Chapter 9

This book is dedicated to one subject, so I will not waste words on the sights of Paris: the phallic Eiffel Tower or the pelvic arches of Notre Dame. I saw them, of course, and the Cafe Flore and the Deux Magots and the Ddme. I enjoyed the food and wine and loved the sight of lovers in tight, steamy, unashamed embraces in public places. I looked with joy at the banned books along the banks of the Seine, and saluted a free country. I spare you the details: smoke a Gauloise and recall them for yourself. I will spare you also the description of our "business" activities: interviews with tedious people and some pleasant book-hunting in the National library.

Rex took me to a dive one night. Mark excused himself from this expedition. We went because I begged for this treat, which I could not have found for myself. Rex's French, Rex's money and Rex's "contacts" were essential.

A negro played melancholy chords on the piano, while we drank Pernod and watched the strange "ballet." This consisted of two girls, high-yellows or quadroons, having a slow-motion lesbian love affair in rhythm. One was slim and played the passive role: she had a pretty mouth, with attractive thick upturned lips, a pair of long supple thighs and the breasts of a girl just developing into adolescence, though she looked about twenty. The other woman was older, short and stout, and looked as muscular as a slaughterman. She had a ferociously ugly face and a very forceful style of movement. When she pretended to come between the younger one's legs she did so in a wild spasm, and appeared to be chewing the girl's nipple in her strong jaws. The pianist, who had a sense of humour, marked the climax with a long descending ripple of notes and a sharp discord.

It all made me shudder a bit: it was so bogus, it had such a taint of sadism, and the slaughterwoman was so very repulsive.

There was only one really pretty girl in the joint, and she was surrounded by three of the most alarming desperadoes I had ever seen: I imagined a knife in my back if I so much as smiled at that delicious morsel with her small piquant face and big round eyes. Were those toughs going to possess her? It would be a rape, and she would be in hospital with multiple injuries!

However, we drank, I became hazy, there was some dancing, and I found myself partnering a not unattractive girl, who turned out to be English. She was tallish, with a good figure, and had fair hair flopping over one eye. She wore hardly anything, and her dancing was so close and insinuating that I felt like a rabbit in the snake's coils. Seeing that I was half-drunk and didn't know my way around, she organised everything, drew me behind a plush curtain and upstairs into a "particular room," with bed and bidet. I thought, here goes, my first professional tart! I was tottering more than a little on my feet. She kindly helped me to undress.

"What's your name?" I asked.

"Dorothy."

It would be. A very English name to suit a very English girl.

She wiped off her lipstick with a face-flannel, remarking that I wouldn't want that stuff on me. I was astonished at this considerate touch.

I undressed her-it didn't take long-and she mean while ran her hands over me, praising and flattering me. My prick was flabby, but she professed to admire it, and my balls, extravagantly: and her talk and her caresses were certainly a tonic!

She did not rush me, at any rate in the preliminaries, the "heats"! She let me dally awhile, kissing her and playing with her resilient breasts. When we were lying naked in bed together, and her hands were fondling my cock, she wanted to talk. The little waiter, who was queer, had found out already that Rex was the same, and the word had reached Dorothy, who wanted to know whether I had ever done anything in that line. I did not mind telling her, and she seemed delighted. She asked me whether I enjoyed the "exhibition" by the two coloured women. I said yes, and asked whether they were genuine lesbians. She said the younger one had men as well, but the elder only had girls. Dorothy admitted having submitted herself-"She's marvellous, she seems to go right through you," she said. I came to the conclusion that Dorothy had not gone on the game simply for the money-she had an avid, perverse interest in sex and its variations.

She dived down the bed and with a darting tongue she licked my thighs, my balls, the stem of my prick from base to dp and then drew the whole knob into her mouth. She gave it tiny alarming toothnips, while her tongue flickered round it. And all the time I thought of birds.

| That morning by the Seine I had watched a swan treading another, and here in the case-house was an inferior but erotic picture on the wall of the divine swan treading Leda.

It happened that I had asked Rex, who knew everything, how birds copulated. "Just like lesbians," he said. They did everything through the same slit, and when it came to mating, the male mounted the female, pressing his slit on to hers, which she reared up beneath him, Then he pressed out the inner wall of his hole so that it fitted inside hers, like a flange, and shot his white sperm into her.

So Leda and the swan was physically quite possible. And I thought of that slaughterwoman, protruding her inner lips into Dorothy's cunt, in their "marvellous" embraces. Birds, and Leda, and Sappho of Lesbos with her schoolgirls, and these tarts in their ferocious pleasures -all these images tumbled round in my half-drunk brain, and my excitement became frenzied. My mood changed from passive to active, very suddenly. I pulled Dorothy up the bed and turned her on her back.

"Take this, then!" I panted, thrusting it into her.

I thought, what they tell you about tarts having slack cunts, like horsecollars, is simply not true: and I didn't care whether they used alum or had stitches put in to tighten them up, as people said. All I knew was that Dorothy fitted like a glove on my modest instrumento, or like the coils of the proverbial snake, till I had sensations that I did not know I could have. Her bum was squirming and her fingernails scrawled my back: she gripped and quivered and shimmied.

"O Christ!" she moaned, her mouth slavering: "Go on, go on, O honey, it's marvellous, O God, I've never had it like this before. O it's too hard, it's too hot, you're burning me, I can't bear it, go on, go on!"

If I was half drunk I was also half sober. It was suddenly obvious to me that she wanted to hurry me on, she was trying to make me come quickly, and she knew the art. But I wanted to prolong it, and the fuck became a terrific battle between us, a tug-of-war, with Dorothy pulling me towards an orgasm with all the strength of her womb, and I keeping up the pistonstrokes but trying with my mind to hold back the eager juices in my balls and not let the climax arrive too soon.

I could feel the sweat running between our soft bellies, which made a laughable squelch sometimes, like a smacking kiss, when they parted and came together again. The smell of her cunty sweat filled my nostrils with a strong exciting tang, too strong for all her perfume to quench it.

"Quick, quick!" she cried, "I want to come!"

Was she really excited at all? Most likely it was all an act. I had to credit her with being a wonderful actress, then. By way of prolonging the shag, and not letting myself go under too soon, I thought about it, and tried to decide whether she was genuinely enjoying it or just pretending. If it was a pretence, she certainly meant me to be a satisfied customer. But she wanted it over quickly no doubt so that she could get on to the next client: some tough like those I had seen downstairs!

My reason said she was play-acting; but my body wanted to believe it was real! It was so flattering, the idea that I could give thrills to a professional, who had slept with half Paris.

Good heavens, what was she doing now? Drawing up her knees, sliding her feet up my belly till she had her legs over my shoulders and was doubled up like the letter V under me, and one hand round the back pressing my balls against her bum-hole. I felt as if I had gone several yards deeper into her, and wouldn't have been surprised to see my prick coming up through her throat. And the muscles inside her started a rhythmic rolling that quickened my prick to a new sensitivity.

"I'm coming, O darling, I'm coming!" she breathed, and bit my lip lightly with sharp little teeth. So was I, by this time; the stimulation was too great, I couldn't have held out for another second. My pounding synchronized with hers, and I felt the wave swim up the channel of my cock and break into her with a gorgeous rush.

She let me pant there on her breast nil I got my breath back. Then she became businesslike, went straight to the douche.

I sponged myself down and got dressed again. I couldn't help asking her, "Did you really enjoy it?"

"Of course," she said. But was it true? I should never know.

"I'll tell you one thing," she said. "You're not a queer."

She was applying her make-up again as she said this. I did not reply: what could I say? She added, "I thought you were, to start with. You're just having a good time, all round, aren't you?"

I would have tried to explain that I didn't accept the modern categories-that I didn't think it was queer to be queer, for one thing-but she had put it so simply that I didn't bother.

Besides, I was thinking about her accent, the way she said that phrase, "to start with." I asked her where she came from. Just as I suspected: my own home town!

All the way to Paris, for a bit of home cooking.

But she has the Parisian recipes, I consoled myself.

Dorothy was extremely pleased when she found we came from the same place. She was no longer in a hurry, she sat down and gave me a cigarette and chattered like mad about the cafes and pubs, and what bands played in the local dance-halls. She told me she was a fruit merchant's daughter, and ran away from school, and was turned out by her parents after she was found picking up motorists on the by-pass. Then she hitchhiked to London and got a job in a night-club... she talked on and on, in a natural, homely way, so natural that I was convinced that everything before was acdng, repeated for every client. Now she was being natural because I had stopped being a client and become a person, a fellow-citizen. This depressed me. Drink, sex and life had all gone cold on me, and time was draining away.

"Come on," I said. "I can't stay here all night."

She looked a bit hurt, but she was used to doing what men wanted. She led me downstairs again, where we were eagerly awaited, she by the angry proprietor and I by the impatient Rex.

Rex looked at his watch. "Either you've done everything, there is, or you couldn't manage anything," he said drily.

The next day, prompted by my vanity, I began to say to myself again, "Perhaps she really did enjoy it, after all?" And then I thought: "You can never know for certain. That's prostitution."

Well, there it was. I had had my first experience of that ancient institution, which has been so many things to so many people.

Flaubert wrote to his mistress: "It is perhaps a depraved taste, but I love prostitution, and for itself, too, quite apart from what there is underneath. My heart begins to pound every time I see one of those flashily-dressed women walking in the lamplight in the rain... The idea of prostitution is a meeting-point of so many elements-lust, bitterness, complete absence of human contact, muscular frenzy, the clink of gold-that to peer into it deeply makes one reel. One learns so many things in a brothel, and feels such sadness, and dreams so longingly of love!"

Perhaps I didn't peer deeply enough, but I didn't feel such extreme sadness, or dream so longingly of love. I suppose I could have been bitter, when I suspected Dorothy of pretending an orgasm when she didn't have one-but wasn't that the kind of deception I was paying for? (or rather, Rex was paying for)! As for complete absence of human contact-Flaubert didn't happen to meet a tart from his own home town. Lust, yes, muscular frenzy, yes; but the rainy lamplight and the clink of gold, no, they belong to the past, or to some French film about the Nineties seen at Studio One or the Cameo-Poly.

by the way, I'm told that Ovid, that great ancient authority on the arts of love, disapproved of women who pretend to come. But it's better than those who don't even pretend to enjoy it, surely!

When we got back, Mark was waiting. He took Rex aside and spoke to him. I heard various French names, including "Cocteau." Rex came over and said to me: "I want you to excuse me, Bobbin, while I look in at a party with Mark-you go on to bed, you must be tired out

I could not even bring myself to answer, and went to bed without a word, so angry that it took me a long time to get to sleep.

The next day in the Rue de Rivoli I met Flora and Joan. They were shopping under the arcades. I asked them to come to supper with us the next evening. Flora looked surprised, but agreed, subject to a telephone call to confirm it. We had an aperitif together, and I tried to see Joan's nipples down the front of her dress while her mother slyly felt the muscles of my left thigh. We both had to rely mainly on our imagination.

When I told Rex I had asked them to supper, he became very lofty with me, said he was surprised I had not asked him first, and added that it was quite impossible. When I asked why, he said, "There are many things you don't understand." I pressed for an explanation. He said Mark was coming to supper, and we couldn't have them at the same time. Flora had done Mark a deadly injury years before, something that could never be forgiven. He refused to give me further details, and I lost my temper and expressed my own opinions about Mark. Rex suddenly cried: "Shut up!" and slapped my face, as if I were a naughty child. Possibly I ought to have hit back, but I just could not strike him. I tore out of the room.

I knew by now that everything was really finished. I did not hate Rex, all my spleen was directed against Mark.

Flora took it very smoothly when I rang up to cancel the invitation. "That's perfectly all right, dear boy, you come here instead and dine with us. We're in the Avenue Victor Hugo, you know, near the Place de l'Etoile."

I told Rex I was going for the day, though my invitation was actually only for the evening. I spent the day roving about Paris on my own, boulevarding, drinking instead of eating, wondering what to do about Rex and the trip to Abyssinia, and trying to turn my angry thoughts in the direction of Joan, with her big laughing eyes and her well-sprung breasts. I was as drunk as a fiddler's bitch by the evening. Everything becomes very easy when one reaches that state. I found the apartment without any trouble at all. Every door sprang open, the lift delivered me on the mat. Flora and Joan tittered as I teetered in. Even the servant was not too discreet to smile.

The rooms were very grand, in a tasteless sort of way. Snowy linen, showy silver and all that sort of thing, and electric candles in real eighteenth-century candlesticks to illuminate the dinner-table, with its pyramid of fruit and its winebottles lolling in ice.

The carpet made your feet feel as if you were walking on a sheep's back, and there was a lot of ochre velvet and black silk about. As for Joan and her mother, a pleasing quantity of woman seemed to be escaping from their tight casings. Soft jazz was coming from somewhere invisible. I began to forget my troubles and relax.

They fussed over me very nicely, those two ladies, and we had cocktails, after which I scarcely noticed what I ate. I know it began with fresh salmon, iced, and that there was a very buttery dish of little peas, and that 1 had a large wine-goblet which got itself refilled all the time without any prompting from me. I remember wondering whether Flora introduced Spanish fly or some other aphrodisiacs into the food, and looking back I think it quite possible she did: she was that sort of person. Myself, I've hardly needed those things up to now, though the day is doubtless approaching...

As we were drinking coffee and fine, a friend of Joan's arrived, a young French woman painter, rather plain, with a crooked nose and jutting lips. She spoke English badly, in a low timid voice and looked nervously at me and Flora. Perhaps she was conscious that she was poorer than Joan and Flora, and more cheaply dressed. Joan led her very courteously in the conversation, helping her to express herself.

Presently they talked a little in French and then went out together, explaining that there was an artist they had to see at the Dome.

"My dear," said Flora when they had gone, "they're so hopelessly in love, they simply have to be alone together, they can't bear anybody else's company. Why don't they simply say so and have done with it? This is Paris, after all! But no, they have to invent an artist they want to see at the Dome."

I was a bit jolted by this, but tried not to show it My head was swimming very nicely and nothing mattered very much.

One more drink, and I began pouring out my troubles to Flora, who laid my head on her bosom and was very comforting. I told her I was through with Rex, and yet was dependent on him.

"Forget him, come with us to Ischia," she suggested.

Why not? I really thought I might. "Could I pick up a living there?" I asked her.

"Dear boy, you could pick up anything, there," she said.

I asked her what was the injury she was supposed to have done to Mark, years ago.

"I? to him?" she almost screamed. "Why, the miserable child tried to blackmail me! I had to threaten him with the police! O the unutterable swine!"

I seemed to have stepped into deep and dirty water, so I asked no more questions.

I was now letting time drift along and putting my sorrows out of mind. We joked a little. Flora's body was reclining very close to mine. She turned the pages of a bunch of sexy magazines, Paris-Bcautt and ParisHollywood. In one of the latter was a picture of a girl fully dressed except for her panties, riding a bicycle. One could imagine, if not actually see, the nub or horn of the saddle sinking into her labia. The bare cheeks of her bottom overflowed the back of the saddle in two soft flanges, deliriously.

"O my God, look at that!" Flora said. "Do you know, when I was a young girl I had to give up riding a bicycle, I simply couldn't stand it, and I dared not tell my mother the reason."

I was a bit dense, with the haze of drinks. "What was the reason?" I asked.

"You know very well, you just want to hear me say it!" she said, breathing hotly over me. "You're trying to make me blush." (Good Lord, I thought, that would be an undertaking!) "Very well, then, I'll indulge you. I'm such a clitoral type, it was a delicious agony to ride a bike, from the very first time I mounted one. I was only about ten, at that time. Every pedal stroke made me quiver, and I used to come back panting and trembling and red in the face, so that my mother thought I had been riding too fast. That was what first taught me-well, you know what. Instead of getting better it got worse, or better, whichever you call it, but by the time I was a budding maiden, you know, it was so terrific I had to give up. I just couldn't go shopping and come home in that state. There, now I've confessed it to you, and you're the first person I've ever told."

Looking back, I think that's very doubtful, but I believed her at the time, and felt duly flattered at being the first person to hear these intimacies. She knew what she was doing; those picture magazines, and her story, and the nearness of her body, very warm and soft, and wickedly perfumed, were building up my mood. The magazines slid to the floor and I found myself kissing her.

Her tongue was a serpent, her blue eyelids flashed like signals, her flesh heaved gently as I pressed closer. But she wanted to play it slowly, she pushed away my exploring hand, and for ages we did nothing but kiss. She must have felt the hardening of my cock, for I let it press on her thigh, and by her stirring and writhing I am sure she must have been secreting her juices thick and fast. But she wanted to take her time.

Also she wanted to talk, or rather to be talked to. She would have liked some confession, such as she had made to me. "What was your first experience? What was it like? Tell me about it, tell me everything!" she begged, panting. I was quite pleased to oblige, not only for her pleasure, but because recalling some of my early thrills was nice, it helped to increase my ardour, which (I'm afraid) was not one hundred per cent stimulated by Flora. And I did not want to let her down. I told her some of the things I have already related to you, reader.

She was very susceptible to words, and mental images. Her eager questions led me on, and she kept exclaiming: "O my God! no! You didn't did you? Is that true? You're telling me the truth, aren't you? Go on!"

My prick was simply aching, with having been erect so long. At last she judged the time was ripe for a move to the bedroom. I went to empty my bladder. When I returned, she had lit two candles-real ones, not electric-in the bedroom, and there were two sticks of sandalwood smouldering aromatically in the hands of a Chinese laughter-god. The mysterious source of music gave out Hawaiian guitars. The sheets were peach-coloured, and the place was full of long curtains and mirrors-we could see ourselves, flattered by the golden light, whichever way we looked. She was holding a glass of wine in one hand and offering me a similar one with the other. As I took it, I reflected that this was the first time I had been offered a seduction in the good old traditional vamp style, with all the trimmings. Though some of the "effects" were a bit cheap and tasteless, I liked it! The oft-tried recipe works, all right.

It soothed my wounded vanity-even though an imp inside me was laughing at it all. Even the wine was spiced, and again I wondered about aphrodisiac.

When I had drunk it, Flora took the glass from my hand and put it down. She led me to the bed and began undressing me, with the endearments she would give to a child, a naughty boy who was being forgiven at bedtime for his tantrums during the day. She would not let me touch her at all, at this stage. I simply had to submit, even to letting her kneel on the floor and take off my shoes and socks for me. When finally she pulled down my underpants, she gave an exclamation as though shocked at what she found there. Not that there was anything spectacular: my cock was only about half erect, taking a quick nap, so to speak, after its long stand on sentry-go, before being sent into action. She touched it tentatively, with curiosity, as if she had never seen one before; then stooped down and kissed it, and the soft skin of my belly.

I now judged it was my turn to act, so I turned her round, and began unfastening the back of her frock. It fell around her feet, then, and her petticoat followed. Perfume breathed from her close-shaven armpits. Above her long fishnet stockings were two samples of smooth thigh below the black lace stepins.

I undressed her with her back to me, holding her slippery, silky self close to my naked skin while my hands slid round to unfasten the suspenders from her stockingtops. I knelt down to pull down the stockings themselves, and rested my cheek against the seat of her pants, as I did so. Then I undid the flimsy suspender belt, after which I rose to my feet again to unfasten the bra and let her tits swing free. The fragrant femininity of her clothes and of her body surprised me: I had always seen her in harsh, tweedy things till that night, and rather imagined her underclothes would be made of jute, and her only scent would be Imperial Leather. But tonight her womanly side was on parade.

I was still standing behind her, but one of the long mirrors showed her to me: her sleek cropped head, her flushed face and wet mouth with lips a little parted, her smooth strong shoulders, her breasts not very large but round as grapefruit and well supported, a well-fleshed middle with a navel deep and full of shadow, all in the wavering candlelight. And my own face like a young satyr peering over her shoulder.

Lastly, I pushed her pants down over her hips and let my hardening prick lie along the cleft of her buttocks, its head nosing on between her legs. In the mirror, I got a shock: I saw the naked lips of her cunt: she had shaved it as close as her armpits, and no doubt scented it the same. My hand caressed her belly from the navel down to the clitoris and it was literally as smooth as a baby's bottom.

When my hand got as far as that she threw her head back on my shoulder, turning it towards me for a kiss, while her hands gripped my wrist, but not to push it away, rather to hold it to the spot.

What she said about cycling must have been true: her clitoris was fantastically sensitive, she almost jumped out of her skin at the very first touch. Her labia writhed together like a pair of snakes.

I tumbled her over on to the bed, and she was already so near to coming that it was hardly a fuck at all.

I got in very quickly and easily-there was plenty of room, and she was sopping wet. I began the motions. Flora seized my hand and guided it between our bodies, whispering, "I want your hand there, use your finger, darling." So I found and frigged her clitoris, while drawing in and out slowly beneath it. She came with a seethe and a spasm that shook her from head to toe.

I gave her a few minutes to get over it, lying still with my prick sunk deep in the well. Then I began to make strokes, in search of my own share of satisfaction. But she said: "No, no!"

"What do you mean?" I exclaimed, stopping instantly and ready to be angry.

"Let me lie on top!" she begged.

Was that all? yes, I readily consented. I would probably be more successful with her if she did the work!

We reversed. I found I could now see ourselves in a mirror in the ceiling, and I confess there was a strange added thrill in watching the smooth rippling back ot the avid Flora, riding me, her buttocks shaking, and my hands clutching round her, the whole thing distant, like another couple.

She whispered to me what she was thinking. Her lesbian side had come into play again. She was pretending that my prick was hers, so to speak, that she was stuck in me, that I was her girl and she was ravaging me, forcing me, against my will. She wanted me to struggle! I struggled a little, and her excitement redoubled. She certainly could do things with her cunt, and in this position she was able to titillate her clitoris on my tangle of hair without the aid of my fingers. She quickly came again, and still was unsatisfied.

For all that, I was not getting anywhere, and I realised I should need the aid of my own imagination to reach a climax. I began to think of Joan: imagining myself stalking into the room and pulling the French lesbian off her, forcibly taking her place between those delicious young thighs.

In the midst of all this, it struck me that in the bedroom where we were there were two beds, the double one on which we were lying, and a single one two yards away.

I surprised Flora by asking, as she panted on top of me, whether her daughter slept in this room, too.

"Of course," she said. "She's not really my daughter, you know, did you think she was?"

I was astounded.

She added: "I've adopted her. I'd like to adopt you, too, Bobbin. I can give you everything."

"Would you give me Joan?"

"Willingly-but she wouldn't play, my dear."

"Do you have her, here, in this bed?"

"Yes, of course. O God, how marvellous she is!"

The idea of Joan, here, on her back, in my place, lying under Flora just like this, breast to breast with her, suddenly did the trick for me. My sudden clutching and muscular stiffening, and the fervour with which I all at once kissed Flora and sucked her lips into mine, told her that my sexual core had been touched, and her convulsive movements hastened us both up to a hot torment, a rapid feverish crisis: my fingertips stuck so hard in the cheeks of her bottom that I must have left ten black bruises, as I clutched her twisting loins on mine and her cunt swallowed my come.

Flora blew out the candles and pinched out the incensestubs. She climbed back. I nestled against her, nuzzled her breast, and fell instantly asleep.

I stayed the night. In my dreams or half-dreams 1 entertained the idea of Joan coming back into the room and getting undressed, quite innocent of my presence. But she didn't. I think it was all arranged between them, in advance. The two lovers had decided to allow each other a "holiday night," by mutual consent.

Before dawn, Flora awoke me: it was her hand stealing round my hips, touching me up, that drew me out of sleep. Again she rode on top, and with the same limitless excitement, seeming to come in a chain of quick climaxes, with hardly a break between. I held back, and then at last forced myself on, at the end of a sweaty half-hour. After which I think even Flora slept.

She was asleep when I woke, and feeling grateful for many things, and having an early morning hard that needed the right kind of massage, I got on top of her and shoved it in. She was actually awakened by the thrust, and opened terrified eyes; but she knew what to do. I retained my orthodox position, this time, but again obliged with a little clitoris-work, with my hand on her hairless mound of Venus.

The bedroom smelt of stale sandalwood, stale candlewax, stale come, stale cunt, stale sweat and stale scent. With the fumes of wine and a few surreptitious farts thrown in, of course. I was not sorry to get some fresh air.

Flora came down to a cafe with me, in mid-morning, and over an aperitif renewed her invitation to Ischia. I did not commit myself.

I intended to go straight "home," but one drink led to another, and Flora slipped her purse into my pocket, and the coloured umbrellas of the boulevards were enticing. We spent the whole day in a long hazy cafecrawl, and at night we found ourselves at Versailles, in some rose-lit restaurant which turned out to have bedrooms attached, so we turned in. She telephoned Joan first.

The wines and brandies had turned me passive, more passive than ever, and I simply let Flora help herself, do whatever she felt like doing. Amazing creature, she was as hungry as ever. She made her little boy, her girl, even the schoolmistress who had first touched her up under a towel at the swimming-pool. I was even once, perhaps as a concession, allowed to be a man! I slept whenever she let me. She was paying in drinks and taxi-fares and so on for what she wanted, and she was getting it: I was a stooge and a stallion, but I was past caring what I was. Many men would have envied me, others would despise me. I didn't care. But I did not grow fonder of Flora. She was only kind out of self-interest, nothing more.

When we went back to Paris next morning I had a fierce hangover and felt drained dry, shagged out. We had a last aperitif together.

"Do let me adopt you," she begged again.

"Listen," I burst out. "First I had parents, then I had tutors, then I had Rex, now it's you. Do you think I want to be a slave all my life? I'm going to go back to England, and get a job, make myself independent, and find some silly young girl to adore me."

She looked at me coldly. "Aren't you being stupid?"

"Very likely," I said. "And you've done wonders, Flora, for me, for which I'm grateful. But you'd be tired of me next week-"

"And you're tired of me already?"

"No, I'm only tired by you. But I should tire of you, too. You only use me as an instrument of pleasure, a dildo, and I let you because I get some pleasure out of it, too. But it wouldn't last, on either side. You'll find plenty more dildoes, tomorrow."

She did not like this moment of truth. She denied it. "I'm fond of you, but you don't appreciate it, you're too young. You'll live to regret this parting, Bob. But remember me. Write to me sometimes, care of Cook's. I shall often have you with me-in imagination."

Yes, I should join her secret art-gallery of memories, sensations, to be summoned up when she wanted something to spur her to an orgasm, as she talked about me to some other lover, or writhed masturbadng between the sheets on hot afternoons. So we parted.

I was probably a fool, but I had to obey my impulse, I said to myself as I hurried back.

Rex and Mark had gone. Whether to another hotel or straight off on their travels I do not know. There was a note from Rex:

Dear Bobbin, I am sure you realise everything has become quite impossible. It's a pity, but there it is, mistakes will occur. The enclosed will ta%e care of your return to England. We may meet again some day, who knows? Bon voyage.

Rex.

I went back to England.