Shuttlecock by Graham Swift Page B

spring, I have been watching the sparrows copulating on our guttering – a mere hop and then it’s over – and the ducks – more rapacious – on the common. It is so simple. Nature prompts them when the season comes, and – I don’t mind admitting it – I often envy their easy contentment, not to be constantly at it, the whole year through. They don’t need any fetishist tricks to urge them on or any shame to restrain them. And sometimes that is just how I see it with Marian and me: a little careless, unadorned instant, like the sparrows; a little flutter of wings and hearts: at one with nature. Perhaps it was like that once, long ago. For Marian and me. For all of us. But now we have to go through the most elaborate charades, the most strenuous performances to receive enlightenment. Because that is the goal, don’t mistake me – enlightenment. All nature’s creatures join to express nature’s purpose. Somewhere in their mounting and mating, rutting and butting is the very secret of nature itself. And when, night after night, I conduct my sexual experiments with Marian, for ever modifying the formula, it’s with the yearning that one day it won’t just be sex, but enlightenment.
    Marian sometimes says I’m hurting her; or ‘Can’t we do it another way?’ or ‘Couldn’t we stop now – wait till the morning?’ And sometimes it’s less my physical insistence that wears her than my demands for things she’s quite unable to supply. For example, sometimes I wish Marian had bigger breasts. Her breasts, I may say, are petite and compact, and perfectly lovely in their way. But sometimes I want her to have big, blouse-bursting tits like Maureen’s in the typing pool. Once, so rumour has it, Eric got Maureen into the stationery cupboard and induced her, as part of some bet, to let him see what they were like. And I’m not sure that things stopped at that. Marian can’t be expected to satisfy my fantasies about a girl she hasn’t even seen. But I demand it nonetheless (without mentioning Maureen of course), and I have even given Marian (who worries about her waistline) a complex about the size of her bust.
    All in all, I’m surprised how little she resists. (Her wonderful pliancy.) She’s afraid, of course, of what might happen if she did. But then one reason why I think she complies is that she shares the adventure. Yes, adventure – why not use that word? It’s not a misplaced one for what Marian and I get up to in our bedroom. I read somewhere once in a magazine – it was one of Marian’s magazines – that sexual adventure is the only form of adventure left to us in our age. It compensates for all the excitement and initiative we’ve lost in other ways. The only true revolution now is sexual revolution, and that is why everything – look around – is becoming increasingly, visibly oriented to sex. Well, if sex is the only true revolution, I don’t see why Marian and I shouldn’t play our part. I’m not extremist, after all – I’m not a promiscuous man – I’m just an ordinary rebel. Though, sometimes – quite often, of late, to tell you the truth – I havethese reactionary moods. Sometimes, coming home on the Tube to Marian, stimulated by the adverts and the proximity of knots of office girls, I wonder: if it’s all so visible and acceptable, and the magazines tell you to do it – what’s so rebellious about it?
    All right, so you’ve gathered it by now. My sex-life is really a preposterous, an obsessive, a pathetic affair. A sham, a mockery. Systematically and cold-bloodedly, like a torturer bent on breaking his victim, I am turning my wife into a whore. This same woman who goes, dutifully, to collect our kids from school; who takes them for walks in the sunshine along the Thames. (By the way, Martin gave her the four pounds but she never spent it; and when she came back she said, in Martin’s presence: ‘There’s the money you gave to Martin to give to me.’