glanced sharply across the road at Hugo. ‘That’s enough, Jake. Go on to your nightclub, if that’s what you enjoy. No doubt Hugo will be Culmington and keep an eye on you.’ He wrapped his white silk scarf around his neck and strolled away towards Park Lane.
Jake swore under his breath, and then called after him, ‘Wait, Julius, can’t you?’
But a taxi was noisily drawing up on Hugo’s side of the street, and Julius seemed not to hear him.
‘Want a cab, gents?’ the driver asked.
Hugo waved his arm. ‘Come on, Jake, come with us. We’re going somewhere lively.’
The inside of the cab smelt of gardenias and stale cigars. Farmiloe leant forward between Jake and Hugo. ‘Dalton’s, Leicester Square,’ he told the driver.
The nightclub was entirely underground. Past the huge doorman who took Hugo’s money and waved them inside without another word, there was a narrow flight of steps leading down to a long, stale-smelling corridor. Farmiloe tried to take Hugo’s arm to help him, but Hugo impatiently shook him off and climbed down sideways, like a crab. Through the double doors at the distant end of the corridor they came to an enormous low-ceilinged room packed with people. A band was playing on a platform at the far side, and everyone was dancing.
Jake stared at the jostling crowd and at the naked powdered back of the woman closest to him, and then he smiled. Here, it seemed, was everything that had been missing at his sister’s dance. The thick air itself seemed to taste of sin.
They found a table against the wall, and Farmiloe beckoned to a waiter. ‘A bottle of brandy.’ There were bottles on every table, as far into the distance as they could see.
‘I’m very sorry, sir. It’s after ten o’clock.’ Ten o’clock was closing time, according to DORA. It was so much after ten that the three of them laughed uproariously. Farmiloe took out a five-pound note and smoothed it on the tabletop. A moment later the note was gone, and brandy and three glasses had materialized in its place.
Jake drank, and felt benign anticipation replacing his earlier restlessness. Hugo and Farmiloe were good fellows, and good company. They knew what they liked, and where to find it. This was where he wanted to be, listening to Farmiloe’s stories through the throb of the music, and watching Hugo lean back to squint past his cigar smoke at the women on the dance floor.
The bottle emptied itself and they called for another. The room was pounding with noise, making even their rudimentary conversation difficult to sustain. Jake had been watching a black-haired girl at the next table. Their eyes met, and a moment later she stood up, sinuous in a slip of satin dress, and came to lean over the back of his chair. Her mouth brushed his ear. ‘Won’t you ask me to dance?’
Jake rose to his feet. Hugo and Farmiloe didn’t appear to notice as he steered the girl away into the hot mass of dancers.
It was too noisy to talk, too crowded to perform more than a shuffle. Jake saw that the girl’s eyes were closed and she was dreamily smiling. Tentatively he drew her closer, and then closer so that she bent against him, pliant and slippery under the thin satin. When he looked down at her face he saw that her powder was creased with sweat and caked at the corners of her eyes, and that she was no longer young, not a girl at all, nor even pretty. He didn’t care in the least. He felt that he loved her, and everyone else in the nightclub. Jake bent his head, and kissed her lipsticked mouth. He heard her give a small, sweet sigh.
The woman looked up at him, a coquettish glance under her thin eyelashes. ‘Do you want to come home with me, dear?’ Jake had seen enough death. He had seen more men dead and dying than there were people packed into this room, but he had survived and he had brought home from the field hospital the discovery that he was not after all a coward, whatever the men who had fought more conventionally might think of him. He had seen the terrible things, and he had worked to alleviate some fraction of the suffering. Somehow he managed to contain the memory and the dreams of the war within himself, without letting anyone else know how they shadowed him. But it did seem that even now he could not escape from death. He had spent today hunched over a corpse, teasing out the strands of dead muscle tissue under their flaps of grey skin. He could smell decay as if it were embedded in his own nasal cavities, and now he wanted the scents of life. He wanted warm, living flesh under his hands and to taste the complicated flavours of skin and sweat.
Jake left Hugo and his friend at their table. He didn’t care if they wondered why he had disappeared, or if they were too far gone even to remember he had been there. He followed the black-haired woman out into Leicester Square, and into the warren of streets around Shaftesbury Avenue. They came to an upstairs room with a brass bedstead and a jug and basin on the table behind a painted screen.
There was a brief financial transaction. It didn’t worry Jake. He had enough money on him for her requirements, that was all that mattered. When she had folded it away the woman smiled at him.
‘How old are you, dear?’
He told her the truth. ‘Twenty-one. My name is Jake.’
She undid his waistcoat and took out his shirt studs. ‘Well then, Jake. Are you going to make me happy? A big, tall, beautiful boy like you?’
He said, ‘As happy as you will make me.’
He loved the deft, businesslike way she undressed him and herself, as if nakedness was normal and natural. He loved this room, with its bare walls and minimal furniture, the big bed. She settled back on it now, one arm behind her head, so that he could look at her. Her breasts rolled apart to expose the ridges of her breastbone.
She had heavy thighs, dimpled and very white. They were scented and powdery, reminding Jake of some childhood sweet. Turkish Delight, he thought. He remembered how the sweets came tightly packed in frills of paper, jelly ridges pressed close together to yield under his fingers. He lowered himself on top of her. Her skin seemed to give off little puffs of her sugary scent mixed with a salty, alluvial smell much closer to the earth.
She was very soft, soft everywhere, deliciously so. He wanted to bury himself in the rolls of melting flesh, deeper and deeper, until he silenced the endless commentary within his own head.
She spread her legs for him, exposing liver-coloured lips lapped with fur. Jake’s breath whistled in his throat. Without any preliminaries he pushed himself up inside her, as far as he could reach, amazed by the slippery heat. He forgot that he was supposed to be making her happy, but that did not seem to matter particularly. He forgot everything except his own scalding pleasure.
When he ejaculated a minute later he knew that what he had guessed was right, that none of his dreams or fantasies or masturbatory experiments could ever be as good as this reality. They gave only the faintest intimation of the heat and pressure and urgency of real love-making with a real woman.
The sensation was so intense he thought that his heart might stop, or that he would faint, or that the blood vessels within his skull would burst. For a moment he would have been happy to die there on the brass bedstead.
He didn’t die, or even faint. He lay with his face against the woman’s neck until his gasping breaths subsided. Then he opened his eyes. She seemed hardly to have moved; her head was still resting against her arm. There was a bluish patch of close-shaved stubble in the exposed armpit, where the salty smell was particularly strong.
Living and breathing, Jake thought. Full of life. Her various emanations mixed with his own seemed to affirm the vitality he longed for. He nuzzled his face into the cup of blue-white flesh.
