Quarter to eight: the Costa Brava
On average I get through seven diaries a year; no matter how big the pages are, and no matter how pithy and austere I try to be, my days always run into weeks. These early sections are embarrassingly full of teenage largesse. But now I glance down the closely written columns and I smile, dear Charles, at your past holidays.
‘I see. So you’ve already got in.’
‘To Sussex, yes, but not Oxford.’
‘I see. Then you’ll be wanting to take the scholarship exam this-November?’
‘Yes’ (you stupid bitch, you dull clit), I said. ‘And I’ll need Use of English and General Paper.’ Shouldn’t she know all this? ‘And Latin O Level.’ I grinned across the table at my future Directress of Studies. She was most unpleasant to look at. I won’t go into it, but she was about thirty-five, had eyebrows as big as teddy-boy quiffs, and her teeth bucked out from her gums at right-angles.
‘I see. So you’ll only be taking the three subjects with us. and they are… ?’
I repeated them. ‘And Oxford Entrance,’ I added, as if it were not necessarily relevant but perhaps of interest in its own right.
Glancing again at my newly compiled dossier she read out in an incantatory honk: ‘A-Level passes: English, grade A, Biology, grade A, Logic, grade A.’ Her chins settled on her throat. ‘Curious subjects … but, yes, I don’t think we’ll have much trouble getting you through your … O Levels. Um …’ She cocked her head in decorous misgiving. ‘You’re a bit old to be going up to Cambridge, aren’t you?’
‘Oxford. Only nineteen,’ I said.
*
When I awoke that morning the bedroom was a rhino pen, the sheets hot straitjackets. Gloria had insisted on sealing the window and keeping the gas fire on – for the purpose, one imagines, of simulating jungle conditions. There appeared to be a seam of sweaty mist all over the floor, as in student productions of Macbeth. My head came up like a periscope, on the lookout for air.
I inched out of the bed, without waking Gloria, and stalked upstairs dressed only in my duffle-coat. No one seemed to be up. I made two cups of tea and – for the lady – two slices of energy-giving Hovis, after some thought spreading them with Marmite, which I hoped would help create a Bacchic after-breakfast atmosphere.
‘Good morning,’ I said, putting the tray down beside Gloria’s cracked smile. I drew the curtains back an inch or two. A gash of sunlight fell athwart the bed, causing a token shriek from the compromised Gloria, who was sitting up and well into her second round of toast. I watched her finish. She wiped her mouth with freckly knuckles, lay back with a grunt and lit a cigarette. Her breasts were exposed; they looked very white now. What did I feel for her? Ambiguous lust, genial condescension, and gratitude. It didn’t seem enough.
She was so much better in the morning – in fact there was no comparison – because one knew that it couldn’t go on all night. I slipped in beside her, tricked out with a bladder-filled erection. Why, the reechiness of the bed began to strike me as rather stimulating. Gloria was evidently bucked by her breakfast, and we rolled about hugging and tickling each other, and laughing, in an evasive cross-fire of bad breath, before coming together cautiously for the first kiss of the day. In my limited experience, this is nearly always tolerable if one is wholehearted about it and almost invariably emetic if one isn’t. I was wholehearted about it, what with adulthood pending.
Tragically, though, Gloria was ‘too sore’. Normally, of course, I would have been greatly relieved. Normally, of course, this would have been one of the most bewitching things she could possibly be: too sore.
Gloria looked actually ashamed. ‘Don’t worry,’ I told her. ‘It’s quite flattering really.’
I went into a long routine of being good about being good about it, gently reproaching her for being so attractive, suggesting that there might just possibly be ways of getting round this problem: all in a diverting, twinkly-eyed manner which Gloria found vastly entertaining. She said things like ‘Oh, Charles, you are terrible,’ and ‘It’s not my fault,’ and ‘Ow, that hurts.’ Eventually I pointed out that she could, you know, always sort of, well, I don’t know, perhaps, I mean … She laughed uproariously at these antics before moving softly on top of me and downwards so that her head lay in the vault of shifting, sunlit dust. It was divine.