Rachel said that – hold your hats – she had ‘given up’ hating her father long ago. I didn’t explain.
Owing to the mendacity of the girl who answered the telephone there, we arrived at the cinema just in time to catch the last hour and a quarter of the B feature. The B feature was called Nudist Eden.
It was grisly. The film presented itself as a documentary, just taking a look round a real nudist camp. The narrator gave facts and figures, interviewed satisfied customers. The camera patrolled the grounds, examined the facilities. Grubby colour, low-budget incompetence; it had a nightmare quality: you can’t tell whether you’re going mad or whether everyone else is going mad; you stare round the cinema to check your bearings; you expect the audience to make some gesture of spontaneous protest. What was more, the producers could afford only middle-aged actors and actresses.
I shifted in my seat as the camera inexpertly focused on a parade of oldster genitals. The men had pricks like hand-rolled cigarettes, balls like prunes. The women did not differ significantly in this area, as far as I could see. Caved-in bums, deflated breasts – these were to be seen everywhere: by the pool, round the camp-fire (a scene scored by an ill-synchronized Deep River Boys number to which the nudists attempted helplessly to mime), in the chalets, at the canteen, and so on.
I began to feel distinct alarm, what with Rachel being so posh, when the camera lingered for a full half-minute on the naked body of a seven-year-old girl. High-spiritedly she was arching herself backwards, to reveal (i) that little girls in nudist camps are healthy and can do the crab, and (ii) her cunt, in order to sate the more recondite predilections of certain cineastes – one of whom, a mackintoshed compost-heap, was sitting immobile, like a toadstool, not even wanking, in a wide circle of unoccupied seats.
The time came to say something. After a most cunning scene, in which, for three minutes, a dangerously overweight couple were to be viewed jumping up and down on a trampoline, I turned to Rachel and said – unanxious, empirical, resigned – ‘That’s motion pictures.’
Rachel started laughing, quite loudly, shoulders hunched, right hand cupped over her nose. ‘I love this sort of thing,’ she whispered. ‘How much of it will there be? Have we missed much?’
‘Not much,’ I said. I grabbed a kiss. ‘There’ll be plenty more.’
I gazed at Rachel’s profile. Goodness me, I really did like her. A novel turn in our relationship. What had it been up until then ? It didn’t seem like affection, far less desire: rather a kind of gruelling, nine-to-five inevitability.
As it turned out, the nude film was a delight and La Rupture left us cold.
Later; at the bus-stop, I quizzed Rachel about the weekend. She was evasive, pointing out that even if my father did ring it might still be difficult.
‘Mummy’s really neurotic about things like this. Maybe because of Daddy. She was so young then, and I think she thinks the same will, you know, happen to me.’
I sighed.
Rachel’s hand writhed in mine. ‘But if you came up and met them to sort of reassure her… ?’ She pinched the loose skin on my knuckles.
‘Okay,’ I said. ‘Yeah, I’ll do that. Tomorrow? What, just come up for dinner, or a drink or something. Yes, I’ll do that. I’m quite good at all that.’
‘ … although Eden, then, is the “goal” of all human life, it remains strictly an imaginative goal, not a social construct, even as a possibility. The argument applies also to the literary Utopias, which are not the dreary fascist states popularizers try to extrapolate from them, but, rather, analogies of the well-tempered mind: rigidly disciplined, highly selective as regards art, and so on. Thus, Blake, like Milton, [hesitate] saw the hidden world, the animal world in which we are condemned to live, as the inevitable complement to man’s imagination. Man was never meant to escape death, jealousy, pain, libido -what Wordsworth calls ‘the human heart by which we live’, [perplexed three-second silence] Perhaps this is why Blake paints the created Adam with a serpent already coiled round his thigh.’