BEFORE HE MET Frankie, Clem’s ideas about sex were a greasy tangle woven from very unreliable materials: dirty rhymes and bawdy songs, smutty jokes, anatomically inaccurate drawings on lavatory walls, the lies of boastful older boys, the reported activities of someone’s sister. No adult, no one who’d actually had sex, had ever told him anything about it, except to expressly forbid masturbation and warn of its crippling consequences. He had joined sniggering huddles with other boys, talking dirty, but their imaginings, like his, lived in fingery darkness, like wood lice under a brick. (Goz usually excluded himself from these lubricious debates. If he spoke of sexual matters at all, he did so with a casual dismissiveness, as if he knew all about them but they were beyond the horizon of his interest.)

Naturally, Clem had spent countless hours trying to imagine what a naked girl might look like, but he lacked certain key items of information. In his fourth year at Newgate, a boy called Taplock had circulated (for sixpence a loan) a nudist magazine with the strangely irrelevant title Health and Efficiency. It featured black-and-white photographs of robust and plain young women engaged in wholesome outdoor activities, such as netball and gardening. None of them wore any clothes, but when Clem’s eyes zeroed in on the really important part of their anatomies, there was nothing there; their lower bellies tapered into a blur, a cloudy vacancy. He found this puzzling. Surely something so talked about, something for which there were so many forbidden names, must have some sort of substance.

(He had never heard, then, of doctoring photos with an airbrush. Later in life he would become an expert at it.)

Very occasionally, and with a warning glare, Jiffy would project painted nudes onto the art-room wall. During the Renaissance, it seemed, naked ladies were often to be found in the Italian countryside, sometimes in large numbers. Invariably, though, their Important Parts were obscured by wisps of gauzy stuff or annoying bits of foliage. Besides, Clem was not stirred by these women; they were a bit on the old side, and hefty-bottomed. Later, the class had looked at nudes by Picasso, but these were of no help at all.

Clem had, of course, studied the anatomical atlas kept on the top shelf of the art-room bookcase, paying particular attention to the chapter “The Reproductive Organs of the Female.” The cross-sectional drawing, all interfolding tubes and hollows, labeled in vaguely religious-sounding Latin, revealed nothing to him about the dark magic of sex. In fact, it made him think, queasily, of a slice through a crustacean or some other form of marine life. He wondered and worried about how his own increasingly restless reproductive organ could possibly get involved in this complex and messy-looking arrangement.

Then, in October 1960, when Clem was in his first term in the fifth form, Penguin Books was taken to court for publishing an “obscene” novel that was “likely to deprave and corrupt” anyone unfortunate enough to read it. It was a modest paperback, costing three shillings and sixpence, entitled Lady Chatterley’s Lover. The author was D. H. Lawrence, who had been dead for thirty years. It told the story of a supercharged love affair between Connie, the wife of a paralyzed aristocrat, and her husband’s gamekeeper, Mellors. The trial (which was very comical and in all the papers) ensured that thousands of people who normally took little interest in books were very keen to read it. A copy was passed from hand to eager hand in the fifth-form locker room at Newgate. By the time it reached Clem, it was close to exhaustion. Its spine was done in. It fell open brokenly at the really dirty bits.

Even though Clem was astonished and thrilled to see the two rudest words in the English language printed in a proper book, he found the story heavy going. A lot of it was posh people conversing about life and the “spirit”: the kind of talk his mum would dismiss as “squit.” He couldn’t relate in any way to the characters. (Although Mellors reminded him slightly of his dad, which was disturbing.) The sex didn’t really get going until about halfway through. After that, Clem skipped the narrative and read the dog-eared juicy sequences, avidly and with mounting bafflement. Mellors didn’t have a penis; he had a “phallos,” which he called John Thomas. It seemed to have mesmeric and magical powers that, as far as he knew, Clem’s own unruly member sadly lacked. Lady Chatterley didn’t like sex very much at first, as far as he could tell, but then she liked it a lot. As far as he could tell. Clem was keenly interested, suddenly, in why. In what girls felt, doing it. What, exactly, they liked about it. If, as he had been led to believe, sex was the hostile pronging of female flesh, why would they encourage it? How could they possibly enjoy it? But D. H. Lawrence’s excited, turgid prose failed to enlighten him. Rather, it confused him. All sorts of things went on in Lady Chatterley’s insides when she and the gamekeeper were at it. Bells rang, soft flames were ignited, feathers melted (there was a great deal of melting, generally), whirlpools swirled, waves swelled and billowed onto a distant shore, sea anemones clamored with their tendrils.

Clem couldn’t quite believe it. He was fairly certain that he wouldn’t like to be the cause of such a hubbub. What’s more, it seemed to go on not only in Lady C’s womb, which was fair enough, Clem supposed, but also in her bowels. This was surprising and deeply worrying. He hadn’t imagined that they were involved.

He handed the book on to Clive Lines, who’d been pestering him for a week, and eventually succeeded in forgetting about it. But he would recall its troubling imagery — and the questions it left unanswered — when he rustled and wrestled with Frankie beneath the beech trees.

Clem’s yearning curiosity was more encoiled by fear than it was for most other boys. This was because he belonged to a family that lived in dread of the very mention of sex, or anything remotely associated with it.

Win, of course, was long past thinking about you-know-what in personal terms. But it was out there. Everywhere. The young women in the laundry canteen, smoking cigarettes, sniggering about it. The young strumpets on the estate giving boys the come-on. That rock ’n’ roll music all about what they called love. Now that Win was a member of the Brethren, the Saved, it was vital that she not be tainted by any of it. That its filthiness not come near her, lest she be infected and denied her place by the throne; that it cost her the cleansing bath in the blood of the Lamb. It was essential that the house she lived in was not sinful. And it wasn’t. It was solace to her that the only nocturnal sound that came from the bedroom her daughter shared with George Ackroyd was snoring. Clem was a danger, being a young male and good-looking with it. He reminded Win of Percy. But he was a good boy. Hardworking. With any luck, he’d escape the snares of carnal sin until the Apocalypse. Nightly she prayed for him on the floor beside her bed, the rim of the chamber pot cold against her knees.

Ruth and George knew that the sexlessness of their marriage was unnatural. They were quietly ashamed of it, as other couples might be ashamed of a perversion. It was their closely guarded secret, and shared secrets are, of course, what keep people together. All the same, they were embarrassed by it. Hurt by it. They coped by pretending that sex simply didn’t exist. They wouldn’t hear of it. Which was as difficult as Eskimos refusing to admit there is such a thing as snow.

Most evenings they would watch the television. Clem sat at the table, paying intermittent attention to the homework spread in front of him. Ruth and George sat on the new mock-leather sofa, George’s ashtray between them. Win sat on an uncomfortable wooden stool because it was small punishment of her flesh.

Sometimes (with increasing frequency, it seemed to them) there would be a program in which love raised its ugly head. A couple would confess it, and then their faces would come close together, a slow, ghastly prelude to the inevitable kiss and the fade-out that suggested they were Doing It. At these awful moments, the dread entered the living room of 11 Lovelace Road like a chilling fog. In response to it, Win would look down, muttering, and accelerate her knitting. George would frown and light another Player. Ruth’s plump neck would redden, and she would get to her feet.

“I can’t put up with this soppy old squit,” she’d say. “I’ll go an put the kettle on.”

And Clem returned to his homework until the embarrassing scene was over. Before, that is, Frankie happened to him. After, he gazed furtively at the screen from the shelter of his hand, afraid of the fear in the room, his poor heart tumbling to the memory of her parted lips and busy tongue.