Dance While You Can (12 page)

Only just managing not to groan, I looked around, trying desperately to dredge up another piece of mind-boggling profundity. When I looked back at her she was still watching me. The moisture on her lips caught the sunlight, and she had unclipped her hair.

‘I think there would be,’ she said, and smiled. ‘I want to be naked. I want you to be naked.’

I felt my penis swell at her words, and reached out to touch her. Her mouth was already open, and as I pushed my tongue deep inside, she took my hand and placed it on the small mound of her breast. ‘Harder,’ she groaned, as I began to rotate her nipple between my finger and thumb. ‘Harder.’

Quickly I leapt over the stile. Her hands slipped down to my waist and she was unzipping my fly. I was solid by now, and could feel the blood pulsating through me. She pushed at my trousers, dragging them down over my thighs, then reached up to slip off her T-shirt. I fumbled with the zip on her jeans, but she pushed me away. ‘I’ll do it,’ she said. ‘Undress with me.’

Naked, we walked into the field beyond. The corn came to our waist, but there was no one around to see us. After a while she stopped, and sank to her knees. Her face was on a level with my penis, and lifting it away from my belly, she covered it with her mouth. I held her head and moved with her, feeling her teeth rub against me. After a while she let me go and looked up into my face. I pushed her back and lay down beside her, manoeuvring myself to kiss her behind the clutch of blonde pubic hair.

I waited until I felt her muscles start to contract, then sat up quickly, holding her legs apart ready to enter her. She licked my lips, sinking her teeth gently into them, and clawed her nails across my buttocks. I positioned myself above her, then making her look into my eyes, I thrust into her with all my might. She screamed out. I thrust again, paused, then again. I knew I was hurting her, but she cried out for more. I was going to come soon, but she wasn’t there yet, and I wanted to make her scream out again – scream and scream. She looked up at me and I saw she was laughing. ‘Think of your life, Alexander. Think of everything in it and use it, push it into me. I want it all.’

I lowered my head and kissed her savagely on the mouth, then grabbed her legs and pushed them up, so high her knees were almost on her shoulders. ‘That’s it, oh yes,’ she groaned. ‘I can feel you coming to me. All of you. Use it, Alexander! Use it to fuck me!’ I was looking down into her face, it was contorted with lust. ‘Was she as good as this?’ she snarled. ‘Your gypsy?’

I stopped dead.

She laughed. ‘Is that who you’re thinking of now?’ she said, writhing beneath me and twisting her fingers through my hair. ‘The gypsy slut?’

My hands slipped round her throat, almost strangling her, then with all the strength I had left I hammered into her, so hard that she cried out for me to stop. But I kept on going, thrust after thrust, driving her into the ground, crushing her beneath me, and not looking at, her once. Let her scream, let her struggle, she was going to pay for that mistake. And then my climax was upon me, crushing me, blinding me, choking me, and it was my voice that cried out – a single name – as my body exploded into hers.

She was trapped beneath me. When she tried to move, I felt sickened and rolled over on to my back. I could hear her breathing, and after a while she started to move again. Finally she pulled my face round to hers. She was masturbating.

‘Watch me,’ she whispered.

I felt only disgust. She saw it, and laughed. Then her back arched from the ground, and she moaned as waves of orgasm surged through her body. I watched her, hating her.

‘So her name’s Elizabeth, is it?’ she said, as we stood at the stile putting our clothes on. She was pulling on her jeans, and seeing her slight body writhe its way into them, I had to fight the urge to crush her with my hands.

‘You’re still angry,’ she said, when I didn’t answer. ‘Just think for a moment, Alexander, and you will see that your anger was the purpose to our love-making. You needed to face up to your pain.’

‘What pain? You don’t know what the hell you’re talking about, so just shut up!’

‘You’re angry inside, Alexander, it’s why you’re the way you are. You need to face it, and I want to help you. I told the Federation I could, and I think I have, though maybe you don’t realise it yet.’

‘Federation! Do you mean to say you’ve been discussing me at your lesbian orgies! You’re sick, do you know that?’

‘No, Alexander, it’s you who are sick. In the way you abuse women, you’re sick. And by abusing us you’re abusing yourself. I was right, it’s because you still yearn for the gypsy. Does it hurt terribly?’

I turned away. ‘Poor Alexander,’ she cooed.

‘Shall we change the subject,’ I snapped.

‘Sure. But if I can face it, and handle it, why can’t you? After all, if we’re going to get married I’m going to have to live with her too, aren’t I?’

I spun round. ‘If we’re what!’

She was laughing, and I’d never hated anyone so much since the day I found out the truth about Elizabeth.

She started to climb the stile and I grabbed her arm. ‘You’d better get this into your head now, Jessica. I’ve no intention of marrying you, or anyone else for that matter. So –’

‘OK,’ she said, and dropping a kiss on my cheek, she skipped over the stile and began running back across the field.

– 11 –

I hated her, yet I was obsessed by her. The harder I tried to stay away the more I found myself going to her. It was as if she had spun a web and trapped me; when she felt like it she crept out of her lair, sated her lust on me, and then discarded me. Weeks turned into months and still I was seeing her. Her independence and elusiveness almost drove me out of my mind. Her quest to find a purpose in life continued and she made it clear that this was something more than I could supply. Her need for identity, recognition, a status, was the source of endless fights between us, but she could no more stay away from me than I could from her.

Henry despised her, but that only served to make her more acceptable to me. When she and I decided to move from our respective colleges and find ourselves a small house on the outskirts of Oxford I thought it was going to be the end of my friendship with him.

‘You’re insane,’ he yelled at me, standing in the doorway of my room as I packed.

‘Maybe,’ I said, taking the Ensor from the wall and grimacing as I remembered the first night I had met Jessica.

‘She’s no good, Alexander. She’s sleeping with other men, you know that, don’t you?’

I nodded. ‘Yep, I know that.’

He punched his fist against the wall. ‘How can you just shrug it off? Jesus, I don’t think I know you any more.’

I laughed at that. ‘This is beginning to sound like a lover’s tiff, Henry.’

He didn’t even smile. His eyes were brilliant and I could see that he was struggling with himself. I turned away and began stuffing my shaving equipment into a bag.

‘It’s Elizabeth, isn’t it?’ he suddenly burst out.

I turned back to him, my razor still in my hand. This was a forbidden subject between us, and had been since before we left Foxton’s.

‘It’s Elizabeth. Jessica’s told me all about it. She lets you think of Elizabeth when you’re screwing her, doesn’t she?’

I felt the blood draining from my face. ‘You’re out of your mind —’

‘No! It’s you who’s out of your mind. Listen, do you know why she does it? Why she lets you carry on this insane delusion? It’s so that you will never completely own her. So that she can walk out on you whenever she feels like it. She’s using you, Alexander. You’re her cause, her challenge. If she can conquer you, break you even, she’ll have scored
the
great victory for womankind.’

‘You don’t know what you’re talking about.’

‘I bloody do. I’m Not Fodder for the Male Chauvinist Pig! Christ, it’s emblazoned all over her T-shirt! She’s made you a laughing stock, Alexander, the way you go running around after her. And you don’t really think you’re going to get Elizabeth out of your system by – ’

‘Out of my system! What in hell’s name are you talking about? So I made a mistake when I was a kid – why can’t you do as I did years ago, and forget it? And as for all that crap about – ’

‘It’s not crap. Jessica told me herself, she’s told everybody. What is it she does for you, Alexander? Put on a nurse’s uniform?’

‘For Christ’s sake!’ I yelled.

Henry’s face was white. His eyes fell to the razor I was still holding. ‘Why don’t you use it now?’ he said. ‘Slit your wrists and be done with it, before Jessica does it for you. Because take it from me, Alexander, she’ll destroy you.’

Before I could answer he had stalked out of the room, slamming the door behind him.

I didn’t see him for several weeks after that, but I was so busy with Jessica I had no time to think about him. Intellectually my life took a new turn as I entered her bohemian world of artists and writers, and languished away the days posing nude while she stood at her easel creating unrecognisable portraits of me. This was her surrealist period.

The novelty of living together soon wore off though, as Jessica started to introduce her feminist friends – the lesbian brigade, as I irreverently called them – into our house, and returned to her old habit of attending women’s rallies in far flung corners of the country. At that time the Women’s Liberal Federation, the organisation she belonged to, was trying to bring about government legislation for equal pay. They had plenty of other causes too such as free contraception, maternity rights for working mothers, laws against sexual harassment in the workplace, Jessica’s old favourite about allowing women to join the Stock Exchange – in fact so many that I often lost track of what Jessica was doing, and got fed up with the endless political wrangling that I seemed to get caught up in whenever she was at home. It wasn’t that I didn’t believe in what she was trying to do, it was just that I was growing a little weary of helping her cope with the basic contradictions in her behaviour. On the one hand she believed passionately in every one of the Federation’s feminist ideals, but on the other, she was not only living with one of the common enemy, she was actually falling in love with him. She could not come to terms with this – and nor could I. It wasn’t as if I expected her to cook for me, wash up after me, iron for me, they were all tasks I could and did perform for myself; but sometimes, when she was feeling particularly warm towards me, Jessica insisted on doing these things. She did them because she loved me, because she wanted to do them, that was what she said at the time – but afterwards she would fly into a terrible rage and nothing I could do or say would convince her that she hadn’t drastically diminished her status as a modern, liberated woman. All men wanted women for was to slave for them, she’d yell at me; they wanted to parade them as status symbols, and then drive them home and father children on them in their own image. There was nothing to compare with the arrogance and stupidity of the male ego! And all this because she had darned a hole in one of my socks, so small that I hadn’t even noticed it was there.

After an altercation that very nearly came to blows just because I asked her to post a letter for me, I walked out of the house. I was sorely in need of male company. I sought out Henry and in no time at all we were slapping each other on the back as if our quarrel had never taken place. Robert Lyttleton, a chap who had come up from Eton a year after us, and knew Henry’s family was now occupying my old room. The three of us began to spend a lot of time together, mostly at Brown’s or the King’s Arms. And Parson’s Pleasure was a convenient male-only retreat that I frequented because I knew it annoyed Jessica.

This isn’t to say that I stopped living with Jessica, of course. Our erratic and eccentric relationship continued along its rocky path, painfully cemented by a compelling mix of hatred and lust. I thrived on the way I could torment her because she loved me; she tried desperately not to mind about the other women I had – and hit back by taking lovers herself. I, at least, was happy with the way we were, and didn’t intend to change it.

So when, after Finals, I had the idea of inviting Miss Angrid up to Oxford for the weekend, no one was more surprised by the suggestion than me. From the look on his face, Henry was pretty flabbergasted too.

‘Just think of the old dragon,’ I said, before he could say anything, ‘waddling her way round college telling everyone to stop biting their nails and tuck their shirts in. It’ll be a kill.’

‘Where will she stay?’

I shrugged. ‘Why not with me and Jessica?’

Henry’s eyes widened, and I realised that perhaps that wasn’t such a good idea. This was confirmed later when Jessica rounded on me and demanded to know how she was expected to cope with a morbid old bag of a matron hanging round her all day. Why on earth had I invited her in the first place – or was I just kinky about matrons?

In fact I had been having second thoughts about the invitation, but after that jibe I went ahead and composed a letter to Miss Angrid the same night. The following week I received a reply saying she’d love to come, and could I book her into that nice Eastgate hotel – the Ruskin suite if I could manage it – where she had stayed the last time she had been up.

On our four-hundred-and-twenty-pounds-a-year grant, plus the six hundred pounds allowance we each received from our fathers, Henry and I managed to stretch to the Ruskin suite, and I was at the station to meet Miss Angrid on the designated Saturday. I was annoyed to find how nervous I was at the prospect of seeing her again, and silently berated Jessica for forcing me into it. And the fact that my heart gave an Olympic-style somersault as Miss Angrid stepped off the train annoyed me even further. However, the situation was saved by the Mercedes. She made no comment, except to purse her lips and glance at me over the top of her new spectacles, but it was a look I remembered so well that I very nearly threw my arms around her and danced her round the car park.

Henry was waiting at the hotel and leapt from his seat when he saw us come in. He then proceeded very nearly to buckle his back by trying to sweep her off her feet. Her face was beaming so hard it looked painful.