With her hair pulled back of her ears, her soft chin in profile, she looks only 9 or 10, alone by windows, blinking into the sun, turning her head on the light counterpane, coming in tears, child’s reddening wrinkling face about to cry, going oh, oh …

One night in the dark quilt-and-cold refuge of their bed, drowsing to and fro himself, he licked Jessica to sleep. When she felt his first warm breaths touch her labia, she shivered and cried like a cat. Two or three notes, it seemed, that sounded together, hoarse, haunted, blowing with snowflakes remembered from around nightfall. Trees outside sifting the wind, out of her sight the lorries forever rushing down the streets and roads, behind houses, across canals or river, beyond the simple park. Oh and the dogs and cats who went padding in the fine snow… .

“… pictures, well scenes, keep flashing in, Roger. By themselves, I mean I’m not making them… .” A bright swarm of them is passing by, against the low isotonic glimmer of the ceiling. He and she lie and breathe mouth-up. His soft cock drools down around his thigh, the downhill one, closest to Jessica. The night room heaves a sigh, yes Heaves, a Sigh—old-fashioned comical room, oh me I’m hopeless, born a joker never change, flirting away through the mirrorframe in something green-striped, pantalooned, and ruffled—meantime though, it is quaint, most rooms today hum you know, have been known also to “breathe,” yes even wait in hushed expectancy and that ought to be the rather sinister tradition here, long slender creatures, heavy perfume and capes in rooms assailed by midnight, pierced with spiral stairways, blue-petaled pergolas, an ambience in which no one, however provoked or out of touch, my dear young lady, ever, Heaves, a Sigh. It is not done.

But here. Oh, this young lady. Checked gingham. Ragged eyebrows, grown wild. Red velvet. On a dare once, she took off her blouse, motoring up on the trunk road near Lower Beeding.

“My God she’s gone insane, what is this, why do they all come to me?”

“Well, ha, ha,” Jessica twirling the necktie of her Army blouse like a stripper, “you uh, said I was afraid to. Di’n’t you. Called me ‘cowardly, cowardly custard’ or something, ’s I recall—” No brassiere of course, she never wears one.

“Look here,” glaring sideways, “do you know you can get arrested? Never mind you,” just occurring to him, here, “I’ll get arrested!”

“They’ll blame it all on you, la, la.” Lower teeth edging out in a mean-girl’s smile. “I’m just an innocent lamb and this—” flinging a little arm out, striking light from the fair hairs on her forearm, her small breasts bouncing free, “this Roger-the-rake! here, this awful beast! makes me perform, these degrading…”

Meantime, the most gigantic lorry Roger has ever seen in his life has manoeuvred steel-shuddering nearby, and now not only the driver, but also several—well, what appear to be horrid… midgets, in strange operetta uniforms actually, some sort of Central European government-in-exile, all of them crammed somehow into the high-set cab, all are staring down, scuffling like piglets on a sow for position, eyes popping, swarthy, mouths leaking spit, to take in the spectacle of his Jessica Swanlake scandalously bare-breasted and himself desperately looking to slow down and drop behind the lorry—except that now, behind Roger, pressing him on, in fact, at a speed identical with the lorry’s, has appeared, oh shit it is, a military police car. He can’t slow down, and if he speeds up, they’ll really get suspicious… .