I imagine that everyone around that table assumed that I was a virgin when the fact was I had probably had more sex than any of them, even Julian, albeit in far less romantic settings. But they had experienced things that I never had, pleasures that I felt certain were superior to the ephemeral thrill of a quickly forgotten climax.
I knew nothing, for example, of foreplay or seduction, of how it might feel to meet a stranger in a bar and strike up a conversation, mindful of the possibility that it might lead somewhere more interesting. The truth was, if I was not screwing within ten minutes of meeting a man, then it was probably never going to happen at all. My Pavlovian response to an orgasm was to pull up my pants and run away. I had never had sex during daytime; instead, it was a shameful activity to be conducted in haste, in hiding and in darkness. I associated sexual congress with the night air, with the outdoors, with my shirt on and my trousers around my ankles. I knew the sensation of tree bark imprinting itself against the palms of my hands as I fucked someone in a park and the smell of sap against my face as a stranger pushed against me from behind. Sex was not scored by sighs of pleasure but by the scurrying urgency of rodents in the undergrowth and the sound of cars rushing past in the distance, not to mention the associated fear that from those same roads might come the unforgiving scream of Garda sirens, responding to the outraged phone call of a traumatized dog-walker. I had no idea what it would be like to wrap my arms around a lover beneath the sheets as we fell asleep, whispering words of gentle affection that drifted carelessly into sleepy tenderness. I had never woken with another person or been able to satisfy my tenacious early-morning desire with an unapologetic partner. I could number more sexual partners in my history than anyone I knew but the difference between love and sex could be summed up for me in eight words:
I loved Julian; I had sex with strangers.
And so I wonder what would have surprised them more: to have known all that or to have learned that I had, in fact, had sex with a woman. Only once, granted, but the extraordinary moment had taken place three weeks earlier when, to my surprise, Alice insisted that we go to bed together and, even more surprisingly, I had agreed.
Intimacy was one of the things that I had managed to avoid over the eighteen months of our courtship and for once I found myself grateful to be living in Ireland, a country where a homosexual, like a student priest, could easily hide their preferences by disguising them beneath the murky robes of a committed Catholic. Naturally, as it was only 1973 and we were children of our time, it was a subject that Alice and I were shy of discussing aloud and so we used the person we had in common, Julian, as our conduit into the subject.
“He has sex with different people constantly,” I whined a few weeks before the wedding as we sat in Doyle’s on College Green, both of us a little excited from having watched Robert Redford and Paul Newman alternate between T-shirts, tuxedos and slicked-back hair for two hours in The Sting. I was in one of those moods where my resentment at her brother’s sexual prowess and unyielding heterosexuality put me in the mood to belittle him. “He basically does it with anyone he wants, which is really disgusting when you think about it. But is he actually happy?”
“Are you kidding me, Cyril?” Alice replied, amused by the absurdity of my question. “I’d say he’s ecstatic. Wouldn’t you be?”
I knew she was teasing me but I didn’t laugh. Sex hovered around the edges of our lives like an anxious guest at a party. It was obvious that sooner or later one of us would have to bite the bullet and go over to say hello. I just didn’t particularly want it to be me.
“Did I mention,” she said, not quite looking me in the eye, “that Max and Samantha are going to London next weekend?”
“No,” I said. Samantha was Max’s second wife. Much like my own adoptive father, who that year was engaged to the woman who would become, albeit briefly, the fourth Mrs. Avery, Alice’s father had obtained a divorce from Elizabeth in the UK on the grounds of unreasonable behavior. In fairness to him, he had cited his own unreasonable behavior in the suit, not hers, for after all the most unreasonable thing that she’d ever done, aside from her brief affair with Charles, was stay with the bastard. Shortly after the decree nisi had come through, Max had married an aspiring actress who bore an uncanny and deeply disturbing resemblance to Alice herself. This was a subject that was absolutely off limits, although I was often keen to ask Julian whether he noticed the likeness and, if so, what he made of it.
“We should go to London sometime,” she continued.
“I daresay we’ll have plenty of holidays to look forward to after we’re married,” I said. “We could go to Spain someday. That’s very popular. Or Portugal.”
“Portugal?” she said, raising an eyebrow in mock-excitement. “Do you really think so? I never imagined I could be the kind of girl who would grow up and get to go to Portugal!”
“All right then, America,” I said, laughing. “Or Australia. Anything’s possible. We’d have to save for an awfully long time if we wanted to go that far but—”
“It’s hard to believe that I’m twenty-six years old and have never set foot outside Ireland.”
“Well, I’m twenty-eight,” I pointed out, “and neither have I. What are they doing in London anyway?”
“Oh, Samantha has a meeting with Ken Russell.”
“Who’s Ken Russell?”
“Film director. You know, The Devils. Women in Love. Oliver Reed and Alan Bates wrestling with their bits hanging out.”
“Oh yes,” I said. “It’s all soft porn, isn’t it?”
“Well, I suppose it depends on how old you are,” she said. “For our parents’ generation, yes, it probably is. For us, they’re art films.”
“I wonder what our children will call them,” I said. “Quaint but terribly passé, I suppose.”
“Children?” she said, looking across at me hopefully. “It’s funny we’ve never talked about children, isn’t it? Considering we’re getting married in a few weeks’ time.”
“Yes, I suppose so,” I said, and for the first time in my life it occurred to me that I had never given any thought whatsoever to the idea of being a father. I paused to think about it and found that the idea quite appealed to me. Perhaps I had never allowed myself to consider it before because I knew how impossible it would be.
“Would you like to have a family, Cyril?” she asked me.
“Well, yes,” I said. “Yes, I think I probably would. I’d quite like to have a daughter. Or many daughters.”
“Like a gentleman from a Jane Austen novel. You could settle a thousand pounds and a hundred acres in Hertfordshire on each one after your death.”