“Here, help me with the arms,” Mrs Biggs said, wedging herself round so that she had her back to him. Zipser hesitated a moment and then, impelled by a fearful and uncontrollable urge, lunged forward.
“Here,” said Mrs Biggs somewhat surprised by the frenzy of his assistance and the unusual whinnying sounds Zipser was making, “the arms I said. What do you think you’re doing?” Zipser floundered in the folds of her mac unable to think at all let alone what he was doing. His mind was ablaze with overwhelming desire. As he thrust himself into the red inferno of Mrs Biggs’s raincoat, the bedder hunched herself and then heaved. Zipser fell back against the sink and Mrs Biggs issued in the hall. Between them on the gyp-room floor, like the plastic afterbirth of some terrible delivery, the disputed raincoat slowly subsided.
“Goodness gracious me,” said Mrs Biggs recovering her composure, “you want to be more careful. You might give people the wrong idea.”
Zipser huddled in the corner of the gyp room breathing heavily hoped desperately that Mrs Biggs didn’t get the right idea.
“I’m sorry,” he mumbled, “I must have slipped. Don’t know what came over me.”
“Wonder you didn’t come all over me,” Mrs Biggs said coarsely. “Throwing yourself about like that.” She plummeted over and picked up the raincoat and, trailing it behind her like a bull fighter’s cape, marched into the other room. Zipser stared at her boots with a fresh surge of longing and hurried downstairs. The need for a girl his own age to take his body off the bedder had become imperative. He had to do something to escape the temptation presented by Mrs Biggs’s extensive charms or he would find himself before the Dean. Zipser could think of nothing worse than being sent down from Porterhouse for “the attempted rape of a bedder”. Or only one thing. The successful accomplishment of rape. That would be a police-court matter. He would kill himself sooner than face that humiliation.
“Good morning, sir,” Skullion called out as he passed the Lodge.
“Good morning,” said Zipser and went out of the gate. He had over an hour to wait before the barbers’ shops opened. He walked along the river to kill time and envied the ducks, sleeping on the banks, their uncomplicated existence.
Mrs Biggs tucked the sheets under the mattress of Zipser’s bed with a practised hand and plumped his pillow with a mitigated force that was almost tender. She was feeling rather pleased with herself. It had been some years since Mr Biggs had passed on, consigned to an early grave by his wife’s various appetites, and even longer since anyone had paid her the compliment of finding her attractive. Zipser’s clumsy advances had not escaped her attention. The fact that he followed her about from room to room as she worked and that his eyes were seldom off her were signs too obvious to be ignored. “Poor boy misses his mum,” she had thought at first and had noted Zipser’s solitariness as an indication of homesickness. But his recent behaviour had suggested less remote causes for his interest. The bedder’s fancy ignored the weather and lumbered to thoughts of love. “Don’t be silly,” she told herself. “What would he see in you?” But the notion remained and Mrs Biggs’ sense of propriety began to adapt itself to the incongruities of the situation. She had begun to dress accordingly and to pay more attention to her looks and even, as she went from room to room and bed to bed, to indulge her imagination a little. The episode in the gyp room had confirmed her best suspicions. “Fancy now,” she said to herself, “and him such a nice young fellow too. Who’d have guessed?” She looked at herself in the mirror and primped her hair with a heavy hand.
At nine-fifteen Zipser took his seat in the barber’s chair.
“Just a trim,” he told the barber.
The man looked at his head doubtfully.
“Wouldn’t like a nice short back and sides, I don’t suppose?” he asked mournfully.
“Just a trim, thank you,” Zipser told him.
The barber tucked the sheet into his collar. “Don’t know why some of you young fellows bother to have your hair cut at all,” he said. “Seem determined to put us out of business.”
“I’m sure you still get lots of work,” Zipser said.
The barber’s scissor clicked busily round his ears. Zipser stared at himself in the mirror and wondered once again at the disparity between his innocent appearance and the terrible passion which surged inside him. His eyes moved sideways to the rows of bottles, Eau de Portugal, Dr Linthrop’s Dandruff Mixture, Vitalis, a jar of Pomade. Who on earth used Pomade? Behind him the barber was chattering on about football but Zipser wasn’t listening. He was eyeing the glass case to his left where a box in one corner suggested the reason for his haircut. He couldn’t move his head so that he wasn’t sure what the box contained but it looked the right sort of box. Finally when the man moved forward to pick up the clippers Zipser turned his head and saw that he had been eyeing with quite pointless interest a box of razor blades. He turned his head further and scanned the shelves. Shaving creams, razors, lotions, combs, all were there in abundance but not a single carton of contraceptives.
Zipser sat on in a trance while the clippers buzzed on his neck. They must keep the damned things somewhere. Every hairdresser had them. His face in the mirror assumed a new uncertainty. By the time the barber had finished and was powdering his neck and waving a handmirror behind him, Zipser was in no mood to be critical of the result. He got out of the chair and waved the barber’s brush away impatiently.
“That’ll be thirty pence, sir,” the barber said, and made out a ticket. Zipser dug into his pocket for the money. “Is there anything else?” Now was the moment he had been waiting for. The open invitation. That “anything else” of the barber had covered only too literally a multitude of sins. In Zipser’s case it was hopelessly inadequate not to say misleading.
“I’ll have five packets of Durex,” Zipser said with a strangled bellow.
“Afraid we can’t help you,” said the man. “Landlord’s a Catholic. It’s in the lease we’re not allowed to stock them.”
Zipser paid and went out into the street, cursing himself for not having looked in the window to see if there were any contraceptives on display. He walked into Rose Crescent and stared into a chemist’s shop but the place was full of women. He tried three more shops only to find that they were all either full of housewives or that the shop assistants were young females. Finally he went into a barber’s shop in Sidney Street where the window display was sufficiently broad-minded.
Two chairs were occupied and Zipser stood uncertainly just inside the door waiting for the barber to attend to him. As he stood there the door behind him opened and someone came in. Zipser stepped to one side and found himself looking into the face of Mr Turton, his supervisor.
“Ah, Zipser, getting your hair cut?” It seemed an unnecessarily inquisitive remark to Zipser. He felt inclined to tell the wretched man to mind his own business. Instead he nodded dumbly and sat down.
“Next one,” said the barber. Zipser feigned politeness.
“Won’t you…?” he said to Mr Turton.
“Your need is greater than mine, my dear fellow,” the supervisor said and sat down and picked up a copy of Titbits. For the second time that morning Zipser found himself in a barber’s chair.
“Any particular way?” the barber asked.
“Just a trim,” said Zipser.
The barber bellied the sheet out over his knees and tucked it into his collar.
“If you don’t mind my saying so, sir,” he said, “but I’d say you’d already had your hair cut this morning.”