'And I'm sure I didn't fuck her enough.'
'What makes you think that?'
Too smashed all the time.' He prodded the ashtray with his cigarette. Put it wouldn't go out.
'No hard-ons?'
'No hard-ons. And I kept puking in the bed.'
'How of ten?'
'More often than not.' He shook his head. 'How're you making out with that Jewish chick?'
I wanted to tell him about it, only I felt this might dash him. 'She wasn't Jewish in the end.'
'Fuck her?'
'Oh yeah. You know, it's not bad, bit boring. You know. Nothing special.'
I'm afraid the next two-and-a-half weeks are rather a blur. The days soon cease to be distinguishable. In my diary several sheets are quite blank, and The Rachel Papers, at this point, are a sorry jumble of cold facts and free-associative prose. However, this prompts me to take a structural view of things -always the very best view of things to take, in my opinion. The dates are there, so are most of my significant thoughts and feelings. And we've only half an hour left. I sip my wine. I turn the page.
Things start well.
Kneeing impedimenta into the kitchen. Rachel and I were met by Norman and Jenny. They had taken up formal positions before the window; each held a bottle of champagne, and a third stood by on the coffee-table, surrounded by half a dozen Guinnesses for Norman to dilute his with. I was embarrassed to find how much this moved me. But what I felt even more strongly - looking at Rachel's smiles, her adult handbag and dinky suitcases - was a sense of her independence and separateness. Rachel had her own identity, you see - here saluted by Jenny and Norm - her own belongings and her own autonomy. She wasn't just a sum total of my obsessions; she simply chose to be with me.
With fizzy noses we sang 'Happy Birthday To Rachel'.
Champagne: more than a drink, a drug. It seems curious in retrospect, too teenage somehow: like cornering the fat girl after school behind the pavilion, fingertips on navy knickers for me, palmful of inconclusive breast for you, flattering and degrading for her (but who is she to be critical ?); or like the friend's elder sister (or mother) glimpsed naked coming from the bathroom; or like the parties knee-deep in duffle-coats and corduroy, beery mouths and sagging bodies conjoin like slow-motion road accidents; or, most obviously, like the endless foursomes of adolescence, when I've got a hand down her shirt, but then again you've got a hand up her skirt, but then again yours is struggling more, who's first? At least, that's how it felt to me, the only teenager in the room, more alive to incongruities.
On all other occasions we had paired off homosexually. Now we have Mr and Mrs Entwistle forming a diagonal truss on the sofa, and Charles Highway with Rachel Noyes across his lap sideways: necking, shouting, laughing, drunk as skunks. Then the shouting and laughing stops. I notice that Norman's hand has started to ride the white billows of Jenny's breasts, and Jenny quails before the all-inclusiveness of Norman's body, the greed of his huge-mouthed kisses. A loud ping follows as Norman frees the top clip of her dress. Jenny, hollow-faced, was being levered on to the floor.
Rachel and I exited.
For a full half an hour after Rachel and I had finished making love directly below, we could hear Norman's bovine heaves and Jenny's cock-a-doodle-doos. Then the joists fell silent.
'Christ,' I said, respectfully.
'Well, it was the first time in nearly a month.'
'Oh, really?'
Some of our pale sobriety disappeared.
'That's what she said.'
'Oh, of course. You're both girls. I keep forgetting. Of course she'd tell you. I suppose she told you why?'
'Ha ha. No, she was going to, actually. But he came in.'
'Could you tell who was doing the withholding?'
'Not really. Him, I think.'
'Seems more likely. Fascinating business. Do you mind, my arm's gone dead.'
'All right?'
That's better.'
I made love to her again, not to be outdone. She was twenty, after all. I had got my Older Woman.
One good thing about the first week.
I learned the pleasures of cleanliness (Rachel bathed at least twice a day so I had to at least once) and not only of having but actually wanting to have clean clothes and a tidy room. I saw then that I had used to enjoy my disarray; whether - an inference the Low corroborates - this was an attempt to symbolize my internal disorders I wasn't sure. One way or another I spent a fair amount of time in bed, and found that I rested quite well with the brown bundle in my arms. The spanking state of her torso seemed to transmit itself to mine, and, what with the reprieve my chest had given me (demanding only one midnight visit to the bathroom thus far), I received intimations of what it might be to have a body you could look in the eye.
Two not so good things, which (I'll be honest) didn't worry me much at the time.
No frankness. I thought that after I had slept with Rachel, after my sacramental exertions of The Pull, I'd be able to totter up to her and say:
Right then. You're okay, but you're callow and vain and you simper too much and your personality is little more than an aggregate of junior affectations, all charming, only without weight, without substance. For example: you wouldn't lie to DeForest about the Blake thing, yet you lied to your mother about the Nanny thing. Fair enough. But does this urge you to restructure your moral thinking ? I don't think I need answer that question. Life, dear Rachel, is more of an empirical or tactical business than you would perhaps concede.
Me? Me, I'm devious, calculating, self-obsessed - very nearly mad, in fact. I'm at the other extreme: I will not be placed at the mercy of my spontaneous self. You trust to the twitches and shrugs of the ego; I seek to arrange these. Doubtless we have much to learn from one another. We're in love; we're good-natured types, you and I, not moody or spiteful. We'll get by.
Maybe that would come later. Maybe I could swing it when I was twenty, too.
Meanwhile, it was frantic avowals and wordy mutual praise. We never contradicted or satirized each other. (Once, I affectionately mimicked her pout; she veered away in pained bewilderment, so I changed it to an imitation of rubber-lipped Norman, claiming I had heard him on the stairs.) Neither of us defecated, spat, had bogeys or arses. (I wondered how she was going to explain away her first period, overdue already.) We were beautiful and brilliant and would have doubly beautiful and brilliant children. Our bodies functioned only in orgasm.
Which brings me to my second point.
We weren't all that inhibited in bed, though Rachel never went much beyond lying in it and looking nice. Indeed, she was so taken aback by pleasure that it would have seemed ungracious to expect her to do anything more. Her legs went where I put them, her arms flapped about on my back. She toyed with my prick every now and then, certainly, but only toyed with it, nothing positive. Sex was Disneyland to her: an allotment of organized wonders and legal mischief. Highly emotional, for all that: yet emotions of only one kind. Though - come on - did I really want to show her the other side, my place ? Dionysian bathroom sex: troop in, tug back the covers, go through the gaping routine, do everything either of you can conceivably think of doing, again, lurch lick squat squirt squelch, again, until it's all over, again. No. And she probably wouldn't let me.
Three important events. One. Monday morning, five days later. Rachel intended to go and see Nanny before school, in order to maintain her complicity in the tissue of lies I had woven. (Of course, she played it for maximum mawk-value anyhow.) Rachel rose at about three, giving her time to bath and make up, but she brought me a cup of tea and parted the curtains before kissing me goodbye. So for half an hour I stretched in nubile enjoyment of the bed's warmth and emptiness. Climbing out of it at eight thirty or thereabouts, I noticed a stray pair of panties under the armchair. As I lit the fire I picked them up to kiss and sniff at.
After I had been kissing and sniffing at them for a while I turned them inside out. I saw: (i) three commas of pencil-thick pubic hair, and (ii)
a stripe of suede-brown shit, as big as my finger.
'Fair's fair, for Christ's sake,' I said out loud. 'They do it too.'
But all day I fed a perverse desire to confront her with them when she got back. 'Ah, Rachel. Come in, please.' (I am sitting in the armchair, arms folded. Exhibit A is pinned out on the desk like a vivisected fieldmouse.) 'Come over here, if you would, and tell me what you see. Now: at approximately eight thirty-five this morning ... Have you anything to say ? Come come, there's no use denying it; the proof's before you. You ... shit.'
With what a ridiculous sense of grief and loss did I drop them into the laundry basket, and with what morose reluctance did I meet her eye when she returned that afternoon. Then I performed a teenage sulk.
It was most illuminating. Our relationship until that moment had been so straightforward and idealized, so utterly without candour, that when the first case of honest, rotten moodiness turned up, I (and Rachel, also) discovered that we had no machinery for breaking through it.
That evening, Rachel was too terrified to breathe. I don't think I'll ever forget her face when I said 'Oh really' and returned to my book midway through her how-Nanny-was and how-sweet-of-me-to-love-her-still speech. A fearful and startled face, as if someone had screamed in the distance or whispered a ghostly obscenity in her ear. I winced at the desk with a thrill of furtive power. To look at my face then, you'd have thought I was expecting Rachel to run up from behind and bash me on the head - or tickle me. A very strange expression; most unpleasant, too, I should imagine.
And, at midnight, when Rachel got falteringly into bed beside me, I said 'So tired,' and turned over. This would have been the first night we hadn't made love (at least twice). I had a huge erection, of course, and felt quite like it actually. But I had to test my nerve. Stiff five minutes. Then, gradually and painfully, she started to cry.
I whipped round, kissed her, apologized, stroked her breasts, licked away her tears, hugged her, whispered (rather throatily now) that: yes, my mother had rung up crying that afternoon; I didn't know why it upset me so much - but The Shit had taken along another of his fancy women to humiliate her. Would Rachel ever forgive me ?
She was still sobbing, with relief more than anything else, when seventy minutes later I brought her to her eighth orgasm and joined her personally in her ninth. It would do anything that night: a truncheon of stupid glands.
She talked me to sleep about her father. Jean-Paul - you've got to laugh - had received a glamorous wound in the Spanish Civil War, fighting (Rachel need hardly have said) for the Trendy Cause.
Two.
Whether The Second Incident was a result of The First Incident is a matter for the psychologists, not for the literary critic.
I woke with my inside buttock in a pool of furry wetness.
'What's going on?' I asked tremulously.
Oh dear God, I naturally thought, I've wet the bed. (I shan't pretend that this wasn't a problem of mine in early adolescence. But my father got hold of some vile contraptions. I went to sleep on a gauze blanket with metal coils on my rig -to wake, at three, in a tram station of bells and alarms, flashing lights, buzzing buzzers.)
Rachel was steaming shamefully in front of the lighted fire. 'You won't believe it,' she said in a matter-of-fact voice, 'but I've wet the bed.'
I got out and knelt beside her. We were naked.
'Ah, don't worry,' I said. 'Never mind, never mind. Christ, I used to do it every night till I was practically eighteen. Nonstop. Till practically the other week, in fact. No, come on. Don't worry.'
My exams began the next day. During that week she tended me as if invisible. Slid food in front of my nose, laid out my clothes and filled my pens each morning, and at night she was no more than a presence of shadow and oil for me to dip into as I pleased - perhaps not exactly as I pleased; more as it pleased me to think she thought I pleased. I was using the Mandrax my dentist had given me, surreptitiously dropping one at ten thirty, read for half an hour, quick bath, drowsy foreplay, fumble with condom, Rachel's basic two orgasms, starvation-ration endearments, sleep.
I mulled over The Second Incident, when I had nothing more urgent to mull over - on the way to school, while peeing myself. And it seemed to weigh on her, too. She was edgy, nervous and diffident at the same time, as one reasonably might after having bled out all dignity in a series of hot, fetid squirts. What would she feel now as she went to sleep ? And I also felt shame: the shame of squiring the girl who farts in a crowded room, the shame of having a mother drunk, the shame of a man whose wife is sick down the dress she's too old for, to veil the tired, freckled breasts. But I tried to imagine her anxiety, after the emotional and sexual drubbing. I tried to imagine what insidious, coaxing little dream she must have had ... waist-high in the sea, crouching behind the bushes, plonked on a convincing lavatory seat, tenseness and panic seeps away. No, too sad, I couldn't bear it.
Three.
Wednesday was Maths and Latin O Level. I sat these at school. No one invigilated. Mrs Tauber herself brought me coffee and a mathematics primer in the morning and tea and a Latin dictionary in the afternoon. I thought I did quite well.
When the Oxford exams began, the next day, so did Rachel's period - harbingered several hours in advance by a festive pimple ... on her nose.
The way things are, boys can afford to look pretty dreadful now and then; they just pretend they're living hard, not sleeping much, heck, being casual and rangy. But the beautiful girl - through no fault of her own - is a perfect girl. I had the odd spot, sure, when Rachel and I were living together. However: boys will be boys; girls shall be girls.
The Third Incident has given me more vestigial doubt than The First or The Second. It was an invitation, no matter how tentative, to candour, and I refused it. (Nothing would have been easier than an adult, left-wing discussion of the other Incidents - nor more detumescing.) Here, though, was a plausible opportunity for me to explain to Rachel that the existence of the body is the only excuse, the only possible reason, for the existence of irony; that some of the body belongs to the bright steel and white porcelain of the bathroom as well as to the muffled, more forgiving warmth of the bedroom: that no one knows what sort of body they'll end up with nor what it will spring on them next. Take, for example, a look at me.
Once again, if her personality had had more bounce and gusto that invitation might have been a firmer one. But to see her pathetic confusion and distress beneath the still chirpy, still as-if-immaculate surface. I think, all the same, that when I opened my eyes to the bubbling big boy inches from my lips, I really should have said: 'Morning, beautiful.' And seeing it half an hour later, matted with make-up, I really should have cried: 'Oh look. You haven't got a spot on your nose!' And, that evening, when Rachel announced: 'The curse is upon me* (misquoting The Lady of Shalott'), my answer should really have been: 'Surprise surprise. Listen, you've got it in italics right across your conk.'
(Geoffrey, by the way, once claimed that - second of course to crapping - there was no more intense emotional experience than having your blackheads squeezed by the one you loved. There you go again.)
At Kensington Town Hall, packed down on my desk like a Rugby forward, I had a sequence of (mild) identity crises, a trio of Sir Herberts staring dubiously over my shoulder, handwriting changed beyond recognition in the course of each paragraph. When I looked at the clock I thought: Rachel, Rachel; or alternatively: Who am I ? Just who, the hell, am I?
The Practical Criticism paper. I explicated a Donne sonnet and paid uncomprehending lip-service to a beefy dirge by someone called John Skelton. There was a D. H. Lawrence essay on how passionate and truthful D. H. Lawrence was: a characteristic piece of small-cocked doggerel which I treated with characteristic knowingness. Finally, I belaboured one of Gerard Manley Hopkins's sleazier lyrics, implying (a last-minute reread made clear) that it was high time we burned all extant editions of the little fag's poetry; emendations took the form of replacing some of the 'ands' with 'buts', and of cha
nging the odd 'moreover' to 'however'.
I took a chance on the general English Literature paper, writing for three hours on Blake alone in an attempt to get the erratic-but-oh-so-brilliant ticket. Risky, I know; but my reading was there in bold parentheses: the almost unread Prophetic Books, Milton, Dante, Spenser, Wordsworth, Yeats, Eliot, and, yes, Kafka. 'I like it, I like it,' the dons whispered in my ear.
Throughout, I stabilized myself with lots of examsmanship, in order to depress my fellow-candidates. I would laugh out loud on my first glance at the questions, trot up happily for more paper with only half an hour gone, drift through the crowd afterwards murmuring phrases like '... a breeze ... candy from a baby ... I romped home ... bloody pushover...'
Owing to some professorial caprice, the last paper required from the student a two-hour essay on a single word. There was a choice of three: Spring, Memory, and Experience. I took the last. The Bible, The Pardoner's Tale, Hamlet-Lear-Timon, Milton again, Blake again, Housman, Hardy, Highway, closing, in semi-delirium, with the exhortation that son of man had fucking better start loving one another, or die.
When I surfaced, dragged along in a tide of fat-legged girls and torpid Pakistanis, cancelled out by fifteen hours of words and months of confused aspiration, born frowning and blinking into the vivid street, there - round-eyed, white-smocked and spotless - was Rachel. I kissed her for a whole minute as the crowd fell apart about us. We went away to the Park in a handicapped shuffle, arms everywhere, to lie in freak autumn weather on cold grass beneath heavy overcoats. In our ears the chant of tired birds who dumbly thought it was summer again, shouting children, and - if we were lucky - the whirr of a pervert's cine-camera. In our noses the smell of trees, soil, and our bodies. O my youth.