Partial Insertion Pt. 01

You don't have to have Byron's morals to like his poetry, say for example, 'When we two parted, in silence and tears'.

It was knocking lines from this poem back and forth at each other across a kitchen that suggested to Rachel and Gerry and everyone else in the room, that they were soul mates: soul mates who had found each other by chance, in a poorly provisioned student party with a tiny hi-fi system and paper cups of bad wine.

They were studying in London, at colleges of the University. It was the early Nineteen Seventies, rather moribund, the ravages of the Luftwaffe still not completely erased after nearly thirty years of post-imperial decay.

When punk rock emerged, half a decade later, it was no wonder that that it would make such perfect sense to a lot of young people; nor a wonder that they would be so contemptuous of the myths of Swinging London and the supposed revolutions of the sixties.

Older people who had grown up crippled by insecurity and guilt about sex, speculated enviously about the young, incessantly 'at it' and supposedly free of such hangups 'because of the sixties' and 'the Pill' and antibiotics.

These influences took a long time to spread through society and geography, to effect the underlying change that might be clear between the fifties and the nineties.

And hence, at eighteen going on nineteen, they were not 'at it', the young lovers Rachel and Gerald, though they walked along the street in each other's arms. Furthermore, their scope for finding the privacy required to get it on was restricted. They might have met at a party in a hall of residence, but they had not been successful in getting places in hall. Instead they had to make do with lodgings arranged for them in private houses by their respective colleges' accommodation offices.

The householders at Gerry's digs enforced a nightmarish dictatorial regime. This made Rachel's, by default, the more congenial of the two, a shared a bedroom in a flat owned by her live-in landlady, divorced and a nurse.

Gerry was studying engineering. A Bristolian, he was inspired by the heritage of Brunel and the more distant genius of Claude Shannon, as opposed to being claimed for it by an inability to master the mother tongue, ferocity on the rugby field and gallons of pasteurised beer. He hid his skinny frame in a surplus store greatcoat and a big scarf. His long curly hair fairly flowed over his collar like a poet's, and in spite of the sixties etc., a lot of his colleagues thought he was a 'poof' for this reason.

Rachel was studying French and German at a women's college. She was also very skinny with brown hair, but whereas Gerry was lanky, she was tiny and seemed birdlike in her delicacy. She had an abundance of hair brushed to a very straight and glossy flow. This she retained with a kerchief until she realised that people thought she was a member of the Christian Union. The fact that Gerry told her he liked small breasts did not console her for this lack of overflowing bosom. Gerry bought her a pendant with an upright walker cat on it from Kensington Market to hang there.

She was often puzzled by the attentions of much older men, ones who liked her precisely because she looked like she was only thirteen, instead of an enfranchised adult. Although she found something unpleasant in this attention, the sleazy nature of their interest never occurred to her.

"Well, where have you been keeping this one hidden, Raitch?" said Beverly, Rachel's landlady, divorced and a State Registered Nurse. "Let's be having him. Let me have a good look, Raitch."

She started manhandling Gerry so as to make him stand up straight, there in the kitchen of her flat, the upper two stories of an Victorian terraced house. A smell of cigarettes and alcohol came off her, along with that of her sweat. He found this slightly repulsive, but there was something funny about this cattle market assessment of his suitability as suitor, and both he, and Rachel's snooty room mate Kate, laughed at it. Beverly's large, pouting lips would open to reveal gapped front teeth which seemed to descend like tusks, and she had a tendency to squeeze her tongue out through them when life was good.

Beverly had just come off shift and she was wearing an institutional housecoat style tunic, white and made of nylon or some other synthetic. As she pulled him around, the lace decoration of a black brassiere peeped out of her cleavage while her breasts bobbed around. Without meaning to, he studied them for a moment. They certainly were big.

When he collected himself he realised that Beverly had a bit of a smirk for him. She turned to put the kettle on. As she did so, he noticed her bra strap which creased the outer garment, and then her black panties visible lower down. Underwear was all she had on under her tunic. Apparently the central heating at the hospital was oppressive. The swish of her arse turning in this plastic sheath was so loud it would have drawn his attention there anyway.

Well... she might be amused by her exposure of him as 'typically male', but he observed to himself, that anyone who wears black underwear under white clothes has surely got more to be embarrassed about than someone who is distracted by it. He should probably also have observed something else: if you actually want to draw attention to the fact that you've got nothing on underneath but underwear, then it's probably quite a good move. He went with the girls upstairs to their room, where they had a good, if quiet, laugh about this.

"She's a weekend hippy type. George says she gets a Janis Joplin look on—whoever that is—with the granny glasses to go up the Roundhouse on Sunday," said Kate, "But she doesn't say no to private property, which is theft if you believe all that stuff—which I, for one, don't."

In a very low voice Rachel said. "I don't know what it is about her. She hasn't done anything bad but I'm always a bit worried she might hit me."

Kate, a tall girl who looked like she might ride with the hunt somewhere—too posh anyway for a set-up like this—Kate said, "She'd better not try it when I'm around... Oh, I heard from one of my sources that the accommodation office told her they would only send girls to her this year."

"Why's that?"

"One can only speculate, Rachel dear, but apparently it was a very unstable household with fights and students leaving in a hurry."

"I'd like to leave in a hurry."

"Maybe she can move in with you," she said to Gerry. "I'd like to move in with George—we're engaged for god's sake but Mummy and Daddy want me to have my own. You know—for decency. I'm on a minimum grant. They're paying, so they call the tune..."

"That would be impossible for me for all sorts of reasons. My landlord and landlady are actually subhuman. They sit around all day making up rules to ruin my life, like don't come in after ten o'clock, don't have overhead light on after after ten o'clock, no radio after 9 o'clock, no telephone at all, don't open the windows more than one inch and so on. If they weren't so unbelievably dumb I'd suspect them of having been in the Blackshirts."

Rachel and Gerry were good walkers. They had to be, as they lived several miles from their campuses, which were separated by several miles. And of course their digs had a good three miles between them. None of these journeys could be completed by single journeys on public transport. Gerry was thinking about a bicycle. But for now, it really was best to be a good walker.

"Oh well, young lovers," said Kate. "I'll give you the next best thing—this room to yourselves. I'm going round to stay over at George's."

Through the frosted glass panel on the door, they could see that Kate had stopped to talk to someone on the landing. Then there was a rap on the panel.

"I want you out of here by half nine, Romeo. That's your accommodation office's rules not mine."

"That's a load of rot." This was mouthed rather than said by Rachel, so low and quiet was her whisper. She did find Beverly (or 'Mrs Strait' as she unvaryingly addressed her) terrifying.

"She's a bit rough, isn't she?" he grumbled almost as quietly.

**********

Gerry now had nearly five solid years of (solo) masturbation behind him. If they had ever managed to broach the subject it might have surprised him to know that Rachel had a far longer and more illustrious record behind her, one that included using a seat with a tidy edge like a stool or a dining room or classroom chair.

On one occasion, she even found herself doing it in a public exam when she became frustrated by the choice of questions on the paper. After swiftly relieving herself in this way, she realised that there were actually enough questions there that she could answer in order to get a pass. But she was quite ashamed of the habit, and what she thought about while doing it, like teachers from her school, and not just men. She was contained and restrained by the morality of her upbringing, although intellectually, she had no use for the virtue of chastity.

Intellectually she was desperate to break out. Yet she couldn't help being silently shocked when she realised, in the first term, that some of the other freshers had already been to bed with a new boy about every week. By contrast, several weeks into the second term, she and Gerry were still virgins. Putting a tick against loss of virginity was most definitely a priority in life for each of them, but not one they discussed in a useful way. Instead they seemed to behave as if a Victorian torture lay ahead of them when they got the privacy for its execution.

Rachel had put herself through an initially mortifying visit to the family planning clinic. Gerry, for his part, bought a supply of Durex from a pharmacist who looked like a concentration camp guard until she handed him his change with, "Don't overdo it, son." He actually managed to visibly trip somewhat on the way out of the shop.

Of all this they managed to mention not a word to the other. Or, at least not until after Rachel had found a way to predict Beverly's shifts, and also Kate's absences, simply by asking her. She didn't care as long as they didn't use her bed.

So eventually, there they were; without a plan. It was the start of a night of frustration. With their background, these two should have started with exploring each other through the mutual masturbation that other rougher types performed round the back of the colleges' discos. But they were too shy and pure for such squalid exhibitionism. Instead they tried to get on with it and without discussion. After several hours of aimless and futile prodding they fell into a bad tempered sleep, knowing full well that it would be a couple of weeks before they could try again.

Quite often, when she was on a shift that ended in the night, Beverly would bring someone back with her and there would be a bit of commotion, a frenzy of shrieks and then low voices as she dispatched the unknown person into the night. Rachel never had any idea who these night visitors might be. Very often she heard a car and wondered, horrified, whether Beverly was selling her herself for a lift home, maybe even to a cab driver. The lodgers' bedroom was at the back of the house, so she couldn't look out without showing herself.

Gerry was still paying his more ordinary visits and so he would run across Beverly from time to time.

"Are you handy with electrics, Gez?"

"Depends what you mean, Mrs Strait."

"Call me Bev. You being tall is good for looking at the stuff in that cupboard."

Quite often, Beverly would apparently be on her way from or to work on an ever changing pattern of shifts, wandering around in her bra and knickers, signatures of her voluptuous assets fore and aft, always black. Despite his conscious desire to retain a pose of sophistication, Gerry would often catch himself gawping at the embroidered landscape of her chest in its 36D bra.

"God, I'm going to be on dead end street at this rate," she said on some other occasion, waving a letter from the bank in her face like a fan, and shouting, "I'll have your rent please, ladies!" and then, lower, to Gerry, "I am not exactly weighed down with assets. Not that kind anyway," catching his eye as she flung down the notice of doom.

On this occasion, he was examining the fuse box when Beverly pushed in and pointed at it. "That's it." she said. He was too distracted by her breast pushing into him to point out that he already had it open. Beverly was behaving as if she was completely unaware of this bodily intrusion, while Gerry was too unsure of himself where women were concerned to say whether this was credible.

The daylight was falling on her. Her face was pudgy, with something of the flush of a boozer. Rachel and Kate held that her snub nose was the snout of a pig. But her hair was brown and thick, with a curl in it which she brushed out to a glossy wave, although it spent a lot of its time tied up because of her work. She was short sighted and had removed the thick black framed glasses she wore for work, so she could examine the electricity equipment. Suddenly he noticed her beautiful pale blue eyes, the pupils wide and receptive under the dark eyebrows.

People with luminous blue eyes have this strange ability to look tremendously sincere when they are talking to you—but what was there to be sincere about with a fuse box? They reminded him of the deep blue of a sky with nothing in it but cirrus clouds.

"Don't let me get in your way," she said as he shut off the power.

Very soon Gerry chuckled with delight. A few minutes and a bit of twiddling later, he switched the vacuum cleaner on and let it go for a minute. "The fuse for this circuit had the wrong fuse wire in it," he said cheerfully. "I've changed it." It might have been a trivial 'repair' but in those days, this kind of thing was 'man's work' and it was pleasing to be seen capable of it.

"Let me see," she said and pushed in again.

This time he was fairly relaxed as she thrust the cushiony volume of her breast at him like a terrible driver turning backwards into a parked car.

"I owe you one. I never forget a good turn," she concluded, and turned those extraordinary eyes on him again to show him that she meant it. This went on for far too long, but somehow he couldn't find the right moment to withdraw. When suddenly she did, he forgot to look away, and his eyes fell into the yawning lace edged landscape of her cleavage. As she moved away there was a smirk on her face, as there had been when they first met.

Some days later, Gerry lay in Rachel's bed staring into the darkness. Why had they bothered? This was useless. He was gnawed at by performance anxiety and actually by some resentment that as a man, he had to present this very visible sign of his potency, a stress that fell only on him.

"Is it stiff enough?"

"Of course it is," he said furiously, but was uncertain if it was. He simply could not find the rapist in himself who would push on into her regardless. He didn't want to be the one to hurt her even if it was for her own good. As well as all the other stuff, he had to reassure her that everything was going to be fine, when he felt that nothing was.

He thought about what Rachel had told him about Beverly bringing people back and shrieking in the night as they had a quick loveless fuck. It wasn't fair that people like that were doing it like going for a piss and others who really cared for each other should be in such difficulty but... but, although he was ashamed to admit it, he envied them and found the thought of it was getting him aroused. If Rachel hadn't been there he would have wanked himself off. There was a shrieker who lived next door to his digs, so he knew the sound, or thought he did. He imagined lying hard against a hot body and that noise going on right behind his ear.

He liked that idea, the idea of being in bed with a woman like that and being the one to bring her to a shrieking climax.

Meanwhile, in real life he was so desperate that he was thinking of breaking up with Rachel, but his affinity with her in ideas, likes, dislikes, what made them laugh and so on was so great that instead they had a tearful making up on a park bench. Maybe, he told her, maybe if they went away for a weekend and had enough time together and rest, maybe it could fall into place. Maybe.

The next time he called round, Beverly answered the door. She was in her dressing gown. He could see that underneath she was wearing a white cotton slip. She drew the gown in closer and tightened its belt, but not before he had noticed the nipples pushing forward through the cloth and the big dark discs behind them.

"I'm just having a chat with Rachel. I think you'd better wait in there," she said in a harsh voice, gesturing at the front room. He sat down, wondering if Beverly had rumbled them, about his overnighting. He realised that he could hear Rachel sobbing, and got up angrily. He went out and put his head round the kitchen door.

She was leaning on Beverly who was stroking her hair and who made a hostile gesture of dismissal by flapping the back of her hand at him.

Rachel was beside herself and her sobs and words came out in a series of gulps.

"Oh Mrs Strait..."

"Don't need to call me that, babe. When it was male lodgers I had to insist or they get too familiar. But—hey—we're all girls together, ain't we?"

"Are we? I'm useless as... as a girl. I'm useless... no good for him... no good for... anybody..."

"Raitch darling, it'll all work out. It always does. Not so much crying though."

"You're making her cry," Gerry said angrily.

"No. You're making her cry. Go and sit in the front room."

"Please," Rachel sobbed.

So he did. Gradually things calmed down and he couldn't hear what they were saying, After about twenty minutes, they came through.

"I think you love birds should go for a walk, and let me do the laundry."

"I'm sorry Mrs—I mean Bev. Thanks."

Rachel and Gerry walked up to the pond and pottered round it.

"You've been talking about us—with her."

"I had to talk to somebody, Gerry. And she's—y'know—experienced."

"I'll say she is. You told me yourself."

"Setting yourself up to judge women's morals is not a very attractive trait in a man, Gerald."

"If you had to talk about this to someone else I don't know why you didn't talk to Kate—why do you think she's engaged?"

"What do you mean?"

"I mean she's 'experienced'."

"Not that much. Bev's twenty eight."

"And it shows. Shop soiled goods."

"Don't be nasty."

"Raitch? Did she kiss you?"

"Why d'you want to know? Do you think I might be turning lesbian?"

"No."

"She just showed me how to kiss, a bit. That's all. She said she was willing to talk to you..."

"What? I don't want you cosily setting up talks for me with your—emm—interesting landlady."

"She's a professional."

"A professional what?"

"A healthcare professional,"

"I thought you were going to say something else."

She slapped him in the midriff.

"We'll work it out—that's what she said. She told me you always fall in love with the first one... Don't you want that to be you? She told me some useful things anyway. You'll see..."

"Like what?"

"We should practise kissing, and you know feeling each other's err bits, and not be in such a terrible rush. Do you want to come back for a bit?"

"Sounds good to me, as long as we don't have to bump into 'Bev'.

**********

It was, however Beverly whom he saw next. It was a Saturday. He often didn't see Rachel until he came round to the Strait establishment at the weekend.

"Rachel's not here," said Beverly when she came to the door. "I think you'd better come in."

Well I don't, he thought, before saying, "Oh. I'll come some other time."