He laid Teri on the bed. She was panting expectantly, like MacTavish did when he reverted occasionally to puppy mode. How would Jamie know if she was enjoying herself, if he was doing the right thing? With Pamela he could tell. It was an unspoken code that had developed over the years; one tone of squeak meant slower, another tone quicker and a final one, which didn’t occur very often these days as they always had one ear out for coitus interruptus of the offspring variety, that meant everything was just right.
How would he know that he had hit the spot with Teri? Particularly if it was her G-spot, which was much lauded on the front cover of Cosmo—she’d have to give him a map if she wanted him to look for that. He hadn’t known there was so much terror involved in adultery, and at this precise moment he was wondering why the hell so many people seemed keen to indulge in it.
Teri wriggled below him and drew him down towards her. He started to open the buttons of her blouse as if in a trance, while she ran her fingers through his hair. The skin inside her blouse was soft and warm, so much softer than Pamela’s despite her indulgence in skin-soothing cream that cost more than sixty pounds a pot—he knew that because she had berated him for using it to rub lavishly into his dry hands after playing golf. Perhaps the sensations were simply heightened by unfamiliarity. Her breasts were small and hard and unspoilt by child-bearing and breastfeeding. And he thought guiltily of Pamela for the last time.
He eased the clothes from Teri’s body until she lay naked beneath him. Her stomach was firm and flat, her hips narrow—her figure more boyish than womanly. She undid his shirt and eased it from his shoulders. This was something he had forgotten too, the sensual pleasure of undressing someone else. Why the minute you got married did you automatically revert to undressing yourself?
‘Have you come prepared?’ she whispered breathlessly in his ear.
Jamie propped himself up on his elbow and looked quizzically at her. ‘Come prepared?’
She flushed slightly. ‘You know. Condoms.’ The pink tinge spread over her cheeks—her facial ones.
‘No,’ he apologised limply. ‘I never thought.’
‘Are you vasectomised?’
‘That makes it sound even more painful than normal,’ he winced. ‘No, I’m not.’
‘Funny, I thought you might be.’
‘I never got round to it,’ he said pathetically, as if he were talking about returning an overdue library book rather than emasculating his manhood.
‘There are some Durex in the bedside drawer,’ she said. ‘They’re probably near their expiry date. I bought a twelve-pack ages ago in the vain hope that I would get seriously lucky at least once a month. You’ll probably notice that they’re still in their cellophane wrapper,’ she added ruefully.
Jamie rummaged through the drawer, fighting his way through tubes of cream, lipsticks, headache tablets—hopefully she wouldn’t need those tonight—roll-on deodorant—too phallic by half in his opinion—and sundry other cosmetic appliances, he eventually found the box of condoms.
He unwrapped it reluctantly. ‘I haven’t used one of these since I was at university,’ he said, examining one of the small, neat envelopes distastefully under the bedside lamp. ‘It always reminded me of having a bath in a plastic raincoat.’
‘Is that something you do often?’ Teri smiled.
‘What?’
‘Have a bath in a plastic raincoat?’
‘No. And this isn’t something I do often either,’ he added sheepishly.
‘Then put those down and come here.’ She drew him towards her. ‘We won’t be needing them just yet.’
Jamie lay back against the pillows and stared at the ceiling. ‘It’s at times like this that I wish I smoked,’ he said wistfully.
Teri snuggled against him. ‘If that was what having a bath in a plastic raincoat feels like, then I’m going to abandon The Source of Life aromatherapy bath gel and go straight down to the nearest outdoor clothing store and buy myself one.’
He squeezed her to him. ‘Why does forbidden fruit taste so sweet?’
‘For precisely that reason. Because it’s forbidden.’ She twisted the hairs on his chest between her fingers. ‘If you could have it every day, it would be like any other boring old banana.’
‘What an interesting analogy.’ He kissed her hair.
They relaxed in silence, luxuriating in the nearness of new naked skin until Teri said, ‘Tell me about your family.’
‘Now?’ Jamie was surprised. ‘It seems a funny time to talk about my home life. I thought you didn’t want to know about it.’
‘I didn’t,’ she admitted, ‘before. I feel part of you now, and I want to know everything about you.’ She trailed her finger lazily over his chest.
Jamie sighed. ‘What do you want to know?’
‘We could start with something easy,’ she said. ‘What’s your house like?’
He shrugged underneath her. ‘Big, expensive and an eclectic mixture of architecture.’
Teri draped her leg over his. ‘Tell me about the kids.’
‘Jack’s three and is a little devil.’ Jamie stroked her shoulder absently. ‘Francesca’s six going on thirty-six, and she’s a little madam.’
‘Do they look like you?’
‘Francesca does. Jack looks like Pa—my wife.’
‘You can tell me her name if you want to,’ she said softly.
‘If I do that, she’ll become real, and right now I can pretend for a short while that she doesn’t exist.’
‘I want to know what she’s like.’
Jamie sighed wearily. ‘Pamela is Pamela.’ He looked at Teri accusingly. ‘There—you’ve made me say it!’
‘Go on.’ Teri prompted him with a nudge in the ribs. ‘You’ve started, so you might as well finish.’
‘She’s self-contained, aloof and distant. And she doesn’t understand me one bit.’ Jamie held up his hand. ‘I know it’s a cliché, and you did voice that very vociferously on one occasion, I seem to remember,’ he said wryly. ‘But she doesn’t. We’ve nothing in common anymore. She doesn’t understand why I still find Monty Python the funniest programme on television or how I can even laugh at Absolutely Fabulous. She doesn’t understand why I weep openly at something like Toy Story, and yet can’t cry at funerals. She doesn’t understand why I find working for an insurance company the most stifling experience in the world. She doesn’t understand why I, along with the children, don’t like her home-made granary bread and long for shop-bought bleached and chemically adulterated white sliced loaves. She doesn’t understand why I find playing golf a relaxing way to unwind. Neither does she understand that although I enjoy watching football, I have lost all desire to kick one.’ He turned and buried his face in Teri’s neck, tasting the salty sweetness of her flesh. ‘And most of all, she wouldn’t understand why I need you.’
She arched towards him, and his body met with hers. They made love again, without the urgency of the first time and without the judicious intervention of latex. It was a wild and reckless thing to do, he thought as he lay beside her later. Particularly for a man who works in insurance.
Teri was slumbering softly when he stroked her breast to wake her. ‘I have to go,’ he murmured.
She made an appealing groaning sound and went to get up.
‘You stay here, I’ll let myself out.’ He kissed her shoulders. ‘I’ll see you tomorrow.’
He crept out of the bed and pulled his clothes on. ‘Do you want me to close the curtains?’
‘No,’ she answered sleepily. ‘When I was Francesca’s age, I was afraid of my curtains. The patterns on them used to make monsters and give me nightmares. I still sleep with them open.’
He smiled. ‘Okay.’ He kissed his finger and touched her nose. ‘Sleep tight.’
He had driven to Leighton Buzzard Station that morning to meet Teri so, thankfully, the Volvo was now parked conveniently outside her house.
You could tell the sort of man he was from the car he drove. A Volv
o—a reliable, roomy family car. Ideal for child car seats, carry-cots, pushchairs, picnic hampers, bikes, balls, Barbie and all the other bloody paraphernalia they took with them whenever they moved out of the house. It was engineered for safety and always fared well in traffic accidents. An insurance man’s dream. And the most sensible car in the universe.
He wished momentarily that he drove a Ferrari. Red and sexy. Too small for anything else but a chick with a tight skirt and long legs. And certainly no room for his conscience.
It was a cold night, but there was no frost, and it was good to think that spring might be just around the corner. Jamie turned the car heater up, so that as soon as the engine warmed, it would be blasting out hot air. It was frightening to think that he had reached the age where he also appreciated the fact that the car seats were heated. The night seemed all the more chilly for his having just got out of a warm and comfortable bed.
It was late, but not suspiciously so. There would be time for a nightcap and a chat with Pamela before they went to bed. He wondered if he would be different now that he had taken this irrevocable step into a life of deception. The actual deceitfulness became easier in practical terms, but the mental side seemed to grow steadily worse. Where was this going to end?
He thought of Francesca asleep at home, blissfully unaware of her father’s duplicity. Would it change her life? Was she afraid of her curtains as Teri had been? There seemed nothing scary about fabric with Beatrix Potter characters on it to him—only the price of it—but then, he wasn’t six. Francesca had nothing else to worry about. There had been no crises in her life other than the inadvertent loss of an idolised hamster called Bedingfield up the vacuum cleaner. She had a mother who fretted over her every move and a father who catered for all the material needs her mother could ever dream up for her.
And what of Jack? His only worry was overcoming the so-far unfathomable joining of Duplo play blocks together. Jamie hoped to God that nothing would happen to change that.
As he drove back from his lover in Leighton Buzzard to his wife in Milton Keynes, he prayed fervently that his children would always enjoy deep and dreamless sleep. At the moment he was having enough night-time terrors for them all.
Chapter 16
The Tom Pearson Ten-Step Plan for Rehabilitation of Errant Husbands wasn’t working. The daily crooning in the Calypso Power Shower was growing even more forceful than the steaming jets of water that coursed over Jamie as he lathered his body. He was stuck on slushy love songs of the seventies and had worked his way through several: ‘How Deep Is Your Love’—one of the Bee Gees’ better efforts; ‘Three Times a Lady’—Commodores; ‘All of Me Loves All of You’—Bay City Rollers (very worrying); most of ‘Saturday Night Fever’; and several of the more sentimental songs by Gladys Knight and The Pips. An alarming deviation had been ‘Great Balls of Fire.’ It wasn’t only Gladys Knight who had the pip.
Pamela combed her hair and stared at her pale reflection in the mirror. They used to have sex in the shower. Years ago, when they were first married. She couldn’t understand why now. It was a tiny shower in their first house, and they used to bang their elbows and knees on the tiles and the Perspex cubicle door. Finally, a bottle of Vidal Sassoon’s Wash and Go shampoo had hit her on the head, and that had been an end to it. They had a much bigger shower room now, but the urge to make love in it never seemed to arise.
Tom had suggested another evening out, to solve the current crisis. Pamela thought this excessive, and there was also a faint whiff of ulterior motive about it. But what else was she to do? It had worked so well last time. She could tell that Jamie had been jealous, but since then his zeal for working long hours and sneaking out to make late-night telephone calls with MacTavish had simply increased.
The discovery about the phone calls had come when she had been forced to take MacTavish on his nightly constitutional due to Jamie’s lateness. The poor dog had been crossing his legs and howling balefully at his lead and, ever mindful that the future displays of daffodils that were sprouting in tender infancy through their soil wouldn’t benefit from a watering with MacTavish’s urine, she had reluctantly donned her Barbour and walked him down the road.
It was when he had stopped at the phone box and refused steadfastly to budge until she had gone through the pretence of making a phone call that the penny dropped. Jamie had clearly thought that the phone box was a safer option than his cell phone. How wrong he had been. It was with a leaden heart and a lump in her throat that she marched MacTavish home and rewarded him with a large bowl of Chum for his treachery. And they say a dog is a man’s best friend! MacTavish was obviously unfamiliar with that concept.
It was disconcerting that when she told Jamie she was going to the Thai restaurant again on another business meeting with Tom, there was a distinct lack of batting of either of his eyelids. ‘Fine,’ he said—and he sounded as if he meant it.
So here she was, dressed up to the nines again and going out with her boss, when she would rather be staying in with her husband on the one night he managed to get home early—although, if Tom’s hare-brained plan actually worked, Jamie would soon be coming home early every night.
Pamela went slowly downstairs and waited uneasily in the lounge. Jamie didn’t flinch as the majestic Mercedes swept into their drive. She was the one who did.
The restaurant was busier than last time. There was a party from one of the large computer companies doing some particularly raucous bonding following a seminar on Lateral Thinking in the Nineties. Bottles of wine were being passed across the table with an intent that was almost savage in its ferocity. The only thing this lot were likely to be doing laterally tonight was sliding under the tables.
From the exterior the restaurant looked rather like a circus tent, with the addition of two gold lions—or were they dragons?—placed strategically at the front door to give it an Oriental authenticity. Inside, it had been transformed into a Far Eastern wonderland of hastily carved rosewood and precarious bamboo canopies.
Tom and Pamela were shown to a table as far away from the inebriated lateral thinkers as possible, on a raised platform towards the back of the restaurant. Two tiny waitresses in traditional costume fluttered round them like exotic butterflies. They ordered a set menu, because Tom had forgotten his reading glasses and she was feeling too uninterested to choose.
‘So it’s not working too well?’ he said when the waitresses had left.
‘No,’ she sighed. ‘It seemed to have the desired effect briefly, but then matters sort of escalated. He’s staying out late—very late—and coming home smelling of Chinese food and Obsession.’
Their own food arrived. ‘Perhaps you’re not playing the part convincingly enough,’ Tom suggested, as he dipped a fish cake into one of the sauces which had been placed alongside them.
‘I never said I was Dame Judi Dench.’
Tom unwrapped a piece of chicken from some sort of sturdy foliage. ‘We might have to take this one stage further.’
‘Why do I think I’m not going to like the sound of this.’
Tom shrugged nonchalantly. One thing Pamela had learned early in life was never to trust a salesman when he shrugged nonchalantly. ‘Perhaps we need some realism injected into this.’
‘Now I know I don’t like the sound of this.’
The butterfly waitresses cleared their plate of starters, which had been decimated mainly by Tom, and brought the main course. He covered her hand with his. ‘You’re a very beautiful woman, Pamela.’
‘And you’re an attractive man.’ She moved her hand away. ‘A married one.’
One of the lateral thinkers crashed to the floor on his chair. Tom moved his closer to her and spooned some noodles languidly onto her plate while not taking his eyes from hers. It was obviously a practised move and, as such, was quite impressive to watch. ‘I’ve always wanted to get to know you better.’
His eyes had taken on the hard-edged glint of a predator. ‘Don’t do this to me, Tom. Please.’
/>
‘What harm could it do?’ He was beginning to sound oilier than Italian salad dressing.
‘I’m in a deep state of confusion and emotional strain as it is. If I even consider placing one more card on the top, the whole wobbly pile will collapse.’
‘Can I be frank with you?’
‘I’d rather you weren’t. I’d rather you were just Tom. The Tom I know and don’t love.’
‘I don’t think you’ve been properly fulfilled as a woman.’
Two of the lateral thinkers started singing loudly, and the restaurant’s owner hovered nervously round their table.
‘I’m perfectly fulfilled as a woman, Tom,’ she said tightly. ‘And if I weren’t, I would be looking to my husband to fulfil me. The answer to my current domestic predicament isn’t a quick bonk in the back of a well-built German car.’
Tom looked slightly deflated. ‘So you don’t think a full-blown revenge affair is a good idea?’
‘No.’
‘Wouldn’t it be fun finding out?’
‘No.’
‘I just—’
‘No.’
His face took on a look of pained honesty. ‘I want to make love to you really badly.’ He was sounding desperate.
She didn’t have the heart to tell him that she’d rather be made love to really well, and that if anyone could do that, it was Jamie. Instead she said, ‘Tom, exactly which part of the word no is it that you’re having trouble with?’
His fixed expression, she guessed, was meant to convey deep and painful longing. It looked instead like he had deep and painfully trapped wind. ‘My arms ache for you.’
Let's Meet on Platform 8 Page 15