Good Clean Fun by Michael Arditti

Author:Michael Arditti [Michael Arditt]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781908129796
Publisher: Arcadia Books Limited
Published: 2011-02-15T00:00:00+00:00

The Fig-Leaf

FRIENDS, I have long believed, should be able to tell one another everything. At the same time, they are understandably concerned to spare each other pain. I have never felt the conflict between these impulses more keenly than on the evening that Janet revealed to me that she had been raped.

Janet and I had met at Oxford, sharing what – in a reference to our favourite Greek restaurant – she dubbed our ‘moussaka days’. Our friendship was sealed when we acted together in several plays. I later secured my links with the stage by joining a theatrical agency. For a long time, Janet addressed me as ‘Mr Ten Per Cent’. She was wrong about the figure (I am, in fact, Mr Fifteen) but right about my having achieved a mere fraction of my potential. After several years and a promotion to junior partner, I had allowed the attractions of a lifestyle to compensate for the lack of a life. Janet too had come to appreciate that the dreams of her youth would not be fulfilled – at least not during her youth (she claimed that the blackest day of her life was when she realised that she had outlived Keats). She had become an English teacher and was making her way through the capital cities of Europe, as if the glamour of the setting made up for the tedium of the job.

We stayed in regular contact, although the heady days of flat-share land (Janet) and bedsit land (me), when we insisted that taking the Tube from Parson’s Green to Kilburn was as easy as walking from Somerville to Queen’s, had long passed. The initiative for our meetings – as for so many others – was generally mine. With more and more of the names in my address book having partners squeezed in beside them – an affront both to the neatness of my pages and to the loneliness of my life – I compensated by cultivating the unattached. Over time, most of them also defected and I fell back on the instant camaraderie of my profession. In Janet’s case, I could blame the emotional distance on the geographical. We saw each other at most twice a year during her duty visits to her mother, and then spent so long catching up that we were unable to move on. Moreover, we had passed the age of heart-spilt correspondence. So I was almost as shocked that she should choose to confide in me as by the confidence itself.

I was at a loss to know how to respond. I had prided myself on my sensitivity to women ever since university, when I was trying to win their trust while most of my friends were trying to worm their way into their beds. Rape, however, reduced me to platitudes. I recalled a discussion in my men’s group (a judicious balance of gay and straight with a floating bisexual) at the time of a particularly brutal assault the previous year. The straight men took

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