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body seemed warmer, more curved and pliant than the doctor’s; and though she lay quite still, he sensed a dormant agility.
    He bent his head to deliver the second token of understanding. But this time he did not encounter the same passivity. The nurse’s hand slipped up behind his head. Their mouths had barely lost contact after his quick peck than they met again. Her lips opened a little, and he detected the same tarry fragrance as with the doctor. It must have been used in mouthwash as well as soap, and by all the staff. A moment or two passed, he tried to draw back, but the hand behind his head insisted he should not, and the girl’s body strained closer. Her tongue began to probe. Then a dark leg bent and slipped up across his, bringing them closer still.
    He felt no less horrified, shocked and indignant than before, but somehow still lacked the will to push the persistent young nurse away. After all, she was a comparatively innocent party; and there was even a certain pleasure in putting the doctor’s nose out of joint by being more cooperative with her junior. He had not been mistaken over the agility, for now the lithe and restless creature bore him backwards on the pillow and swarmed half across him, seemingly not to be denied this demonstration of her ability to prolong and deepen a kiss. In another few moments she had managed to find her way entirely on top of him. The doctor must have got off the bed. He felt the nurse reach down and catch his limp left wrist on the rubber sheet, then lead his hand to lie on the rounded contour of her right cheek. To the now quite unashamedly suggestive synecdoches of her tongue were added quiverings and tremulous little borings in the surface beneath his hand. In a vain attempt to calm her he raised his right hand and placed it on the other cheek.
    He knew, as in a nightmare, that he was slipping fatally towards disaster; and equally was powerless to prevent it. Yet somewhere inside his blinded psyche an entire moral being continued to protest at this abject surrender to animality, this blatant pandering to the basest instincts. It was seconded by an aesthetic being, a person of taste, a true if temporarily lost Miles Green – who would not, he knew it in his bones, have ordinarily been caught dead in such vulgar and humiliating physical circumstances, or for a moment listened to the doctor’s specious justifications. It occurred to him, with a dawning excitement, that this intuitive sense of what he could never have been might be a useful clue to what he actually was, and he began to speculate – with some difficulty, as Nurse Cory had now raised herself on her arms and was teasing his face and mouth with her exuberant young breasts – as to a suitable profession. Almost at once he had evidence that he was on the right track, and that the doctor, in hinting at something vaguely louche, promiscuous, had once again been deliberately misleading him.
    From nowhere, miraculously, came a first recall of something he knew was autobiographical, and to do with his occluded past. Though it was only the very haziest apprehension, without detail, he knew it had something to do with rows of watching, attentive faces; and that what they were watching was he himself. Of that he was quite sure. Indeed, in his excitement at this breakthrough he inadvertently dug his nails into the nurse’s bottom, a gesture she misinterpreted, so that he had to suffer a paroxysm of breasts and loins in response. The last thing he wished was to be distracted from his train of thought. It therefore seemed wisest to encourage her in hers. Having improved his grip on the exposed cheeks, and undergone another bout of trembling, he was able to concentrate anew on his discovery.
    More specific clues his crippled memory refused to surrender; but he felt convinced that he had been used to performing in some way in public. As he absentmindedly caressed an excited nipple with the end of his tongue, purely to still