The Wanting Seed Read Online Free PDF Page B

Men with the right ideas. I’d hate to lose you, Brother Foxe.’

Nine
    ‘D EAREST one.’
    ‘Darling, darling, darling.’ They embraced hungrily, the door still open. ‘Yumyumyumyumyum.’ Derek disengaged himself and kicked it shut.
    ‘Must be careful,’ he said. ‘I wouldn’t put it past Loosley to follow me here.’
    ‘Well, what’s the harm?’ said Beatrice-Joanna. ‘You can visit your brother if you wish to, can’t you?’
    ‘Don’t be silly. Loosley’s thorough, I’ll say that for thelittle swine. He’ll have found out what Tristram’s working-hours are.’ Derek went over to the window. He came back from it immediately, smiling at his own foolishness. So many storeys up, so many indistinguishable crawling ants on the deep street. ‘Perhaps I’m getting a bit too nervy,’ he said. ‘It’s only that – well, things are happening. I’ve got to see the Minister this evening. It looks as though I’m in for a big job.’
    ‘What sort of job?’
    ‘A job that means, I’m afraid, we shan’t be seeing quite so much of each other. Not for a time, anyway. A job with a uniform. Tailors came in this morning, measuring. Big things are happening.’ Derek had shed his public skin of dandified epicene. He looked male, tough.
    ‘So,’ said Beatrice-Joanna. ‘You’re getting a job that’s going to be more important than seeing me. Is that it?’ She had thought, on his entering the flat and taking her in his arms, of urging, in a mad instant, that they run away together, to live for ever on coconuts and love among the banyans. But then her woman’s desire for the best of both worlds had supervened. ‘I sometimes wonder,’ she said, ‘whether you really mean what you say. About love and so on.’
    ‘Oh, darling, darling,’ he said impatiently. ‘But listen.’ He was in no mood for dalliance. ‘Some things are happening which are far more important than love. Matters of life and death.’
    Just like a man. ‘Nonsense,’ she said promptly.
    ‘Purges, if you know what those are. Changes in the Government. The unemployed being drafted into the police force. Oh, big things, big things.’
    Beatrice-Joanna started to snivel, to make herself look very weak, defenceless, small. ‘It’s been such an awful day,’ she said. ‘I’ve been so miserable. I’ve been so lonely.’
    ‘Dearest one. It’s beastly of me.’ He took her in his arms again. ‘I’m so sorry. I think only of myself.’ Content, she went on snivelling. He kissed her cheek, neck, brow, buried his lips in hair the colour of cider. She smelt of soap, he of all the perfumes of Arabia. Embraced, they four-legged their way clumsily into the bedroom, as in some blind dance undisciplined by music. The switch had long been touched which sent the bed swinging – in an arc like Tristram’s chalked Pelphase–to the floor. Derek swiftly undressed, disclosing a spare body knobbed and striated with muscle, and then the dead eye of the television screen on the ceiling was able to watch the writhing of a male body – crust – brown, delicate russet – and a female – nacreous, touched subtly with blue and carmine – in the exordia of an act which was technically both adulterous and incestuous.
    ‘Did you,’ panted Derek, ‘remember to–?’ There was now no possible ideal observer who could think of Mrs Shandy and, thinking, grin.
    ‘Yes, yes.’ She had taken tablets; everything was quite safe. It was only when the point of no return had been reached that she remembered that the tablets she had swallowed were analgesic, not contraceptive. Routine let one down sometimes. Then it was too late and she didn’t care.

Ten
    ‘G ET on with it,’ said Tristram, frowning unwontedly. ‘Read it up on your own.’ The seventh stream of the Fourth Form offered him wide eyes and mouths. ‘I’m going home,’ he said. ‘I’ve had enough for one day. Tomorrow there will. be a test on the matter contained between Pages 267 and 274