Read Online I Could Love You by William Nicholson - Free Book Online Page A

struck at a certain moment in time. But sexual desire goes to the very core.
    Looking back over his life he realizes that he has always believed in his own desire but never in theirs. Not the desire of the women. He always suspected in them, more than suspected, assumed in them an ulterior motive. The man wants sex and baits it with the chance of commitment. The woman wants commitment and baits it with the chance of sex. So far, so obvious. Except that there are casualties here that lie unremarked on the field of combat: the death of female desire; the loss of men as sexually desirable beings.
    We collude. I collude. So frantic in my twenties in the pursuit of sex by any means I fed the hope of something more. Why else would she oblige me? Then the parting, the accusation of betrayal, the guilt. You lied to me! You didn’t love me! After a while the act of lying itself comes to be sexually charged, or at least the intensity of the sexual excitement seems to be contingent on the level of the moral transgression. We collude in the lie that sex is an early way station on the road to love. Even our bodies collude in the lie, because always after the sex comes the revulsion, the sense of worthlessness, the self-accusation: was it for that that I lied?
    No, not for that. Not for the short shudder of bliss. For the gathering storm that preceded it, for the rolling thunder that begins low and far away and comes ever closer until it fills the sky and drowns the world. For desire.
    ‘You’re very quiet, Tom,’ says Vernon.
    ‘Why aren’t we talking about low-season discounts?’ says Richard Graves.
    ‘We can’t advertise discounts,’ says Vernon. ‘That’s an inducement, and inducements are illegal.’
    ‘Bloody stupid if you ask me,’ says Richard Graves. ‘So how are we going to pay the bills when we’ve doubled in size and halved our bookings?’
    ‘Maybe,’ says Tom, who hasn’t been listening and so says what they’ve all been thinking, ‘maybe we shouldn’t go ahead with the expansion.’
    ‘But we’ve built it!’
    ‘So? We don’t have to equip it, staff it, heat it.’
    ‘That is a legitimate option,’ says Vernon cautiously, looking round the table.
    ‘So what do we do with it?’
    ‘I don’t know. Put it to sleep. Wait for better times.’
    This precipitates an explosion of disagreement. Tom withdraws once more into his own thoughts. He’s indifferent to the outcome one way or the other. What’s the worst that can happen? The hospital goes bust. He’s a shareholder, he loses his stake. So what? He has a marketable skill. Life goes on.
    So I have no ambition any more?
    In some strange way he feels as if he’s started his life over again. This time round there’s no drive to achieve, no deferring of pleasure in the interests of later gain. This time, the pleasure.
    Yes, she said. Of course I’ll be in.
    The other day she asked for a picture of him when he was young. He showed her the photograph his friend Olly took of him dancing at his twenty-first. He’s always liked it because he looks happy though in fact he wasn’t.
    ‘Oh, you’re so gorgeous!’ Meg said when she saw it.
    Looking through her eyes he saw a sweet-faced boy with shaggy hair, a lithe body. It was as if he was looking at a stranger. His own memory is of physical awkwardness, sticky-out ears, narrow chest, freckles, eyes that plead and look away. The musty odour of desperation.
    Now, of course, thirty years later, three stone heavier, balding, cheeks sagging, eyes bagging, he can no longer be called gorgeous. But it’s now that he’s desired.
    The meeting comes to a conclusion. The hospital expansion will proceed. A new marketing drive will aim to lift patient numbers. Vernon undertakes to brief the marketing team and Pegasus, the retained PR company.
    As they leave Richard Graves murmurs to Tom, ‘I should have thought you’d have more to say, with your new-found interest in marketing.’
    Meg is in marketing.
    ‘I