This Time It's Personal
The Song Remembers When
For three years this story has been on the back burner. Now it can’t wait any longer. I need to write it. Why the title? Michael Ball was one of the few places of common interest – she liked his voice, I liked his looks. The CD was a cheapie, bought while killing time in town as they cleaned my three-piece suite. I was getting rid of her, effacing the memory of things we’d done on that sofa. Why, then, should I want to keep the big patchwork cushion she made for me, with its complex pattern of two interlinking circles that turns out to be simple squares and triangles fitted together. When she gave it to me, I said it was like us – you couldn’t tell if it was pink on a white background or white on a pink background. We were two women who made a mistake, tried acting on it, and found it defeated us. She’d say – oh, bugger her! I want to put it my way, even if I get my titles from songs on the disc. That’s my trouble, there’s nothing original about me.
Empty Chairs, Empty Tables
People are tracked by places just as much as by a particular song. The empty chairs I’m thinking of are in a pub in a gay-village area of a big town in the West Midlands. They are empty now, she’s gone, and the woman who organised the poetry reading is dead. I was in two minds about going. But when I got there, someone new was in the group sitting around the table, which was unusual enough. The only vacant stool was next to this newcomer. Her voice sent a prickle of pleasure down my spine and into my sex - a natural contralto, beautiful of phrasing and economical of words. She had a trick of making a little movement of her head and a twist of her lips rather than put a single word in the wrong place. “Jill,” she said. “What a lovely name.” I’d hated it. Until that moment. Christ, I envied her. Why should she be able to put people at their ease when I couldn’t? But I was on the town that evening, and I decided I wanted her, so I let my tongue loose round a pint of Stella without thinking of where it might lead.
Love on the Rocks
Lies trip you up in the end. I shouldn’t have tried them on her before I found out how much she knew. Was that mistake number one? No, it was mistake n-thousand and one. I’ve always lied, to myself and to others. As a young girl, I invented a world to suit me. We were never middle class; I’d never reached Grade 4 piano (I failed Grade 1, then refused to have more lessons). She was all she claimed to be – a peasant with a veneer of education, aware of herself and totally confident. I used to boast that my people came over with the Conqueror. Hers were here long before he even thought of invading.
It was the same for the alteration in her sexual status. Whatever she took on, she did with a completeness I’d have found impossible. Once she’d decided she’d be bisexual – because, as she Sid, you can’t cut 23 years of marriage and otherhood out of your life – she became, in her own way, more butch than I could ever be. I don’t think I was really a lesbian, just someone running from a marriage I couldn’t stand any longer. It seemed the easiest way out. I always took that. I got myself pregnant at 19 because I didn’t dare face the challenge of a job in Brussels. Before she’d married, she’d led what she called “the life of Riley,” with all kinds of men and some women, and had never made mistakes. I ran from things – from my marriage, my children, myself, too, I suppose. She just left when the time came, running towards something, positive, definite.
It’s no good. I’ve tried to capture her, but each time I read over a paragraph she’s slid through its mesh, like the silver fish she was, slipping through my hands. What did I see in her? What did I really want?
I Don’t Want a Lover
I fetched up in this town jobless and homeless, knowing nobody. She was solidly based with her County Council, owned her own house, lived in a village where she was accepted as a lovable rebel; if she’d turned up one day at a meeting and said she was a poached egg, no-one would have batted an eyelid. Being gay went under that heading. Her neighbours accepted her once they realised she wasn’t going to eat their children.
She had quality. Whatever that means. My first two women were tarts, common as muck. You get that when you run away from things. Wherever she was going, she wanted to take me with her. That’s why my children started to be afraid. We were together three years, a strange togetherness, Gemini and Pisces; one, a person divided against herself, the other, always pulled in two directions. Some horoscopes said we were ideally matched, others – that we should avoid each other. We did a bit of both.
Wind Beneath My Wings
She called me her muse. It’s true she wrote more poems during our relationship than she’d ever written for anyone. I’d told her I wrote poetry. Some claim! She called my work ”salami” – cutting a piece of prose into lines and arranging it on the page. She was right. I couldn’t tell a limerick from a sonnet then, and couldn’t now, not really. Her letters were what she said: works of art. Like Jean-Luc Godard’s pack of cards, with a beginning, a middle and an end. “But not necessarily in that order,” she’d say. She wanted me to say clever things like that, except with her they came naturally. I kept a photocopy of the letter I sent her the day after we became lovers. It’s a mixture of the real me, and the me I think I ought to sound like. Listen:
When we parted, I felt dazed and shaken. I
had permitted the very special woman with
whom I had just shared the honour and joy of
the deepest intimacy to glide out of my experience
down an escalator. I hope your journey
home was satisfactory and wonder along
which path your emotions were travelling.
She, on the contrary, went home and wrote a witty, filthy little limerick about us, followed by a sonnet which shook me with its sensitivity. I didn’t know words could be used like that, not by ordinary people. But then, that’s just what she wasn’t.
Music of the Night
It was the same with music. She didn’t divide it into Classical and Pop, only into good and bad music. I told her I knew lots about it. I didn’t – I used to listen to Radio 2. I stopped short at Beethoven, Tschaikovsky, and a record of mum’s called Excerpts from Messiah, made in the days before such things were matters of music scholarship. That’s another of her phrases. She just looked at the record sleeve and said in a tone of withering scorn, “Oh, yes – 1960s Huddersfield Choral Society style.” She’d sung Messiah in the Royal Festival Hall in London for several years running and knew chunks of it by heart.
I used to watch her face when she came off the platform or out of the concert hall. It was true – music did set her free. In the car with some of her friends, I’d listen, my stomach twisting jealously, to their light-hearted analysis of the evening. The trouble was, they weren’t saying things just to sound clever. They knew what they meant. It was their language.
“Yes, but when he started on the adagio… his tempo was wrong.”
“I just hate muddy-sounding baritones.”
“Did you see Alex’s face when we missed those two bars!”
“Rutter’s Gloria starts with the ten bars Walton left off Belshazzar’s Feast.”
Then she’d turn to me and apologise, for God’s sake, for leaving me out of things, showing me up in public.
Even when we were alone together, I couldn’t catch up with her. If I turned on Classic FM she could guess not just the composer, but usually the title and the actual movement of the work before I could count my ten fingers over. I used to say that when I was bringing up my family I didn’t have time to listen to the radio. But she’d done all that and held down a full-time job, so that wasn’t much of an excuse. I mixed Vaughan Williams up with Tippett, and said I didn’t like what he wrote, that it was jangling. Pride stopped me admitting I’d got it wrong. She fascinated me, like a snake fascinates a bird it wants to catch and eat. Me, I wanted to be the great benefactor, but time and again I had to accept that I was only the recipient.
Love Changes Everything
Were we ever really in love? We were certainly in lust when we were together. Often, in company, the need to be alone so that we could kiss turned into a physical ache. Was she friend, girl-friend, lover, partner? Was she everything I needed in a woman? I used to leave the letter u out of my surname, punning on “missing u.” You don’t write things as silly as that if you’re not in love. At least I don’t.
Neither of us, now that it’s all over, will resume life where we left it. She said at the beginning that if I hung around with her, I’d learn a lot and go places I’d never been before. Now, it only sounds patronising, but then it was what I so much wanted, to see things through her eyes and hear what she heard. Each failure stretched our rubber band relationship a little further, until there was no option but for it to snap, fly stingingly into both our faces. That’s a phrase she must have used. I don’t think I could have worked it out for myself.
I’m struggling to get across an impression of what she was like. She had her own life agenda, and bent things to fit them into it. She was an initiator, sociable, quick and aggressive. I’m the opposite. I analyse things to destruction level; I’m guarded, slow and passive. Perhaps that was one reason we enjoyed what we had, being opposites. She described me as a neat cameo of a person with clearly-defined edges, light and shade and a silver surround. I couldn’t see that. She was a ruby set in silver, with a fire-glow for a heart.
She was short, stout, her grey hair cropped; white when newly washed. Her eyes were light blue, and she always emphasised her eyebrows and lashes behind oval glasses. The way she wore her clothes made them classics, though she claimed they mostly came from charity shops. Me, I went to places like John Lewis and Debenhams, and still didn’t manage it. I didn’t need her top-to-toe raking glance to show me I’d got it wrong again.
The picture I’m making of her isn’t coherent. But my reaction to her wasn’t coherent, and still isn’t quite settled. Was she really a person, or only some kind of book made up of bits of other people?No, that’s just bitchery on my part, because I couldn’t find the real her amongst the bushes and trees she planted around her. Catch me if you can, she seemed to be whispering, even at our most intimate moments. Or perhaps she was some weird – what’s the word? Oh, yes, saprophyte. I’ve just looked it up. “Something which lives a dependant life on a host.“ Well, she slept in my bed often enough, used my shower gel, ate my food; whether that establishes her as dependant, or me as host, isn’t something I can be specific about.
Bend over, let me see you shake your tail-feathers.
I put up with her for a year, with all her superior knowledge and her abilities. I watched her charm my friends. I fought back rude comments when she criticised me. Then one day it was too much. At the bar of our favourite gay pub I stood looking back towards the platform where she was dancing with another girl from our group. She was all rhythm, every movement synchronised, living the beat of the DJ so much that even some of the boys were watching in admiration, in spite of her age and size. Like I say, suddenly I couldn’t see her. I paid for the drinks, put them down on the shelf, ran and hid in the ladies toilet. I wanted her to come looking for me. She thought I was making too much of things. She didn’t stay over that night. She said we weren’t far from the station. I snapped that I’d parcel up her things and post them to her. “Okay,” she shrugged. “Goodbye, then.”
My Heart Will Go On
I had a typical letter from her about six weeks later.
I told you my friends had to wait for my
inclination to write to them. My goodness,
that makes you sound like some kind of
unwelcome task, which you most certainly
are not. At least now that we are friends,
rather than lovers, I can say what I think
and if you want to, you can disagree, and
there will be no hard feelings.
My letters - and I hope you will simply
enjoy them, take them at face value, not
spend time looking for weird double meanings,
which I promise you there certainly
won’t be - are usually long descriptions of
what I’ve been doing, spiced with jokes,
comments on current affairs and anything
else that’s worth saying. WARNING - you
may need to carry an oxygen cylinder while
reading, so as not to suffer from exhaustion.
Whatever you want to say to me, and
whenever you want to say it, you know it
will give me pleasure.
She still couldn’t resist taking a dig at me. I’d tried to address her in French, and even got that wrong. She closed with “Votre (please note correct use of plural) bien dévouée.” I ripped the letter in half, and if I’d had a fire, I would have burned it. I’m glad I didn’t.
I can’t go on backtracking around corners that I’ve turned...
Our affair went the usual see-saw way of relationships between people who aren’t equal and never will be. I caved in first, and begged her to come back:
Our love didn’t die, it exploded. You primed
my temper as a soldier primes his musket.
I upset you first, and before that, you hurt
me. And so it goes. Strange then, that I
don’t want to be without you. I miss you, I
need you, I love you – please come back!
That’s what I wrote on a card. We made it up cautiously. But I felt alarm bells ringing inside her; she’d identified me as a pseudo-person, and the more I struggled, the deeper I dug myself into that hole. She seemed unconcerned, just went on forgiving my mistakes and ignoring the silly episodes that cropped up between us.
The more I wanted us not to be identified as a gay couple, the more she seemed to try to do it. She took a perverse pleasure in dropping a word or a phrase into a conversation, talking about a gay film, play, author or musician in a way that implied that I, too, knew all about it. At first, she was the one who drew her hand away. Now she was reaching for mine, putting her arm around me, kissing me in station waiting rooms or on the train where she knew we’d be labelled. It was like she was jeering at the world, and at me, for our
lack of courage.
I sent her away because something she once said to me, in a kind of prophecy, had come true. “You’ll go back to him,” she remarked, as casually as if she was talking about the weather. “All that fuss about being a lesbian, getting out of the bonds of matrimony, it didn’t mean what you tried to make it mean. One day something will happen, and you’ll just throw it all away. And when it does, I shall understand – but I hope your heart breaks.”
She never said she loved me – guess she thought I knew...
How true that last song is. We talked about love, we made love, but the one thing which was missing over the three years we spent pulling each other into pieces was any kind of direct statement from her. The words which matter, which cement people together. Perhaps she ought to have known I needed that reassurance. Perhaps I ought to have known she was too proud to say something like that in an increasingly shaky relationship.
She was away on one of her absurd singing weeks when I had the letter from my family. My children pointed out to me quite clearly that my ex-husband was my responsibility, now that he was ill; I’d had my fun, and I must pay for it. I didn’t dare tell her the real reason. So when I wrote, I mentioned the good times we’d had, and played on my feelings of dullness against her knowledge. I said I felt like the village idiot when I was with her, especially when she poured scorn on my trivial remarks.
I’ve kept her reply, her last letter. I remember seeing on a TV programme that Queen Elizabeth kept her last letter from the Earl of Leicester, so I’m in good company.
My dearest Jill,
Because that is what you will always be to
me, no matter what. Thank you for your
letter. You must be psychic… after a week of
being with my own kind of people, witty,
worldly, with a home-base of the knowledge
and love of music, I was going to write to
you and say just the same things. It is not
fair of me to continue dragging you at my
chariot wheels.
Shall I give the strap-on to the Girl
Guide Jumble Sale? Maybe not!
Let me close with the words from the end
of Part 1 of The Dream of Gerontius. (I know
– you will say angrily that you were always
too busy in the kitchen to listen to things like
that.) “Go on thy course, and may thy place
today be found in peace, and may thy
dwelling be the Holy Mount of Sion: through
the Same, through Christ our Lord.”
Page(s) 13-16
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