Now, by his own acknowledgement A’s fertility is marginal. My own, I have cause to suspect, is approaching its term. Over the last two years my menses have grown ever more erratic: not infrequently I skip a month altogether. Through the period of my connexion with “George III,” these irregularities seldom caused me more anxiety than any woman might feel at the approach of her menopause: on the occasions when His Royal Highness (who was not impotent either, only slowed by age and debilitated by his “madness,” which followed in some detail the course of his original’s), aroused by an erotic passage, say, in some Fielding or Smollett I was reading to him, achieved congress with his “Lady Pembroke,” she was properly pessaried in advance. For the same reason I was not uneasy about these latter two Noctes Ambrosianae (faithful to his promise, he has so far conducted himself with rather more discretion than I). But that rash initial coupling in my office still fretted at my peace of mind. I had only his word for it that his “motility” was low (upon a former wife he fathered a child, a retarded daughter whose custody he retains); in any case it wanted only one healthy swimmer to do the job. That infusion I’d been obliged to sit upon through our committee meeting — where we’d postponed nominating A. B. Cook by the procedural diversion of disqualifying Ambrose from the committee on the grounds of your having mentioned him for the award, and selecting his replacement, a sensible woman from the French Department — was enormous, and coincided with the mild Mittelschmerz of my ovulation time. What was more, sore experience had taught me… a lesson that will keep for another letter.

Therefore, despite the heavy odds against my impregnation, I welcomed with relief the cramps that came on me in the evening of 2 April — and Ambrose rejoiced in the coincidence of my flow with the full Pink Moon.

That moon marked, in some oestral almanac of my lover’s reckoning, the end of the First Stage of our affair and the commencement of the Second (still very much in progress a fortnight since, though I cannot imagine it to be of very long duration!), which I can describe only as Coition to Exhaustion. Earlier on I remarked that I am neither prudish nor “frigid,” though the celebrated reserve of the English is, in my view, a quality much more admirable than not, and which I hope I yet manifest in some measure, at least in the other theatres of life. I cannot account for my behaviour, unprecedented in my biography if not altogether in his: having duly observed that he is my first lover younger than myself; that the erotic aspect of my past connexions had ever been of less moment to me than their other aspects; that I am undeniably in the last phase of youthfulness if not yet of vigour; that Ambrose’s style is still very much to encourage equality in the area of sexual initiative (a style with obvious appeal to one in my position) — having acknowledged all this, I am still at a loss to explain my, his, our appetite for raw copulation, its adjuncta and succedanea, these two weeks!

He is not my first lover, nor I his; and you, sir, are not my first novelist, nor I (I daresay, despite your protestations au contraire) your first “model.” We all know what we want from one another, and having decided (or been led to choose) to give, I shan’t hold back. Ambrose Mensch is, has been, at least with me… a fucking-machine! And I another! We do not love each other. We are neither better nor worse friends than before. In all other particulars we and our connexion are unchanged. But we fuck!

He has taught me to relish that word, which I ever despised; he professes to wonder as much as I whence our energy and unquenchable lust; I cannot keep my hand out of his fly, he his my drawers. A woman past forty-five, I tell myself, acting provost of a university faculty, does not bestride one of her adjunct professors in his own office in midmorning, upon his swivel chair or amid his books and papers, and hump him hornily whilst students throng through the corridors en route to class. At forty-five-plus the blood has cooled; sex takes its place — a real but not a preeminent place — among one’s priorities; many other things more engage one’s time and interests; companionship is important, one’s projects in the world are important. Placing the olives from one’s faculty-cocktail-party martinis into the (acting) provostial cunt to be osculated therefrom and eaten two hours later by one’s junior colleague is not important, and should not at one’s present age excite to olive-by-olive orgasm first at the prospect (as one secretes the olives in one’s handbag), second at the insertion (in the faculty women’s loo), a third time at the extraction (squatting over Ambrose’s face on the hearth rug at 24 L), and a fourth time now at the narration: four comes per olive times four olives gives sixteen comes in this case alone, twelve of them before we even got down to that evening’s fuck…

You get the idea. Where will this lead? Our naughty little tyrannies: I make him wear my semen-soaked “panties” to a departmental luncheon; he makes me recite passages from the works of my earlier, more famous lit’ry lovers whilst he rogers me…

Enough (she cries, who cannot have enough)! Yesterday, I note with mild distress, your New York State legislature voted down a model bill to legalise the abortion laws in that state. In Maryland, once a Catholic province, they are even more medieval. My imperious lover will arrive any minute; I must apply the pessary. What shall we do tonight, who already this morning managed soixante-neuf during Shirley Stickles’s coffee break? When will I recognise myself again as

G?

P.S.: As I closed A. entered, and informed me as we threw off our clothes that today is the 195th anniversary of the outbreak of the American Revolution at Concord and Lexington (I knew it already; Harrison Mack used to wear mourning from 19 April through 4 July). We set to reenacting that conflict sexually: I seized his New York, he crossed my Delaware; ahead lay Brandywines, Valley Forges, Saratogas. But as Mother Country was getting in her licks on the White Plains of my coffee table, he caught sight of this page, snatched up the whole letter, and read it, over my protests, with whooping glee… Then it was straight to Yorktown and my surrender, and the prime article of our subsequent Treaty of Paris was that he be shown any future such letters, in return for my full freedom to say whatever I choose of him with impunity. But my punishment for having thus far confided our intimacies without consulting him is to take it up the arse athwart my writing desk and write as best I can not only this postscript but those passages:

Most people in this world seem to live “in character”; they have a beginning, a middle and an end, and the three are congruous with one another and true to the rules of their type.

And

It is our intention to preserve in these pages what scant biographical material we have been able to collect concerning Joseph Knecht, or Ludi Magister Josephus III, as he is called in the archives of the Glass Bead Game.

And

A squat grey building of only thirty-four stories. Over the main entrance the words, CENTRAL LONDON HATCHERY AND CONDITIONING CENTRE…

And

When I reached C company lines, which were at the top of the hill, I paused and looked back at the camp, just coming into full view below me through the grey mist of early morning.

And even

An unassuming young man was travelling, in midsummer, from his native city of Hamburg to Davos-Platz in the Canton of Grisons, on a three weeks’ visit.