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gestures seem to me a negligible improvement on misshapen or ill-assorted limbs. I see little to choose between subsultory mastication (or twitchy mealtime banter) and rotten teeth (or scum-lined lips). Post-coital tears disgust me as thoroughly as do pre-menstrual pimples. And the dreadful things they
say
. They keep trying to understand you; they keep wanting to talk about proper things; they keep trying to be people. We take it, we talk to them back. We’re not supposed to let on that, for all their many charms, they just aren’t very interesting.
    Has Terence said anything about my sexual dispositions? No doubt he has. Well, I won’t deny it. If it’s a ‘sexual equal’ I want — i.e. a boy, and a boy’s unyielding musculature — then it’s a sexual equal I go ahead and have, rather than a thing with breasts that happens to urinate sitting down. (Terence will stick up for them, of course. The pungent witches whom he tends to squire are, expectably, among the heroines of this unhappy genre.) What I like are moneyed chasubles of silence, soft topography of flesh, the trickle of retreating satin and the white avenues of underwear, the mute secrets of dew and down.
    Imagine, then, my incredulous horror on discovering the true colours of this Miranda, this jumpy little idiot whose immediate transfer I have gulled Terence into accepting (a tedious mode of dismissal, you may think, but a relatively painless one. I detest scenes). It was at a noisy after-dinner party in the flat of my fashionable friend Torka that I incautiously made her acquaintance. Tired, stifled, and almost completely exasperated byAdrian’s vulgar rot, I was at first perfectly willing to give some of my time to a young, deferential and — I concede — reasonably pretty girl who seemed to be prepared to refill my glass and to take an intelligent interest in my work and opinions. She stood there; she listened; her teeth were clean. Only when I offered to drive her home in my powerful green car did the nightmare truly begin. She stuck with a kind of dumb immobility to my side throughout the entire course of the party — even when the famous Torka tried to pry me loose for a chat — kissed me with repulsive candour on the stairs, and then blandly announced, as my handsome sports car roared into life, that she had missed the last train back to the provinces and had nowhere in London to stay! I’m never, ever, going to fall for that one again.
    I was putty in her hands. I always am. ‘I don’t want to hurt their feelings.’ Why don’t I? What feelings? I don’t mind if they hurt
my
feelings. They’ve got no more feelings than I have. Miranda is just a bloke, anyway, like me, the mad bitch.
    The physical aspect of what happened next — and went on happening practically every night for the following two weeks — has already been adequately delineated by me. I think that one is entitled — no? — to a reasonable helping of startled indignation when an eighteen-year-old girl has a dented backside, tropical armpits
and stringy white lines on the undercurves of her breasts
. That first morning she sprang out of bed — having had her noisome way with me — and knelt naked before the bookcase, rummaging in her bag for some item that her genes loved. I watched, dressing her with my eyes. Her bottom is quite out of control, I thought; and I can’t take the smell she has down there. It’s not her fault, I know. It’s her nerves’ fault.
    An even stronger threat to my ease, however, was what one might call the girl’s character. Not yet twenty, and each turn in her conversation opened up a chapter of wretchedness and squalor in her past — an infatuationunrequited, a pass snubbed, a pocket of pleasureless promiscuities (fifty men in two years,
and
she admitted it). Small wonder that I’ve seriously hated her ever since that first impact. I hate it when she comes near. When she touches me I close my eyes and pray for patience. When we make