to make you nice," Halfway up Europe on that fucking bike.
They spent the night with some unspeakable hippies in Granada, Andy conducting a sale of dud narcotics on whose proceeds the couple dined at the Ritornello club in Alicante, where he moreover made her dance. They spent two nights in a zoo-peseta pension in Peniscola ("Cock-coke," Andy called it), slept on the beach at Sitges, and lived naked for a week on a Pyrenean ridge. They ate jumbo prawns and collected a mescaline consignment in the Marseilles docks, stayed at the George IV in Monte Carlo, contracted scabies in a Le Touquet youth hostel, and sat for thirty-six hours in the Orly waiting rooms. Apart from the squalor, the crappy people they encountered, the filthy macrobiotic food he occasionally bothered to make her eat, and that fucking motorbike, what appalled Diana most was the unforgivable corniness of her predicament. Tight little rich girl encounters working-class spunk. Seen from the outside everything he did was in trite inverted commas: he was uninhibited, zany, impulsive—"lyrical." And yet being with him was an utterly unreflecting activity; Diana never hesitated because nothing gave Andy pause. There was the sex, too, of course, and it was perhaps this that gave Diana most retrospective embarrassment. Unlike the delicate, artful sex technicians she had slept with in the past, Andy didn't seem to concern himself much with her own inclination or pleasure. For some reason this made her feel achingly passionate and (the word made her squirm) "tender," also. Once, in the Pyrenees, he encouraged her to drink too much wine and she was sick over her naked body. He held her shoulders. "Now you won't like me any more," she had said. Andy hurled her down in the long grass and made love to her with unprecedented ferocity. Ten minutes out of his presence and she began to feel confused, frightened, and intensely sad.
He dropped her off at the preliminary customs checkpoint in Boulogne harbor. Andy asked Diana what she was going to do when she got back. She told him she would be starting at London in October. Which college? She told him which college. Andy couldn't help it — he had to laugh. "Why are you laughing?" she asked. But Andy kicked the bike into gear and Diana kissed his lips quickly before he could zip off down the salty black road.
Diana was still crying three weeks later when she took her place in the check-in queue at Wolfson College, London,
a huge post-modern matchbox which loomed starkly over
Golders Green bus depot. Although her transparent silk trouser suit assumed a perfunctory sexiness, Diana stood in an ·' unwonted slouch and her head hung, resigned and unalert. He recognized her anyway. "There you are at last—I've been here a year already." He kissed her condiment lips as the students threaded past. "Are you going to come and live with me, or what?" She started to cry again. "Yes, please," said Diana.
21: down unknown paths
Oh, but it was not just from her that Miss Lucy Littlejohn got an uneasy reception when she flounced into Appleseed Rectory at seven o'clock that evening, chewing gum, smoking a cigarette, peeling a banana, carrying an empty bottle of wine, trying to mend a broken onyx necklace, and wanting a great deal of cash for the undersized mini-cab driver who had himself escorted her to the door. Andy greeted Lucy with exactly the kind of grisly animality that Diana had dreaded most. (As Andy kissed Lucy's mouth for the second time Diana remembered noticing that he really was a bit too fat, and noticing also that his being a bit too fat was one of her favorite things about him.) Quentin, on the other hand, popped his lips on Lucy's cheek with soldierly restraint, having preceded the gesture with the introduction of his wife. Distant twinges threatened Giles's normal equanimity when Lucy knelt by the side of his chair, whispered in his ear, and kissed his tightened lips; three ten-pound notes fluttered absentmindedly from his fingers. The Americans were then presented en masse by a fluent Villiers. Unintroduced, Whitehead observed these intercourses from the corner of the room, where he was perched on a baronial velvet armchair.
And Lucy. To little Keith's narrow blue eyes she was something of a disappointment. The tales he had heard about her were, by and large, dehumanizing in tendency. Lucy was a thing that fucked people for money, that would wank you off for a favor, that removed its clothes if you asked it to. But here she was — to all appearances spectacularly human. Further, while only slightly less pretty than Keith's much-thumbed mental photographs of her, Lucy's looks were 50 expressive of personality, so dispiritingly unusual. Surveying her crew-cut silver hair, sequinned eyelids, pendulous mouth, multipainted teeth, nonexistent chin, and quite extraordinarily baroque and bulky costume, one was at a loss to see why people hadn't thought of looking that way before. No. Lucy was palpably the holder of views, the entertainer of thoughts, the proprietress of some individuality. Just listen to her—
"Eye-eye-eye. I really made a friend of that dwarf taximan. When I got into the cab I said to myself, 'Kid, the man who's driving you — he's a dwarf. He's sitting on practically the Encyclopaedia Britannica just to get a hand to the steering wheel. Don't talk about dwarfs till he gets you there and goes away again.' I sat in the back trying to think of things not to do with dwarfs to say to him. Halfway through the park I got as far as telling him I'd just been to see Snow White and the Seven. and then sort of trailed off. It wasn't my fault— that's what I saw this morning. So what I want to make clear is, before we go on, I don't mean any offense, no matter what things come out of my mouth. So are there any dwarfs or queers or Jews here or anything like that, so I know?"
"Well, I'm a Jew," said Marvell.
"I'm a queer," said Skip.
". And I'm a dwarf," said Keith (before anyone else could), to vast applause.
"See? See? Hey, whose shoes do you have to walk a mile in to get a drink around here?"
As Quentin self-reprovingly poured Lucy a whiskey from the flagon that Giles had recently sauntered down the stairs with, Marvell asked, impatiently, "What do you want a drink for, Lucy, anyhow?"
The Americans, you see, had received Lucy with snotty reserve, with ostentatious cool. They had spent the past half hour in a more or less successful attempt to establish an atmosphere of gravity and devotional calm. Marvell had brought down from his room a large cuboid case, laying it carefully on the table in the grotto-like dining alcove of the larger sitting room, from which he fussily produced and then arranged various bottles, vials, syringes, nostril spoons. Skip had loped round the house marshaling its inhabitants, laconically instructing them to take their seats in the living room. There they were met by Roxeanne, who in the intervals of trying to restore Giles to life gathered chairs and incidentally: cemented her alienation of Diana by sexily persuading Andy not to put a record on. The household had entered into the spirit of things with a kind of ironic docility, but the clamor of Lucy's entrance quite broke their mood.
"Is this a seance or something?" asked Lucy.
"What do you want a drink for, Lucy," Marvell asked again, less edgily. "I have much better gimmicks right here."
"Far out. I don't want a gimmick, I want a drink."
Since "far out" had come to carry roughly the same force as "oh really?" Marvell's asperity returned. "Look, explain it to her, Quent, willya? I reiterate, I don't want to get too straight about this but we'll be all out of whack if we do it unscientifically. Okay?"