This is what I thought. Since Henry Miller’s Tropic books, of course, it has become difficult to talk sensibly on the question of girls’ cunts. (An analogy: young poets like myself are forever taunted by subjects which it is no longer possible to write about in this ironic age: evening skies, good looks, dew, anything at all to do with love, the difference between cosmic reality and how you sometimes feel when you wake up.) I remember I overheard in an Oxford pub one undergraduate – a German, I believe – telling another undergraduate that Swedish girls were okay, he supposed, but ‘their conts are too big.’ In the same place on a different occasion I talked sex with a pin-cocked Geordie who dedicated himself to the proposition that Oxford girls weren’t nearly as good as Geordie girls, the reason being that their cunts were too small. Narcissistic rubbish. Size doesn’t matter – unless, that is, you have troubles unknown to the present reviewer.
Which isn’t to say that cunts are homogeneous. Now Rachel’s was the most pleasing I had ever come across. Not, for her, the wet Brillo-pad, nor the paper-bagful of kedgeree, nor the greasy waistcoat pocket, the gashed vole’s stomach, the clump of veins, glands, tubes. No. It was infinitely moist but not wet, exquisitely shaped and yet quite amorphous, all black ink and velvet recessed into pubic hair that resembled my own as a Persian carpet resembles a mat rug. And it was warmer than me; it was, actually, hot.
Meanwhile my fingers paddled there, enclosing it with the flat of my hand, entering with one, two fingers, one, two inches, flicking the clitoris. Rachel was quaking and warbling away: however, it seemed right out of context when I pressed my mouth against her ear and (well I never) my sharp erection against her thigh, and said, with a nicely gauged crack in my voice:
‘How do you undo this dress?’
Her movements ceased at once. Her eyes opened. ‘I’m not on the pill.’
‘No, really?’ I said.
But then, you see, we did the sort of lyrically zany thing that the under-twenties do fairly often. On Rachel’s suggestion, after some tweedy humming and ha-ing from me, we decided that we’d jolly well go up – fuck them all – and buy some contraceptives at the late-night chemist in Marble Arch. Nonplussed at first, I soon fell in with the requisite mood. We drank wine, put on coats, and made our whacky way down the square.
Even if we tenderly pooled our money we couldn’t afford a taxi – Rachel had to have enough to get back – and besides I thought it more in keeping to take a bus. There was still enough summer about for it not to be really dark, and also you never got beaten up when you were with girls.
It seems improbable now, but on the way there we talked about DeForest’s infrequent and ham-cocked performances in bed. (We laughed, too, wholly without malice: an example of prelapsarian high spirits which as of tonight will be another experience unavailable to me.) DeForest’s chief, though by no means his only, problem was that he tended to come before either he or Rachel could say – ‘Jack Robinson’. He would slap on the contraceptive and surge into her with the look of someone who had just remembered that he ought to be doing a terribly important thing elsewhere, like attending his mother’s funeral. (I merely annotate Rachel’s imitation.) Then he would screw up his freckly face and sink down on top of her, while his prick slithered out as fast as it had slithered in, not to reappear until he had completed a fortnight of stalling, apologizing, rationalizing. I soft-pedalled my amusement through most of this, partly out of real admiration for Rachel’s tolerance and lack of embarrassment. But I nearly burst out crying with laughter when she recounted one of DeForest’s wheezes to prolong their delight. He took a history textbook to bed, which, so the idea was, he would pore over as Rachel shinnied away beneath him; when they were level-pegging, Rachel was to attract her lover’s attention in some way, DeForest would hurl Tudor England aside, and be granted four or five seconds of impetuous transport before melting into her dream. It didn’t work, I need hardly add, though DeForest clocked up a minute on one occasion.