So we drifted out into the hot evening street, leaving the dreadful battlefield of the party behind, and Susan and her friends wandered off, and we got a taxi in the King’s Road. Derek took me right across London to a spaghetti house called The Bamboo near the Tottenham Court Road, and we had spaghetti Bolognese and a bottle of instant Beaujolais, as he called it, that he sent out for. He drank most of the Beaujolais and told me that he lived not far from Windsor and that he was nearly eighteen and this was his last term at school and he was in the cricket eleven and that he had been given twenty-four hours off in London to see lawyers as his aunt had died and left him some money. His parents had spent the day with him, and they had gone to see the M.C.C. play Kent at Lords. They had then gone back to Windsor and left him with the Normans. He was supposed to have gone to a play and then home to bed, but there had been this other party and then mine, and now how about going on to the 400?
Of course I was thrilled. The 400 is the top nightclub in London, and I had never graduated higher than the cellar places in Chelsea. I told him a bit about myself and made Astor House sound funny, and he was very easy to talk to, and when the bill came he knew exactly how much to tip and it seemed to me that he was very grownup to be still at school, but then English public schools are supposed to grow people up very quickly and teach them how to behave. He held my hand in the taxi, and that seemed to be all right, and they seemed to know him at the 400 and it was deliciously dark and he ordered gins and tonics and they put a half-bottle of gin on the table that was apparently his from the last time he had been there. Maurice Smart’s band was as smooth as cream and when we danced we fitted at once and his jive was just about the same as mine and I was really having fun. I began to notice the way his dark hair grew at the temples and that he had good hands and that he smiled not just at one’s face but into one’s eyes. We stayed there until four in the morning and the gin was finished and when we went out on to the pavement I had to hold on to him. He got a taxi, and it seemed natural when he took me in his arms, and when he kissed me I kissed back. After I had twice taken his hand off my breast, the third time it seemed prissy not to leave it there, but when he moved it down and tried to put it up my skirt, I wouldn’t let him, and when he took my hand and tried to put it on him, I wouldn’t do that either, although my whole body was hot with wanting these things. But then, thank heavens, we were outside the flat and he got out and took me to the door and we said we would see each other again and he would write. When we kissed good-by, he put his hand down behind my back and squeezed my behind hard, and when his taxi disappeared round the corner I could still feel his hand there and I crept up to bed and looked into the mirror over the washbasin and my eyes and face were radiant as if they were lit up from inside and, although probably most of the lighting-up came from the gin, I thought, Oh, my heavens! I’m in love!
Three: Spring’s Awakening
IT takes a long time to write these things, but only minutes to remember them, and when I came out of my daydream in the motel armchair, WOKO was still playing “Music to Kiss By,” and it was someone who may have been Don Shirley improvising through “Ain’t She Sweet.” The ice in my drink had dissolved. I got up and put in some more from the icebox and I went back and curled up in my chair and drank a careful mouthful of the bourbon to make it last, and lit another cigarette, and at once I was back again in that endless summer.