‘You’re right, of course,’ I said, releasing her, gripping her hand and staring responsibly past her at the bushes. ‘We’re two grown-up people. We can’t just sail into a thing like this with our eyes shut.’
‘Maurice.’
‘Yes?’ I spoke gruffly, to show how tortured I was feeling.
‘Maurice, why have you suddenly changed? One moment you’re seducing me as hard as you can go, and the next you back off and say we ought to worry about what we’re doing. You’re not having second thoughts, are you?’
‘No,’ I said rather quickly, ‘certainly not, but you said something about getting our ideas straight, and that reminded me of, well …‘
‘But you are absolutely sure you really care?’ Her tone was edged with suspicion, and I realized what a mistake it would be to suppose that those who habitually talk insincerely, or for effect, or balls, are no good at spotting others who try the same line. When she went on, ‘That sort of thing sounds so funny, coming from you.’ I took her point at once: all the balls-talking that afternoon was going to be done by her.
‘Well, I …‘ I muttered, and did something in the air with my free hand, ‘I was just …‘
‘Maurice,’ she said, at her ease again and giving me a wide-eyed hazel stare, ‘isn’t it wrong to put one’s own pleasure before everything else, before other people’s happiness?’
‘Perhaps. I don’t know.’
‘Wouldn’t you say that one of the most absolutely typical things about the way everybody goes on nowadays is this thing of making up your own rules?’
‘There’s a lot of truth in that.’
‘And what bothers me is can it ever be right. After all, you wouldn’t take the line that we’re just animals, would you?’
‘No.’
‘Maurice … don’t you think sexual attraction is the most peculiar and unpredictable and sim—ply mad thing in the world?’
At this, I cheered up a little. Either Diana was semi-consciously groping for the sixty-four-cent question, the ultimate bit of balls which I would pass the test by letting her get away with, or she was just running out of material. ‘I’ve never understood it,’ I said humbly.
‘But isn’t it true that if people don’t pay attention to what their instincts tell them then they get jolly closed up and cut off from everything and perfectly awful in every way?’
I was feeling by now as if I had not paid attention to what my instincts told me for weeks, and perhaps never would again, but just then, to emphasize her proposition about its being a bad thing to be perfectly awful, she leaned earnestly forward, and I caught sight of the bare flesh between the base of the mound of her left breast and the lip of the brassière-cup. My concentration slipped; I had it back on full within a couple of seconds, but in that interval I found I had said something like, ‘Yes, well let’s go and show we’re not that sort,’ and had started to open the door on my side.
She caught my wrist, pursing her lips and frowning. Even before she spoke I could see that, after mounting a series of short but cumulatively valuable ladders, I had just gone sliding down a major snake. But, as in the substantial form of the game, so too in the version Diana and I were playing, there are certain parts of the board where a single throw can restore everything lost on the previous turn, and more.
‘Maurice.’
‘Yes?’
‘Maurice … perhaps if two people really want each other it’s sort of all right in a way. Do you really want me?’
‘Yes, Diana, I really want you. I mean it.’
She stared at me again. Perhaps she thought I did mean it—and, good God, any man who had not only put up with all this without screaming, but was ready for more if need be, must really want her in some fairly ample sense. Perhaps I had merely produced the necessary formula with the necessary show of conviction, nothing more than a piece of sexual good manners. Perhaps, whatever the difference might be between really wanting someone and wanting someone, I had meant it. Anyway, the last snake was behind me now, or so it seemed to me then.
‘Let’s make love to one another, my darling,’ said Diana.
The new problem was to prevent her from making too many remarks in this style until the stage of no remarks was reached. I got out of the truck, went round and helped her down.
‘In a summer season,’ she said, actually looking up at the sky, ‘when soft was the sun …
‘Well, we can’t say we haven’t been lucky with the weather,’ I babbled, pulling her along beside me. One more really corking cock-crinkler like that one and I would be done for. The forecast said rain later, but they’re hopeless, aren’t they? Just a lot of guesswork. Here we are.’
I preceded her into the hollow and swung her down the three- or four-foot drop. The place was as clean as when I had reconnoitred it the previous day, without even any evidence of courting couples. Probably Fareham couples could not find the energy to court, slipping bemusedly into marriage as they might into debt or senile dementia.
‘Maurice, I’m sure it’ll all be marvellously beautiful, with the—’
I cut this one off by kissing her. While I was doing so, I finished unbuttoning her shirt and unclipped her brassière. Her bosom was firm under my hand, almost hard. The discovery had the effect of making me begin to draw her with me towards the ground. She freed herself and stepped away.
‘I want to be naked,’ she said. ‘For us, I must be naked.’
She took off her shirt and this once I overlooked her literary style. If she had, after all, wanted me to think she was an interesting person, not just seem to think so, she was going a much better way about it now than at any earlier time. Her breasts turned out to be high as well as full and firm, and heavily pointed, but a few moments later I could see how small-made, how long in leg and body she really was. In the short time it had taken her to strip, her face had changed, losing only now its quick directed glance and tenseness of jaw, becoming heavy-eyed, slack-mouthed, dull with excitement. Slowly, her shoulders drawn back and her stomach in, she sat down on a patch of short turf, and seemed to catch sight of me.
‘You too,’ she said.
This struck me as a novel and not particularly good idea. A man undressing lacks dignity; more than that, a man undressed in the open feels vulnerable, and with good reason. From an outsider’s point of view, a naked woman out of doors is either a sun-worshipper or a rape victim; a man in the same state is either a sexual criminal or a plain lunatic. But I obliged just the same, finding the air pleasantly warm. Diana sat and waited, not looking at me, gently and rhythmically pressing the inward surfaces of her upper arms against the sides of her bosom. It was clear that she had had to be naked not for us, let alone for me, but for her. Here, though, was something in her that was really in her, for narcissists, by definition, do not care whether other people find them interesting or not. There was a paradox here, involving the way Diana went on when she was fully dressed, but I had no time for that now: I agreed too heartily with her about the importance of her body.
As I soon found when I lay down with her, it was the top half of that body that most appealed to her. In some important ways, she had sexual and aesthetic right on her side. However attractive a woman’s face may be when she has her clothes on, it is much more so when she is naked; then, sometimes only then, it becomes the most attractive part of her. Throat, shoulders and upper arms, not to speak of breasts, are all individual or at least personal; below the waist, there is a massive lack of detail and a small amount of mere anatomy. I worked on Diana’s principle for some time, with her unqualified and often noisy approval. But eventually there had to come the start of the accelerating swing to anatomy and, in every sense, to lack of detail. Diana’s pleasure abated at once.
At this point I saw (just) that I had a choice. I could perhaps return as far as possible to what she so obviously enjoyed most, while nearly—but not quite—stopping what I had just started on my own account: a sort of sexual equivalent of uninterruptedly perf
orming a piano sonata and at the same time lunching off a plate of sandwiches. Or, without any effort at all, I could forget about her and, more important, forget about myself. That afternoon, I wanted this release even more than usual, but on the other hand I wanted to end up with a satisfied and grateful Diana—if there was any such thing—more yet. So I chose the first alternative, in fact improved on it by metaphorically playing a demanding coda, full of ornamentation and difficult runs in both hands, that went on quite a long time after the disappearance of the last sandwich. (They had been good sandwiches, anyway, as sandwiches go.)
I moved the minimum distance away. Diana peered at me. Her face was flushed and looked swollen round the eyes and mouth.
‘Oh God,’ she said, ‘lovely. There was so much of it. Wish I could remember it all. I don’t know how I felt.’
‘You were beautiful. You are beautiful.’
She smiled and looked away, down at herself. Soon she stopped sprawling and lolling, drew in her chin, crossed her legs and pushed herself up into a half-sitting position. When she looked at me again, her eyes were side, the swollen look had almost faded into her familiar expression of faint anxiety touched with pertness.
‘Maurice,’ she said now, ‘that was ab-so-lute-ly terr-i-fic. I don’t know how … you do it. Was it nice for you? You certainly deserved it to be.’
‘It was splendid.’.
I put my arms round her again and briefly ran over some of the main points treated in depth earlier, but this time in a lofty, impartial spirit, just underlining the essential continuity of how I felt about her attractions. After a few minutes, I said,
‘Diana.’
‘Yes?’
‘Diana, have you ever been to bed with more than one person? At the same time, I mean.’
‘Maurice, really … Well yes, I have, actually. Years ago now. Before I met Jack.’
‘Was it fun? It was two men, I suppose?’
‘Maurice … Yes, it was two men. If you could call them men. I thought I was the one it was going to be all about, but they were only really interested in each other. They went on taking it in turns to be in the middle, and what they wanted me to do wasn’t very nice. I got totally and completely bored and simply left them to it. It was all quite ghastly. But—’
‘I’m sure it was. But it would be quite different if you—’
‘You mean you and Joyce.’
‘Well, yes. She’s always—’
‘Maurice, you’re not to be furious with me, because I know you often are, but I must ask you something. What makes you even think of a thing like that? It’s all so frightfully unnecessary. Could it be that you really are getting old? I want to ask you something else. Can I?’
‘Ask away.’
‘Well … how often do you and Joyce make love? On the average?’
‘I don’t know. Once a week, perhaps. Sometimes not as much.’
‘There you are. You want to sort of spice it all up in a horrid way. You’ve got a lovely young wife who absolutely adores you, but you have to go for me as well, and even then that’s not enough for you. It’s like, you know, boots and transparent macks and typing-up and things.’
‘Sorry, Diana. Forget all about it. I’ve made a mistake. I thought you were the sort of person I could ask that. I’m sorry.
‘What sort of person do you mean?’
‘Well, eager for new experience, new sensations. Somebody who wants to … extend their awareness.’ (Her head was safely on my shoulder, where she could not meet my eyes.) ‘Somebody who’s interested in everything, and also interesting in all kinds of—’
‘Maurice, when did I say I wasn’t interested? I was just jolly fascinated to know why you wanted to do it. Isn’t that what I asked you?’
‘Sorry, yes, it was. Of course. And, you know, it wouldn’t be like the time with the two chaps. I do exactly what you love having done, don’t I?’ (Here I made a short allusion-in-action to some of this.) ‘Don’t I, darling?’
‘Oh yes. Yes, you do.’
‘And Joyce thinks you’re the most stunning creature she’s ever—’
‘Does she? What does she say?’
‘Oh, that she can understand what lesbians are on about when she looks at you, and she’d love to find out if that figure’s real, and all that. And you see, Diana darling, you’d be the complete centre of attraction. After all, Joyce and I are used to each other these days, you know what I mean, but with you we’d both—’
‘Have you mentioned it to her?’
‘Not yet.’
‘Well, don’t until we’ve talked about it again. Maurice…’
‘Yes?’
‘What else does Joyce say about me?’
I produced some more exaggerations or inventions—Joyce certainly admired Diana’s looks, but the amorous part of that admiration, if any, I knew nothing about. What I said was unmemorable enough but effective. Diana began breathing deeply, then squaring and relaxing her shoulders as she did so. I moved in.
A little later, fully dressed and savouring the relief that this brings in any adulterous circumstance, I obeyed Diana’s command to disappear for five minutes and climbed out of the hollow, which I found I had not until then thought of as a place in any full sense. Even the criss-cross pattern of indentations the grass had made on my forearms and knee-caps, noticeable as I put my clothes on, had been no reminder that we had actually been lying on and among grass, and the scene outside, the brambles, the sandy, stony banks and the trees farther off, had been on the edge of non-existence. Now all this, in the duller light from an overcast sky, settled into position. I strolled along the track towards the woods into which it disappeared. The air was thick and sultry, without any breeze. When I had walked a hundred yards, I turned off in the direction of the road, firstly to have a pee, secondly to establish, in an idle, time-filling way, just where I was in relation to my house. I moved up the ridge, skirting the more thickly-grown area, mostly oak and ash with a scattering of holly, hazel and elder, which I took to be the copse that could be seen from the front of the building: I had never wandered up as far as this before.
The going was difficult, with slippery tussocks of grass, patches of crumbling soil and here and there holes in the ground a foot or more deep. As I neared the crest, there appeared the slender chimney-pots of the Green Man, the shallow tiled slopes of the roofs, finally the main body of the house and the outbuildings. The annexe containing the guest bedrooms was hidden by the bulk of the original inn. As I stood there, an inconspicuous figure, no doubt, against the taller hillside behind me, I saw a car approach and turn into the yard (possibly the Cambridge party who had booked by telephone the previous day), and then somebody standing at one of the dining-room windows and looking in my general direction. Whoever it was—one of the waiters, I assumed, in an interval of laying for dinner—could scarcely have seen me, but there was no point in an unnecessary risk. I turned to retrace my steps, then noticed a rough path leading through the wood towards the track. This would take me some dozens of yards out of my way, but would be preferable to the scrambling, stumbling route I had followed a minute before. I started along the path.
Immediately I felt very frightened indeed. At first—if it makes any sense to say so—this did not alarm me. I am well acquainted with causeless fear, with the apparently random onset of all the standard symptoms, from accelerated pulse and breathing to tingling at the nape of the neck and rear part of the scalp, sudden profuse sweating and a strong desire to cry out. Then, as my heart went into a prolonged stumbling tremor, the concomitants of fear, in themselves no more than very disagreeable, seemed to bring fear itself. I halted on the path. For a few more seconds I wondered if I were really about to die, but soon after that I became certain that whatever was going to happen was outside me. What it might be, or where, I could not imagine. Something frightening, yes; something monstrous, so monstrous that the mere fact of it, its coming to pass at all, would be harder to bear than its actual menace to me
personally. My head began to tremble uncontrollably. I heard, or thought I heard, a whispering sound like the wind through grasses, saw, had no doubt that I saw, the growth of ivy on a near-by oak ripple and turn its leaves to and fro, as if in the wind, but there was no wind. Just beyond this, I saw a shadow move in a thicket, but I knew there was nobody else in the wood, and there was no sun. This was the place that Underhill’s ghost had been seen watching, and what had terrified him was here. With a sharp snap, one of the fronds of a large fern growing beside the path detached itself from its root, turning over and over like a leaf in a squall as it moved fitfully towards the thicket where the shadow had appeared. I did not wait to see if it was still there, but ran headlong down the path, through the wood and out of it on to the track I had walked up five minutes before, and down it again to where Diana sat smoking a cigarette on the edge of the hollow.
At my approach, she turned her head with a display of grace which faltered when she looked at me. ‘What’s the matter? Why the great gallop? You’re—’
‘Come on,’ I said, panting. I must have shouted it.
‘What’s the matter? Are you ill? What’s the matter?’
‘All right. Got to go. Now—’
Diana did no more than look genuinely alarmed while I got us into the truck, turned it unhandily round and drove as fast as possible down the track to the road. There, I turned away from the village. After about a mile, I found a field of pasture with an open gate and parked just inside. I had got my breath back and had stopped trembling, had been frightened only in retrospect ever since leaving that wood. But that was how I felt still. I opened the dashboard cupboard—yes, there was a half-bottle of Scotch, nearly full. I saw in passing that I had thought to mix a bit of water in for reasons of taste. I drank it all.
I realized that I would have to think of something to say to Diana, who had gone on sitting unnaturally quiet beside me, but my mind was a blank. I began to talk in the hope that words would bring ideas.