‘You aren’t going to write an article about me, are you?’ I asked, realising as I spoke that this was a dreadful possibility. ‘I’m not going to be on the front page of Varsity, am I?’ To hold back from Jack de Manio and the Today programme only to end up as an item in Varsity! Quite a coup for the ego-diminishment project.
‘Of course not, I’m just interested. But you have to admit you’re one of a kind.’
‘Aren’t we all?’
‘You know what I mean.’
By now I was uneasy about the sharing of a bed. What if Noel did want to undertake the activity decriminalised by both the lower chamber and the Lords Spiritual and Temporal? How could I refuse? It would be no earthly use squeaking ‘Stop what you’re doing at once! I won’t be of legal age till after Christmas!’, since he was clearly younger than me. If he wanted something to happen then happen it would.
Consent and refusal in my case were abstract notions. My Yes was taken as read, and my No was a silent scream that no one would hear, impotent mandrake struck dumb at the moment of its uprooting.
It was too late for second thoughts. I hadn’t made my bed, and now I would have to lie in it. Noel sat on the bed and supported me between his knees while he took my clothes off. His touch was awkward but not incompetent. This was the moment I must get through without my self-confidence shrivelling, buoyed up by nothing more than the habit of buoyancy.
Noel didn’t ask me what I wore at night. It would have been a polite enquiry to make, unless naked intimacy was on the menu. If he had asked me, I would have said ‘Nothing’, not because I had read the James Bond books and knew that a real man sleeps in the buff, but because it was enough trouble taking off one lot of clothes without having to struggle into another. Deprived of the Margaret Erskine Dream-Cloud I dare say I would have frozen to death in my undergraduate years.
He helped me onto the bed and then undressed himself. He kept on his singlet and Y-fronts. He even looked doubtfully at his socks for a moment before taking them off. This disparity in our costumes didn’t seem promising, but who was I to know what was promising? Perhaps there was striptease to come.
My sexual experiences had been fleeting, though rich in their way, and they had rarely been connected with beds. I had spent too long trapped in one to expect to discover much novelty on that terrain. A bed was far less promising a venue for me than a music room, a dark lane or a nice public lavatory.
He turned the light off and climbed into bed, moving carefully to avoid squashing me. He had a faint nutty smell, which started to interest me all over again. In the dark my nose came alive and had a sniff of something it liked. Free of visual reality, I could idealise his features. My third eye took a good look round and my third leg flexed.
I wondered if we were about to have carnal congress, and if so how much I really wanted it to happen. My consent and refusal had become elusive even to me. This was all so entirely different from any script I had ever imagined. All those back roads and lanes I had driven down, looking for the person who would inflict his secrets on me!
Was it possible to be sought out in my own bed, and be shown the skeleton key to intimate behaviour there? The thing that can happen between people who lie down together, the shiver of what is possible.
Then it turned out that Noel had no such plans, or if he had ever had them they had been overtaken by sleep. Angst or no Angst, he was well away. There would be no tickling-too-deliciously pleasure for me that night, and my reason was safe from being derailed by a landslide of bliss. Every fifteen minutes the Catholic Clock with its defective mechanism ironically saluted the protraction of my virginity. Unless I had lost it to the Yeti. Though I have to say, going by my shreds of memory about our encounter, that the Abominable Snowman behaved like a perfect gentleman.
It was strange that I regarded myself as a virgin despite having been superbly fellated more than once by the depraved and accomplished Luke Squires at Vulcan. Somehow that didn’t seem to count.
Having someone sleeping so near to me was a novelty, even without the active sensuality of touch. Peter’s life had been warm in our bedroom at Trees, but Noel’s life was warm in my actual bed — yet I got little joy from his presence. At one point I became so overheated that I had to nudge the Dream-Cloud aside.
Unconsciousness dissolved any pact between us, in terms of my separate space, which he invaded. In sleep he was all bones and angles. Bones and angles and rapt little snores. A hot hand inched between my legs, but it was innocent of any impulse to grope.
In the night I needed a pee. I lay there wishing my bladder could sit tight for the whole night — life would be so much easier if it could. There was nothing to stop me from using the pee bottle as usual, except that it wasn’t in its usual place. In the flurry of going to bed in company, I hadn’t left it within reach, so I gave Noel quite a bolshie nudge. Since he was here by his own wish, he might as well be useful. He groaned as he woke and went like a sleepwalker to fetch the pee bottle.
The shock of rapport
Then I must have slept more heavily. When I awoke I was alone in the bed. Then I started to hear strange grunting from floor level. When I wriggled myself round I could see Noel doing photogenic little press-ups. He grinned at me when he caught me looking. ‘I made you a cup of tea,’ he said.
I took it for granted that Noel would be on his way as soon as he could. No such luck. He seemed annoyingly refreshed, and in a mood to be further entertained. He had exhausted his curiosity about me, but had apparently promised himself the treat of meeting my bedder.
His smile was on full disarming power from the moment Mrs Beddoes arrived. She’d barely had time to say, ‘Hello, and who are you?’ than he’d offered her a cup of coffee. My coffee, not actually a plentiful resource. Reluctantly I introduced them. From nowhere Mrs Beddoes produced something which she’d been keeping dark, a Christian name. ‘Jean Beddoes.’
Noel said, ‘John kindly let me stay last night after I had a fit of the heebie-jeebies from a film we saw. Have you ever had a fit of the heebie-jeebies from watching a film, Mrs Beddoes?’
She hardly hesitated. ‘There was one … what was it called? Gravestones, and a man pouncing on a boy. Staring eyes. I couldn’t sleep for weeks after that.’
Noel raised his hands in front of him and gave a theatrical shudder. He even closed his eyes. ‘Magwitch!’ he whispered, in reverent horror, and then they were away, fast friends already on the basis of Great Expectations. At that moment, peeking out at Mrs Beddoes from behind a finger fence of artificial surprise, he looked like a minor Dickensian character himself. Minutes later he was helping her to make the bed.
Since I slept wrapped up in a cloud of dreams there was actually no need to do any such thing, but Mrs Beddoes would not be deflected from her professional code. There was no question of slackening off even when rigour was nonsensical. So every day she would unmake the bed and remake it, tucking the coverlet in with brisk determined movements so there was no possibility of the pillow making a run for it. I had shown her once that this technique would have made it hard for me to get into bed, if I hadn’t preferred the Dream-Cloud. I had slid my stick in and then yanked sideways to open a usable gateway to the sheets, like Dad using his paperknife on a letter, to show her how preposterous she was being. She stuck to her principles.