We weren’t all that inhibited in bed, though Rachel never went much beyond lying in it and looking nice. Indeed, she was so taken aback by pleasure that it would have seemed ungracious to expect her to do anything more. Her legs went where I put them, her arms flapped about on my back. She toyed with my prick every now and then, certainly, but only toyed with it, nothing positive. Sex was Disneyland to her: an allotment of organized wonders and legal mischief. Highly emotional, for all that: yet emotions of only one kind. Though – come on – did I really want to show her the other side, my place ? Dionysian bathroom sex: troop in, tug back the covers, go through the gaping routine, do everything either of you can conceivably think of doing, again, lurch lick squat squirt squelch, again, until it’s all over, again. No. And she probably wouldn’t let me.
Three important events. One. Monday morning, five days later. Rachel intended to go and see Nanny before school, in order to maintain her complicity in the tissue of lies I had woven. (Of course, she played it for maximum mawk-value anyhow.) Rachel rose at about three, giving her time to bath and make up, but she brought me a cup of tea and parted the curtains before kissing me goodbye. So for half an hour I stretched in nubile enjoyment of the bed’s warmth and emptiness. Climbing out of it at eight thirty or thereabouts, I noticed a stray pair of panties under the armchair. As I lit the fire I picked them up to kiss and sniff at.
After I had been kissing and sniffing at them for a while I turned them inside out. I saw: (i) three commas of pencil-thick pubic hair, and (ii) a stripe of suede-brown shit, as big as my finger.
‘Fair’s fair, for Christ’s sake,’ I said out loud. ‘They do it too.’
But all day I fed a perverse desire to confront her with them when she got back. ‘Ah, Rachel. Come in, please.’ (I am sitting in the armchair, arms folded. Exhibit A is pinned out on the desk like a vivisected fieldmouse.) ‘Come over here, if you would, and tell me what you see. Now: at approximately eight thirty-five this morning … Have you anything to say ? Come come, there’s no use denying it; the proof’s before you. You … shit.’
With what a ridiculous sense of grief and loss did I drop them into the laundry basket, and with what morose reluctance did I meet her eye when she returned that afternoon. Then I performed a teenage sulk.
It was most illuminating. Our relationship until that moment had been so straightforward and idealized, so utterly without candour, that when the first case of honest, rotten moodiness turned up, I (and Rachel, also) discovered that we had no machinery for breaking through it.
That evening, Rachel was too terrified to breathe. I don’t think I’ll ever forget her face when I said ‘Oh really’ and returned to my book midway through her how-Nanny-was and how-sweet-of-me-to-love-her-still speech. A fearful and startled face, as if someone had screamed in the distance or whispered a ghostly obscenity in her ear. I winced at the desk with a thrill of furtive power. To look at my face then, you’d have thought I was expecting Rachel to run up from behind and bash me on the head – or tickle me. A very strange expression; most unpleasant, too, I should imagine.
And, at midnight, when Rachel got falteringly into bed beside me, I said ‘So tired,’ and turned over. This would have been the first night we hadn’t made love (at least twice). I had a huge erection, of course, and felt quite like it actually. But I had to test my nerve. Stiff five minutes. Then, gradually and painfully, she started to cry.
I whipped round, kissed her, apologized, stroked her breasts, licked away her tears, hugged her, whispered (rather throatily now) that: yes, my mother had rung up crying that afternoon; I didn’t know why it upset me so much – but The Shit had taken along another of his fancy women to humiliate her. Would Rachel ever forgive me ?