As Near as I Can Get by Paul Ableman Page B

their pressure a serious attempt to dislodge my grasp, after which it manifested, by convulsive squeezing, acquiescence and finally encouragement. Between my delicate fingers, the tiny buds of her nipples grew. Her breathing deepened and accelerated to match my own and, with an exultation that remains even now one of the most vivid impressions of my adult life, I withdrew my hands, stooped low, lifted her and carried her up the stairs to the first bedroom I came to. Ignoring hertightly-shut eyes, her parted lips, her beckoning outstretched arms, as she lay nestled on the soft eiderdown, until I had pulled and worried myself out of my clothes (except for time-consuming and relatively unimpeding shoes), I lay down with an involuntary groan of desire beside her and enfolded her fully-dressed (faintly-dressed) body in my arms. And fully-dressed she remained when, in the glowing bedroom, into which the sun had crept back, and after, with a little (only a very little) gauche assistance from her, my excitement had been copiously quelled and hers too, so little hindrance had her filmy knickers supplied, had been brought by my gentle hand beyond its peak, and after too, the sweet, helpless, period of intertwined slumber that had followed, we awoke.
    That bright evening, for the dispersal of the inspissated smoke left a sky of limpid blue and mellow, slanting sunbeams , was the kindest of our whole relationship ( dispassionate term adopted by a sinless age). Liquid with tenderness , Vanessa grilled the ‘flounder’, her surprisingly accomplished preparation of the meal repeatedly interrupted by caresses, glances, murmurs and for an hour, for a night, the ‘I love yous’ were simple, hopeless expressions of a helpless truth. And it was bliss. I always remember it and the basic memory has become so firmly set, from repeated handling, that it requires exquisite retrospective surgery to detach from the main fibre the little icy sinews of continued thought, of restlessness and of already-incipient contempt for my newly-won mistress.
    But she was a snob and a racialist (shrinking at the change-returning black hand of a ‘nigger’ bus-conductor) and provincial, provincial—with no notion of life on terms other than those of ‘nice things’ and conventional ideas. Strange how the balance of my awareness of her shifted over the weeks that followed from almost exclusive sensitivity to her slim, lovely body and fetching countenance to what it was when I could contemplate her nudity (climbing out of the bath; voluptuously curved over the task of applyingcrimson varnish to her toenails) without even a ripple of desire interrupting the stream of my contemptuous analysis of her latest pretty or whimsical remark.
    The next day she had a headache and by the time I knocked (we had not yet obtained a second key) in the evening, the externally active phase of her menstrual cycle had begun and a plug of gauze, absorbing the sanguinary debris of her untried, shedding womb, kept me impatiently at bay. And at the end of the week:
    ‘Just for a moment. It’ll be all right. I won’t——’
    ‘No! You must use one. I don’t want to get caught!’
    And so we never ‘knew’ each other at all, for a barrier, if a thin one, of ‘medicinable gum’ from some damned Arabian or, more probably, Malayan tree, subtly but effectively kept us apart, until finally, that is a few weeks after our first meeting, I was conscious of the inert, lightly- gasping form beneath me, in the greenish dusk, as no more than a sort of erotic liability and my desire flamed once more along the dancing street.
    Amongst the girls. The floating girls, the gliding girls, the tripping, mincing, flaunting girls, surging in seductive battalions through the rumbling conduits of the metropolis at morning and evening rush hours, swaying down Regent Street, clustering in giggling flocks beyond the plate-glass keeping them from the gauze and flounces of ephemeral garments, whispering