The D'Avenant Society is one of those semi-secret clubs that form the mystique of Oxford undergraduate life. Half mist-swirled rumour, half academic pretension: the society, founded in honour of former Lincoln College student William D'Avenant, in its modern guise meets regularly for undergraduates to read papers to each other, in pursuit of scholarship, yes, but in provocative and theatrical fashion.

Membership in the society is by invitation and very much for male students only (tradition!). There are a few, trifling initiation rituals, with which we will not detain the reader, but all accepted in good sport and camaraderie. Women, however, are invited from time to time as guests, and, in particular, where they are presenting for the edification and entertainment of the members.

William D'Avenant himself famously never graduated, but nevertheless gained much from his time at Oxford. In the heady days of James I, anyone who was anyone in England found their way up to Oxford or Cambridge at some point, although William D'Avenant actually went to the trouble of being born there. His mother was well-known in town; his father unknown, though rumoured to be the Bard himself, and namesake, William Shakespeare, who served as godfather to the boy at his christening. D'Avenant's plays are a treasure of their time period and really ought to be better known than they are. John Milton, whose word saved William D'Avenant from execution by the Roundheads, certainly thought so.

But that's not to say that only literary topics were entertained by the Society founded in his honour. The members are intellectual omnivores, and could take an education from any discipline. And so it was that Eleanor Dale, a philosophy finalist hailing from Knaresborough in Yorkshire, was invited to address the Society. Francis Greer, a moustachioed member of the Society from Hillsborough, County Down, was in a tutorial with Eleanor and had made the running for her to be today's speaker, impressed with her on, well, on every level.

Francis and Eleanor had alternately sparred and supported one another in the crucible of Oxford's BA Philosophy course. As iron sharpens iron, so they had worn off what was rusty or naïve in the other's thinking. And there was an undeniable physical attraction, with flirtatious subtext in their conversation along with a touch here, a glance there. Though, to date, Francis had not yet made a move to take things further, being unsure whether Eleanor saw a future with him beyond the cloistered walls of Oxford.

The Society meeting in a room in Lincoln College smelt of candlewax, sweet port, and aftershave. The audience was entirely male today, dressed in dinner jackets and bow ties. The candles in the D'Avenant room were already guttering when Eleanor arrived, ten minutes late. A dozen young men in dinner jackets turned as one. She wore, in contrast to the black and white sea before her, a formal dress in scarlet, full length, sleeveless, scoop necked, which showed off her collarbones and pale decolletage to advantage without being indecent. The dress fitted well, clinging where it needed to around her curvy hips and round breasts, while flowing and draping down to just above the ankle. She tucked a wisp of curly dark brown hair over her ear as she entered, head held high.

The President, a languid physics student named Hugo, who wore a monocle for the occasion, rose with theatrical courtesy and pulled out the chair at the foot of the long table. "Miss Dale," he said, voice posh and plummy, "we are honoured." Eleanor stood at the head of the table, not sitting, and placed her handbag on the green baize beside the glass of port which had been poured for her. She caught Francis' eye briefly and then began.

"Gentlemen," she began, her Yorkshire accent warmer but surely appearing less refined, less appropriate for the gathering than Hugo's. "When your President's note arrived, it contained only a single line beneath the date of the meeting: 'Miss Eleanor Dale is invited to read a paper on any subject she deems suitable.' Any subject I deem suitable," she repeated, as she looked around the table, noting the anticipatory glances evident on some faces, faint amusement on others.

"I turned the card over in my hands for a long time. A woman, invited once, as novelty or penance, into a society that has spent a century and a half carefully excluding women from its doings. What subject could possibly be suitable? I considered speaking on time, on memory, on the metaphysics of absence," listing recent seminar topics she and Francis had explored, "which are polite topics that would let you nod sagely and congratulate yourselves on your broad-mindedness in admitting a female voice, provided it sounded sufficiently like your own."

Some uneasy stirring from the back of the room. Hugo took a large sip of port.

"But," continued Eleanor, "that would have been obedience. Instead I asked myself a sharper question: here, in this masculine assembly, what can I, as a woman, qua woman, most usefully say to you that you have never had to hear? And the answer arrived with the crude, ancient clarity of biology that has never bothered to dress in academic costume: I should speak to you about the one thing your society has insulated itself against. Generation. Conception. The moment when a man's proud solitude is breached, not by argument or wine or Latin, but by a woman's body and the child that issues from it. So tonight I have prepared a paper on Emmanuel Levinas and the erotic drive to have children."

Well, now she had their attention, those of the group who weren't embarrassedly staring at their cufflinks. At the word "erotic" Hugo had shivered, Francis' mustache twitched, and a number of men's eyes widened. Eleanor slowly and deliberately reached inside the neckline of her dress and removed from her bra two folded sheets of A4 paper containing her paper. She read, formally:

"Levinas, that Jewish phenomenologist who fled the Nazis in the Baltic only to chase the infinite in the face of the Other, gives us in 'Totality and Infinity' a vision of ethics not as rules or duties, but as an erotic encounter. The Other is not an object to be known or possessed," she chuckled, "oh no, that would be totality, the violent reduction of difference to sameness. He means God. Instead, the Other appears as divine infinity, a face that commands without speaking: 'Thou shalt not kill.'"

She could see puzzlement from some of the science students, unused to the vocabulary, styles, and verbal frills of the humanities.

"But Levinas does not stop at the face. He ventures into the caress, that tactile prelude where skin meets skin, and from there into fecundity," her left hand now placed over her womb, thumb at her navel, palm flat on her dress, and fingers pointing downward. "That is to say, the begetting of children, as the ultimate transcendence. Why children? Why this messy, biological compulsion amid his lofty abstractions? Because, gentlemen," she looked up, "the drive to procreate is the body's rebellion against death, but Levinas elevates it to metaphysics. In the erotic relation, we touch the Other not to conquer, but to yield. The caress, he says, is 'a movement unto the invisible,' a groping in the dark that seeks not mastery but mystery."

She could see more than a few around the table were thinking they'd like to do some groping in the dark with her mystery.

"It is voluptuous, yes, but it points beyond pleasure to paternity. The child is the fruit of this yielding: a new Other, discontinuous from the self, who carries the future without being owned by it. Picture it: two bodies entwined," she moved her left hand to wrap around her waist, "not in the solipsistic rut of mere satisfaction, but in a Levinasian pas de deux where each surrenders to the alterity of the other. The drive to have children is not accidental here; it is the erotic's telos, its hidden commandment. Without it, the caress remains sterile, a closed circuit of desire that loops back on itself like a frustrated hand."

She gestured as if stroking a cock, a titter of embarrassed laughter from some of the men.

"But introduce the possibility of conception, and suddenly the act opens onto infinity. The seed spilled is not wasted. Instead it ruptures time, projecting the self into a future it cannot control. The child, Levinas insists, is 'my future without me,' a stranger born of intimacy, who is the measure of me from the cradle. 'Without' here carries the double meaning of exteriority and, ultimately, absence. What will remain of us is love, they say, and more precisely, our progeny, conceived in the act of love. And yet, how sexually charged this all is! Levinas cloaks it in philosophy, but strip away the jargon and what remains? A defense of procreation as the pinnacle of eros. The drive to have children, he implies, is the ethical consummation of desire: not the quick release of the bachelor (that perpetual adolescent, fiddling with his own totality), but the full-throated plunge into responsibility. It is as if Levinas whispers to us: 'Go forth and multiply', not for God's sake or society's, but because in the sweat and sigh of the bedchamber, you encounter the infinite."

She had their complete attention now. On the faces of some, raw desire. Eleanor felt her heartbeat quicken, the pheromones in the air mingling with candle smoke and alcohol. She took a sip of port, her first, and then resumed.

"The woman's body, in this schema," she said, stepping slightly backwards and extending her left arm to gesture from her shoulder down to her feet, "becomes the gateway. That is not to say it is objectified, mind you, but rather, exalted as the site of fecundity. You, gentlemen of the D'Avenant, with your rituals, might recognise this. Your society is a kind of sterile eros: all caress without conception, debates that fondle ideas but birth nothing new."

A fancy way to call us wankers, thought Francis.

Eleanor went on: "The drive to procreate mocks such celibacy. It demands we risk the cry of the infant, that piercing accusation from the Other we have summoned into being. Why do we heed it? Because, as Levinas knows, the alternative is annihilation: not just personal death, as die we all must, but the death of meaning. Without children, the erotic dwindles to onanism, homo incurvantus in se. But enough. I sense this paper veering too close to the boudoir, though, I wonder: is not all philosophy a sublimated drive, a way to intellectualise the body's imperatives? And so," she said, folding up her notes and placing them in her handbag, which she then hooked over a shoulder, "rather than taking questions, I thought I might select one of you fine young men for practical exploration of the matter."

She walked slowly around the table, as if appraising the gathered men, although she had already chosen her quarry in her mind.

"Men take the initiative in so much of life, but the female prerogative is in the selection of a mate. Whom does she see fit to be the father of her children? And who will be left to sterility, forced to take their excitement and drive into their own hands? Gentlemen, I hope I have stiffened your resolve," she tried to look as many in the eye as she could. "But though many are called, few are chosen."

She had arrived behind Francis, and placed a hand on each of his shoulders. Francis, like the other men present, was by now hard, and he jumped slightly at the touch. "Mr Greer, care to join me in application of matters discussed? You may debrief me on how my paper has been received. Gentlemen, we shall leave the remainder of you to your leisure."

Taking him by the crook of his arm, Eleanor walked Francis out of the room. Nobody else moved, though as they left they heard the scrape of chairs on the floor. She took him down the staircase, emerging into the front quad, then through a passage to the chapel quad and up a staircase to her first-floor room. Closing the door behind them, she faced Francis, and kissed him.

"I hope this isn't embarrassing you, Francis, but this is what I want, and I'm fairly sure you want it too. Still," she picked up something from the table, "this is your out, if you need it." She handed him a condom packet.

Francis considered it. "Eleanor, no, you've persuaded me. All this year I've been dying to kiss you. I just wasn't sure if you saw us being together beyond Oxford."

"Oh, I do. Or, I'm open to it if it happens." She put her hands behind his head again and kissed him, then helped him take off his jacket. "So, now, let's see if you have any feedback for me on the paper. I can feel," she said, pressing her body against his erection, "it has had some effect."

Francis kissed her back, and started to remove his tie and shirt, then slipped off his shoes. Eleanor similarly removed her heels, then unzipped her dress at the back, sliding it off. She then lay back on the room's queen size bed, in her bra and knickers, a matching black silk set.

Francis dropped the condom packet to the floor, and loosened his belt, took off his trousers and briefs. He climbed onto the bed and began to kiss Eleanor, moving down from her neck, collarbone, breasts and stomach. Arriving at the top of her knickers, he gently pulled them down, and she slid them off, flicking them away with a foot. Francis' kisses then resumed, moving lower and transforming into gentle flicks with his tongue. Eleanor moaned with delight and urgency, pent up desires now on the cusp of consummation, mingled with the intellectual triumph of her paper.

"Francis! Francis! Put it in, man!"

Francis pulled himself up the bed, legs between hers, his weight on his forearms as he guided himself in. Eleanor reached and unfastened her bra, then threw it, too, out of the bed. Francis pushed gently, then slipped inside, until he was as far in as he could be. Eleanor let out a faint gasp. It felt better, different than she had imagined.

Francis began to move, making long, slow strokes. He, too, had fantasised before on many occasions about how it would be to have sex with Eleanor. On more than one occasion he'd been lost in precisely those thoughts when picked on for a question in tutorials, leading to a fumbling embarrassment. But now, here, he could focus and take his time, savouring the moment. He moved his head down, kissing her breast, teasing her nipple with his tongue. Five minutes ago he'd never seen Eleanor's full, round breasts uncovered, but now he was kissing them, touching them. The thought made his cock swell even more.

Eleanor gasped again, a hand reaching up and into Francis' hair. "Yes!"

He moved fluidly, the pace building, then slackening, and building again, an experiment of tempo and pressure, the two of them discovering inchoately what merely worked, and what was sublime. Eleanor's legs began to tremble after a while, and she moved them round his, locking her ankles together and forcing him deep inside as she shuddered all over. She moaned again in passion, clenching around him. Francis couldn't last any longer, feeling his orgasm rising. Thinking what she had said about children, and surmising Eleanor was therefore not on contraception, thoughts of making a baby with her played in his head as he came deep inside her. Eleanor held him inside until his cock began to soften, then released her legs, allowing him to lie down on the pillow beside her.

Both lay, breathing heavily. Eleanor took his hand in hers and interlaced fingers. "Thank you," she whispered.

Seven years later saw Eleanor Greer leaving the Royal Victoria Hospital in Belfast on her twenty-eighth birthday, hand on abdomen, a handful of ultrasound prints ready to show Francis, who was wrangling two small boys outside. "Come here," he said to them. Looking at Eleanor, he searched her eyes. "Well, Mummy?"

"Sam, Toby, you're going to have a baby sister!"

Francis kissed her. The boys made "yuck" faces. They laughed together, their little family growing.