laugher. Mind you, washed and groomed and suited and booted, Natasha looks as if she shits chocolate ice cream; whereas poor old Charlie only ever looks like she thinks she does. ‘Richard will hang on and we’ll drive you back in a bit – he’s got the Merc.’
‘Oh goody.’
‘I’ll come too, Mumu. I’ll make you your favourite snack of the moment when we get there.’
‘Double-chocolate–fudge goody in that case.’ And while I sink back into the pillows (incidentally, the one good thing about modern British hospitals – good, big, clean, nicely plumped pillows; if it weren’t for them this joint really would be the bed and breakfast of the soul), the two of them begin gathering up my pathetic little valise’s worth of shampoo sachets and books and women’s magazines and underwear. All my life my underwear has troubled me– soon, at last, I’ll be free of it. The Playtex Shroud – separates you from life, lifts you up to heaven.
Of course in the sixties, when the girls were small, I still wore pantyhose and girdles, or stockings and girdles, or just fucking girdles. Anything to flatten that great Ceres of bellies, and strap myself into sylphhood. First came the girls – then the fucking girdles. If I wore stockings I’d snap them on to eyes that were actually attached to the girdle – what an embrasure of nylon and rubber and steel. In the sixties, spontaneous sex was unbelievably difficult to achieve. Any level of arousal whatsoever was bound to be damped down by the time he’d managed to insinuate a hand inside this lot-let alone a dick. It was like a three-minute air-raid warning: ‘Aawooo! Aaaawoooo! Sex coming! Sex coming!’ And quick, quick boys – an ecstasy of fumbling; but then, ‘Aaaawoooo Mum-may!!’ The not-all-clear sounded and it was too fucking late. Not that I enjoyed their father’s love-making much – but it was the principle that counted. When I grew up, sex really mattered. We didn’t have drugs, or many consumables – but we could hump. We’d come of age during the Second War, when it was de rigueur to rock ‘n’ roll with all and sundry. Then came the fifties and sixties, when every car that backfired sounded to me like a ten-megaton detonation. The Cold War didn’t exactly give me the hots, but along with many many others I assumed that what I’d want to do while it all came crashing down was screw with Dr Strangelove.
That or kill the kid. Or both. Kill the kid while screwing Strangelove – that was the early sixties for me. But really it was kill the kid. ‘When they drop the bomb we’ll have to kill the kid,’ I’d say to David Yaws. ‘You realise that, don’t you’ I’d say it over dinner; in those days everything was over dinner – ‘because even if we survive the bombs they drop on London, we’ll wish we hadn’t. It’ll be the kindest thing to do.’
‘Really, Lily,’ he’d reply, shovelling his food up in the English fashion, the fork a little bulldozer, the knife a petite barrier, ‘the Soviets may have walked out of this round of negotiations, but they’ll be back. They know a nuclear war would be madness – just as Eisenhower does.’ Christ! What a sententious prick the man was. He always spoke as if he himself had recently been consulted on the matter in hand: ‘Is that Mr David Yaws, the ecclesiastical historian?’ ‘Speaking.’ ‘I have the Chairman of the Politburo on the telephone for you . . .’ While I could hardly bear to look at a newspaper, Yaws devoured crisis after crisis, confident that none of it would touch him, that he’d sail on by as he always had.
Yaws had been in the Royal Navy during the war. ‘I was on the North Atlantic convoys’ was the way he used to put it, in lounge bars, golf-club bars, train buffets – wherever he could adopt the correct hands-in–flannel-trouser–pockets pose. But the truth was he’d been at the pushing-off point for the Atlantic convoys. He was the guy who checked they
‘Oh goody.’
‘I’ll come too, Mumu. I’ll make you your favourite snack of the moment when we get there.’
‘Double-chocolate–fudge goody in that case.’ And while I sink back into the pillows (incidentally, the one good thing about modern British hospitals – good, big, clean, nicely plumped pillows; if it weren’t for them this joint really would be the bed and breakfast of the soul), the two of them begin gathering up my pathetic little valise’s worth of shampoo sachets and books and women’s magazines and underwear. All my life my underwear has troubled me– soon, at last, I’ll be free of it. The Playtex Shroud – separates you from life, lifts you up to heaven.
Of course in the sixties, when the girls were small, I still wore pantyhose and girdles, or stockings and girdles, or just fucking girdles. Anything to flatten that great Ceres of bellies, and strap myself into sylphhood. First came the girls – then the fucking girdles. If I wore stockings I’d snap them on to eyes that were actually attached to the girdle – what an embrasure of nylon and rubber and steel. In the sixties, spontaneous sex was unbelievably difficult to achieve. Any level of arousal whatsoever was bound to be damped down by the time he’d managed to insinuate a hand inside this lot-let alone a dick. It was like a three-minute air-raid warning: ‘Aawooo! Aaaawoooo! Sex coming! Sex coming!’ And quick, quick boys – an ecstasy of fumbling; but then, ‘Aaaawoooo Mum-may!!’ The not-all-clear sounded and it was too fucking late. Not that I enjoyed their father’s love-making much – but it was the principle that counted. When I grew up, sex really mattered. We didn’t have drugs, or many consumables – but we could hump. We’d come of age during the Second War, when it was de rigueur to rock ‘n’ roll with all and sundry. Then came the fifties and sixties, when every car that backfired sounded to me like a ten-megaton detonation. The Cold War didn’t exactly give me the hots, but along with many many others I assumed that what I’d want to do while it all came crashing down was screw with Dr Strangelove.
That or kill the kid. Or both. Kill the kid while screwing Strangelove – that was the early sixties for me. But really it was kill the kid. ‘When they drop the bomb we’ll have to kill the kid,’ I’d say to David Yaws. ‘You realise that, don’t you’ I’d say it over dinner; in those days everything was over dinner – ‘because even if we survive the bombs they drop on London, we’ll wish we hadn’t. It’ll be the kindest thing to do.’
‘Really, Lily,’ he’d reply, shovelling his food up in the English fashion, the fork a little bulldozer, the knife a petite barrier, ‘the Soviets may have walked out of this round of negotiations, but they’ll be back. They know a nuclear war would be madness – just as Eisenhower does.’ Christ! What a sententious prick the man was. He always spoke as if he himself had recently been consulted on the matter in hand: ‘Is that Mr David Yaws, the ecclesiastical historian?’ ‘Speaking.’ ‘I have the Chairman of the Politburo on the telephone for you . . .’ While I could hardly bear to look at a newspaper, Yaws devoured crisis after crisis, confident that none of it would touch him, that he’d sail on by as he always had.
Yaws had been in the Royal Navy during the war. ‘I was on the North Atlantic convoys’ was the way he used to put it, in lounge bars, golf-club bars, train buffets – wherever he could adopt the correct hands-in–flannel-trouser–pockets pose. But the truth was he’d been at the pushing-off point for the Atlantic convoys. He was the guy who checked they
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