On all other occasions we had paired off homosexually. Now we have Mr and Mrs Entwistle forming a diagonal truss on the sofa, and Charles Highway with Rachel Noyes across his lap sideways: necking, shouting, laughing, drunk as skunks. Then the shouting and laughing stops. I notice that Norman’s hand has started to ride the white billows of Jenny’s breasts, and Jenny quails before the all-inclusiveness of Norman’s body, the greed of his huge-mouthed kisses. A loud ping follows as Norman frees the top clip of her dress. Jenny, hollow-faced, was being levered on to the floor.
Rachel and I exited.
For a full half an hour after Rachel and I had finished making love directly below, we could hear Norman’s bovine heaves and Jenny’s cock-a-doodle-doos. Then the joists fell silent.
‘Christ,’ I said, respectfully.
‘Well, it was the first time in nearly a month.’
‘Oh, really?’
Some of our pale sobriety disappeared.
‘That’s what she said.’
‘Oh, of course. You’re both girls. I keep forgetting. Of course she’d tell you. I suppose she told you why?’
‘Ha ha. No, she was going to, actually. But he came in.’
‘Could you tell who was doing the withholding?’
‘Not really. Him, I think.’
‘Seems more likely. Fascinating business. Do you mind, my arm’s gone dead.’
‘All right?’
That’s better.’
I made love to her again, not to be outdone. She was twenty, after all. I had got my Older Woman.
One good thing about the first week.
I learned the pleasures of cleanliness (Rachel bathed at least twice a day so I had to at least once) and not only of having but actually wanting to have clean clothes and a tidy room. I saw then that I had used to enjoy my disarray; whether – an inference the Low corroborates – this was an attempt to symbolize my internal disorders I wasn’t sure. One way or another I spent a fair amount of time in bed, and found that I rested quite well with the brown bundle in my arms. The spanking state of her torso seemed to transmit itself to mine, and, what with the reprieve my chest had given me (demanding only one midnight visit to the bathroom thus far), I received intimations of what it might be to have a body you could look in the eye.
Two not so good things, which (I’ll be honest) didn’t worry me much at the time.
No frankness. I thought that after I had slept with Rachel, after my sacramental exertions of The Pull, I’d be able to totter up to her and say:
Right then. You’re okay, but you’re callow and vain and you simper too much and your personality is little more than an aggregate of junior affectations, all charming, only without weight, without substance. For example: you wouldn’t lie to DeForest about the Blake thing, yet you lied to your mother about the Nanny thing. Fair enough. But does this urge you to restructure your moral thinking ? I don’t think I need answer that question. Life, dear Rachel, is more of an empirical or tactical business than you would perhaps concede.
Me? Me, I’m devious, calculating, self-obsessed – very nearly mad, in fact. I’m at the other extreme: I will not be placed at the mercy of my spontaneous self. You trust to the twitches and shrugs of the ego; I seek to arrange these. Doubtless we have much to learn from one another. We’re in love; we’re good-natured types, you and I, not moody or spiteful. We’ll get by.
Maybe that would come later. Maybe I could swing it when I was twenty, too.
Meanwhile, it was frantic avowals and wordy mutual praise. We never contradicted or satirized each other. (Once, I affectionately mimicked her pout; she veered away in pained bewilderment, so I changed it to an imitation of rubber-lipped Norman, claiming I had heard him on the stairs.) Neither of us defecated, spat, had bogeys or arses. (I wondered how she was going to explain away her first period, overdue already.) We were beautiful and brilliant and would have doubly beautiful and brilliant children. Our bodies functioned only in orgasm.
Which brings me to my second point.