her looks were of the sort that improves with the strength and definition of maturity. She was tall; her bony face was longish and I liked the suggestion of thrust in her chin and lower lip. I liked her narrow forehead and her slightly ill-humoured eyes – perhaps she needed glasses. And there was a coarseness about her skin which enchanted me. I liked a quality of graining in the skin; it was to me a sign of a subtle sensuality. There was firmness and precision in her movements, and always a slight bite to her speech. Women were continually provoked by her manner, which gave the impression of irony even when none was intended. She affected a very old and grubby khaki-coloured macintosh, which it was always a pleasure to help off, for below it, and always as a surprise, were soft, cool colours, and a body fresh and scrupulously cared for. Not even the macintosh could hide the fullness of her breasts, to which I had for some little time been admitted. They were not the self-supporting cut apples of the austere French ideal; but breasts curving and rounded with a weight just threatening pendent excess, which the viewer, recognizing the inadequacy and indeed crudity of the cupping gesture, instinctively stretches out a hand to support; breasts which in their free state alter their shape and contour with every shift in the posture of their possessor; breasts which in the end madden the viewer because, faced with such completeness of beauty, he does not know what to do. No one loved her breasts more than Sandra herself. She caressed them in moments of abstraction; and indeed it was this ritualistic, almost Pharaonic, attitude – right hand supporting and caressing left breast, left hand supporting right – which had first brought her to my startled if delighted attention in the dreary library one morning and had encouraged me to pen an invitation to coffee on one of the library’s borrowing slips and slide it towards her across the polished table that we shared. Pure joy it was later, at the assisted uncovering, to discover that she painted the nipples of her breasts. So absurd, so pathetic, so winning. I kissed, caressed, stroked with hand and cheek; inadequate speech was dragged out of me. ‘Lovely, lovely,’ I said. And Sandra had replied, ‘Thank you.’ A cooling thing to hear, as I lay between her breasts; and head and hands for an instant went still. But it was a revealing reply, in its humourlessness and confidence. The adoration of none could equal her own; and even at that first encounter I could feel her own sense of self-violation. Self-possessed at one moment, she became frantic at another that the fumbling should go no farther.
Language is so important. Up to this time my relationships had been with women who knew little English and of whose language I frequently knew nothing. These affairs had been conducted in a type of pidgin; they were a strain; I could never assess the degree of complication we had arrived at after the sexual simplicities. Once this had been glamorous and had suited me; now it was like entering an imperfect world, some grotesque tunnel of love, where, as in a dream, at a critical moment one is denied the use of arms or legs and longs to cry out. With Sandra there was no such frustration; the mere fact of communication was a delight; to this extent I had changed. And for all the recurring checks that occurred in my rooms, our relationship developed. It was with surprise that I discovered that, though of the city, her position in it was like my own. She had no community, no group, and had rejected her family. She saw herself alone in the world and was determined to fight her way up. She hated the common – her own word – from which she nevertheless freely acknowledged herself to have sprung and about which she therefore claimed to speak with authority; no one knew ‘them’ as well as she. To the end she had a cruel eye for the common, and she passed on to me the word and the assessing skill. No family, two or three school friends, now scattered: it was easy to see how she felt imprisoned and fearful and