The Rachel Papers (26 page)

I whipped round, kissed her, apologized, stroked her breasts, licked away her tears, hugged her, whispered (rather throatily now) that: yes, my mother had rung up crying that afternoon; I didn't know why it upset me so much - but The Shit had taken along another of his fancy women to humiliate her. Would Rachel ever forgive me ?

She was still sobbing, with relief more than anything else, when seventy minutes later I brought her to her eighth orgasm and joined her personally in her ninth. It would do anything that night: a truncheon of stupid glands.

She talked me to sleep about her father. Jean-Paul - you've got to laugh - had received a glamorous wound in the Spanish Civil War, fighting (Rachel need hardly have said) for the Trendy Cause.

Two.

Whether The Second Incident was a result of The First Incident is a matter for the psychologists, not for the literary critic.

I woke with my inside buttock in a pool of furry wetness.

'What's going on?' I asked tremulously.

Oh dear God, I naturally thought,
I've
wet the bed. (I shan't pretend that this wasn't a problem of mine in early adolescence. But my father got hold of some vile contraptions. I went to sleep on a gauze blanket with metal coils on my rig -to wake, at three, in a tram station of bells and alarms, flashing lights, buzzing buzzers.)

Rachel was steaming shamefully in front of the lighted fire. 'You won't believe it,' she said in a matter-of-fact voice, 'but I've wet the bed.'

I got out and knelt beside her. We were naked.

'Ah, don't worry,' I said. 'Never mind, never mind. Christ, I used to do it every night till I was practically eighteen. Nonstop. Till practically the other week, in fact. No, come on. Don't worry.'

My exams began the next day. During that week she tended me as if invisible. Slid food in front of my nose, laid out my clothes and filled my pens each morning, and at night she was no more than a presence of shadow and oil for me to dip into as I pleased - perhaps not exactly as I pleased; more as it pleased me to think she thought I pleased. I was using the Mandrax my dentist had given me, surreptitiously dropping one at ten thirty, read for half an hour, quick bath, drowsy foreplay, fumble with condom, Rachel's basic two orgasms, starvation-ration endearments, sleep.

I mulled over The Second Incident, when I had nothing more urgent to mull over - on the way to school, while peeing myself. And it seemed to weigh on her, too. She was edgy, nervous and diffident at the same time, as one reasonably might after having bled out all dignity in a series of hot, fetid squirts. What would she feel now as she went to sleep ? And I also felt shame: the shame of squiring the girl who farts in a crowded room, the shame of having a mother drunk, the shame of a man whose wife is sick down the dress she's too old for, to veil the tired, freckled breasts. But I tried to imagine her anxiety, after the emotional and sexual drubbing. I tried to imagine what insidious, coaxing little dream she must have had ... waist-high in the sea, crouching behind the bushes, plonked on a convincing lavatory seat, tenseness and panic seeps away. No, too sad, I couldn't bear it.

Three.

Wednesday was Maths and Latin O Level. I sat these at school. No one invigilated. Mrs Tauber herself brought me coffee and a mathematics primer in the morning and tea and a Latin dictionary in the afternoon. I thought I did quite well.

When the Oxford exams began, the next day, so did Rachel's period - harbingered several hours in advance by a festive pimple ... on her nose.

The way things are, boys can afford to look pretty dreadful now and then; they just pretend they're living hard, not sleeping much, heck, being casual and rangy. But the beautiful girl - through no fault of her own - is a perfect girl. I had the odd spot, sure, when Rachel and I were living together. However: boys will be boys; girls shall be girls.

The Third Incident has given me more vestigial doubt than The First or The Second. It was an invitation, no matter how tentative, to candour, and I refused it. (Nothing would have been easier than an adult, left-wing discussion of the other Incidents - nor more detumescing.) Here, though, was a plausible opportunity for me to explain to Rachel that the existence of the body is the only excuse, the only possible reason, for the existence of irony; that some of the body belongs to the bright steel and white porcelain of the bathroom as well as to the muffled, more forgiving warmth of the bedroom: that no one knows what sort of body they'll end up with nor what it will spring on them next. Take, for example, a look at me.

Once again, if her personality had had more bounce and gusto that invitation might have been a firmer one. But to see her pathetic confusion and distress beneath the still chirpy, still as-if-immaculate surface. I think, all the same, that when I opened my eyes to the bubbling big boy inches from my lips, I really should have said: 'Morning, beautiful.' And seeing it half an hour later, matted with make-up, I really should have cried: 'Oh look. You haven't got a spot on your nose!' And, that evening, when Rachel announced: 'The curse is upon me* (misquoting The Lady of Shalott'), my answer should really have been: 'Surprise surprise. Listen, you've got it in italics right across your conk.'

(Geoffrey, by the way, once claimed that - second of course to crapping - there was no more intense emotional experience than having your blackheads squeezed by the one you loved. There you go again.)

At Kensington Town Hall, packed down on my desk like a Rugby forward, I had a sequence of (mild) identity crises, a trio of Sir Herberts staring dubiously over my shoulder, handwriting changed beyond recognition in the course of each paragraph. When I looked at the clock I thought: Rachel, Rachel; or alternatively: Who am I ? Just
who,
the
hell, am I?

The Practical Criticism paper. I explicated a Donne sonnet and paid uncomprehending lip-service to a beefy dirge by someone called John Skelton. There was a D. H. Lawrence essay on how passionate and truthful D. H. Lawrence was: a characteristic piece of small-cocked doggerel which I treated with characteristic knowingness. Finally, I belaboured one of Gerard Manley Hopkins's sleazier lyrics, implying (a last-minute reread made clear) that it was high time we burned all extant editions of the little fag's poetry; emendations took the form of replacing some of the 'ands' with 'buts', and of changing the odd 'moreover' to 'however'.

I took a chance on the general English Literature paper, writing for three hours on Blake alone in an attempt to get the erratic-but-oh-so-brilliant ticket. Risky, I know; but my reading was there in bold parentheses: the almost unread Prophetic Books, Milton, Dante, Spenser, Wordsworth, Yeats, Eliot, and, yes, Kafka. 'I like it, I like it,' the dons whispered in my ear.

Throughout, I stabilized myself with lots of examsmanship, in order to depress my fellow-candidates. I would laugh out loud on my first glance at the questions, trot up happily for more paper with only half an hour gone, drift through the crowd afterwards murmuring phrases like '... a breeze ... candy from a baby ... I romped home ... bloody pushover...'

Owing to some professorial caprice, the last paper required from the student a two-hour essay on a single word. There was a choice of three: Spring, Memory, and Experience. I took the last. The Bible,
The Pardoner's Tale, Hamlet-Lear-Timon,
Milton again, Blake again, Housman, Hardy, Highway, closing, in semi-delirium, with the exhortation that son of man had fucking better start loving one another, or die.

When I surfaced, dragged along in a tide of fat-legged girls and torpid Pakistanis, cancelled out by fifteen hours of words and months of confused aspiration, born frowning and blinking into the vivid street, there - round-eyed, white-smocked and spotless - was Rachel. I kissed her for a whole minute as the crowd fell apart about us. We went away to the Park in a handicapped shuffle, arms everywhere, to lie in freak autumn weather on cold grass beneath heavy overcoats. In our ears the chant of tired birds who dumbly thought it was summer again, shouting children, and - if we were lucky - the whirr of a pervert's cine-camera. In our noses the smell of trees, soil, and our bodies. O my youth.

Five evenings later, my diary says, the evening before her 'parents' were due back from France, Rachel ran down the stairs and into my room.

'Guess what ?' she said.

'What.' The Oxford University candidate was to be seen in T-shirt and khaki strides, his nasal blackheads hovering above the
Evening Standard's
entertainments guide. I was picking a film for us to see. A going-away treat.

'Jenny's going to have the baby!'

'Which baby?'

'Her
baby.'

Of course, of course.

'Don't tell me,' I said. 'Norman wanted her to have an abortion. Am I wrong?'

'But now he says it's all right.'

That's why he was a murderer.'

'What?'

Naturally, them being girls both, Rachel had hardly set foot in the house before Jenny confided in her. She was three months pregnant, pregnant the day I arrived.

'Christ,' I said. 'In six months I'll be an uncle.'

'Isn't it wonderful.'

'Yeah. Why didn't you tell me?'

'She told me not to tell anybody.'

'I dare say, but why didn't you tell me?'

'None of my business.'

'Mm. Suppose they'll stay together now. Norman must have come to some kind of decision. Probably didn't want to get tied down. What changed his mind, do you know?'

'No idea. Jenny just rushed up and said he was going to let her have it.'

I reflected that Norman wouldn't have worded it quite so ambiguously, unless he had in fact followed up with a consolation head-butt. Well then. Kevin Entwistle was now poking chauvinistically at the reaches of my sister's womb, combing his hair, smoking fags, planning craps. I would have gone upstairs to offer congratulations, or something, but apparently they had gone out to dinner.

'Well I never. Dash my buttons. He must've decided that the time had come. Guilt, too, probably.'

(Wrong again, by the way. That wasn't why.)

When two couples are living together - no matter how fortuitously - and something like this happens to one of them, something epoch-making, it seems that the other couple is subject to a new kind of self-consciousness, a vague pressure to reinvestigate themselves. It seems also that there need be no logical connection between what has happened to one relationship and what the other couple feel necessary to do to theirs. This, at any rate, was how I rationalized my cumbrous misgivings and uncertainties as I sat next to Rachel in the damp cinema.

I'm fucked (I thought) if I'm going to tool into that bedroom tonight, bung on one of those feelthy heedeous condoms, and complete the hushed, devout routine. I was being at least fifty-per-cent sincere when, prior to The Pull, I said that enthusiasm and affection were enough, that French tricks were unimportant. But then again, then again ... No. Tonight, my lad, you are going to get laid. Selfishly. You're going to get gobbled for a kick-off. You gonna bugger her good. You gonna rip out her hair in fistfuls, fuck her like a javelin hurled across ice, zoom through the air, screaming. Then, whether she wants to or not, and especially if she does not want to, she is going to ... let me see...

Or was all this mere bear-trap credulity? The film, you understand, was
Belle de Jour. Belle de Jour
tells the story of a beautiful girl, married to a man so considerate and handsome and successful that she has no choice but to go off to a brothel in the afternoons, there to be fucked by twenty-stone Chinks, snaggle-toothed gangsters, and generally have a good time. Don't forget, also, that I had been reading a lot of American fiction, and that Norman had told me the other night about a girl who used to like gobbling him so much that they found it convenient to sleep one-up one-down, her feet on his pillow.

'Bunuel extends an imaginative sympathy that includes the messiness and arbitrariness of our ... unwanted desires,' I explained, as we made our way down the Bayswater Road. 'And why don't you go on the pill ?'

We walk on, our breaths smoky in the November night. This
is
a mute moot point, never before mentioned. Her hand squirms in mine.

'I don't like to feel —' Rachel hesitated, then went on - 'that my body's a sort of machine, that I'm a sort of machine...' Rachel hesitated, then went on - 'being programmed. Put those in me, and it'll have - ' Rachel hesitated, then went on - 'it'll have a designed effect.'

Ur?
What can she mean? She talks as if she's filling in a form. 'What about
me ?'
I want to yodel. How do you think
my
body feels, wearing that sliver of bathroom? (It's unpractically pricey, too. A week after The Pull I had to lone up to Soho and buy a gross-pack of 'Sharpshooters' - economy dunkers - three of which I daily transfer to one of those plush Penex three-slots. Knowing, you see, how hurt she'd be if she thought I was fucking her on the cheap. Are there any limits to my sensitivity ?)

Apparently not. Instead of saying, You'll get over it, or. Tough, or, Grow up; instead, I halt in front of a lamp-post at the foot of the square, stroke her cheeks with my hands, nuzzle her ear, and whisper: