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‘Never say die, Uncle Freddy.’ This is not the sort of expression I normally use. I practically added, ‘Life in the old dog yet’, such was the infectious, indeed pestiferous influence of my uncle. Instead, I repeated ‘So did you do it with a French lass?’

‘Thereby hangs a tale, my boy, and it’s one I’ve never told a living soul.’

I think if I’d shown genuine interest at this point, I might have scared him off, but I was slumped in the oppressive reflection that my uncle was not just an old bore, but a parody of an old bore. Why didn’t he strap on a peg-leg and start capering round some inglenooked pub waving a clay pipe? ‘Thereby hangs a tale, and it’s one I’ve never told a living soul’. People don’t say that any more. Except my uncle just had.

‘They fixed me up, you see.’

‘Who fixed you up?’

‘The Surrealist boys. My new-found chums.’

‘You mean, they found you a job?’

‘Are you stupid tonight or just normal? I’m not sure I can tell. They fixed me up with a woman. Well, two to be precise.’

I began to pay attention at this point. Needless to say, I did not believe my uncle. He was probably fed up with the lack of impact made by the umpteenth retelling of How I
Met The Surrealists, and had been working up some new embellishment.

‘You see, in my considered opinion, those get-togethers … They all wanted to meet up and talk smut, but couldn’t admit it, so they said there was some scientific purpose behind it all. Fact is, they weren’t very good at talking smut. Inhibited, really, I suppose I’d say. Intellectuals. No fire in their veins, just ideas. Why, in my three years in the army…’

I will spare you this ritual diversion.

‘… so I could sense what they were after, but I wasn’t going to provide it. Almost like betraying your country, talking smut to a group of foreigners. Unpatriotic, don’t you think?’

‘Never tried it, Uncle.’

‘Ha. You’ve got a tongue on you tonight. Never tried it. That was just like them, wanting to know what I’d never tried. Trouble with their sort is, if you say you’ve never wanted to do so-and-so, they don’t believe you. In fact, just because you say you
don’t
want to do so-and-so, they assume that deep down this is what you’re busting to do. Cock-eyed, eh?’

‘Could be.’

‘So I thought it incumbent upon me to raise the tone of the gathering. Don’t laugh, I know what I’m saying. You wait till you find yourself sitting around with a lot of intellectuals all talking about John Thomas. So I said, “Here’s one to think about. What if there were two lasses who made love in the same way? Exactly the same way, so that if you closed your eyes you couldn’t tell the difference. Wouldn’t that be a thing?” I said. And with all their brains they hadn’t turned
up that conundrum before. It set them by the ears, I don’t mind telling you.’

I’m not surprised. It’s one of those questions you tend not to ask. Neither about yourself (is there somebody else out there who does it in a way indistinguishable from me?), nor about others. In sex, we observe distinctiveness not similarity. She/he is/was good/not so good/wonderful/bit boring/fakey, or whatever; but we don’t as a rule think, oh, being in bed with her was very much like being in bed with so-and-so a couple of years ago. In fact, if I were to close my eyes … We don’t, on the whole, think that way. Courtesy, in part, I expect; a desire to maintain the individuality of others. And perhaps, a fear that if you do that to them, they might start thinking the same back about you.

‘So my new chums fixed me up.’

‘…?’

‘They wanted to thank me for my contribution to their discussions. Seeing as I’d been so useful. Chappie I’d met in the bar said he’d be in touch.’

‘Surely the rally was about to start, Uncle?’ Well, it was hard to resist.

‘The next day he pitched up and said the group was offering me what he called a Surrealist gift. They were touched by the fact that I had not as yet enjoyed the favours of a French lass, and they were prepared to right this wrong.’

‘Remarkably generous.’ A remarkable fantasy is what I really thought.

‘He said they’d booked a room for me at three o’clock the next afternoon in a hotel off Saint-Sulpice. He said he’d be there too. I thought this a bit strange, but on the other hand, never look a gift-horse and all that. “What are you going to be there for?” I asked. “I don’t need my hand
holding.” So he explained the arrangement. They wanted me to take part in a test. They wanted to know if sex with a Frenchwoman was different from sex with an Englishwoman. I said why did they need me to help them find that out. They said they thought I’d have a more straightforward response. Meaning, I suppose, that I wouldn’t sit around and think about it all the time like they would.

‘I said, “Let me get this straight. You want me to have a couple of hours with a French lass and then come round the next day and tell you what I thought of it?” “No,” Chappie says, “Not the next day, day after. The
next
day we’ve booked you the same room with another girl.” “That’s handsome,” I say, “two French lasses for the price of one.” “Not quite,” he says, “one of them is English. You have to tell which is which.” “Well,” I say, “I can tell that just by saying Bonjour and looking at them.” “That’s why,” he says, “you aren’t allowed to say Bonjour and you aren’t allowed to look at them. I’ll be there when you arrive and blindfold you, then I’ll let the girl in. When she’s gone and you hear the door shut, you can take the blindfold off. How do you feel about that?”

‘How did I feel about that? Well, you could have knocked me down. I’d just been thinking, Don’t look a gift-horse in the mouth, and now it was a question of not looking two gift-horses in the mouth, or anywhere else. How did I feel? Man to man, I felt like a couple of Christmases had come round at the same time. Part of me wasn’t too partial to the blindfold business; though, man to man, another part of me rather was.’

Isn’t it pathetic how old men lie about the sex they had in earlier days? What could be more transparently an invention? Paris, youth, a woman,
two
women, a hotel room in
the afternoon, all set up and paid for by someone else? Pull the other one, Uncle. Twenty minutes in an
hotel de passe
with a rough hand-towel and a subsequent dose of clap is more like it. Why do old men need this sort of comfort? And what banal scenarios they drool out to themselves. OK, Uncle, fast forward with the soft porn. We’ll forget about navigating in the rally.

‘So I said count me in. And then next afternoon I went to this hotel behind Saint-Sulpice. It came on to rain and I had to run from the Metro station and got there in a muck sweat.’ This wasn’t bad - I’d been expecting a brilliant spring day with accordionists serenading him through the Jardins du Luxembourg. ‘I got to the room, Chappie was there, took off my hat and coat. Wasn’t planning to get starkers in front of mine host, as you might imagine. He said, “Don’t worry, she’ll do the rest.” He just sat me down on the bed, wrapped this scarf around my head, knotted it twice, made me promise as an Englishman not to do any peeping, and left the room. A couple of minutes later I heard the door open.’

My uncle put down his whisky, set his head back and closed his eyes, closing them to remember something he had not in any case seen. Indulgently, I let him drag out the pause. At last he said, ‘And then the next day. Again. Raining again too.’

The gas-fire noisily held its breath, the ice-cubes trilled promptingly in my glass. But Uncle Freddy didn’t seem to want to continue. Or perhaps he’d really stopped. That wouldn’t do. It was - how shall I put it? - like narrative cock-teasing.

‘So?’

‘So,’ my uncle repeated softly. ‘Just so.’

We sat quietly for a minute or two until I couldn’t avoid the question. ‘And what was the difference?’

Uncle Freddy, head back and eyes still squeezed together, uttered a noise between a sigh and a whimper. Eventually he said, ‘
The French lass licked the raindrops from my face
.’ He opened his eyes again, and showed me his tears.

I was strangely moved. I was also wearily suspicious, but this didn’t stop me being moved. The French lass licked the raindrops from my face. I gave my uncle - whether plausible liar or sentimental remembrancer - the gift of my envy.

‘You could tell?’

‘Tell what?’ He seemed half absent, being tweaked and tickled by memories.

‘Which one was English and which one was French?’

‘Oh yes, I could tell.’

‘How?’

‘How do you think?’

‘Smell of garlic?’

He chuckled. ‘No. They both wore scent as a matter of fact. Quite strong scent. Not the same, of course.’

‘So … they did different things? Or was it the way they did it?’

‘Trade secret.’ Now he was beginning to look smug again.

‘Come off it, Uncle Freddy.’

‘Always made it a rule never to snitch on my lady friends.’

‘Uncle Freddy, you never set eyes on them. They were provided for you. They weren’t your lady friends.’

‘They were to me. Both of them. That’s what they felt like. That’s what I’ve always considered them.’

This was exasperating, not least because I’d been drawn into giving credence to my uncle’s fantasy. And what was the
point of inventing a story and then withdrawing the key facts?

‘But you can tell me, Uncle, because you told them.’

‘Them?’

‘The group. You reported to them the next day.’

‘Well, an Englishman’s word is his bond except when it isn’t. You’ve lived long enough to know that. And besides … the truth is I had a feeling, not so much the first time but more strongly the second, that I was being watched.’

‘Someone in the wardrobe?’

‘I don’t know. How, where. Just sensed it, somehow. It made me feel a bit grubby. And as I say, I made it a rule never to snitch on my lady friends. So I took the boat-train home the next day.’

Forgetting about the motor-rally, or the career in authentic wax polish, or whatever else it might have been.

‘And
that’
, my uncle continued, ‘was the cleverest thing I ever did.’ He looked at me as if his whole story had been aimed at this moment. ‘Because that’s where I met your Aunt Kate. On the boat-train.’

‘I never knew that.’

‘No reason why you should. Engaged within the month, married within three.’

A busy spring indeed. ‘And what did
she
think of your adventure?’

His face shut down again. ‘Your Aunt Kate was as pure as driven snow. I’d no more have talked about that than … pick my teeth in public.’

‘You never told her?’

‘Never breathed a word. Anyway, imagine it from her side. She meets this likely fellow, gets a bit soft on him, asks what he’s been up to in Paris, and he tells her he’s been
knocking off lasses at the rate of one a day after promising to go back afterwards and talk smut about them. She’d not be soft on him for long, would she?’

In my limited observation, Aunt Kate and Uncle Freddy had been a devoted couple. His grief at her death, even when exaggerated into melodrama by drink, had seemed quite genuine. The fact that he survived her by six years I attributed to no more than the enforced habit of living. Two months after this final birthday evening, he gave up that habit. The funeral was the usual sparse and awkward business: a Surrealist wreath with an obscene motif might have helped.

Five years later the
Recherches sur la sexualité
appeared, and my uncle’s story was partly corroborated. My curiosity and frustration were also revived; I was left staring at the same old questions. I resented the fact that my uncle had clammed up, leaving me with nothing but
The French lass licked the raindrops from my face
.

As I have mentioned, my uncle’s encounter with the Surrealist Group was relegated to a mere appendix. The
Recherches
are of course extensively annotated: preface, introduction, text, appendices, footnotes to text, footnotes to appendices, footnotes to footnotes. Probably I am the only person to have spotted something which is at most only of family interest. Footnote 23 to Session 5(a) states that the Englishman referred to as ‘T.F.’ was on one occasion the subject of what is described as an ‘attempted vindication of Surrealist theory (cf. note 12 to Appendix 3)’, but that no record of the results obtained has survived. Footnote 12 to Appendix 3 describes these ‘attempted vindications’ and mentions that in a few of them there was an Englishwoman involved. This woman is referred to simply as ‘K’.

I have only two final reflections on the matter. The first
is that when scientists employ volunteers to help with their research projects, they often withhold from these participants the true purpose of the test, for fear such knowledge might, wittingly or unwittingly, affect the purity of the process and the accuracy of the result.

The second thought came to me only quite recently. I may have mentioned that I take a novice interest in wine. I belong to a small group which meets twice a month: we each take along a bottle and the wines are tasted blind. Usually we get them wrong, sometimes we get them right, though what is wrong and what is right in this matter is a complicated business. If a wine tastes to you like a young Australian Chardonnay, then that in a sense is what it is. The label may subsequently declare it to be an expensive burgundy, but if it hasn’t been that in your mouth, then that is what it can never truly become.

This isn’t quite what I meant to say. I meant to say that a couple of weeks ago we had a guest tutor. She was a well-known Master of Wine, and she told us an interesting fact. Apparently if you take a magnum and decant it into two separate bottles and put them into a blind tasting, then it’s extremely rare for even wily drinkers to guess that the wine in those two particular bottles is in fact the same one. People expect all the wines to be different, and their palates therefore insist that they are. She said it was a most revealing experiment, and that it almost always works.

M
ELON