Talking It Over Read Online Free PDF

why I wanted the money! As if it was any of his business! As if I knew! I just let out a giggle of disbelief which made the oldgecko who ran the class flutter his ruff at me in disapproval; I calmed him with a quip and continued the negotiations with my round and financially tenacious new chum. Some months later I paid him back, ignoring his ridiculous caveats and quibbles about interest rates because they were frankly unintelligible, and we’ve been mates and muckers ever since.
    He had a girlfriend. Before Gillian, I mean. Back in the days when a groat and a half, etc. And do you know what? I’m sure he won’t mind my telling you this – he wouldn’t sleep with her . Get that. No rumpy pumpy. He declined to make free with her narrow loins. When such Stakhanovite chastity over a period of months finally coaxed some forlorn gesture of affection from the girl, he told her he wanted to get to know her better . I said that this was what she’d been proposing, dummkopf , but Stuart wasn’t having any of it. No, that’s right, he wasn’t having any of it.
    Of course, he might have been lying, I suppose, but that would have been an imaginative step for him to take. And besides, I have other evidence. Boffins have definitively spotted the tie-up between sex, interest in/lack of interest in, and food, interest in/lack of interest in. (You doubt me? Then let me cosh you with this detail: one of the most important human pheromones, or sex-pongs, is called isobutyraldehyde, which in the mighty pulsing chain of carbon lies immediately next to – the odour of bean sprouts! Chew on that, amigo.) Now, Stuart, as you will discover if you have not done so already, believes that the principal raison d’être of food is to conceal from public view the hideous pattern on the plate beneath. Whereas few – not to boast – few are speedier on the draw with the old chopsticks than young Ollie.
    Ergo , I’ve never had much trouble in the related department of human behaviour either. Family Hold Back has not been my motto. Perhaps my reputation as a coureur emasculates Stuart. And working at the Shakespeare School of English doesn’t exactly hinder me in that direction. After-hours individual tuition in a one-to-one personal interface situation. Stuart must have rung my boudoir and learned how the telephone is answered in about fifteen languages so far. But he’s all right now. He’s got Gillian, hasn’t he?
    To tell the truth, I didn’t have a steady girlfriend at the time he swanned into the Café des Squires and exited with Gillian. I was a bit blue, and being blue always makes me satirical, so I expect the odd unfair jest might have escaped my lips. But I was happy for him. How could I not have been happy for him? And he was so puppyish that first time they came round together to my place. So tail-waggingly, bone-snafflingly puppyish that I nearly tickled him under the ears.
    I’d tried not to make my apartment look too intimidating. I loosely tossed a swirl of Moroccan curtain over the sofa, slid Act 3 of Orfeo onto the revolving mat, lit an Al Akhbar joss-stick, and left it at that. Rather a bienvenue chez Ollie effect, I thought. Oh, I could have gone further, I suppose – put up a bullfight poster to make Stuart feel at home – but one mustn’t entirely submerge one’s personality, I find, otherwise one’s guests don’t know whom they’re meeting. I lit a Gauloise as the bell went and prepared to meet my doom. Or Stuart’s doom, as the case might be.
    At least she didn’t ask why I kept my curtains closed in the daytime. My explanations of this foible have become increasingly baroque of late: I find myself announcing everythingfrom a rare eye disease to undying homage to the early Auden. But perhaps Stuart had warned her.
    ‘How do you do,’ she said. ‘Stuart’s been telling me about you.’
    I did a touch of Makarova in Romeo and Juliet at that, just to put everyone at his ease. ‘Oh God,’ I replied,