Stories: All-New Tales

Anyway Jenny, despite our investment in special clothing and sex aids, wasn’t getting a big enough buzz out of my efforts. It’s like horror movies or superhero comics, you either stop and give them a rest or you have to keep heightening the action. Even if the games didn’t bore me, our widening circle of acquaintances did. I wasn’t finding enough time alone. Individuals, couples, whole fucking communes got involved. If they gave me a good paragraph or two, I wouldn’t have minded so much, but there was an infantile sameness about their scenarios. Jenny and I were driven further apart by what the courts call intimacy. I tried to get to see Rex and Chick on their own, desperately needing to find out how they had rescued themselves from the crack of the crop, the smell of damp leather, the spell of repetition. Did you just grow out of it? Sometimes Jenny seemed to be flagging until some fresh variation on a familiar theme perked her up again. She was a natural addict. I’ve never been seriously addicted to anything. So I started trying to get her off the habit. It didn’t work. She made excuses, started doing stuff in secret. I hate ambiguity in my day-to-day life. There’s enough in my work. A writer needs routines and certainties. What can I say? As well as losing real intimacy with old friends, I lost it with Jenny. In a half-arsed attempt to restore our earlier closeness, she told me some of her new adventures. Then I got hooked for a while. I started pumping her for more revelations. She owed me that, I decided. They added nothing but did become pretty chilling. The seduction of underage girls. Things my friends liked to do. It amazed me how so many women took the odd rape for granted. Too many secrets revealed. Friendships frayed. Rex came back in the picture. I moved out.

I took my kids, whom I’d been missing anyway, on a long trip round the USA. It made us feel better. To my relief we grew back together. Feeling my old self I got home, bought a short lease on a little flat in Fulham, just when Notting Hill turned into a gentrified suburb. I saw enough of Jenny to know it was thoroughly over. I didn’t like what she’d done to herself. She’d dyed her hair bright blond and her brown eyes had a vaguely dazed, mirrorlike quality, as if they only reflected and no longer saw anything. She’d lost her sense of humour, too, and was into various odd relationships, still searching for the good life. When I shifted the last of my stuff she made a halfhearted attempt to patch things up. She wanted to have a baby, she said, and get back into our old domestic routine. Even while she proposed this deal, a bloke I vaguely knew was sleeping upstairs in what had been our bed, where once, like Proust, I’d done most of my writing. From being a place of concentration in which I conceived stories it had become a place of distraction, where real stories died. I said she could keep the place. All she had to do was pay the mortgage.

“But I love you.” She wept. She made an awkward attempt to remind me of the old days. “I love just lying in your arms at night while you tell me a story.”

I was sad. “It’s too late, Jenny.” Those stories were over.

I went up to Windermere, phoned Rex and Chick, but Chick was frosty. Did I know I had almost broken them up? I apologized. I said how much I regretted what had happened. Rex, just as distant and haughty, put the phone down on me. I saw them in Kendal once or twice and in Grasmere. They wouldn’t speak to me. Once, over his shoulder, Rex gave me the most peculiar leer. Did he wish we were still deceiving Chick? It made me shudder. Was something wrong with him?

Of course I longed to be back with Helena but she’d settled down with a jolly Scottish chef and was doing her best work. Why would she want to change that?