Kiss Kiss (16 page)

you
, and Josephine is
me
—wait a
minute, come back over here again so you can get a better
look.”
      
We creep back around the cage to keep the baby in view.
      
“See how she’s fondling it and kissing it all over! There!
She’s
really
kissing it now, isn’t she! Exactly like me and you!”
      
I peer closer. It seems a queer way of kissing to me.
      
“Look!” I scream. “She’s eating it!”
      
And sure enough, the head of the baby rabbit is now
disappearing swiftly into the mother’s mouth.
      
“Mummy! Quick!”
      
But almost before the sound of my scream has died away,
the whole of that tiny pink body has vanished down the
mother’s throat.
      
I swing quickly around, and the next thing I know I’m
looking straight into my own mother’s face, not six inches
above me, and no doubt she is trying to say something or it
may be that she is too astonished to say anything, but all I
see is the mouth, the huge red mouth opening wider and wider
until it is just a great big round gaping hole with a black
centre, and I scream again, and this time I can’t stop. Then
suddenly out come her hands, and I can feel her skin touching
mine, the long cold fingers closing tightly over my fists, and
I jump back and jerk myself free and rush blindly out into
the night. I run down the drive and through the front gates,
screaming all the way, and then, above the noise of my own
voice I can hear the jingle of bracelets coming up behind me
in the dark, getting louder and louder as she keeps gaining on
me all the way down the long hill to the bottom of the lane
and over the bridge on to the main road where the cars are
streaming by at sixty miles an hour with headlights blazing.
      
Then somewhere behind me I hear a screech of tyres skidding
on the road surface, and then there is silence, and I notice
suddenly that the bracelets aren’t jingling behind me any
more.
      
Poor Mother.
      
If only she could have lived a little longer.
      
I admit that she gave me a nasty fright with those rabbits,
but it wasn’t her fault, and anyway queer things like that
were always happening between her and me. I had come to
regard them as a sort of toughening process that did me more
good than harm. But if only she could have lived long enough
to complete my education, I’m sure I should never have had
all that trouble I was telling you about a few minutes ago.
      
I want to get on with that now. I didn’t mean to begin
talking about my mother. She doesn’t have anything to do
with what I originally started out to say. I won’t mention her
again.
      
I was telling you about the spinsters in my parish. It’s an
ugly word, isn’t it—spinster? It conjures up the vision either
of a stringy old hen with a puckered mouth or of a huge
ribald monster shouting around the house in riding-breeches.
But these were not like that at all. They were a clean, healthy,
well-built group of females, the majority of them highly bred
and surprisingly wealthy, and I feel sure that the average
unmarried man would have been gratified to have them
around.
      
In the beginning, when I first came to the vicarage, I didn’t
have too bad a time. I enjoyed a measure of protection, of
course, by reason of my calling and my cloth. In addition,
I myself adopted a cool dignified attitude that was calculated
to discourage familiarity. For a few months, therefore, I was
able to move freely among my parishioners, and no one took
the liberty of linking her arm in mine at a charity bazaar, or
of touching my fingers with hers as she passed me the cruet
at suppertime. I was very happy. I was feeling better than I
had in years. Even that little nervous habit I had of flicking
my earlobe with my forefinger when I talked began to disappear.
      
This was what I call my first period, and it extended over
approximately six months. Then came trouble.
      
I suppose I should have known that a healthy male like
myself couldn’t hope to evade embroilment indefinitely simply
by keeping a fair distance between himself and the ladies. It
just doesn’t work. If anything it has the opposite effect.
      
I would see them eyeing me covertly across the room at a
whist drive, whispering to one another, nodding, running their
tongues over their lips, sucking at their cigarettes, plotting the
best approach, but always whispering, and sometimes I overheard
snatches of their talk—“What a shy person . . . he’s
just a trifle nervous, isn’t he . . . he’s much too tense . . . he
needs companionship . . . he wants loosening up . . . we must
teach him how to relax.” And then slowly, as the weeks went
by, they began to stalk me. I knew they were doing it. I could
feel it happening although at first they did nothing definite to
give themselves away.
      
That was my second period. It lasted for the best part of
a year and was very trying indeed. But it was paradise
compared with the third and final phase.
      
For now, instead of sniping at me sporadically from far
away, the attackers suddenly came charging out of the wood
with bayonets fixed. It was terrible, frightening. Nothing is
more calculated to unnerve a man than the swift unexpected
assault. Yet I am not a coward. I will stand my ground against
any single individual of my own size under any circumstances.
But this onslaught, I am now convinced, was conducted by
vast numbers operating as one skilfully co-ordinated unit.
      
The first offender was Miss Elphinstone, a large woman
with moles. I had dropped in on her during the afternoon to
solicit a contribution towards a new set of bellows for the
organ, and after some pleasant conversation in the library she
had graciously handed me a cheque for two guineas. I told
her not to bother to see me to the door and I went out into
the hall to get my hat. I was about to reach for it when all at
once—she must have come tip-toeing up behind me—all at
once I felt a bare arm sliding through mine, and one second
later her fingers were entwined in my own, and she was
squeezing my hand hard, in out, in out, as though it were the
bulb of a throat-spray.
      
“Are you really so Very Reverend as you’re always pretending
to be?” she whispered.
      
Well!
      
All I can tell you is that when that arm of hers came sliding
in under mine, it felt exactly as though a cobra was coiling
itself around my wrist. I leaped away, pulled open the front
door, and fled down the drive without looking back.
      
The very next day we held a jumble sale in the village hall
(again to raise money for the new bellows), and towards the
end of it I was standing in a corner quietly drinking a cup of
tea and keeping an eye on the villagers crowding round the
stalls when all of a sudden I heard a voice beside me saying,
“Dear me, what a hungry look you have in those eyes of
yours.” The next instant a long curvaceous body was leaning
up against mine and a hand with red fingernails was trying to
push a thick slice of coconut cake into my mouth.
      
“Miss Prattley,” I cried. “Please!”
      
But she’d got me up against the wall, and with a teacup in
one hand and a saucer in the other I was powerless to resist.
I felt the sweat breaking out all over me and if my mouth
hadn’t quickly become full of the cake she was pushing into
it, I honestly believe I would have started to scream.
      
A nasty incident, that one; but there was worse to come.
      
The next day it was Miss Unwin. Now Miss Unwin
happened to be a close friend of Miss Elphinstone’s
and
of
Miss Prattley’s, and this of course should have been enough
to make me very cautious. Yet who would have thought that
she of all people, Miss Unwin, that quiet gentle little mouse
who only a few weeks before had presented me with a new
hassock exquisitely worked in needlepoint with her own hands,
who would have thought that
she
would ever have taken a
liberty with anyone? So when she asked me to accompany
her down to the crypt to show her the Saxon murals, it never
entered my head that there was devilry afoot. But there
was.
      
I don’t propose to describe that encounter; it was too painful.
And the ones which followed were no less savage. Nearly
every day from then on, some new outrageous incident would
take place. I became a nervous wreck. At times I hardly knew
what I was doing. I started reading the burial service at young
Glady’s Pitcher’s wedding. I dropped Mrs Harris’s new baby
into the font during the christening and gave it a nasty
ducking. An uncomfortable rash that I hadn’t had in over two
years reappeared on the side of my neck, and that annoying
business with my earlobe came back worse than ever before.
Even my hair began coming out in my comb. The faster I
retreated, the faster they came after me. Women are like that.
Nothing stimulates them quite so much as a display of modesty
or shyness in a man. And they become doubly persistent if
underneath it all they happen to detect—and here I have a
most difficult confession to make—if they happen to detect,
as they did in me, a little secret gleam of longing shining in the
backs of the eyes.
      
You see, actually I was mad about women.
      
Yes, I know. You will find this hard to believe after all that
I have said, but it was perfectly true. You must understand
that it was only when they touched me with their fingers or
pushed up against me with their bodies that I became alarmed.
Providing they remained at a safe distance, I could watch
them for hours on end with the same peculiar fascination that
you yourself might experience in watching a creature you
couldn’t bear to touch—an octopus, for example, or a long
poisonous snake. I loved the smooth white look of a bare arm
emerging from a sleeve, curiously naked like a peeled banana.
I could get enormously excited just from watching a girl walk
across the room in a tight dress; and I particularly enjoyed the
back view of a pair of legs when the feet were in rather high
heels—the wonderful braced-up look behind the knees, with
the legs themselves very taut as though they were made of
strong elastic stretched out almost to breaking-point, but not
quite. Sometimes, in Lady Birdwell’s drawing-room, sitting
near the window on a summer’s afternoon, I would glance
over the rim of my teacup towards the swimming pool and
become agitated beyond measure by the sight of a little patch
of sunburned stomach bulging between the top and bottom
of a two-piece bathing-suit.
      
There is nothing wrong in having thoughts like these. All
men harbour them from time to time. But they did give me
a terrible sense of guilt. Is it me, I kept asking myself, who is
unwittingly responsible for the shameless way in which these
ladies are now behaving? Is it the gleam in my eye (which I
cannot control) that is constantly rousing their passions and
egging them on? Am I unconsciously giving them what is
sometimes known as the come-hither signal every time I glance
their way? Am I?
      
Or is this brutal conduct of theirs inherent in the very
nature of the female?
      
I had a pretty fair idea of the answer to this question, but
that was not good enough for me. I happen to possess a conscience
that can never be consoled by guesswork; it has to
have proof. I simply had to find out who was really the guilty
party in this case—me or them, and with this object in view,
I now decided to perform a simple experiment of my own
invention, using Snelling’s rats.
      
A year or so previously I had had some trouble with an
objectionable choirboy named Billy Snelling. On three consecutive
Sundays this youth had brought a pair of white rats
into church and had let them loose on the floor during my
sermon. In the end I had confiscated the animals and carried
them home and placed them in a box in the shed at the bottom
of the vicarage garden. Purely for humane reasons I had then
proceeded to feed them, and as a result, but without any
further encouragement from me, the creatures began to
multiply very rapidly. The two became five, and the five
became twelve.
      
It was at this point that I decided to use them for research
purposes. There were exactly equal numbers of males and
females, six of each, so that conditions were ideal.
      
I first isolated the sexes, putting them into two separate
cages, and I left them like that for three whole weeks. Now
a rat is a very lascivious animal, and any zoologist will tell
you that for them this is an inordinately long period of separation.
At a guess I would say that one week of enforced
celibacy for a rat is equal to approximately one year of the
same treatment for someone like Miss Elphinstone or Miss
Prattley; so you can see that I was doing a pretty fair job in
reproducing actual conditions.
      
When the three weeks were up, I took a large box that was
divided across the centre by a little fence, and I placed the
females on one side and the males on the other. The fence
consisted of nothing more than three single strands of naked
wire, one inch apart, but there was a powerful electric current
running through the wires.
      
To add a touch of reality to the proceedings, I gave each
female a name. The largest one, who also had the longest
whiskers, was Miss Elphinstone. The one with a short thick
tail was Miss Prattley. The smallest of them all was Miss
Unwin, and so on. The males, all six of them, were
ME
.
      
I now pulled up a chair and sat back to watch the result.
      
All rats are suspicious by nature, and when I first put the
two sexes together in the box with only the wire between
them, neither side made a move. The males stared hard at the
females through the fence. The females stared back, waiting
for the males to come forward. I could see that both sides were
tense with yearning. Whiskers quivered and noses twitched
and occasionally a long tail would flick sharply against the
wall of the box.