Rabika Flatman – Mrs Flatman, as it excited me to think of her – was one of those Jewish women who just miss out on looking African; she had broad nostrils and fleshy lips and an easy swaying nonchalance of gait, but no matter how much time she put in lying in the sun, she lacked the final finishing touch of colour. She was swarthy but she wasn’t black. I didn’t mind; the rippling mockery of her laughter was still sufficient to startle the elephants at a water-hole and cause the white men’s wives to lie awake and worry under their mosquito nets. I blazed whenever she came near me, and she would throw her head back with gaiety, showing me the dusky flare of her nostrils, and sending me on errands for her and giving me sixpence and ruffling my hair when I returned. Once, on a warm Sunday, the Flatmans invited the Fuglemans to a picnic and the two families squeezed together into the shooting-brake, the adults taking turns to put the children on their knees. On the way back, with only a couple of miles to go, I found myself (though I was neither child nor adult) on Mrs Flatman’s. I could feel her thighs, not quite together, beneath me, giving off tremendous heat. Her fingers fluttered at my waist like drunken butterflies. Prepositions of the most brutal explicitness flooded into my brain. Suddenly, as she was attempting to adjust my weight, her left hand (the one with all the rings on, the one that made her Mrs) accidentally – accidentally? accidentally! – brushed my lap. On the instant, from hitherto small acorns, sprang the oak, the scarlet oak, the redwood, which now knew and was never to forget the climate and the terrain most propitious to its growth. The gold-ringed hand withdrew at great speed but the damage was done. In, I thought, in, on, against, up, between, under, oh under! And I was a long time waking up to the realization that the car had stopped, that we were home, and that there was a froth and bubble of laughter on Mrs Flatman’s rubbery lips.

Thereafter, whenever the peal of her mockery reached me, clearly through my half-opened bedroom window, or muffled through the walls against which I pressed my best ear by the hour, I believed that I was its object. I was convinced that she told on me to her husband, to her friends, to the neighbours, to her little girls even; I was certain that there wasn’t anybody who didn’t know and hadn’t laughed about what had happened to me under her hands. And I couldn’t decide whether that was a source of pain to me, or a source of pleasure. But I took to staying indoors now far more than I used to, becoming unusually dreamy and bookish.