This story is a direct follow on from my romance, "Next time in London" where I described how I met and began to get to know Sarah.
Chapter 2: In London
When my Grandchildren ask me what has changed most in my life time I tell them, 'communications' In the period of this story, there was no internet, e-mail, mobile phones or faxes. Trunk dialling was far from universal, and any way not many people had a phone. Last week I was in a highland hotel, and they still had the gloomy little cubbyhole under the stairs where the Public Telephone used to reside. There isn't even a phone there now, just marks on the wall and I have no doubt if you knew what you were looking at, you could trace the history of the telephone by the various holes and wire marks.
If you wanted to contact someone from somewhere like the Field Centre, it was through the old penny in the slot phone, and you had to go though the operator even to ring Oban. In those days people still communicated by writing letters, often with fountain pens. Today, by the time she had stopped for her coffee at Tyndrum, Sarah, who I had been getting to know on the island, would probably have sent me an SMS just to make sure that I remembered her.
What actually happened, was that a week or two after she left the Island, Sarah sent me a thank you card simply addressed to "Euan" at the Centre. It took a few weeks to catch up with me, as I'd gone to Manchester to begin my Post Graduate course. I am the world's worst correspondent and it was a couple of weeks before I got round to replying, (no point in seeming that keen in any case). Neither of us had phones where we lived, so the communications were, initially, entirely by letter. I remember Sarah's well, they were written on a deep pink scalloped notepaper, with a pink lined envelope.
We settled down to write with increasing openness, initially writing on alternative Sundays. I began to look forward to the distinctive letter being in my pigeon hole when I got into the University every other Monday if I was lucky, or Tuesday if I wasn't. After a couple of these exchanges, our letters became almost daily. I'd never carried out a courtship by correspondence before. Oh, I'd had girlfriends with whom I had corresponded before of course. With them, there was a sound foundation of experience. All we were doing was affirming a situation which already existed, much of the correspondence was to do with mutual friends, who did what to whom or said this or that, nothing like what Sarah and I were doing.
With Sarah, it was different. Apart from what? four or five hours together, we had very little in common. Mind you, what a four or five hours they were! Although I had gone physically further, quicker in the past with other women and had walked away, there was something about this woman that meant I was settling down to what was in fact a rather bizarre correspondence. I could have said that it was the style of her English. And boy could Sarah could write well. I wasn't surprised some years later to discover that she had become a novelist.
It was only when I read Linklater's "The Dark of Summer" that I understood why what Sarah wrote was so compelling. In "The Dark of Summer", the Hero has to take passage from Orkney to the Faroe Islands in a Naval Trawler. In the Captain's day cabin, where the hero sleeps during the voyage, there is a book case. Linklater describes it thus, "all its authors were women: Virginia Woolf, Colette, Rosamund Lehmann..."
The Captain and the Hero subsequently have a conversation. "That's what I call my harem." "Do you read no authors but women?" "Not at sea," he said. "The sea has two disadvantages: it's salt, as I mentioned before, and there are no women on it. Not in war-time. So female authors are a necessity, as well as a luxury. All those books and some are a lot better than others contain a woman who's undressing herself. Oh yes, they do! Some of them only unwrap their sensibility and their intelligence, but even they give you the feeling that there's a bed behind the door. But most of them take you on a beautifully observant, roundabout walk, that might be a little bit boring if you didn't know where it was leading; but it's leading you all the time, with unfaltering purpose. The whole thing — the whole female art of novel-writing — is an exquisitely prolonged strip-tease. Have you read this one?"
He threw a book on to my bed, a book that has been much admired and said, 'That's one of my favourites How wonderfully the disrobing of her sensibilities leads, at long last, to taking off her petticoats! And then what intimacy! Oh, nothing vulgar, but how her mind embraces you. And what good soap she uses. You can smell the steam in her bathroom. In reality, I expect, she would be an infernal nuisance, but in a book, at sea, she's pure enchantment.'"
Well Sarah was pure enchantment. I thought that I was a bit of a wordsmith but Sarah took me for a beautifully observed roundabout walk. Building on the foundation of our time together on the Island she took us past my frequently rigid prick into areas of soft talk and being together.
I heard her life story, I heard how her brother had tried to rape her when she was 14 (she was adopted), and she had successfully fought him off and knew that she could in the future. She was of course interested in the act of sex, but equally interested in making sure that it took place in a genuine situation of real intimacy. Had Linklater been writing in the 1970s rather than the late 1950s, and reflecting attitudes of a decade and a half earlier, he might have had "Silver" describe the work of female writers as an exquisitely prolonged foreplay. Certainly, through her letters, mentally my erotic zones were being touched and caressed.
The correspondence took place against a complicated background. I was perfectly happy as I was in Manchester, I had picked up some very posh totty indeed.
At a party in the department, I had picked up a young lady called Drusilla, who had been educated at Benenden School. While Drusilla had a boyfriend at Oxford, who was very posh as well, (I think that he was in the Bullingdon Club) Drusilla had no problem pounding the mattress with an Oik like me. Mind you, being Irish, I was exotic enough to be outside the English class system, and anyway I had gone to both a good School and University, even if I didn't have a lot of money with which to bless myself.
Fortunately, right at the beginning of our relationship, we had confessed to each other that we had another in reserve. It was the most liberating experience I ever had. I must tell you about the screwing of Drusilla some other time.
