There were lions everywhere. Real, fierce ones with ravaging jaws and roars like the doorbell. The largest beast pealed mercilessly into her left ear. The sound of a maddened, hungry doorbell. It was the doorbell …
Frances groped out her hand and grabbed a tail. The lion was sleeping upside down beside her.
‘Hell!’ she muttered. ‘The milkman.’
She pulled on her Harrods house-coat and loped downstairs.
‘Coming!’ she called through the locked door, struggling with stiff bolts. She hardly dared look up. She felt like the Princess in the fairy tale, face to face with her frog prince.
First, she saw his shoes. Scuffed black lace-ups from Freeman, Hardy and Willis. Her eyes moved slowly up towards his trousers – grey turn-ups with a hole in the knee, brown plastic belt, navy nylon anorak. A small man, a thin man, but what about his face? Adonises could be pint-sized. She took a deep breath and jumped from grubby grey collar to flabby white face. Three warts, two faded eyes and a gingery moustache. It was the only hair he had. His peaked United Dairies cap covered only half of his shining bald head. Yul Brynner? No, Yul Brynner was a he-man. This was a shrimp. And not even pink. A dead shrimp, pale and bloated. He looked as if he’d been drinking too much of his own pallid milk.
‘Yes, madam?’
They still said ‘madam’ on Richmond Green – one of the reasons Charles chose to live there.
I’d like you to sire my baby. No, she couldn’t say that. ‘I wondered if you had any … yoghurt?’
‘Strawberry, blackcurrant, or mandarin?’ His voice sounded like gravel plopping through porridge. Perhaps he had a younger assistant, one of those cherubic boys with soft skins and golden hair. Colette had extolled the virtues of the youthful male. But was it safe to father children under age?
‘Strawberry, blackcurrant, or …’ He began his litany again.
‘Lovely weather, isn’t it?’ Frances smiled her best blue-chip smile. Anything to keep him there. She glanced in the direction of the milk float – there didn’t seem to be a boy. Only a mangy dog sniffing at the bottles. ‘I mean, it’s surprising to see the sun after all that rain.’
He grunted. ‘Or we do have the plain. That’s a penny cheaper.’
Perhaps he had a day off, and another, younger fellow took over, a Kevin Keegan, or a Bjorn Borg. ‘Of course it is July. I suppose we should expect a little sun.’
He took a step backwards. ‘So you won’t be wanting yoghurt, ma’am?’
‘Er … no thanks, not today.’ She closed the door. No yoghurt, no strawberry-flavoured baby. The whole thing was utterly ridiculous. Even if he had been Adonis, what on earth could she have done? Asked him in and demanded a free sample of his double jersey cream? Told him she was doing a market research survey on South Thames milkmen and would he please strip off? Mr Rathbone should have sent her a handbook on how to seduce milkmen, like the instructions he enclosed with her temperature chart. She knew those off by heart: take the temperature every morning, by mouth, before rising. Do not eat, drink, smoke, talk, move, breathe, before recording it. Start a new line on the first day of every period and plot the graph for that month. A dot for every day. She’d grown accustomed to her little dots – her start to the day, like Charles’ exercises or the Morning Service.
Every time they made love, a small neat circle went around the dot. She was often tempted to add a few more circles. They never seemed quite enough. Either Charles was away, or exhausted. He refused to rush it, was a perfectionist even in the bedroom. No snatched five-minute snacks, but a four-course meal with all the trimmings.
Apart from the paucity of circles, the charts were perfect. Some women had erratic charts, so Rathbone said, with temperatures rising and falling completely at random, but hers were as neat and orderly as her life. Twenty-eight-day cycles to the minute, the little dip just before ovulation, the one-degree rise exactly on day fourteen. Up and down it went, exactly as it should, and in and out went Charles’ thing (work permitting), following its curve. And absolutely nothing happened: no continued rise denoting pregnancy, but down again, start again, new line, new chart.
The trouble with the charts was that they killed all spontaneity, more or less ordered you when to make love, when to abstain. And if Charles was away on those few vital, fertile days, she felt almost bereaved. In the last year alone, she had followed him to outlandish and unlikely places, just so they could put a circle round the dot. Once, they were grounded in Alaska with engine trouble, followed by a blizzard, and Charles was so upset about missing his International Tax Conference in Hawaii that he couldn’t even get it up. Another time, she’d spent seven rain-sodden days trailing round the Isle of Man, trying to prise Charles away from three hundred identical accountants, and eventually collapsing with ’flu and pharyngitis (and still no circles round her dots).
She couldn’t really blame Charles. For almost eighteen months now, they’d done it on the right days, and she had stayed on her back for thirty minutes afterwards, with her legs stuck up in the air (Mr Rathbone’s Holy Writ again). And still no results – except backache and lost sleep.
Frances scanned The Times and nibbled on her starch-reduced roll. Two gold stars. Charles liked her slim and well-informed. She’d planned a round of golf today. Laura had taken time off and was collecting her at ten. She felt a dart of envy. When every day was more or less a day off, freedom lost its flavour. She didn’t even feel like golf. Once, it had been crucial to drive a ball cleanly down a fairway and two-putt every green, but now it seemed absurd to lavish all that ardour and attention on a tiny white ball. When Laura knocked, she was still dawdling through the paper in her house-coat.
‘Good God, darling, have you gone down with the dreaded influenza?’
‘No, I’m just a bit ungolfish.’
‘Impossible! Look, have a cup of coffee and you’ll feel better.’
‘I’ve had three and I feel worse.’
‘Well, make me one, then. To tell the truth, I’ve only just crawled out of bed myself. Do you know, Frances, this is the first time I’ve ever caught you in your nightie! If that indefatigable spouse of yours ever had a free minute to communicate with lesser mortals, I’d tell him what wicked things you get up to when he’s three thousand miles away.’
‘Yes, it’s my chatting-up-the-milkman gear!’ With Laura, you had to be flip.
‘Frances, if you’re going to have a fling, for goodness sake aim high. A diplomat, or something. Far better perks, and a decent pad to do it in. Personally, I just wouldn’t fancy a milk float. All those empty bottles banging against my breasts.’
Frances tried to smile. It was all talk with Laura. She spattered her conversation with wild allusions to her tempestuous life, yet most evenings she was closeted with Clive and half a dozen poodles, in front of Nationwide.
‘Laura, do people really have all these affairs?’
‘Which affairs?’
‘Oh, come on, you know what I mean. You can’t pick up a women’s mag these days without some article on ‘‘Why You Need a Latin Lover’’ or ‘‘How To Stop Your Husband Finding Out’’. It’s credible, until you bring it down to actual individuals. I can‘t imagine Mrs Eady with a lover, even an Anglo-Saxon one. And what about Viv? Does she have affairs?’
‘Can’t you use the word in the singular, darling? You talk about affairs like eggs, as if they came in dozens. I should have thought one affair was more than enough for anyone.’
‘Well, one, then. Does Viv have even one?’
‘How should I know? You’re closer to her than I am. I doubt it, frankly, with all that surplus avoirdupois. Unless, of course, she’s found a fellow with a fat fetish.’
Laura was a bitch. She wasn’t slim herself, but it was the sort of flesh you called voluptuous, rather than obese. She pushed away the sugar bowl and prised open the tiny silver snuff-box which held her saccharin. ‘Frankly, I think it’s all a ploy, darling. A hidden plug for male superiority. You know the sort of line – now women are liberated, all they want is men.’
Frances frowned. ‘But most of those articles are written by women. The liberated kind.’
‘Oh, half of them are probably men in drag. Haven’t you noticed how androgynous most women’s libbers are? Facial hair and baby slings. The poor male ego has taken such a bruising recently, they’ll stoop to anything just to shore it up again. Frankly, it tends to put me off them. There’s nothing sadder than a drooping ego.’
Frances glanced across at her. Laura’s elegant long legs had been dipped in sheer black silk, and were crossed provocatively at the thigh. Her three-inch heels lengthened them still further. Even when she changed into her golf clothes, the men still goggled. Laura loved it. She lapped up men like cream, then spat them out again.
‘Quite honestly, Frances, I haven’t bothered with affairs since I drew up a balance sheet on them. You know, pros and cons. The pros took two lines, and the cons four pages. I simply can’t be fagged risking syphilis, BO, boredom, trichomonas, guilt, or cancer of the cervix – to name but a random few.’
Or pregnancy, thought Frances. Laura had been sterilized ten years ago, as casually as if she’d had her hair cut. She herself had been shocked when she heard. Sterilization seemed a violent act, a desecration, almost. She knew all the arguments, of course – over-population, strain on natural resources, wrong to bring a child into a wicked world. But that was only talk. Women didn’t get their tubes tied because harvests had failed in Bangladesh, or Peking was stock-piling the Bomb. Laura wanted to keep her leisure and her looks, her independence, her freedom to travel, her glossy, streamlined job. Frances almost envied her – just to be that certain. Laura never agonized. She knew what she wanted and she got it.
Frances removed a wilting carnation from the stiff flower arrangement on the table. ‘Do you think Viv …?’
‘What about her?’ shouted a voice from the hallway. Viv had let herself in, the back way, and was standing panting at the door. ‘Sorry I’m late. Midge refused to go to school. She crawled underneath the hall seat and clung on to the legs. It took three of us to prise her out.’
‘Little monster,’ muttered Laura, who regarded children as a lower form of life. Strange, thought Frances, how children wormed their way into everything. Women who didn’t have any were set apart, put in a special category, frigid, selfish, spoilt. It was true they were less restricted – their lives weren’t swallowed up in rose-hip syrup or school bazaars, or parcelled out among a dozen grabbing hands. All the same, it seemed a strange basis for alignment. Viv was friendly with the most unlikely people, simply because they had a school or a Brownie pack in common, whereas she was lumped with Laura, on the arbitrary basis that neither had a child.
In fact, she felt pulled between the two. Laura’s elegant, untrammelled life was not unlike her own. The difference was that Laura enjoyed it. Her glass and concrete office and her Homes and Gardens house (complete with rich, phlegmatic husband) apparently fulfilled and satisfied her, so that she didn’t yearn for children, or that elusive Something Else. And, yet, she didn’t want to be a Laura, with a padlocked womb and a solid silver locket in place of a heart.
Neither did she want to be a Viv – an overweight earth mother who had run to seed. Yet Viv lived far more fully and unselfishly than she or Laura ever could. Viv had five kids and a heart big enough to fit them all. Viv was warm, real, safe, easy, comfortable. And – Laura would have added – stolid, slovenly and boring. Chewing-gum on chair seats and marbles dropped in cornflakes packets. When Frances thought about her own child, it never looked like Viv’s, with their runny noses or filthy fingernails. It never had rashes or earache or diarrhoea, or answered back, or was stupid at arithmetic. She relied on Charles to produce a model infant, something she could stand on the mantelpiece and admire like a flower arrangement.
And yet Charles had produced nothing, whereas Viv’s David had fathered five, and he was away even more than Charles – a sales engineer with three-month stints abroad. Viv snatched her babies from him between electronic equipment exhibitions in Frankfurt, or customer conferences in Singapore, and then set about having them as casually as other women had summer colds or dandruff. Eight months gone with Rupert, she’d dug up their wilderness garden, single-handed, and transformed it into a sand-pit for the older children. Now, it had reneged into a wilderness, but that wasn’t the point. What was astonishing was Viv’s slapdash attitude to pregnancy itself. It seemed too sublime a condition to treat so cavalierly. If she herself were pregnant, she knew she would view her body as the Temple of the Holy Ghost, yet there was Viv wedging that sacred bulge into the bowels of the motor mower or squeezing it underneath her oily, stalling Volkswagen.
Even now, she looked enceinte. (Although she wasn’t. The bulges had stopped with Rupert. David had insisted that number five be their finale, and had doubled his stint in Singapore to underline the point. He was still there now, leaving Viv a widow until October.) She sat slumped in a chair, in one of her old maternity smocks, bunched around the middle with what looked like a piece of hair ribbon. The fragile Sheraton strained stoically beneath her eleven stone.
‘Playing golf in your nightie?’ she grinned, plugging her mouth with a chocolate biscuit, as if it were a deprived and hungry child.
‘She’s betraying us with the milkman, Viv!’ Laura wrinkled up her twice-remodelled London Clinic nose. ‘Rating United Dairies above the Royal Mid-Surrey Golf Club is almost certainly a treasonable offence.’
‘Oh, Laura, do stop. If you want to know, I’ve actually decided to go and get a job.’
‘A job, darling. But you’ve only just stopped working.’
‘No, I’ve been idle for over a year. It doesn’t suit me.’
‘Idle!’ There was a faint groaning sound as Viv bounced forward on the chair. ‘You must be joking. You and Charles don’t know the meaning of the word. I’ve never known such a pair of eager beavers in my life – so many committees and commitments, I have to book a year ahead just to have coffee with you.’
‘So it’s back to the world of the plunging bosom and the plummeting hem. Well, old Peters will be glad. He always fancied you.’
‘Don’t be silly, Laura. Anyway, I’m not going back. Not there. It’s too much of a strain, with all my other activities. I just want a little job.’
‘What, like reorganizing British Rail?’ Laura spooned cream into her second cup of coffee.
‘You’re crazy,’ said Viv. ‘You don’t have to work at all. You don’t even have the excuse of escaping from the kids. If I were you, I’d loll around drinking schnapps and reading Mills and Boon.’
‘With the occasional breathless little foray into United Dairies,’ added Laura.
Frances escaped into the kitchen to make more coffee. Everything was joke and chatter with her friends. She burned to examine motives and morality, or probe into philosophy and purpose, but it was one of the rules, not to be too serious. There were whole layers of life, waiting and wasting underneath, while they all frothed and frittered on the surface.
‘What sort of job do you want?’ Viv shouted through the open door.
‘Oh, I thought I’d work in a florist, or something.’
‘You’re nuts, Frances! You’d be bored stiff in a day. All those dreadful damp daffodils and people weeping over wreaths.’
‘Well, what can I do? I don’t fancy teaching. I don’t want anything too arduous …’
‘How about a traffic warden? You’d look fantastic in the uniform. And you could give me special permission to park outside Sainsbury’s.’
‘Get a fun job,’ urged Laura. ‘You’ve been so bloody serious all your life. It’s time you broke out. How about a croupier? Or a bunny girl?’
‘What, with my figure? They don’t take 34As.’ Back to the silly chat again. She felt like screaming at them, laughed instead. ‘Anyway, Charles would go berserk.’
‘Charles needn’t know. I read about a girl the other day, a diplomat’s daughter. She took a job as a high class courtesan, and her father thought she was having music lessons. He even dropped her there each evening, with her Chopin.’
Viv gulped down her fourth chocolate biscuit. ‘Shouldn’t we set off? Or I won’t get my eighteen holes in before it’s time to meet the kids.’
‘Sure you’re not coming?’ asked Laura.
‘Positive.’
When they’d driven off, she wished she’d joined them. Golf was probably no more absurd than anything else in life. At least it had rules which couldn’t be broken. The other rules seemed remarkably fragile. Middle-aged wives are faithful to their husbands. Middle-class graduates take serious jobs. But were they? Should they?
She spread out the local paper and last night’s Evening Standard. Scores and scores of jobs she couldn’t do: computer operator, laboratory technician, tool maker, chef patissier. What was one paltry arts degree and ten years’ experience in public relations, compared to this ocean of skills she knew nothing of? She didn’t want to go back to the fashion world. Oh yes, it was well paid and well regarded, but such a trivial world, where bitchy people took fatuous frivolities desperately seriously. She wanted something in which steel-souled philanthropists got to grips with life-and-death emergencies. A missionary, a bomb-disposal expert, a lion tamer. She grinned at the lion which was squatting on a kitchen stool. It already seemed a friend.
That sort of mission was impossible. She couldn’t bring the Gospel to savages in Botswana, when Charles needed her in Richmond Green. In any case, she had to conserve her energies. One of the reasons she hadn’t conceived when she first came off the Pill was the stress of her career – she was sure of it. This time it would be a gentle, unambitious little venture; yes, a little job, pace Mr Rathbone.
But what should it be? Whatever Viv said about damp daffs, a florist’s would be ideal. A most suitable background to conceive a baby in, all those buds and blooms. But no florist’s post was advertised. How about a waitress? There were scores of openings there, except Charles would disapprove. And supposing one of the members of the Royal Mid-Surrey Golf Club should come in as a customer and catch their ex-Lady Captain slopping about with trays of shepherd’s pie. She turned back to the ‘situations vacant’.
Temporary Owner-Drivers Urgently Required
Medfield Mini-Cabs
A driver. Now that was something she could do. She had her own car, an elegant Citroën which spent a lot of its life yawning in the garage. Driving was simple and soothing and wouldn’t overtax her. She’d still have vital energy to spare for circles round the dots. And it could be called a fun job. Not as daring as a bunny girl, but then you didn’t need a forty-inch chest to be a driver – it would only encumber the steering wheel. But at least a little daring. Wasn’t there some risqué film called Confessions of a Taxi Driver? Charles wouldn’t allow his wife to be a taxi driver. But as Laura had said, Charles needn’t know. Well, need he? He was away for a week in any case, so she could just try it out. She almost ought to break a rule, on principle. She’d been so obedient all her life, so careful and professional, never taking risks, never acting foolishly. She suddenly wanted to turn round and stick her tongue out, shrug off all those cautions and prohibitions, and, if not plunge in the deep end, at least put a toe in the water.
She picked up the phone. ‘Medfield Mini-Cabs? Hallo, I’m phoning about your advertisement for drivers. Yes, of course I’m a woman, what did you think? Oh, I see. Good Lord, what prejudice! I’ve got a remarkably good sense of direction. It’s nothing to do with sex – I could read a map when I was eight. Yes, a ’79 Citroën Pallas. Of course it’s got four doors. Clean licence? Yes. What, you want me to come now? Right, give me half an hour.’
She took the stairs two at a time. She’d got an interview and she wasn’t even dressed; wasn’t sure she wanted a job at all, let alone a crazy one like this. She hunted through her wardrobe for something suitably severe; didn’t want anyone to get ideas. She pulled on a sludge grey suit and a pair of walking shoes, and peered in the mirror. She still looked too demure. Her Minton china look, Charles called it. Charles loved fine china. Her dark hair was cut like an elf (an elf with a healthy bank balance and an extremely good hairdresser). Her eyes were blue, a very deep intense blue. Inestimable eyes, Charles had called them, when he’d first fixed his own lighter ones upon them and promptly decided they were assets he should invest in. He approved of the fact she had dark hair and blue eyes, which seemed to make her special, or at least superior to those who automatically associated blue eyes with fair hair, and dark with dark. She didn’t like her nose. It was too small and insignificant, but she’d learned the trick of not seeing it when she looked in the mirror. She focused on her eyes instead, or on her even teeth.
She wished she were an inch or two taller. It might help as a driver. Small women were always treated as even more fragile and feeble than the big ones, and it rankled. She kicked off her brogues, put on her highest heels.
‘Lord! You’re a littl’un,’ muttered the small, greasy man in shirt-sleeves, stirring his coffee with a custard cream. The Medfield office was a dingy room sulking above a coin and stamp shop – girlie posters on the walls, nothing on the dirty concrete floor. The man fished half a soggy biscuit out of his cup and dried it on the blotter. ‘I’m Reg,’ he said, ‘the boss. You must be Mrs Jones.’
‘Yes.’ She had dispensed with the Parry. ‘And if you’re worried that I can’t reach the pedals …’
‘All right, keep your hair on, Mrs Jones. You’re the women’s lib one, aren’t you?’
‘Certainly not! I don’t believe in women’s liberation, not as it stands, in any case. It needs total re-thinking and reform …’
‘Well, we don’t get many women on this job, lib or otherwise. But with the summer hols coming up, I can’t be choosy. Sit down.’
The interview took exactly twelve minutes, half of which Reg spent answering outside calls. Did she have a police record? Did she know the area? Could she add up?
‘Now, listen …’
‘OK, OK, I’ll take you on. Though I wouldn’t, if I weren’t desperate. I’ve nothing against you personally, mind, but women are invariably born with no sense of direction.’
Frances opened her mouth to object, but Reg was rattling on about insurance, commission, and methods of payment.
‘Phone in tomorrow for your first booking. Nine o’clock sharp. No excuses. We’ll take it from there.’
‘Tomorrow? Good gracious! I don’t think that’s …’
‘And don’t forget to see that bloke I mentioned. He’ll fix up your insurance right away, if you say I sent you. OK? Close the door behind you. There’s a draught.’
She reeled to the nearest café and ordered a black coffee, to recover from the shock. She never acted impulsively like this. She should have gone to a professional employment agency and taken a job more suited to her station in life. She grinned into her Danish pastry. No one except Charles used expressions like that.
The trouble was, her station in life was so exceptionally narrow. She’d never had a job which wasn’t sheltered and respectable; never even had a lover. Oh yes, a few tepid paddlings when she was at university, but they didn’t really count. Then Charles had taken over and insisted on an early marriage, before she’d even sat her degree and long before she’d had a chance to taste the wide and wicked world. And here she was, aged thirty-four, and fifteen years married, Charles’ creation more or less, accomplished, efficient, successful, and barren. Charles was ten years older, or maybe a hundred years. She loved him, she admired him, she depended on him almost frighteningly, and yet sometimes she felt he’d taken away all her spontaneity, kidnapped her youth, and locked it in a bank vault.
She selected a second Danish pastry, even larger and stickier than the first. (Three black crosses. Charles hated obese women and bad teeth.) Was the job an act of rebellion? Mrs Parry Jones, mini-cab driver, stuffing herself with pastries, and wasting Charles’ precious time. Perhaps she’d do worse – waste the whole day window-shopping and sprawling in the sun. She’d be a working girl tomorrow, so she’d treat herself to a little indulgence today. It wasn’t easy. She was so accustomed to being useful and committed, it seemed sinful to miss the Save Wildlife fund-raising tea-party, and to turn down a freelance fashion job when her old boss phoned in a panic and begged her to do it for him. Worst of all, Charles’ eye seemed to peer down at her from the sky in mingled disbelief and horror when she switched the Bach recital over to Radio 2 and lay down to doze in her bikini on the lawn.
She was due for drinks with Clive and Laura in the evening. She cancelled that as well. Laura was still more maddening on her own home ground – all fizz and façades – and Clive made a life’s work out of being unobjectionable, and hid behind half a dozen clichés and the whisky bottle. Besides, she felt it was important not to see anyone before she started the Medfield job. They’d all make witty remarks and say how amusing she was (meaning downright stupid) and then she’d weaken, and instead of ringing Reg in the morning, she’d be chairing the meeting for the Richmond Residents’ Association or practising her Mozart. She’d written a new rule for herself: do something impulsive, ridiculous, and jolly well enjoy it. She had and she would.
She was watching a thriller on ITV when Charles phoned, just before ten. She switched it off hastily – his all-seeing eye was frowning from Bahrain.
‘Miss you, darling.’
‘Miss you too.’
‘Good flight?’
‘Not bad.’
The shorthand of her marriage. She could have done it in her sleep. ‘How did your paper go?’
‘So so.’ (That meant brilliant.)
‘Hotel all right?’
‘Not bad.’ (Five star, with all the trimmings.)
‘Are they working you hard?’
‘No, not really.’ (Fourteen-hour day and homework on top of it.)
‘Poor darling.’
‘No, I’m fine.’ (Man is born to labour.)
It was comforting, predictable. Charles never let her down. Cards for all their anniversaries, phone calls for his trips away. And yet, somehow there was a barrier between them. She longed for her bare soul to rub against his, for their two minds to crash into each other and send up showers of sparks. But all that happened was this kid-glove conversation, this whirring of words. They never seemed to meet head-on, only obliquely, and, even then, there was a moat and a drawbridge up on Charles’ side.
‘Charles,’ she said suddenly. ‘I …’
‘What, darling?’
‘I … love you.’
‘Yes, of course, love you too.’
The formula again. That wasn’t what she’d meant to say. But how could you start on all those forbidden, complicated things, via a crackling line half a world away? She could picture Charles in his Turnbull and Asser maroon silk dressing-gown, with all his possessions arranged in straight lines in the drawers; the items on the dressing-table drawn up in military formation, the alarm clock set for earlier than he needed it, the memoranda on the bedside table.
Suddenly, she missed him. The second bed looked cold and empty, his brown spare slippers gaped on the bedside rug. She reached out and picked up the lion from where it had fallen on the floor, tried to turn it into Charles. It wasn’t easy; Charles was hairless and didn’t have a tail. She turned the other way and imagined Charles beside her, stroking her breasts the way he always did, seriously and with total concentration, as if he were trying to increase their output or improve their dividend. Charles approached sex like a business meeting, a challenge he must meet with unqualified success. It was always successful – when they had the time for it. They did all the right things in the right order. She sometimes even came, and pretended quite convincingly the other times. They tried new positions and never skimped on foreplay. They’d ploughed through Masters and Johnson and the Hite report. Yet, somehow, they both remained detached and apart. However hard their bodies thrust and thrashed, the heads above were looking the other way, averting their eyes. She found she was making a shopping list, or working out a problem, at the very moment Charles was spurting into her.
She worried, sometimes, that there was something wrong with her. She never felt abandoned or overcome with passion, like all the books described. Did Laura scream and squirm in ecstasy? Did Viv cry out ‘I’m dying with it, Fabrizio,’ like a Bertolucci heroine? She’d never know. It was bad enough never having had another man. Being faithful was almost a perversion these days, more pitiable than being scrofulous. You were more or less obliged to pretend to affairs – hint at torrid entanglements and abandoned couplings, to give yourself a modicum of self-respect.
She picked up the lion and held him close against her breasts. His tail dangled down conveniently against her pubic hair. She tried to move herself against him. ‘I’m dying with it, Fabrizio,’ she whispered. And yawned. It really was more tempting simply to go to sleep.