Rachel looked at me in helpless apology, as she had when my father asked her up for the weekend.
'Why were you coming back so late? You finish at four, don't you?'
'1 had to stay and finish an essay.'
Hence no DeForest. I found I was staring at her with goofy delight. 'Really? What on?'
'Daniel Deronda. Have you read it?'
'Certainly not,' I said, untruthfully.
Norman frowned. 'I've seen that. BBC 2. It's not bad, is it?' He glanced at his watch. 'Hey, look. Bugger all this tea. I'll get the drink.'
'Can't we go up?' asked Jenny in a plaintive voice.
Norman dismissed the suggestion with a wave of his hand. 'Be a sec.'
Jenny picked up the tea-tray. Rachel helped. I looked out of the window. Shortly Norman returned, rattling like a milk float: a crowded tray that resembled a miniature Manhattan, bottles of wine in either hip-pocket, and a further one of Dubonnet down the front of his trousers.
Then I had time to risk taking in the chestnut orbs, the sandy complexion, the hair you could see your face in, and even the nose, quite shiny also, and the smudged brown lips. The white smock made short work of her breasts, but on the other hand it twirled airily high up her thin Bambi thighs.
Eleven ten: The Rachel Papers, volume two
Here come the sexy bits. I'm having a hell of a job, all the time whipping from Conquests and Techniques: A Synthesis to the Rachel Papers and back again. My files really are in need of thorough reorganization. A good way to spend my twentieth birthday ?
I'm sure Norman planned the whole thing. Firstly, he got us all drunk. He poured Rachel out a gin and tonic, insisting that girls never drank anything else, as she well knew, and kept topping it up. Next, he ordered her to ring home and say she was staying to supper. Rachel demurred, until Norman said : 'What's the number? I'll do it.'
Rachel did it.
Then, five minutes later, he said he was taking Jenny out to dinner and that there were some sausages in the fridge if we wanted them. He winked at me and Jenny shrugged. As she and Rachel discussed modes of preparing and serving sausages, Norman pointed his great Watney's thumb at a bottle of wine and looked at Rachel with a molten leer.
But I was beginning to feel ridiculous. She didn't want to be here. When we were alone I would apologize, offer to ring her a taxi, make excuses for Norman's intimidating high spirits. As that entrepreneur now took his leave, I winced at his smutty gnomes. 'Be good,' he said, 'and if you can't be good be careful.' Jenny followed him as if bribed to do so.
'Bye,' said Rachel.
It was about seven thirty and the room was darkening. To suspend the moment, underline our aloneness, the street-lights played on the smoke from Rachel's cigarette.
'Can you really stay ?'
She nodded.
I poured out more drinks, dutched myself up on neat gin. What's it going to be? I appraised certain gambits - a waste of time; not because of any swinging intensity, but because I felt tired.
'How's DeForest?'
She didn't reply.
I gathered from the female novelists I had been reading (there was a page or two on it downstairs) that the malleable, soft-centre syndrome was no longer considered attractive and that the confident autonomy syndrome was steadily gaining ground.
Tell me how DeForest is,' I said.
Still no reply. What did she want ? Some kind of purer response ? It was back to tried and trusted methods.
There's a stanza in Blake,' I droned, 'Songs of Experience:
Love seeketh only self to please, To bind another to its delight, Joys in another's loss of ease. And builds a Hell in Heaven's despite.'
By rights, Rachel should have quoted the complementary stanza, but she probably didn't know it. 'I'm glad you're here,' I said, 'because I've missed you so much. But I still want to get at you although I know how unsatisfying it would be.' I sipped my gin. 'Here's the other stanza:
Love seeketh not itself to please, Nor for itself hath any care, But for another gives its ease, And builds a heaven in Hell's despair.'
Rachel received this idiot outpouring with a pathic nod. (I don't care what anyone says: poetry, if you can bring yourself to recite some, never fails. Like flowers. Give them a posy, speak a verse - and there's nothing they won't do.) Thus:
'I was going to ring you.'
'Were you ? But when I rang that Sunday you started going on about cars and roads and things.'
'No, I was going to ring you yesterday.'
There was an appreciative hoarseness in my voice when I asked: 'What for?'
She couldn't or wouldn't answer. I knew anyway. I thought of saying, 'Forgive me, I should like to be alone for a few moments,' but what I in fact said was: 'Hang on - just going to have a pee.'
Within two minutes I had sprayed my armpits, talc-ed my groin, hawked rigorously into the basin, straightened my bedcover, put the fire on, scattered LP covers and left-wing weeklies over the floor, thrown some chalky underpants and a cache of fetid socks actually out of the window, drawn the curtains, removed The Rachel Papers from my desk, and run upstairs again, not panting much.
'Let's ... let's go downstairs for a bit.'
She stood up and looked at me demandingly. I had nothing appropriate to say, so I went over and kissed her.
'Didn't it work with DeForest, or what?'
'No good.'
My left hand slid off her right buttock and twirled round the neck of the wine bottle.
'Let's go downstairs. Chat about it there.'
But we were diverted by another kiss and soon folded on to the sofa. We talked in one another's arms.
DeForest had more or less fallen apart during the weeks roughly corresponding to the Low. Of course the scatty bitch hadn't told him she was coming to stay with me, and he minded her not having told him. Also, though DeForest didn't mention it, Rachel had a hunch that he thought I had banged her on the Friday night. I was flattered to learn that Rachel eventually told him she hadn't banged me - out of the blue. He appeared to believe her, but, five minutes later, burst into tears. Cracked. That was ten days ago. Since then? Smashed up his car twice; crying all the time; stopped working; once came into Rachel's classroom and dragged her out of it; the headmaster had taken Rachel aside for a talk: the lot. Rachel closed with the not unaffecting low-mimetic remark that she didn't want to make two people miserable so she'd make one person happy, if she could.
'Me?' I asked blankly.
'If you still want me.'
Right then.
As regards structure, comedy has come a long way since Shakespeare, who in his festive conclusions could pair off any old shit and any old fudge-brained slag (see Claudio and Hero in Much Ado) and get away with it. But the final kiss no longer symbolizes anything and well-oiled nuptials have ceased to be a plausible image of desire. That kiss is now the beginning of the comic action, not the end that promises another beginning from which the audience is prepared to exclude itself. All right? We have got into the habit of going further and further beyond the happy-ever-more promise: relationships in decay, aftermaths, but with everyone being told a thing or two about themselves, busy learning from their mistakes.
So, in the following phase, with the obstructive elements out of the way (DeForest, Gloria) and the consummation in sight, the comic action would have been due to end, happily. But who is going to believe that any more ?
Ready ?
Now, as an opener, I decided to try something rather ambitious. I rose, poured out drinks, held her eye as we sipped, took her glass away. You really need to be six foot for this, but I gave it a go anyway: knelt on the floor in front of her, reached out and cupped her cheeks, urged her face towards mine ... No good, not tall enough, she has to buckle inelegantly, breasts on thighs. Rise to a crouch, start work on ears, neck, only occasionally skimming lips across hers. Then, when leg begins to give way, I do not churlishly flatten her on to the sofa nor shoo her downstairs: I pressure her to the floor, ha
lf beside half on top of me. (It was bare boards so it must have seemed pretty spontaneous.) Reaching to steady her my hand has grasped her hip; not sober enough to be over-tactical, I let it stay there.
Hardly seemed worth bothering with her breasts. In one movement, her skirt is above her waist, my right leg is between her legs, and my hand floats on her downy stomach. 'Doing' one of her ears I bulged my eyes at the floor. Phase two.
Move my hand over her bronze tights, tracing her hip-bone, circling beneath the overhang of her buttock, shimmer flat-palmed down the back of her legs, U-turning over the knee, meander up her thighs, now dipping between them for a breathless moment, now skirting cheekily round the side. It hovers for a full quarter of a minute, then lands, soft but firm, on her cunt.
Rachel gasped accordingly - but the master's hand was gone, without waiting for a decisive response, to scout the periphery of her tights. And her stomach was so flat and her hip-bones so prominent that I had no problem working my hand down the slack. By way of a diversionary measure (as if she wouldn't notice) I stepped up the tempo of my kisses, harrying the corners of her mouth with reptile tongue. It must be so sexy. How can she bear it?
Meanwhile the hand is creeping on all fours. At the edge of her panties it has a rest, thinks about it, then takes the low road. The whole of me is along with those fingers, spread wide to salute each pore and to absorb the full sweep of her stomach. Mouth toils away absently, on automatic. I nudge her with my right knee and give a startled wheeze as she parts her legs wide. Still, the hand moves down, a hair's breadth, a hair's breadth.
On arrival, it paused to make an interim policy decision. Was now the time for the menace ? Had the time to come to orchestrate the Lawrentiana ? What I really wanted more than anything - yes, what I really wanted more than anything else in the world was a cup of tea and a think. Covertly I looked at Rachel's face: it included clenched eyelids, parted lips, smallish forehead wistfully contoured; but there was no abandonment to be read there.
Nor to be read here. I begin to find all this rather alarming. It makes me feel confused, frightened, sad. Because we have come to the heart of the matter, haven't we ? This is the outside looking in, the mind moving away from the body, the fear of madness, the squirrel cage. How nice to be able to say : 'We made love, and slept.' Only it wasn't like that; it didn't happen that way. The evidence is before me. (If any respectable doctor got hold of these papers he would have no choice but to cut my head off and send it to a forensic laboratory -and I wouldn't blame him.) I know what it's supposed to be like, I've read my Lawrence. I know also what I felt and thought; I know what that evening was: an aggregate of pleasureless detail, nothing more; an insane, gruelling, blow-by-blow obstacle course. And yet that's what I'm here for tonight. I must be true to myself. Oh God, I thought this was going to be fun. It isn't. I'm sweating here. I'm afraid.
Back on the breakfast-room floor, my fingertips awaited instructions. They had me know that I was dealing with mons hair of the equilateral-triangle variety, the pubic G-string variety, the best, not that of the grizzled scalplock, the tapered sideburn, the balding fist of stubble, fuzz and curls. So, impelled - who knows - by a twinge of genuine curiosity, a mere presence now, the hand went over the mound, straining against the pull of her tights and pants, and, once in position, began its slow descent.
This is what I thought. Since Henry Miller's Tropic books, of course, it has become difficult to talk sensibly on the question of girls' cunts. (An analogy: young poets like myself are forever taunted by subjects which it is no longer possible to write about in this ironic age: evening skies, good looks, dew, anything at all to do with love, the difference between cosmic reality and how you sometimes feel when you wake up.) I remember I overheard in an Oxford pub one undergraduate - a German, I believe - telling another undergraduate that Swedish girls were okay, he supposed, but 'their conts are too big.' In the same place on a different occasion I talked sex with a pin-cocked Geordie who dedicated himself to the proposition that Oxford girls weren't nearly as good as Geordie girls, the reason being that their cunts were too small. Narcissistic rubbish. Size doesn't matter - unless, that is, you have troubles unknown to the present reviewer.
Which isn't to say that cunts are homogeneous. Now Rachel's was the most pleasing I had ever come across. Not, for her, the wet Brillo-pad, nor the paper-bagful of kedgeree, nor the greasy waistcoat pocket, the gashed vole's stomach, the clump of veins, glands, tubes. No. It was infinitely moist but not wet, exquisitely shaped and yet quite amorphous, all black ink and velvet recessed into pubic hair that resembled my own as a Persian carpet resembles a mat rug. And it was warmer than me; it was, actually, hot.
Meanwhile my fingers paddled there, enclosing it with the flat of my hand, entering with one, two fingers, one, two inches, flicking the clitoris. Rachel was quaking and warbling away: however, it seemed right out of context when I pressed my mouth against her ear and (well I never) my sharp erection against her thigh, and said, with a nicely gauged crack in my voice:
'How do you undo this dress?'
Her movements ceased at once. Her eyes opened. 'I'm not on the pill.'
'No, really?' I said.
But then, you see, we did the sort of lyrically zany thing that the under-twenties do fairly often. On Rachel's suggestion, after some tweedy humming and ha-ing from me, we decided that we'd jolly well go up - fuck them all - and buy some contraceptives at the late-night chemist in Marble Arch. Nonplussed at first, I soon fell in with the requisite mood. We drank wine, put on coats, and made our whacky way down the square.
Even if we tenderly pooled our money we couldn't afford a taxi - Rachel had to have enough to get back - and besides I thought it more in keeping to take a bus. There was still enough summer about for it not to be really dark, and also you never got beaten up when you were with girls.
It seems improbable now, but on the way there we talked about DeForest's infrequent and ham-cocked performances in bed. (We laughed, too, wholly without malice: an example of prelapsarian high spirits which as of tonight will be another experience unavailable to me.) DeForest's chief, though by no means his only, problem was that he tended to come before either he or Rachel could say - 'Jack Robinson'. He would slap on the contraceptive and surge into her with the look of someone who had just remembered that he ought to be doing a terribly important thing elsewhere, like attending his mother's funeral. (I merely annotate Rachel's imitation.) Then he would screw up his freckly face and sink down on top of her, while his prick slithered out as fast as it had slithered in, not to reappear until he had completed a fortnight of stalling, apologizing, rationalizing. I soft-pedalled my amusement through most of this, partly out of real admiration for Rachel's tolerance and lack of embarrassment. But I nearly burst out crying with laughter when she recounted one of DeForest's wheezes to prolong their delight. He took a history textbook to bed, which, so the idea was, he would pore over as Rachel shinnied away beneath him; when they were level-pegging, Rachel was to attract her lover's attention in some way, DeForest would hurl Tudor England aside, and be granted four or five seconds of impetuous transport before melting into her dream. It didn't work, I need hardly add, though DeForest clocked up a minute on one occasion.
Whether by design or not, this had the effect of making me feel rather cocky. I had come on impact once or twice myself, but only when I couldn't be bothered not to. I would have readjusted my anxiety chart, only I was unable for the moment to think of anything to fill the DeForest's-prick-size slot.
'Have you ever had an orgasm?' I asked, as we got off the bus.
'Never,' said Rachel.
'Just you wait.'
But I soon came up with something. Of course: I had never used a sheath before. With those girls who weren't self-contracepting I had practised coitus interruptus, practising it all over their stomachs or in between the sheet and their bums, depending on locale and whether or not I liked them. (There was no definite rule here, yet you were always prompted to g
o one way or the other.) I was conversant with Durex lore, however, having naturally peed and wanked into them a good deal as a youngster, and Geoffrey once took me along to score a pack. Further, I had read widely in prophylactic literature. The great things were to squeeze the air out of the tip, lest they burst, and not to put them on inside-out, because then they catapulted off and you opened yourself up to ridicule scrabbling about after them in the dark.
The chemist's was like a chunk of America, a neon labyrinth of bristle and cellophane, ranks and display pyramids of things to minimize your smells, things to soften your hair, bully your spots, reclaim your feet, flush out your ears. We stood in the doorway, shy latecomers to a formal party. The activity and splendour made me feel drunk and empty-stomached. Store detectives, housewives and dotards cruised the aisles. At the far end a quartet of junkies awaited the return of their forged prescriptions.
'Whereabouts?' I said from the corner of my mouth. Rachel put her hands in her pockets, looping my arm. We moved forward. Only nail-polish remover and badminton rackets seemed to be on sale. Feeling our merriment ebb, I pointed out a not all that unlikely-looking counter. A liberal middle-aged man was in charge of it. What would it really sell? Scabies ointment. Baby powder. Cock-enlarger cream. Dildoes.
'Do you want to come or do you want to wait?'
'I'll come,' she said.
A kooky smile seemed in order.
As a matter of routine, the moment I committed myself to approaching the counter the enlightened-looking man disappeared beneath it, in favour of a woman with silver hair and a glacial uniform. Oh, come come, I wanted to say, you must of course see that this is too much like low-brow American fiction.
'Can I help you, young man?' She smiled on cue to reveal oppressively false teeth, dull dying white, the colour of newspapers three weeks old.