Joanna and Her Lovers Ch. 01

A second week went by without Joanna. By now, I was a total wreck. I gave up going to lectures and my essays were perfunctory efforts at best. I spent my mornings quartering the town, hoping to catch sight of her. But I didn't. It wasn't until an evening in the third week of her absence that I went into a pub and saw her almost immediately, sitting drinking with another man.

There's something to be said for English reserve. My instinct was to run to her and crush her roughly to my chest, smothering her in kisses, while I simultaneously berated her for deserting me and punched her companion viciously in the face. (Almost a physical impossibility, I know, but that was the way I felt.) The actuality, however, was rather different. I went to the bar and bought myself a pint of bitter, then turned and, pretending mild surprise, 'noticed' her for the first time. Joanna smiled and waved, so I floated over and said, as casually I could manage, that I hadn't seen her around for a while - not, I thought, this term, now that I considered it - and when had she got back? - and how had her vacation been? - and so on. (I was, of course, babbling like an idiot, but at least I was trying to preserve an appearance of nonchalance.)

And Joanna went along with my charade. She said she'd been a bit busy since she got back, and introduced the man - a smug-looking, red-haired individual called Jeremy, from Magdalen - and asked after my own vacation and how my lectures were going. And then, those niceties having been disposed of, she fell silent and smiled at me expectantly, in an 'any-other-business?' sort of way.

I'd been expecting her to ask me to join them, of course. It would, admittedly, have been an excruciating experience, but I'd expected to be invited to sit down and make small talk with the two of them - my girlfriend and my new worst enemy. And if she'd asked, I would have accepted. But it didn't happen. Joanna just smiled at me blankly for a few moments longer until I - having finally got the message - sketched a self-consciously casual wave in the air and murmured something about having friends to meet and seeing her around some time. And then I ambled off, with a pressure in my chest akin to pain. I was absolutely certain that I'd lost my girlfriend.

*****

So I was shocked, surprised and comprehensively confused when, some five weeks into the term, I heard Joanna's distinctive knock on my door. She walked straight in without waiting for an invitation - the knock had been no more than an announcement of her arrival - came to me where I sat open-mouthed in my reading chair, grabbed me roughly by the shirt and hauled me to my feet. She then pressed her lips to mine in the most urgent, passionate kiss I think I've ever experienced. There was no talking. I had, of course, spent days and weeks rehearsing my complaints against her - complaints interspersed with declarations of hopeless, undying love. But I had no opportunity to utter any of them. Almost immediately, Joanna had our clothes off, and was propelling me determinedly towards the bed. And there we fucked for hours. She fucked me to exhaustion, in fact - and into silence. Because when that bout of sex was finished, I had nothing left to say to her at all. I was dumbstruck. I was simply sated by her body.

And so our relationship moved into a new and different pattern. Joanna simply turned up at my room whenever she felt like it. She might come to me three or four afternoons in a row, and then I wouldn't see her for a fortnight. But the sex we had was always intense - the kind of sex, in fact, that any man would be stupid to turn down, however aggrieved he might feel about other matters.

The idea of her being 'my' girlfriend had gone by the board. When I saw Joanna in the street by accident, or in a pub or at the theatre, I now made no assumptions about my precedence. She was normally with somebody - not only redheaded Jeremy from Magdalen, but others as well; too many in fact, I realised at last, for me to keep track of them all even if I'd wanted to. On those occasions, I simply gritted my teeth, gave her a false cheery wave and moved on. It was always painful at the time - it never stopped being painful - but we were playing by Joanna's rules. And the remarkable thing was that those rules had never been stated.

In fact, very little was ever stated between us. When she came to me, we fucked like bunnies - and that was all there was to it. There was hardly any conversation. Joanna didn't hurry away from me after our love-making - she often stayed for hours - but our entire relationship was physical. We communicated through touch, not words.

Which meant, of course, that after almost a year of making love to her, I hardly knew Joanna at all.

*****

That state of affairs went on until the end of the academic year. Before I left Oxford for the long summer vacation I did make the effort to try to get a home address out of Joanna, and I even suggested we meet at some point - in London, perhaps, for a trip to the theatre, or somewhere on the coast for a 'dirty weekend'. But she deflected my questions effortlessly.

It crossed my mind at one point that she was being more than usually evasive about her plans for the summer, but since she'd shared so little of herself with me up to now (aside from her body, that is), I had no real basis for comparison. So, when I went home for the holiday, I had to resign myself to being deprived of her company until the autumn, and to the prospect of an uncertain future with her even then.

That vacation was, for me, a torment. It stretched on for almost four months (Oxford has very short undergraduate terms), and I was suddenly and comprehensively starved of sex. In part, the starvation was simply the result of my own ineptitude. Although I'd had so much sex with Joanna, I still wasn't very good at talking to girls in general, and the parties I went to that summer usually involved desperate attempts on my part to make some kind of connection with one or other of them - all of which were failures. It must be said, though, that another aspect of my lack of success with women was simply the age I lived in. 1964, as it now was, was trembling on the lip of the 'sexual revolution', but the revolution's mouth (to extend the metaphor to - or perhaps beyond - its breaking point) had not yet opened. 'Free love' hadn't quite arrived. So girls in 1964 were not normally 'promiscuous', and I came to realise that Joanna, and Geraldine before her for that matter, were decidedly unrepresentative of their sex.

Of course, Joanna was merely ahead of her time. In just a few years, her sexual directness would be normal, and even the derogatory term 'promiscuous' would fall out of use, in favour of much more celebratory expressions. But in 1964, as I discovered to my cost, there were very few Joannas, and none at all in the part of Surrey where my parents lived.

As you can imagine, I was desperate to get back to Oxford to see her, and I hurried back to college in October at the earliest opportunity. And there I had my biggest disappointment to date. Because Joanna wasn't there!

*****

The cold fact of her absence dawned on me very slowly. I no longer expected to see her as soon as I got back. - I was inured to the knowledge that I shared her favours with others and that I'd have to wait my turn. So I was patient for almost four weeks. Then I cracked and made the familiar journey to her college to enquire after her - and learned that she hadn't returned for the Michaelmas term at all.

It was like being kicked in the stomach. It knocked the air out of me. I had no way of contacting her - the porters were unwilling to give out her home address - and I had no idea what might have happened to her.

I have to say at this point that my anxiety wasn't exclusively sexual. I was genuinely worried that something bad might have happened. I was so worried, in fact, that I actually stopped one of her other lovers in the street (because, rightly or wrongly, I identified every man I'd seen her with as a lover). He was a tall, rather supercilious rower with curly hair, called Henry. We hadn't actually spoken to each other before, but I knew him by sight and reputation. (He was rumoured to be in contention for a place in the university boat and therefore something of a celebrity.) Surprisingly, he knew who I was before I introduced myself - probably, I realised, because all Joanna's men had a jealous interest in each other. Anyway, the upshot of the conversation was that he, too, was worried and mystified by Joanna's absence. So that made two of us - and as my enquiries continued through that term I discovered that nobody at all knew what had become of Joanna.

A year is a long time, even for an undergraduate. By which I mean that, eventually, I got over her. If I spent most of that Michaelmas term fretting about Joanna, by Trinity, the third term of the year, I'd more or less forgotten her. Or, to be precise, I looked back fondly on that first year with her, but it was like a dream or a favourite fantasy. I became more or less accustomed to the state of sexual frustration which, after all, most of my colleagues endured, and I only wondered about Joanna in odd moments. In fact, I think there were times when I doubted that she'd existed at all.

So it was quite a shock when, just back from the summer vac, Joanna was the first person I bumped into in the university library.

*****

It wasn't a comfortable meeting. She was decidedly distant. She looked a little plumper, though she was still devastatingly attractive, but her smile - for me, at least - had gone. In fact, she hardly spoke and her answers to my questions were decidedly non-committal. I wanted us to go somewhere to talk and, let's face it, I also wanted us to go somewhere to have sex, but her blunt refusal was only just this side of rudeness. So I gave up and for the rest of that year - my last, now her second - I only sighted her infrequently, and never spoke to her properly again.

Despite the rebuff, my jealousy flared up. I was constantly on the look-out for the new men in her life, because I was convinced that I'd been supplanted in her affections by one or more others. But, oddly, I never saw her with a man. A couple of times I saw her on the High with a woman friend or two, but she was usually alone - or, at least, alone except for an armful of books. And when I met one of the other former 'lovers' he confirmed my own suspicions:

"I don't know if she's become a lesbian or a nun," he said, "but either way it's a terrible loss to Mankind. That woman was the greatest gift to sex there's probably ever been, and now she's given it up. It just goes to show, you can never, ever get enough of a good thing."

So that was the definitive end of my Oxford affair with Joanna, and I wasn't to meet her again for almost twenty years. And when we did finally renew our acquaintance, I discovered that she was both exactly the same and very, very different. But that story, I'm afraid, I'll have to leave for another time.

*

(To be continued)