the lip of the brassiere-cup. My concentration slipped; I had it back on full within a couple of seconds, but in that interval I found I had said something like, ‘Yes, well let’s go and show we’re not that sort,’ and had started to open the door on my side.
She caught my wrist, pursing her lips and frowning. Even before she spoke I could see that, after mounting a series of short but cumulatively valuable ladders, I had just gone sliding down a major snake. But, as in the substantial form of the game, so too in the version Diana and I were playing, there are certain parts of the board where a single throw can restore everything lost on the previous turn, and more.
‘Maurice.’
‘Yes?’
‘Maurice … perhaps if two people really want each other it’s sort of all right in a way. Do you really want me?’
‘Yes, Diana, I really want you. I mean it.’
She stared at me again. Perhaps she thought I did mean it—and, good God, any man who had not only put up with all this without screaming, but was ready for more if need be, must really want her in some fairly ample sense. Perhaps I had merely produced the necessary formula with the necessary show of conviction, nothing more than a piece of sexual good manners. Perhaps, whatever the difference might be between really wanting someone and wanting someone, I had meant it. Anyway, the last snake was behind me now, or so it seemed to me then.
‘Let’s make love to one another, my darling,’ said Diana.
The new problem was to prevent her from making too many remarks in this style until the stage of no remarks was reached. I got out of the truck, went round and helped her down.
‘In a summer season,’ she said, actually looking up at the sky, ‘when soft was the sun …
‘Well, we can’t say we haven’t been lucky with the weather,’ I babbled, pulling her along beside me. One more really corking cock-crinkler like that one and I would be done for. The forecast said rain later, but they’re hopeless, aren’t they? Just a lot of guesswork. Here we are.’
I preceded her into the hollow and swung her down the three- or four-foot drop. The place was as clean as when I had reconnoitred it the previous day, without even any evidence of courting couples. Probably Fareham couples could not find the energy to court, slipping bemusedly into marriage as they might into debt or senile dementia.
‘Maurice, I’m sure it’ll all be marvellously beautiful, with the—’
I cut this one off by kissing her. While I was doing so, I finished unbuttoning her shirt and unclipped her brassiere. Her bosom was firm under my hand, almost hard. The discovery had the effect of making me begin to draw her with me towards the ground. She freed herself and stepped away.
‘I want to be naked,’ she said. ‘For us, I must be naked.’
She took off her shirt and this once I overlooked her literary style. If she had, after all, wanted me to think she was an interesting person, not just seem to think so, she was going a much better way about it now than at any earlier time. Her breasts turned out to be high as well as full and firm, and heavily pointed, but a few moments later I could see how small-made, how long in leg and body she really was. In the short time it had taken her to strip, her face had changed, losing only now its quick directed glance and tenseness of jaw, becoming heavy-eyed, slack-mouthed, dull with excitement. Slowly, her shoulders drawn back and her stomach in, she sat down on a patch of short turf, and seemed to catch sight of me.
‘You too,’ she said.
This struck me as a novel and not particularly good idea. A man undressing lacks dignity; more than that, a man undressed in the open feels vulnerable, and with good reason. From an outsider’s point of view, a naked woman out of doors is either a sun-worshipper or a rape victim; a man in the same state is either a sexual criminal or a plain lunatic. But I obliged just the same, finding the air pleasantly warm. Diana sat and waited, not looking at me, gently and rhythmically pressing the inward surfaces of her upper arms against the sides of her bosom. It was clear that she had had to be naked not for us, let alone for me, but for her. Here, though, was something in her that was really in her, for narcissists, by definition, do not care whether other people find them interesting or not. There was a paradox here, involving the way Diana went on when she was fully dressed, but I had no time for that now: I agreed too heartily with her about the importance of her body.
As I soon found when I lay down with her, it was the top half of that body that most appealed to her. In some important ways, she had sexual and aesthetic right on her side. However attractive a woman’s face may be when she has her clothes on, it is much more so when she is naked; then, sometimes only then, it becomes the most attractive part of her. Throat, shoulders and upper arms, not to speak of breasts, are all individual or at least personal; below the waist, there is a massive lack of detail and a small amount of mere anatomy. I worked on Diana’s principle for some time, with her unqualified and often noisy approval. But eventually there had to come the start of the accelerating swing to anatomy and, in every sense, to lack of detail. Diana’s pleasure abated at once.
At this point I saw (just) that I had a choice. I could perhaps return as far as possible to what she so obviously enjoyed most, while nearly—but not quite—stopping what I had just started on my own account: a sort of sexual equivalent of uninterruptedly performing a piano sonata and at the same time lunching off a plate of sandwiches. Or, without any effort at all, I could forget about her and, more important, forget about myself. That afternoon, I wanted this release even more than usual, but on the other hand I wanted to end up with a satisfied and grateful Diana—if there was any such thing—more yet. So I chose the first alternative, in fact improved on it by metaphorically playing a demanding coda, full of ornamentation and difficult runs in both hands, that went on quite a long time after the disappearance of the last sandwich. (They had been good sandwiches, anyway, as sandwiches go.)
I moved the minimum distance away. Diana peered at me. Her face was flushed and looked swollen round the eyes and mouth.
‘Oh God,’ she said, ‘lovely. There was so much of it. Wish I could remember it all. I don’t know how I felt.’
‘You were beautiful. You are beautiful.’
She smiled and looked away, down at herself. Soon she stopped sprawling and lolling, drew in her chin, crossed her legs and pushed herself up into a half-sitting position. When she looked at me again, her eyes were side, the swollen look had almost faded into her familiar expression of faint anxiety touched with pertness.
‘Maurice,’ she said now, ‘that was ab-so-lute-ly terr-i-fic. I don’t know
‘It was splendid.’.
I put my arms round her again and briefly ran over some of the main points treated in depth earlier, but this time in a lofty, impartial spirit, just underlining the essential continuity of how I felt about her attractions. After a few minutes, I said,
‘Diana.’
‘Yes?’
‘Diana, have you ever been to bed with more than one person? At the same time, I mean.’
‘Maurice, really … Well yes, I have, actually. Years ago now. Before I met Jack.’
‘Was it fun? It was two men, I suppose?’
‘I’m sure it was. But it would be quite different if you—’
‘You mean you and Joyce.’
‘Well, yes. She’s always—’
‘Maurice, you’re not to be furious with me, because I know you often are, but I must ask you something. What makes you even think of a thing like that? It’s all so frightfully unnecessary. Could it be that you really are getting old? I want to ask you something else. Can I?’
‘Ask away.’
‘Well … how often do you and Joyce make love? On the average?’
‘I don’t know. Once a week, perhaps. Sometimes not as much.’
