‘No,’ she said, when I put my hand on her leg. I pushed them apart, and she wondered what was coming.
‘I’m going to see Alfie in my dinner hour tomorrow, and I’ll tell him what’s been going on between us all this time.’
‘Oh!’ she exclaimed. ‘How could you be so rotten?’
‘Because I want you. You drive me crazy. But I’ll tell him, and then he’ll go to this new girl he’s got his eyes on. I’ll pack you in as well.’
She laughed it off: ‘There’s plenty of other pebbles on the beach.’
I laughed as well. ‘The sea’s a long way away, and at Skegness it’s all sand.’
She stood silent for a while, then said solemnly: ‘Do you mean it?’
I swore that I did, so she took my hand and said: ‘All right, then.’
‘What do you mean?’ — I wanted it straight and from her own lips.
‘You can do it to me.’
We found a place, and after passionate kisses she lay down, head back on the grass and her legs open. She was warm and somehow her lips were peppery, mixed with the sweetness of her lipstick that seemed to be sliding all over me. I pushed up and took down everything, and after fingering her for some minutes my flesh-rod went sliding chock-a-block into her, and before I began going up and down I made her large breasts spread loose. Then after only a few goes I had the top of my head blown off with sweetness, and just after this she started to shift and bite, before I shrank out of her.
I felt sorry she’d only done this with me on condition I wouldn’t spoil things between her and Alfie, and arm in arm on the way back I was jealous of him for the first time. But I needn’t have been, for though I’d used false words to get her into that wood, the more I saw her after that the less she met Alfie, until we were going steady together, and having it marvellously several times a week in various fields and parks. When our hands clasped on meeting out of work we couldn’t breathe till that smell of grass and full-grown leaves got into our noses. We’d thread our way through hidden paths, branching off from them and hiding absolutely from the world, living in our own house where we could all but strip naked under the trees, and I could bury myself deep into the first love of my life. Both of us wanted it, but she sometimes made it hard for me, so that I had to cajole and struggle, though this was doubly sweet because the end was certain.
After a few weeks of this man-and-wife play I got familiar and facetious, and on our way back from the woods one night I asked if she used to have it so good with my old pal Alfie.
She stopped under a lamp-post and looked at me very seriously: ‘Shall I tell you something? Shall I, Michael?’ Not waiting for me to say yes or no: ‘I will tell you, though. I never had it with Alfie Bottesford. Never. I don’t care whether you believe me or not, but I’m telling the truth. He’d never dare, because when he tried and I put him off (as Mam always said I had to do) he never came back for me but got downhearted and sulked. So in all the time we went together it never came to it.’
We walked on and I was all of a sweat. We were ‘going steady’ and the full force of these soul-treading words came to me now, because if she hadn’t been having it with Alfie, then my little plan to ensnare her into having it with me had done nothing more than ease me into getting ensnared by her. It was hard to say who had set out to get who, but we had certainly got each other now, and that was a fact. She took my arm and leaned on my shoulder as if heaven were about to open and belt down the chimes of multiple church bells on to us. Passing a bus-stop queue I felt as if people were weighing us up in their different ways, thinking that there went another nice young couple to the altar in a few more months. An old man seemed to smile and smirk in the twilight and I felt like thumbing my snout and saying: ‘That’s what you bloody-well think, mate.’ But I squeezed my sweetheart’s hand, and kissed her when we reached the shadow of a hedge.
‘I thought you was a bit quiet,’ she said. ‘I hope that made you feel better.’
‘It did, duck.’
‘Are you coming home with me tonight, Michael?’
‘I don’t think so. I’ll miss the last bus.’
‘Tired?’
‘Not me.’ But I wouldn’t go to her house because that would put the seal on it, for if her parents liked us, we were as good as engaged, and this I couldn’t stomach. There’d been a terrible rash of early marriages at work among the nineteen-year-olds, and I sometimes got the liver-jitters at Claudine’s seriousness. It seemed as if I was being dragged towards a chute not too far in front, and that once on the brink I’d fall into a canning machine and come out at the other end with Claudine in the same tin marked IDEAL MARRIAGE. Where I got this terror from I don’t know, though I suppose it was natural at such an age. Perhaps I didn’t feel like getting tangled in something my mother had never entered into. She was one of those free and independent women who believed they were the equal of any man providing they didn’t get married, so we got on well together as long as we didn’t say much about the way we wanted to live. As a child she’d been thin in the frame, but now she was nearing forty and had put on weight. Men were still like flies around her, though she rarely brought them to the house. When she did I kept out of the way, for I was embarrassed at her getting from them what I was now so assiduously giving to Claudine.
I was absorbed in what I called the three — ings: reading, working, and fucking, and I did all three to the best of my time and ability. But now that I was beginning to feel too tightly held in my closeting with Claudine, I saw that after all one wasn’t made as wise by reading good books as I had thought. I could read, but not at the same time learn, which made it all seem a bit of a gyp, till I laughed it off on realizing that good books were only as much of an escape from the world as sex-and-gangster stories. The solution to this was not to give up reading, which had hit me early as a cure to some disease whose name I did not know, but to go on getting more out of life on the one hand, and learning more from it on the other. There’s no doubt I was mixed up in my feelings, but at least I wasn’t crazy in it as well. Believing this only proved how crazy I really was, though the assumption that I had cool sense stopped me going round in circles, and at least led me to feel I was the most important person in the world.
In the factory, I was tolerated more than employed, though I must have been worth the eight pounds handed to me every Friday night. I carried bales of cloth from the stores to the cutting rooms, sometimes loading finished garments on lorries that drew up to the warehouse bay. The one advantage was getting suits of clothes at a discount, and occasionally for nothing when I worked up nerve enough to walk brazenly out with one wrapped in my overalls. In spite of my slackness, some intelligence had been noted when I suggested a way of speeding up the transport of cloth from one department to another, and the general manager asked one day if I wouldn’t like to work in the office. Wallace Pushpacker had been a major in the Army, had a blustery face and a thick ginger moustache, and I believe he expected me to jump at the chance as a kind of promotion, but he was taken by surprise when I said in a voice as quick and sharp as his that I’d like to think about it first.