If I ever did come of age, a thing which frequently I have cause to doubt, it was thanks to the women in my life. Anything I learned of the civilising values I learned from them, beginning with my mother. And in the matter of becoming what I am, emerging from the chrysalis of callow youth into at least the rudiments of manhood, one woman – or girl, really – was the onlie begetter. I shall call her C. We were 11 when we fell in love.
She was not my first girlfriend. There had been a precursor, B., daughter of one of the grander families in our little town in the south-east of Ireland. They were horsey people, and our assignations were usually conducted on open grassland. She would emerge through a five-barred gate, mounted on an enormous brown stallion, looking excitingly severe in her skintight jodhpurs and hard hat. I remember in particular the horse’s huge glossy eye regarding me with what seemed sceptical amusement. It couldn’t last, and didn’t.
C. was from Wallasey, a ferry ride across the Mersey from Liverpool. She used to come with her family each summer to stay for four weeks in the little seaside village which has featured in two or three of my novels under the name of Ballyless. She had relatives in one of the holiday chalets in a field just behind the beach where, also in a – smaller – chalet, my family and I spent our summers.
I must have been aware of C. before I met her properly – though at that age children do not so much meet as congregate. There were games of rounders, of charades, of hide and seek, and a more violent version of hide and seek which we called ‘hunt’. I think of hunt as a dionysiac rout, with swarms of miniature maenads fleeing amid shrieks of wild laughter before a herd of ruddy-cheeked satyrs in sandals, shorts and singlets. What we did with our quarries when we captured them I can’t remember. Very little, I’m sure.
We spent so much time in the sea we were practically amphibious. We swam at morn and noon and eve, in sun and storm, under blue skies and grey, under warm rain, in the chill gales of mid-June. In the first clear recollection I have of C., she is wearing a one-piece black swimsuit. This elegant item marked her out from the others as a nymphet in the true Nabokovian sense. The others wore togs made of crimplene – remember crimplene? – which looked like limp chainmail, and, in some sad cases, wool, even. She was as sleek as a seal.
Her accent was a great draw. It was the standard middle-class English variety, which to us rough post-colonials was far above standard. When she wished to be funny, as she often did, she would descend into rich, singsong Scouse, or deepest Bumpkinshire, which she was very good at – Ar, I cum oop from Soomerzet where the zider arples groaw. She in turn found our broad Irish brogue hilarious, while our piously euphemistic expletives made her shriek. Japers? she would cry, what do you mean, Japers? – and who on earth is Janey Mac?
Indeed, it was through C. that I first came to appreciate the uniqueness of Irish Catholicism. She and her family were Catholic, but not at all in the way that we were. Compared to theirs, our religion was a lot of superstitious hokum, as primitive and mysterious to her as Zoroastrianism or the Kabbalah. Her concept of sin was essentially frivolous, certainly compared to our scrupulous and tormented eschatology.
‘You mean you really believe,’ she said to me once, ‘that if you don’t go to Mass next Sunday and die on Monday, God will condemn you to Hell for all eternity?’ And when I said yes she shook her head and did that incredulous whistle that I can still hear, as clear as the sound of pan pipes on a burning noon in the stillness of an Attic grove. Ah, my Chloe amid the laurels, my lost Atalanta.
