In fact I lost my nerve after six digits, hung up, took deep breaths, redialled; her Continental mother answered, I hung up again.
On my way to the bathroom I glimpsed Jenny and Norman standing by the cooker. They were enjoying a kiss – well, more of a snog really. It didn’t look half as extraordinary as one might have thought.
But you should have seen my parents, when they got the news.
The Highway breakfast-table, once again, the Saturday before Easter :
‘My God,’ cries mother, ‘Jenny’s going to be married.’
Gordon Highway: ‘Jenny ?’
‘Jennifer. To a businessman. Thirtyish. “Norman Entwistle”.’
‘What kind of businessman?’
‘Household “appliances”.’ She reads on. ‘Second-hand appliances.’
‘My God.’
‘In a fortnight. She’s giving up Bristol.’
My father leans over. To whom is that letter addressed?’
‘Both of us. I opened it because —’
‘I see. Well, she’s twenty-four’ (actually she’s twenty-three), ‘legally an adult. I see no point in forcing the issue.’ He sighs. ‘There’ll be some sort of reception to arrange… ?’
‘Jenny says she realizes it’s short notice. She says she rather thinks a small dinner-party. At his house.’
My father looks up meanly from his newspaper. ‘Well. That’s something.’
The following weekend the young couple motored down for tea. I diluted it. My Valium-ed mother fluttered between them on the sofa. My father paced the hearth. When Norman gave voice to such idioms as ‘settee’, ‘pardon?’, and at one point ‘toilet’, my father could be seen to wince as a man who is in pain will wince. He was a bit thrown by the opulence of Norman’s car and accoutrements – but he wasn’t a man to be gulled by the mere tokens of privilege. (Furthermore, my father was so very much shorter than Norman that Norman had had to go down practically on his haunches to be introduced.)
While my mother and sister convened their teach-in on babies, honeymoons and pre-menstrual tension, I gave Norman a game of backgammon – later abandoned for pontoon. We seemed to get on quite well.
‘It could conceivably be worse, I suppose,’ my father supposed when they’d gone.
Gloria and I had just reached an impasse on the subject of is there, or is there not – excluding, for the purposes of argument, the Tamla-Motown genre – a legitimate place for brass accompaniment in the current pop scene, when I counted down from ten in my head and glided forward in her direction, eyes half closed, lips pursed, arms spread wide.
Sitting comfortably? In fact, that was a direct quote from Conquests and Techniques: a Synthesis, a folder of mine. Most of the stuff here is in note form, with the odd diagram; but when I get a good idea, or a detail worth elaborating on, then I turn it into a full-dress sentence (and circle it with red ink). The section entitled, simply, ‘Gloria’, I now see, is done in a rather pompous mock-heroic style, like Fielding’s descriptions of pub brawls – the sort of writing I usually have little time for. But there is a sense in which this style is suited to the subject, so I’ll let it pass. That evening had something inimitably teenage about it and, after all, I shall never see its like again.
Firstly, I assume I’m right in saying that teenage sex is quite different from post-teenage sex? It’s not something you do, just something you get done. The over-twenties, I grant you, must see it largely as a matter of obligation, too: but obligation to the partner, not to oneself, like us. Take a look at the scaly witches round your local shopping centre, many of them with children. Grim enough with their clothes on. Imagine them naked! Snatches that yo-yo between their knees, breasts so flaccid you could tie them in a knot. One would have to be literally galvanized on Spanish Fly even to consider it. Yet it gets done somehow. Look at the kids. – The teenager may be more spontaneous, doglike, etc., but it’s generally only another name on the list, only another notch on the cock … Perhaps there’s some kind of plateau during one’s twenties and very early thirties. I might well give statistical weight to these filthy speculations by going down to the village tomorrow morning, twenty years of age, and finding out. (I could easily pull the village idiotess, who in any case, one windless summer night, had wanked Geoffrey and me off through the school railings, simultaneously; we stood there clutching the bars, like prisoners.)