The Rachel Papers (22 page)

Which isn't to say that cunts are homogeneous. Now Rachel's was the most pleasing I had ever come across. Not, for her, the wet Brillo-pad, nor the paper-bagful of kedgeree, nor the greasy waistcoat pocket, the gashed vole's stomach, the clump of veins, glands, tubes. No. It was infinitely moist but not wet, exquisitely shaped and yet quite amorphous, all black ink and velvet recessed into pubic hair that resembled my own as a Persian carpet resembles a mat rug. And it was warmer than me; it was, actually, hot.

Meanwhile my fingers paddled there, enclosing it with the flat of my hand, entering with one, two fingers, one, two inches, flicking the clitoris. Rachel was quaking and warbling away: however, it seemed right out of context when I pressed my mouth against her ear and (well I never) my sharp erection against her thigh, and said, with a nicely gauged crack in my voice:

'How do you undo this dress?'

Her movements ceased at once. Her eyes opened. 'I'm not on the pill.'

'No, really?' I said.

But then, you see, we did the sort of lyrically zany thing that the under-twenties do fairly often. On Rachel's suggestion, after some tweedy humming and ha-ing from me, we decided that we'd jolly well go up - fuck them all - and buy some contraceptives at the late-night chemist in Marble Arch. Nonplussed at first, I soon fell in with the requisite mood. We drank wine, put on coats, and made our whacky way down the square.

Even if we tenderly pooled our money we couldn't afford a taxi - Rachel had to have enough to get back - and besides I thought it more in keeping to take a bus. There was still enough summer about for it not to be really dark, and also you never got beaten up when you were with girls.

It seems improbable now, but on the way there we talked about DeForest's infrequent and ham-cocked performances in bed. (We laughed, too, wholly without malice: an example of prelapsarian high spirits which as of tonight will be another experience unavailable to me.) DeForest's chief, though by no means his only, problem was that he tended to come before either he or Rachel could say - 'Jack Robinson'. He would slap on the contraceptive and surge into her with the look of someone who had just remembered that he ought to be doing a terribly important thing elsewhere, like attending his mother's funeral. (I merely annotate Rachel's imitation.) Then he would screw up his freckly face and sink down on top of her, while his prick slithered out as fast as it had slithered in, not to reappear until he had completed a fortnight of stalling, apologizing, rationalizing. I soft-pedalled my amusement through most of this, partly out of real admiration for Rachel's tolerance and lack of embarrassment. But I nearly burst out crying with laughter when she recounted one of DeForest's wheezes to prolong their delight. He took a
history textbook
to bed, which, so the idea was, he would pore over as Rachel shinnied away beneath him; when they were level-pegging, Rachel was to attract her lover's attention in some way, DeForest would hurl
Tudor England
aside, and be granted four or five seconds of impetuous transport before melting into her dream. It didn't work, I need hardly add, though DeForest clocked up a minute on one occasion.

Whether by design or not, this had the effect of making me feel rather cocky. I had come on impact once or twice myself, but only when I couldn't be bothered not to. I would have readjusted my anxiety chart, only I was unable for the moment to think of anything to fill the DeForest's-prick-size slot.

'Have you ever had an orgasm?' I asked, as we got off the bus.

'Never,' said Rachel.

'Just you wait.'

But I soon came up with something. Of course: I had never used a sheath before. With those girls who weren't self-contracepting I had practised coitus interruptus, practising it all over their stomachs or in between the sheet and their bums, depending on locale and whether or not I liked them. (There was no definite rule here, yet you were always prompted to go one way or the other.) I was conversant with Durex lore, however, having naturally peed and wanked into them a good deal as a youngster, and Geoffrey once took me along to score a pack. Further, I had read widely in prophylactic literature. The great things were to squeeze the air out of the tip, lest they burst, and not to put them on inside-out, because then they catapulted off and you opened yourself up to ridicule scrabbling about after them in the dark.

The chemist's was like a chunk of America, a neon labyrinth of bristle and cellophane, ranks and display pyramids of things to minimize your smells, things to soften your hair, bully your spots, reclaim your feet, flush out your ears. We stood in the doorway, shy latecomers to a formal party. The activity and splendour made me feel drunk and empty-stomached. Store detectives, housewives and dotards cruised the aisles. At the far end a quartet of junkies awaited the return of their forged prescriptions.

'Whereabouts?' I said from the corner of my mouth. Rachel put her hands in her pockets, looping my arm. We moved forward. Only nail-polish remover and badminton rackets seemed to be on sale. Feeling our merriment ebb, I pointed out a not all that unlikely-looking counter. A liberal middle-aged man was in charge of it. What would it really sell? Scabies ointment. Baby powder. Cock-enlarger cream. Dildoes.

'Do you want to come or do you want to wait?'

'I'll come,' she said.

A kooky smile seemed in order.

As a matter of routine, the moment I committed myself to approaching the counter the enlightened-looking man disappeared beneath it, in favour of a woman with silver hair and a glacial uniform. Oh, come
come, I
wanted to say, you must of course see that this is
too
much like low-brow American fiction.

'Can I help you, young man?' She smiled on cue to reveal oppressively false teeth, dull dying white, the colour of newspapers three weeks old.

'I hope so. May I have a packet of contraceptives, please?'

She glanced at Rachel. 'Certainly, sir. Lura, or Penex?'

'The Penex, please, if I may.'

Twenty-five or thirty pence?'

'Oh, I think the thirty, please, if possible.'

As she turned away I felt Rachel's hand slide through my jacket vents. A fingernail poked my vertebra, making me jerk. Rachel stifled a snort of laughter. The assistant looked up. I met her eye. And my voice was husky when I spoke :

'Better make that a two-pack, lady.'

'I beg your pardon ?'

'I'm so sorry. May I have two packets, please?'

'Certainly, sir.'

On the way back I entertained Rachel and kept things going with an account of my own sexual history. Now I had had ten girls. I considered doubling, even squaring, this figure. I ended up halving it. AH five, I stressed, had been important and serious relationships. I was sorry, but I had no time for the other kind. Excuse me, but I wasn't interested in purely sexual encounters, thank you, although it was true - one hated to say it - that most of the boys I knew were interested ... in precious little else - no, perhaps that wasn't fair. Of course I had tried it, more out of curiosity than anything, I supposed. It was odd, but - I don't know - it seemed that a girl's body was ... empty unless you liked its owner. Sure, the incredibly beautiful girls in these experimental liaisons had got in a bit of a state - what with being so incredibly sexed up at the time. Understandable. (One or two, I didn't mind telling her, had got pretty violent, pretty ugly, about the whole thing.) But I had had just to explain myself, as tactfully as possible. No - hell - they could keep their money; a boy can't fake it.

What was good sex? Well, good sex had nothing to do with expertise, how many French tricks one knew (how convincingly you munched on each other's stools, etc.). No: if there was affection and enthusiasm, that was enough.

With a heart-beat like a drum-roll I led Rachel down the stairs, past the bathroom, to the bedroom.

It smelled to me of every sock I had taken off, all the ear-wax I had pasted under its furniture, each bogey I had swiped across its walls, and the bouquets of cheap talc puffed into the air to disguise these. A Low-legacy, perhaps. Or my own stressed senses.

Rachel generously took off her coat while I subdued the lighting by means of a cotton scarf over the desk-lamp. We sat on the floor next to the fire and sipped the wine I had brought down. The pink glow flattered us. It made Rachel look extra Oriental, softening her features, ironing out the nose, giving her eyes a distant luminousness - you wouldn't call it a twinkle exactly. In strong contrast, my face became even more angular and shadowy, more hollow and ... sinister, my jaw-line more haunting somehow, my mouth - if anything -still more sensual. Let's get it over with, I thought.

'Charles,' said Rachel, 'when I talked about DeForest on the bus, I hope you didn't think I was being callous. I'm really very fond of him. I wasn't just poking fun. It's just that —'

'Ridicule is the only exorcist there is,' I said in a hypnotic voice, 'and laughter the only true deliverance. Don't trick yourself into guilt. - Let's get undressed.'

Balls-aching drivel, unquestionably - and poor tactics, too. One of the troubles with being over-articulate, with having a vocabulary more refined than your emotions, is that every turn in the conversation, every switch of posture, opens up an estate of verbal avenues with a myriad side-turnings and cul-de-sacs - and there are no signposts but your own sincerity and good taste, and I've never had much of either. All I know is that I can go down any one of them and be welcomed as a returning lord.

Here I had gone and played the sage Frenchie, the crack-barrel
artiste de la chambre; so
'let's get undressed' had seemed obvious, indeed unavoidable. I had pledged myself to stranded, lean nudity. People really ought to stick together at such a time.

Keeping my body well out of the way, I looked on as Rachel methodically revealed hers. She tugged the elasticized bust of the smock over her head, lowered her tights with an electric crackle, bent and turned to unclip her bra. I was still concealed behind the chair when Rachel went over to the bed, pantied, and slipped between the sheets. Leave them on, for Christ's sake; I needed all the vulgar stimulants I could get. For my knob was knee-high to a grasshopper, the size of a toothpick, as I skipped across the room and fell to a crouch by the side of the bed.

Only her little brown head was visible. I kissed that for a while, knowing from a variety of sources that this will do more for you than any occult caress. The result was satisfactory. My hands, however, were still behaving like prototype hands, marketed before certain snags had been dealt with. So when I introduced one beneath the blankets, I gave it time to warm and settle before sending it down her stomach. Panties ? Panties. I threw back the top sheet, my head a whirlpool of notes, directives, memos, hints, pointers, random scrib-blings.

Foreplay included ear-jobs, bronchitic sweet-nuthins, armpit-play (surprisingly good value in this respect), and a high-jinks of arse and thigh work. The big moment came for Rachel when Charles, the runaway robot, sat up, leaned forward, placed a hand flat on either hip-bone, and literally
peeled
off her panties. As soon as she began to show vulnerable self-consciousness (symptomized as usual by raising right knee) I considerately turned my gaze on her face and bunged my fist in the triangle described by thighs and panty-band. Over her knees my reach ran out. Then, in a very superior move, I got hold of an ankle and pulled it towards me, doubling up the legs. In one movement the panties draped her toes. I swung them into the middle of the room.

'Hadn't I better put the thing on now?'

Penex Ultralite come in dull pink flip-top packets of three. On the bed with my back facing Rachel, who stroked it for something to do, I removed a sheath and peered at it: a florin-sized ring of elastic that gathered into an obscene bobble. I undid the elastic with twitchy fingers.

'Won't be a sec.'

But you seemed to need a minimum of three hands to get it on: two to hold it open and one to splint your rig. After thirty seconds my cock was a baby's pinkie and I was trying to put toothpaste back in the tube.

'Christ
how do you get these things on.' I held it up accusingly. 'Just how, just how are you supposed to get these things on.'

Rachel took a look. 'Oh, baby,' she said. 'You don't undo it first.'

So it was more necking, strange and perfunctory necking, and more body patrol.

This time, under Rachel's supervision, I held the nozzle daintily between finger and thumb and pulled the greased wafer down with my other hand.

'Oh, I see,' I said.

After all that sweat and goonery, was there any point in trying to find the blighted hair of passion, a whisper of real desire, submerged in that tub of clotted vaginal fluid ?

Supported on elbows, I hoisted myself above her and brought a knobbled knee up between hers, through the thighs. Glancing downwards, my rig, in its pink muff, looked unnatural, absurd, like an overdressed Scottie dog. I watched with approval, though, as the knee bore downwards. Then I got to work on ears, neck and throat, and paid elaborate lip-service to her breasts, on the assumption that they were to be found in the immediate vicinity of her hazel-nut nipples.