one of the nastier withdrawal symptoms. Only Hugo, once again in me, part of me, driving in like a needle into flesh, will stop this particular distress.
I look Stef and Hugo up in the telephone book. I punch out the numbers. The hotel phone sings its special little sickly Stef-and-Hugo tune. A child’s voice answers. No doubt Peter, aged eight. The eldest. The other two are twins; aged four, I seem to remember Hugo saying. Peter ought to be in bed. What kind of a mother is she? I find I am lost for words: put down the telephone, but not before a woman snatches the phone and says, ‘Who’s that? I know who that is! Bitch!’ before I cut her off. She shouldn’t speak like that, behave like that, in front of her own children: No wonder Hugo prefers Valerie the Comparatively Well Behaved.
Presently the phone beside the bed goes. It is Hugo. He can come for an hour. Why only for an hour? Isn’t he living here with me? Never mind, never mind.
I hear his step; I open the door into the hotel corridor. It has a timeless, placeless look: it could be anywhere in the world. There is not enough air on earth for me to breathe: my love is consuming all the oxygen in heaven. We are on the floor together: the door has to swing to on its own, as it is designed to do, though more for the sake of security than lovers. Oh, the fix, the fix!
Now I am myself again I can get on with Lover at the Gate.
LOVER AT THE GATE [4]
Bernard and Ellen’s Catholic months
‘YOU’RE ABSOLUTELY RIGHT,’ SAID Ellen to Bernard on the first night of their wedded life. ‘Sex is not only sinful, it’s disgusting.’
‘You shouldn’t not do it because it’s disgusting,’ said Bernard, ‘but because it’s carnal.’
‘Absolutely,’ she said. ‘The more you pay attention to the body, the less attention you’ve got left to pay the soul. I really do understand that.’
She agreed with him whenever possible. That way, she imagined, domestic harmony would lie. They took the little house two doors away from Ken and Rhoda; her own to play with, to sweep and dust and arrange as she liked, and meals for two to cook at her discretion, and her father and grandmother just down the road so she had both a respite from them and could keep an eye on them, not too close but not too far. Though what the eye saw was increasingly dismal. Then one day Rhoda went off like a damp squib into eternity: and after that it went into a sort of déjà vu double vision, watching Ken and his ex-saxophonist’s widow get together. She slept a good deal.
‘But, Apricot,’ protested Brenda and Belinda, ‘you can’t just give up and do nothing. Not after all that.’
Brenda was going to a college where there was an excellent women’s hockey team, and Belinda to university to read English literature. Liese was doing a secretarial course, but they’d all rather expected that.
‘I’m not doing nothing,’ said Apricot. ‘I’m getting used to a new life. And I have a really nice little part-time job at an optician’s. Goodness knows where it might not lead.’
‘You’re the receptionist,’ observed Brenda. ‘It will lead precisely nowhere except sitting around will give you a fat arse.’
‘She’ll never have a fat arse,’ said Belinda. ‘Not like me.’
Bernard came in and they moderated their language. He had that effect on people.
For their parting present, before they went off into their futures, they gave Apricot six months’ supply of contraceptive pills.
Brenda’s brother was a certified drug addict and stole more prescriptions from doctors than he ever needed to use.
‘I don’t need them for the moment,’ said Apricot, ‘because Bernard and I don’t do it. He says we can’t until we’re properly married in the eyes of God as well as man; he says it’s worth waiting for. I certainly hope he’s right.’
Belinda said it was and Brenda said it wasn’t. Liese said she was not in a position to say. Bernard said, ‘Ellen, the sooner your friends stop coming round and chattering the happier I will be.’
Brenda said, ‘Apricot, how can you do it? He won’t even let you have your own name!’
Ellen said, ‘I prefer Ellen to Apricot. Apricot was my mother’s fantasy and my mother was an alcoholic who deserted me. She had no sense of responsibility, no vision of the future. She was even worse than Rhoda.’