Whenever it happens, though, the light always gets very red for them.

Once they met at a teashop: she was wearing a red sweater with short sleeves, and her bare arms glowed red by her sides. She hadn’t any make-up on, the first time he’d seen her so. Walking to the car, she takes his hand and puts it, for a moment, lightly between her moving legs. Roger’s heart grows erect, and comes. That’s really how it feels. Up sharply to skin level in a V around his centerline, washing over his nipples… it is love, it is amazing. Even when she isn’t there, after a dream, at a face in the street that might against chance be Jessica’s, Roger can never control it, he’s in its grasp.

About Beaver, or Jeremy, as he is known to his mother, Roger tries not to think any more than he has to. Of course he agonizes over technical matters. She cannot possibly—can she?—be Doing The Same Things with Jeremy. Does Jeremy ever kiss her cunt, for example? Could that prig actually—does she reach around as they’re fucking a-and slide a mischievous finger, his English rose, into Jeremy’s asshole? Stop, stop this (but does she suck his cock? Has he ever had his habitually insolent face between her lovely buttocks?) no use, it’s youthful folly time here and you’re better off up at the Tivoli watching Maria Montez and Jon Hall, or looking for leopards or peccaries in Regents Park Zoo, and wondering if it’ll rain before 4:30.

The time Roger and Jessica have spent together, totaled up, still only comes to hours. And all their spoken words to less than one average SHAEF memorandum. And there is no way, first time in his career, that the statistician can make these figures mean anything.

Together they are a long skin interface, flowing sweat, close as muscles and bones can press, hardly a word beyond her name, or his.

Apart is for all their flip film-dialogue, scenarios they make up to play alone for themselves in the nights with the Bofors door-knocking against her sky, with his wind humming among the loops of barbed wire down along the beach. The Mayfair Hotel. “We are quite the jet-propelled one aren’t we, only half an hour late.”

“Well,” Wrens and NAAFI girls, jeweled young widows side-glancing on by, “I’m sure you’ve put the time to good use.”

“Time enough for several assignations,” he replies, looking elaborately at his watch, worn WW II style on the inside of his wrist, “and by now, I should say, a confirmed pregnancy or two, if not indeed—”

“Ah,” she blithely jumps (but upward, not on), “that reminds me…”

“Yaaahhh!” Roger reeling back to a potted plant, among the lilting saxophones of Roland Peachey and his Orchestra playing “There, I Said It Again,” and cowering.

“So, that’s on your mind. If mind is the word I want.”

They confuse everyone. They look so innocent. People immediately want to protect them: censoring themselves away from talk of death, business, duplicity when Roger and Jessica are there. It’s all shortages, songs and boy friends, films and blouses…