The Belting Inheritance by Julian Symons Page B

happen and I wanted it to happen, and Hugh got most of my clothes off, and then do you know what? There I was sprawled on the bed and he was bending over me, and he smacked my face and said, ‘Do you think I want Miles’ leavings?’, and he put on his clothes and walked out.” She cocked an eyebrow at me, and then laughed. “What a situation for a girl. They call some girls teasers, but what would you call him? I never saw or heard from him again. Why did he do it, you ask?” (Though I hadn’t asked.) “I thought about it a good deal afterwards, and though I should like to think it was my fatal charm that lured him on, I don’t think that’s true. I think he set out to humiliate me. Deliberately. And I suppose you could say he succeeded. Luckily for me, though, I’m like an indiarubber ball, when I’m hit I bounce back.”
    “Why should he want to humiliate you?”
    “Who knows, Chris? Basically he was queer, I suppose, probably that’s why.”
    “What did Miles think about it?”
    “He never knew. Or at least I never told him.”
    Greatly daring, I said, “What about David?”
    She put her chin in her hand and considered David. “He was much more handsome than Hugh, madly good-looking, but in a mother’s boy Rupert Brooke sort of way. I’m sure he modelled himself on Rupert Brooke. David went on coming to the flat, even though Hugh didn’t, and, well, I told you I was like a rubber ball. I bounced back at David.”
    I protested. “But you didn’t like him.”
    “Oh, I liked him all right in a way, you couldn’t help it, he was serious and boyish and brought out the mother impulse that’s lurking somewhere in every woman. And then there was another thing. This happened in the early part of the war, David had gone into the Air Force like a patriotic lad, and he was in uniform. I’ve always gone for uniforms, though of course he wasn’t in uniform when we did it.” She laughed. “Now I have shocked you.”
    She had. I bravely said, “Not at all.”
    “Good for you, even if you don’t mean it. Well, as you’ve gathered, I don’t take sex seriously, you enjoy yourself and that’s it. But David wasn’t like that, he pretty well went crazy. He was stationed not far from London at the time and there were letters, telephone calls, sudden visits. If Miles hadn’t been as blind as they come, and working part of the time, he must have known what was going on. As it was, we went on for six months, with David feeling guilty, wanting to tell Miles, weeping round the place, wanting me to get a divorce and marry him, and writing bad poems about it all the time. It was perfect hell for me, I can tell you. I was almost glad when the balloon went up one day, when Miles came home and found us together. There was the most tremendous scene, with Miles and David shrieking at each other like actors in a Jacobean tragedy. I sat back and enjoyed it.”
    “What happened then?”
    “What would you expect? They went home and told their tales to Mamma. I’ve always thought that she settled it, like an umpire at cricket, you know. Miles and I parted, he took it very hard, and David wrote me reams of letters about how he loved me but we’d better not meet again. I answered one or two, but then I got fed up with them, and just about that time I got tied up with a BBC war correspondent, and – well, that was the end of it. Except that Miles got a divorce. He had plenty of grounds. David wasn’t named.”
    My first reaction was excitement at this glimpse of a sexual bohemianism that I had only read about. Betty Urquhart suddenly appeared to me an entirely different person. What had been a rather old boyish-looking woman in dirty smock and trousers was transformed into an ideal image of sexual freedom. It was hard enough for me to imagine Miles, Hugh and David in the rôles she had allotted to them, but that the first woman who talked to me about having sexual relations with men should wear no make-up and have grubby