The curtsey

Fiction, about two adults over 18. She has strong opinions about deference. She has held them all her adult life. None of them prepared her for the third one.

Fiction. Every character in this story is a consenting adult over 18.

A story by the editor.

I want to begin with what I think about curtseying, because otherwise none of the rest of this makes any sense.

I think it is indefensible. I think it is a gesture invented to make women smaller in rooms that men were already running, and I have said so out loud, at a dinner, with some force, to a man who was being sentimental about the royal family. I am thirty-eight. I did an entire dissertation on domestic labour. My mother says you do not lower yourself for anybody, and she means it politically as well as physically.

And I have spent the last eleven months learning to do one properly, and it has reorganised something in me that eleven years of reading did not touch.

It was not his idea. I should get that out of the way, because the obvious story is a man who wanted a woman to bob at him, and that is not what happened.

I found it in a list. We were doing the boring thorough version of negotiation, the one where you go through a document and mark things yes, no or curious, and the word was on there among fifty others. I marked it no. Emphatically no, underlined, with a comment in the margin about what I thought of it.

And then I could not stop thinking about it for nine days, which is how I have learned to identify absolutely everything I actually want.

I practised alone first. Obviously. I was not going to be bad at it in front of a person.

That took a fortnight, in the kitchen, mostly at night, with the blind down like a woman doing something criminal. It is harder than it looks. The weight goes on the back leg, the dip comes from the knees rather than a bend at the waist, and the whole thing has to be slow, because a fast one is a bob and a bob is a joke. Back straight. Eyes down. Hands at the sides.

My first attempts were terrible. I wobbled. I laughed at myself twice, alone, in my own kitchen, with nobody there, which tells you something about how much of this was already happening in my head before it ever happened in a room.

By the end of the fortnight I could do it. Properly. Slowly, silently, on a tiled floor in socks, and stand up again without a wobble. I was, and I am aware of how this sounds, quite proud of it.

Then I did one in front of Paul, and every single thing I understood about myself rearranged in about four seconds.

Nothing else was happening. That is the part I need to be accurate about. There was no scene running. He had come into the front room in the ordinary way and stood by the fireplace, and I had said, the day before, that I would try it, and so I stood up off the sofa and did the thing I had practised forty times.

Weight back. Down. Eyes down. Up.

And it was completely different. Not slightly. It was not the same act at all. In my kitchen it had been a physical exercise, like learning a stretch. In front of another person it was a statement, made with my whole body, in a language older than anything I have opinions about, and my ears went so hot I could feel my own pulse in them.

I stayed down a half second too long because I could not make myself come up.

He said, "Again."

Not sharply. That is the thing I would want anybody to understand about how this works and why it is not the pantomime people imagine. He did not raise his voice once, that evening or any evening since. He said "again" in the tone you would use to ask somebody to repeat a postcode.

So I did it again.

"Again. Slower."

Again.

"Eyes."

Down. Again.

Seven times. I counted afterwards, lying in bed, the way you count things afterwards. Seven, in a front room in Leytonstone, with the television off and somebody's car alarm going two streets away, until the seventh one was right and he said, "Good. Thank you," and I burst into tears standing up straight with my hands still at my sides.

Here is what I have worked out since, and I have had eleven months and a great deal of time on trains to work on it.

It is the repetition. Anybody can survive one. One is an experiment, a thing you are trying, half a joke. It is the fourth one that gets you, because by the fourth you cannot pretend to yourself that you are testing anything.

You are simply doing as you are told, over and over, in front of somebody who is going to keep saying "again" until it satisfies him, and there is no way to perform that ironically. The irony runs out. Mine ran out somewhere around three.

And it is that nothing is being threatened. Nobody is holding anything. There is no implement in the room. I could stop at any point by simply standing there, and both of us know it, which means every single repetition is a thing I have chosen, again, with my own knees. Being made to choose it repeatedly is worse and better than being made to do anything.

The physical side of what we do is quite ordinary and takes twenty minutes and I am not going to write it out. The curtsey is not part of that. The curtsey happens at the start of an evening, in ordinary clothes, in a lit room, and it puts me somewhere that the rest of it then works on. It costs nothing. It leaves no mark. It is the single most effective thing either of us has ever found.

Do I still think it is indefensible? Yes. I do. That has not shifted an inch and I would say the same at the same dinner tomorrow.

What I have had to accept is that the two things are not in the same category. What I believe about how women should be treated in the world is a set of arguments I hold and will fight for.

What happens in my own front room, with a man I chose, at my own suggestion, that I can end with one word, is not a political position. It is a private appetite that borrows a shape from somewhere unpleasant, and the borrowing is exactly why it works. If curtseying were neutral it would do nothing at all.

There is a good page about this on this very site, about being a feminist and wanting this, and I read it about nine times in one week before I said anything to him at all.

Eleven months. I can do a proper one now, first time, on carpet or tile, and he almost never says again any more.

Which I mind. Which is its own discovery, and one I have not admitted to him yet.