Pearly himself had experienced the buffetings and deliriums of love, and as he neared the three-storeyed Pegasus Building, which was on his books, his memories had segued from Deidre Utterspan and the rugby coach to his humiliation over Gwendolyn Posswillow. She’d been his Juliet when Pearly was in the seventh form and she one year younger. For six months of that year everyone else in the world had faded to a pale and pygmy insignificance, and he’d maintained an almost permanent erection. Gwendolyn was languidly beautiful and cruel. She favoured Pearly in an offhand way when the moon was full, and others when it suited her. On footy practice nights when he had the motorbike he would walk through the Posswillow shrubbery of azaleas and rhododendrons to reach her bedroom window and tap on it. If she was at home and in the mood, the window would lift and they would talk there, her desk close, her bed against the far wall. Nothing they talked about was of consequence to either of them. Everything was in their mutual awareness of proximity. Twice when he came she had a classmate with her to witness how completely he was in thrall. She never allowed him to climb in, and the smooth, blue cover of the bed was undisturbed despite its daring proximity. On a wet winter’s evening when she was still in school uniform, her mother came into the room and found them kissing at the windowsill. Pearly had cut and run, half blinded by the cold spray from the leaves he dashed through.

It was the end of it, although Pearly and Gwendolyn never discussed the incident, and he never returned to the window. Pearly had wondered what she’d expected of him, what she would have considered an appropriate response to her mother’s arrival as he stood drenched, lovesick, outside the bedroom window. Most likely if he had at the beginning of it all gone to the front door and politely asked to see her, it would have been okay and turned out differently, but Pearly had felt that his intentions must have been as clearly seen on his face as they were felt internally. It was all an eternity away, and most of Pearly’s love affairs since had been conducted with greater success and more sangfroid, but that first wound was still tender. Her teeth were white, uniform and pointed, and when she raised her narrow face to be kissed it was like the approach of a vixen.