A Man of Parts by David Lodge Page A

on the bench in Regent’s Park they had not formally parted when he left London, because they had never been formally betrothed. He wrote to her occasionally during his time at Holt and Stoke, in the tone of a friend not a lover, letters to which Isabel responded in the same style, but when he returned to London he picked up the threads of their old relationship as if nothing had interrupted it. Isabel, for her part, had acquired no other beau in the meantime. Before long he was lodging with his Aunt Mary once more. As he prospered the family accepted that it was only a matter of time before he and Isabel married, and living in close proximity to her he became more and more impatient for this conclusion.
    He imagined their wedding night with excited longing, but also some anxiety about his own inexperience. One evening, after working late at the College, instead of going home as usual, he acted on an impulse to walk down to the West End and find a prostitute. The woman he selected proved to be not as young and comely as she had seemed when she accosted him coaxingly in a shadowy street behind the Haymarket. She led him up a dirty staircase of creaking bare boards to a narrow, sparsely furnished room, and lit the gas jet. He saw that she was a mature woman with a tired, heavily painted face and when she flashed him a professional smile she revealed a disconcerting gap in her front teeth. She stripped off her clothes without coquetry and squatted over a basin of water to wash herself with a rag cloth as if her private parts were no more interesting or sensitive than a soiled plate. Nevertheless the brazenness of the action excited him, and he stared, hypnotised, at what he had only known by touch under Edith’s skirt. ‘Ain’tcher goin’ to take yer togs off, then?’ she said. And, as he hesitated, added knowingly: ‘This yer first time, is it ducky?’
    ‘Yes,’ he murmured, and turned his back to remove his jacket, shoes, trousers and drawers. He kept his shirt on: this was not to be the ideal, idyllic naked embrace he had dreamed of for so long, but merely a mechanical practice for that event. His erect penis stood out rudely between the tails of his shirt in spite of his efforts to conceal it. ‘My, you’ve got a big one for a little chap,’ the woman said, as she lay back on the bed and spread her knees. It was the first intimation he had that he was unusually well endowed in this respect, for he had had no opportunities to compare himself with other males since boyhood. Encouraged by the remark, he lay on top of the woman and began to butt at her crotch with his rigid member, but with little effect until she took it in her practised hand and guided him in. The act ended instantly, with an unstoppable, intensely pleasurable ejaculation, but it was accomplished. He was a man. Isabel seemed to sense it when he next looked at her. She flushed and lowered her eyes, as if she had perceived in his the gleam of a new knowingness in his desire for her, and shrank timorously from it.
    He resorted to prostitutes again on a few occasions, simply for physical relief, using the rubber contraceptive sheaths which were readily available from seedy barber’s shops, backstreet pharmacists and purveyors of dubious reading matter – partly as a precaution against infection, and partly to get used to handling them, for he had no intention of starting a family as soon as he married. ‘Suppose we have children, Bertie?’ Isabel said once, trying to persuade him to wait longer, and save more money. ‘We won’t,’ he said. ‘But how can you be sure?’ ‘There are things one can use,’ he said. ‘Things?’ she echoed fearfully, as if she imagined that hard pointed instruments were somehow involved. ‘Rubber sheaths,’ he said, ‘which the man puts on.’ ‘Oh, Bertie,’ she whispered, blushing and covering her face with her hands. ‘Don’t.’ What did she mean by that monosyllable: Don’t use them or Don’t