She/he is/was good/not so good/wonderful/bit boring/fakey, or whatever; but we don’t as a rule think, oh, being in bed with her was very much like being in bed with so-and-so a couple of years ago. In fact, if I were to close my eyes … We don’t, on the whole, think that way. Courtesy, in part, I expect; a desire to maintain the individuality of others. And perhaps, a fear that if you do that to them, they might start thinking the same back about you.
‘So my new chums fixed me up.’
‘…?’
‘They wanted to thank me for my contribution to their discussions. Seeing as I’d been so useful. Chappie I’d met in the bar said he’d be in touch.’
‘Surely the rally was about to start, Uncle?’ Well, it was hard to resist.
‘The next day he pitched up and said the group was offering me what he called a Surrealist gift. They were touched by the fact that I had not as yet enjoyed the favours of a French lass, and they were prepared to right this wrong.’
‘Remarkably generous.’ A remarkable fantasy is what I really thought.
‘He said they’d booked a room for me at three o’clock the next afternoon in a hotel off Saint-Sulpice. He said he’d be there too. I thought this a bit strange, but on the other hand, never look a gift-horse and all that. “What are you going to be there for?” I asked. “I don’t need my handholding.” So he explained the arrangement. They wanted me to take part in a test. They wanted to know if sex with a Frenchwoman was different from sex with an Englishwoman. I said why did they need me to help them find that out. They said they thought I’d have a more straightforward response. Meaning, I suppose, that I wouldn’t sit around and think about it all the time like they would.
‘I said, “Let me get this straight. You want me to have a couple of hours with a French lass and then come round the next day and tell you what I thought of it?” “No,” Chappie says, “Not the next day, day after. The next day we’ve booked you the same room with another girl.” “That’s handsome,” I say, “two French lasses for the price of one.” “Not quite,” he says, “one of them is English. You have to tell which is which.” “Well,” I say, “I can tell that just by saying Bonjour and looking at them.” “That’s why,” he says, “you aren’t allowed to say Bonjour and you aren’t allowed to look at them. I’ll be there when you arrive and blindfold you, then I’ll let the girl in. When she’s gone and you hear the door shut, you can take the blindfold off. How do you feel about that?”
‘How did I feel about that? Well, you could have knocked me down. I’d just been thinking, Don’t look a gift-horse in the mouth, and now it was a question of not looking two gift-horses in the mouth, or anywhere else. How did I feel? Man to man, I felt like a couple of Christmases had come round at the same time. Part of me wasn’t too partial to the blindfold business; though, man to man, another part of me rather was.’
Isn’t it pathetic how old men lie about the sex they had in earlier days? What could be more transparently an invention? Paris, youth, a woman, two women, a hotel room inthe afternoon, all set up and paid for by someone else? Pull the other one, Uncle. Twenty minutes in an hotel de passe with a rough hand-towel and a subsequent dose of clap is more like it. Why do old men need this sort of comfort? And what banal scenarios they drool out to themselves. OK, Uncle, fast forward with the soft porn. We’ll forget about navigating in the rally.
‘So I said count me in. And then next afternoon I went to this hotel behind Saint-Sulpice. It came on to rain and I had to run from the Metro station and got there in a muck sweat.’ This wasn’t bad - I’d been expecting a brilliant spring day with accordionists serenading him through the Jardins du Luxembourg. ‘I got to the room, Chappie was there, took off my hat and coat. Wasn’t planning to
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