acknowledgement, staring over his shoulder at the scribbling on the opposite wall as if she was trying to read what was there.
‘Did you ever hear of Shelley?’ he asked. He felt he had a duty to educate her. ‘He was a great poet if you like, a rebel. That’s what I am. I don’t agree with the world as it is today. I mean to say. I’ve read all his works. Do you know him?’
‘No, I can’t say I do,’ she conceded. His hands were at rest now he was going to teach her all about Shelley, and she wasn’t sure if she would have preferred his tongue to be at rest instead.
‘There’s a smashing wee pome of his I learned off by heart,’ he said relentlessly. ‘Would you like to hear it?’
‘I don’t mind I’m sure,’ she said patiently. She had been out with all kinds of boys in her short sweet life. She had learnt to be accommodating.
‘See!’ he declared abruptly, and she was reminded of a Scots comic she had once heard say, ‘See? See me! I don’t like fish!’
He gulped and went on in a canting voice.
The mountains kiss the heavens
And the waves clasp one another.
And the moonbeams kiss the sea.
What is all this kissing worth
If you don’t kiss me?
‘That’s nice, I like that,’ she breathed, and they kissed. He wasn’t very good at it and she felt he needed practice.
‘That’s Shelley, that is,’ he broke off. He couldn’t kiss and talk and he had to talk. He was getting scared at his own state. He was there on the brink, afraid the dip would be too cold. Talking would put off the embarrassing need for action. ‘It’s called love’s philosophy.’
‘Oh, yes, of course,’ she answered intelligently.
‘It goes on,’ he said.
And he went on, his hands onher hips inside her open coat while hers dangled daintily over his narrow shoulders.
The fountains mingle with the river
And the river with the ocean,
The winds of heaven mix for ever
With a rare emotion.
Nothing in the world is single,
All things by a law divine
In one another’s being mingle,
So why not you with mine?
He ended throatily, appealingly.
‘I don’t like that,’ she said severely, staring beyond him again. ‘I don’t think it’s very nice.’
She wriggled. He was pressing too hard against her. She squirmed loose and stepped past him, right shoulder forward, her body very straight and her head up as if she was doing the side-stepping movement in a reel.
He managed to grab the tail of her coat just as she reached the bend in the close under the gaslight. She was halted. Percy tugged and she pulled and they wrestled. They finished up panting in the back-close again, only this time they were against the opposite wall. So Percy won. Or Sophy let him win, for who would dare argue that the parallelogram of forces represents the resultant of a lovers’ scuffle?
‘Don’t be daft,’ he complained, standing over her with his long arms on either side of her drooping shoulders so that she was barred from escape. ‘What did you want to run away like that for?’
‘Cause I didn’t like what you were insinuating,’ she said firmly.
‘I wasn’t insinuating nothing,’ he answered, all hurt. ‘It was Shelley I was saying.’
‘I still don’t like it,’ she tossed her head.
‘But there’s nothing wrong in it,’ he argued. ‘It’s perfectly natural. That’s what Shelley was saying. If two people love each other like you and me—’
His arms came closer in his eagerness to confine her.
‘I wish you’d lay off the subject,’ she muttered, scowling darkly in the dimness.
‘Why?’ he demanded, and his arms went round her like the coils of a boa-constrictor. Inspired by a confused recollection of a novel by Lawrence he had tried to read he was proud of his wholesome maturity and maleness and he longed to reach the dark roots of her being and quicken her. ‘We should act according to our impulses, it’s the only natural thing to do, if a man’s to be a man.’
‘I thought you was a nice boy,’ she complained, struggling again.
He was worse than he had been. The wrestling-match at the bend of the close had raised his temperature to boiling point and he was in a state again.
‘Oh, Sophy, please,’ he groaned, an asthmatic bull in a grassless meadow. ‘I think you’re wonderful. I love you. I want you.’
She didn’t even pretend to be impressed. She sent a little signal of scepticism through her nose, a maidenly snort of disbelief, but he blundered on. He felt he was face to face with death, the death of his hopes for an initiation with Sophy. He didn’t want to die, ever, and he was panic- stricken in case he died wondering.
‘Come on, be a sport, let me!’ he pleaded, as hoarse as an NCO after his first day taking a squad in the square.
He wound round her to crush her squirming body in a heroic hug, but she ducked, side-stepped, and stood free of him. He was bang up against the scarred brown paintwork on the wall while Sophy stood at his side with one hand on her hip and the other caressing her pony-tail. But he still wasn’t beaten. He was only provoked. He went on blundering.
‘I can make it worth your while,’ he declared, staggering from the unwelcoming wall. He delved into the pocket inside his new sports jacket (best Harris tweed, heather mixture pattern, fourteen guineas in Carswell’s), fumbled with his pocket book, opened it trembling, and brought out a five-pound note, another five-pound note, waved them before her astounded young eyes.
‘You can have them! You can have them both! I don’t care, there’s plenty more where they came from!’
He was teetering there, certain he was going to gain her, and then her little hand darted. First in a vertical flash it scattered his precious wallet and then it came back on the horizontal plane and slapped him hard across the face. (Mrs Maguire on the ground floor stood with the teapot over her cup and breathed nervously, ‘What was that?’)
Percy put his hand to his cheek as if to make sure it was really his face she had smacked.
‘Well, I like that!’ Sophy flared. ‘So that’s the kind of girl you think I am! Just right here and now, eh? Just like that? Do you think I’m mad? And if you’ve got that kind of money to throw away what the hell are you bothering about me at all for, tell me that! You don’t need to come slobbering round me if you want to buy it. You know where to go or it’s high bloody time you did. Well, I like that! You and your po’try. And I don’t know what you’re doing with all that money anyway, a fella that’s no’ working. I’ve a good mind to tell my brother about you.’
Her inflated little bosom heaved, she flared and sputtered at him. Then she picked up her handbag and marched off. No side-slip this time, but a military quickstep, and Percy was left alone with his smarting face. He stood bleak and frozen in the twilight of the back-close, heard Sophy’s high heels tattoo upstairs, heard her knock at her door on the second storey of the three, heard the door open and the door bang. She was gone, gone for ever. He nearly wept. But perhaps her brother was in. There was no time to waste in tears. He picked up his wallet in a flurry, put the fivers back inside as he hurried through the front-close and ran to the nearest bus-stop.
It was all very well for Shelley. He could say it and get it printed in his immortal works and even in the Golden Treasury. But Shelley didn’t have