I CAN’T say I liked him—gosh, that hardly entered into it—you see, it was terribly difficult to know where you were with him, he was peculiar, it’s perfectly true. He was different. He never tried to pretend he wanted something else, like all the other boys who start just wanting to hold your hand or something, and then think because you’ve let them do that they can start fiddling with your bra as soon as the lights go out and look hurt when you tell them to stop, as though you’ve broken a promise, when all you did was let them hold your hand for a moment. He never asked to hold my hand at all, he just looked at me, and I suppose every girl likes to be looked at like that, not with the usual undressing look that boys start practising even before they know what there is for a dress to cover up, but with a straight question, Will you or won’t you, which sends shivers up and down your spine as you give him a really haughty look back. I didn’t like him for looking at me like that, but it’s very flattering and he was rather attractive, too, apart from being able to send shivers up and down my spine with that sexy look, I mean almost before we were introduced, not staring at me or summing me up or telling me how pretty I looked, just asking me with his eyes and not even considering that I might not know what he meant or not like it.
Of course I did know, exactly, and I dare say any girl would, even if she’d never actually been in bed with a man before, which I had, because it was so obvious and anyway it was so exciting, so you couldn’t miss it possibly, unless you wanted to, and then it was pretty difficult. Not that the boy I’d slept with ever looked at me like that. He would have thought it caddish to look at anyone that way, and he wouldn’t have known how to even if he’d wanted to. He was a Guards officer called Ralph and he didn’t actually call me ‘old girl’, though he would have done if we’d got married which he pretended he wanted to, only they all say that because they know and the girl knows that they’re not allowed to, because of some silly rule, but he was nice, all the same. David wasn’t nice, at least I never thought about him being nice, it wasn’t one of the things you thought when you thought of him. His way of looking at you had nothing to do with being nice at all, and that was exciting, anyway it made a change. And of course I had no intention of letting him do anything of the sort, in fact I pretended I didn’t understand what the look meant, and then I tried acting as though I was very shocked and insulted, and I hardly spoke to him the first time because I thought he needed snubbing, looking at someone like that when he didn’t even know her, though it was exciting. But he simply didn’t pay the remotest attention to what I was doing, he just went on looking at me in the same way, and, well, you know, even if you don’t know the man very well, it is nice, and I like being whistled at on the street, though Ralph always used to get very angry, though I never turn my head, of course, to see who’s whistling.
When David came over to play tennis for the first time, I’d already decided what to do to put him in his place, so I was watching from my bedroom window when the car drove up, and he parked it and looked around for a minute or two before he came to the door and rang the bell. And I thought to myself—I was really quite angry—if he thinks he can look around like that as though he owns the place he’s got another think coming, that young man, because I really made myself feel angry with him, which suited what I meant to do anyway, which was keep him waiting. And surely enough Mummy came and yelled up the stairs that he was there, and I yelled back that I’d be down in a minute, and then I just sat on my bed and read a book of Giles’ cartoons, and then a few pages of a book by Jack Kramer on how to play really top-class tennis, and by that time I thought he’d be furious, so I went down without even brushing my hair or anything, to show him I didn’t care at all about him. I mean it was obvious to anyone who looked at me that it would have taken exactly a minute to change into my tennis dress and that I hadn’t done anything else in the half-hour or so I’d been upstairs, which is what I meant it to look like. And I breezed into the drawing-room and said: ‘Oh, hello, are you here?’ or something casual like that, and he was sitting reading Country Life or The Tatler, and when he looked up he saw exactly what I wanted him to see, that I didn’t give a damn for him, and that I’d kept him waiting deliberately, and he just said: ‘Oh, hello’, and looked at me with that same question in his eyes, which were very beautiful, actually, very dark brown and big, and he didn’t even have the manners to get up, he just looked at me, and it wasn’t a pleading look, it was just a question demanding the answer ‘Yes’, like in Latin, but I wasn’t going to say ‘Yes’, so we went and played tennis.
I hadn’t really expected him to be any good, but he wasn’t bad at all, actually, very steady, though he had no style at all, and he got the ball back over the net and ran about and returned quite difficult ones and had quite a decent serve, in fact he did pretty well. He wasn’t really good, but he would have done jolly well in club tournaments and things till he met someone who was good, and he would have made a very decent partner in a mixed doubles, because he was so reliable and steady. So I forgot all about him and his look and concentrated on beating him, getting him into the wrong position and then passing him with my backhand drive, which is easily my best shot, and very strong, but he caught on to that quite quickly and tried to feed only my forehand, so it was good practice for me, and I was really rather enjoying it, though not extending myself, of course. I won the first set pretty easily, and I was winning the second five-three when we changed ends and met at the net and he said: ‘You’re not bad, are you?’
‘Of course I’m not bad. If you practised a little more and took some lessons you might be quite good yourself. But your swing is all wrong, you don’t have any style.’
‘I get the ball back where I want to most of the time,’ he said, and smiled with that funny smile of his which made him look cynical, which was right in a way, because he was pretty cynical. And even while he was smiling he was looking at me like that, not touching me, but letting his hand swing free across his thighs in a sexy way, and he made me feel his hands were all over me which I didn’t like much, because I was thinking about tennis, so I said: ‘Come on, and I’ll really beat you up.’
But somehow he made me lose my concentration, making me feel that, and he won the next game, which was my service, and then his own service, and eventually he took the set nine-seven.
‘Whew,’ I said, ‘would you like to rest a little now? Or shall we go straight on?’ I was sweating a little, which I don’t often do unless it’s a tough game, and I’d had to fight myself as much as him the last few games. I was getting a little wild and not getting the shots in.
‘You ought to wipe the sweat off your face,’ he said, ‘or it’ll get in your eyes.’
Well, that made me furious, no man should ever say a thing like that to a girl, it’s insulting, and what made it worse was that he wasn’t sweating at all, and you expect a man to sweat when he’s playing games. And then he began to unbutton his shirt without asking me, and he had it half off before he said, in the most casual way: ‘Mind if I take this off?’, and I had to say: ‘Not at all,’ though I did mind, really, not his taking it off but the way he didn’t bother to ask until he’d already started. Actually, though, he had a nice body, and he wasn’t thin at all, really, he was sort of spare, lots of muscle and no fat, though his skin was pale and like an American’s—they don’t have the same kind of complexion, somehow, more of a sheen and less colour than us, and not darker exactly but—well, different. And he didn’t have any hair on his chest, though there was some on his legs, and I liked that, because I don’t like hairy men, it’s disgusting somehow, some of them have it all over their shoulders and everywhere, but he just had a little on his legs, and that’s all right, I don’t mind legs so much. Well, I suddenly realized that I’d been looking at him more than I should. I mean girls aren’t supposed to look at boys the way boys look at girls, so I pulled myself together and said: ‘Would you like to go on?’
‘Just as you like,’ he said, and obviously he meant just that, that he could take tennis or leave it (he was always saying he could take something or leave it, and I picked up the habit), and that he wasn’t there just to play tennis but to give me that look all the time, too, and that made me cross. He seemed to want to have everything his own way, so I said: ‘All right, let’s keep going, then,’ so we did, and after the next set, which I won, after nearly losing it by forcing instead of taking my time, we went and sat in deck-chairs and relaxed, by the little pavilion thing where we put towels and chairs and things while we’re playing. He had very bony hands, I thought, long and looking as though you could snap the fingers like twigs, so I said: ‘What funny fingers you have,’ and then he looked at them slowly back and front. ‘What’s funny about them?’ he said at last, looking at me with that look again.
‘They’re sort of like bunches of twigs.’
‘Oh, really?’ And then he lost interest in them, and let them fall on his hairy thighs, because he wore terribly short shorts and almost all of his thigh was visible—not all, of course, but an awful lot—and he kept on looking at me, so I said: ‘Don’t look at me like that.’
‘My God, you do nothing but criticize.’
‘I didn’t mean that, I meant——’
‘—that I shouldn’t look at you like that. Don’t you like to be looked at?’
‘Yes, but not like that.’
‘Why not like that? How was I looking at you? How do you want me to look at you? Do you want me to look at you?’
‘Really,’ I said, because all this was very bewildering, and I didn’t begin to know what to say. I just didn’t want him to look at me like that then, when there was no one around, and he made me feel nervous.
‘I can’t even remember how I was looking at you. Like this?’ and of course it was just exactly like that, so I said: ‘Yes, and stop it,’ and he said: ‘But I always look at people like that.’
‘I bet you don’t look at my mother like that.’
‘But you aren’t your mother, thank God,’ he said, and while I was trying to think of some way of saying that he was the rudest man I’d ever met and that if he couldn’t be polite he’d better go home, he closed his eyes and completely vanished, not literally, I mean, but just seemed to withdraw from the scene, and when I said what I thought I should say he ignored me completely, so we sat in silence for a bit, and then I said: ‘Your shorts are awfully short, where did you get them?’
‘I can’t remember,’ he said, after I’d given up hope of getting an answer out of him. ‘It could have been almost anywhere.’
‘You certainly couldn’t have got them in England.’
‘No, you can’t get anything in England that you really want at the time, place and price you want it.’
‘Don’t you like England?’
‘It’s O.K. It makes very little difference to me where I am.’
Well, I thought that was pretty rude, after the way he’d been looking at me, so I pouted a bit, hoping his eyes were open by now, and eventually I said: ‘I suppose you’re an angry young man or something silly like that.’
He sat right up at that and looked terribly surprised, so I felt pleased, and he said: ‘A what?’
‘An angry young man. You know—one of those people who say the queen has an awful voice, and so on—they’re always complaining.’
‘Oh,’ he said, and sank back irritatingly, ‘then I’m not. I don’t stay anywhere if there are things to complain about.’
‘Then you do like England, because you’re here.’
‘I’m here because I have to be here,’ he said, and when I asked him what he meant he didn’t answer, he just laughed and said: ‘Didn’t you know I was a convalescent?’
And then we just lay there for a bit, me thinking about how awful he was, but how exciting, too, and how irritating that made him, and how he needed taking down a peg or two, and he thinking about whatever he did think about, pretty odd things, I should say, when he suddenly sat up and said: ‘Well, shall we go?’, so I said: ‘Where?’ and he looked at me again, so I looked away, and then he said: ‘I’d better be getting back, then. Raymond may want the car.’
That was what was so utterly maddening about him, he never even made a pass the way you expected him to, he simply looked and expected you to come when he called, and if you didn’t he didn’t waste time trying to persuade you, he just went away, as he did that time, leaving me furious, though he had given me quite a decent game.
Anyway, he came again a couple of days later, and we were changing ends in the middle of the third set when he looked at me like that very strongly and I was just paralysed, and he came up very close to me and put his hand straight there, where no man is supposed to put his hand on a woman in the open, and not often in private, either, and I was so flabbergasted, I mean I simply couldn’t think of anything to say, and by the time I’d thought it was too late, we were half-way to the house, and that was the first time, with me terrified that Mummy would suddenly want to know where we were, but she was out in the garden, luckily, weeding, and so we lay there, ears cocked for any sound, at least mine were, while he looked at me crossly and said: ‘But you didn’t sweat,’ and I was so astonished by everything, I just said: ‘I don’t sweat much.’
‘You do playing tennis.’
He was funny, too, because as soon as we’d finished he’d cover himself up, or put on his shorts, so that I couldn’t look, not that I wanted to, particularly, but it was odd, I thought, and he looked at me all right, in a sort of measuring way which made me want to hit him, but I didn’t. Of course, he was much better than Ralph, who was terribly clumsy and often rather drunk, too, by the time we got that far, and awfully sentimental, which I quite liked, though it was sickening sometimes, too. And then he—David, I mean—would lie there absolutely still, so I lay very still, too, beside him, and after a bit he’d say: ‘You didn’t sweat,’ crossly, and I would say: ‘What do you want me to sweat for?’ and he’d say nothing, he’d just get up abruptly and get dressed and say: ‘I’d better be getting back. Raymond may want the car.’
And the really funny thing was that I didn’t care whether he stayed or went, because I didn’t like him very much. I enjoyed doing it with him very much, but I didn’t like him, and it never occurred to me that I might be in love with him, though Daddy would say: ‘You’re seeing a lot of that young man, aren’t you, Jane?’ and wink a lot, which was stupid, because I simply didn’t care if I never saw him again, though I hoped I would, because—well, it was fun, though he wasn’t much fun, never saying anything, if that makes sense. And, anyway, I knew he’d come back, because he seemed to enjoy it, too, and, besides, he had this thing about wanting me to sweat, which I never did, and sure enough he came, nearly every day, and he’d arrive in his ordinary clothes so he’d have an excuse to come upstairs to change, and he’d use Teddy’s room, which was next to mine, with a bathroom in between with connecting doors, and he’d undress down to his pants and come through the bathroom into my room without even knocking and put his hand straight there and hardly say anything till we’d finished, and then he’d cover himself as though he had some inkling of delicacy, which he didn’t, not a notion, and say: ‘You didn’t sweat,’ and then we’d go and play tennis, and I always beat him, but he gave me a jolly good game, and sometimes took a set off me, and afterwards the same thing would happen again, so I had to admire his virility if nothing else.
But I still didn’t like him, in fact I felt terribly detached about him, though not about his body, of course. I had no idea what was going on inside him at all, and I really didn’t care very much. Why, I don’t know, because I’m always falling in love with people just for their looks, but not him. In fact I behaved rather peculiarly, but if I didn’t like him I was certainly intrigued, though he never said anything about us that wasn’t exclusively about going to bed, and when I complained he just said: ‘What do you want me to say? I love you?’ and I didn’t want him to say that, I just wanted him to say something that showed he knew I was a person, not an animal, but he never did, and complaining was like talking to a concrete wall. He never even invited me to a dance or a cocktail party, though I invited him once or twice, but he always refused on some obviously invented excuse which he would defend even when I’d proved to him that it was all lies. But somehow I didn’t care, there was no one to care about, no one to take offence at, behind the lover and the tennis-player, at least not that I could discover, though his body was marvellous and he was the only person within miles who could give me a reasonable game of tennis, so we just went on like that for about a fortnight.
One week-end Teddy suddenly appeared from Oxford, the way he so often did, without telling anyone he was coming, and then pretending it was us who had failed to remember. I’m mad about Teddy, he’s the sweetest brother you could want when he isn’t being silly, though he usually is, and he’s terribly good-looking with auburn hair and green eyes, except they’re really grey, though they ought to be green, and if he wears a green shirt or even a green tie they look green, so I always give him something green for his birthday and Christmas, though he says I’m just trying to turn him into a vegetable. Teddy’s always excited about something, and when we were children he was always inventing games and then he would make me play them with him without even telling me the rules, so naturally I did things wrong and then he’d get furious, or else he wouldn’t let me play with him at all. I was never allowed to choose a game of my own, so we were always fighting, but we always made it up again quickly, and he’s only two years older than me and now we get on terribly well, and I love him very much indeed, though he can be infuriating at times. I don’t know what they do at Oxford, but to judge by Teddy they sit around talking about Life and Sex and Art and Religion all the time, because he was always coming home with some crazy new idea which he’d try and explain to me, and of course I never understood a word, and he used very difficult words, too, like ‘empiricism’ and ‘syndrome’, which I had to ask him to spell and then went and looked up, and he was just the same as when we were young, because either he was making you listen to some terrible nonsense full of difficult words, or he’d sit alone in his room and lock the door and complain bitterly at being made to attend regular meals. He gave me the most obscure books to read, which I would hide under the mattress and pretend I’d lost, and then he’d accuse me of being irresponsible and not caring about really fundamental things like the one he was on to at the moment, whatever that might be, but he was awfully lovable in spite of all the silliness, and we got on very well, in fact we always had. I only ever won one battle with Teddy, and that was about calling him Teddy, because he suddenly decided that Teddy was too nursery, and would we please call him Edward, or if we had to shorten it, Ed, only Mummy said she certainly wasn’t going to allow anyone called Ed around the house, Ed was a butcher’s boy sort of name, and Daddy agreed that he ought to be called Edward now, but I could never remember, and though he’d get very angry, eventually he gave up, and let me call him Teddy as I always had.
On Saturday night he came into my room about midnight and woke me up, of all things, though we’d always come in and out of each other’s rooms without bothering about knocking or anything because we would often have long talks together at night, even when we were quite small, and if it was cold we would get into the other’s bed, just to keep warm, but we were too old for that sort of thing now, we thought, so we usually just sat on the bed. So there wasn’t anything unusual about his coming in, though it was a bit mean to wake me up, I’d been playing tennis all afternoon with David and some other people, and afterwards there’d been the other business, so I was really pretty tired, and it’s awful to wake up just after you’ve got off to sleep. You feel dizzy and horrid for a few minutes, and often you can’t get back to sleep again, which is awful, and, besides, for a moment I thought he was David and I couldn’t think what he was doing there at that time of night, but it was Teddy. And he wanted to talk, obviously, and he was started even before I’d woken up properly, and he looked as though he’d be going on for hours, and I couldn’t understand a word of what he was saying, though it seemed to be about honour and things, only then it turned out to be about David and me, and how had he found out? I wondered, so I listened, though I would have told him anyway, in fact we always told each other everything, he even told me about what he did at school, and about his first girl who was a tart somewhere, and his eyes were very green, because he was wearing the pyjamas I’d given him for his twenty-first birthday, and he walked up and down making huge gestures as though he was addressing a crowd, not just me, his sister, curled up in her nightgown and just watching him and thinking how handsome he was and not really listening at all.
Teddy said David was evil, so I said that was nonsense, and what did he think he was talking about, he’d only met him that afternoon, and anyway what does evil mean? But once Teddy gets an idea it’s very difficult to get him off it, and he paced up and down with eyes flashing green, saying: ‘I know he’s evil, I can sense it, I feel it with every pore, with every minute hair on every inch of skin. I feel the evil as something absolutely repugnant, the way you smell a rotten egg and suddenly you know there’s a whole range, a whole spectrum, of smells and sights and sounds, too, probably, which aren’t merely rotten, whose rottenness is only a disguise for their utter corruption, which are against, actively against, the smells and sights and sounds we like, which are only symptoms of a whole principle of corruption and evil, a whole anti-morality, and you can’t rationalize, you can’t explain how you recognize it, you can only apprehend without being able to comprehend, and I tell you, Jane, he is evil, he is against.’
Well, naturally I didn’t understand what Teddy was talking about, so I just said: ‘If you knew him as well as I know him, you wouldn’t talk such rubbish.’
‘I know him better than you do, Jane, because I can see, I can watch, I’m not tangled in him the way you are. I could see from the way you looked at him that you weren’t seeing him as he was but as some dream of your own, you probably think you’re in love with him——’
‘I do not.’
‘—and who’s to say whether you are or not, it makes no difference what you call it, because you’re caught, and there’s no way out, you’re trapped, wrapped up and ready for destruction, corruption, whatever he wants, but I’m detached, I can see him as he is, and he’s against us, Jane, against everything.’
‘Against what?’
‘Against—against Mendleton, against history, against tradition, against society. Oh, probably he never thinks of it like that, he’s probably not even aware of what he is doing, simply doing it, and if you told him he’d just mock you with his big brown eyes and tilt his nose for an instant in derision to let you know he didn’t care whether you were right or not. Because he doesn’t think like that, you can tell from watching him listen to people talk. He thinks we’re all insane, talking of things that don’t matter, ridiculous things, like love and morality and right. He doesn’t act the way we act, with a sense of principle. He no more thinks like that than an animal. He lives for the precise moment and its possibilities, not planning for things to happen, but causing them by his presence, by his failure to plan and to think like us, putting us at a perpetual disadvantage, so the things he’s caused seem inevitable, uncontrollable. And if you appealed to his better instincts you would appeal to something that’s not there. He has instincts, all right, but they’re neither good nor bad to him, they’re simply instincts and to be obeyed, so you can’t tell the instincts from the man as you can with normal people, where the struggle between instinct and society or morality or training shows on the face, in the eyes, in a gesture checked or a nervous contraction, but for him there is no struggle, no conflict to show in the eyes, no moral world at all, don’t you see, simply the world? It’s as though his moral sense has been amputated, as though he lacked some obvious faculty like sight or hearing, as though somewhere in Borneo or one of those places he was talking about a witch-doctor had operated on him with some voodoo drug and removed it, leaving no scar. But not even that, quite, for after an amputation the patient goes on feeling the lost limb, the man without a leg aches with his missing toes, and the ache is as real as when the toes were there, the senses play tricks, you can never forget you once had a limb where there is now only space or a wooden leg or a metal shoe, and even an appendix whisked out by the best surgeon in London leaves its absence in the tangible reminder of an intimate scar, but with him there is no scar, no continuity of feeling after the amputation, so he must have been born without one, without that sense which distinguishes men from beasts; perhaps he doesn’t even know he’s defective, different, doesn’t realize how much advantage he takes of people.’
‘I simply have no idea of what you’re talking about, Teddy,’ I said. ‘You’ve met him exactly once, and you’ve hardly spoken to him, and then you come out with all this piffle. What suddenly made you know all this nonsense?’
‘I can’t tell you,’ said Teddy, and he pulled his pyjama jacket tight round his neck and hunched himself up. ‘I don’t understand it myself, I just know what happened to me when I got close, and then I sensed it. I’ve never been so frightened in my life.’
‘Well, that’s rot, utter rot, and I ought to know, I’ve slept with him.’
‘He’d sleep with anyone, anyone.’
‘I dare say he would. But that doesn’t make him all the things you’ve been talking about. Sometimes you make me wonder if you’re all there, Teddy.’
‘I can feel it. I know it.’
Well, a blank wall like that isn’t worth arguing with, and I seriously wondered if Teddy might not be feverish or something, because there was a very odd look in his eyes indeed, and he absolutely refused to tell me when and where he suddenly came to his fantastic conclusion. He just said it was something he had to absorb and understand for himself before he could talk about it, but that he felt he had to tell me David was evil, and I said that was piffle again, and then we kissed good night and he went away, and thank goodness for that, I thought he was going to go on all night, but he gave up suddenly like that as though remembering how frightened he’d been stopped him. And of all the nonsense that was the most ridiculous, because there was nothing frightening about David, though he was rather odd, as I’ve said.
And a few days later he was really very odd indeed, because we’d been playing tennis and had come in and he’d just entered my bedroom and put his hand there when he said something that no one had ever said to me before and certainly I hope they don’t ever again, because it was a very dirty word indeed, and I wasn’t even quite sure what he’d said, though I’d heard right the first time, or exactly what it meant, though it was obviously very dirty, so I said: ‘What did you say?’
And he repeated it, and I asked what it meant, though I was a bit put out that he should say it to me, and then a sort of cold dreamy look came over his face and he explained very slowly and in great detail and I would really have been terribly shocked, only I didn’t have time to be, because he suddenly launched himself on me and by the time we’d finished I was sweating, because it was like nothing that had gone on before. And then he covered himself up as usual, and lay absolutely still, though with a smile on his face and his eyes open, and I couldn’t move at first, I felt terribly lethargic, and that I was going to sink off to sleep, which I’d never done before, I felt exhausted, but at last I forced myself awake, and for no reason I suddenly said: ‘I think I hate you,’ which wasn’t true, really, though when I’d said it I wondered if it might not be. But he didn’t move a muscle, he just lay there looking at me in a sated sort of way, and then he said: ‘It does you credit,’ and turned over on his back and went to sleep. And so I watched him, lethargically, wondering whether I did hate him, and why he’d said that word, and why I’d said I hated him when I didn’t, or did I? And I felt terribly aloof and distant from him, though our sides were touching, and I was very conscious of his skin and bones and tissue, but I still didn’t have any feeling about him very much, and while I was thinking about all this, he woke up and said: ‘You sweated that time,’ and I said: ‘Yes, I did, so what?’, but he didn’t answer, he just sighed in a contented way, so I said: ‘What makes you tick, David?’
‘Tick? Do I tick?’
‘No, no. What do you think about all the time? What do you feel? You never say anything about what you feel.’
‘I feel good,’ he said, but only after a long pause. Then he got up and said: ‘I’d better be getting back. Raymond may want the car,’ and I didn’t want him to go so soon, so I said: ‘Teddy thinks you’re evil,’ but he said: ‘Oh, really?’ and went into Teddy’s room to get dressed, and then he came back and said: ‘How do you like sweating when you make love?’ and I hadn’t thought about it, but I had felt exhausted, so I said: ‘It’s tiring,’ and he said: ‘It’s a pity you want to be an English lady, Jane,’ so I said: ‘What do you mean?’ and he laughed and said: ‘Every English woman thinks sex is a bore till someone shows them, and then they don’t always change their minds. Do you think you’ll change yours, Jane?’
‘But I never thought it was a bore.’
‘Yes, you did, with your Ralph. It’s a means to you, to every woman, first of getting a man, then of getting a child.’
‘I think you’re terribly rude.’
‘I’m not a gentleman,’ he said, and he stood there mocking me with his beautiful deep rich-brown eyes, and then he said: ‘And I’m not even an angry young man. Poor Jane, nowhere to fit me in. I think it’s time you got married, Jane,’ and I wondered if he was proposing to me, and I suppose he saw that, because he said: ‘Not to me,’ very quickly and nastily, and soon after that he went back to Cartersfield and for an hour or two I did hate him, because I hate everyone who says things I don’t understand, except Teddy, but then everything he says is nonsense, and then I decided I didn’t, and next day I phoned and asked if he was coming over that afternoon to play tennis, and he said he was terribly sorry but he’d pulled a muscle that last time and couldn’t play for a week or two, he was sorry, and I could tell from the way he said it that he was lying, and I told him so, but he insisted it was the truth, in a sort of astonished and polite way that was simply maddening.
‘But won’t you come over anyway?’
‘I’m afraid Raymond wants the car.’
And so I knew he wouldn’t come back to do that, and I suppose I knew it the same way Teddy thought he knew David was evil, and for a day or two I wondered if he might not be right, Teddy, I mean, but then evil’s all nonsense, and I’d never liked David very much, and there’s an awful difference between being not very nice and being evil, and anyway I found I couldn’t even hate him properly. He’d never really touched my feelings at all, you see, and though I cried after he’d said that on the phone, I didn’t cry for long, though I thought about him a good deal, but not him so much as his body, and I wished he would come over, because I decided I really didn’t care what he was like, but he was terribly good at making love, and it was nonsense about me not enjoying it and I wanted to prove it to him, and there was only one way of doing that, and then I said that awful word once or twice to myself, but it didn’t have the same power when I said it, it needed a man’s voice, and then I pulled myself together and went and practised my service, only it was rather awful coming back to the house and knowing he wasn’t there to come in and put his hand there like that without a word, because even if he was rather odd he was terribly exciting.
And Mummy asked where he was these days, and Daddy said: ‘Poor Jane, she’s lost her young man,’ till I could have killed him, because he wasn’t my ‘young man’ ever, he was, well, he was David, and very special, and when Daddy said that he sounded so protective and loving, and he obviously didn’t understand at all, I could have killed him, that’s all.