‘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 mad thing in the world?’
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 the lip of the brassière-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 brassière. 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.