The Rachel Papers Read online

  And quite right too. Thinking back, actually, 'self-infatuation' strikes me as a rather ill-chosen word. It isn't so much that I like or love myself. Rather, I'm sentimental about myself. (I say, is this normal for someone my age?) What do I think of Charles Highway? I think: 'Charles Highway? Oh, I like him. Yes, I've got a soft spot for old Charles. He's all right is Charlie. Chuck's ... okay.'

  The bus was good, too. I sat up the front, to admire the chubby, unsmiling driver, whose combination of snake-eyed intentness and natural flair made quite good viewing. Elation was gathering on me like a drug - I smiled at my fellow-passengers, gazed interestedly out of the window, and was polite and deferential to the transport operative, producing the correct money and enunciating my destination clearly.

  Nor was it as if this was an obviously epoch-making journey. Perhaps it was simply that I had rung this girl Gloria before I left.

  At any rate, Oxford station, recently modernized so as to resemble a complex of Wimpy Bars, was sobering enough. The newsagents was closed so I looked out a paperback from my suitcase. Seated appropriately far from the window, A Room with a View lay unopened beside me all the way there.

  London is where people go in order to come back from it sadder and wiser. But I had already been there - returned from it only three weeks before, in fact.

  When my A-Level results came through my father beefily gave me seventy-five pounds with which to 'get the hell out of England and have a good time'. It was suggested that I go to a warm healthy country, and stay there some while; otherwise I was given a free hand. A boy I knew was going to Spain the next week so I gave him a newsy letter addressed to my parents for him to post when he got there. Then, with Geoffrey (a like-minded friend), I headed for Fat City.

  We holed up for a month in the Belsize Park flat of a Miss Lizzie Lewis, Geoffrey's actress sister, who was away doing a summer season of panto at a holiday camp in Port Talbot. It was a month I always think of with a certain pimply lyricism. It was a month of plonk and coffee-bars, pinball arcades and party-hunts, of looking for girls and wet daydreams, white smell of sweat and dusty afternoons, of getting burnt by ghoulish hippies, of such mind-expanding drug experiences as pork-chop vomiting and consommé diarrhoea. It ended one mid-August morning when I happened to glance down at the undulating area between my stomach and the stomach of a girl I just so happened to be poking at the time (in a sweaty, hungover state, I might add). What I saw there were worms of dirt — as when a working man, his day done, strides home rubbing his toil-hardened hands together, causing the excess grit to wriggle up into tiny black strings, which he soon brushes impatiently from his palms. Only these were on our stomachs and therefore much bigger: like baby eels.

  I was back in Oxford for lunch that same day, with feverish stories about its having been Spain's worst summer since the war - hence the pallor. My parents informed me, however, that I had 'been seen' on the Portobello Road in the last week of July. I denied this and silenced them by pretending to be far iller than I was, not that they need much silencing. (There was also the question of a little going-away present from the young lady - my partner in grime - which is another story.)

  The train got into Paddington about eight thirty. The station, empty for what was a Bank Holiday weekend, seemed vast, echoic, etc., and I hoped that it wasn't going to come on all uncanny and Hemingway-esque on me. Curious (no?) how clearly I remember this: far more clearly than the events of the last couple of weeks.

  I decided in the end to take a cab, arguing that it was an indirect economy because I then couldn't afford to take Gloria out and the evening would cost no more than a level teaspoon-ful of my sister's instant coffee. Furthermore, it was far, far too late to go on the tube without getting denounced by drunkards or, alternatively, castrated by skinheads. As the taxi swept up the ramp into the city, I unwound in the back, quietly rehearsing lower-middle-class accents for the benefit of my brother-in-law. Behind the darkened windows I peered at the many purple-T-shirted and Afghan-fur-waistcoated girls who lined the throughways of Paddington and Netting Hill Gate.

  I had met Norman Entwistle, my sister's terrifying husband, on only two occasions. I saw him now, for the third time, as I walked up the sloping approach to his Campden Hill Square home. If it hadn't been for all the noise he was making I might have missed him altogether.

  Norman was up in the tree that stood alone in the middle of the slender front garden. He looked rather as though he were trying to saw himself in half - an activity that on his previous showings I wouldn't have put past him. Both his legs and one of his arms were wrapped round a branch. Using his free hand in a piston-like action, he was attempting to sever it at its base. The branch, which was obviously dead, hung about six feet from the ground.

  I halted. 'When you cut through the branch,' I pointed out to him, 'you'll fall down.' Norman ignored me. I could just make out some of his face; it was stretched in murderous concentration.

  'To the ground,' I explained.

  I went on watching him for a few seconds, then walked up to the front door and rang the bell. The door was about to open when I heard a wrenching noise - as of the splitting of wood - followed by a loud crash. I turned round. Norman was already on his feet, brushing himself down like someone covered in lice.

  'Christmas,' said Jennifer Entwistle, my sister.

  We kissed, blushing, as we always did when we kissed, and on the way into the kitchen Jenny gave me a formulaic ballock-ing for not alerting her of my premature arrival.

  'What's Norman up to?' I then asked.

  'Oh, just sawing down a dead branch.'

  I assumed I was interrupting the denouement of some kind of row. Probably Jenny had wondered out loud when Norman was going to get round to cutting down the dead branch and Norman had raced out and cut it down straightway, thus putting her in the wrong. There you go.

  I sat not being a nuisance at the kitchen table, put on my glasses and watched her make tea. She looked all right. In the role of elder sister she had seemed to me merely graceless and sulky. None of my friends (for instance) had ever asked to be told what her tits were like. Even on her vacation visits from Bristol, when I was especially sensitive to this sort of thing, I never masturbated about her once. However, I did masturbate about her - electrically - all through last Christmas holidays. That voluptuous languor, those invigorating, slow, easy movements: what a transformation, real physical deliverance. To quote my elder brother Mark, who sports-carred up on Christmas Eve and down again on Boxing Day, she looked 'spunk-drunk'. And it was evidently Norman's she was carousing on, because she never went back to Bristol to complete her B. Litt., and by April they were married.

  Now, she seemed somewhat hungover, but wholesome enough. In particular, her hair was long, shiny, and quite thick for a Highway; and, remarkably, even though she was mousy-blonde, big-boned, full-breasted, wide-hipped and generally slightly sallow, there was no reason to believe that with her clothes off she would smell of boiled eggs and dead babies.

  Norman himself came in now. He nodded in my direction and sat down opposite me at the table, briskly flattening a dogeared Sunday Mirror on to its artificial surface. He read with concentration, his nose perhaps six inches above the page, mouthwashing with tea from a pint-sized mug which Jenny had time and again to refill. She stood by her husband, one hand resting awkwardly on his shoulder, as she and I chatted about home, and my plans.

  Norman spoke only once on that occasion. I mentioned that Gloria would probably be stopping by later on.

  Jenny had asked, 'Will she be wanting dinner?"

  'Oh no,' I said, 'she won't be here till about nine, nine thirty.'

  Norman looked up from his paper and said, with scorn but without disapproval:

  'Fuck and coffee, is it ? Just fuck and coffee.'

  After tea I went to unpack. My bedroom was in the front basement, commanding a view of the dustbins and redundant coalshed. Jen had clearly done some work on it: matching curtain and bedcover, Expo '59 c
offee-table, serviceable desk and chair. I lowered myself on to the bed before starting to unpack. The room wouldn't, after all, need much preparation for Gloria - record-sleeves scattered negligently about the room, certain low-brow paperbacks displayed advantageously on table and desk, and the colour supplements, open at suitable pages, on the floor. Gloria probably had no very fixed conception of me so there wasn't much point in going into detail.

  I wondered if there were any important lies I had told her which it would be worth reacquainting myself with, but could think of none. But ... ah yes, I was twenty-three and an adopted orphan, that was all. (She was an undemanding girl.) Instead, I got out a note-pad and drafted a short list of topics with which to amuse her for the duration of the walk back from the station and the pre-pass half-hour. I could enlarge on my guardians busting me about last summer, which she would enjoy, and thereby explain why I hadn't contacted her for a month. Also, there was the continuing story of Gloria's driving lessons (given by her father, a twenty-stone carpet-layer), of which she would certainly welcome the chance to keep me abreast. Otherwise, there was always pop-music. — Which reminded me; there was another lie: I was friendly with Mick Jagger. But before I did anything else I went upstairs to make a telephone call. Not to Gloria; to Rachel.

  In fact I lost my nerve after six digits, hung up, took deep breaths, redialled; her Continental mother answered, I hung up again.

  On my way to the bathroom I glimpsed Jenny and Norman standing by the cooker. They were enjoying a kiss - well, more of a snog really. It didn't look half as extraordinary as one might have thought.

  But you should have seen my parents, when they got the news.

  The Highway breakfast-table, once again, the Saturday before Easter :

  'My God,' cries mother, 'Jenny's going to be married.'

  Gordon Highway: 'Jenny ?'

  'Jennifer. To a businessman. Thirtyish. "Norman Entwistle".'

  'What kind of businessman?'

  'Household "appliances".' She reads on. 'Second-hand appliances.'

  'My God.'

  'In a fortnight. She's giving up Bristol.'

  My father leans over. To whom is that letter addressed?'

  'Both of us. I opened it because —'

  'I see. Well, she's twenty-four' (actually she's twenty-three), 'legally an adult. I see no point in forcing the issue.' He sighs. 'There'll be some sort of reception to arrange... ?'

  'Jenny says she realizes it's short notice. She says she rather thinks a small dinner-party. At his house.'

  My father looks up meanly from his newspaper. 'Well. That's something.'

  The following weekend the young couple motored down for tea. I diluted it. My Valium-ed mother fluttered between them on the sofa. My father paced the hearth. When Norman gave voice to such idioms as 'settee', 'pardon?', and at one point 'toilet', my father could be seen to wince as a man who is in pain will wince. He was a bit thrown by the opulence of Norman's car and accoutrements - but he wasn't a man to be gulled by the mere tokens of privilege. (Furthermore, my father was so very much shorter than Norman that Norman had had to go down practically on his haunches to be introduced.)

  While my mother and sister convened their teach-in on babies, honeymoons and pre-menstrual tension, I gave Norman a game of backgammon - later abandoned for pontoon. We seemed to get on quite well.

  'It could conceivably be worse, I suppose,' my father supposed when they'd gone.

  Gloria and I had just reached an impasse on the subject of is there, or is there not - excluding, for the purposes of argument, the Tamla-Motown genre - a legitimate place for brass accompaniment in the current pop scene, when I counted down from ten in my head and glided forward in her direction, eyes half closed, lips pursed, arms spread wide.

  Sitting comfortably? In fact, that was a direct quote from Conquests and Techniques: a Synthesis, a folder of mine. Most of the stuff here is in note form, with the odd diagram; but when I get a good idea, or a detail worth elaborating on, then I turn it into a full-dress sentence (and circle it with red ink). The section entitled, simply, 'Gloria', I now see, is done in a rather pompous mock-heroic style, like Fielding's descriptions of pub brawls - the sort of writing I usually have little time for. But there is a sense in which this style is suited to the subject, so I'll let it pass. That evening had something inimitably teenage about it and, after all, I shall never see its like again.

  Firstly, I assume I'm right in saying that teenage sex is quite different from post-teenage sex? It's not something you do, just something you get done. The over-twenties, I grant you, must see it largely as a matter of obligation, too: but obligation to the partner, not to oneself, like us. Take a look at the scaly witches round your local shopping centre, many of them with children. Grim enough with their clothes on. Imagine them naked! Snatches that yo-yo between their knees, breasts so flaccid you could tie them in a knot. One would have to be literally galvanized on Spanish Fly even to consider it. Yet it gets done somehow. Look at the kids. - The teenager may be more spontaneous, doglike, etc., but it's generally only another name on the list, only another notch on the cock ... Perhaps there's some kind of plateau during one's twenties and very early thirties. I might well give statistical weight to these filthy speculations by going down to the village tomorrow morning, twenty years of age, and finding out. (I could easily pull the village idiotess, who in any case, one windless summer night, had wanked Geoffrey and me off through the school railings, simultaneously; we stood there clutching the bars, like prisoners.)

  Anyway: Gloria. I imagine that the older man thinks it's going to be hell and is often agreeably surprised to find that it's not quite, not quite, as bad as he had such excellent reasons to fear. With the youngster the very reverse is true. Gloria and I undressed like lifeguards, and without actually separating. I always forgot the full drama of the change that came over her the minute she was underway. In normal circumstances, with her embarrassment in any kind of pre-coital conversation, her unassumingly pretty face, the stiff-limbed movements: you were a plaything of her unease. Once underway, though, Gloria would have been able to detect few noteworthy points of contrast between sexual arousal and rabies.

  It wasn't that bad, as I remember, not significantly worse than usual. Fifteen, maybe twenty minutes trying not to come, with a beady dread of what was going to happen when I did; a decent (i.e. perceptible) orgasm; a further two or three minutes in garrotted detumescence. Cock attains regulation minimum and is supplanted by well-manicured thumb; Gloria has another ... five? orgasms; and so it ends. I roll over. My thumb looks as though it has been for a four-hour swim: grey, puffy, dappled where I've eaten bits of it in the past. My alarm clock claims it's only ten fifteen. I wish I were back in Oxford.

  A remarkable phenomenon, students of the human condition gather round. While thinking about this, while leafing through my notes, I have a shirty erection. I am jealous of myself. If Gloria came through the door now - I'd do it again. She is a fine-looking girl, certainly: excellent middle-weight figure, costly red hair, huge mouth, a judicious number of freckles, and, paradoxically, she does look very becoming with her clothes off. But such attractions shouldn't becloud (let alone obliterate) an elementary correlation of pleasure and pain. Can it just be experience we're after?

  Restored by a cigarette, Gloria beguiled the following hour in an attempt to actualize my full nineteen-year-old potential. Conquests and Techniques: a Synthesis: 'Now she wheedled and tugged at my snaily genitalia, now scoured my ears with her tongue, now patrolled my ankles and shoulder-blades for uncharted erogenous zones. After our second coupling I go as far as faking a third orgasm. My gurgles of pain are taken for cries of virile delight.' That sort of thing.

  'Wow,' I then said. 'That really was something. Well - have you got enough pillow there ? - night night, sleep well. Until the morning.'

  Gloria looked at me oddly.

  Front to the wall I feigned sleep ... the odd incoherent murmur ... two or three tentative snor
es ... a certain amount of involuntary twitching. But the sheets whispered beside me. I felt a hand traverse the lower areas of my back. In seconds -radar-tracked by my whisker-sensitive pubic hairs - it was treading air above my groin. And my groin, in its youthful way, said: 'I'm game.'

  During the long pre-copulative session I glanced downwards - and what should I see but Gloria, practising the perversion known as fellatio. Unaccountably, she was doing this with great rigour and enthusiasm, circling her head so that her long plush hair skimmed and glided over my hips, thighs and stomach. Visually, it was most appealing, but all I could feel was a remote, irrelevant numbness - plus, in my legs, cramp and pins-and-needles respectively. Have I come already, perhaps ? I asked myself.

  Gloria didn't think so. She swooped up, said 'I only do that for boys I like,' planted a fizzy kiss in my mouth, and hoisted me on top of her.

  I recall turning at one point from the section of wallpaper I was perusing to check on Gloria's face (just for the files): and impressively atavistic it was too. Accordingly, her orgasm came with clenched teeth, bull-whip shuddering, yelps of dismay; mine came (or did it?) with back pains, bronchitic gasping, with everything all caving in. When I withdraw, it occurred to me, I shall surely get blood over Jenny's nice room.

  Gloria lay back, her race run. After a while she folded up and went to sleep. And I watched the ceiling, breathless with envy.