to see those changes in my body that might unmask me and show me up as an imposture. When I had held my lady’s nightshift against my face and smelled her perfume, as when I put my hand between her sheets, I was aware of my heart keep intemperate time and a sweet tingling in my secrets, then a little gush between my thighs. After when I examined myself I was still moist as with a thick milky dew that I was afraid might appear as a stain on my slops if I should be seated so I took care to remain standing. I determined to wear some rag of linen always about my loins.
Also I felt a little ache and swelling in my breasts though not such as would appear beneath my doublet and shirt but only if I should be surprised naked without my nightshirt which I made sure never to be. Nevertheless I determined to bind my breasts for greater safety. I did not yet wish to lose my life as Amyntas for Amaryllis, to be confined by skirts and forced to consider marriage but would serve my lady as long as I could.
And while I lay there on my pallet I felt for the first time a fear of what would become of me, how I should make my living. Cast out by my countess I could only practise as a wise woman or a midwife and I had no mind to marry, to become subject to a husband and bear children. Perhaps I could continue in disguise in some place where no man knew me but that was to lose sight of my lady and daily intercourse with her. Suddenly my life which seemed so sweet and easy had been darkened by that shadow standing over me and all seemed at risk that before had been secure.
‘Secrets’: what a sweet word for it. Or them. Like bees thrusting into the trumpet bodies of newly opened flowers. And not like cunt that rhymes with grunt, hunt, runt, stunt and National Front. All hard rude masculine monosyllables. The female organ as devourer, a mouth with teeth that would chop a prick down to size. Not petalled softness. Just an excuse for violence and rape. A word to be shouted back in defiance or orgasm, that can be used for men as well as women. ‘You fucking cunt!’ I suppose the American equivalent is motherfucker. The ultimate insult. Coney, cunni was gentler. And pussy. Each with a slightly different feel to it.
My delight is a coney in the night
When she turns up her furry tail.
A fun bunny. Whereas pussy is more dangerous, with claws, naughty and a bit spiteful. Twat is just contemptuous, taken over by schoolboys and shouted on the bus going home.
After the boat docked at Westminster I walked back along the Embankment elated with booze and lust, not wanting to go tamely home to my studio flat. The city was afloat on the river, the floodlit Shell building, Somerset House and on the opposite bank, the County and Royal Festival Halls were moored ships that seemed to rise and fall with the dark waters as they leaned over their own reflections. Other drunks came towards me out of the night but I was too exultant and pissed to care. I was fireproof, more alive than for years. Would she seek me out? Would I ever hear from Helen Chalmers, my charmer, again?
The bridges were slung across the Thames on ropes of stars. I turned up Beaufort Street, crossed over King’s Road where London was still swinging its Friday night away. Then memory goes blank. I must have gone on up Dovehouse Street over Fulham Road and up into Earl’s Court, got out my keys, unlocked the house door and climbed up to my first-floor flat but in the morning I remembered nothing after I left the river and my vision of the floating city.
My clothes were hung up neatly. There was an untouched glass of water by the bed.
Saturday morning. Nothing could happen for two days. How to pass this time? I could call up Joel and we’d go to Heaven. I felt like dancing. I was still high.
‘You wouldn’t like it,’ he said when I told him my great idea.
‘Why not? I haven’t had a dance since for ever.’
‘That’s the point. We’re too old. It’s strictly for kids now.’
‘How do you know?’
‘I thought the same as you. You know: haven’t been for a long time. Check it out. It took me half an hour queuing to get in. I thought the bouncers on the door gave me a funny look. I left after another half hour. It was embarrassing. Nobody over twenty. Thirty you might as well be on crutches.’
‘Where do all the thirty-year-olds go then?’
‘Serial partnerships. “Going steady” it used to be called. They stay home or visit each other’s pads and cook what they’ve seen on the tele. There were some really dishy young guys there though and everyone was on something: pot, pills, speed. Who knows? You have to be to rave on like that all night.’
‘Where can we go then?’
‘The pub and a pizza, and then the pub.’
It was our usual routine. Only I’d fancied something different.
Joel is one of the most stable things in my life. We met when he was being cautious over boy-shags-boy encounters at the height of the Aids scare, when people had just found out that what they’d been doing in fun was killing them. For some it was already too late. Joel and I found ourselves going to too many hospitals followed by too many funerals. That was before they found the drugs to put it on hold. Sometimes I didn’t even know the guy but I’d go along so Joel didn’t have to face it alone, wondering what was happening in his own bloodstream and when the trodden-on rake would jump up and smack him in the face, a favourite image of Dad’s for disaster lying in wait.
What first brought us together was his accent. ‘You come from Gateshead?’ I said.
‘How do you know?’
‘My parents sound just like you.’
‘So what happened to you?’
‘I was born here. Corrupted from birth.’
I can do it of course, talk like Mam and Dad, but it’s fake, imitation, acting. Like assuming a foreign language that you know well. Sometimes my parents make the duty trip to see ageing relatives. ‘Gateshead Revisited,’ Dad cracks. I’ve gone with them when I was still at school, seeing the streets where they were born, touring the homes of great-aunts and cousins. Feeling just that: a tourist. Roger always managed to slide out of it somehow with exams or football: a game he couldn’t miss.
‘It’s the Sunday dinners I can’t face,’ he once admitted to me. ‘As if time had stood still up there with meat and two veg, Yorkshire pudding swimming in gravy, tinned fruit and ersatz topping.’ His corners are smoother or rounder than mine and he can trade on being a man and the indulgent smiles that still brings to excuse him. At home with Jenny it’s watercress soup and pasta with pears belle Helene, or whatever manifestation of the latest nouvelle cuisine, the fashionable foodie commonplace for a time until the next chic chef woks it out.
‘What’s all the excitement?’ Joel asked after we’d sat down with our pints, his Guinness, mine bitter. It was a bit of old Gateshead I’d learned from Dad and still stuck to. It will all change now with the opening of the Baltic Museum and the gentrification of the Northeast.
I wasn’t ready to tell Joel I’d fallen for someone at the office party. After all nothing might come of it. She might not seek me out and if she bumped into me, or more likely sidled past in the corridor, she’d avoid eye contact, perhaps pretend we hadn’t met at all. No it was too soon for confession. There would have to be something to confess first. So I stalled with: ‘I was afraid we might be getting set in our ways, stale, that’s all.’
My passion for the older woman had begun after uni though it didn’t extend to Margaret Thatcher who was still reigning at the time. I found myself speculating about other members of staff, wondering if they saw through me or if I was as opaque to them as they