Read Online As Far as You Can Go by Julian Mitchell - Free Book Online Page A

curfew, and at the same time not having to talk to them for more than a few minutes before they went to bed.
    “Darling,” said Harold, “wouldn’t it be nice not to go to the cinema, but just to stay here and make love?”
    “Certainly not,” said Helen. She had very firm ideas about love-making, and one of them was that it was indecent to start till it was dark, and then only with the lights out. The latter indignity Harold had overcome occasionally, but the former never.
    “I want to now ,” he said, looking meaningfully at the bed, though he felt absolutely no desire.
    “No.”
    “Why not?”
    “Because, sweet.”
    “Well, can I have a drink?”
    “You’ll have to make it a short one, because dinner’s practically ready.”
    Really, he thought, as he mixed himself a stiff gin and tonic, what can marriage be like, if having a mistress is like this? The same, only with smelly children all over the place, and the discipline even stronger, and the temptation not to come back again even more powerful, probably. No, certainly . Why on earth men let themselves get into it was incomprehensible . It must be that everyone felt having a family was good, so everyone did it, without anyone really enjoying it, though everyone thought he must be enjoying it, since everyone else said it was good.
    “Hallo, David,” he said, going into Brenda’s room which was serving as dining-room for the evening, the girls feeling it incorrect to serve the food hot from the pans at the kitchen table.
    “Nice to see you, old boy,” said David. He was reading an evening newspaper. “Where did you get that drink?”
    “Kitchen.”
    “God, Brenda said it was too near dinner-time for me to have a drink.”
    “That’s women for you. I expect she’s frightened you’ll do something nasty in the cinema if you have too much to drink.”
    “I have every intention of doing something nasty in the cinema, as you put it. It would be an inexcusable waste of opportunity not to do something nasty in the cinema, in fact, drunk or sober. Doing something nasty in the cinema, you might say, was one of my chief pleasures in life.”
    “I believe you,” said Harold, wearily. David had a rather academic tendency to shake a subject by its scruff until it was dead.
    “Doing something nasty in the cinema is a way of life .”
    “I know exactly what you mean.”
    “I wonder if you do,” said David. “You see, it’s like this. One goes to a cinema to watch obviously nasty, though physically attractive, people do appallingly nasty things, all in glorious colour. Well, to me, this is a challenge. In the same amount of time as the characters in the film have to shoot, maim, betray and kiss each other within the limits set by a censorship board voluntarily set up by the industry itself—by the industry itself, mark you—I try and do as much and more in the way of nastiness not permitted by that voluntary censorship board.”
    “You obviously haven’t seen Les Tapettes de Trouville ,”said Harold, who had caught this prize-winning study of fashionable degeneracy in France at Easter. It was rumoured that the English censor would require so many and such drasticcuts that the film’s running time would be reduced by a little over an hour, but that even then there might well be a profitable public outcry. In its original version it had lasted four hours, most of which was spent less between than on top of the sheets.
    “No, I haven’t. Is it sexy?”
    “Not sexy, really, no. But they do spend a good deal of the time in bed together with nothing on.”
    “How can it not be sexy, then?”
    “Oh, it’s an art film, you know. They talk a great deal about life and things.”
    “Things must include sex.”
    “Oh, God, they’re talking about sex,” said Brenda, coming in with the first course. Harold speculated on her sexual activity with David, and decided that it was probably quite vigorous. David was rather stocky, and stocky men were said to