As Near as I Can Get Read Free Page A

assurance of my own robustness (and I had frequently felt weak for my size), her vigourous, exclamatory and inevitably inconclusive struggles, rare voluptuous abandon. I had been ashamed of her earlier, when we had left the glowing saloon of the ‘Starling’, to walk holding hands (she had fumbled first for mine) towards Piccadilly, crazed with light, down into the tiled abyss, side by side, to twist and roar through the entrails of night, towards her station. Being ashamed, I had been sullen. Ricky had taken her home last year or the year before. Mike Sampson had known her. Who hadn’t? When she had been fleshed and pretty, it seemed to me, all the watchful prowlers in the pubs and clubs had left with her on one night or another. And it was only now, when she was ruined with narcotics, that I got a chance.
    What was the name? Celia, Celia Bridges, a fresh, staring girl with a sharp nose and a good figure whom I had once succeeded in getting back to my room and whose breath had proved to be so foul, and whose teeth, on surreptitious inspection, so decayed, that I had been unable to repeat an initial kiss. And, in spite of half-hearted attempts at prevarication, Celia had known, when we had parted without further intimacy, a little later, that I had found her repulsive.
    As we approached Milly’s flatlet from the underground station, down a winding, bus-loud road, and she began to squeeze my hand and give signs of strong, impulsive physical attraction, I remembered Celia, and how I might have hurt her, and hoped fervently that I wouldn’t reveal to Milly,when we were close, that I found her thin beyond the point of desirability.
    â€˜Thin, aren’t you?’ I said, after she had sat down across my lap in the arm-chair and wriggled and hugged me until I had taken her up, as a father might his overtired daughter, and carried her to the bed. ‘Just skin and bone.’
    Strangely uncircumspect, having discovered a tenderness that balanced my persisting revulsion at her thinness, I found for an hour I could be natural.
    â€˜Lay off the drugs. You’ll waste away completely. There’s not much of you left now.’
    â€˜Pneumonia,’ she informed me, ‘pneumonia, and then I was in a home.’
    No drugs, just germs, lethal colonies of microscopic parasites, and germs in the head, of fact more astonishing than fable, impermanence, warring germs of arbitrary value for which no antibiotic of unifying principle had yet turned up in the laboratory of twentieth-century thought. The sky raged with planes. Above ten thousand tubs of geraniums, and starview diners sipping cocktails, over the flaring beacons of commerce, and the quaint domes of an archaic architecture, screamed the havoc bringers.
    Though plane and bomb are big, the pilot is a wee, technique-cramped fellow whose will is the will of the corporation, and whose pleasure and whose pain are but ripples on the surface of the world’s hard-worn reservoir of feeling.
    And anyway, whatever I had failed to conceal of my feelings, I don’t think Milly would have noticed. The short, feverish caresses and gasped endearments were not for me but for any pleasure-promising male physique. But not pleasure-providing, it seemed, unless pleasure is only inspissated excitement. Someone rustled hurriedly down to the telephone a floor or two below and then talked urgently, a betrayed, angrily betrayed, girl from (the flat drawl revealed ) the island-continent of Australia, insisting that ‘I did speak to Ethel. Don’t tell me I couldn’t have done! Idid! Well, I’m not going to stand much more. Where are you now?’
    â€˜Darling,’ said Milly, panted Milly, moaned Milly, struggling in folds of the chiffon with which, to no achieved purpose of modesty, she was still entwined, as she attempted to enlace me anew in her thin limbs, ‘Oh! This thing—off—take it off——’
    She was too slight and