‘Can I put the other side on ?’
She was referring to the Beatles record (late-middle period -between pretty-boy rock and bleared occult) which had just come to an end. This had seemed a safe choice, since to be against the Beatles (late-middle period) is to be against life.
All I had had to do, really, was make the bed more thoroughly (sprinkling talc between the sheets), readjust the record stacks, and, as a last-minute thought, place two unfinished poems on the coffee-table, to be shyly gathered up when and if I got her in there.
I watched Rachel crouch in front of the gramophone. She was wearing a fawn crew-neck jersey, a tight (and quite short) pinstripe skirt, and brown knee-high boots. As she knelt her arse formed a … whatever you like – an arse-shaped semicircle above the heels of her boots.
Rachel settled herself again on the bed and, with modest sways of the head and in a small but pleasing voice, began to sing along with the gnomic George Harrison: about the space between us all, about those persons who wilfully conceal themselves behind a wall of illusion, and so on.
I was still soggy with retrospective alarm about the miraculous escape I had had eighty minutes earlier. When I followed Rachel into the room the first thing I saw was a huge notice on the mantelpiece. The notice had this to say:
FOR THE LOVE OF GOD DON’T LET HIM TOUCH YOU HE HAS GOT AN UNUSUALLY REVOLTING DISEASE
The notice was written on a small bottle of pills (pressed into my shaking hand twenty-four hours before). The notice was in code form; it said :
Flagyll. One to be taken four times daily.
I pocketed the pills while Rachel was looking at the copy of Encounter on my bed. Later I put them on the shelf in the bathroom, out of the reach of children.
Seconded by the boyish Paul McCartney Rachel now urged me to send her a postcard, drop her a line, stating my point of view and indicating precisely what I meant to say. Instead, I tried to read an Encounter article on the relationship between art and life. Rachel was leaning back on the bed. She fell silent. She looked out of the window. And she lit a cigarette, her first since we had got back, her first for an hour. I peered over the rim of my spectacles. Even supine Rachel seemed erect, reminiscent of early Jennifer. Her knees were hunched up so that I could see the opaque darker-brown tops of her tights and the elusive shadow above.
It was natural that I should pick up the improvised saucer-ashtray from the coffee-table and only polite to glide over and put it on the backless bedside chair. It seemed fair enough to stand by the window for a while, to be expected that I should drop the Encounter to the floor, totally credible to sit on the lower third of the bed, and quite on the cards when my left foot brushed against her boots. This was how it seemed to Rachel. To me, as always, the pass was a new and unexpected turn: dreamy and inevitable enough, but alien, altogether different from what had gone before.
Lovely Rita meter maid
Lovely Rita meter maid
sang Rachel. Then she stopped singing.
Do I speak ?
There was a warm, musty silence. The diagonal curls of smoke from her cigarette were spangled by a thousand grains of dust highlit by the shaft of autumn sun. The shaft of autumn sun struck through the recently dismembered tree in the front garden, squeezed between the railings, quartered itself against the window-frame, wormed its way into the room.
Rachel stubbed out her cigarette.
I squeezed her leathery ankle.
She turned towards me, exhaling smoke, smiling.
Her lips were smudged with some pasty brown substance, almost the colour of her skin. I stared at them, leaning over. Those diamond-hard, slightly crooked teeth. Those lurid gums. Did I dare offer up my grim stripe to that pristine orifice ?
The orifice was still smiling when I kissed it.
It yielded, but by no means voraciously, so mine kept its distance, varying the angle every few seconds. Rachel was still on her side. The manoeuvre had involved leaning over her legs and lower torso. I supported myself, with some effort, on a single quivering arm, positioned near the small of her back, with enough purchase to keep some distance between our bodies. With my free hand I did things like describing the outline of her hair against her face, stroked her jawline, let a finger hover above her right ear. But I could keep this up for only so long.