Dirty Minds (21 page)

‘Harry, the husband, was killed in the same accident that so nearly did for Maggie?’

‘Yup. As Maggie recovered she thought she would reinstate the threesome as a twosome. Suzy went along with it at first. Maybe out of a sense of obligation but most probably because she wanted to. She’s got a pretty wild sexual appetite, that lass. But then, without Harry’s guiding hand, Maggie’s warped sexual proclivities took over. Suzy found she was getting seriously bashed about. She protested but to no avail. The result was last night’s nastiness.’

‘That was a truly horrid business.’

‘Yes, but … ’

Tom looked up and caught her eye.

‘But?’

‘You’ve seen Suzy. Like I said, she’s got a fairly abnormal sex drive. Now that Tom Marshall has saved her from Maggie, I bet all you would need to do is invite her into your room and she would be on you like a rash. Let the record show that I am not proposing that course of action. Got it? And if Alfonso and Jimmy were in there with you, she probably wouldn’t bat an eyelid. I’ll tell you this, Tom, I think if had made the right noises last night, I would have got the same. She’s a victim, of course she’s a victim, but I’m damn sure I would never have got into that situation in the first place.’

‘I have no doubt. You are
l’intoccabile.
’

‘Untouchable, that’s me. Of course, it depends who’s doing the touching.’

He looked up at her. For a moment, he was on the verge of saying something, but he couldn’t find the words.

She helped him out. ‘Now, weren’t you going to tell me something about dear old Fonsie?’

He took a moment to draw breath. ‘Poor old Fonsie, as you call him, is feeling his age. I think it was Groucho Marx who said “A man is only as old as the woman he feels.” Well, Alfonso has just been made aware that the woman for him is not Suzy’s age, or even your age. It’s someone a lot nearer to his age.’ He glanced at his watch. ‘It’s one o’clock. We’d better make a move.’

‘You didn’t finish the story. The story about Alfonso.’

‘Finish the story? You want the finish? The finish is that she made him a cup of herbal tea and sent him to bed on his own.’

Ros sat bolt upright. ‘Herbal tea?’

‘And bed on his own. But the funniest part is, wait for it, he told me he had the best night’s sleep he’s had for ages.’

Lunch was an open buffet. They all helped themselves and took the food to small tables spread around the room. Unlike most buffet lunches in Penny’s experience, there was not a single chicken drumstick, bag of crisps, Scotch egg or coleslaw in a plastic pot. This lunch offered lobster, pan-fried scallops and cold roast goose. There were five or six different types of salad. For dessert, there was an amazing selection of cheeses, a perfect lemon cheesecake and a meringue tart that took the breath away. It was almost a pity to have to hurry it. But she and Scott threw the food down their throats and were on their way up the stairs by half past one.

Janet allowed Alfonso to select the finest pieces from the smallest of the lobsters. He placed the plate before her with the observation, ‘There is more taste in the small ones than the bigger ones.’

She looked him squarely in the eye and replied, ‘And they say that size isn’t important.’ She accompanied her words with a calculated dip of her body towards him. She knew that, by so doing, she would expose more of her bust to him than she had exposed to anybody since her last mammogram. The result was more than satisfactory. His eyes went positively dreamy and the fork fell out of his hand.

Beside her, Melissa gawped in amazement. But this time she was gawping at Janet. What was her secret?

Jimmy brought his plate across to where Suzy was sitting. She looked up and gave him a warm smile.

‘Hi Jimmy. How’s it going?’

‘I’m fine. Hey, Suzy, I was really upset to hear what happened to you last night. Are you OK now?’

She smiled at him. It was an open, friendly smile. ‘Thanks, Jimmy. I’m fine now. Tom saved me.’

‘I’d have saved you, if I’d known.’

‘I know you would.’ Her eyes roamed across his athletic body. ‘Like I said, I’ll know who to come to.’

Jimmy found himself blushing. He dropped his eyes and concentrated on his food. The goose was superb.

‘Have you ever had goose before?’

‘Goose? Is that what it is? I thought it was turkey.’ She looked up. ‘Jimmy, you know stuff. What are those white things in the metal pan?’

‘Scallops, Suzy. You never had them? They’re shellfish. Do you like shellfish?’

She shook her head. ‘I don’t know. I’ve only really had prawns. You know, prawn curry, prawn fried rice, that sort of stuff.’

‘Well, you’ve got to try these. Wait a moment.’

He leapt up and spooned a handful of scallops onto a plate. He could feel her eyes on his back. It felt good. He returned to the table.

‘Here, take a bite.’

There was a slight hesitation. Then she took one. She slipped it into her mouth and chewed gently. Her expression went from suspicious to enthusiastic. ‘Wow, Jimmy. They’re great. That’s amazing. Here, show me some other new stuff.’

From their table by the wall, Tiffany had watched the scene unfold. She leant across towards Luca. ‘I think romance is in the air.’

He didn’t reply. He had other things on his mind. As with so many Italian men, sex and food were very high on his agenda. Last night, Tiffany had more than satisfied him on the sex front, so he was happily concentrating on food this lunchtime. She watched him affectionately. He was like a kid in a toyshop. He had taken a sample of virtually every dish on offer. Not out of greed, he hadn’t piled his plate high. There was just a neat selection of the different foods, arranged in bite-sized piles. As he worked his way through them, he exclaimed in delight.

‘Tiffany, my darling, you have got to taste this lobster. It is quite amazing.’

‘I have. And the goose. Have you tried that yet?’

‘Next one on the list.’ He washed his lobster down with a mouthful of Sancerre and attacked the goose. ‘Wonderful. This weekend cannot get any better than this.’ He looked up at her, a glint in his eye. Under the table, his foot rubbed seductively up her leg. ‘Or maybe it can. You treated me like a God last night, my darling. After ten years, you still have the power to astound and enchant me.’ He laid down his fork and reached for her hand. She smiled across at him. ‘But tonight, Tiff, is all about you. Tonight is your night.’

She felt a familiar thrill run though her body. ‘Oh, Luca.’

He kissed her fingers. ‘Mind you, there seems to be a lot of it about.’ His eyes strayed across to the empty table where Scott and Penny had been sitting.

She giggled. ‘I’m not sure if Ros and Tom would agree with you on that.’

‘I never knew this writing business could be such a turn-on. Maybe I should read more.’ He gave her a wink and returned his attention to his plate.

‘So how are you going to spend the afternoon, my dear?’

‘I am going to sleep.’ Seeing her expression, he explained. ‘You see, darling, I am going to be very busy tonight.’

She sighed and squeezed his hand.

They reconvened, as planned, at two thirty.

‘Right, let’s make a start. This afternoon’s session is probably the most important of the weekend. What we have got to do is to review our list of characters and decide who does what and to whom. In particular, we need a storyline that leads the reader on, not just a series of erotic scenes.’

He looked around the table. Penny was looking flushed yet again, while Jimmy and Suzy were happily seated side by side. Janet was smiling dreamily. He didn’t dare look at Ros. Tiffany still emanated the same contented glow she had had since arriving at the hotel.

‘There’s one thing we didn’t have time for before lunch. Have you reached a decision about my proposal this morning? Do we want to go with physical violence in the book?’

‘No.’ The reply was from Tiffany. ‘In our group we were all agreed that, after what happened, we didn’t want anything to do with it.’ She paused, looking around in embarrassment. ‘I feel we know each other well enough now, for me to be able to tell you this. Luca and I tried a bit of that.’ She suddenly felt all eyes upon her but she pressed on. ‘Nothing major, he just had a go at spanking my bottom: not a lot and not terribly hard. But, it really didn’t do anything for me. I mean, it was a bit of a thrill. More than the spanking, though, I think it was the naughtiness of doing something kinky. You never know, if he had dressed me in rubber, tied me up, or tickled me with a feather, the result might have been the same.’

‘Using a feather during sex is not kinky. Using the whole chicken is.’ Jimmy delivered his line with a straight face. Tiffany had to wait for the room to calm down before finishing.

‘Anyway, while I can see that doing something naughty can be fun, it is all too clear that any kind of violence has the potential to lead to the sort of nastiness we witnessed last night. So the answer is no, leave it out of our book.’

‘And the other group?’

Janet answered. ‘I was with Suzy and Penny. They made me chair the meeting as I’m the oldest.’ She smiled across at them. ‘We had a good discussion and came to see things in a rather different light.’

The others sat up and took note, Tom included.

‘We had the good fortune to have Suzy in our group. She has, as we all know, first-hand knowledge of physical violence. Her point of view was very interesting. Neither Penny nor I have any experience of that sort of thing, so we asked her to talk about it. She’s asked me to try and pass on her experience and her feelings.’

Suzy smiled, glad to let Janet do the talking.

‘What happened here last night was excessive, unacceptable and potentially a criminal offence. Suzy’s point is that BDSM, to give it its full title, can span anything from a playful pinch on the bottom to full-blooded torture. Our conclusion, after hearing her talk, is that, like Tiffany, we understand a bit of naughtiness can sometimes lend spice to a sexual event. But it just must not get out of hand.’

‘But who’s to say what is acceptable and what isn’t?’ Ros wasn’t convinced. ‘And what does “out of hand” mean?’

‘That’s the problem.’ Janet looked at Penny for support.

She took a deep breath. ‘We’ve all read each other’s demo pieces by now, so you may remember that mine involved some fairly hard-core violence: The Marquise and others spend quite a bit of it whacking each other. I was just using my imagination and regurgitating a few things I’d read or heard. Having seen the reality of last night, I feel ashamed and, to be honest, downright dirty.’

Tom butted in. ‘No, Penny, it’s not up to you to feel ashamed. If anybody needs to apologise, it’s me. I didn’t think it through. I should have given guidelines. But I just didn’t know enough about it.’

Penny shook her head. ‘No Tom, it’s not your fault. It’s nobody’s fault. None of us really has any idea of what sort of thing other people find erotic and what is just plain creepy. We’re all different. Personally, I know I don’t want anything to do with whips, crops or ropes. But if the one-armed Wing Commander decides to get the big-busted chambermaid to smack him on the bum, I can’t see any harm in it.’

To the surprise of everybody around the table, Jimmy raised a hesitant hand. ‘Erm, I have sort of got experience of that sort of thing.’ He now had the attention of everybody in the room. He smiled nervously. ‘Not me, my flatmate. He has a girlfriend who ties him up and spanks him. And he loves it. So much so, that I think I’m going to have to move out. It’s got so noisy I can’t sleep at nights.’ There was laughter. ‘My point is, horses for courses. There will always be some people who get off on spanking. I’ve never tried it myself because it doesn’t appeal to me. I think we have to write about what we know and what we feel comfortable with.’

Tom looked at him with approval. ‘I think Jimmy is dead right. We have got to write what we feel comfortable with. You said it, Jimmy. So, hands up, who feels comfortable with the inclusion of a bit of spanking or similar?’

Janet and Penny looked at each other, then kept their hands down. Everybody else looked at Suzy. Realising she was the object of their attention, she raised her eyes bravely.

‘I think that answers your question, Tom. It can be fun. It really can. It all depends on the people. But it’s something that can get out of hand, as I know to my cost. For the sake of your book, it’s probably best to avoid any of it.’

‘Good, very good. So be it. And it’s not my book, it’s our book.’ Tom smiled at them all. ‘That does create one minor problem, however. If you remember, in your trial pieces, four out of the six of you introduced a sadomasochistic element. I fully accept that you put it in because of the references to
Fifty Shades of Grey
, but the problem we now face is what to put in its place. So, before we hit upon a storyline, we need to know the nature of the sexual elements we are setting out to describe. Any ideas?’

There was a deadly hush in conference room A.

He tried to help them. ‘We have a good collection of characters now. From what little I have read about the 1920s and the upper classes back then, it appears that there was quite a bit of hanky-panky going on at some of these parties. Drink, drugs and fairly licentious sex were par for the course. That gives us scope, surely?’

‘Mind you, most of our couples are married couples.’ Jimmy was thinking aloud.

‘Just because sex is between a husband and a wife it doesn’t mean it always has to be boring.’ Tiffany had a point to make. ‘There’s more to it than grit your teeth and think of England, missionary position sex.’

‘Absolutely.’ Tom could see nodding heads around the table. ‘So we have adventurous married sex. What else? A bit of bed-swapping would seem inevitable.’

‘A few of the unhappy couples could mix and match.’ Penny’s suggestion drew a few approving nods.

‘Then there’s the lad who was sent down for licentious behaviour.’ Ros was scanning her notes. ‘That could be anything really. I suppose it might even have been homosexuality. There was a good bit of that going on in the upper classes at that time. Of course it was still illegal, so it would have been kept undercover.’

‘Out of interest, did that apply to women as well? Was lesbianism an offence?’

Penny’s question stumped all of them.

‘You know,’ Janet chipped in, ‘legal or illegal, there’s always been a double standard there. I consulted quite a few sex sites before writing my thousand words – I expect most of us did. It’s pretty clear that men enjoy looking at pictures, or reading stories, of couples having sex, but also of girls having sex with each other. Now, I can only speak for myself, but the idea of two men having sex with each other, doesn’t do it for me in the slightest.’

A general murmur of agreement accompanied her observation.

Tom took over. ‘So, if we are trying to aim our book at women readers in particular, do I take it that homosexuality is out?’ There was general agreement once more. ‘But lesbianism is OK?’

More agreement.

‘Janet’s dead right. It’s a funny, funny thing.’ Ros was reminiscing. ‘I worked in an industry absolutely overflowing with gay people of both sexes. There were some beautiful men and some beautiful girls doing it. But, like Janet, however beautiful the boys, the idea of them having sex together leaves me cold.’

‘While the idea of two beautiful girls doing it together is very, very appealing.’ Jimmy’s eyes were half closed, and he was thinking aloud. He blinked as all faces turned towards him. ‘Sorry about that. Not sure why that popped out.’

The others burst into laughter.

‘I think that proves Janet’s point.’ Tom flipped over a clean page on the chart and started writing. ‘So we’ve got, for want of a better expression, Standard Sex. I’ll put MF in brackets for male and female. Then we can have Extramarital. What’s that Penny?’

‘Of course we’ve got to have extramarital MF sex, but we’d better include FF sex too. One of the teachers at my old school left her husband for another woman.’

‘Surely FMF could be in there too?’ Tiffany was thinking of all the possible permutations.

‘Is that the same as FFM?’ Jimmy was curious.

‘It depends how you’re doing it.’ Janet couldn’t help thinking of Melissa in her student days.

So extramarital two women and a man sex is on the list.’ Tom was writing on the board.

‘And there’s always FFFM.’ Janet felt she should explain. ‘That’s what I wrote about in my thousand words. I got the idea from a friend’s recollections of university.’ She decided not to blow Melissa’s cover.

‘Uni was never like that for me.’ Jimmy sounded rueful.

‘So, anything else we want to stick into our arsenal?’ The room erupted into guffaws. It took him a moment before he realised his mistake. ‘Sorry, sorry, I should have chosen my vocabulary a bit more carefully.’

‘Although, it’s interesting you should say that.’ Tiffany was still thinking of possible sexual permutations. ‘That’s another taboo that seemed to appear regularly on most of the websites I looked at.’ She looked around the room. ‘Do we add that particular act to the list?’

‘Of course.’ Suzy didn’t look in the least bit phased.

‘I suppose we should.’ Penny agreed. ‘Alongside oral sex.’

‘OK. Anything else we’ve missed?’

‘Fetishes?’ Suzy was gaining in confidence. ‘I did the modelling for Harry’s shop.’ She explained, for the sake of those who did not know. ‘He had an online sex toys shop. I had to model all the different clothes. There were all sorts of leather and rubber outfits, but also nurses’, even policewomen’s outfits.’

‘OK. Fetishes and specialist clothing. Anything else?’

‘Role playing is big these days.’ Suzy really was a goldmine of information. ‘You know the kind of thing: the man is the landlord, come to collect the rent; the girl hasn’t got the money, so they have to come to another arrangement.’

Tom finished writing and looked round. ‘OK I think that gives us enough to keep us going. So, now we are approaching the most important part of the weekend. We’ve got to decide what happens in the book. Not just the sex, I mean. We need a story.’ He looked at his watch. ‘There’s tea outside. Can you all please try to give as much as thought as possible to the plot before we reconvene.’

A sudden thought occurred to him.

‘And another thing. I’d like us all to take a walk around the house and grounds, familiarising ourselves with the layout. Those of you with phones or cameras might like to take a few shots to remind you. Let’s make it a short tea break, followed by a tour. We then come back here and try to decide on the plot. OK?’

Melissa was waiting in the morning room when tea was served. As soon as she saw Janet, she passed on his message. ‘Alfonso asked me to tell you that he’s just having a lie down. He feels a bit tired this afternoon. Jan, if I didn’t know better, I’d be blaming you for tiring him out.’

‘That is, hopefully, yet to come. Thanks for the message. I’ll let him sleep. I’ll pop in on him when the last session ends.’ She helped herself to a cup of tea and sat down by Melissa. ‘You not getting too bored out here on your own?

‘No, I’m fine. I have been for a lovely walk round the park, right down as far as the lake. It’ll make a great setting for your book.’

‘We’re all going for the grand tour after tea. Where are the other men?’

‘Scott is outside, waiting for the man from the car rental firm to fix his hire car. I think Luca is taking a tactical time out.’

Janet smiled. ‘If you’ve got time, you wouldn’t do something for me, would you?’

‘I’ve got all the time in the world. Just say it.’

‘Could you look up a couple of things on the internet for me? I need to know when homosexuality was legalised in this country, and the same for lesbians.’

Melissa nodded. ‘That shouldn’t be too difficult.’

‘And if you could find out roughly what was happening in England, and the world, in the 1920s, that would be great.’

‘You mean politically?’

‘Yes, but anything really. Who won the World Cup? Come to think of it, was there a World Cup then? Who won the Derby? What songs they were singing? Names of famous authors and playwrights. Who were the silent movie stars? All that sort of thing. General background. Anything you can dig up.’

‘I’ll do my best.’

Suzy and Jimmy were sitting together on the other side of the room.

‘What’s this about your friend being tied up by his girlfriend?’

‘It started out the other way round. He tied her up. She didn’t like it so she tied him up.’ He went on to tell her how Dolores had left it to him to release Clinton from his bounds.

‘Dolores sounds like quite a girl.’ There was a note of admiration in her voice.

Jimmy resolved never to introduce Suzy to either Dolores or Clinton. He thought it wise to change the subject. ‘Have you got your costume for tonight?’

‘Yes. Do you know, it used to belong to my great grandmother. It’s ever so old, but it’s lovely. I’m sure you’ll love it. What about you?’

‘I couldn’t think where to find something suitable. I tried a load of online shops, until I hit on one in south London. It was while flipping through their stock that I found just what I wanted.’