Sir Peverel from the castle rode out, his puissant steed . . functions in inverse association to the anima or tribal sex-instinct . . heard, yet declined to give any further account of these monstrous occurrences . . I say, Kins says, sitting up, don’tcha think the people’ll be up from the shelter pretty soon? He presses his lips together, mangling out the booze from phrases he hopes sound. . calm and sober. She’s so very close — he daren’t touch her. . lest I explode! Give over, Moira says, there weren’t any lights in the square — an’ that ain’t because they’re so bloomin’ careful, it’s ’cause they’ve all sodded off for the duration — packed their kiddies off to Canada, while they’re all down in the country noshing on snob’s duck. . She folds her arms wantonly behind her head and says, looking at him appraisingly, Arn’tcha gonna do nothing, then? You want I should give your thingummy a rub or sumfing? I’m getting bloody parky — there’s a hell of a draft in ’ere. He shrugs off his sports jacket and enfolds her in it. She giggles: Ooh! that tickles, and he stifles her giggles with his lips, seeking against Sirbertian odds sobriety in her sharp little tongue’s staccato. Withdrawing, he aff ects pomposity: I’m a man seeking a position. . Which he does, disposing his long legs carefully so my thingummy is pressed hard against the upholstery. Kins feels himself subsiding, so, to buy himself a little time, he tells her. . a chaise-longue story. They were a day and a night on that breakwater, don’tcha know. They hung to the ironwork, but when the tide came in some of ’em were washed off — others were machine-gunned by the dive bombers. Plenty lost their nerve — cracked up. Apparently some of them screamed so much they. . they threw up their own blood. My poacher got taken off by a pleasure boat on the second morning and was brought back to Worthing — they set him up in the little bar on a pile of old bunting, and gave him dandelion and burdock laced with brandy. . As Kins speaks Moira touches his face, splaying her fingers against his sunburnt forehead, his ruddy cheeks, his soft chin. Gotta gasper? she says, and, as he gropes in his jacket pocket, she giggles. He strikes a match. . and we meet and are consumed in the flame. Two days later, Kins puffs, my chap was skulking on the platform at Peterborough — they’d scattered to the four winds, y’see, chucked away their warrant cards, torn up their pass books. A few had even smashed their rifles — naturally none of that made it into the papers. Anyway, my chap’s skulking because he’s no warrant or ticket, when he sees one of the officers from his company. What’re the odds on that! My chap’s taken with an ice-cold rage — and he’s no hothead, he’s a sensitive type. Waits until this officer goes into the gents, follows him in there and barges him into one of the stalls. — Kins takes a long pull on his cigarette, and carefully tips the ash on to the shelf below Moira’s underthings. — Well, I should imagine you can guess what came next! — Moira touches his chin, her own tongue, his chin again — she rubs the saliva between her fingertips. When they begin to make love he’s taken aback but profoundly grateful . . for her skilful. . finessing: she draws out from him the caresses he wishes to bestow but doesn’t know how. How, he wonders in the mess of her hair, can it be that this chit of a girl — a common slut, apparently — understands my body with such thoroughness? Moira’s fingers beckon him forth, then. . choke me off! First time I done that, she husks, was to the tallyman, stopped him dead in ’is tracks. . This further bromide comes to Kins, unbidden: Sirbert . . diving down over the cards. . a bluff, of course . . for he’s only to glance at his hand to know what he has. . and, by extrapolation, what everyone else has as well. Sirbert, his dorsal nose beginning to marble with veins — though he drinks far less as a rule than the rest of us: only the stout in his morning messery, a glass of wine at supper, and perhaps two or three Bombshells when the cards are dealt. . under the table. Moira pulls his sweat-encrusted shirt from his shoulders. Kins says, I’m ’fraid I haven’t bathed in a while. She chuckles. He supposes she’s pretty enough — but that’s not what grips him. When she leans forward and his sports jacket falls away, he’s overwhelmed by. . Brockleby’s Friesians lowing and swaying their way into the parlour. There’s her teat . . stiffening between his lips, her other breast pressing against his cheek — there’s her skin, smooth beneath his fingers as he forages from hip to thigh. . and into the thicket. After that matters take their natural course . . although the girl manifests some strange behaviour: scratching Kins’s bum. . KENBAR toilet paper in the gents at Victoria as she shows him. . entirely matter-of-factly how to put on the French letter. — C’mon, it’s just like puttin’ on a sock — you rolls it up, an’ rolls it down. But how did you get hold of it? Kins asks — he’d visited a rubber-goods shop some Wheatsheaf regulars spoke of, but run away when he saw the old woman behind the counter. . a withered procuress. You aren’t — his cracked diction falls on to the broken glass — a, um, lady of the night? She slaps his member, lightly, and it twangs back and forth. The bloody cheek of it! she says, I oughta turn you out! She does it for him, the rubbery smell and the tickle of the French chalk is. . sobering as the schoolroom. All right, she says, all right, luvvie. . All right, she grunts, all. . right. . now. . luv-vie. . Lying on top of her, he’s too terrified to move: for years he’s carried this fuse between his legs primed — and ready to go off! should it get anywhere within a few inches of its target. Here it is, after some awkward bumping and boring — deep inside! Moira bucks a little and Kins smells gas rings . . tastes burnt milk . . and sees kipper scraps congealing on a greasy plate . . She bucks a bit more, and the small movement turns a crank that pulls a chain that opens a trap that releases a ball-bearing that scours round a spiralling groove and drops through a hole on to a pressure-sensitive plate that tilts a lever that withdraws a cork unleashing water down on to a wheel connected by rods to the two tiny figures deep in the brick-lined shaft of Gordon Square, Heath Robinson marionettes that all at once begin. . to go like the clappers . . Suddenly there it was: THE END of his boyhood, the titles rolling up on the screen and the seats banging as their occupants rose to the first organ chords of God Save the King. — Into this interlude Moira intrudes: Get that slimy fing off yer todger, there’s a good boy. Kins happily fuddles: There can be no posture less dignified. . then quotes to himself: The greatest fault of penetration is not that it goes to the bottom of a matter — but beyond it . . Moira, watching him fold the deflation into a page taken from one of the broken books, says, I started out doing HP ledger work for a timber merchant in Poplar, y’know — same time I was doing evening courses at Pitman’s to get typing and shorthand. . Kins catches her drift: she wishes it known — as if he didn’t know well enough already — that I’m in capable hands