Angela fumbled at the bottom of her handbag for her keys. Her fingers touched a clothes peg, then a tampon. She could have rung the doorbell. Gregory’s car was parked in the driveway, but she had grown to hate the way he opened the door to her when she’d forgotten her key on these occasions; as though she were not his wife, but a stranger who had interrupted him in some important task. He never mislaid his keys, he kept them on a long key-chain which he attached to a belt loop on his trousers. There were seventeen keys on Gregory’s bunch. They bulged in his right-hand trouser pocket.
When Gregory opened the front door, he found his wife on her hands and knees on the doorstep, crouched over the contents of her handbag.
Angela smelt wood-smoke in the hall-way and knew that she was in for at least an hour and a half of sexual activity in front of the log fire in the living room. When she had gathered her things together and thrown them into her handbag, he extended his hand and pulled her to her feet. They went into the kitchen and unpacked the plastic grocery bags in silence. When everything was in its proper place, Gregory said, “Shall we go and sit by the fire?” It was what he always said.
She went into the living room with him and sat down on the brown leather sofa. He put his arm around her neck and pulled her towards him. He pecked at her with his thin lips. His moustache felt like a small animal grazing on her mouth. He got up and crossed to the switch by the door and dimmed the wall lights. Then he went back to her and kissed her more ardently. He then pulled her down on to the towel which he had laid over the Chinese patterned hearth rug in front of the fire. He removed her outsize clothes and folded them carefully and laid them in a mounting heap on the carpet.
Angela closed her eyes and thought about the delicious sex she had once enjoyed with Christopher Moore in the sagging bed they had shared when they were young. They had devoted whole weekends to making each other happy. She could still smell the pungency of the sheets as she rammed them into the mouth of the industrial washing machine at the launderette on Monday evenings. Sometimes she had felt dizzy with remembered desire and had been obliged to leave the humidity and the swirling drums of clothes and go out into the night to cool off.
Gregory placed his jacket, trousers and tie on the wooden multi-purpose hanger he always used. Then hung it on the hook behind the door that he’d fixed there for the purpose. He removed his thermal vest, underpants and socks and placed them behind a cushion on the sofa. He went to the switch on the wall and turned the lights off. Then he bent over the fireplace and thrust a long copper poker with a jester’s head in between the smouldering logs. He needed flames: flickering firelight. Once, when drunk, he’d tried to explain why, but had only got as far as telling her about a camping trip with the scouts, before becoming incoherent.
“I’ll fetch a firelighter,” he said, and slipped his bare feet into his brown felt slippers. Angela arranged herself as best she could into a fetching arrangement: one leg slung over the other, toes pointed. One hand supporting her stretch-marked breasts. Head thrown back so as to tauten her chins. He knelt down, she heard his knees crack, he leaned over her awkwardly and kissed her newly revealed neck. “Wait for me,” he said, and crossed the lounge, hiding his genitals with one hand. After he’d closed the door, Angela let everything go and her body settled itself comfortably in the darkness.
When he returned a few moments later he was holding a single white firelighter ahead of him, like a baton. He looks like somebody about to run a relay race, thought Angela. And, as he crouched over the fire, breaking pieces of petroleum-soaked stick over the logs, he could indeed have been settling himself into the starting blocks waiting for the sound of the starting pistol. Once the fire was blazing he excused himself again, and went to the cloakroom where Angela listened to him washing his hands and brushing his nails.
Gregory had nothing to do with Angela’s orgasm, twenty minutes later. It was entirely Christopher Moore’s doing. It was the first time she had ever been unfaithful to Gregory, and she was surprised to find that she didn’t feel at all guilty. She lay on her back and watched the colours in the fire and was just wondering how long it would be before Gregory reached his own climax, when an exploding spark from the fire fell on to Gregory’s hairy back, and he leapt off her and yelped in pain, and flailed at his back with his right hand. His penis quickly lost height and size, until it resembled a one-eyed creature hiding in a cave. “Should have put the fire-guard up,” he grumbled as he gathered his clothes together. Then, “Aren’t you getting up?”
“Not yet,” she said. “It’s lovely, just lying here.” He stood looking down at the full expanse of her. His hand was covering his genitals again. She didn’t arrange her body in the customary way. She was fully conscious, but her body lay flat and totally relaxed, as though she had been anaesthetised for an imminent surgical operation.
When Gregory had pulled on his Y-fronts and left the room to make some tea, Catherine came and lay down beside her mother. She had to write an essay in German about Cologne cathedral and she was worried. Angela listened to her and told Catherine that if she got stuck she must bring the essay and they would work on it together. She kissed her daughter’s beautiful face and squeezed her hand and said, “You’re my perfect, perfect dream girl.”
The door opened and Gregory came in carrying a tray on which were two glasses of Tia Maria and a Chinese rice bowl containing Marks and Spencer’s prawn crackers.
“Ich liebe dich, Mum,” said Catherine, and was gone.
♦
Lionel locked his bike in the shed at the bottom of his small garden. He’d forgotten his gloves and his hands were numb with cold and where he had gripped the handlebars. As he struggled to turn the key in the padlock, he looked down the garden to the terraced house where he could see his wife sitting behind the window in their living room, watching the nine o’clock news on the television. A picture of Nelson Mandela was showing on the screen and Lionel wondered if he was dead. He tapped on the window before opening the side door to the kitchen and his wife turned round and blew him a kiss through the glass. It was their evening ritual. As he passed through the kitchen, he saw his dinner on a film-wrapped plate, waiting by the microwave. As he ate it he would tell his wife, who was always eager for news, about his day in the booth of the multi-storey carpark. As he took his coat off, he decided that tonight’s anecdote would be about the fat woman who talked to herself about her daughter.