extraordinary-sounding older woman and – ‘What was she like?’ I kept asking Clare. ‘Like, physically? Tall? Fair?’
‘Oh, yeah, all of that,’ said Clare, right back. ‘She was amazing’, and she kept returning to that phrase of how much she fancied her: ‘I fancied her rotten,’ she repeated.
For that reason, I never got a real portrait of X for the purpose of writing this, something I would have liked, actually, to have been able to create a portrait of that woman in the Henry James way of showing character that is not the Tolstoy way but more uptight and detailing all the moral qualities of a person before you get anything of the physical, like you always get with Tolstoy straight away, the physical, you read about that first. Instead I’m left just with that ‘tall’ and ‘fair’ of my own here – enoughto make X a Valkyrie, I suppose, to keep the Wagner theme live, more a daughter of the god Wotan than an earthly Isolde – and Clare said she was having classes with this woman every week and loving the classes, of course, just sucking in every single thing about signs and signifiers, and going off and doing all the reading in between, reading that Barthes book and Lacan and Foucault and everyone, and all because she was in love with this person, X, and this was the only way, through reading the books X had read and had written about, those many texts of hers, Clare could get close.
‘Finally,’ Clare said, ‘after all this, after all the tutorials and the flirtation – because I knew she was flirting with me, using the books, her
texts
, to flirt with me – so, finally …’ And this is what I thought Clare said … ‘We had a day together.’
Finally we had a day together
.
As I say, that is what I thought she said. The next part of the story depends upon me writing it like that – faithfully, but with a sense of drama, of narrative fulfilment – in the way I heard Clare say it, that ‘Finally’ performing its trick, you see. ‘Finally we had a day together.’
Clare knows she looked great that day. She was wearing a leather jacket and a shirt that she loved. ‘It was from Flip’ – I know I’ve got that part exact. ‘And it was beautiful, beautiful cotton,’ she said. When I asked her more details about that later – when we went on to talk about the importance of the feel of the clothes you wear on top of your body, that first layer of clothing and how thatmakes you feel when you are with someone you fancy, how you remember every detail – she said it was a pale blue shirt with a thin, thin yellow stripe, ‘a fine stripe’, Clare said, putting her thumb and forefinger together to show how very fine it was. ‘It was quite preppy—’
‘A Connecticut shirt,’ I interpreted. ‘Like the boys wear there, on the Eastern Seaboard.’
‘Yes,’ Clare said. ‘And it was made of, as I said, this beautiful cotton and I know I looked great in that shirt. I knew I looked just great.’
So, and again I say it,
finally
, there she was. Dressed as she was – and it was ‘illegal’. Clare kept using that word. ‘It was illegal,’ she said. For them to be having this day together, time out, a whole day, first having lunch, somewhere in Soho and then walking around London, the two of them, in term time, and on their own … And they’d ended up on Westminster Bridge kissing – with the air cold, it was freezing on Clare’s exposed skin, from where this woman had unbuttoned her shirt right there on the Bridge, had unbuttoned that pale blue and yellow stripe cotton beneath her leather jacket in order to touch her breasts as they kissed. December and a thin cold wind was blowing across the Thames and there they were, these two women, a young woman in a leather jacket and a rather gorgeous sounding boy’s shirt and a sophisticated and should I write splendid older woman? (I want her to be splendid, so keep it in), a beautiful tall older woman, her teacher. Yes, ‘tall’
‘Oh, yeah, all of that,’ said Clare, right back. ‘She was amazing’, and she kept returning to that phrase of how much she fancied her: ‘I fancied her rotten,’ she repeated.
For that reason, I never got a real portrait of X for the purpose of writing this, something I would have liked, actually, to have been able to create a portrait of that woman in the Henry James way of showing character that is not the Tolstoy way but more uptight and detailing all the moral qualities of a person before you get anything of the physical, like you always get with Tolstoy straight away, the physical, you read about that first. Instead I’m left just with that ‘tall’ and ‘fair’ of my own here – enoughto make X a Valkyrie, I suppose, to keep the Wagner theme live, more a daughter of the god Wotan than an earthly Isolde – and Clare said she was having classes with this woman every week and loving the classes, of course, just sucking in every single thing about signs and signifiers, and going off and doing all the reading in between, reading that Barthes book and Lacan and Foucault and everyone, and all because she was in love with this person, X, and this was the only way, through reading the books X had read and had written about, those many texts of hers, Clare could get close.
‘Finally,’ Clare said, ‘after all this, after all the tutorials and the flirtation – because I knew she was flirting with me, using the books, her
texts
, to flirt with me – so, finally …’ And this is what I thought Clare said … ‘We had a day together.’
Finally we had a day together
.
As I say, that is what I thought she said. The next part of the story depends upon me writing it like that – faithfully, but with a sense of drama, of narrative fulfilment – in the way I heard Clare say it, that ‘Finally’ performing its trick, you see. ‘Finally we had a day together.’
Clare knows she looked great that day. She was wearing a leather jacket and a shirt that she loved. ‘It was from Flip’ – I know I’ve got that part exact. ‘And it was beautiful, beautiful cotton,’ she said. When I asked her more details about that later – when we went on to talk about the importance of the feel of the clothes you wear on top of your body, that first layer of clothing and how thatmakes you feel when you are with someone you fancy, how you remember every detail – she said it was a pale blue shirt with a thin, thin yellow stripe, ‘a fine stripe’, Clare said, putting her thumb and forefinger together to show how very fine it was. ‘It was quite preppy—’
‘A Connecticut shirt,’ I interpreted. ‘Like the boys wear there, on the Eastern Seaboard.’
‘Yes,’ Clare said. ‘And it was made of, as I said, this beautiful cotton and I know I looked great in that shirt. I knew I looked just great.’
So, and again I say it,
finally
, there she was. Dressed as she was – and it was ‘illegal’. Clare kept using that word. ‘It was illegal,’ she said. For them to be having this day together, time out, a whole day, first having lunch, somewhere in Soho and then walking around London, the two of them, in term time, and on their own … And they’d ended up on Westminster Bridge kissing – with the air cold, it was freezing on Clare’s exposed skin, from where this woman had unbuttoned her shirt right there on the Bridge, had unbuttoned that pale blue and yellow stripe cotton beneath her leather jacket in order to touch her breasts as they kissed. December and a thin cold wind was blowing across the Thames and there they were, these two women, a young woman in a leather jacket and a rather gorgeous sounding boy’s shirt and a sophisticated and should I write splendid older woman? (I want her to be splendid, so keep it in), a beautiful tall older woman, her teacher. Yes, ‘tall’
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