Jomier is not a Jew but he sees elemental truths in Jewish myth. God creates Adam but decides ‘that it is not good that man should be alone’ and so creates Eve as a helpmate and companion. Adam is delighted. But Eve is discontented: from the start, woman runs true to form. She likes the look of the one thing they may not eat in the Garden of Eden. The Forbidden Fruit. Fuck that! She plucks it, takes a bite, then inveigles Adam to do the same. The result? The end of innocence. ‘They saw that they were naked.’ He looks with revulsion at her pubic hair and slimy vulva; she, with the same disgust, at his dangling penis and swaying scrotum. Yuk. They cover up with loincloths made from fig leaves. The birth of shame. God notices this screening of their private parts. ‘Who told you were naked? Have you been eating of the tree I forbade you to eat?’ Now comes the blame game. ‘It was the woman you put with me,’ says Adam. ‘She gave me the fruit, and I ate it.’ And Eve: ‘The serpent tempted me and I ate.’ The serpent!

Their excuses do not wash. God kicks Adam and Eve out of the Garden of Eden, but before they go, he ‘makes clothes out of skins for the man and his wife’. The start of the rag trade. The birth of fashion. Now, a million years later, the skins are silk and satin. Diaphanous lingerie with lace edging to at once entice and veil the shame. Bras, corsets, stockings, garters, camiknickers. Jomier knows them all only too well. He has unveiled and unbuttoned and unhooked and pulled down to uncover the soft and the spongy, the puckered and the hirsute, the slippery and the engorged. Jomier has observed and mentally dissected but never again has he known the primordial innocence of those early years with Tilly 1 – when they did not know that they were naked and remembered nothing of their acts of love.

Chapter 5

Chapter 5