‘You
‘How often do you think an unattached one of those comes wandering in?’
‘They don’t have to be unattached, do they? What about the wife of that Dutch tulip-grower in the spring?’
‘Soil expert. That was different. He passed out in the dining-room, David put him to bed, and she said she didn’t feel sleepy and it was a beautiful night. What could I do?’
‘But what’s at the back of it all, Maurice? What makes you so determined to make love to me, for instance?’
‘Sex, I should imagine.’
I knew this would be nowhere near good enough for Diana in her present mood, indeed in the only mood I had ever seen her in in the three years I had known her. Glumly, I tried to run up in my mind a spontaneous- sounding remake of the standard full answer—reproductive urge, power thing, proving one’s masculinity (to be introduced one moment and decisively rejected the next), restlessness, curiosity, man-polygamous-woman- monagamous (to be frankly described as old hat but at the same time not dismissible out of hand) and the rest of it, the whole mixture heftily spiked with pornographic flattery. However, I had barely started on this grim chore when Diana herself let me off that particular hook by attending to our route.
‘Where are we going? You’re taking us back to the village.’
‘Just round the edge of the village. We cross the main road in a minute and go up behind the hill, a bit beyond where the new houses are going up.’
‘But that’s almost opposite the Green Man.’
‘Not really. And you can’t be seen from there.’
‘Pretty close all the same.’ A farm lorry came into view ahead and
‘There’ll be no flaunting if I have any say in the matter, and as I said no one can see you anyway.’
‘Still…’ She lowered the paper. ‘Do you know another thing that’s been puzzling me dreadfully?’
‘What?’
‘Why you haven’t done anything about me until practically the other day. You and I have known each other jolly nearly since Jack and I moved to Fareham, and you just treat me as a friend, and then you suddenly start making these colossal passes at me. All I’m asking is, why … the change?’
This was her least dispiriting query so far, at any rate in the sense that I could think of no answer, either then or later. Almost at random, I said, ‘I suppose I’ve realized I’m nearly an old man. I haven’t got all the time in the world any longer.’
‘That’s complete and utter rubbish, Maurice, and you know it, darling. You haven’t got a paunch and you’ve got all your hair and I can’t think how you do it when you drink so much but you look about forty-four or five at the outside, so don’t be so silly.’
She had more or less had to say something on these lines, since to declare a fondness, whether sneaking or flagrant, for budding old-age pensioners would have made her seem to herself one of the wrong sorts of interesting person. But it was nice to hear it said just the same.
We duly crossed the main road beside the dilapidated and overgrown churchyard where Thomas Underhill was buried, and climbed a twisting lane where a hazy afternoon sun came down diagonally through a straggle of poplars. Just beyond the crest I drove the truck into a turning so narrow that the hedges brushed the doors on either side. Two minutes later I took us off this into a space almost enclosed by a high bank, a rough semicircle of brambles and a sudden rise in the ground between us and the main road. I stopped the engine.
‘Is this it?’
‘It’s nearly it. There’s a splendid little hollow in the ground by those bushes that you can’t even see from here.’
‘Is it safe?’
‘I’ve never seen anyone up this way. The track peters out in those woods.’
I started kissing her again before she could speculate on the reasons for this or whatever other facts might strike her. The only really good point about the raised hem-line is that a man can put his hand on a girl’s thigh a long way from the knee without being said to be putting it up her skirt. I took full advantage of this. Diana responded to it and such moves as enthusiastically as anybody setting out to display a contrast with earlier, unresponsive behaviour. But quite soon, using a moment when my mouth was not on hers, she said, sounding as if she really wanted to know,
‘Maurice, don’t you think it’s important to get some things straight?’
I could not imagine any such things, or any things, but said, perhaps a bit dully, ‘Don’t let’s bother about that kind of stuff for now.’
‘Oh, but Maurice, we have to bother, surely. We must.’
In a sense I felt this too, or had done so and would again, but this was not enough to call me back from where I was. What did that was the knowledge, dim but powerful, that she had not yet had her say—her ask, rather—that nothing would make her throw away her present seller’s-market advantage and postpone having it until significantly later, and that therefore she had better have it now, not when I had got her on her back. Playing up to her, however revolting in retrospect, would probably shorten the say, or at least cut down the intervals between the various sections of it. Well, worth a try.
‘You’re right, of course,’ I said, releasing her, gripping her hand and staring responsibly past her at the bushes. ‘We’re two grown-up people. We can’t just sail into a thing like this with our eyes shut.’
‘Maurice.’
‘Yes?’ I spoke gruffly, to show how tortured I was feeling.
‘Maurice, why have you suddenly changed? One moment you’re seducing me as hard as you can go, and the next you back off and say we ought to worry about what we’re doing. You’re not having second thoughts, are you?’
‘No,’ I said rather quickly, ‘certainly not, but you said something about getting our ideas straight, and that reminded me of, well …‘
‘But you are absolutely sure you really care?’ Her tone was edged with suspicion, and I realized what a mistake it would be to suppose that those who habitually talk insincerely, or for effect, or balls, are no good at spotting others who try the same line. When she went on, ‘That sort of thing sounds so funny, coming from you.’ I took her point at once: all the balls-talking that afternoon was going to be done by her.
‘Well, I …‘ I muttered, and did something in the air with my free hand, ‘I was just …‘
‘Maurice,’ she said, at her ease again and giving me a wide-eyed hazel stare, ‘isn’t it wrong to put one’s own pleasure before everything else, before other people’s happiness?’
‘Perhaps. I don’t know.’
‘Wouldn’t you say that one of the most absolutely typical things about the way everybody goes on nowadays is this thing of making up your own rules?’
‘There’s a lot of truth in that.’
‘And what bothers me is can it ever be right. After all, you wouldn’t take the line that we’re just animals, would you?’
‘No.’
‘Maurice … don’t you think sexual attraction is the most peculiar and unpredictable and sim—ply
At this, I cheered up a little. Either Diana was semi-consciously groping for the sixty-four-cent question, the ultimate bit of balls which I would pass the test by letting her get away with, or she was just running out of material. ‘I’ve never understood it,’ I said humbly.
‘But isn’t it true that if people don’t pay attention to what their instincts tell them then they get jolly closed up and cut off from everything and perfectly awful in every way?’
I was feeling by now as if I had not paid attention to what my instincts told me for weeks, and perhaps never would again, but just then, to emphasize her proposition about its being a bad thing to be perfectly awful, she leaned earnestly forward, and I caught sight of the bare flesh between the base of the mound of her left breast and
