‘No.’
‘No, neither would I, but she did seem a bit tight this afternoon. Or something, from the way she went on. Anyway, she started saying how marvellously attractive she thought you were, wonderful colouring, terrific figure and everything, so much so that it began to dawn on me that she wasn’t just paying compliments, she had something particular in mind. So, after a bit it all began to come out.’
‘Go on.’
‘She went into a great kind of thing about how dull life was in Fareham, for people like her and you and me, and of course I agreed with that, and how we ought to do something about it, get some excitement from somewhere. Such as where? Well, what was wrong with the idea of the three of us having a little romp together?’ Joyce said nothing, so I went on, ‘She meant all going to bed. I thought she was joking at first, but evidently not. I said I wasn’t sure I could satisfy two ladies all by myself, and she said I needn’t worry, that wouldn’t be necessary.
‘What did she mean?’
‘Well, I suppose she meant, in fact I’m sure she meant you and she could have fun together between times. It would be all sort of mixed.’
‘I see. What did you say?’
‘I said I thought she had something, but naturally I couldn’t commit myself until I’d talked to you about it. Oh, there was one other thing she said. We needn’t worry about the Jack side of it, because it turns out she hates him.’
Joyce looked at me for the first time since we had started talking. ‘Diana hates Jack?’
‘That’s what she said.’
‘You mean she had to tell you?’ (At this point it was I who said nothing.) The first time we met them Diana couldn’t bear Jack, and she’s gone on not being able to bear him ever since. How funny you’ve never noticed.’
‘Why didn’t you mention it to me?’
‘I thought it was so obvious it wasn’t worth mentioning.’
‘That’s not how things work. In the ordinary way you’d have been bound to bring it up some time, just casually. Why have you been keeping it to yourself for so long?’
‘Pretty good deduction,’ said Joyce, apparently with genuine mild admiration, though I was on the alert about appearances, at any rate for the moment. ‘I haven’t mentioned it because I was waiting to see if you’d ever notice it on your own, and you haven’t. That’s typical, both bits, I mean you not noticing and you seeing straight away that I’d not mentioned it on purpose. That’s how you are. You sort of observe all the time, and do it bloody well, often, and yet you don’t see. Do you see what I mean?’
‘Yes, and you may be right,’ I said, trying not to sound impatient. ‘But let’s get back to Diana’s idea. She seemed to think we could—’
‘She meant that you’d, well, do her, for instance, and then she and I would work each other over for a bit, until you were ready again, and then you’d do me from behind, I don’t mean, you know, just from behind while she sort of did the front of me, and then she and I would go on together again until perhaps you could do the same thing again only the other way round, or else you and I could divide her up and take different bits of her, and then you and she could take different bits of me, and so on. Is that the kind of thing?’
‘Roughly, yes.’ Listening to Joyce’s outline had been not altogether unlike having the plot of Romeo and Juliet summarized by a plasterer’s mate. At the same time I was swallowing hard with the effort not to want to laugh. ‘Of course, we’d find plenty of—’
‘All right.’
‘What?’
‘Let’s do it, then.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘Yes. We might just as well. Why shouldn’t we? You fix it up with Diana and let me know. Now I must go and find Magdalena. There’s the chef’s gazpacho tonight, and then lamb cutlets Reform. Ought to be damn good.’.
With Victor in a loose ball on my lap, I sat and tried, not very hard, to watch Friday Playhouse, one of those two-character efforts which nevertheless seem marred by the excessive size of the cast. I was puzzled by the sensation that Joyce had let the situation down in some way: having wished beforehand for nothing better than her ready acceptance of the orgy project, I was now wishing she had put up objections for me to beat or wheedle out of the way. There was material here for a mental discussion about sex and power, but I shelved this. Perhaps it was Joyce’s reaction that had—against all the odds —made me feel less than totally triumphant about the replacement of orgy project by orgy prospect, or perhaps it was just Jack’s pills. If the latter, then there was a problem looming.
Dinner came and went; so did further television, culminating, or ending, in a discussion about God that made God seem comparatively immediate and to be reckoned with, as if God’s sphere of influence might reach out to within a few light-years of the Solar System any millennium now, or traces of God’s activities had been proved to extend as late as the beginning of the Devonian Age. Joyce went silently off to bed before it was over. Nick sat on for a while over a journal of French studies, then told me I was to wake him at any time if I felt like some company, and retired in his turn.
It was exactly midnight. I washed down two more pills with the puny draught I must habituate myself to, and left the apartment, picking up a lightweight raincoat on the way. This —camouflage, not protection from the weather—I put on and buttoned up to the chin before hurrying downstairs and out at the side door. In the open, there was plenty of movement to and fro, and plenty of standing about, too; as I waited in the shadows for a clear moment, I congratulated myself on having allowed plenty of time. At last a man half-lifted a girl into a car I considered he was much too young to own, and drove off, leaving the car-park empty of people. I scuttled across to the Volkswagen and got away without being seen, feeling light-headed in a more literal sense than I would have imagined possible, had I ever considered the matter: the parts of my brain usually reserved for thinking seemed to have been invaded by some gas, of low atomic weight but not otherwise tricky to handle—helium, perhaps, rather than hydrogen.
To use up spare minutes, I drove round the village a couple of times. It was deserted and showed hardly a light. Diana was waiting at the place we had agreed; I picked her up with most of the swift efficiency of somebody on TV mounting a robbery or an assassination. This parallel obviously occurred to her too, and for the next few minutes she interrogated me about the sense of adventure, and whether its appeal to men rather than women did or did not go to show that men were really frightfully school-boyish at heart, in all sorts … of ways. I probably said it did.
We reached the graveyard. I parked the car off the road in the deep shade of a pair of elms; there was a thin but clear moon. Diana stood and waited, hands in the pockets of her rather schoolmistressy cardigan, while I collected the tools out of the back.
‘Don’t you feel scared, Maurice?’
‘Not at the moment, no. Why should I?’
‘But you told me you knew you were going to be, and that’s why you insisted on me coming along.’
‘Oh yes. I was really thinking about when we actually start. Take this, would you? Keep the light pointed away from the road.’
We moved off through the thick grass, halting and standing still for a quarter of a minute or so while the headlights of a car, no doubt full of drunken diners from the Green Man, swept towards and across us, or near us. The corroded iron gate of the graveyard leaned open. We entered, the torch Diana held making odd bits of greenery, at our feet or at head height, flare up like a mild and miniature firework display. One after the other, we stumbled over minor obstructions.