My Uncle Oswald(79)

Anyway, this duchess and I had been jouncing for an hour or so in the bathtub, and now that she had had enough she threw the soap at my face and stepped out of the water. The large slimy missile caught me on the mouth but as none of my teeth were dislodged or even loosened I ignored the incident. In point of fact, she had done it simply to quieten me down and to give her a chance to get away, which it did.

“Come back in,” I said, wanting a second helping.

“I’ve got to go,” she answered. She was keeping her distance as she dried her trim little body with one of my huge towels.

“It’s only half-time,” I pleaded.

“The trouble with you, Oswald, is you don’t know when to stop,” she said. “One day someone’s going to lose patience with you.”

“Frigid bitch,” I said. It was a silly thing to say and quite untrue, but I said it.

She went into the next room to get dressed. I remained sitting in the bath, silent and feeling thwarted. I didn’t like it when others called the tune.

“Good-bye, darling,” she said, coming back into the bathroom. She was wearing a short-sleeved silk dress, dark green.

“Go home, then,” I said. “Go back to your ridiculous duke.”

“Don’t be so grumpy,” she said. She walked over to me and bent down and began to massage my back under the water. Then her hand slid around to other areas, caressing and teasing gently. I sat still, enjoying it all and wondering whether she wasn’t perhaps going to start melting all over again.

Now you won’t believe this, but all the time the little vixen was pretending to play around with me, what she was actually doing was surreptitiously and with consummate stealth removing the plug from the plughole in the bottom of the bathtub. As you know, when the plug is withdrawn from a bath that is brimful of water, the suction down the plughole is immensely powerful. And when a man is sitting astride that plughole as I was at that moment, then it is inevitable that the two most tender and valuable objects in his possession are going to be sucked very suddenly into that dreadful hole. There was a dull plop as my scrotum took the full force of the suction and flew into the neck of the hole. I let out a scream that must have been heard clear across Kensington Square.

“Good-bye, darling,” said the duchess, sweeping out of the bathroom.

In the excruciating moments that followed I learned exactly what it must feel like to. fall into the hands of those Bedouin women who delight in depriving a traveller of his masculinity with blunt knives. “Help!”! screamed. “Save me!” I was impaled. I was glued to the tub. I was clutched in the claws of a mighty crab.

It seemed like hours but I don’t suppose I was actually stuck in that position for more than ten or fifteen minutes. It was quite long enough though. I don’t even know how I eventually managed to prize myself free all in one piece. But the damage was done. Powerful suction is a terrible thing and those two precious jewels of mine, which were normally no bigger than a couple of greengages, had suddenly assumed the size of cantaloupe melons. I think it was old Geoffrey Chaucer way back in the fourteenth century who wrote