Old Sins (19 page)

She pulled her mind away from this reverie and turned back
to her new friend who was gently guiding her towards the heap of plates at the buffet table.

‘Now look,’ he said, ‘we’ve reached the food. Should we get a plateful for your husband as well, do you think?’

‘Oh, no,’ said Lee, ‘he likes to choose his own. He’s terribly, terribly fond of his food. You just go ahead. I’ll wait for him.’

‘Nonsense,’ he said. ‘Having found a friend I’d like to stay with her. If I may. Until lunch is over at any rate. I hardly know anybody here. I haven’t been in New York long.’

‘Are you from London?’ asked Lee, helping herself to a modest amount of chicken in mayonnaise, anxious not to appear greedy, and careful to choose something that she could eat easily with a fork. The last thing she wanted to do was drop food down her new red dress in front of this rather intimidatingly svelte creature.

‘I am.’

‘And why are you here?’

‘Oh, to learn a bit about American business methods. I’m opening up in New York, and the more contacts and knowledge I have the better.’

‘What’s your business?’

‘Direct selling, I suppose you’d call it,’ he said. ‘It’s a bit of a new science in England, but it’s catching on. And then I thought I’d bring some coals to Newcastle and try it here.’

‘I see,’ said Lee, trying desperately not to show that she didn’t.

He read her face and smiled, understanding. ‘Don’t worry about it,’ he said, ‘old English saying. Let’s just leave it at the direct selling. Toiletries mostly.’

‘Oh,’ she said, ‘that’s Dean’s field too. He’s coming now, look, he will be interested. Oh, now I don’t know your name, I can’t introduce you. Why haven’t you got a label?’

‘Allergic to them,’ he said, ‘we don’t often have them in England. Silly, I know, they’re a very good idea. Anyway, Dashwood is the name. Hugo Dashwood.’ He held out his hand. ‘Delighted to meet you.’

Lee took his hand and smiled and felt a delicious charge of warm pleasure shoot through her. My goodness, she thought, this guy could be dangerous. The thought was surprisingly interesting. ‘Lee Wilburn,’ she said, ‘and I’m certainly
delighted to meet you. Dean,’ she called to her husband, who was scanning the room anxiously, his overladen plate tipped dangerously to the side, his tie dangling horribly near his potato salad, ‘Dean, we’re here. Come and sit down, we kept you a place. Now this is Hugo Dashwood, from London; Mr Dashwood, this is my husband Dean Wilburn. Mr Dashwood is in direct selling, Dean, in toiletries mostly. I was saying you would be really interested to talk to him.’ She spoke with a certain satisfaction, feeling that for the first time, since the convention had begun, she had actually acquitted herself and performed as a conference wife properly should.

‘Well, that is just wonderful,’ said Dean, easing his two hundred pounds cautiously on to the spindly chair and tucking his tie carefully into his shirt buttons (Lee, who had long ago given up trying to stop him doing that, wished suddenly and fervently that she hadn’t). ‘It’s real nice to meet you, Mr Dashwood. My company is very big in own-brand toiletries in the supermarkets, and I’d really like to tell you about that. How long have you been operating over here?’

‘Oh, I’ve hardly begun,’ said Hugo, ‘I’m mostly involved in my business in England. But I like the market over here. It’s very fast moving at the moment.’

‘Oh, you can say that again,’ said Dean, in between mouthfuls of Russian salad. ‘Lee, honey, would you like to try and find me a beer? I don’t go a lot on wine at lunch time. Do you, Mr Dashwood?’

‘Oh, do please call me Hugo. Well, I don’t like drinking at lunch time at all. I’d like a soft drink. But let me get you both a drink. Mrs Wilburn, what would you like?’

‘Oh, a beer,’ said Lee without thinking, and then could have bitten her tongue out. Beer! How unsophisticated, how gauche! Why couldn’t she have said wine, or better still fruit juice? He would think her so hick, so crass, just like her husband, she thought sorrowfully, watching Dean wipe his plate with his bread, and then lick each finger in turn, before standing up and picking up his plate. ‘I’m going to get myself some more food,’ he said, ‘I hate these buffet things. No substance. Hugo, how about you?’

‘Oh, no thank you,’ said Hugo, ‘but I will get you your beer.’

‘Er – Hugo – I won’t have beer,’ said Lee, ‘if you could find me a soda water, that would be fine.’

‘Oh,’ he said, his dark eyes snapping at her with amusement and an unmistakable appreciation, ‘I will if you like. But I would have the beer if you want it. You haven’t got to work this afternoon, as we have.’

‘No,’ she said firmly, anxious to retain the more refined image she felt sure he would appreciate, ‘I really wasn’t thinking. Soda water, please.’

She sat sipping it, wishing it was beer, watching Hugo Dashwood listening courteously to Dean, and occasionally glancing at her with his warm, intensely interested eyes, and thought he was the most attractive man she had ever met in her entire life.

They became quite friendly after that, the three of them; they had supper together that evening, and Hugo joined them for breakfast the next day on his way to the conference, and they met in the bar of the Hyatt one evening when the last seminar of the day was over while Dean and Hugo unwound and Lee recounted the events of her day: a tour of the Radio City Concert Hall, and a trip around Tiffany’s, which she had found disappointing. ‘It just wasn’t a patch on the jewellery shops on Beverly Drive, not glamorous at all.’

She enjoyed talking to Hugo; he had a way of listening that was flattering and that encouraged her to talk, and she enjoyed feeling his eyes on her. She could see he found her attractive, and it made her feel confident and rather grown up; he was so extremely sophisticated and so obviously clever, and she was, after all, a perfectly ordinary American girl; she might have majored in psychology, but she knew quite well she wasn’t intellectual; she could chat away amusingly, and even manage the odd wisecrack when she’d had a beer or two, but that was hardly the sort of thing an urbane upper-class Englishman was going to fall for. Or maybe it was. Anyway, in the meantime it was a wonderful few days. Lee felt more alive, more aware of herself, and a lot more sexy, than she had with Dean in a month of Sundays.

On the fourth and last evening of the conference there was a cocktail party. Lee had dressed for it with great care in a pink
shot-silk sheath dress that clung to her body and stopped just below the knee to show off her long, long slender legs. She had bought it in Macy’s that morning, and a pair of extra-high-heeled shoes to match; her blonde hair was drawn back with pink combs, and hanging in a straight shining sheet down her back. She was excited and nervous, looking across the room restlessly for Hugo from the moment they arrived. He wasn’t there, and an hour later, as the party began to wind down, he still hadn’t appeared; she was disappointed and miserable, and found it depressingly hard to concentrate on what the interminable line of husbands and wives Dean was managing to get a hold of, and hand his cards out to, was saying. She had just told one woman how delighted she must be to have left their four children behind, and another how sorry she was to hear she had just installed a new kitchen, when she felt a hand moving gently up and down her arm, and a mouth pressed into her ear. ‘You look wonderful. I’m awfully late. Have I missed anything important?’

She turned, abandoning both wives totally, her face alight. ‘Hugo! I’m so glad you’re here. No not a thing. It’s been terribly boring,’ said Lee cheerfully, and then realizing what she had said, blushed and tried frantically to retrieve the situation. ‘Er, Hugo this is Mary Ann Whittaker, and this is – er Joanne Smith. This is our friend from England, Mr Hugo Dashwood.’

‘Mary Ann White,’ said the kitchen owner pointedly, holding out her hand. ‘Which part of England are you from, Mr Dashwood?’

‘London,’ he said.

‘Oh,’ she said, ‘we have some very good friends there. They have an upholstery business. You may have met them. Their name is Walker. They live in, now let me see, would it be Willesden?’

‘It could be,’ he said, ‘there is such a place.’

‘But you don’t know them?’

‘I don’t think so,’ he said. ‘Of course there are a lot of Walkers in London. And it’s a big place.’

Then suddenly, he put his arm round her shoulders and said to Mary Anne White, ‘You must excuse us now, I’m afraid, we have to meet friends on the other side of the room,’ and steered
her away, and she turned to apologize and saw that he was grinning hugely.

‘God in heaven,’ he said, grasping a glass of wine from a passing tray, ‘why can’t more American women be like you?’

‘I am really sorry,’ said Lee, ‘to have got you into that. I would like to say, in defence of my race, that she was a bad sample, but I don’t think I can. Where is Willesden, anyway?’

‘Oh,’ said Hugo, ‘a very long way away from the centre. Don’t apologize, I enjoy such encounters. They amuse me. My only regret is it kept me from talking to you. Here’s to you, Mrs Wilburn, and what I hope will be a lasting association.’

Lee looked at him, meeting his dark vivid eyes with her clear blue ones, very steadily. ‘I hope so too,’ she said, composed, in command of the situation suddenly, ‘and if you ever come to California, then you must come and stay. We live in Los Angeles, right on the ocean at Santa Monica, it’s a great place to come at weekends.’

‘I’d love to,’ he said, ‘now Dean has given me his card. Several, actually,’ he added, and grinned, but it was a kindly, unmalicious grin. ‘I don’t have any at the moment, I’ve run out, but if you really need to, you can get me at this number, it’s my office in New York, but I’m hardly ever there, so not very satisfactory, I’m afraid. Anyway, I’ll certainly ring you. I’ve never been to Los Angeles and I’ve always wanted to go, so now I shall have a double reason for visiting.’

‘Good. Do you want to eat dinner with me and Dean tonight? We wondered if you’d like to join us?’

‘I can’t, I’m afraid. I have another engagement. But thank you for asking me.’

‘That’s all right.’ She felt ridiculously disappointed, her evening suddenly emptied of substance, her pink dress foolishly profitless; he looked at her sharply and then smiled and tipped up her face towards him.

‘Don’t worry,’ he said, ‘we will meet again. I couldn’t bear the thought-that we wouldn’t. I think you are perfectly lovely, and Dean is a very lucky man. And that dress is extremely distracting. It’s just as well we’re not going to have dinner together, I wouldn’t hear a word anybody said. Now I must go, I only popped in to say goodbye. Say goodbye to Dean for me, will you? I don’t want to interrupt him.’

‘I will,’ she said, ‘and thank you for coming. It was nice of you to bother.’

‘No,’ he said, ‘not nice at all. I wanted to see you.’ He paused for a moment, looking at her very seriously. ‘I find you rather desirable. Now I must go. Goodbye.’

He kissed her lightly on the lips, a gentle, glancing embrace, and then smiled at her and turned away. Lee stood there quite still, a hot fierce lick of desire stabbing at her, so physically disturbed she hardly knew what she was doing. She went to the ladies’ room and shut herself in the cubicle, and sat down quietly and very still on the toilet seat waiting for the throbbing in her body to subside. After a while she felt calmer and went outside and bathed her forehead and her wrists in cold water. Next best thing to a cold shower, she thought to herself cheerfully and grinned at her reflection. Only men were supposed to get these great onslaughts of sexual desire, to have to hide their hard-ons, to work off their discomfort. Yet she had known them all her grown-up life – ever since she had started to develop a bust, and noticed how interestingly her body was changing, and had found what acute pleasure could be achieved by touching and exploring herself with her fingers, by finding the small hard tender centre of her feeling that was her clitoris and gently, very gently but insistently working and stroking at it, and feeling herself grow wet, liquid with delight, until a hot, consuming sensation rose and rose in her and then exploded with such force she could almost see it before her tightly closed eyes. She tried not to do it too often, because it was so delicious she felt sure it must in some way be wrong and it was something nobody had ever told her about; her mother had patiently talked to her carefully and gently for hours in the most incomprehensible way about how babies were made, and what to do should she find blood in her knickers, but had never mentioned, never hinted at, the concept of pleasure.

As she grew older, though, the feelings came of their own volition, she did not have to do anything to arouse them; uncomfortable, disturbing, she had to release them as soon as she could, otherwise they dominated everything she was doing or thinking. Worried that there might be something wrong with her, she asked her best friend, Betsy Newman, if she had experienced anything like them; Betsy said no, she
never had, but she had once heard her big brother Ralphy talking to his friend about girls, and he had described something Betsy couldn’t understand but sounded a bit like what Lee was talking about.

Lee felt a bit better after that; when she was sixteen and went to high school she made a new friend, a beautiful girl called Laura, who asked her quite casually in the shower one day after basketball how often she masturbated, and if she had ever had a boy do it to her; Lee, misunderstanding, said certainly not, that was the straight way to pregnancy and generally wrecking your life, and Laura had laughed and said no, had a boy done it with his hands. Lee said she hadn’t and Laura said she really should, it was great and it kept the boys happy too; on her next date, Lee allowed Brett Mitchell to caress her breasts and on the one after that, to explore her desperate, hungry vagina. In return she offered to attend to his penis in much the same way. They were both amazed and delighted by the pleasure they gave and were given.

A year or so later Lee surrendered herself to more conventional sexual experiences; most of the girls she knew remained virgins until they were married, but Lee couldn’t wait. She was intrigued, excited, exhilarated by sex; she loved it, she needed it, and if she didn’t get it, she became irritable and depressed. It seemed to her worth the attendant risks, of expulsion from college if you were caught in flagrante, and of pregnancy even if you weren’t; but she was never caught, and she told everyone the danger of pregnancy was seriously overrated, all you had to do was use a sheath and maybe count a bit as well, and not do it right in the middle of your cycle, and you would be perfectly all right.