The Rabbit

by Ted Lewis

  “What’s wrong with her?”

  “She’s an old bag. She’s lazy and she’s too fat. She eats chocolates all the time, by the box-full. All she thinks of is herself.”

  Immediately I hated her mother, someone unable to give love to a unique person like Janet.

  “Still,” she said, smiling, “they won’t be back till tomorrow.”

  We reached the house and she let us in through the front door which was panelled with frosted glass. The silence of the house heightened the sense of adventure, the feeling of excitement I felt at being alone with someone who I knew I could love, who I felt could feel the same way about me. I looked at every detail of the hall, trying to plant each item in my memory so that when I was at home I could live off my mental pictures. Janet walked down the hall and said:

  “Are you hungry?”

  “Well...” I said. I was starving, but a childhood echo reminded me never to accept unless pressed.

  “There’s loads to eat. I remembered you said you could only just make that boat so I thought perhaps you wouldn’t have had much time to get anything.”

  The thought that had inspired her to prepare some food amazed me. Was this me, was this Victor Graves, being ministered to with such consideration by such a girl?

  I followed her to the door at the end of the hall and instead of opening it she turned and put her arms round me and pulled herself to me and we kissed. We kissed for a long time and when she drew back she hugged me and said:

  “We’d better go in the kitchen.”

  Her tone of voice was what would have been described, in the kind of American paperbacks I sometimes read, as husky. She turned and opened the kitchen door and I fol¬lowed her through.

  The table was covered with a bright starchy tablecloth and on the table were sandwiches and a pork pie and a cake and with special poignancy I noticed two cups and saucers arranged next to what was obviously the Sunday tea pot.

  “Sit down,” Janet said. “I’ll make the tea.”

  I sat down at the table and savoured the gloriously civilized feeling of sitting down to tea with a girl when there was no one else in the house. I’d had tea with Veronica before but even apart from the feelings I was experiencing for this girl, those previous occasions didn’t count because the presence of her grandmother in the upstairs room had always precluded any heightening of the drama of complete privacy. And my appreciation of this occasion was also heightened by references back to my parents, of their imagined attitudes if they were to know my present where¬abouts and situation. The guilt added a little extra something to the scene.

  As Janet went about the business of making the tea she talked constantly, asking me how much holiday work I’d already done, did I think Spencer’s nudes had the same kind of power as Goya’s, only in an English way, didn’t I think Roualt was the most sensuous and passionate painter ever, weren’t Joseph Herman’s drawings the most expressive I’d ever seen, and so on. I replied with as much matching vigour as I could muster, all the time marvelling at her, at the situation, and at my own luck. At one point, just before she added the hot water to the kettle, she paused and bent over me and kissed me on the top of my head, endorsing the intimacy of the scene.

  So far I hadn’t taken any of the sandwiches or a slice of the pork pie mainly because I was unwilling to contort what I considered to be my already ill-proportioned face by filling my mouth with food. I felt the same about smiling. I smiled as little as possible and when I did smile the smile was limited to as small an area of my face as was necessary to indicate that I was in fact smiling. Too many hours spent in practising smiling from all angles in front of my dressing- table mirror had convinced me of the futility of trying to enhance my charm by opening my mouth. Similarly with eating; already overproportioned jowls circulating with the action of chewing could hardly accentuate my appeal. But when Janet, as she poured the tea, pointed out that I hadn’t yet taken anything, there was no choice but for me to eat. She took a sandwich herself and sat down and for a moment or two there was silence while we both chewed away, looking everywhere except at one another. As the silence continued, it seemed as though one of us should break in, in case it became too solid, but I was unwilling to be the one to do it for fear of spitting crumbs on to the table cloth. Then Janet said:

  “Remember that Gerry Mulligan I told you about? The Olympia concert?”

  I nodded.

  “Like to hear it?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Terrific.”

  She stood up and the kitchen was filled with sounds of scraping chairs and clattering cups and saucers and plates as we gathered ourselves to go into the lounge. Janet pushed open the kitchen door with her foot and we went through.

  The lounge had a flowered carpet and modern three piece suite and above the mantelpiece the familiar decoratively shaped mirror with the green darts dividing the reflections into three unequal triangles. Record covers were strewn all over the carpet. Janet knelt down and looked for the record.

  “Here it is,” she said, pressing the record down on the spindle. “Actually, it’s one of Dad’s, really.”

  “Your dad’s?”

  “Yes, he’s quite a fan, really. He says he isn’t but he is. Every now and then he’ll come back with a record and he says ‘here you are, some more rubbish for you,’ but I know he really buys them for himself. He listens to them when I’ve gone to bed. Of course my mother complains. She likes Edmundo Ros.”

  Incredible, I thought. A girl with a father who likes modern jazz, who actually buys records. My own experi¬ences seemed to belong to a different civilization.

  The music began. We both sat on the floor, myself leaning with my back against the settee, Janet adjacent to me against one of the chairs. An image of Veronica’s sitting room flashed into my mind, and the comparison that followed con¬cluded that two similar situations had nothing whatsoever in common. And the conclusion was reinforced when Janet drew her knees up to her chin and layers of petticoat concertina’d from behind her legs, like a flapping Christmas decoration. I caught a brief glimpse of the paleness of her thigh between the brightness of her petticoats, and the shiny tan of her stockings. This intimate glimpse at once excited me and stimulated my guilt, a feeling that if she was aware of the thoughts her thigh had inspired, she might find this beginning of ours to be somehow devalued. But the thoughts were there and I puritanically absolved my guilt by reminding myself that if our relationship developed, then there would be a properly measured period of yearning through which I could pine. All the same, the cup of tea over which I’d glimpsed a part of her mystery shook noisily as I put it back on the saucer.

  Now there was a faraway look in her eyes as the music drifted out through the half-open French window and over the trellis work and the huts of the suburban back gardens. The counterpointing of Gerry Mulligan’s barging lyrical music with the view I had of the tiled roofs and the frosted glass of bathroom windows and the kodachrome blue of the evening sky above induced a kind of nostalgia for unexperi¬enced places and events. I looked away from the window and found that Janet was watching me, smiling, and the moment that she saw that my gaze had come to rest on her she rustled across the carpet and took my hand and lay back with me against the settee. A minute later we were kissing and during the kiss we slid downwards until we were side by side on the floor. There was a slight thump as her head hit the carpet, which caused a temporary break in the kiss, but nothing more embarrassing than that to affect the smoothness of the negotiation. I slid my uppermost arm round her waist, my hand at the small of her back. The minute I touched her there she pressed herself against me, her breasts flattening out against my chest, the taffeta and the petticoats rustling as she bent her leg and crooked it over my legs, pressing her crutch against mine. Her fingers dug into my shoulder blades and her mouth opened wider and her tongue began to flutter against my tongue. I responded
by tightening my own grip and we thrashed about on the floor, her legs slithering against mine until they opened wide enough to allow my own leg to slip between and receive the heat from between her legs as she pressed herself against me. We stopped kissing for a moment and as she pressed her face against my neck I looked downwards and saw that the taffeta had all bunched up around her thighs and her stockinged leg was bent double so that her knee was digging into my side. My view was interrupted as she pulled my face back to hers and we kissed again. She took my hand which by now was stroking the back of her head and placed it just below the small of her back. Her leg slithered up and down. I dared to lower my hand slightly and squeezed her buttocks through the mounds of taffeta, and she kissed me even harder. At this encouragement I tried frantically to decide if I should go further in my explora¬tions. She couldn’t, after all, on our first meeting, want me to. It just wasn’t done. And yet if, as I supposed, she felt for me what I felt for her, that she was overcome by me, then this was wonderful, beautiful. And of course it had to be that. That this was standard procedure with her was un¬thinkable, a devaluation of the passion. If that was what she wanted, then it was because of me, not because of any baser reasons. But how could I be really sure that she wanted me to go on? Supposing I continued and found that I’d misread her and that I insulted her by assuming that I could attempt that kind of thing the first time. And yet I might insult her by not going farther, by appearing either not to want to with her, or by making her feel cheap because of the passion of her encouragement. Whatever happened, I didn’t want to risk anything that might prevent the continuance of our relationship.

  The problem was solved by the ripple of musical chimes out in the hallway. My Christ, I thought. Her parents are back. It must be. It’s too early for the party.

  I scuttled up from the floor. Janet pushed her skirt down and, red-faced, not looking at me, said:

  “That’ll be Moira.”

  “Moira?”

  Janet stood up and looked in the mirror and primped her hair.

  “She’s my friend. She said she’d be round early to help me get ready for the party.”

  She turned away from the mirror and looked at me.

  “I know what you’re thinking,” she said.

  “What about?”

  “About just then. I know what you must think.”

  I’d no idea what to say but I opened my mouth anyway, but before I could speak she came close to me and put her arms round me and, with the same roughness in her voice that had been there when she’d kissed me outside the kitchen door, she said:

  “It’s because it’s you; you won’t believe me, but it’s true.”

  The bells chimed again and this time they rang a little more joyfully in my ears. I hugged her and said:

  “I feel the same about you.”

  She looked up into my face.

  “Do you?”

  I nodded.

  “I—” I began, but the bells rang again.

  “I’m glad,” she said.

  We looked at each other for a moment longer then she squeezed my hand and ran out of the room.

  By nine thirty, the party had really got going. Janet had only invited the people in my year, the year she would be a fully-fledged member of next term, so with Moira that made just ten people altogether. Stew Gibson and the rest of the year had arrived together so that there had been an immedi¬ate explosion of atmosphere into the house, no early guests to warm up, however informal the atmosphere.

  Everyone had seemed to get pissed very quickly in a very happy way, and everybody was either lying on the floor or lying across the furniture, shouting and making stupid jokes, as if celebrating some great victory or some marvellous release. In fact it had crossed my mind that for nearly every¬one present it was the first time they’d been to a party which wouldn’t end with the arrival home of the parents who owned the house, and this was probably why everyone was so elated. I also imagined that no one had told their own parents the truth of the situation, so there was a clandestine element to sweeten the high spirits with a satisfying illicit quality. The only person who didn’t really enter into the atmosphere was Moira. She sat in an armchair, watching everyone, smiling from time to time, but more as if the joke was private, not at a demonstration by the person she was smiling at. At first I thought it was because she was an out-sider as far as college was concerned, but she was always included in the jokes and the antics and so I began to wonder. Still, she’d been the recipient of what I’d taken to be Janet’s pride when I’d been introduced before the others had arrived and she’d responded as I (and presumably Janet) had hoped she would, and so there was that in her favour. Girls always seemed to have friends like Moira. And besides, what did Moira’s influence amount to when all that mattered was this incredible situation with Janet? I’d never imagined that things could have turned out this way. A romantic picture could never be like this: there would be no point in making it. Everything would be too perfect. There would be no drama. Since Moira’s arrival, Janet and I had experienced the sweet longing for each other that lovers feel in the company of others. Even now, huddled on the couch together, we couldn’t seem to get close enough to each other.

  The party was now at a point when the more foolish the behaviour, the more ecstatically it was received. Even Gareth, who at college worked like a Trojan and was pretty much a loner, was now wearing his glasses upside down and was without a shirt, as he caressed the giggling head of Joyce Brown as it lay on his smooth hairless chest. Through the noise and my own swimming senses I heard Janet whisper in my ear:

  “I wish we were on our own.”

  I turned to her.

  “So do I,” I said.

  We kissed.

  “I just wanted to say,” I said. “About earlier. I didn’t think anything wrong about you, when we were like that. What I mean is, I felt the same. I know what you were feeling. I wanted to go on. It’s incredible to feel like this the first time.”

  “I know.”

  “I’ve never felt like this before.”

  “Neither have I.”

  We kissed again.

  “God,” she said.

  “If only we could be alone.”

  She was silent for a moment. Tracing the circle of one of my shirt buttons with her finger she said:

  “We could be.”

  “How?”

  “There are other rooms.”

  “Sue and Bernard are in the front room.”

  “I know.”

  I was slow in grasping her meaning but when it finally seeped through, my breath stopped and my bowels seemed to weaken. When she saw that I’d understood her she pressed her head against my chest.

  “Are you sure?” I said, some of her hair getting in my mouth as I drew in breath.

  She nodded her head.

  “I don’t want you to think...” I said.

  “I won’t.”

  “It’s because of the way I feel about you.”

  “I know. We both know.”

  She looked up at me as she said the last few words. She’d had as much to drink as I’d had but that knowledge didn’t affect my reaction to the look that was on her face. It couldn’t have expressed what I wanted to see there better if I’d drawn it on myself.

  “What shall we do?” I said.

  “You go first,” she said. “I’ll follow.”

  I got up and weaved over to the door and went out into the hall. The central light was on and the hall seemed flood¬lit compared to the gloom of the dining room. I waited like a performer in a game of Postman’s Knock for a few minutes and then when Janet didn’t come out of the dining room I went and sat on the stairs and looked at the coats that hung on the hallstand. There was a reversible mac that must have belonged to her father, black on one side and
hounds-tooth check on the other. Quite stylish, I thought. A mark of the man as hinted at by Janet. I could like her father.

  I heard the dining room door open and close and then Janet appeared at the bottom of the stairs. We kissed and then she took my hand and began to mount the stairs. I stood up and followed her.

  The landing was quiet and smelled of talcum powder. Various white panel-less doors stood ajar, the blackness beyond them illuminating no clues as to which was her bedroom. We crossed the landing and Janet pushed open a door.

  “Wait here,” she said, “you might knock something over.”

  She disappeared beyond the door and a minute later there was a click and a small soft light suffused the bedroom with a rosy glow.

  The bedroom was small, decorated with flowered wall¬paper. The double bed was covered with pink candlewick and by the bed there was a small chest of drawers on which stood the lamp that Janet was now removing and placing at floor level. The new location of the lamp darkened the room to a deeper shade of cosy pink and threw the shadow of the bed all along one of the bedroom walls. The room was filled with a faint perfume, a combination of cosmetics and the woolly smell of the bedspread and the silky smell of the eiderdown underneath.

  I’d never been in a girl’s bedroom before. The delightful smells and the softness of the décor made me reel as I drank them in. I closed my eyes to heighten my appreciation and then I heard the faint sound of the eiderdown and the met¬allic creak of the mattress as Janet sat down on the edge of bed. I opened my eyes. She was sitting with her hands folded in her lap, looking down at them. I went and sat down next to her. She looked at me and I took her hands. We both fell back on the bed and kissed and during the kiss we both lifted our legs so that we were now lying completely on top of the bed. Underneath the bedspread the eiderdown rippled and I closed my eyes and the quietness of the room sang in my ears. Janet’s arms slowly slid round my neck and we broke our kiss and we looked into each other’s faces as we lay there side by side, a good third of each of our faces buried in the valleys we created in the bedspread. I opened my eyes. Beyond Janet’s shoulder I could see the wrist on which I wore the watch my grandmother had given me on my sixteenth birthday. It was ten o’clock. The boys would be in the George. If only they could see me now, I thought.