Love Rules (13 page)

Thea tried to unbutton Saul's shirt but it was taking too long so he pulled it over his head, undid his belt and ripped down his trousers to his knees. At the same time, Thea wriggled from her T-shirt and Saul pulled her bra straps down over her arms, not bothering with the clasp, not minding that it remained on, just as long as her tits were exposed for him to feel, to see and to suck. Thea's hand worked energetically over and under his boxer shorts, at last liberating his straining, leaping cock. They crumpled themselves down onto the rubber floor, romping and humping and snogging and sucking. Saul tugged Thea's jeans down, freeing her right leg. He moved her knickers to one side and took his mouth down to her. He could have spent hours feasting on her juice but tasting the rush of her moistness gave an urgency to the moment. With his trousers around his ankles, eyes closed, breathing fast and audible, Saul thrust into Thea and she ground against him. They humped and bucked and grunted and fucked, coming simultaneously; eyes scrunched shut, voices loud, faces racked into near-grimaces with the intensity of it all while their bodies spurted and sponged. And then they rolled apart, lay on the rubber floor, sticky and slippery and sweaty and satisfied, unable to speak while they let their heartbeats settle down.

‘Jesus Christ,’ Saul exclaimed on rolling towards Thea, his eyes slightly bloodshot. Just a few centimetres to the right of her face, a Sabatier knife lay glinting.

‘Christ,’ Thea agreed, her face flushed, a rash to one corner of her mouth. She reached her hand to Saul's face and gently flicked chopped parsley from his hair.

‘Ouch!’

‘Sorry, babe.’

‘I don't think the beads go
there
, Richard.’

‘I'm sure I saw it on some porn vid once. All right, how about here?’

‘Well, they fit – but I can't say my world is shuddering. Porn vid? What porn vid?’

‘How about if I try this with them? Hang on.’

‘Do what with them where?’

‘This! I'm doing it!’

‘Are you? Oh.’

‘Hang on, what about—’

‘Don't you dare!’

‘We're kind of running out of orifices, Sal.’

‘Do you think it's orifices or orificii?’

‘Wait a sec, let's try – this. Move that leg a bit. A bit more. There.’

‘Ouch. Give them here.
You
roll over.’

‘You must be bloody joking!’

‘Look, shall we just bin the beads and have a good old shag?’

‘Now you're talking.’

‘Happy anniversary, big boy.’

Adam

Seven months after Alice and Mark were married, after Saul and Thea had formed a couple, Adam came into the world. Until then, Alice had hailed her wedding as marking the zenith of her creative and organizational talent. But Adam surpassed all of that. Adam was Alice's baby. Her true love. Her life's work. Her future ambition. Her past achievement, her present success. Her key to larger offices two floors above.

Just before her first wedding anniversary, Alice won Launch of the Year for
Adam
at a prestigious industry awards ceremony. The trophy, a rather dramatic slash of perspex in a gravity-defying swoop into a lump of softwood, shared pride of shelf-space in her executive office two floors up, alongside a framed first issue of
Adam
– the one with Clint Eastwood on the cover.

‘Our project name was Quentin,’ Alice told a packed Grosvenor House ballroom at that awards night, ‘but as we kept having to stress “as in Tarantino, not Crisp” we needed something synonymous with Alpha Male. So our magazine became
Adam
. Biblical connotations end with the title – as we all know, publishing is no Garden of Eden, it's a men's mag jungle out there. However, with our spectacular circulation
figures – and now with this major award –
Adam
reigns supreme.’

As she returned to her table, carried on a cushion of generous applause, the trophy pleasingly heavy, a reassuring ache in her arches from her Jimmy Choos, Alice believed the moment to mark the apotheosis of her career. Unfortunately, there was no Mark to the moment – he was in Hong Kong and she couldn't even phone him because of the time difference. With no husband to cuddle up to, Alice intended to get justifiably drunk on the company credit card and stay out ridiculously late.

‘Mr Mundy,’ she said whilst leaning around their round table topping up her team's glasses, ‘Mr Mundy, you are a dickhead.’

‘Thank you, Miss Heggarty,’ Saul acquiesced, chinking glasses and sharing a raised eyebrow with the fashion editor and advertising manager.

‘I mean,’ Alice qualified, ‘if you'd only come off your free-lance high horse and join the mag as staff, you'd be up there awarded Editor of the Year.’ The fashion editor and ad manager nodded earnestly.

‘That's kind of you,’ Saul said, pausing to applaud a woman on stage receiving her jag of perspex for being Specialist Editor of the Year, ‘but I've told you, I don't want to trade my freedom – my access to variety – for commuting, office politics and a lump of plastic.’

‘It's perspex!’ Alice retorted. ‘It's sculpture!’

‘Sure,’ said Saul, ‘but if I did
Adam
full-time I'd have to relinquish all my other work. And I'm a loyal bastard.’ He clapped with everyone though he had no idea of the award just won.

‘But me pay top dollar,’ Alice said in a peculiar Japanese accent.

‘Your dollars can't buy my desire for diversity, Alice,’ Saul
said, tonguing the words theatrically. ‘I spend more time on
Adam
than on any of my other commitments. But I like my tutti-frutti life. I like dipping my finger in a fair few pies.
ES
mag versus the
Observer, T3
versus
GQ. MotorMonth
versus
Get Gadget
. I
need
variety.’

Another award was won, this time by a former colleague of Alice's so she wolf-whistled through her fingers – a raucous skill amusingly at odds with her sartorial grace and sleek deportment. ‘Desire for diversity?’ she balked, turning again to Saul. ‘finger-dipping?’ Alice wagged her finger at him. ‘Your need for variety better not go beyond your professional life, Mr Mundy.’

Saul laughed. ‘I may flirt my working way around publishing circles – but at play I'm working on being all Thea's. In my mind, in my heart,’ he said, ‘I'm all hers.’

‘Promiscuous by pen is fine, promiscuous by penis – not!’ Alice declared, rather pleased with that and wondering if she could regurgitate it in print. Not for
Adam
, obviously.
Lush
, perhaps.

‘Has it escaped you that your first wedding anniversary also marks my first year with Thea?’ Saul said defensively.

They chinked glasses.

‘To Thea,’ Saul drank, ‘I couldn't love her more.’

‘I love my husband, I love my job, I love my posh house, I love the plants I can't pronounce in my garden,’ Alice proclaimed with regular sips, ‘I love
Adam
. I love Thea. I love you!’

‘This isn't the Oscars,’ Saul laughed.

‘It's the champagne,’ Alice rued, ‘it makes me emotional.’

‘Switch to water,’ Saul suggested.

‘Bugger off!’ Alice retorted, topping up everyone's glasses.

Mark flew back from the Far East and was immensely proud of Alice's Launch of the Year award, so much so that he
persuaded her to bring it back home from the office at week-ends. Until one weekend when he was abroad on business and Alice didn't bother. His excessive travelling and deal-mongering paid dividends in the form of a large and timely bonus. He whisked Alice off to Prague for their first anniversary and replaced Alice's shopping-channel paste earrings with genuine diamonds. Only larger. And set in platinum. She'd bought him a papier mâché globe because the girls on
Dream Weddings
reminded her that the first anniversary is paper. Alice was overwhelmed by Mark's gift. In fact, she was a little taken aback.

‘I feel too young for such fuck-off rocks,’ she confided to Thea, ‘like I've sneaked my mum's for dressing up. Only my mum doesn't have diamonds even half this size. I have to keep them in a safe when I'm not wearing them or else they're not insured.’

‘They're
stunning
,’ Thea marvelled, privately thinking that, despite their dazzle, they were almost too big to be attractive or actually look real.

‘They're serious,’ Alice assessed. ‘The fun of the fakes was that they were cheap tat. A joke where I had the last laugh. Do you want them?’

‘Sure!’ Thea said. ‘Which ones?’ she added.

‘Where can I take you?’ Saul asked Thea, a few days before their first anniversary. ‘Cartier? TopShop?’

‘Memory Lane,’ Thea answered decisively.

‘Is that some spa in Barbados?’ Saul half joked.

‘Primrose Hill,’ Thea laughed. ‘I want to retrace our steps.’

‘Christ, you're soppy,’ Saul said.

‘I just want to walk hand in hand on Primrose Hill!’ Thea protested.

‘And if it's raining?’

‘We'll get wet.’

‘Can't I whisk you off to Babington House or somewhere, in a top-of-the-range Jag?’ Saul all but pleaded.

‘You don't have a car,’ Thea reminded him patiently, ‘you have a scooter.’

‘Actually, that's where you're wrong. I've been given said Jag for the weekend – to take for a spin and assess for
MotorMonth
.’

‘What colour is it?’ Thea asked, slightly tempted.

‘Racing green,’ Saul shrugged, ‘cream leather.’

‘But I
want
to go to Primrose Hill to
our
bench,’ Thea said with a petulant pout Saul couldn't resist.

So they compromised. They drove the mile or so to Primrose Hill and paid-and-displayed for two hours at great expense. At the top of the hill, Saul pulled out a roll of Refreshers and a family-size pack of Opal Fruits though it said Starburst on the packet. For Thea, the gesture was far more romantic than a country hideaway accessed by sports car. As an expression of her gratitude, she took off her jumper, and with no bra beneath her T-shirt, her nipples stood to Saul's attention, reminding him instantly of a year ago, when she was up there, all cold and hungover. He stroked her arms, giving her far stronger goose bumps than the November air.

Thea gazed at him, marvelling to herself that she hadn't noticed the slate-grey flecks to his irises. ‘I love you, Saul Mundy,’ she said.

‘Happy First Whatever,’ he grinned, ‘Happy Us.’

When did you stop qualifying your age with
and a quarter
, or
and a half
, or
and three-quarters
? Thea continued until she hit her teens. In her mid-twenties, Alice was still in the habit of saying ‘next year I'll be …’ which, according to
the time of year, enabled her to add up to two years onto her current age. However, the precise notch in the scale of their thirties soon seemed of little concern to others, it was the age of their relationships which generated interest now. Though both Alice and Thea had loved their first year with Mark and Saul, they were impatient for their first anniversaries to give their relationships status. As soon as Alice had passed the six-months mark, she took to saying she'd been married ‘almost a year’. Thea spoke in terms of seasons rather than months. She'd say she and Saul had been together ‘since last autumn’ – which, by the following summer, seemed a distant time indeed. Thea did theorize to herself that November probably qualified as winter, but last November –
their
November – really had been mild. On average. According to meteorologists. According to high-street retailers. Hadn't ornithologists been concerned that certain birds hadn't yet flown south?

By the close of their first year, Thea was deeply in love with Saul and Alice loved being married very much. Alice rejoiced in believing that she knew everything there was to know about Mark. That there were no surprises was a blessing. She didn't envy Thea always learning something new about Saul, be it grey flecks to his eyes, or his expulsion at fifteen from boarding school, or his threesome with two Danish girls in his twenties on his first press trip. No, Alice was happy to embrace predictability at the expense of thrills. Thrills, her experience had taught her, were far too costly. If her head was now not for turning, it followed that her heart could not be for breaking.

Mark continued to be all she'd had a feeling he'd be – that hunch on the back of which she had proposed in his kitchen through a mouthful of carrot. He was a husband perfect for her. Loving, straight and responsible. And, now that she'd managed subtly to supervise his entire wardrobe,
dapper too. Nice even brown eyes, unblemished education and career history, no deviations from the sexual norm. They didn't argue, there was nothing to fall out about. Tolerance was a key quality of Mark's and it sat well with his belief in the attraction of opposites. He never reacted when Alice over-reacted, he gladly sprang to his duty to calm and cool her down. Anyway, such times usually transpired only when work interfered. And it flattered and touched Mark that Alice should care so much and need him so. Best of all, he loved the baby-voiced, doleful-eyed ways she had of pleading with him not to stay late at work, not to fly to Hong Bloody Kong again.

Though Alice herself adored her job and was as ambitious and committed to her career as Mark, it seemed the pressures of Mark's job were actually more challenging to Alice than to him. No matter how demanding his day, how fraught the financial world, how difficult the deal, he always came home with an easy smile, eager and energized by his role as husband. The frequent travel he undertook was strenuous for him, yet it appeared to be far tougher on Alice. He just had jet lag to contend with, the vagaries of business etiquette around the world, the precarious threads that deals hung by, the tedium of chain hotels no matter how luxurious; his timetable was so full there was rarely an opportunity to think, let alone relax. Alice, however, was left with only half her home; all the trimmings of marriage but with no husband. It wasn't that she actually moped for Mark, nor that she felt forsaken. It simply wasn't much fun playing home alone.