Among what rank weeds are ceremonies remembered, are continued. I read what I had written, to take it up. My characters were not even people. They were athletes. I did not even give them names. Maloney, who was paying me to write, effectively named them. “Above all the imagination requires distance,” he declared. “It can’t function close up. We’d risk turning our readers off if there was a hint that it might be a favourite uncle or niece they imagined doing these godawful things with”; and so Colonel Grimshaw got his name and his young partner on the high wire joined him as Mavis Carmichael.
This weekend the Colonel and Mavis were away to Majorca.
“Write it like a story. Write it like a life, but with none of life’s unseemly infirmities,” Maloney was fond of declaring. “Write it like two ball players crunching into the tackle. Only feather it a little with down and lace.”
Mavis had come straight from the typing pool where she was working to the Colonel’s flat.
“That bastard McKenzie knew I wanted to be away early. He made me go right back over the last two letters. You could feel his breathing as he pushed up to me to point out the errors,” Mavis declares as she flings off her coat.
“It’s perfectly ridiculous, darling, and all your own fault. I’ve always said you should give up that filthy job and come to work for me full time.”
“I know what working full time for you would mean. It’d mean I’d never be off the job.”
“I can’t think of anything more delightful,” the Colonel beams. “We’ve still almost three hours to the flight time. What would you like to have, darling? A g-and-t?”
“With plenty of ice,” she says kicking her shoes off and stretching full length on the wine-coloured chaise longue. She has on a black wrap-around leather skirt and a white cotton blouse buttoned up the front and fringed with pale ruffles.
He lets his fingers dangle a moment among the ruffles and she smiles and blows him a low kiss but says firmly, “Make the drinks first.”
When he comes back with the drinks he sits beside her on the chaise longue. “We’ll have time for a little old something before going to the airport.”
“I could do with a good screw myself.”
As he sips at the drink, “It is my great pleasure,” he slowly undoes the small white buttons of the blouse, and slips the catch at the back so that the ripe breasts fall.
Seeing his trousers bulge, she finishes the gin, reaches over and draws down the zip. She has to loosen the belt though before she can pull ‘my old and trusty friend’ free. The Colonel shivers as she strokes him lightly along the helmet, lifts it to her mouth. Uncontrollably he loosens the ties of the skirt, pushes the leather aside to feast his eyes on the pale silk and softer, paler skin. With trembling fingers he undoes the small buttons, and the mound of soft hair, his pussy, his Venus mound, breathes free between the rich thighs.
“Why don’t we go into the bedroom, I’m tired,” she says.
He picks her up like a feather and carries her into the room, feeling as if he could carry her without hands on the very strength of his bayonet of blue Toledo.
“I want to see that gorgeous soft mound on high,” he says and lifts up her buttocks and draws down a pillow beneath, and feasts on the soft raised mound, the pink of the inside lips under the hair. When she puts her arms round his shoulders the stiff pink nipples are pulled up like thumbs, and he stoops and takes them turn and turn about in his teeth and draws them up till she moans. Slowly he opens the lips in the soft mound on the pillows, smears them in their own juice, and slowly moves the helmet up and down in the shallows of the mound. As he pulls up the nipples in his teeth, moving slowly on the pillow between the thighs now thrown wide, she cries, “Harder, hurt me, do anything you want with me, I’m crazy for it.”
She moans as she feels him go deeper within her, swollen and sliding on the oil seeping out from the walls. “O Jesus,” she cries as she feels it searching deeper within her, driving faster and faster.
“Fuck me, Ο fuck me, Ο my Jesus,” he feels her nails dig into his back as the hot seed spurts deliciously free, beating into her. And when they are quiet he says, “You must let me,” and his bald head goes between her thighs on the pillow, his rough tongue parting the lips to lap at the juices, then to tease the clitoris till she starts to go crazy again.
“I have to shower,” she says firmly, as much to herself as to him. “We haven’t all that much time.” “We’ll shower together,” he lifts her and carries her into the bathroom. She wraps her thighs round his hips as the iron-hard rod slips again within her. Once he pulls the switchcord they can be seen in all the walled mirrors, and she watches herself move at the hips, over and back on the rod, feeling it hard and enormous within her. “We have to hurry,” she says. Then, slowly, pressed back against the steamed mirror, she feels the remorseless throb within her, and gripping him tighter she opens and closes to suck each pulse until she shouts out, “O Jesus,” as she feels the melting into her own pulsing go deeper and deeper, as gradually the world returns to the delicious scalding water showering down on them.
I am tired and flushed as I get up from the typewriter. Nothing ever holds together unless it is mixed with some of one’s own blood. I am not able to read what I’ve written. Will others be inflamed by the reading, if there is flesh to inflame, as I was by the poor writing? Is my flush the flesh of others, are my words to be their worlds? And what then of the soul, set on its blind solitary course among the stars, the heart that leaps up to suffer, the mind that thinks itself free and knows it is not — in this doomed marriage with the body whose one instinct is to survive and plunder and arrogantly reproduce itself along the way?
I am impatient for the jostle of the bar, the cigarette smoke, the shouted orders, the long, first dark cool swallow of stout, the cream against the lips, and afterwards the brushing of the drumbeat as I climb the stained carpeted stairs to the dancehall.
I check myself in the mirror but I am already well groomed enough, except for a dying flush, for both the bar and the dance, and with a shudder of relief I go out, leaving the light burning beside the typewriter and pages on the still marble.
As soon as I came through the swing door I saw him against the smoked oak panel at the far end of the bar, his pint on the narrow ledge, puffing on a pipe and staring meditatively into space. Space mustn’t have been all that absorbing for he woke and began to greet me with over-active flourishes while I was still feet away. He was in his all-tweed outfit, long overcoat and matching suit, gold watch-chain crossing the waistcoat which had wide lapels. The small hat was tweed as well, “English country”, and much the same colour as the coat and suit, a dead briar brown. The bow-tie was discreetly florid and the highly polished oxblood boots positively shone.
“Ahoy, old boy,” he mimicked an English accent quite unsuccessfully. “What’s it to be?”
“A pint.”
“Another pint when you have the time there, Jimmy,” he called to the barman in his own voice.
“A Colonel Sinclair lived down the street from us. Every morning he’d come down for his Times and ten Kerry Blues. ‘Times and a packet of dogs,’ he’d shout as soon as he’d come through the door. ‘Times and a packet of dogs.’”
I wondered if his imitation English accent or the ordering of the pint had triggered the story. “You look ridiculous in that gear.”
“Tweeds are in, old boy,” he was not at a moment’s loss. “And besides, your good Harris, well treated, will last forever, unlike its masters.”