Black Dogs by Ian McEwan

Bernard, sexually obsessed. Since I had only ever known them elderly and hostile, I would have liked to tell her that, like a child with the blasphemous notion of the Queen on the lavatory, I found it hard to imagine.
    But instead I said, ‘I think I can understand that.’
    ‘I don’t think so,’ she said, pleased with her certainty. ‘You can have no idea what it was like then.’
    Even as she was speaking, images and impressions were tumbling through space like Alice, or like the detritus she overtakes, down through a widening cone of time: a smell of office dust; corridor walls painted in cream and brown gloss; everyday items from typewriters to cars, well-made and heavy and painted black; unheated rooms, suspicious landladies; farcically solemn young men in baggy flannels biting on pipes; food without herbs or garlic or lemon juice or wine; a constant fiddling with cigarettes considered a mode of eroticism, and everywhere, authority with its bossy, uncompromising latinate directives on bus tickets and forms and hand-painted signs whose solitary fingers point the way through a serious world of brown and black and grey. It was a junkshop exploding in slow motion, my idea of what it was like then, and I was glad June could not sense it too for I saw no place for sexual obsession.
    ‘Before I met Bernard I’d been out with one or two other young chaps because they had seemed “quite nice”. Early on I used to take them home to meet my parentsfor the judgment: were they “presentable”? I was always measuring men up for possible husbands. That’s what my friends did, that was what we talked about. Desire never really came into it, not my own anyway. There was only a vague general sort of longing for a friend who was a man, for a house, a baby, a kitchen – the elements were inseparable. As for the man’s feelings, that was a question of how far you let him go. We used to huddle up and talk about it a great deal. If you were going to be married sex was the price you must pay. After the wedding. It was a tough bargain, but reasonable enough. You couldn’t have something for nothing.
    ‘And then, everything changed. Within days of meeting Bernard my feelings were ... well, I thought I was going to explode. I wanted him, Jeremy. It was like a pain. I didn’t want a wedding or a kitchen, I wanted this man. I had lurid fantasies about him. I couldn’t talk to my girlfriends honestly. They would have been shocked. Nothing had prepared me for this. I urgently wanted sex with Bernard, and I was terrified. I knew that if he asked, if he insisted, I would have no choice. And it was obvious that his feelings were intense too. He wasn’t the kind to make demands, but one afternoon, for a set of reasons I’ve now forgotten, we found ourselves alone in a house belonging to the parents of a girlfriend of mine. I think it had something to do with the fact that it was raining very hard. We went up to the guest bedroom and started to undress. I was about to have what I had been thinking about for weeks, but I was miserable, full of dread, as if I were being led off to my own execution ...’
    She caught my quizzical look – why misery? – and drew an impatient breath.
    ‘What your generation doesn’t know, and mine has almost forgotten, is how ignorant we were still, howbizarre attitudes were then – to sex, and all that went with it. Contraception, divorce, homosexuality, VD. And pregnancy outside marriage was unthinkable, the very worst possible thing. In the twenties and thirties respectable families were locking their pregnant daughters away in mental institutions. Unmarried mothers were marched through the streets, humiliated by the organisations that were supposed to be looking after them. Girls killed themselves trying to abort. It looks like madness now, but in those days a pregnant girl was likely to feel that everyone was right and that she was mad and deserved everything she got. Official attitudes were so