Maggie Gee - The White Family

And he had turned Dirk into a kind of thing, all smeared and swollen and unlike himself.

In fact, Dad met his friend George on the walk and went back to George and Ruby’s for tea. By the time he came home, he was over it. He was almost shamefaced, though he never said sorry, but he came and talked to me, unnaturally friendly, asking about my work at college, something he didn’t know anything about, and he watched TV with Dirk on his lap, stroking his hair, which made me want to throw up.

And Dirk went along with it. Dirk was grateful. That was the most sickening part of it. Dirk always idolized our father.

(And he’s never grown up. I think he still does.)

The row was over, but I couldn’t stay at home. I had to get out of the house that evening. I went to a party at Alison Green’s, a party I never meant to go to, at the house of someone I didn’t like, though she was in the same group at college as me. (She kept her hair in a fat French pleat, and wore very short skirts, though she claimed to be religious, with a crucifix and a polo-necked sweater that showed two decks of bosom and bra. I can see her so clearly; her plump pink lips, her enthusiastic questions in lectures, her grey eyes gleaming with real passion, for she was so eager to be a teacher, to go to Africa, like her parents, and then come home and ‘teach the underprivileged’. I thought, my family is underprivileged, but save me Lord from Alison Green.)

I wanted to teach then with my whole heart. But it didn’t happen. I messed things up. I had my chance and messed things up. People from our class don’t get two chances.

Alison’s parents were some kind of missionaries (‘Taking the faith to the savages in Kenya’, but I never even noticed the way they talked.) And they were both abroad that spring, and it was her birthday, in their strait-laced house with its fussy rugs and dried-flower arrangements and pelmets and flounces and Roman Catholic pictures. I arrived early. It looked utterly grim. But I helped her switch off most of the lights, and put red crêpe paper over the others, and hide the worst of the holy pictures ‘in case people spill their drinks on them’. She had laid in plenty of bread and cheese and a great many bottles of cider. We all clubbed together to buy some wine, six bottles of a warmish white that I thought delicious, and impressively French — vin de table , probably, mere vin de table , but the vowels on the label looked strange and sweet and a world away from the bottles of beer on which my father became obnoxious –

‘An éclair , madam?’ the waitress asked, her pale peach apron tightly wrapped around an unreasonably tiny waist. ‘A millefeuille , perhaps? Or the tarte tatin ?’

‘I’ll have the eclair.’ These days it means nothing, French or English, we’re European —

There were several boys that I didn’t know. Two of them were friends of a cousin of Alison who looked confusingly like her, but more so, with bigger bosoms and more prominent teeth and a shorter skirt and higher heels … however, Kate didn’t wear a crucifix. And the boys she was with were very attractive, both of them tall, with well-fitting jeans and coloured shirts and narrow ties. Alison had told me they were all students. Classy students, not people like us. Trainee teachers couldn’t hope to be classy. Whereas these were university students .

‘I’m not religious,’ Kate announced to me, pouring the wine with impressive freedom. ‘My family are. I think they’re cracked. Alison is. Do you know her well?’ ‘Not very well.’ I felt disloyal, but repressed it. I wasn’t particularly Christian then, and Alison was not a close friend. I wanted to be glamorous and fun, like them. I wanted something I had never known. I wanted to be taken away from my family, away from littleness, away from rules. The boys were tall and slim and dangerous. One of them was swaying his hips as he danced, narrow and definite and sexual. My cheeks felt hot. I wanted him. My eye still throbbed where my father had hit me, how dare he hit me, I’d never forgive him –

His name was Ivo. Imagine! Ivo . Not Ivor, as I first thought, which is just Welsh, but Ivo. Unbearably aristocratic. I soon found out that the other boy was Kate’s. He’s mine, I thought. Ivo is mine. I had the haziest idea of what to do with him, but I started by dancing with him, decorously, watching him closely, which was easy enough as he liked to dance with his eyes half-closed, immensely cool, looking at the floor, making strange little sallies to left and right which at the time seemed like the acme of dancing. I wasn’t really sure he was dancing with me, but when the music slowed down he took hold of me, and started massaging the tops of my arms, my trembling shoulders, my neck, my hair –

‘Watch him, Shirley,’ shrieked Alison, in passing, over David Bowie’s ‘Aladdin Sane’. ‘Oh, I’m all right,’ I told her, airily, trying to be airy and failing, failing, because his hands had found the toggle of my zip, because he was gently kissing my eyebrows, and no one had kissed my eyebrows before.

Soon I was swimming. We were swimming together, through shoals of limbs and warm wine and music. Breathing was hard. Swimming through space, and someone had put on ‘Ziggy Stardust’, flying out further, too far to come back, ‘Ground Control to Major Tom … Ground Control to Major Tom’ … and now I was drifting with Major Tom, out across a Milky Way of pleasure, shivering stars of electric feeling as his fingers brushed the smooth ridge of my spine, going lower, lower as I flew higher, above the crowd, above the voices of my mother and father saying, not too far, don’t go too far , and Ground Control was getting fainter and fainter …

There was an ugly screech like a demented bird as Alison stopped the record-player. ‘It’s too slow,’ she yelled above a chorus of complaint. ‘I want to have fun. I want to — rock!’ It sounded as if she’d read it in a book, but she meant it from the bottom of her heart; her eyes gleamed frantically behind her glasses, her dress had slipped down low on her chest, a film of sweat lit up her breasts. I thought that Ivo would notice them, but he was burrowing into my neck, breathing hard, one hand down my back, caressing the last few points of my spine. The silence was odd; I heard his heart beating, or my heart beating, or both our hearts, and his embarrassingly heavy breathing. ‘Upstairs,’ he said, as Alison’s favourite Rod Stewart record roared into life behind us and everyone started to jump like monkeys. ‘Let’s go upstairs. I can feel you want to.’

I don’t think I did want anything much except to go on in this dream forever, being stroked and held and dissolved by him, being carried so far away from home, so far away from pain and anger. I wanted more wine. He fetched more wine.

But dreams don’t last. We went upstairs. I can’t imagine how I got upstairs. I have lived this evening over and over and I still can’t remember going upstairs, I still can’t remember deciding to go. That’s more important, if I ever decided.

I hope I did it for some kind of purpose. I hope I wasn’t just another stupid girl who slept with a man because she was tipsy. I hope I wasn’t just a stupid cow. I hope my life had some pattern, some point.

Because that evening changed it forever. He pulled off my dress and stroked my back and held my breasts one by one in his hands, and told me I was beautiful, and I thought, yes, he is mine, this is bliss, we shall be together forever like this. Then he pulled down my pants. I know I protested, partly because I wasn’t sure I was clean, or clean enough for whatever he intended. I think I felt sad I could no longer hear the music or be with the other young people dancing, young people, not grim old parents with their rules and habits and desperation, young people in the world we would make, all of us free and unfrightened and happy.