Some cynical ironies are not sophisticated in-jokes but edge on crime.

MODERN LOVE

By Sarah-Jane Mackenzie

There were about twelve of us in the Latin Class I attended at my private school in England, and only four of us studied Ancient Greek.

Our teacher used to serve us different types of tea to try in those as we struggled with Plato’s Symposium which he had chosen for our main text and used to encourage me to play out scenarios for the benefit of his humour which even at the time I found mildly irritating. For instance, I often had to pretend to be a cleaner and put on a Cockney accent, he would say “Where’s the cleaner?” when the blackboard chalk needed smoothing away as cue, and wait for entertainment that might amuse him. He loved amusing us as well and once I am ashamed to say I wet my knickers through laughing so much at one of the jokes he had got carried away with…but instead of making me feel embarrassed it was clear he was delighted with my lack of self-control.

Later on he would even go to the lengths of smuggling a mattress back into that very classroom and quiz me as to whether I most believed in Plato’s separated souls coming together to form a whole again, or in Shakespeare’s “Beast with two backs”.

When I moved to study in the sixth form at another school was when he declared to me that he loved me. He had got my parents involved in a friendship and had even roped in my grandparents into a kind of familial relationship with him.

Although he seemed insurmountably arrogant he was in some respects very insecure and preferred the company of a young girl to that of an adult because he perceived there would be less criticism. Though I am going to tell you some horrible stories in the forthcoming narrative there were times when he could seem very charming. I was very flattered by his attentions at first and we spent so many years together it would have been impossible not to have missed him or thought about him fondly at sometimes.

He would tell me that his love for his wife was of the Apollonian kind and that I brought out his Dionysian tendencies. I somehow was placed hand in hand with some kind of destructive tendencies and hated the self-image and the image in his mind too which he gave me by that role to occupy.

In retrospect it is all rather contrite and embarrassing and most depressing when it came to the matter of two consecutive abortions mediated by a miscarriage in which he feigned sorrow for the struggling baby inside me and allowed me to wallow in hospital before again sending me off to Scotland for an abortion (it was not allowed in some parts of England at the time).

He bought me grown up all-in-one-playsuits lingerie that I at first did not know what to do with…whether you still wore a bra or not? And with studs at the rear which could be popped apart in any indoor or outdoor location that appealed to his lust.

Once he even buggered me in a Church, just partly perhaps to see whether he could get away with it. At that time Churches in England were left unlocked in case somebody wanted to go in to prayer, and there was no CCTV in that Church he drove me out to right in the middle of the Moors in

Lastingham, proving his point to be sceptical about God right in front of the altar having first got me slightly tipsy on the local brew of “Old Peculiar”.

He bought me pink heart shaped earrings that he thought were wonderfully jokey, but my sense of humour was not willing to take myself as victim. That just seemed to goad him more. His parked Volkswagon Camper Van would rock back and forth as he ravished my dignity away from me parked at ‘The Hole of Horcum’ on the Yorkshire Moors whilst he laughed at my Grandfather’s attempt to deign it ‘The Whole of Oakham’ for delicacy.

Partly because he took me from behind so often and made me watch so many documentaries on AIDS back in the early nineties I suspected he might also be bi-sexual. But as far as he was concerned he had once been an Oxford Scholarship Student and could do anything and everything he wanted to….We slept not just in classrooms and other Housemistresses beds but in his wife’s own too. He took risks because he liked taking risks, it added to his sense of exhileration and made life more exciting for him, appealing also to his lonely sense of amusement and humour.

I played the part of not being complicit, but kind of being elsewhere, burying myself deeper into an aura of displayed dignity because I knew I was being abused, not wanting to acknowledge the extent of what was actually happening.

Because he was the first experience I had of a man and because the relationship lasted many many years despite its unpromising nature and not much pleasure but terrible stress on my part I was not in a hurry to find anyone else.

When after twelve years of this we finally moved in together and he took his own former wife as his mistress, placing me in the wife position and his former wife then taking the mistress one for his further excitement I finally left him. For he further was cementing relationships with other pupils that were way beyond the mark of respectability. I began to see his behaviour as something generic, rather than to do with something personal to do with me myself.

When I became pregnant again after just a couple of months with another boyfriend later on in life I still felt so exhausted and it all seemed so easily thwarted and complicated I left men behind me altogether and decided to live life without a man at all, in the complete pure innocence of being a single parent with a beautiful baby daughter, looking forward to the peace of mind I might be able to attain in that way.

If at anytime I did feel sexual I used to masturbate. I was still in sheer horror that if I slept around I might get HIV and so limiting myself and keeping myself separate from everybody, and away from all the stress that might unfold from a relationship really did seem the very best option for me. Besides that I had terrible stretch marks at the end of giving birth that I was sure would disgust any man at all, and also suffered third degree tears.

And I was still living with the former nightmares that my teacher had implanted in me. Although there are drugs now that people in at-risk categories for HIV can take to prevent them becoming infected and from transmitting an infection if they are I was never myself either bisexual or in an at-risk category on the face of it, being essentially rather a loyal type and very conservative in my outlook. When I went once to the Family Planning Clinic back when I was with Bill I saw the image of a tree with branches on it, with the threat that anyone you might be loyal to, or think loyal to you, might have a sexual life and sexual history that far outfathoms your knowledge or calculations.

Though I am grateful for the fact that gay and bi-sexual men do not have to suffer like they once did and do see the curbing of HIV as having further effects on limiting the transmission to women I still feel that sometimes it is the groups that know they are taking those types of risks that are being catered for, not the innocent fool who is beamed up for a single man’s exploitation and enjoyment from a younger age.

Nearly fifty now, I spend most of my time in solitude and love my dog Lucy, in the Platonic sense, of course. We have a wonderful relationship and give each other mutual comfort just by being with each other and for the most part eschewing any other demands on each other, just enjoying companionship and being grateful for the warmth that alights in each of our hearts.

The world has changed. Nothing like I have experienced would happen now in the world, in England at least, and I am very grateful indeed for the fact that no-one else would have to suffer such an awful, isolating and lonely experience under pain of pressured silence as I once did.

But if a man is bent on exploitation I feel like there has to be, or at least ought to be, something like a conscience that stops him.

I remember the story of the Ring of Gyges in Plato’s Republic and the question of whether it is only the sense that someone that might possible know or tell, or that we may be witnessed, that prevents humanity from committing outrageous acts.

Though I feel I myself committed atrocities by going along with the abortions I would like to feel that in a dense jungle some dignity in humanity might prevail, that there are real inner values that can serve to stop us murdering one another and exploiting another human being for our sexual lusts. But maybe men, like boys, need social pressure more than we may realize to curb an inner insanity, and to stop them living life up to such an extent that if life becomes a joke at another's expense, it is a bizarre, not funny, one.