He was too intent to laugh.
‘It’s a lovely warm towel!’ He exclaimed, grabbing a corner of it. ‘Don’t be greedy! It’s big enough to cover two of us! How about saving me from the foggy, foggy dew? I’m shivering.’
The odd thing was, that when they were pressed together under the towel, Jimmy did begin to shiver. Excitement made him shiver as he felt her wet limbs wet upon his. He ran his hand down the great hyperbola of Rose’s back, sliding it over her buttocks and gripping them, then working it round her thigh.
‘Oh, Jimmy, you know I’m hungry!’ she wailed.
‘For God’s sake, give me time,’ he said.
She did. He fed upon the riches of the wide world on that cramped wooden floor. Sometimes he wondered, with only the mildest concern, whether she would not suffocate him, sometimes whether she would not crack his ribs; sometimes whether he had not bitten off more than he could chew, but always he rose triumphantly to face a fresh attack, always they were matched. She had spoken at the party against making a mockery of sex; of that she was not guilty; the core of earnestness Jimmy sensed in her was there even in her gladdest abandonment; she swam with him up the mountainside of love like a salmon leaping up a waterfall. In the end, he was flooded with a delighted and transcendent surprise, cast on a shore beyond Ultima Thule. Exhausted, thrilled, jubilant, panting like a dog.
‘Oh, darling …’ Rose sighed at last, ‘what a rough brute you are!’
‘Me! You’re the brute! – you’re the beauty and the beast. Rangey, you’re all things. Rangey, how old are you?’
‘Don’t ask petty questions,’ she said, giving him a final hug, tugging his hair gently, kissing his neck.
‘But I know so little about you!’
‘That’s just as well for you,’ she said, getting onto her knees. He tried to pull her on top of him again but she wisely would not come, so he got up and fetched the Chianti bottle. She was dressing as fast as she could and would take no wine.
‘We must be filthy from this beastly floor!’ she said. ‘It’s all gritty and beastly. Don’t they ever sweep the damned place?’
‘Wonderful, heavenly floor!’ Jimmy said. ‘We’ll come and visit it and lay an offering to Venus on it every anniversary of this date, won’t we?’
When she did not reply, he knew he was being hearty. More, he knew they would never come here again. He was about to say something else when she seized his arm. Footsteps sounded outside on the concrete path. A pause while the grass muffled them. Then the handle of the changing hut door was turned. Jimmy clapped his hand up to his forehead to cover his ER in case it should be visible through the frosted glass, but it had ceased to glow. They listened while the footsteps receded.
‘We could always have said we were waiting for a bus,’ Jimmy said.
‘Jill’s old man keeps late hours,’ Rose said tugging on her skirt. ‘It’s past midnight.’
‘And a good time was had by all. Oh, Rangy, I love you so! This has been such a wonderful evening for me. I can’t really believe your name is English Rose.’
‘Does it sound so very unlikely?’ she asked, with a strange seriousness in her voice.
‘Very,’ he said. It astonished him that he should be feeling suddenly irritable with her, and hid it as best he could; we resent those who please us, for they can guess our weakness. ‘I’m going to get you a meal now, woman.’
‘Really?’ She relaxed at once. She was nearly dressed. He regretted it was too dark to see anything of her underclothes; such things were a mystery to him. Pulling himself together, he blundered round the partition to put his own clothes on.
‘Where, Jimmy?’
‘Where what, pet?’
‘Where are we going to eat?’
‘Your uncle Jimmy knows a dirty little Chinese restaurant off Shaftesbury Avenue which stays open till two in the morning.’
She came and stood on his side of the partition then, to show him she was proud of him. When they were finally ready, they crept out of the hut, leaving the key on the outside of the lock, and walked quietly round the pool. Its surface was as still and black as oil. Keeping on the grass as far as possible, to avoid the scrunch of gravel, they skirted the house, where no lights burned.
A voice softly called ‘Goodnight!’ from above them. They looked up to see Jill Hurn leaning out of her bedroom window, shadowy under the eaves. She must have been there a long while, watching for them. Jimmy raised a hand in silent salute to all good things and led Rose back to the car.
They ate their chow mein, sweet and sour pork and crispy noodles in a quiet mood; when, after the meal, Rose insisted on catching a taxi and going off alone, Jimmy protested without vehemence and yielded without delay.
They were tired and had nothing more to offer each other.
It was a quarter to two when he let himself into 17 Charlton Square, and after three before he fell asleep. When he awoke next morning, it was to find his sheets full of earth, dead grass and dirt picked up from his session on the changing hut floor.
3
At the IBA
The Home of the International Book Association, where Jimmy worked, was a tall, undistinguished building just off Bedford Square. Unlike its rival and elder sister, the National Book League, the IBA claimed no Regency graces. There was American capital behind it: it was modern and proud of it.
As you went through plate glass doors into a foyer ambushed with cactus, a sign in sanserif announced, ‘Only books stand between us and the cave. Clyde H. Nitkin.’ The IBA ran mainly on dollar lubrication supplied by the Clyde H. Nitkin Foundation, and the words of the great man, at once original and obvious, were in evidence throughout the building. In the cafeteria downstairs, among the Mojave Desert décor, was ‘To read is to strike a blow for culture. Clyde H. Nitkin.’ In the Main Exhibition room on the ground floor was ‘Speech is silver: silence is golden: print is dynamite. Clyde H. Nitkin.’ Up in the library, appropriately enough, was ‘Only by libraries can man survive. Clyde H. Nitkin.’ And, most touching heart cry of all, reserved for the board room up by the roof, was ‘Dear God, I would rather be an author than Clyde H. Nitkin.’
This morning, Jimmy came in rather late. He stood for a moment in the rear of the foyer, exuding general goodwill. It was only six months since he had come to live in London and take this, his first job. Pleasure still filled him at the thought of it; he surveyed everything with a contentment at once filial and avuncular. Posters and book jackets jostled convivially here under busts of Shakespeare, Sophocles and Edna St Vincent Millay. Mr J. B. Priestley would speak on the 18th next on ‘What the Canadian Theatre Means.’ Angus Wilson’s new play Regular Churchgoers in its fifth week at the Criterion. Thyroid Annerson’s new play at the Stumer. The new Francis Bacon exhibition – the one with the laughing dogs – at the Hanover Galleries. Kingsley Amis to speak, mysteriously, about ‘The New Distaste’ on the 25th. The posters at least were quietly, staunchly English.
The book jackets struck a more exotic note. Peter Green’s name appeared on the serpent-haunted jacket of his large new novel Patinotoxa’s Donkey. Monkeys chased themselves round the latest Mittelholzer title from Secker’s. A formal jungle surrounded the word ‘Popocatepetl’ on Edmund Wilson’s new collection of travel essays. Orange prisms crashed across Berg and the Instability of Our Times. It was all, Jimmy told himself, at once homely and exciting. ‘The hoi polloi are rather coy at facing the printed word, but mad dogs and publishers care nought for the midday herd,’ he intoned to himself.
He nodded amiably to Mrs Charteris, the receptionist (somehow he could never think of anything to say to that woman) and went