Los Angeles, 1957
LEE WILBURN HAD just come in from the beach when the phone rang. It was long distance. ‘Santa Monica 471227? Mrs Wilburn? Will you take a person to person call from London? From Mr Hugo Dashwood?’
‘Yes, yes I will,’ said Lee, pushing her hair back from her face, feeling her heart pound, her knees suddenly limp.
‘Lee? Hello. It’s Hugo Dashwood. How are you?’
‘I’m fine, Hugo, thank you, how are you?’
‘Very very well. I’m coming to New York next week. Can I come over the following weekend and see you both? Will Dean be there?’
Lee thought very quickly. ‘Yes, to both. You’ll be very welcome. Come on Friday night if you can get away. I’ll – we’ll look forward to seeing you.’
‘Yes, I should make it. I have an early meeting on Friday morning, then I could leave. I’ll get a car from the airport, don’t worry about meeting me.’
‘OK. Bye, Hugo.’
‘Goodbye, Lee. And thank you.’
She put the phone down; she was shaking all over. That had done it; there was no going back now.
She walked slowly through into the kitchen and poured herself a cold beer. Then she went into the living room, opened the full-length windows and looked out at the ocean for a long time. It was the most perfect of Californian evenings, the sky a bright, almost translucent blue, the sun sending a golden dusting on the sea. The beach was still busy, the white sand covered with people; the surf was gentle, almost slow-motion. Lee never got tired of this view, this time; relaxed and at peace from the sun and the sea, she would sit there, enjoying it, drinking it in, and go into an almost trancelike state, wishing she need never move again. A lot of her friends were taking up yoga and meditation but she never could see the point in that. Half an hour on the patio with a beer and the ocean, and she felt as relaxed as anybody.
The phone rang again, disturbing her peace; she frowned, went into the kitchen and picked it up, aiming her beer bottle at the trash can as she passed. It missed, and slithered into the corner.
‘Hi,’ she said into the phone.
‘Lee? Hi, honey, it’s Dean. You OK? I’ll be home in a couple of hours. It’s going to be a great weekend. You missed me? I sure have missed you.’
‘You know I have, Dean,’ said Lee, smiling into the phone, and it was true, she had. ‘And I have your favourite dinner for you.’
‘You’re my favourite dinner. Now honey, you haven’t forgotten I’ll be away next weekend, have you? I’ve tried to wriggle my way out of it, but I can’t. Is that really going to be OK?’
‘I think I can just about handle it. We’ve got this one after all. Don’t be late, Dean.’
‘I won’t.’
She put the phone down, left the beer bottle where it was (she was not an over-fastidious housewife) and went slowly through the hall and towards the stairs. She caught sight of herself in the long mirror at the end of the room: long streaky blonde hair, blue eyes, freckled face, wearing denim overalls and an old white shirt of her husband’s. She looked like a college kid, not a married woman about to commit adultery . . . she grinned into the mirror and went on upstairs.
Standing in the shower, alternating the hot and cold water (it was good for the bustline and the skin – and the bowels, Amy Meredith had told her, for heaven’s sake, now how could that be true? Stimulation, maybe – ) soaping the salt out of her sun-drenched skin, she wondered what actually brought people to the edge of adultery, or tipped them over it and into the bed. Not unhappiness, she couldn’t claim that; she and Dean were perfectly happy, had been ever since they married seven years ago. Boredom? No, not really. Of course after seven years drums didn’t roll and stars leap out of the sky every time she saw him, and the earth didn’t exactly rock around every time they had sex, which anyway wasn’t very often these days, nor very satisfying either, but he was still fun, still jokey, and she still enjoyed his company. So – what? What excuse did she have? I’m just bad, maybe, she thought, stepping out of the shower and wrapping herself in a huge white towel. I’m greedy. I want more than I ought to have. It was not an entirely nice thought. She drenched her skin all over with body milk (otherwise it got so dry and flaky) and then sprayed herself liberally with Intimate, the new Revlon fragrance she liked so much; it was sexy and it stayed with you, didn’t fade like a lot of those much more expensive ladylike scents. She felt very interested in sex at the moment. She supposed it was because of Hugo Dashwood and the way he was disturbing her; anyway, so far it wasn’t doing Dean any harm, she could hardly keep her hands off him, and he wasn’t to know that it was a different face from his own that swam into her head as he laboured over her, grunting with pleasure; a thinner, more handsome face, with brown eyes, and a beautiful dancing smile.
She studied herself in the mirror, as she stood there naked; her body was pretty good still, she thought, it didn’t look twenty-nine years old, tall (five foot eight), slim (a hundred and ten pounds), with a stomach so flat it was practically concave, and surprisingly, lusciously full breasts. Her bottom was her greatest pride: flat and neat, firm as a drum; she worked hard on that bottom, she did exercises twice a day, and swam for at least half an hour. It wasn’t a particularly sexy bottom – men fondling it hopefully at parties were slightly repelled by its firmness, its lack of yieldingness – but she didn’t care, and besides her breasts made up for it. The line of her bikini was dramatic: clearly carved out of her suntan. It was quite modest, her bikini; she didn’t really like the ones that were cut so low you could see the line of the buttocks disappearing into them. Kim Devon’s was like that and Lee thought it was vulgar. She wondered if she ought to trim her pubic hair for Dean’s return; it was looking shaggy, and he did like things to be neat. That reminded her, she must clear up the kitchen a bit, pick up that beer bottle, wash the floor. Although, she thought, smiling at herself suddenly in the mirror, she could easily distract him away from the kitchen floor.
Which did mean trimming the pubes, she supposed . . .
She and Dean had met Hugo Dashwood at a conference in New York on advertising a couple of months ago. It had been a real treat for her to go; Dean was away such a lot, in his job as representative for an own-label marketing company, and not to have to stay at home and on her own for once, and to see a bit of New York, was just too good to be true. The conference was at the Hyatt, and the delegates were all scattered round the city; Lee and Dean were staying just off Broadway; it was an undeniably tacky hotel, but as Dean kept pointing out to her it was all a freebie, and tackiness was the last thing in the world Lee cared about anyway.
The wives had their own programme for a lot of the time, and she had taken the Circle Line tour, gone up the Empire State and explored the wonders of Bergdorf’s and Macy’s (ducking out of the more cultural outings on offer, like the Museum of Modern Art and a tour of New York’s churches) but on the first day there had been a buffet lunch, so that they could all get to know one another; she hadn’t actually taken too much to many of them, older than she was, most of them, formally and forbiddingly dressed, and very self-consciously good American wives, talking with huge and ostentatious knowledge not only about their husbands’ companies, but the advertising industry in general, exchanging telephone numbers and addresses, discussing their husbands’ career patterns, comparing company benefits, and constantly interrupting the men’s conversations to introduce them to their own newfound acquaintances. Lee could positively feel them looking her up and down, examining her and discarding her, as being young, flighty, and altogether too attractive to be included either in the earnest merry-go-round or the introductions to the men, and decided she preferred her own company; she was standing in the queue for the buffet waiting for Dean to finish an interminable conversation with someone about the rival virtues of supermarkets and drugstores as an outlet for cotton wool balls when a voice that was just like English molasses, as she confided to Amy Meredith later (‘If you can imagine such a thing, all dark brown and treacly, but so refined’), asked her if she would be kind enough to keep his place while he went and retrieved the book he had been foolish enough to leave in the conference hall. ‘I don’t want to lose it, I am enjoying it immensely, and besides, I’m on my own here, I’m not fortunate enough to have a wife to keep me company, and I may need it if I can’t find anyone to talk to during lunch.’
‘Oh, my goodness,’ said Lee, ‘we can certainly help you there, my husband and I, but do go and get it anyway, before they clear it away. I’ll hold your place.’
She looked at him thoughtfully as he disappeared into the crowd; he was exactly as she would imagine an upper-class Englishman to be (she could tell he was very upper class, he spoke with that David Niven accent everybody had in English films, with the exception of the comic characters, rather clipped and drawly at the same time). He was wearing a grey pinstriped suit, a white shirt, a white and grey spotted tie; he was tall and very slim, with long legs and the most beautiful shoes, in very soft black leather. His hair was dark and slightly longer than she was used to, and he had velvety brown eyes and the most beautiful teeth. She couldn’t, she thought, have possibly asked for a more desirable lunch companion, and felt pleased that she had decided to wear her red sheath dress and pin her hair up in a French pleat, so that she looked more sophisticated rather than leaving it hanging down on her shoulders the way Dean liked it.
He was back in a minute, with a copy of The Grapes of Wrath tucked under his arm: ‘I’m mugging up on my American social history,’ he said with a smile. ‘Marvellous book, I suppose you’ve read it?’
‘Of course,’ said Lee earnestly, remembering how she had picked her way painfully through it in high school, and rewarded herself for finishing each chapter with a chapter of Gone With the Wind; ‘I loved it, of course.’
‘Of course,’ he said solemnly, ‘and do you read a lot, Mrs –’ he peered at her name badge – ‘Wilburn?’
‘Well,’ said Lee carefully, ‘quite a lot. Of course I don’t have a great deal of time. But I do enjoy it. When I do.’ Jesus, she thought, how do I manage to talk such crap?
‘And why are you here?’ he asked her, moving into safer territory. ‘Are you one of the delegates?’
‘Oh, no,’ she said, charmed and amused at the same time, that he should think her of sufficient status and intelligence to warrant her own place at a conference. ‘I’m here with my husband.’
‘And what does your husband do?’
‘He’s a sales representative. He works for an own-label marketing company. He’s very good at his job,’ she added, mindful of her shortcomings as a professional wife.
‘I’m sure,’ he said, ‘can you point him out to me? Where is he?’
‘Over there,’ said Lee, pointing to Dean who was furiously distributing his business cards as if they were leaflets on the subway, to a rather unenthusiastic-looking group. ‘He’ll be over in a minute. He wouldn’t miss a lunch.’ She looked at Dean rather thoughtfully, trying not to compare him unfavourably with the Englishman. She was very fond of him, but nobody could call him a dresser; he had bought a new suit in Terylene mohair for the conference, it hadn’t looked too bad in the shop, but here it seemed rather too bright a blue, and it had a slightly tacky sheen on it. And then there was his tie: it was a real mistake, that tie, much too wide, with that awful splashy pattern on it – the English tie, she noted, was discreetly narrow. And she really must, the minute they got home, start doing something about his weight. He must be thirty pounds over now, and rising; apart from looking bad, with his beer belly sticking out over his trousers, however hard he tried to hold it in, it wasn’t good for him. Amy was always going on about cholesterol and the dangers of heart disease, and telling her she should give Dean more vegetables and feed him bran for breakfast. And however trying he might be at times, she certainly didn’t want to lose him; she must try to be a better wife.
She pulled her mind away from this reverie and turned back to her new friend who was gently guiding her towards the heap of plates at the buffet table.
‘Now look,’ he said, ‘we’ve reached the food. Should we get a plateful for your husband as well, do you think?’
‘Oh, no,’ said Lee, ‘he likes to choose his own. He’s terribly, terribly fond of his food. You just go ahead. I’ll wait for him.’
‘Nonsense,’ he said. ‘Having found a friend I’d like to stay with her. If I may. Until lunch is over at any rate. I hardly know anybody here. I haven’t been in New York long.’
‘Are you from London?’ asked Lee, helping herself to a modest amount of chicken in mayonnaise, anxious not to appear greedy, and careful to choose something that she could eat easily with a fork. The last thing she wanted to do was drop food down her new red dress in front of this rather intimidatingly svelte creature.
‘I am.’
‘And why are you here?’
‘Oh, to learn a bit about American business methods. I’m opening up in New York, and the more contacts and knowledge I have the better.’
‘What’s your business?’
‘Direct selling, I suppose you’d call it,’ he said. ‘It’s a bit of a new science in England, but it’s catching on. And then I thought I’d bring some coals to Newcastle and try it here.’
‘I see,’ said Lee, trying desperately not to show that she didn’t.
He read her face and smiled, understanding. ‘Don’t worry about it,’ he said, ‘old English saying. Let’s just leave it at the direct selling. Toiletries mostly.’
‘Oh,’ she said, ‘that’s Dean’s field too. He’s coming now, look, he will be interested. Oh, now I don’t know your name, I can’t introduce you. Why haven’t you got a label?’
‘Allergic to them,’ he said, ‘we don’t often have them in England. Silly, I know, they’re a very good idea. Anyway, Dashwood is the name. Hugo Dashwood.’ He held out his hand. ‘Delighted to meet you.’
Lee took his hand and smiled and felt a delicious charge of warm pleasure shoot through her. My goodness, she thought, this guy could be dangerous. The thought was surprisingly interesting. ‘Lee Wilburn,’ she said, ‘and I’m certainly delighted to meet you. Dean,’ she called to her husband, who was scanning the room anxiously, his overladen plate tipped dangerously to the side, his tie dangling horribly near his potato salad, ‘Dean, we’re here. Come and sit down, we kept you a place. Now this is Hugo Dashwood, from London; Mr Dashwood, this is my husband Dean Wilburn. Mr Dashwood is in direct selling, Dean, in toiletries mostly. I was saying you would be really interested to talk to him.’ She spoke with a certain satisfaction, feeling that for the first time, since the convention had begun, she had actually acquitted herself and performed as a conference wife properly should.
‘Well, that is just wonderful,’ said Dean, easing his two hundred pounds cautiously on to the spindly chair and tucking his tie carefully into his shirt buttons (Lee, who had long ago given up trying to stop him doing that, wished suddenly and fervently that she hadn’t). ‘It’s real nice to meet you, Mr Dashwood. My company is very big in own-brand toiletries in the supermarkets, and I’d really like to tell you about that. How long have you been operating over here?’
‘Oh, I’ve hardly begun,’ said Hugo, ‘I’m mostly involved in my business in England. But I like the market over here. It’s very fast moving at the moment.’
‘Oh, you can say that again,’ said Dean, in between mouthfuls of Russian salad. ‘Lee, honey, would you like to try and find me a beer? I don’t go a lot on wine at lunch time. Do you, Mr Dashwood?’
‘Oh, do please call me Hugo. Well, I don’t like drinking at lunch time at all. I’d like a soft drink. But let me get you both a drink. Mrs Wilburn, what would you like?’
‘Oh, a beer,’ said Lee without thinking, and then could have bitten her tongue out. Beer! How unsophisticated, how gauche! Why couldn’t she have said wine, or better still fruit juice? He would think her so hick, so crass, just like her husband, she thought sorrowfully, watching Dean wipe his plate with his bread, and then lick each finger in turn, before standing up and picking up his plate. ‘I’m going to get myself some more food,’ he said, ‘I hate these buffet things. No substance. Hugo, how about you?’
‘Oh, no thank you,’ said Hugo, ‘but I will get you your beer.’
‘Er – Hugo – I won’t have beer,’ said Lee, ‘if you could find me a soda water, that would be fine.’
‘Oh,’ he said, his dark eyes snapping at her with amusement and an unmistakable appreciation, ‘I will if you like. But I would have the beer if you want it. You haven’t got to work this afternoon, as we have.’
‘No,’ she said firmly, anxious to retain the more refined image she felt sure he would appreciate, ‘I really wasn’t thinking. Soda water, please.’
She sat sipping it, wishing it was beer, watching Hugo Dashwood listening courteously to Dean, and occasionally glancing at her with his warm, intensely interested eyes, and thought he was the most attractive man she had ever met in her entire life.
They became quite friendly after that, the three of them; they had supper together that evening, and Hugo joined them for breakfast the next day on his way to the conference, and they met in the bar of the Hyatt one evening when the last seminar of the day was over while Dean and Hugo unwound and Lee recounted the events of her day: a tour of the Radio City Concert Hall, and a trip around Tiffany’s, which she had found disappointing. ‘It just wasn’t a patch on the jewellery shops on Beverly Drive, not glamorous at all.’
She enjoyed talking to Hugo; he had a way of listening that was flattering and that encouraged her to talk, and she enjoyed feeling his eyes on her. She could see he found her attractive, and it made her feel confident and rather grown up; he was so extremely sophisticated and so obviously clever, and she was, after all, a perfectly ordinary American girl; she might have majored in psychology, but she knew quite well she wasn’t intellectual; she could chat away amusingly, and even manage the odd wisecrack when she’d had a beer or two, but that was hardly the sort of thing an urbane upper-class Englishman was going to fall for. Or maybe it was. Anyway, in the meantime it was a wonderful few days. Lee felt more alive, more aware of herself, and a lot more sexy, than she had with Dean in a month of Sundays.
On the fourth and last evening of the conference there was a cocktail party. Lee had dressed for it with great care in a pink shot-silk sheath dress that clung to her body and stopped just below the knee to show off her long, long slender legs. She had bought it in Macy’s that morning, and a pair of extra-high-heeled shoes to match; her blonde hair was drawn back with pink combs, and hanging in a straight shining sheet down her back. She was excited and nervous, looking across the room restlessly for Hugo from the moment they arrived. He wasn’t there, and an hour later, as the party began to wind down, he still hadn’t appeared; she was disappointed and miserable, and found it depressingly hard to concentrate on what the interminable line of husbands and wives Dean was managing to get a hold of, and hand his cards out to, was saying. She had just told one woman how delighted she must be to have left their four children behind, and another how sorry she was to hear she had just installed a new kitchen, when she felt a hand moving gently up and down her arm, and a mouth pressed into her ear. ‘You look wonderful. I’m awfully late. Have I missed anything important?’
She turned, abandoning both wives totally, her face alight. ‘Hugo! I’m so glad you’re here. No not a thing. It’s been terribly boring,’ said Lee cheerfully, and then realizing what she had said, blushed and tried frantically to retrieve the situation. ‘Er, Hugo this is Mary Ann Whittaker, and this is – er Joanne Smith. This is our friend from England, Mr Hugo Dashwood.’
‘Mary Ann White,’ said the kitchen owner pointedly, holding out her hand. ‘Which part of England are you from, Mr Dashwood?’
‘London,’ he said.
‘Oh,’ she said, ‘we have some very good friends there. They have an upholstery business. You may have met them. Their name is Walker. They live in, now let me see, would it be Willesden?’
‘It could be,’ he said, ‘there is such a place.’
‘But you don’t know them?’
‘I don’t think so,’ he said. ‘Of course there are a lot of Walkers in London. And it’s a big place.’
Then suddenly, he put his arm round her shoulders and said to Mary Anne White, ‘You must excuse us now, I’m afraid, we have to meet friends on the other side of the room,’ and steered her away, and she turned to apologize and saw that he was grinning hugely.
‘God in heaven,’ he said, grasping a glass of wine from a passing tray, ‘why can’t more American women be like you?’
‘I am really sorry,’ said Lee, ‘to have got you into that. I would like to say, in defence of my race, that she was a bad sample, but I don’t think I can. Where is Willesden, anyway?’
‘Oh,’ said Hugo, ‘a very long way away from the centre. Don’t apologize, I enjoy such encounters. They amuse me. My only regret is it kept me from talking to you. Here’s to you, Mrs Wilburn, and what I hope will be a lasting association.’
Lee looked at him, meeting his dark vivid eyes with her clear blue ones, very steadily. ‘I hope so too,’ she said, composed, in command of the situation suddenly, ‘and if you ever come to California, then you must come and stay. We live in Los Angeles, right on the ocean at Santa Monica, it’s a great place to come at weekends.’
‘I’d love to,’ he said, ‘now Dean has given me his card. Several, actually,’ he added, and grinned, but it was a kindly, unmalicious grin. ‘I don’t have any at the moment, I’ve run out, but if you really need to, you can get me at this number, it’s my office in New York, but I’m hardly ever there, so not very satisfactory, I’m afraid. Anyway, I’ll certainly ring you. I’ve never been to Los Angeles and I’ve always wanted to go, so now I shall have a double reason for visiting.’
‘Good. Do you want to eat dinner with me and Dean tonight? We wondered if you’d like to join us?’
‘I can’t, I’m afraid. I have another engagement. But thank you for asking me.’
‘That’s all right.’ She felt ridiculously disappointed, her evening suddenly emptied of substance, her pink dress foolishly profitless; he looked at her sharply and then smiled and tipped up her face towards him.
‘Don’t worry,’ he said, ‘we will meet again. I couldn’t bear the thought-that we wouldn’t. I think you are perfectly lovely, and Dean is a very lucky man. And that dress is extremely distracting. It’s just as well we’re not going to have dinner together, I wouldn’t hear a word anybody said. Now I must go, I only popped in to say goodbye. Say goodbye to Dean for me, will you? I don’t want to interrupt him.’
‘I will,’ she said, ‘and thank you for coming. It was nice of you to bother.’
‘No,’ he said, ‘not nice at all. I wanted to see you.’ He paused for a moment, looking at her very seriously. ‘I find you rather desirable. Now I must go. Goodbye.’
He kissed her lightly on the lips, a gentle, glancing embrace, and then smiled at her and turned away. Lee stood there quite still, a hot fierce lick of desire stabbing at her, so physically disturbed she hardly knew what she was doing. She went to the ladies’ room and shut herself in the cubicle, and sat down quietly and very still on the toilet seat waiting for the throbbing in her body to subside. After a while she felt calmer and went outside and bathed her forehead and her wrists in cold water. Next best thing to a cold shower, she thought to herself cheerfully and grinned at her reflection. Only men were supposed to get these great onslaughts of sexual desire, to have to hide their hard-ons, to work off their discomfort. Yet she had known them all her grown-up life – ever since she had started to develop a bust, and noticed how interestingly her body was changing, and had found what acute pleasure could be achieved by touching and exploring herself with her fingers, by finding the small hard tender centre of her feeling that was her clitoris and gently, very gently but insistently working and stroking at it, and feeling herself grow wet, liquid with delight, until a hot, consuming sensation rose and rose in her and then exploded with such force she could almost see it before her tightly closed eyes. She tried not to do it too often, because it was so delicious she felt sure it must in some way be wrong and it was something nobody had ever told her about; her mother had patiently talked to her carefully and gently for hours in the most incomprehensible way about how babies were made, and what to do should she find blood in her knickers, but had never mentioned, never hinted at, the concept of pleasure.
As she grew older, though, the feelings came of their own volition, she did not have to do anything to arouse them; uncomfortable, disturbing, she had to release them as soon as she could, otherwise they dominated everything she was doing or thinking. Worried that there might be something wrong with her, she asked her best friend, Betsy Newman, if she had experienced anything like them; Betsy said no, she never had, but she had once heard her big brother Ralphy talking to his friend about girls, and he had described something Betsy couldn’t understand but sounded a bit like what Lee was talking about.
Lee felt a bit better after that; when she was sixteen and went to high school she made a new friend, a beautiful girl called Laura, who asked her quite casually in the shower one day after basketball how often she masturbated, and if she had ever had a boy do it to her; Lee, misunderstanding, said certainly not, that was the straight way to pregnancy and generally wrecking your life, and Laura had laughed and said no, had a boy done it with his hands. Lee said she hadn’t and Laura said she really should, it was great and it kept the boys happy too; on her next date, Lee allowed Brett Mitchell to caress her breasts and on the one after that, to explore her desperate, hungry vagina. In return she offered to attend to his penis in much the same way. They were both amazed and delighted by the pleasure they gave and were given.
A year or so later Lee surrendered herself to more conventional sexual experiences; most of the girls she knew remained virgins until they were married, but Lee couldn’t wait. She was intrigued, excited, exhilarated by sex; she loved it, she needed it, and if she didn’t get it, she became irritable and depressed. It seemed to her worth the attendant risks, of expulsion from college if you were caught in flagrante, and of pregnancy even if you weren’t; but she was never caught, and she told everyone the danger of pregnancy was seriously overrated, all you had to do was use a sheath and maybe count a bit as well, and not do it right in the middle of your cycle, and you would be perfectly all right.
‘Or maybe I’ve just been lucky,’ she would say. Five years into her marriage with no baby in sight, even though she and Dean hadn’t used any kind of contraception for years, she realized she maybe hadn’t been so lucky after all.
Hugo Dashwood spent a weekend with the Wilburns about a month later; Dean and Lee took their duties as hosts seriously and showed him the sights of LA, in a tireless, enthusiastic forty-eight hours; they took him to Graumann’s, and to Griffith Park and the Observatory; they took him to Beverly Hills and showed him the film stars’ mansions; they took him to Muscle Beach where he laughed at the desperate seriousness of the men posing and pumping (‘Look,’ said Lee in awed tones, pointing to one particularly impressive rippling blond mountain, ‘it’s Mickie Hagerty’) and to Malibu where they sat in a beach bar and he marvelled at the compulsive joy and excitement of the surfers and the sea. ‘I just love it,’ he said when they finally got back to the Santa Monica house on Sunday afternoon. ‘I would adore to live here.’
‘Well, come,’ said Lee, flinging herself on to the swing seat on the patio and tearing the top off a bottle of beer. ‘Bring your wife over. It’s not expensive. There’s all the opportunities in the world. New people coming in all the time, with the new engineering industries. And this particular bit where we live, here, do you know, they’re so desperate for young people to come and live, because everyone wants to be inland, up in the hills, we got free rent for a year and a free television, as bait.’
‘I wish I could,’ said Hugo, ‘but I have enough problems coping with living in London and getting a business going in New York. Any more complication would finish me off altogether.’
‘How’s it going?’ said Dean lazily. His eyes were closed. He had drunk several beers and the sun and the alcohol had got the better of him.
‘OK. It’s tough over there, as you know. But I think it’ll work. My main base will always be London, though.’
‘Why doesn’t your wife ever come over?’ asked Lee. The last thing she wanted was the minutiae of Hugo’s marriage, but she found ignorance still more painful than knowledge. The knowledge she had was minimal, not because he did not answer any questions, but because she did not ask many (not wanting to know the answers); neither did Dean because he wasn’t interested, and Hugo didn’t volunteer a great deal of information. (Lee was a little disappointed to learn that Hugo wasn’t as aristocratic as she had imagined; middle class, he told her he was, and the product of a grammar school rather than Eton as she had visualised.) They knew he had a wife, whose name was Alice; that they had been married five years; that she did not get over-involved with the business, largely through lack of time; that there was a child; and that as families went it was a fairly happy one. More than that Lee could not bear to hear; she pictured Alice as buttoned-up, frigid English, with a plummy voice and a cold stare, and the vision kept her calm and conscience-free. It was based on nothing Hugo had said or even implied.
‘She’s busy. She has a lot to do. The house is in a dreadful state, and then we have the child, she can’t keep whipping across the Atlantic for the dubious pleasure of waiting in a hotel room for me to come back from work every day.’
‘Will you get somewhere permanent to live, do you think, in New York?’
‘Not worth it at the moment. I don’t plan to stay on a long-term basis. I want to find someone who can run the business for me. If it really takes off, then obviously I would take a place, but at the moment it’s cheaper to stay in hotels when I do come. I’m still doing a suck-it-and-see operation, as we say in Britain.’
Dean was now snoring, his mouth hanging open, his empty beer bottle dangling loosely in his hand. Lee took it gently, looking at him in some distaste, and set it down on the ground.
‘He’s always like this after the sun. He can’t take it, really. Not like me. I love it, it makes me feel just – oh, wonderful.’
She stretched herself out on the seat, arching her body; seeing Hugo looking at it, at the long, slender line from her breasts down to her legs, she stayed still for a moment, holding the pose; then she relaxed and smiled at him.
He smiled back. ‘You should go and do that at Muscle Beach. You’re much prettier than all of them. Tell me how the sun makes you feel.’
‘Oh, you know, kind of warmed through. Happy, peaceful, good all over.’
‘Sexy?’
She was surprised by his directness. He was normally rather Englishly reserved. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘yes, very.’
‘I thought so.’ He was silent.
‘You look tired,’ said Lee, jumping up, easing out of the tension. ‘Let me get you a drink. What time do you have to be at the airport?’
‘My plane leaves at nine. Could you ring for a taxi?’
‘I’ll take you. Dean has his Sunday homework to do, he’s always busy on Sunday night. I get lonely. It’ll be a pleasure. Beer?’
‘Bourbon.’
‘Fine.’
She was gone for a while, finding the bourbon, cracking the ice; when she came back he had drifted off to sleep too; she sat there, very quiet and still holding his drink. He opened his eyes with a start, looked towards Dean, who was utterly soundly asleep, and then took her hand, and raised it to his lips and kissed it and smiled at her; and then took the drink from her.
‘Tell me, Mrs Wilburn,’ he said, ‘why have you not had any children?’
‘Oh,’ she said, turning away from him and looking out to sea, ‘it just hasn’t happened, that’s all. I’d like them, we both would, but God and Mother Nature don’t seem to agree with us.’ And without warning her eyes filled with tears.
‘Oh, darling, I’m sorry, so sorry,’ said Hugo, using the endearment unself-consciously, entirely naturally. ‘I’m an idiot to have asked, I shouldn’t have.’
‘It’s all right,’ she said, smiling at him slightly shakily, ‘in a funny way I think Dean’s quite pleased. I think. It means I can concentrate completely on him.’
‘Well,’ he said, ‘he has a point.’
‘Do – do you enjoy being a father?’
‘Oh yes. But it has its drawbacks. They’re very demanding.’
‘And does – your wife like being a mother?’
‘Yes, I believe so. She finds it difficult at times, of course. All women do, I imagine.’
‘Yes, I imagine they do,’ said Lee bitterly.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘that was tactless of me. I didn’t mean to hurt you. Look, don’t worry about driving me to the airport. It’s silly. I can get a taxi.’
‘No, honestly, I’d like to take you. I like driving. And I love airports. Let me have a shower and fix Dean a steak, and we’ll go.’
He looked at her, and gave her his slow dancing smile. ‘All right.’
The road to the airport was busy; the city was growing relentlessly and even the new freeways seemed inadequate. They sat in silence, crawling along, listening to the radio. Pat Boone was throwing his heart and soul into ‘April Love’. It was hot. Lee sighed, pushed the hair off the back of her neck, threw her head back. ‘Just think, you’ll be cold tomorrow. March in New York. And what about England?’
‘Cold.’
‘Well,’ she said, ‘I’d rather be here.’
‘Lee,’ he said.
‘Yes.’
‘I do find you very interesting, and very very beautiful. I would like to know you better. Could you remember that?’
She turned and looked at him. ‘I think so.’
‘Good.’
The traffic had slowed to a complete standstill. The radio was now playing a selection from West Side Story; Hugo leant over to Lee, turned her towards him. ‘Kiss me.’
She kissed him. She didn’t usually like kissing, it was somehow rather tedious, and men got so worked up about it, breathing heavily and slavering away. Kissing Hugo Dashwood wasn’t too much like that. He kissed with what she could only call style, thinking about it afterwards; very slowly, very strongly and deliberately, pausing every now and again to stroke her hair, her neck, his hand lingering gently, tenderly, on her breast, and he did not just kiss her mouth, he kissed her eyes, and her chin, and her throat. Lee felt as if she was floating, drifting in some delicious, tossing liquid, rising and then sinking, let loose in desire. She sighed, pulled away from him for a moment. He took her face between his hands.
‘What do you feel?’ he said.
‘Everything,’ she said simply. ‘Absolutely everything.’
‘Ah,’ he said. ‘Good.’
Around them cars were hooting, other drivers shouting. ‘Get a goddamned move on,’ and ‘Get off and do that off the fucking road.’ The disc jockey had just started to play ‘Good Night Little Susie’.
Hugo sighed, then laughed and drew away from her. ‘We’d better go or we’ll be arrested.’
They drove in silence the rest of the way. When they got there he simply kissed her cheek briefly and got out. ‘Good night, Lee. I shall hope to see you soon. Thank you for a wonderful weekend.’
She watched him until he disappeared into the crowd and then drove home, very fast, which was the only other way she knew of relieving sexual tension; when she got home she went into the shower for a long time and came out calmer.
She was never able to hear ‘Good Night Little Susie’ again without becoming seriously sexually aroused.
She did wonder if she should tell Amy or Kim what she had orchestrated so cleverly for the next weekend; they were both such good friends, they wouldn’t tell, they would be thrilled for her and she felt an overpowering need to talk about Hugo and how she felt about him. With Amy in particular she had the most terrific and explicit conversations about sex and men in general, their husbands in particular; Amy had a husband who was the opposite of Dean, and couldn’t let her alone; he would disturb her as she cooked and sewed, made up her face and even went to the lavatory (that, indeed, she told Lee, seemed to excite him more than anything). Lee could see that could be worse than permanent frustration, and that a rampant Bob Meredith would not always be a welcome element in a quiet baking session or even a spell on the toilet; on the other hand, Amy plainly did not have the first idea of the constant hot hunger in her body, or the fretful misery of a half-accomplished orgasm. It would be such fun to talk to them about Hugo; to describe him and how sexy he was, how much she fancied him, how intelligent and how special he made her feel, how skilfully she had made her plans, how nervous and excited she felt about the weekend. But then on the other hand, it was safer not to tell anyone; neither of them lived in Santa Monica, none of her friends did, and nobody at all would know who she had there with her. It had to be better that way. And so she waited, fearful, excited; she doubled her exercise routine, she swam and sunned herself; she tidied the house compulsively; she changed the bed; she counted the hours, the days; she bought the London and the New York Times so that she might make intelligent conversation; she even, on the afternoon before he was due to arrive, shaved her pubes. And then she could do no more, and so she simply waited.
She was on the patio when he arrived. She was wearing a T-shirt and a pair of white slacks; unusually (for she felt uncomfortable, uneasy without them) she had left off her bra and her pants; she had drenched herself in Intimate; her hair was slightly damp from the shower; she looked just about seventeen.
‘Lee, you look like an angel,’ said Hugo, kissing her formally on the cheek. ‘An all-American angel. It’s so nice to see you.’
‘It’s good to see you too,’ said Lee, smiling at him, ‘can I fix you a drink?’
‘That would be nice. A beer I think. Is Dean not home yet?’
‘Not yet,’ said Lee, going quickly into the house; she re-emerged with the beer and a glass, and poured it for him, thinking that she could never remember how amazingly good-looking and sexy he was, and feeling all over again inadequate and crass.
‘How was your flight?’
‘All right. Long.’
‘Are you hungry?’
‘Not really. I can wait. Why don’t you have a drink too?’
So Lee fetched another beer and sat down beside him on the patio, on the swing seat, and they looked together silently at the ocean; she did think of asking him what he thought might happen over the Suez crisis, just to show she knew there was one, or even if he had seen West Side Story yet, but it didn’t really seem very appropriate, so she just sat there; then: ‘When will Dean be home?’
‘Not tonight.’
‘I see.’
That was all he said; no corny responses, no come-on, no surprise. Just ‘I see.’ Very English.
‘Would you like your dinner now?’
‘Yes please, I would.’
So they sat inside eating steaks and salads and drinking red wine, just chatting like any married couple, like she and Dean did in the evening and it wasn’t especially exciting or erotic or anything, just very very nice.
‘I’m tired,’ he said at last, ‘can I go to bed now?’
‘Of course,’ she said, ‘I’ll show you your room.’
‘Don’t worry,’ he said, ‘I’ll find it, it’s the same one, I suppose? You tidy up down here. I’ll look after myself. Good night Lee.’
She felt half rebuffed, anxious; was he telling her he didn’t want her, she wondered, that she was being foolish and presumptuous? And saying she should tidy up, had he noticed the overflowing trash can, the dishes heaped in the sink, the magazines dumped behind the couch; she was sure Alice would keep the house neat as a pin all the time, he probably hated it here and her casual ways. She smiled at him nervously.
‘I’ll fix you some coffee,’ she said.
‘No, don’t,’ he said, ‘it’ll keep me awake, but I’d like some water and a brandy maybe to go with it. Perhaps you could bring it up to me in a minute.’
And she knew then she wasn’t being foolish and presumptuous, that he wanted her as much as she wanted him, that he was simply a courteous, thoughtful man, giving her every chance to let herself off the hook should she change her mind – or indeed should he have misread it.
She put a jug of iced water on a tray and a bottle of brandy and a glass, and went quietly up the stairs in her bare feet. Outside his room she listened: silence. She knocked gently and went in; at first she thought he was asleep. She went over to the side of the bed and put down the tray very quietly. As she turned to leave the room, his hand came out and caught hers.
‘Don’t go,’ he said, ‘unless you really want to.’
‘I don’t,’ she said and sat down on the bed; he looked at her for a long time, very seriously, and then put out a hand and traced the outline of her face with his finger.
‘You’re so lovely,’ he said, ‘so very very lovely.’ And then he pushed his hand under her T-shirt and stroked very very gently her breasts, and then he leant forward and kissed her on the mouth, gently, repeatedly, as he had in the car.
Lee sat still and silent; she felt her nipples grow erect, a monstrous aching deep within her, but she did not move.
‘Lie down,’ he said, ‘lie down beside me,’ and her eyes never leaving his face, she slid her T-shirt over her head, unbuttoned her trousers and stood naked before him, smiling.
‘No underwear, Mrs Wilburn? Is this for my benefit, or would that be presumptuous of me?’
‘It would,’ she said untruthfully, ‘I never wear any. I don’t like it.’
‘I think you’re lying,’ he said, reaching out and stroking her stomach, ‘I don’t believe those wonderful breasts could survive without the help of a bra. Dear God, have you no pubic hair?’ he added, sitting up and peering at her with genuine interest.
‘I shave it,’ she said, ‘Dean doesn’t like it. I thought you wouldn’t either.’
‘You were wrong,’ he said, ‘but it doesn’t matter. Here.’ And he put his hand behind her buttocks, pressing her towards him, burying his face in her stomach, kissing her where the hair should have been, licking her, searching out her clitoris with his tongue.
‘It’s different,’ he said, smiling up at her. ‘I’m not sure if I like it but it’s different. Is that nice? You must tell me.’
‘Oh, God,’ said Lee, and it was almost a groan, ‘it’s nice. Don’t, don’t stop.’
‘Oh, I think I will,’ he said, ‘in a minute,’ and he went on and on, until she cried out with pleasure and an exquisite pain, and fell on to him, lying above him, kissing him, licking him, biting him, thrusting herself on to him, and feeling suddenly the immense strong delight of his penis going deep deep within her, answering her need, gratifying her awful, aching desire. She lay there, tearing at him, like some hungry animal, rising from him, arching away, and then lunging down again, over and over again, shuddering with pleasure and need; she came once, and then again, and still she was hungry, still wanted more; he turned her on to her back, driving into her fast and hard, almost hurting her, stirring places and pleasures she had never known; she felt the waves growing, then breaking, and as she clung to him, calling out in an agony of release, he shuddered into her, with a huge groan of delight and relief.
And afterwards, they lay together and he took great handfuls of her long blonde hair and wound it round his fingers and kissed it and kissed her everywhere, on her eyelids, her nose, her lips, her breasts, saying her name over and over again. And then she felt him growing hard again, and her own need growing too, then he took her with him, further, higher than she would ever have imagined possible; and finally they slept, completely peaceful, for a long, long time.
It was midday when they woke; Hugo looked at his watch, groaned and shook her.
‘Lee, it’s after twelve, for God’s sake wake up, when is Dean getting home?’
And she looked at him through a haze of love and sleepiness, her body sated and yet hungry again, and smiled and kissed him and said, ‘On Friday night.’
They stayed there all weekend, occasionally going downstairs for food and wine and once to swim; they made love until their bodies ached with exhaustion and even Lee could ask for no more.
On Sunday afternoon they finally got up and showered together and dressed and sat quietly in the kitchen, drinking coffee and looking at one another.
‘I have to go quite soon,’ he said.
‘When?’
‘My plane leaves Los Angeles for New York at nine. I’ve ordered a car for six.’
‘Let me come with you.’
‘No.’
‘What do you want me to do?’
‘I don’t know,’ he said and she knew it was a lie.
She knew what he wanted. He wanted her to stay with Dean, and to be there when he needed her. It was a hard bargain. But she knew she had to settle for it. She had no choice. It was that or absolutely nothing at all.
In time, she could see, she would grow angry, resentful, but now, so filled with him, filled with pleasure and love, she could accept it easily and gracefully.
‘I’ll come to the airport with you,’ she said quietly, and was rewarded by seeing the respect in his eyes.