The Rachel Papers Read Online Free PDF Page A

wholehearted about it and almost invariably emetic if one isn't. I was wholehearted about it, what with adulthood pending.
    Tragically, though, Gloria was 'too sore'. Normally, of course, I would have been greatly relieved. Normally, of course, this would have been one of the most bewitching things she could possibly be: too sore.
    Gloria looked actually ashamed. 'Don't worry,' I told her. 'It's quite flattering really.'
    I went into a long routine of being good about being good about it, gently reproaching her for being so attractive, suggesting that there might just possibly be ways of getting round this problem: all in a diverting, twinkly-eyed manner which Gloria found vastly entertaining. She said things like 'Oh, Charles, you are terrible,' and 'It's not my fault,' and 'Ow, that hurts.' Eventually I pointed out that she could, you know, always sort of, well, I don't know, perhaps, I mean ... She laughed uproariously at these antics before moving softly on top of me and downwards so that her head lay in the vault of shifting, sunlit dust. It was divine.

    Gloria held the assistant pet-food saleswomanship in, handily, a Shepherds Bush emporium. I walked her there, then came back up the Bayswater Road to the Tutors, which was barely half a mile from Campden Hill Square.
    Mrs Noreen Tauber, B.A. (Aberdeen), went on to bore me some more about dates and things. Then, with a frowsy sigh, she offered to take me on a tour of the school, probably with nothing more ambitious in mind than to show me that it wasn't a workhouse or blacking-factory after all, We walked up a corridor, admired two identical classrooms, and walked back down it again, over wobbly parquet, past farting radiators. The pace was relaxed, donnish; the conversation general, discursive; we tried, in our small way, to make the place seem nicer than it was.
    Legless buskers cavorted outside Holland Park Underground. I bought some newspapers (Fleet Street's big two, in fact, the Sun and the Mirror), leftily dropped ten pence into the musicians' bowler hat and stood there reading the headlines, tapping my foot to a trilled-up version of 'Oh, You Beautiful Doll'. I was about to aim up to Notting Hill for a coffee at the Costa Brava when a hook-nosed queen with flat hair appeared from behind the curtains of the station photograph booth. He asked if I knew the time. I said what it was, referring him to the large clock attached to the wall opposite. He thanked me and inquired if I ever went down the Catacombs club in Earls Court.
    'I don't think so,' I said, flattered.
    It was being a good September, quite warm in the sun, so I took my time, glancing through the papers, occasionally halting mid-stride to mull over a joke or the better to marvel at a pin-up.

    I was a queer, too, once upon a time.
    The point is worth elaborating.
    For possibly the most glamorous thing about me is that I am, actually, a delicate child - or as near to one as you can well get nowadays.
    I got bronchitis - absolutely spontaneously - at the age of thirteen.
    The night after it was diagnosed I crept down and looked it up in the encyclopedia. There it was, 'acute bronchitis', which was what the doctor said I had. Better still, though, was 'chronic' bronchitis: you got that at least once a year. I asked old Cyril Miller, our GP, whether there was any chance that I might develop, or acquire, the chronic kind. Praising recent scientific breakthroughs and modern drug techniques, he said this was unlikely. Chronic bronco was reserved for nicotined oldsters with suede-shoe lungs.
    Yet, if you want a couple of weeks in bed (as I did, bi-annually), and if you have indolent and credulous parents, it's amazing what a few packs of French cigarettes will do.
    Besides, there were plenty of other things to keep me going. Take, for example, my mouth - literally a shambles. My milk-teeth wouldn't go away, they just curdled, although politely moving over to accommodate my grown-up ones. At the age of ten I must