29 September, 2021

Dear Harry,

Is Marie still with us, in some corner of our poor, exploited planet? I don’t see why not. She was just four or five years my senior, and these days many people live well into their nineties, more and more into their hundreds. If she is still alive—as I hope, if she is also well and hearty—this intermittently appearing inamorata of my youthful days will be a very old lady now! I hope she still remembers me with the same fondness and gratitude that I remember her, because I share equally in the blame for the havoc she eventually brought into my life.

Did I ever bring her home with me to Sharnbrook? I seem to remember that I did. Maybe more than once. I wonder what you could have thought of her? She was not outwardly the kind of girl who normally attracted me—not beautiful or even pretty in any conventional way. Her least prepossessing feature, if I can take the rather invidious liberty of a purely objective, aesthetic assessment, was her ankles. They were the ankles of a natural-born country girl, strong and solid, compared with the shapely, elegant ankles of the city girl who is brought up walking in high heels on the even paving stones of sidewalks and never in the mud.

Yet she projected a powerful sexual energy. And I must qualify that: her energy was not only sexual. I saw it as a kind of joyful lust for all the pleasures life could bring and damn the consequences. We survived—miraculously—a disastrous, rain-soaked camping trip in Germany that first summer, and continued to see each other in London in the fall, each teaching at a different school in the south-western area of the city.

I am not proud of the young man I was at that time, Harry. I discovered in short order that teaching was not the poet’s sinecure I had envisioned. The short hours were lengthened interminably by such things as teacher conferences, sports supervision and… my God, the homework! Hours upon hours of squinting through smudged, illegible exercise books, in which I was obliged not only to correct the countless grammatical or punctuation errors, but also to add comments, commendations, questions, the exasperated “See me!” The long holidays I had so naively anticipated turned out to be much-needed periods of restoration to a measure of health and sanity. Weekends, an all-too-brief and welcome respite. Worse, my teenage charges were quick to spot my deficiency as a disciplinarian—and to take advantage.

Marie loved teaching. I’m afraid to say I grew to loathe it. Meantime, inexcusably, I began to treat her with cavalier entitlement. I was happy to exercise seigneurial rights to disport myself with other women, but I blithely assumed unquestioning fidelity on her part, and instant availability at my whim. If I had nothing more interesting going on, it was time to call Marie. And in truth she always was available. Until she wasn’t.

It was one Saturday evening. I called her at the last moment, in full confidence that she would of course come running at my behest… and found that she had other plans. She had been invited to a party. She would probably be home late but perhaps we could find time to see each other the next day, Sunday.

It was been a while since my jealousy last showed its ugly face, but it hit me with a vengeance when I called her late that evening from our flat (mobile phones were no more than a germ of implausible speculation in the minds of science fiction writers, along with the barely conceivable video phone that Facetime has become today!) and she didn’t answer. Where was she? I had visions of her cavorting with some tweedy young man with cavalry twill trousers and a striped college tie.

I suffered through a sleepless night disturbed by endless speculations, and called her at home as early as I decently could on Sunday morning. There was still no answer. Impossible! Could she, would she have spent the night in another man’s bed—a man who might be, God forbid, wealthier, smarter, more charming than myself and endowed—God! No!—with a bigger, more appealing cock? The image of her allowing another man’s penis up inside her whipped me into a rage that I could barely control. I called again, and again the ring went unanswered. And again… I called Barry, to ask if he had heard from her. He was surprised, and sounded infuriatingly amused by my anxiety. I drove over to the small suburban house she shared with a roommate who, I had always been quite sure, distrusted me. She seemed delighted to see me so upset. No, Marie had not been home the night before.

My hours that Sunday morning were spent in an ever-increasing state of despair and rage. I was convinced by now she had betrayed me, that she had (joyfully!) allowed another man to penetrate the body that was rightfully mine. And then finally, in this deranged state of confusion and, well, yes, truthfully self-pity, the phone rang. It was Barry.

“I have a surprise for you,” he said. “Come on over.”

Which I did. I ran.

Barry greeted me at the door with one of his wicked grins and waved me in, and led me up the stairs to the empty living room… Then, with a dramatic gesture, he flung wide the door to his bedroom, his and Mary’s, and there, behind the door, giggling, was Marie.

The initial flood of relief at seeing her was tempered immediately by a flood of questions that I did not dare to put to her aloud: where had she been? Where had she spent the night? With whom? I dreaded the answers to the questions that I feared to ask, and instead pretended to believe the story she came up with. But I didn’t. At heart, I knew that she was lying.

Worse, a new suspicion began to seep like poison into a distrustful corner of my mind: what was she doing here at Barry’s? They seemed to be having a lot of fun at my expense. In conspiracy. How long had she been here? Where was Mary? The bed, I could see behind her, was a tangle of sheets and blankets. It looked appallingly like my own bed after a night of sex. Had she…? Had she slept with Barry…? I could not put it past him.

As for Marie… my jealously swamped any other feelings. Sent trust flying. After all, I realized, I had treated her so badly, could I blame her if she’d seized the opportunity to take revenge?

Enough for this one letter, Harry. I’m exhausted. I’ll need to continue this story in my next.

Your son, Peter