Not that he was in any way weak or weedy; Harry was well able to look after himself and hardly the type to accept sand kicked in his face. Twice Brenda had seen him deal with would-be bullies, and they had been the ones to go away nursing cuts and bruises. She secretly prided herself that on both occasions she had been the spur to his anger. Harry was indifferent towards jibes aimed at himself – he could always ignore them, put them down to the ignorance of louts-but he would not accept insults or insinuations directed at Brenda, or at himself when she was with him. At times like that he seemed almost to become another person, a harder, faster, more capable person entirely. And yet even his mastery of self-defence mystified her; it was just another of those things in which he had grown inexplicably expert. Like his lovemaking, and his writing. Brenda looked at them in that order:
Harry had been sixteen when he first made love to her when they first did it properly, anyway – but he’d been eager for it long before that. And as she had pointed out on the beach, he had very quickly got to be very good at it. Innocent in all such things, Brenda had thought there was only one way to do it, but Harry’s sexual repertoire had seemed inexhaustible. And it was perfectly true: she had often wondered if someone else had shown him how.
In the end she’d stopped worrying about it, putting it down to the fact that he was precocious. For some unexplained reason there were skills in which Harry Keogh excelled – in which he excelled naturally, without any prior knowledge or intensive instruction. His writing:
Harry had once admitted that his English had used to let him down badly; it had very nearly stopped him going on to the Tech. to complete his schooling, when he’d completely messed up the English examination paper.
Well, however much that had been the case then, it certainly wasn’t so now. Perhaps it was that he’d worked hard at it, but when? Brenda had never seen him studying or swotting-up his English; he had never seemed to study I anything much. And yet here he was, eighteen years old and an author, and so prolific that he was published under four pseudonyms! Only short stories so far, but three a week at least – and all of them snapped up – and she knew that he was now working on a novel.
His battered, second-hand typewriter stood on a small table close to the window. Once when she’d dropped in to see him unexpectedly, Harry had been working. It was one of the few occasions when Brenda had actually seen him at work. Coming upstairs, she had heard the intermittent clatter of the keys of his machine, and creeping into his tiny entrance hall she’d poked her head round the door. Lost in thought, smiling to himself -even muttering to himself, she’d fancied – Harry’s chin had been propped in his hands where he sat at the table. Then he had straightened up to tap out a few more two-fingered lines, only pausing to nod and smile at some private thought, and gaze out of the garret window and across the road.
Then she had knocked on the door, startling him, and entered the room; Harry had greeted her, put away his work and that had been that – except that she had glanced at the sheet of paper in the typewriter and had seen typed at its head: Diary of a Seventeenth-Century Rake.
It was only later that she’d wondered what Harry could possibly know about the seventeenth century (what, Harry? with his limited knowledge of history, which as it happened had always been his very worst subject?) or, for that matter, rakes . . .
She was all done with dressing now and tip-toed across the room to apply a little make-up to her face in front of a wall mirror. This took her close to his table, and again she glanced at the typewriter and the uncompleted sheet it contained. Obviously he was still hard at his novel: the A4 sheet was numbered P.213 and in the left-hand upper corner bore the legend Diary of. . . etc.