When Harry gave me the mirror and I paused before I looked at myself, testing myself for hardness, for indifference hardened to near inhumanity, it was Miles I was thinking of. It was two months since I’d seen him and the last time we’d been together he had run his tongue over my lips as he left and smiled, saying, ‘You are quite the sexiest woman I’ve ever known.’ I held up the mirror and saw a twisted, grotesque mask, those same lips sliced and torn, healed in white welts. Strangely, I didn’t cry. I said nothing. I gave Harry back the mirror and lay down.
Perhaps this is something else that Ellen and I have in common — we have both been relieved of the burden of ageing. Both of us can point to a moment in time and say, ‘That’s when I ceased to care about the face I present to the world.’ When Ellen’s husband fell out of a fishing-boat and out of her life, when her womb contracted and stifled her unborn child, she relieved herself of the need, the desire, to be attractive to men because she ceased to care. As I did when I looked in the mirror. I saw Miles at that party in Exeter two and a half years later and he ignored me. I can understand it; I don’t blame him. But I relieved him of the burden of smiling and he should have relieved me of something.
9 October 1979
The first night I went out with Miles, I slept with him. I’d never done that before — gone out with a man and slept with him within hours. Miles took me to Topsham, to the Bridge Inn, a barn of a pub full of small dark cubby-holes with fires roaring. We huddled over a small round table, which wobbled beneath our elbows, and talked of work and literature, colleagues and their inadequacies. He taught politics and sociology, subjects I knew little about. I became increasingly inarticulate as he stared at me, crept closer. The skin of my face grew warm and I found it difficult to concentrate on what he said, I was so busy looking at his beautiful face. He had the ridiculous sideburns of the time and blond hair which flopped over the collar of his shirt.
After a few pints he became even more animated, kept touching my arm, moving ever closer, as he talked about his specialist subject: Northern Ireland. It was February 1971 and the first British soldier had been killed that day by a gelignite bomb as he moved into riots in the Ardoyne district of Ulster. Miles was outraged. Not by the soldier’s death but that he was there at all. He bought another round of beer and whiskies and slipped an arm round me as he sat, his hand encircling my waist. cThe British should just get out, let the Republicans exercise their birthright. We’ve got no bloody business there.’
As it turned out that was exactly what we had — bloody business. In those early years I worried very little about the Troubles, as the never-ending battle was quaintly named. It was not that I was uncaring as such but the world at the time was frankly overwhelming. American troops were in Cambodia, the American National Guard was shooting students at Kent State University. The PLO took hostages and blew up jumbos on airstrips. A tidal wave killed 150,000 people in East Pakistan, the steel railings buckled at Ibrox and Charles Manson was found guilty of slaughtering the pregnant Sharon Tate. In England the strikes were beginning to take hold. The death of a soldier in Ulster was as nothing compared to all this, as nothing compared to watching Miles’ soft lips talking so close to mine.