She was still sobbing, with relief more than anything else, when seventy minutes later I brought her to her eighth orgasm and joined her personally in her ninth. It would do anything that night: a truncheon of stupid glands.
She talked me to sleep about her father. Jean-Paul – you’ve got to laugh – had received a glamorous wound in the Spanish Civil War, fighting (Rachel need hardly have said) for the Trendy Cause.
Two.
Whether The Second Incident was a result of The First Incident is a matter for the psychologists, not for the literary critic.
I woke with my inside buttock in a pool of furry wetness.
‘What’s going on?’ I asked tremulously.
Oh dear God, I naturally thought, I’ve wet the bed. (I shan’t pretend that this wasn’t a problem of mine in early adolescence. But my father got hold of some vile contraptions. I went to sleep on a gauze blanket with metal coils on my rig -to wake, at three, in a tram station of bells and alarms, flashing lights, buzzing buzzers.)
Rachel was steaming shamefully in front of the lighted fire. ‘You won’t believe it,’ she said in a matter-of-fact voice, ‘but I’ve wet the bed.’
I got out and knelt beside her. We were naked.
‘Ah, don’t worry,’ I said. ‘Never mind, never mind. Christ, I used to do it every night till I was practically eighteen. Nonstop. Till practically the other week, in fact. No, come on. Don’t worry.’
My exams began the next day. During that week she tended me as if invisible. Slid food in front of my nose, laid out my clothes and filled my pens each morning, and at night she was no more than a presence of shadow and oil for me to dip into as I pleased – perhaps not exactly as I pleased; more as it pleased me to think she thought I pleased. I was using the Mandrax my dentist had given me, surreptitiously dropping one at ten thirty, read for half an hour, quick bath, drowsy foreplay, fumble with condom, Rachel’s basic two orgasms, starvation-ration endearments, sleep.
I mulled over The Second Incident, when I had nothing more urgent to mull over – on the way to school, while peeing myself. And it seemed to weigh on her, too. She was edgy, nervous and diffident at the same time, as one reasonably might after having bled out all dignity in a series of hot, fetid squirts. What would she feel now as she went to sleep ? And I also felt shame: the shame of squiring the girl who farts in a crowded room, the shame of having a mother drunk, the shame of a man whose wife is sick down the dress she’s too old for, to veil the tired, freckled breasts. But I tried to imagine her anxiety, after the emotional and sexual drubbing. I tried to imagine what insidious, coaxing little dream she must have had … waist-high in the sea, crouching behind the bushes, plonked on a convincing lavatory seat, tenseness and panic seeps away. No, too sad, I couldn’t bear it.
Three.
Wednesday was Maths and Latin O Level. I sat these at school. No one invigilated. Mrs Tauber herself brought me coffee and a mathematics primer in the morning and tea and a Latin dictionary in the afternoon. I thought I did quite well.
When the Oxford exams began, the next day, so did Rachel’s period – harbingered several hours in advance by a festive pimple … on her nose.
The way things are, boys can afford to look pretty dreadful now and then; they just pretend they’re living hard, not sleeping much, heck, being casual and rangy. But the beautiful girl – through no fault of her own – is a perfect girl. I had the odd spot, sure, when Rachel and I were living together. However: boys will be boys; girls shall be girls.
The Third Incident has given me more vestigial doubt than The First or The Second. It was an invitation, no matter how tentative, to candour, and I refused it. (Nothing would have been easier than an adult, left-wing discussion of the other Incidents – nor more detumescing.) Here, though, was a plausible opportunity for me to explain to Rachel that the existence of the body is the only excuse, the only possible reason, for the existence of irony; that some of the body belongs to the bright steel and white porcelain of the bathroom as well as to the muffled, more forgiving warmth of the bedroom: that no one knows what sort of body they’ll end up with nor what it will spring on them next. Take, for example, a look at me.