‘Which baby?’
‘Her baby.’
Of course, of course.
‘Don’t tell me,’ I said. ‘Norman wanted her to have an abortion. Am I wrong?’
‘But now he says it’s all right.’
That’s why he was a murderer.’
‘What?’
Naturally, them being girls both, Rachel had hardly set foot in the house before Jenny confided in her. She was three months pregnant, pregnant the day I arrived.
‘Christ,’ I said. ‘In six months I’ll be an uncle.’
‘Isn’t it wonderful.’
‘Yeah. Why didn’t you tell me?’
‘She told me not to tell anybody.’
‘I dare say, but why didn’t you tell me?’
‘None of my business.’
‘Mm. Suppose they’ll stay together now. Norman must have come to some kind of decision. Probably didn’t want to get tied down. What changed his mind, do you know?’
‘No idea. Jenny just rushed up and said he was going to let her have it.’
I reflected that Norman wouldn’t have worded it quite so ambiguously, unless he had in fact followed up with a consolation head-butt. Well then. Kevin Entwistle was now poking chauvinistically at the reaches of my sister’s womb, combing his hair, smoking fags, planning craps. I would have gone upstairs to offer congratulations, or something, but apparently they had gone out to dinner.
‘Well I never. Dash my buttons. He must’ve decided that the time had come. Guilt, too, probably.’
(Wrong again, by the way. That wasn’t why.)
When two couples are living together – no matter how fortuitously – and something like this happens to one of them, something epoch-making, it seems that the other couple is subject to a new kind of self-consciousness, a vague pressure to reinvestigate themselves. It seems also that there need be no logical connection between what has happened to one relationship and what the other couple feel necessary to do to theirs. This, at any rate, was how I rationalized my cumbrous misgivings and uncertainties as I sat next to Rachel in the damp cinema.
I’m fucked (I thought) if I’m going to tool into that bedroom tonight, bung on one of those feelthy heedeous condoms, and complete the hushed, devout routine. I was being at least fifty-per-cent sincere when, prior to The Pull, I said that enthusiasm and affection were enough, that French tricks were unimportant. But then again, then again … No. Tonight, my lad, you are going to get laid. Selfishly. You’re going to get gobbled for a kick-off. You gonna bugger her good. You gonna rip out her hair in fistfuls, fuck her like a javelin hurled across ice, zoom through the air, screaming. Then, whether she wants to or not, and especially if she does not want to, she is going to … let me see…
Or was all this mere bear-trap credulity? The film, you understand, was Belle de Jour. Belle de Jour tells the story of a beautiful girl, married to a man so considerate and handsome and successful that she has no choice but to go off to a brothel in the afternoons, there to be fucked by twenty-stone Chinks, snaggle-toothed gangsters, and generally have a good time. Don’t forget, also, that I had been reading a lot of American fiction, and that Norman had told me the other night about a girl who used to like gobbling him so much that they found it convenient to sleep one-up one-down, her feet on his pillow.
‘Bunuel extends an imaginative sympathy that includes the messiness and arbitrariness of our … unwanted desires,’ I explained, as we made our way down the Bayswater Road. ‘And why don’t you go on the pill ?’
We walk on, our breaths smoky in the November night. This is a mute moot point, never before mentioned. Her hand squirms in mine.
‘I don’t like to feel —’ Rachel hesitated, then went on – ‘that my body’s a sort of machine, that I’m a sort of machine…’ Rachel hesitated, then went on – ‘being programmed. Put those in me, and it’ll have – ‘ Rachel hesitated, then went on – ‘it’ll have a designed effect.’
Ur? What can she mean? She talks as if she’s filling in a form. ‘What about me ?’ I want to yodel. How do you think my body feels, wearing that sliver of bathroom? (It’s unpractically pricey, too. A week after The Pull I had to lone up to Soho and buy a gross-pack of ‘Sharpshooters’ – economy dunkers – three of which I daily transfer to one of those plush Penex three-slots. Knowing, you see, how hurt she’d be if she thought I was fucking her on the cheap. Are there any limits to my sensitivity ?)