topics: |  fiction | uk | erotica

Brilliantly innovative prose.

Quotations from title story

I think I can safely say I have slept with all the men and boys of my
acquaintance, including the grey-beards and one-way homosexuals and those
towards whom I had not thought I felt an iota of oestrus. p. 1

[Her imagined life.  He asks: Where were you last night?  They were watching
TV together.  But]  I can hardly admit that I had a most colourful and
stimulating night, thank you, lying bear-hugged with your squash partner
skin to skin, dissolving in an exchange of slow damp kisses.

"You're only fourteen, aren't you darling," I teased, pressing his head to my
bosom, pretending to be motherly.  I woke describing circles, and I was
laughing.

[just before her wedding, she looks at the Thames flowing] I had a
premonition that my privacy and self-possession, which harmed nobody and
were my only important treasures, would be things of the past the day after
tomorrow.  My saying yes to a wedding appeared in this illuminated instant
as self-betrayal.  A tide of shame and teror crept over my skin, moving
fast like spilt wine.  I stammered some thin wedge of these thoughts to my
future husband, thinking (with an early marital shudder at the
predictability), he will say no man is an island.
   "No man is an island," he said.

Conjugal life correctly conjugated reads: libido libidat libidamus libidatis
libiDON'T.  Goodbye to the pure uncomplicated glee which spring up between
strangers, leading them out of their clothes and towards each other in a
spirit of, among other things, sunny friendship.

he was the other half who would make you hole.

"Either it's Animal Lust, which doesn't last, or its the Real Thing, which
means Marriage." Rhoda [whom she meets once in a while for a slice of
cauliflower quiche] likes things cut and dried.  Recently she became engaged
to the only possible father of her children.  She took him shopping for a
ring, hauled him past the windows of Hatton Garden, and he expressed nothing
but ridicule at the prices.

Lily-livered, swathed in white from head to foot, I said, "I will." 3

I am lying cool and straight on my bed when he climbs in with a
proprietorial air.

We fall into bed like two nasty children.  He says things so hard that I
feel little shooting spasms in sexual places, so then I feel they must be
true. 5

This morning when I wolf-whistled him as he emerged shaggy and glistening
from the shower, he clapped his hands over himself and said, "That's not
exactly very feminine, is it."  He has beautiful hands, fine as earth,
rough and warm like brown sand. 6

Author bio

Helen Simpson read English at Oxford University, where she wrote a thesis
on Restoration farce, then worked for five years as a staff writer at Vogue
before becoming a freelance-writer, contributing articles to newspapers and
magazines and publishing two cookery books.

Her first collection of short stories, Four Bare Legs in a Bed and Other
Stories (1990), won the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award and a
Somerset Maugham Award and she was chosen as one of Granta magazine's 20
'Best of Young British Novelists 2' in 1993.