Aunt Margaret's Lover (26 page)

I
gazed at Oxford and blinked with innocence. He was pressing his two forefingers together and staring back at me very hard. Wait till we are alone and I will get even with you for that. . .

The meal and games were over. We had turned down the offer of nightcaps, and I suddenly felt as if someone had thumped me in the solar plexus again. 'Could we,' I asked mine host, 'take a stroll around the garden before
...
um .
..
we go to
..
. um . . .?'

'Bed,
I
think, is the word, dear,' said Oxford.

George swung the French doors open wide and the two of us went out into the cool night air. It was nice to be alone at last. But it was not for long.

'Good idea,' said another voice, and they all trooped out chattering and exclaiming
into the once silent darkness.

I
had a moment of wild and wondering fantasy that this was going to turn into one of those royal beddings of yore when King, Queen and half the Court piled into the bedchamber to watch the sovereign couple get tucked up for the night.

But down behind the rustling, sinister topiary, illuminating long points of shadow on the lawn, he pulled me into the darkness, where we waited for the others to pass by, holding our breath, holding each other tight, like refugees against an uncertain enemy. It was enough. Even imagined danger breeds a closeness. And, as soon as we could, we dived back through the swinging ochre curtain and ran up the ornate stairs towards the unassailable silence of our tapestried room. Hardly the romantic discretion of Ovid's persuasion, but you have to come up to date sometimes.

We are going to a log cabin by a lake in Manitoba for most of the summer, so communications will not be so easy. Not that that will make much difference. We don't seem to be very good at it, do we? Write, anyway! Haven't heard for ages.

Verity looks at the clock and feels like a mother who has sent her virgin daughter to her bridal bed. She has intermittently looked at the clock from about five o'clock this afternoon. If Margaret isn't having fantasies, thinks Verity,
she
certainly is. She imagines some sumptuous hotel full of noise-absorbing carpets and staff gliding around in uniforms, with blank faces that have seen it all and say nothing. She imagines them arriving at five, ordering tea in the salon and then not having the patience to wait for it to cool; she sees the look that passes between them which says, 'I want you now.' She imagines the privacy and anonymity of their bedroom, the locked door, the champagne on ice, the curtains drawn and the candles lit. She pictures the sweep of sunlit lawn beneath their window and hears peacocks calling from far away as Aunt Margaret's Lover lays her back upon the bed and slowly undresses her. Her friend's eyes glow like coals, her arms are stretched above her head. Fingers stroke the glistening flesh in ecstasy, while the soft pale aureoles of her breasts gradually stiffen beneath his lingering mouth. Verity, at this point, gets up and moves about a bit. It is now ten minutes past eleven and the two
of them must have dined and be
getting ready for, if not actually
doing,
round two.

Verity decides that what she needs is a drink. A nightcap, she thinks, and then she bursts into tears. From the back, in her fantasy, Aunt Margaret's lover looked not unlike Mark, and Aunt Margaret's nipples not unlike her own. She will not ring him, she will
not.
He's a gutless incompetent. It will only go sour all over again.

She looks at the clock for the umpteenth time. She unscrews the cap of the bottle and makes a modest nightcap for herself.

'Can't even trust your friends. They always let you down.'

The wall seems to concur.

'She'll probably marry the bugger.' Tears plop from Verity's eyes. 'And I shall be always alone. No more slipping under the duvet in the darkness with a pair of arms around you and a nose breathing into your ear,
ever.
Do you see?'

Plainly the wall does not, since hugs for walls are not generally considered necessary.

'Well, do you?'

The wall may well be making a heroic attempt to understand, but the result is blankness.

'Be glad you are a wall, then,' she says. 'I bloody well wish I were . . .'

Writers should use their sufferings, she reminds herself.

She looks back at her beautiful, bare, clean Italianate and glowing wall. Her kitchen companion. A woman's place is in the kitchen - she feels safe there, unthreatened. Why, even the dishwasher becomes a friend. The scales, the fridge - all her pals, and all keepers of her innermost confessions. Good job Mark
isn't
around any
more. With what she has said to the fridge about him, for instance, if he opened it now to take out a beer it would probably savage him to death.

Upstairs she totters into her study. Kitchen - kindly. Food equals love. She switches on her machine and writes.

Your recipe is enclosed.

This particular dish is our most spectacular and popular, and requires great skill. We suggest you do not attempt it until you are fully confident of success. Once you have mastered it you will find it is requested of you again and again.

WARNING: This will affect your statutory rights.

essential equipment

1 ripe man 1
ripe woman

A glass or two of good wine

A little oil

A generous handful of time
,

A flat surface for rolling out on

A few sweet words for decoration

method

Pour wine into two glasses. Drink a little from time to time.

Remove outer garments from the man and woman carefully. Set aside.

Check the skin for any remaining undergarments, remove slowly assessing each area uncovered for damage.

Any damage may be removed at this stage with careful application of lips to the area.

Place undergarments with outer garments for use later.

Feel remaining flesh all over for less obvious signs of damage.

If whole and unbruised, rub all over generously with oil, then lay out flat.

Wait for the man to rise fully.

The man and the woman are now ready.

Let them prove themselves, turning occasionally.

Judge when they are done by how they feel. They should be very hot and very damp.

Sprinkle with sweet words.

Leave to rest before returning to original under and outer garments
.

Verity is pleased with this. It's funny. It's witty. It shows she can still be on form despite the bitter, bitter pain. It is exactly the sort of thing Mark would like to receive.

She switches off her machine and leaves the study, closing the door with a bang. But he damn well
won't.

Jill watches David on the Flymo and tries to concentrate on his rather nicely muscular forearms as opposed to his rather round stomach. He is cutting the grass for the advent of Margaret and her new lover. Jill has made their bed and put fresh roses in the room, though the scent of the old rose petals, still in their bowl, lingers beneath their sharper perfume. The odour of love, she thought sadly, closing the door tight to keep it in.

She feels both excited and afraid. Excited because she has looked forward to seeing her friend for so long, afraid because everything has changed now, even to the extent of Margaret's stay. Originally she was going to come up for at least a week. Now it is only the weekend - Friday night to Sunday. When Jill had suggested that Margaret could come up a few days earlier, or even a night earlier, Margaret had made some very convincing excuses for why it was not possible. True, she did say that she would come up again on her own very soon, perhaps in July, but
..
. Jill feels she is behaving like a jealous schoolgirl. She looks at David's strong arms and his well-shaped legs in their shorts. Nothing wrong with the way he is made, nothing wrong at all - only somehow, somehow right now he seems to lack the power to engage her. She looks at her watch. They are due to arrive in half an hour. Oh, David is
so
irritating about that bloody Flymo. He had started cutting the grass too late to finish before they arrived.
Of course
he had - because he wanted the new chap to admire its lines and fine engineering. He once had a Porsche, in the good old days of the eighties, and that never got half the admiration and attention. Love me, love my Flymo. Jill smiles. She had better tell Margaret to pass this wisdom on to her lover so that they can all have a really harmonious weekend!

Chapter 24

'Star bursts,' he said from the window seat.

I sat up, propped against the pillows, burrowed in the bedcover, and smiled at his dark silhouette. He had the base of the tapestried curtain wrapped around him, though his chest and shoulders were bare. He was lit from behind by moonlight and from within the room by a solitary candle's glow - a strange combination of coldness and warmth which created a hybrid image, somewhere between the cool northern painting of Vermeer and the deep warm shadows of Caravaggio.

'Sex is beautiful,' I said drowsily.

If you have no expectations nor responsibilities, I was thinking to myself, and you are turned on by the person you are with, then sex is the simplest and the best of all the rather beautiful pleasures in the world. Of course, I would probably change my mind as soon as hunger loomed around breakfast time. Eating so often supersedes sex as the most pleasurable of indulgences. Yet another example of clever Mother Nature - get 'em eating and fucking and the world goes on turning. But right then, at about three-thirty on a May night in the country, sex seemed a great deal better than bacon and eggs.

I was about to say something along these lines when my kindly
eminence grisette,
the one who perches on my shoulder from time to time and ge
ntly
suggests that I should put a sock in it, did.

'There's no art to find the mi
nd's construction in the face,'
says Duncan, getting it completely wrong and trotting off to Glamis for a quick touch of regicide. But that was politics. After sex the face
does
reflect the feelings. Oxford looked at ease, and I felt at ease. We had pre-ordained ourselves -decisions were out of our hands. It was like being naked on a warm desert island.

'Go on,' he said later, as we lay close and were drifting towards sleep.

'Go on, what?'

'Say it.'

'Say what?'

He turned to me, yawned, and spoke in that tone that denotes the pleasurable slipping from consciousness. 'Say, "I'm glad we've got that bit over
..."'

'Well, I am . . .' I said, brushing off my
e
minence
grisette.

But he was already asleep.

Later, looking suitably ragged, we dressed for breakfast. The morning was sunny, full of birdsong and warm enough for our casement to be open. A smell of lavender and newly cut grass drifted into the room. We could never have designed such perfection, I thought - it could only ever come together like this when the gods decide.

'I don't think .
..'
he said, lying back on the gorgeous crumpled stuff of the bed and pulling me towards him, 'I don
^;
t think I could face breakfast with that lot again. How about you?'

I shook my head. It could never be fun the second time around. 'Let's have it up here in the room,' I said.

'Good idea.' He began rubbing his cheek with a not altogether roseate thumb. 'And then have breakfast
..
.'

As we drove out of the gates, I thought that there was some wonderful material here for Verity. She should book herself in some time and take in the eccentric flavour. That morning, while Oxford paid, I was invited to take a look at the hothouse. It was as if we really were back in Jane Austen's days when any visit to a country seat must,
de rigueur,
include

an opportunity to admire the peaches. In fact they were apricots - the precocious fruit - and looked so erotic, like little round and willing bottoms, that I came dangerously close to remarking so. I was about to touch one with a fingertip when my hostess restrained me.

'They are so delicate at this stage,' she said, 'and bruise so easily. When they are a little riper they will toughen up enough to be handled.' She gave me a bright smile.