The Primal Urge

2

A Towel in Common

The innocence, simplicity and diffidence which formed a good proportion of Jimmy Solent’s character were often ousted by male cunning; now mixed drink had precipitated their expulsion. Anyone who drinks at all knows there are a hundred degrees of sweet and subtle gradation between sobriety and the doddering old age of intoxication; Jimmy was a mere thirty or forty notches down the slide, and still firing on most cylinders. Only his old aunt Indecision had been shut away.

He conjured up a taxi directly Rose and he got outside and urged it to Charlton Square as fast as possible. Knowing something of the oddness of women, he had realised the cardinal fact that once they had bathing costumes and the question of nude bathing was thus disposed of, the whole stunt would seem, by comparison, respectable. He wanted to borrow Aubrey’s car: taxis to and from Walton-on-Thames would be expensive. He had yet to tell Rose exactly where the pool was, for fear that she would object that it was too far away.

Jimmy found when he reached the flat that Aubrey had evidently come in and gone out again with Alyson. That was bad; perhaps he had taken the damned MG. Moving like a clumsy wind, while Rose sat downstairs in the ticking taxi, Jimmy seized his own swimsuit and Alyson’s from the airing cupboard – it would have to fit Rose, or else. Sweeping into the kitchen, he pulled two bottles of Chianti from the broom closet which served as wine cellar. Then he was downstairs again, shouting goodnight to a surprised Mrs Pidney, and back in the taxi with his arm round Rose.

At the garage they were in luck. The MG was there. Aubrey and Alyson would be walking; it was a nice evening for walking, if you did not have to get to Walton. Jimmy paid off the taxi and bustled Rose into the coupé.

‘They’re looking at us as if you’re trying to kidnap me,’ Rose said, waving a hand in indication at a couple of mechanics.

Jimmy laughed.

‘No, it’s because we’re both bright pink,’ he said.

Laughing, they backed out of the garage. Jimmy drove with savage concentration, fighting to keep the whiskers of drink away from his vision. They could crash on the way back and welcome, but he was not going to spoil the evening now. He was full of exaltation. He had won a prize!

‘Had an old car when I was up at Oxford,’ he shouted to her. He should not have said it; he reminded himself of Penny, who had ridden in that car. Dear little, dull little, Penny! Penny had not the sheer presence of this great luscious lascivious lump …

‘What happened to it?’ she asked.

… nor that look in her eye.

‘Sold it to Gabby Borrows of Corpus for £20.’

You still owe me £4 on that deal, Gabby, you sod.

‘He got a bargain, didn’t he?’

What, off me, Ikey Solent!?

‘You should have seen “Tin Lizzie”! She was about tenth hand when I got her. And what am I sitting here talking to you about automobiles for, Rangy, my sweet pet?’

He drew into the side of the road without signalling, braked, and took a long, deep kiss from her. She shaped up round him immediately like a young wrestler. Together, they plunged. The next thing he recalled afterwards was cursing loudly because he could not unhook her brassière. It popped most satisfactorily, and he slid his hands over her breasts, cupping them, kissing them. They excited and bemused him; he hardly realised what he was doing.

‘Let’s have a swim first, sweet,’ she said, gasping.

Jimmy struggled up and looked at her. They were bathing each other in pink light. It was like a warm liquid over them. The long face had undergone a change. Her brow was wide and tolerant; every line of her face had relaxed, so that she seemed plumper, less mature, even less sure of herself. Here, now, she was beautiful. He took a long look at her, trying to remember it all.

‘“And threw warm gules on Madeline’s fair breast,”’ he quoted, half-shyly. ‘Have some Chianti?’ Just how much had she drunk before the party, he wondered, that she should ever want him?

They drank gravely, companionably, out of the one glass Aubrey kept stowed in his locker, then drove on. Jimmy covered the road more slowly now. For one thing, he had caught the savour of the evening; it was something peaceful, relaxedly relentless – a kind of homecoming. He was going to be a proper man and take the correct tempo; Rangy would appreciate that. She knew and seemed to tell him exactly how these things should go. For another thing, he was having misgivings about the Hurns and their pool.

Rupert Hurn had been at Merton with Jimmy. Their friendship had not been close, but twice Rupert had taken Jimmy and another friend to his home. They had met Rupert’s younger sister (what was that plump child’s name?), and his docile mother, and his pugnacious little stockbroker father; and they had swum in his pool. But the last visit had been two years ago. Rupert might not be at home; the family probably would not remember him. They might even have moved. Jimmy’s idea began to look less bright with every mile they made.

He mentioned no word of his misgivings to Rose. If the evening was going to spoil, it should do so without any help from him.

The sun was setting as the MG passed Walton station. To Jimmy’s relief, he remembered the way clearly and picked up Ryden’s Road with confidence. He could recall the look of the house now; it crouched between two Lutyenesque chimneys; the porch rested on absurdly fat pillars and a laburnum grew too close to the windows. Jimmy had passed the place before he realised it; they had had the sense to chop the tree down.

He backed into the drive and climbed out. Rose climbed out and smoothed herself down. She took his arm, looking at him quizzically; her irises were a perturbing medley of green and brown. Jimmy wondered how on first impression she had seemed unattractive.

‘Er … come on,’ he said. Their Norman Lights had ceased to burn. He stepped between the fat pillars and rang the bell; in reply, a mechanism in the hall said ‘Ding Dong Ding Dong’. There was no other sound.

‘Perhaps they’re out,’ Rose said. ‘There are no lights anywhere. Surely they won’t have gone to bed yet?’

‘You’re beautiful,’ Jimmy said. ‘Forgive me for not mentioning it earlier. You’re beautiful, wonderful, unique.’

The door opened, and a very young man thrust his head out. After a searching glance at them, he stepped onto the porch, pulling the door to behind him. He wore a soft black suit with a mauve bow tie and big suède shoes; he had a (violently) contemporary fringe-cut to his hair, while on his brow an ER disc glinted metallically. His little, enquiring face was at once sweaty and fox-like.

‘Who are you? You aren’t Fred,’ he said, surveying them anew.

‘Touché,’ Jimmy said, with an attempt at what he called his society laugh. ‘What can we do to redeem ourselves?’

‘What do you want?’ the young man asked, refusing to be deflected into a smile.

‘We are friends of the Hurns,’ Jimmy told him. ‘We beg entry in the name of hospitality – or don’t they live here any more? Tell me the worst.’

‘Which Hurn do you want? They’re nearly all out.’

‘For heaven’s sake,’ Rose said, making a determined entrance into this asinine conversation, ‘Who are you, a bailiff?’

The young man shot her the look of dumb endurance one sees on the faces of wet dachsunds. He was about to speak when a girl appeared in the open doorway, wearing a severe blouse and slacks, the austerity of which was relieved by a hundredweight of charm bracelet clanking on her left wrist. In the dim light, she looked very young, very lovely. She also wore an ER, though her hair was swept forward so as partly to conceal it.

‘Jill!’ Jimmy exclaimed. The name of Rupert’s sister had returned to him suddenly, just when vitally needed. Jill! That podgy creature who had swooned over Rock Hudson and played Jokari from a sitting position had transformed herself into this moderately svelte little armful. He wished two years had done as much for him.

‘My giddy aunt, you’re – aren’t you Jimmy Solvent, or someone?’ the girl said.

‘Solent. Wish I was solvent. Fancy your remembering my name!’

They clasped each other’s hands.

‘My dear, I had a perfectly silly crush on you once. You used to look so sweet on the back of a motor bike!’

‘Cross my heart, I still do,’ Jimmy said, sliding in the nicest possible way round the fringe-cut, who stood there nonplussed by this turn of events. ‘This, forgive me, is Rose English; Rose English, this English rose is Jill Hurn.’

‘And this,’ Jill said, swinging up the charm bracelet in the direction of the scowling youth, ‘is my boy friend, Teddy Peters. You’d better come in. Were you looking for Rupert, because he’s not here. He’s in Holland.’

‘Each to his destiny,’ Jimmy said easily, forging into the hall. ‘Actually Rose and I came to ask you if we could have a swim. It seemed a shame for a couple like us to waste a bath like yours on a night like this.’

With Jill leading and Teddy following, they had reached a living room at the back of the house. A teleset radiated dance music softly from somewhere upstairs. Jill switched on a light on a corner table; in the illumination flowing over her face, Jimmy saw she was too heavily made up and a trifle spotty. All the same, it was a good attempt for – what? – sixteen, she would be no older. She headed for an expensive cocktail cabinet, moving with a copybook grace.

‘You must have a drink,’ she said. ‘Daddy and Mummy are out.’ That was a slip, although it told Jimmy nothing he had not already guessed. To readjust the role she was playing (and that little lout Teddy wouldn’t have noticed the slip, Jimmy thought), Jill sloshed whisky into three glasses, squirted soda at them and doled them out like Maundy money. She reserved something else for herself; perhaps a Pepsi-Cola.

Jimmy took his glass, looking askance at Rose, wondering just how she was feeling. She took a sip and said, ‘What a lovely room you’ve got here’ – which greatly cheered Jimmy; even half stewed, he could see it was a ghastly, ostentatious room.

‘It’s beautiful,’ he lied. ‘Your chandelier must have been particularly expensive. And your Jacobean radio – gramophone.’

‘Let’s get back upstairs, honey,’ Teddy said, speaking for the first time since his setback on the porch. Turning to Rose, he added, with a sort of rudimentary parody of Cagney courtesy, ‘We were dancing.’

‘How heavenly,’ Rose said gravely. ‘I love dancing.’

Jill, tilting her tightly covered rump like a snub-nose, was edging Jimmy into a corner. He was content to be edged until the vital question was answered; this now popped impolitely out of him again: ‘Can we have a swim?’

She did not answer at once, being busy breathing somewhat industriously.

Her eyes were ludicrously wide. Her perfume was as painful as a trodden corn, and then she smiled. The performance would be better in a year; in eighteen months you would not be able to tell it from the real thing. Perhaps, indeed, there wasn’t a real thing: only a series of undetectable fakes. It might be one of those shams which Rose said that Norman Lights would abolish. Apropos of which, Jill’s, old boy, was turning pink on you. Keep your ruddy genes to yourself, you in the ruddy jeans. It’s useless getting sanguine over me. Title for a song …

‘Of course you can swim, Jimmy,’ Jill was saying. She had made her voice husky for extra appeal; perhaps, Jimmy thought, she did it by holding Pepsi-Cola at the back of her throat; and he watched her mouth eagerly to see if she dribbled any. ‘Only you see, Jimmy,’ she continued, ‘Daddy isn’t very broad-minded about couples swimming after dark – we had a lot of trouble in the spring with Rupert and an awful girl called Sonia MacKenzie – you ought to hear about that some time – but of course I’m broad-minded, so I don’t care, but you’d better be out before Daddy gets back. Teddy and I would come with you, but Teddy can’t swim.’

‘Pity about that,’ Jimmy murmured.

‘Here’s the key to the changing hut,’ Jill said, handing over a large label tied to a tiny key. Her hand touched his and stayed there. He stroked her chin with his free hand.

‘You’re an absolute darling,’ Jimmy said. ‘I love you, and I’ll remember you in my will.’

‘I never think that’s a very practical suggestion,’ she said frowning. The remark amused Jimmy considerably; he choked over his whisky.

‘As you can see,’ he said, ‘owing to present commitments, I am unable to offer you anything more practical!’

Still laughing, he turned to find Rose dancing a slow quickstep with Teddy. Both of them still clutched their drinks. Both scowled in concentration. Both were showing faint pink on their ERs.

‘Hey, you’re meant to be swimming!’ Jimmy said, forgetting his manners. Catching hold of Rose round the waist, he dragged her away, turning to wave at the other two as he pushed her through the door. Shoving her down the hall, he got her into the open and shut the front door behind them.

‘That was very rude!’ Rose said admiringly. Under the stars she drained the last of her glass, let it drop onto the gravel, and slid forward into his arms. They kissed, rapturous with reunion. In the house they had been apart: it was another world. Now they were together again, the evening once more on their shoulders like a tame raven.

Jimmy grabbed the Chianti and the swimsuits out of the car. ‘I just don’t give a damn,’ he thought wonderingly; ‘Not a damn!’

‘Hang on here a moment, pet,’ he whispered. ‘I’m going to take the car just down the road a bit, in case the old man comes home early and spots it.’

‘What old man?’ she asked curiously.

‘Any old man, Rangy, my love, my bright shiner.’

He seemed to be away an age, finding an unobtrusive place for the car and relieving himself heartily into a hedge, but when he returned Rose still stood in the centre of the drive and asked him again, with the same puzzlement in her voice, ‘What old man, darling?’

‘Jill’s old man. Old man Hurn. Come on; let’s go see the puddle.’

The swimming pool was at the rear of the house. By daylight it looked small and impoverished; the concrete was a maze of cracks, the diving boards both drooped. Now, camouflaged by night, Aphrodite could have risen from it without putting it out of character. On the other hand, the changing hut (the Hurns showed a surprising modesty in not labelling it ‘the pavilion’) was even smaller, darker and stuffier now than by daylight. Inside the door with the frosted glass window was one room with a partition down the middle, opposite sexes who changed there together being trusted not to look round it – a simple-minded but ideal arrangement, Jimmy thought.

‘Can you see to undress?’ he asked Rose.

‘Yes, by the light of your ER,’ she said.

‘Sorry,’ he muttered, turning tactfully away.

‘How’s the costume?’ he asked, when they emerged into the night air a minute later.

‘A bit tight.’

‘So’m I. Feel O.K.?’ She looked like a lusty goddess.

‘Hungry,’ she said, wrapping her arms round her middle.

‘We’ll eat later, that I swear: Jimmy’ll never let you starve. The night’s young!’

Suddenly he knew indeed that the night was young and he was young. The excitement of the dark purred through his body. In one grand flash, he recalled all the events of the day, getting up, his work, having his ER fitted, the party, Rose. It was all unreal, bygone, prehistoric. A new era had begun; the ERs were going to change everything. In Merrick’s words, he had inherited a major liberty.

He raced round and round the lawn, puppy-like.

‘The world’s begun again, Rangy my love,’ he shouted. ‘You and I are the only ones to guess it yet, but the jolly old millennium began today? Hurray! Life’s the greatest invention yet!’

‘Not so loud, Jimmy,’ she said. ‘You’re crazy!’

‘Nuts to you, you great big lovely ploughable adult of a woman,’ he called. Charging at the pool, he bounded in and disappeared with a resounding splash. Rose followed more gracefully, diving off the side of the bath.

‘Distinctly frappé,’ she said in a small voice, as they swam together. She shook her head vigorously in distress.

‘Where have they kept this pool all day?’ he asked. ‘Feels like liquid oxygen. Death to the loins.’

‘Oh Jimmy, I do feel funny. I think I’d better get out.’

He put an arm round her shoulders. Her flesh was as heavy and cold as refrigerated meat.

‘Come on then, pet,’ he said. ‘I’ll give you a hand out. You’d better go indoors and have a warm-up. A sip more whisky’s what you need.’

‘No, wait a tick … Ugh, better now, I think. It was just one of those momentary things. Sorry. I seem to be functioning properly again now.’

Rose trod water, and then they began swimming slowly round the tank like a goldfish in a bowl. The water had evidently had a cooling effect on their genes, for their Norman Lights no longer glowed, spoiling what might have been rather an unusual effect.

‘Are you sure you’re all right, Rangy?’

‘I told you I was.’

‘The water’s quite hot when you get used to it.’

‘What I was thinking.’

He floated on his back, gazing into the clear night sky with its complement of stars. Somewhere way up there was a super-civilisation which had solved all its troubles and wore new suits every day; it was not having half the time he was.

‘I think I’m ready to get out,’ he said. ‘How about you, Rangy?’

‘I could stay here till dawn now I’m properly in. One becomes acclimatised, you know.’

He drifted over to her. Her face and the reflections of her face seemed to palpitate before him like butterflies in a cupboard. Reaching out, he caught and kissed her; they climbed together up rickety wooden steps, trotting over short grass and gravel to the changing hut.

There, Jimmy thoughtfully locked the door on the inside, and proceeded with the next stage of his master plan. Waiting a moment, he called softly in mock-consternation. ‘Rangy, what a fool I am! I forgot to bring any towels.’

‘You are lying to me, Jimmy, and I hate lies,’ she said from her side of the partition.

‘I’m not lying!’ he said angrily. ‘I did not bring any towels. I was in such a hurry I forgot.’

In the faint light, he noticed as he spoke a towel hanging on a hook, on the rear wall of the hut. Rose presumably had found one too and believed Jimmy had provided it. Snatching it off the peg, he bundled it up and thrust it under the seat. Then he bounded round the partition.

‘If you’ve found a towel, you’ll have to let me share it, pet,’ he said. He saw at once that she had one.

‘Go away, Jimmy,’ she said quickly, clutching the towel round her body as he bathed her in his ruby light. ‘I haven’t got any lipstick on yet.’

He was too intent to laugh.

‘It’s a lovely warm towel!’ He exclaimed, grabbing a corner of it. ‘Don’t be greedy! It’s big enough to cover two of us! How about saving me from the foggy, foggy dew? I’m shivering.’

The odd thing was, that when they were pressed together under the towel, Jimmy did begin to shiver. Excitement made him shiver as he felt her wet limbs wet upon his. He ran his hand down the great hyperbola of Rose’s back, sliding it over her buttocks and gripping them, then working it round her thigh.

‘Oh, Jimmy, you know I’m hungry!’ she wailed.

‘For God’s sake, give me time,’ he said.

She did. He fed upon the riches of the wide world on that cramped wooden floor. Sometimes he wondered, with only the mildest concern, whether she would not suffocate him, sometimes whether she would not crack his ribs; sometimes whether he had not bitten off more than he could chew, but always he rose triumphantly to face a fresh attack, always they were matched. She had spoken at the party against making a mockery of sex; of that she was not guilty; the core of earnestness Jimmy sensed in her was there even in her gladdest abandonment; she swam with him up the mountainside of love like a salmon leaping up a waterfall. In the end, he was flooded with a delighted and transcendent surprise, cast on a shore beyond Ultima Thule. Exhausted, thrilled, jubilant, panting like a dog.

‘Oh, darling …’ Rose sighed at last, ‘what a rough brute you are!’

‘Me! You’re the brute! – you’re the beauty and the beast. Rangey, you’re all things. Rangey, how old are you?’

‘Don’t ask petty questions,’ she said, giving him a final hug, tugging his hair gently, kissing his neck.

‘But I know so little about you!’

‘That’s just as well for you,’ she said, getting onto her knees. He tried to pull her on top of him again but she wisely would not come, so he got up and fetched the Chianti bottle. She was dressing as fast as she could and would take no wine.