Highway’s first para-bronchitic summer.
Mother was going through a menopausal introspection-jag, so, by way of therapy, my father persuaded her to throw a tea-party – on the lawn, one Saturday – to make some local friends. After all. Jenny was there to help, and so was … Suki, a friend of hers from Sussex who had come to stay. Suki had a special effect on me at once. I had just finished The Mill on the Floss and was achingly in love with Maggie Tulliver (the sexiest heroine in fiction), whose gypsyish, magical good looks Suki seemed to me to share. Moreover, a girl with a name like Suki – the adolescent thought – would do anything; there was nothing a girl with a name like that wouldn’t do.
Mother supervised the preparations in frothy hysteria. Us boys were confined to our rooms for being in the way. ‘Who’s she invited, for Christ’s sake,’ my elder brother grumbled, ‘Marie Antoinette?’ I watched from my window. To ensure a constant flow of hot water a three-point gas-ring was set up outside the dining-room, directly beneath. And a table: cakes like sand-castles, damp strata of bread and ham, crushed-fly biscuits, greying boiled eggs in a marble pyramid.
At four o’clock rowdy hags had grouped on the lawn; some, panting like dogs, formed a tea-queue; others sat on deck-chairs and looked at a pile of gardening tools as if it were a cinema screen. As late as four fifteen, mother flaked out: either the party had aggravated her sense of intraspecific alienation, or her tranqs, all day neutralized by adrenalin, had hit her together in one clammy punch. Someone helped her to her room. Jenny was left to handle the hags. The tea and hot water dispensing fell to Suki.
Suki wore a summer dress of flame-coloured cotton and the summer dress turned out to have a low-cut front. Now if Suki bent forward, which she kept on having to do, and if I simultaneously craned my neck, which I kept on doing, I got to see the lion’s share of her hard high brown little breasts and -once – a flash of dark nipple. I sat with a decoy paperback on the window-sill for over an hour. And, as she became more flustered, and sweat surfaced on her forehead and shoulders, and she more frequently palmed the hair from her eyes: to me her movements seemed slower, quieter, and to have less and less to do with filling teapots and lifting kettles and being down there. The flabby blue flame from the gas-ring heat-hazed over her, came shimmering up the outside wall, and breathed thick air into my open mouth. Then her body began to squirm and writhe; I couldn’t focus on her, but she was all that was there.
As the party began to end, and Suki went to join the last of the hags, I fell back from the window, dropped the paperback, and swayed about the room actually wringing my hands. I wondered how I had ever played Scrabble, or read a book, or combed my hair, or brushed my teeth, or eaten a meal, when -it was all so clear now – Suki’s face was what it was, and her breasts were what they were. I melted on to my bed and lay there trembling, until, with no climax, I started to feel very cold instead of very hot and the voices of the women, at first inaudible, seemed to hail me from the garden.
I was sweaty and feverish the next day and decided to spend it in bed. (Besides, how could I face Suki?) Everyone thought it was the bronch returning, but I knew it wasn’t. No. Queer meets right girl, and never looks back.
Up on my knees I can now see from the light in the sitting-room the little patch of grey where the grass never fully recovered after that swirling, gaseous afternoon. I close the window with an air of self-conscious finality. I think I know how things will turn out. Passing mother’s room in the thin passage I hear her call ‘Gordon ?’, but I hesitate, shrug, walk on, and make no noise, having decided to stick to the story.