‘Do please come in and meet someone,’ called Norman.
Blotchy head between the half-closed sliding doors: Norman was on the sofa with two girls, an arm around each of them. The girls were Jenny and Rachel.
‘Christ.’
‘Come on, wanker, get a cup.’
‘There’s one here,’ said Jenny.
‘So there is.’ Norman went on: ‘Met her down the road. Went out for a News – there she was. She told me she had to get home’ – he squeezed Rachel’s shoulders – ‘but I told her she had to come and have some tea.’
Rachel looked at me in helpless apology, as she had when my father asked her up for the weekend.
‘Why were you coming back so late? You finish at four, don’t you?’
‘1 had to stay and finish an essay.’
Hence no DeForest. I found I was staring at her with goofy delight. ‘Really? What on?’
‘Daniel Deronda. Have you read it?’
‘Certainly not,’ I said, untruthfully.
Norman frowned. ‘I’ve seen that. BBC 2. It’s not bad, is it?’ He glanced at his watch. ‘Hey, look. Bugger all this tea. I’ll get the drink.’
‘Can’t we go up?’ asked Jenny in a plaintive voice.
Norman dismissed the suggestion with a wave of his hand. ‘Be a sec.’
Jenny picked up the tea-tray. Rachel helped. I looked out of the window. Shortly Norman returned, rattling like a milk float: a crowded tray that resembled a miniature Manhattan, bottles of wine in either hip-pocket, and a further one of Dubonnet down the front of his trousers.
Then I had time to risk taking in the chestnut orbs, the sandy complexion, the hair you could see your face in, and even the nose, quite shiny also, and the smudged brown lips. The white smock made short work of her breasts, but on the other hand it twirled airily high up her thin Bambi thighs.
Eleven ten: The Rachel Papers, volume two
Here come the sexy bits. I’m having a hell of a job, all the time whipping from Conquests and Techniques: A Synthesis to the Rachel Papers and back again. My files really are in need of thorough reorganization. A good way to spend my twentieth birthday ?
I’m sure Norman planned the whole thing. Firstly, he got us all drunk. He poured Rachel out a gin and tonic, insisting that girls never drank anything else, as she well knew, and kept topping it up. Next, he ordered her to ring home and say she was staying to supper. Rachel demurred, until Norman said : ‘What’s the number? I’ll do it.’
Rachel did it.
Then, five minutes later, he said he was taking Jenny out to dinner and that there were some sausages in the fridge if we wanted them. He winked at me and Jenny shrugged. As she and Rachel discussed modes of preparing and serving sausages, Norman pointed his great Watney’s thumb at a bottle of wine and looked at Rachel with a molten leer.
But I was beginning to feel ridiculous. She didn’t want to be here. When we were alone I would apologize, offer to ring her a taxi, make excuses for Norman’s intimidating high spirits. As that entrepreneur now took his leave, I winced at his smutty gnomes. ‘Be good,’ he said, ‘and if you can’t be good be careful.’ Jenny followed him as if bribed to do so.
‘Bye,’ said Rachel.
It was about seven thirty and the room was darkening. To suspend the moment, underline our aloneness, the street-lights played on the smoke from Rachel’s cigarette.
‘Can you really stay ?’
She nodded.
I poured out more drinks, dutched myself up on neat gin. What’s it going to be? I appraised certain gambits – a waste of time; not because of any swinging intensity, but because I felt tired.
‘How’s DeForest?’
She didn’t reply.
I gathered from the female novelists I had been reading (there was a page or two on it downstairs) that the malleable, soft-centre syndrome was no longer considered attractive and that the confident autonomy syndrome was steadily gaining ground.
Tell me how DeForest is,’ I said.
Still no reply. What did she want ? Some kind of purer response ? It was back to tried and trusted methods.