Barefoot in the Dark (17 page)

Chapter 18

Allegra lived in a tree-lined street in Pontcanna, in a tall skinny house with a big beech hedge outside that looked like it could have been in Chelsea. It was the sort of house Jack had himself once fancied occupying, before marriage to Lydia and the absolute necessity for a decent state school and a double garage had had her drag him out to suburbia.

He had bought flowers – a small cellophane-wrapped bunch that he’d found in the supermarket, which he’d chosen because they were all the same colour – mindful of something Lydia had once said about style being all about understatement. They smelled nice, at any rate. Allegra, who had expressed fulsome delight, had then given him a glass of white wine and ushered him into a sparsely furnished living room, the most arresting feature of which was the complete absence of anything that hadn’t been put there as decoration. There were bookcases but no books, a sound system but no CDs, coffee tables but no coffee. The only evidence that organic life existed in the place was the flower arrangement thing on the low table in the centre. But even here – it consisted of three stems of some outrageously enormous lily-type plant – the life that had created such magnificent blooms had been all but strangled out, for they were tied up with lengths of artfully twizzled copper wire and set rigid among a kilo of black pebbles. Jack wondered, not for the first time in his life, why on earth anyone would think that was nice. But thinking this, as usual, made him feel out of step with the world, and he now contemplated his own floral offering with dismay. He felt decidedly scruffy in his suede jacket and chinos. He was glad he’d worn a shirt, at least.

‘Great! Come to mine first,’ she’d said, when he’d suggested a restaurant, and Jack had immediately wished he’d thought of somewhere else. The
Pot au Feu
was currently
the
restaurant to be seen in in Cardiff. Not because the food was anything particularly special, but because it was the result of a much-hyped collaboration between an ex rugby international with a side-line in falling out of pub doorways and the ‘cockney charmer’ (so it was said) Jimmy Bath, the television embodiment of The New Estuary Cuisine. Jack had only been there once, on the night it had opened – some twot clearly thinking it would make sound business sense to send a freebie to a journo who wrote only about sport – and, like the hack he really was, he hadn’t been that impressed.

He swilled wine around his mouth. He’d regretted his choice even before that, in fact, because he actually couldn’t afford it right now. And as she went there so often she’d hardly be impressed. But no, she was enthusiasm personified. ‘Perfect, perfect!’ she’d cooed at him. So here he was.

He’d spent the preceding days in quiet and anxious conversation with himself about what exactly he had hoped to achieve by inviting Allegra out to dinner. It would boost his limp self-esteem to bed her, for certain, but beyond that he really didn’t know. Assuming they did have sex (come on, who was he kidding?) would she then expect to be serviced on a regular basis? Would she want to ‘go out’ with him? And if she did, would he want to ‘go out’ with her? He’d not quite thought that through. (No. Surely not. Allegra didn’t ‘go out’ with people, did she? She had lovers. Affaires. A different thing altogether, he thought.)

There was a large gilt-framed mirror hanging above the fireplace. He looked at himself and saw the face of a man for whom indecision had long been the lifestyle of choice. It was the face of a worried man, the forehead etched with the rift valleys and tributaries of stress. As if every one of the pounds he’d shed since his divorce had been scooped out specifically with crenelation in mind. Was right now the start of his mid-life crisis?

Another face came to join his. Allegra, who’d answered the door to him in a blink-making firework explosion of a kimono and a large helping of feminine fluster (she was not-yet-ready on purpose, he judged), had returned, primped and painted and ready for action. It may have been an illusion, but she seemed to have even less on now. It was only late March but she had nothing bar a length of green crepe stuff between her and the elements. It could have been a dress, or a top and skirt, or some altogether different variety of womenswear. He wasn’t sure. But, whatever it was, it shimmered and plunged and generally moved around her body as if busy making love to her itself.

She popped her chin on his shoulder.

‘You look nice,’ he said. Meaning it. She generally did.

‘So do you,’ she said. ‘And I love that tie. Is it Hermes?’

‘No, it’s St Michael’s,’ he said. Which made her laugh. It was funny. Making Allegra laugh was something that came easily to him. He didn’t have to do anything funny. Didn’t have to think about it. Didn’t they say women got turned on by men that made them laugh? There had to be something in it, when you looked at Woody Allen. Jack didn’t think he was particularly funny, but perhaps that was why Allegra wanted to shag him so much. Right now, quite possibly. Because he could feel her hip bone pressed up right against his left buttock.

‘And you smell so delicious, too,’ she said, giving him his shoulder back and drawing alongside him in front of the mirror to roll her lips around a bit and poke at her hair. He resisted the urge to check if there was now a beige blob on his jacket. Her face did have an awful lot of powder on it. You didn’t see it from a distance, but up close she was seriously dusty.

And she seemed shorter tonight than she usually did. She couldn’t have been, of course, and she was still in the spindly footwear she tended to favour. And he hadn’t grown, so perhaps it was just that she was stooping a bit, in an attempt to appear less scary. Whatever. It was cheering. And very much in her favour. She was scary enough at five foot seven, or whatever height she was.

He drained his wine and she led him out into the hallway, where she put on a long black leather coat. She then spent some moments hoicking the sleeves up her forearms. It made her look as though she intended a veterinary diversion, to shove her arms up a cow’s bottom or something. Then she swirled a stripy woollen scarf around her long neck, and announced herself ready to go.

It wasn’t a good choice, as it turned out. Almost as soon as they entered the restaurant people started waving and cooing at them – OK, mainly at her – and by the time their drinks arrived (together with a small white dish containing what looked like the droppings of a large, sick rodent, but were apparently date-and-cambozola
hors d’oevres
) it was beginning to feel as if they were not sitting in a restaurant at all, but behind a post office counter on benefit day.

‘Chester!’ she panted. ‘Adelia!’ she breathed. ‘Oh, Timmy, you old devil! I thought you were in Penang!’ It was pretty tedious. Even the arrival of an elderly lady in a poncho saying, ‘Goodness – Jack! How lovely to see you! I still listen in, you know,’ was insufficient to quell his increasing irritation. He didn’t like to tell Allegra that it was only Hil’s grandmother, who’d been a presenter there herself in about 1803. Jack didn’t like this sort of thing. No. He hated this sort of thing. He had forgotten quite how much.

But Allegra was as astute as she was sociable, and when the oily waiter came up to take their order, she leaned across the table and beckoned him to do likewise.

‘Jesus, this is dire, don’t you think? Shall we just order main courses and head up to the Stones for a drink after?’

He didn’t think she thought it was dire for one minute. You didn’t get to know almost the entire clientele of a restaurant unless you frequented it a very great deal. But that didn’t matter. He would much rather be in a saloon bar with a pint in his hand. Plus she’d seem less scary in the pub.

Except that when they were finally in the pub, lubricated by two small buckets of wine, she became voluble and not a little amorous. She kept stroking his jacket, which made him feel like a Pekingese dog.

‘You,’ she said, prodding him in the chest with a fingernail, ‘have been a very very naughty boy, you know.’

Jack slurped the head off his pint. ‘I have?’

Allegra slipped her hand along his thigh and pinched his flesh. ‘For keeping me waiting so long.’

They didn’t stay long. Half an hour after they got there a loud and drunken hen party fetched up. The women, who were mainly corpulent and plain, were all wearing big T-shirts with stupid slogans daubed on the back and, to a man, black stockings. The bride-to-be sported a range of flashing accessories and a novelty condom-based hat.

‘Home, I think,’ announced Allegra, after she’d been barged from behind for the third time. Jack nodded. There was no point in staying anyway. The DJ – who up until then had been tinkering listlessly with chart staples at low volume – clearly felt invigorated at the arrival of so many women in suspenders (the lighting was dim), and had cranked up the music to a level where the only form of communication possible was semaphore or signing. Worse than that, he’d dug out a microphone from somewhere and four of the hen-ees, or whatever they were called, had mounted his rostrum, huddled sweatily around it, and were now massacring ‘Angels’ so loudly and comprehensively that Jack wouldn’t have been surprised if Gabriel himself had flown in from on high to tell them to shut the hell up.

‘Home,’ he repeated, though unsure which home she meant. But not for long. She had her hand under his jacket and was stroking his bottom.

Allegra’s kitchen was like the flight deck of a cartoon spaceship. Everything was either white or silver, bar the contents of the chrome bowl that sat on the work surface. These were lemons and limes and oranges and grapefruit, all so artfully arranged and so unrealistically gleamy that he wasn’t sure they weren’t plastic. But, no, she plucked out a lime now and lobbed it playfully at him.

‘Deal with that, will you, big boy, while I go get the gin?’

So he found a knife and cut two thin slices from the lime, while Allegra poured slugs of gin. Then she splashed in some tonic, said, ‘Upstairs, I think, don’t you?’ and led the way up her long hill of stairs.

She kissed him a bit then, all citrus saliva, then slipped off her stilettos and went around lighting candles, before disappearing, purring at him, into the en suite.

Marooned in the vast bedroom, Jack began to feel more than ever as if he was on the set of a stylish television drama, or strolling through the pages of a glossy magazine. The bed itself, low and wide, was heaped with jewel-coloured cushions and backed with some sort of padded hanging that was strung along an iron pole. It wasn’t a bed you could imagine eating toast in.

Allegra returned from the en suite still dressed. He had been concerned on this point. She’d become so pointedly, aggressively sexual by now that he had half expected her to return completely naked, thus depriving him of the initiative and a chance to draw level on the lust front. She had, though, he noticed, removed her tights. Or stockings. He didn’t know which. Her slender legs were the colour of French mustard, and her long toes were painted a mother-of-pearl colour, as if they’d been trailed in meringue. She sat on the end of the bed and patted the space beside her.

He sat down and for want of appropriate conversation, began kissing her, still feeling self-conscious perched beside her, but grateful for the presence of an (albeit scant) item of clothing or two that he could concentrate on, twiddle with and generally explore. He duly explored. He slid his hand under the hemline, then back up under the shoulder strap, he pulled it down, he pushed it up, he slipped his fingers under the bit that gave access via her armpit to her breast, and, as her tongue began ferreting around the tops of his molars, he was rewarded with a reassuring flood of intense animal arousal. He kissed her harder still and began to relax. They lay back. It would be all right, after all.

Anxious to take the initiative now, he moved his hand down her arm and brought it inwards to cup her breast in his hand. It was a nice, approachable, un-scary breast, full but not too full – not the sort of breast that would burst out once released, all creamy and challenging, and make him think of his mother. There was no bra under the fabric and he could feel the nipple as a hard, pea-sized nugget under his fingers.

She sat up, suddenly, and then rose to her feet, crossing her arms and gathering up the fabric of the dress before peeling the whole thing up over her head. Now she
was
fully naked and he was still fully dressed. Not good. But she clearly intended to address that disparity, for she straddled his legs immediately and lowered herself into his lap. The breasts, now at face height, with their petits pois nipples, wobbled in front of him while she busied herself removing his tie from his neck. Then she started on the buttons of his shirt – bish bash bosh – and slipped his trouser button from its button hole with a deft flick of her thumb. And then, suddenly, she had her hand on the front of his trousers, clamped around his scrotum like a cricket ball she’d just caught. Jack had always thought – always – that bedroom nirvana would be a woman such as Allegra – God, was she growling? – taking him so masterfully in hand. It was the stuff of dreams, wasn’t it? But here it was, happening, and it wasn’t. It wasn’t at
all
. He remained passive, trying to keep focussed, kissing her still while she tugged down his fly. Her hand began ferreting, fishing around for the waistband of his boxers, then slipping down, warm and deliberate and questing, inching ever closer to her quarry.

‘Hello,’ she said, grinning at him. ‘What have we here? I think our little fella’s gone to sleep!’

He had pleaded a need for a wee.

The en suite was dimly lit, tiled in intricate mosaic tiling, and the floor was icy beneath his bare feet. He stood in front of the washbasin, legs slightly apart, hands on hips, and tried very very hard to think deeply sexy thoughts. This had never happened to him, ever, in his life and he didn’t know what the hell to do about it.

Never happened to him before in his
life
… He straightened his back. OK. Allegra on the bed… legs spread… What was happening to him? No. Allegra on the bed, legs spread, beckoning him to come and… Completely floppy. Like a jelly baby! Like a… OK. Try Natalie Imbruglia. Or Britney Spears… How could it do that to him? Just straight down.
Down
. Down and out. Not interested. How did this happen? Why couldn’t he… OK. Relax. Britney Spears. In one of those little tops, with her airborne breasts jutting, and her stomach, her belly button. Oh, shit. Patti. No. No. This was no good. Limp! As flaccid as a piece of liver. Noooo. No liver. Liver bad. OK. Not Britney Spears, then. The girl who read the weather bulletins on HTV. Her. OK. On screen – suit jacket, prim expression, meteorological expertise. Occluded fronts. Isobars. Scattered showers… whereas
below
screen. That was the one. That one always worked. Nothing on below the south coast of the Isle of Wight…. Come on. Isle of Wight… but not this time, obviously. Non-functional. Come on. Come
on
… He could do this. Surely he could. He looked at his expression in the mirror. It was a frightened expression. It was a terrified expression… It was…