He looked at the mattress’s grid of squashy diamonds, satiny and synthetic, the stains here and there that he wanted to think were coffee. Unlike the rest of the furniture, the bed did not belong to the landlord. It was Claire’s. He’d never been sure how he felt about that. Was sleeping on a stranger’s mattress, where untold numbers of other strangers had previously had sex, any worse than sleeping on the mattress upon which your own girlfriend had fucked dozens of other men before she met you?

He ferreted the notebook out.

B. was a virgin. He came to my room in halls one night and we discussed it and in the process of the discussion he told me that he would like his first time to be with me, so I obliged. We put the lamp on. We went to bed. He was smiling, but not to cover up his nervousness – it was a kind, honest smile that acknowledged his anxiety and his own amusement at himself. He was a very calm presence although he trembled. The skin of his chest was brown and soft, his nipples very plump, and his penis was large – too large, almost, improbably mismatched to his gentleness. He didn’t know what to do with it. On one level I liked the feeling that I did know what I was doing – I liked the power, the confidence, it gave me. On another level I felt closed out of my own experience, but this time by the power I held, not by the power I was lacking. Afterwards he was plainly grateful but also, I suspect now, probably disappointed, and perhaps even hurt by the whole thing, while I made crude comments to myself like ‘I’ve deflowered a virgin!’, enjoying the illusion that I’d done this sensitively, when of course I had deprived him of the chance I’d had myself: to do it for the first time with someone who loved him.

He felt hot: scorched, almost, as if he’d looked down into a smoking pan. ‘Monstrous’ did not seem too strong a word. It was monstrous to acquiesce to someone’s wishes like that, knowing what you knew, knowing that they would regret it. Monstrous to crow about it afterwards. Almost more monstrous to write it down so frankly; to be able to see so clearly what you had done wrong. She’d used this B., not for sex, but for the experience of being in control: to see how it felt. She’d stolen something from him that he’d never get back. It was not dissimilar to what the teacher had stolen from her. So she hadn’t only learned abjection from her earlier life. She’d learned manipulation too.