The Fall and Rise of Gordon Coppinger by David Nobbs

Author:David Nobbs [David Nobbs]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2012-10-05T00:00:00+00:00

It’s wasted already

One couldn’t have said that the early days of 2012 were happy days exactly, not for the world, not for Britain, and not for Sir Gordon Coppinger. But they weren’t the worst days that the world has known, or that Britain has known, and they weren’t the worst days that Sir Gordon had known either, or was soon to know. They were best described, perhaps, as the Doldrums. Not much fun, but perhaps to be cherished none the less, in view of the storms that were to come.

He did face, however, one great problem. It was the problem many men have faced and many men will face. It was – there’s no getting away from it, there’s no way of avoiding it – the problem of sex.

With Christina there was an uneasy, slightly embarrassed peace, but embarrassment was so much more pleasant than hostility that he barely felt it to be embarrassing. They had come a long way together in these last weeks. They had managed to cobble together some kind of construction out of the rubble of their love. Their love was like a precious vase that has been broken, discarded, found in the back of a cupboard and carefully but not entirely successfully restored. It might look all right on a table, but if you put flowers and water in it you would find that it leaked. They were tender together. Sir Gordon knew that Christina was being more tender than he deserved, in view of his revelations. There was something about her again of the old Christina. But there was the problem of sex.

He pretended to himself that his broken leg was the cause of his impotence with her, but he knew in his heart that it was not so. He knew in his heart that he was inhibited in the present because the present just could not live up to the past. It was overwhelmed by the past. He thought of suggesting that they should go out to dinner and pretend that it was a first date, that they knew nothing about each other. But he knew it wouldn’t work. It would be altogether too twee a procedure.

It was all so ridiculous. His desire for all the other women there had been in his life grew and grew. He had never been celibate for any length of time before. But he had promised Christina – and the nation through the press – and he would not break that promise.

He was a sex addict without sex.

The absence of Mandy hurt him physically. The thought of Francesca’s body was so disturbing that he felt that he would continue to have difficulty walking even after the removal of the plaster from his leg. As for Alice Penfold, he had to pass her every morning. It was agony. His only consolation was that he knew that if she hadn’t got her ring and her stud it would have been an even greater agony.

He longed to talk to another human being about all this, but to whom could he talk? Other men had friends.

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