Once it used to be the case, or it was supposed to be, that you fell in love and then, after being patient and chaste for perhaps a long and excruciating time, you got to make it. Now, I sometimes think, it may be all the other way round. You make love and then, maybe and maybe only rarely, you fall in it. But on a March night thirty years ago it happened at the same time. Though it may be a shade more honest to say to you now, since I’d never have made the mistake of saying it then, that I’d fallen in love with your father—who’d been around the house after all—just a little bit, before.
We were undulating anyway. Not just pillow talk, you might say, but billow talk, and what with this and all the sharing of our earlier years, I may even have had a fleeting picture of the long, rhythmic waves that used to roll and spill, not onto Brighton beach, but onto the sandy crescent bay at Craiginish in Scotland, where I’d spent summers as an unsuspecting girl and where one day, yes, Kate—I certainly wouldn’t have suspected this on that night in Osborne Street—your father would propose to me, actually if not exactly formally propose to me, in the dunes.
I’d already broached the Scottish thing. Yes, I was a Campbell, Paula Campbell, though in fact I came from Kensington. And here I was anyway in Sussex, on the south coast, about as far from Scotland as you could get.
But the undulating, for a moment, had its obstacle, its impending, unavoidable difficulty. There was no way I could break it gently to your father. He would form the wrong impression, he would take alarm, he might even feel he was caught (please not) in some kind of punishable act.
I didn’t want to interrupt your daddy’s sweet and gathering rhythm, so I said it as softly as I could.
“He’s a High Court judge.”
5
WHEN YOUR FATHER was twenty-one, he didn’t wear prisoner-of-war clothes. He wore, just for the embarrassing record, purple trousers with huge flares and a cracked leather jacket over a rotation (turquoise, muddy orange, salmon pink) of those T-shirts with buttons at the top which used to be called, and I never thought it funny then, granddad T-shirts. He had black hair almost to his shoulders, which was a bit curly and gypsyish at the ends. (Let’s not delve into my student wardrobe.) He looked pretty good, pretty unembarrassing to me.
And to Linda and to Judy, with differing consequences, beforehand. One way or the other, they’d relinquished their claims. There was no competition. All the same, since they were both in the house and were certainly
interested,
it was an open question exactly how things would proceed on the morning after that night.
We must have got
some
sleep. After dawn, perhaps, as the light came seeping in and the Brighton gulls began their morning mewing and squawking. It was a March night, a Friday to a Saturday night—like this night. It’s permanently inscribed in my mental almanac, and I’ve mentally placed an indelible plaque on the front wall of 33 Osborne Street: “Paula Campbell and Michael Hook first slept together here.”
I suppose it was still technically possible when we finally emerged, at some time approaching midday, that that night might have proved to be just another visit. No, your dad hadn’t come to stay, to spend the rest of his life with me. But I didn’t think I had to ask the question, and Linda and Judy at least weren’t going to deny what they could see with their eyes. All students get up late, but the two of them had been loitering for some time in the kitchen, clearly not intent on going anywhere. They were waiting to check us out. I still see their slightly glassy stares. Well, well, they might have said. Well, well, what have we here? But their silences and fidgety displays of matter-of-factness were perhaps more eloquent still.
And could this all have happened—it’s an entirely theoretical question, of course—if he hadn’t slept (or had some kind of turn)
We were undulating anyway. Not just pillow talk, you might say, but billow talk, and what with this and all the sharing of our earlier years, I may even have had a fleeting picture of the long, rhythmic waves that used to roll and spill, not onto Brighton beach, but onto the sandy crescent bay at Craiginish in Scotland, where I’d spent summers as an unsuspecting girl and where one day, yes, Kate—I certainly wouldn’t have suspected this on that night in Osborne Street—your father would propose to me, actually if not exactly formally propose to me, in the dunes.
I’d already broached the Scottish thing. Yes, I was a Campbell, Paula Campbell, though in fact I came from Kensington. And here I was anyway in Sussex, on the south coast, about as far from Scotland as you could get.
But the undulating, for a moment, had its obstacle, its impending, unavoidable difficulty. There was no way I could break it gently to your father. He would form the wrong impression, he would take alarm, he might even feel he was caught (please not) in some kind of punishable act.
I didn’t want to interrupt your daddy’s sweet and gathering rhythm, so I said it as softly as I could.
“He’s a High Court judge.”
5
WHEN YOUR FATHER was twenty-one, he didn’t wear prisoner-of-war clothes. He wore, just for the embarrassing record, purple trousers with huge flares and a cracked leather jacket over a rotation (turquoise, muddy orange, salmon pink) of those T-shirts with buttons at the top which used to be called, and I never thought it funny then, granddad T-shirts. He had black hair almost to his shoulders, which was a bit curly and gypsyish at the ends. (Let’s not delve into my student wardrobe.) He looked pretty good, pretty unembarrassing to me.
And to Linda and to Judy, with differing consequences, beforehand. One way or the other, they’d relinquished their claims. There was no competition. All the same, since they were both in the house and were certainly
interested,
it was an open question exactly how things would proceed on the morning after that night.
We must have got
some
sleep. After dawn, perhaps, as the light came seeping in and the Brighton gulls began their morning mewing and squawking. It was a March night, a Friday to a Saturday night—like this night. It’s permanently inscribed in my mental almanac, and I’ve mentally placed an indelible plaque on the front wall of 33 Osborne Street: “Paula Campbell and Michael Hook first slept together here.”
I suppose it was still technically possible when we finally emerged, at some time approaching midday, that that night might have proved to be just another visit. No, your dad hadn’t come to stay, to spend the rest of his life with me. But I didn’t think I had to ask the question, and Linda and Judy at least weren’t going to deny what they could see with their eyes. All students get up late, but the two of them had been loitering for some time in the kitchen, clearly not intent on going anywhere. They were waiting to check us out. I still see their slightly glassy stares. Well, well, they might have said. Well, well, what have we here? But their silences and fidgety displays of matter-of-factness were perhaps more eloquent still.
And could this all have happened—it’s an entirely theoretical question, of course—if he hadn’t slept (or had some kind of turn)
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