Ellie

by Lesley Pearse

  Her lips met his and Magnus couldn’t and didn’t want to avoid them and all at once he had her in his arms, kissing her back with the kind of passion he hadn’t felt for twenty years. He was just a boy again, his heart racing, blood pumping at twice the normal speed. Reason, logic and morality had no meaning. He was like a salmon desperately swimming upstream against the current of his conscience, and winning because the need was so great.

  Bonny didn’t give him a moment to draw breath or consider what they were doing. Her fingers were creeping between the buttons on his shirt, gliding tantalisingly over bare skin, giving him a picture of exactly how it would be if they were in a hotel room.

  Magnus’s hands slid into her coat, the soft crêpe of her dress making it so easy to feel the contours of her body. When his hand cupped her breast there was no brassière beneath to dull the impact of hardened nipple against his fingers and her gasp of pleasure made it doubly thrilling. Her lips stayed on his, her tongue driving him wilder and wilder until his only thought and need was to possess.

  What would make a normally sane, intelligent man of forty plus begin to make love in a public park, even if the girl was the most desirable blonde he’d ever seen? It was Bonny, not him, who pulled her coat over herself as his hand went up under the skirt of her dress. He no longer cared if anyone might see them. She was wet already and so very hot, and as his fingers drew aside her knickers she was arching against him, her need as great as his.

  She made soft little moans of bliss as his fingers caressed her, pushing against him for more, and still her lips scorched into his. Her fingers traced the length and width of his erect penis through his trousers, teasing him until he was almost in pain.

  ‘Take me somewhere and make love to me?’ she whispered, slowly unbuttoning his flies. ‘I want you so badly.’

  Bonny knew she shouldn’t be doing this, arousing a man purposely just to entrap him. But there was something about his reluctance which excited her. Few men ever even tried to turn her down.

  It was only when Bonny’s hand reached into his trousers that Magnus knew he was lost. It was either take her here on a park bench and face the possibility of arrest or take her to a hotel. There was no turning back.

  Hand in hand, they ran from the gardens, through the busy streets and down towards the Royal Oxford. Magnus had checked out this morning, but he’d left his car in their yard. He was counting on a room being available.

  ‘Of course we can find another room for you, Mr Osbourne.’ The clerk smirked knowledgeably at Bonny. ‘How nice that your wife came to join you!’

  Magnus was convinced he knew Bonny was appearing at the theatre; and surely anyone could read the signs of dishevelled clothing, too bright eyes and swollen lips. But it didn’t matter. All that counted was getting into a room, pulling off her clothes and consummating their desire.

  It was the sweetest, fiercest love-making Magnus had ever known. Their clothes tossed off at the door, too hungry for one another for even the briefest of foreplay. They fell upon the bed and devoured one another and only in the afterglow of the first frenzied orgasm was there a moment to reflect on how much more they had to give one another.

  Magnus knew she was no virgin, even though he expected her to claim she was later. But she wasn’t a selfish lover. Her practised hands sought to please him in the manner of a true courtesan.

  Love-making with Ruth was always beneath the covers in the dark. Not once in seventeen years had he seen her entirely naked. But Bonny displayed herself without shame or embarrassment, taking him to new heights of pleasure as she wantonly guided his fingers to the seat of her desire. She wound her slender legs around him and clawed at him deliriously, her moans of ecstasy awakening a dormant beast inside him which demanded more and more of her young, firm flesh.

  ‘I’ll have to go,’ she murmured at half-past six, disentangling herself from his sweat-soaked body. ‘Come and see the show again and I’ll come back afterwards for the night.’

  Magnus couldn’t turn her down as he watched her washing herself at the basin. The line of her narrow back and her firm round buttocks were too beautiful and erotic to shut out He briefly argued with himself that one more night couldn’t hurt, that it would be cruelly insulting to her if he left her now and went back to London. Yet deep inside him he knew he was lost already.

  She turned back to him, a hairbrush in her hand. As she lifted her arms to brush her hair, he gazed at her beauty. Her breasts were pert and up-tilted, her blonde hair showering over her naked shoulders, and her face so achingly vulnerable.

  ‘You do want me tonight? Don’t you?’ she whispered, those enchanting turquoise eyes swimming with tears. ‘Say if you don’t. I’ll understand.’

  ‘Of course I want you,’ he said hoarsely. ‘But you must understand I’m married, Bonny, and tonight’s all we can have.’

  ‘Bonny, no,’ Ellie pleaded with her friend as they waited backstage for their cue, later that day. ‘You’ll get hurt, Magnus is out of your league.’

  ‘He’s not.’ Bonny tossed her head defiantly. ‘I know he’s married, but I don’t care. He’s the man I want.’

  Ellie turned her head away. Her emotions were red raw, she was exhausted from having had no sleep last night and then travelling up to London and back. She couldn’t cope with any more scenes now. She wanted to pour out to Bonny how it had felt to lose a woman who’d been a major part of her life since she was born. To tell her how it was to go back to Coburgh Street, and find that Annie King’s affection for her was unchanged, despite the way Ellie had hurt her son.

  There was the sharp pain she needed to share, of seeing a snapshot of Charley taken on the ship going out to Australia. He was with three or four girls. Could one of them be a new romance?

  Ellie had rushed back to Oxford, refusing Annie’s offer of a bed for the night, not just because of the show, but because she thought Bonny would comfort her. But Bonny was too wrapped up in this new man to consider Ellie’s grief at losing Marleen, or that tonight she might need a friend to pour it all out to.

  The band was striking up with ‘I’ve Got Rhythm’. Ellie could hear the other dancers whispering in the wings as they lined up in readiness. As her mother would have said, ‘The show must go on.’

  There was only one constant thing in her life: her talent. Friends might let ner down, people would come and go, but no one could take her talent away. Ellie knew that, as from tonight, she had to learn to be as single-minded as Bonny.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  August 1946

  Magnus stood at the ticket barrier at Victoria station, his stomach churning like one of the cement mixers on his building site. He could see the train held up by lights just outside the station and he reminded himself there was still time to turn and run.

  But he stayed, oblivious to the throngs of people milling round him or the dusty, choking heat of the station. Porters staggered by with luggage, children clanged buckets and spades, mothers stridently admonished small boys to behave, but Magnus’s mind was on Bonny.

  It was now August, three and a half months since he’d met her in Oxford. London was in the grip of a heat wave and it seemed today everyone was trying to escape the city. Yesterday, as he’d laid bricks with his workmen in the searing heat, Magnus had thought longingly of Craigmore and Yorkshire. There he could be lounging beneath a shady tree, Ruth bringing him ice-cold lemonade or plunging into the pond with Sophie and Stephen, and at night there would be cool breezes coming off the moors. Today he wondered if the heat were responsible for another attack of middle-aged madness. Why else would a man risk everything he cared for, and lay himself wide open to ridicule?

  Four days in Oxford, that’s all he’d had with Bonny. Four wonderful, crazy days and nights when he felt he’d danced with the angels, seen the seven wonders of the world, yet made a pact with the devil – all with one woman. Woman! he thought with some cynicism. Bonny wasn’t a woman, she was just seventeen, something she’d only admitted a
fter a slip-up. How many more lies had she told him? The week’s work in Rome! Would that turn out to be a lie? Was she really an orphan? Could he really believe she felt anything for him? Wasn’t it more likely she was out to see what she could get, pulling on his string once more, just to check he was still attached?

  Magnus had intended to end their affair in Oxford. He took both Bonny and Ellie and put them on the train to Brighton to go on to their next show. Ellie was pale and silent, her eyes still red-rimmed from her aunt’s funeral the day before. Bonny had clung to him, tearfully insisting she couldn’t live without him. In a moment of weakness, he’d tucked a ten pound note in her hand, along with the address of a friend in London where she could write to him, and rushed away cursing his stupidity.

  Yet despite Bonny’s fevered declarations of love, she’d only written twice in all this time. Brief, hurried notes, one saying she was going to Rome to dance, another saying she had an audition for a film part. It was odd she didn’t send a postcard from Rome, or explain what happened at the audition!

  But then, just as Magnus began to think he’d never hear from her again, she wrote to say she was free this weekend. He knew it was folly to see her again, but Bonny had given him something more than a few heady and thrilling memories. That vital spark at the core of her had affected him, given him youthful vigour and a head full of dreams, and he’d charged into his building project like a new man.

  Guilt at betraying his marriage vows made long hours of back-breaking work clearing the site preferable to the comfort of home and Ruth’s silently questioning eyes. He had no intention of sitting back and watching his men work; he needed the manual labour to feel they were his houses. His labourers’ rough ways and crude language helped him forget such things as honour, family pride and his place in society back home

  An image of Bonny’s flashy taste had influenced the design of his simple houses, giving them something original and almost futuristic. Now the first one was almost completed. Once sold, he’d have tripled his initial stake and have enough capital again to pay for the building of the other five; then on to other similar projects. Maybe he’d discover this weekend that what he thought he felt for Bonny was just a brief infatuation. He hoped so.

  The train chugged into the station and doors were thrown open, disgorging passengers. Steam and smoke prevented a clear view down the platform but suddenly Bonny appeared through it like a mannequin.

  Magnus’s heart thumped alarmingly, his pulse racing. She was wearing a sky blue dress which clung to her legs as she tried to run with her small case in her hand. Her blonde hair swung beneath a tiny veiled pillbox hat and her wide smile said everything Magnus hoped for.

  ‘Oh Magnus,’ she squeaked, dropping her case and hurling herself into his arms. ‘I thought you’d change your mind!’

  Magnus found it hard to keep his eyes on the road as he drove out of London. Just the sight of Bonny’s sun-tanned long legs stretched out next to him was making him feel hot under the collar. He’d booked them into a small hotel in Windsor, but they could hardly arrive at eleven in the morning and retire to their room immediately without raising a few eyebrows.

  ‘Would you like to see the house I’m building?’ he asked, turning to smile at her. ‘It’s not quite finished, but it’s right on the river and I could hire out a rowing boat and take you to a pub for lunch further downstream.’

  ‘As long as you don’t rock the boat,’ she smiled, taking off her little hat and tossing it into the back seat. ‘I’ve been scared of water ever since I nearly drowned once.’

  ‘Tell me about it,’ Magnus suggested, wondering if this was a tall story too.

  ‘Another time.’ She shuddered, as if remembering the incident frightened her. ‘I wish I could get over it. It must be nice to take a dip on a hot day like this. I feel as if I’m on fire.’

  Magnus was on fire too, but it wasn’t because of the weather, only her. ‘How’s Ellie?’ he asked, wishing he could get his mind off the moment when he could undress Bonny. ‘Has the show finished? You didn’t say in your note how you came to be having a weekend off?’

  ‘Oh, one of the other dancers is taking my place,’ she said quickly. ‘She wanted the experience of doing a solo. I made out I had to visit my –’ She halted suddenly. ‘An old aunt.’

  Magnus suspected this wasn’t the truth, but he said nothing.

  ‘Ellie’s okay,’ Bonny went on. ‘She’s got a boyfriend now, so I don’t see so much of her.’

  Bonny wished he hadn’t started asking questions quite so quickly. The truth of the matter was that she’d been sacked from the Brighton show at the beginning of July. She was still living there, sharing a room with Ellie, but there was a certain amount of friction between them. That was why she’d written to Magnus and asked him to meet her this weekend.

  ‘Ellie’s getting over her aunt’s death then?’ Magnus asked, sure Bonny was hiding something.

  ‘It changed her quite a bit,’ Bonny admitted. ‘We’re both doing solo numbers now, not the double act you saw in Oxford. Also Edward, her old friend from the show at the Phoenix, is working in Brighton too, as a pianist in a club. Sometimes Ellie sings with him after the show.’

  Bonny’s trouble in Brighton all stemmed from her assumption when they left Oxford that she and Ellie would continue to be a double act. But Mr Dyson, the Palace Theatre producer, singled out Ellie to do a couple of solo comedy song and dance numbers and she was relegated to the chorus line again. When Edward turned up there too and began monopolising Ellie, that was the last straw. Looking back, Bonny knew she should have crept round Mr Dyson instead of being difficult, but she was hurt, missing Magnus and jealous of Edward, so she did what she always did when she was unhappy, and found a few older men to make a fuss of her.

  ‘So you get a bit lonely?’ Magnus turned, raising one eyebrow questioningly.

  ‘Sometimes,’ she said, and Magnus saw she was biting her lip as if this admission troubled her.

  ‘Mind where you step!’ Magnus said, taking Bonny’s hand and leading her across lumpy soil strewn with building rubble. The almost completed house was in front of them. It had been rendered over the bricks and painted a very pale grey, but it had the graceful appearance of small Georgian houses. Either side were two more skeletons of houses, the brickwork only completed on the ground floor. The foundations were laid for the remaining three, but all work had stopped temporarily until the first could be sold.

  ‘I don’t expect you’ll be very impressed,’ he said as he opened the front door. ‘You have to imagine so much at this stage.’

  Bonny said nothing as she walked into the main room, her high heels clip-clopping on the bare floorboards. She paused for a moment, looking all around, then moved on to peer into the kitchen and dining-room.

  She came back into the main room and opened the french windows. There was scrubland down to the river some twenty yards away and although the sunshine made the river itself look beautiful, Magnus had to admit that the six-foot weeds fronting it spoilt the view.

  Bonny turned back to him, her eyes glinting. ‘It’s absolutely lovely,’ she said in an awed voice. ‘It’s like a rich person’s house, only smaller. Imagine when that’s all lawn down to the river, a couple of small trees and flower beds.’

  Magnus was delighted by her enthusiasm, and her understanding of the image he had tried to create. He loathed those awful red-brick houses the councils were so fond of; he felt people deserved better.

  ‘You’re so clever,’ she went on. ‘I love that elegant staircase, the pretty fireplace and the hatch from the kitchen into the dining-room. I’d give my right arm to live here.’

  He saw then that the glint in her eyes was caused by tears, but he didn’t understand quite why the house moved her so much, unless it was the flashy touches he’d added because of her. She ran upstairs, looking at the bathroom and bedrooms, opening cupboard doors and moving from room to room as if planning the decoration.

  ‘The k
itchen will be built in,’ Magnus said when she came back down again, showing her a glossy brochure with an illustration of a woman rolling out pastry on a fitted work surface with cupboards above and below. ‘It’s a new space-saving idea, they have them like this in America.’

  Bonny looked at the brochure and with a stab of guilt remembered her parents’ kitchen with its ugly boiler, white china sink and the cabinet with an enamel, drop-down flap. She hadn’t seen them since she moved to Brighton. They thought she was still in the show too.

  ‘I think it’s all marvellous,’ she said wistfully. ‘I can’t imagine anything better than living here.’

  It was the sad look in her eyes which made Magnus take her in his arms. ‘You’ll get married one day and live somewhere like this,’ he said. ‘Probably somewhere even better. I designed this with ordinary people in mind.’

  She turned her face up to his, and the moment their lips met, passion flared up like fire in dry straw.

  Her tongue flickered against his, two hungry mouths feasting on one another as he crushed her into his arms. She pulled out his shirt, reaching under it, her fingers clawing at his back, insinuating her hips and belly against his until she felt him grow hard against her.

  ‘Make love to me here,’ she whispered, sliding her hand over his erection. ‘Now, here on the floor.’

  ‘It’s dirty,’ he said weakly, glancing round at the bags of plaster, the tins of paint, yet his fingers were already fumbling at the row of tiny buttons on the bodice of her dress.

  ‘I don’t care,’ she sighed, as his hand cupped round one breast. ‘Please, Magnus?’

  Magnus knew that any one of his workmen would have taken her against a wall, on a pile of bricks, anywhere, to satisfy their lust. He had always thought he had more respect for women than that, but he couldn’t help himself.