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.
