and a towel and a naked hanging light bulb and not much else. June undressed methodically. It was too much for Willie. He hardly enjoyed the moment. In no time at all it was over for him, after a whole weekend of planning, after all the expense, and he didn't know what to say.
June, letting his head rest on her plump arm, said, “A friend of mine says it happens with Indians. It's because of the arranged marriages. They don't feel they have to try hard. My father said his father used to tell him, ‘Satisfy the woman first. Then think of yourself.' I don't suppose you had anybody telling you anything like that.”
Willie thought of his father with compassion for the first time.
He said, “Let me try again, June.”
He tried again. It lasted longer, but June didn't say anything. And then, as before, the moment was over. The toilet was at the end of the black corridor. Spiderwebs, furry with dust, covered the high, rusting cistern, and hung like a kind of material on the small window at the top. June, when she came back, dressed very carefully. Willie didn't watch her. They walked down the steps without talking. A door opened and an old woman looked hard at them. An hour ago Willie would have minded; he didn't mind now. On a landing they saw a small black man with a broad-brimmed Jamaican hat that shadowed his face. His trousers, half of a zoot-suit, tight at the ankles and ballooning all down his legs, were in a thin material meant for a warmer place. He looked at them for longer than he should. They walked down the poor streets, which were very quiet, with big windows blank with sagging curtains and makeshift blinds, to where there was the light of shops and reasonable traffic, London again. No taxi for them now. A bus for June—she talked of going to Marble Arch to get a bus to a place called Cricklewood. Another bus for Willie. Going back to the college, thinking of June going home, to some place he couldn't imagine, thinking of Percy, he felt the beginning of remorse. It didn't last. He kicked it aside. He found he was pleased with himself, after all. He had done a good, an immense, afternoon's work. He was a changed man. He would worry about the money side later.
When he next saw Percy he asked, “What's June's family like?”
“I don't know. I've never seen them. I don't think she likes them.”
Later he went to the college library and looked at a Pelican paperback, The Physiology of Sex. He had seen it around, but had been put off by the scientific title. The little wartime paperback was so tightly bound, with rusting metal staples, that it was hard sometimes to see the beginning of lines. He had to pull at the pages and hold the book at different angles. He came at last to what he was looking for. He read that the average man could keep going for ten to fifteen minutes. That was bad news. A line or two later it became much worse. He read that a “sexual athlete” could easily keep going for half an hour. The frivolous, gloating language—not something he expected in a serious Pelican book—was like a blow. He rejected what he had read, and read no more.
When he next saw Percy he asked, “How did you learn about sex, Percy?”
Percy said, “You have to start small. We all started small. Practising on the little girls. Don't look so shocked, little Willie. I am sure you don't know everything that was happening in your extended family. Your trouble, Willie, is that you are too neat. People look at you and don't see you.”
“You are neater than me. Always in a suit and a nice shirt.”
“I make women nervous. They are frightened of me. That's the way for you, Willie. Sex is a brutal business. You have to be brutal.”
“Is June frightened of you?”
“She is scared stiff of me. Ask her.”
Willie thought he should tell Percy about what had happened. But he didn't know what words to use. Something from an old movie came to him, and he was on the point of saying, “June and I are in love, Percy.” But he didn't like the words, and they refused to come out.
Just a week or so later he was glad he hadn't said anything. Percy—the man about town—took him to a party in Notting