I suppose I really ought to explain.

The thing is that I am a member of that sad, ever-dwindling minority ... the child of an unbroken home. I have carried this albatross since the age of eleven, when I started at grammar school. Not a day would pass without somebody I knew turning out to be adopted or illegitimate, or to have mothers who were about to hare off with some bloke, or to have dead fathers and shabby stepfathers. What busy lives they led. How I envied their excuses for introspection, their ear-marked receptacles for every just antagonism and noble loyalty.

My father has in all sired six children. I used to suspect that he had had so many just to show the catholicity of his tastes, to bolster his image as tolerant patriarch, to inform the world that his loins were rich in sons. There are in fact four boys, and he has given us progressively trendy names: Mark (twenty-six), Charles himself (pushing twenty), Sebastian (fifteen) and Valentine (nine). As against two girls. I sometimes wish I had been born female, if only to rectify this bias.

'Good morning,' I said, putting the tray down beside Gloria's cracked smile. I drew the curtains back an inch or two. A gash of sunlight fell athwart the bed, causing a token shriek from the compromised Gloria, who was sitting up and well into her second round of toast. I watched her finish. She wiped her mouth with freckly knuckles, lay back with a grunt and lit a cigarette. Her breasts were exposed; they looked very white now. What did I feel for her? Ambiguous lust, genial condescension, and gratitude. It didn't seem enough.

Legless buskers cavorted outside Holland Park Underground. I bought some newspapers (Fleet Street's big two, in fact, the Sun and the Mirror), leftily dropped ten pence into the musicians' bowler hat and stood there reading the headlines, tapping my foot to a trilled-up version of 'Oh, You Beautiful Doll'. I was about to aim up to Notting Hill for a coffee at the Costa Brava when a hook-nosed queen with flat hair appeared from behind the curtains of the station photograph booth. He asked if I knew the time. I said what it was, referring him to the large clock attached to the wall opposite. He thanked me and inquired if I ever went down the Catacombs club in Earls Court.

Next, exploring my powerhouse elder brother's desk I came across a body-building mag, called Tensio-Dynamism or something, one of the ones that explains to you how to kick the shit out of anyone who bugs you at the seaside. Resignedly I went back to my room, curled up in bed with it, started turning the pages, waiting equably for an erection. No way. Idiot faces glaring in pinhead conceit, ghastly all-out-of-control tenements of beef-cake. Never felt less sexy in my life: it beat me how females could fancy them. These gentlemen were, I realized, unrepresentative - but even so.

I did an instant assessment. She was fairly formidable, a bit out of my league really. She didn't belong to the aggressively sexy genre, like some of the more tear-jerking girls there, whose golden thighs and teeming breasts I found about as approachable as leprosy. However: tallish, nearly my height, shoulder-length black hair conventionally shaped around strong features, she made much of her eyes, her nose made much of itself, black boots and black cowgirl skirt met at the knee, manly white blouse, expensive handbag, few bracelets, one insignificant ring, rather stern no-crap stance, intelligent lower-middle class with a good job, something bossy like public relations, living alone, older than me, possibly half Jewish.

The ethnic detail, yes, would provide me with an opening. I am in rny own appearance if anything rather oppressively Caucasian, but I could always go up and say This party's none too kosher, is it?' or 'I see your schul-days are over.' At that moment I glanced round and guessed that I was the proprietor of the only foreskin in the room. Perhaps I should appeal to her Aryan side then, or at any rate show my sensitivity to this two-way pull she must so often feel. 'Hi there, couldn't help noticing you looked possibly half Jewish. It must be..." Oh, I'm a right one I am.

I had no desire whatever to enlarge on this cryptic reply. 'Christ, how should I know?' Christ? Was that wise, what with her being half Jewish and all ? I held up a hand, to silence her, to call a halt. 'Why don't we talk about something that interests you? Make-up ... clothes ... babies... ? Anything you like. Let me get you a drink.'

'How do you know they interest me?'

'You're a girl.'

'So?'

'They interest you. All girls like talking about those things, surely you must know that. It's all all girls ever talk about. Shops ... pillow-slips ... hairbrushes.'

'You can't generalize like —'

'Why no—'

' — because, there are so many exceptions.'

'Oh really?'

She sighed. 'I'm an exception.'

'Then you're the exception that makes the rule.'

Bloodcurdling, I quite agree; yet the bookish teenager will often find himself behaving in this way.

Why couldn't Rachel be a little more specific about the type of person she was? Goodness knew; if she were a hippie I'd talk to her about her drug experiences, the zodiac, tarot cards. If she were left-wing I'd look miserable, hate Greece, and eat baked beans straight from the tin. If she were the sporty type I'd play her at... chess and backgammon and things. No, don't tell me she's the very girl to show me what egotistical folly it is to compartmentalize people in this sad way; don't tell me she's going to sort me out, take me on, supply the cognitio and comic resolution. I couldn't bear it.

With comb and fingertips I styled my pubic hairs. It was a good idea to spruce myself up for Rachel, the reason being that one honestly did never know. One night last July: at 10.5, in Belsize Park tube station, a girl was telling me to go away before she called the police; at 10.17 I was lying on the floor -between untouched cups of still quite hot tea - helping her off with her greasy panties. Admittedly the girl was quite hideous, had smelled unclothed of open wounds and graveyards, etc., but you still never knew. It was a theory of Geoffrey's that pretty girls liked sex more than rough ones. Take Gloria, whom I had seen only yesterday. What an excellent time I was having in London. Oxford seemed years away, like childhood.

I was in the Notting Hill Gate Smith's at the time, standing with my back to the front entrance and scratching my scalp -not in puzzlement, but because it itched. Badly shaken by my fell-off-a-lorry slip the other day, I had just put down a book on Cockney slang ('Cheers, Norm, where's the trouble and strife? Up the apples and pears having a pony and trap?'), and was just picking one up on 'Criticism and Linguistics'.