Barefoot in the Dark

by Lynne Barrett-Lee

‘You’re cold,’ he observed.

  ‘I’m freezing, as it happens.’

  ‘Shall we get back inside, then?’

  She nodded and leaned forward a little. One of the chipmunks was poised on a branch, still as stone, bar small twitching undulations of its tail. ‘Bye bye, little chipmunk’ she crooned at it, waving her fingers. Women, eh. So other. So exquisitely other. He squeezed his hand against her shoulder. This was shaping up well.

  But Jack knew from long experience that when things started shaping up well there was always scope for a downturn. And now one happened.

  He’d led the way back up the fire escape stairs light of heart, tall of bearing, decidedly joyous of spirit. But then the back door wouldn’t open.

  ‘Shit,’ he said, pushing against it.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ Hope was standing behind him, one step down.

  ‘The door’s stuck.’

  ‘Oh dear.’

  He pushed it again.

  ‘Shall I help?’

  ‘Oh, bugger.’ He shook his head. ‘You can’t. It’s not stuck. It’s bloody locked.’ In his haste to implement Operation Chipmunk he must have failed to engage the little lug on the latch properly. Which meant – oh, damn – that he had locked them both out.

  ‘Oh dear,’ she said, smiling up at him. ‘Can we get in another way?’

  He peered down through the grating. Leonard’s flat was still dark.

  ‘Er, probably not.’

  Hope joined him on the balcony itself.

  ‘What about round the front? Or is there a window?’ She leaned around him. ‘That window up there, maybe. Look. Isn’t that one open? That’s your bathroom, isn’t it?’

  Jack was still shouldering the door, albeit pointlessly. Bloody hell. Why did they put a bloody Yale lock on a back door, anyway?’

  Hope moved around him. ‘Funny having a Yale lock on a back door,’ she said.

  ‘Security,’ he answered grimly. Oh, ho bloody ho.

  She’d moved along the balcony now, and was looking up at the bathroom window. ‘There,’ she said, pointing to it. ‘It is open. Crisis sorted.’

  She looked elfin, almost, with her nose tilted upwards like that. Crisis sorted. Spit spot. She was so sweet.

  But sweet or not, it was a very small window. And head height. A good six feet up. Though Jack’s flat was a flat, it was in the kind of house that pleased itself in the matter of floor levels. The bathroom, just off his bedroom, was reached via three extra stairs. And the window, in addition, was set high in the wall.

  ‘I’ll never get through there,’ he said.

  She looked him over. ‘Hmm. You might not,’ she said finally. ‘But I definitely will.’

  ‘You can’t possibly –’

  ‘Don’t be daft. I can get through there easily.’ She grinned at him fetchingly.

  ‘If you give me a leg up.’

  Though Jack could imagine all sorts of scenarios that would give him a legitimate opportunity to get his face five inches from Hope’s stockinged thighs, this would not have been one of them. But here it was anyway. On a plate. ‘Are you sure?’ he said.

  ‘Well, unless you’d rather stand out here in the dark all night with nothing on your feet,’ she said. ‘Or call the police. Come on.’ She gestured to him then turned to face the wall, her back to him. ‘Come on. Let me get my foot up.’

  So he cupped his hands obligingly while she lifted her leg, then took the weight of her right foot as she hoisted herself upwards, rising, as if a small fragrant wraith from a lake, before swivelling to open the window to its widest and pulling her body over on to the sill. ‘You see?’ she called down to him, grinning. ‘Piece of piss.’

  He was still marvelling at her unexpected turn of phrase when the pressure eased in his hands and she was manoeuvring through the window, slithering her body over and down into the room. She was grunting a little. He tried not to look up her dress.

  ‘You see,’ she called again, as her legs disappeared inside. ‘There we are – oof!’

  ‘Hope? Hope? Are you all right?’ He reached up and grabbed the sill himself now, mildly impressed at the sudden surge of power in his biceps. He really must get back down to the gym. He could still hear her wincing. And now he could see her. She was sprawled on the bathroom floor, clutching her leg.

  ‘Oh, God,’ he said, balanced over the fulcrum of the sill now. His feet skittered ineffectually against the brickwork. There was no way, NO way he was going to get through this window. She scrabbled to a sitting position on the bath mat and blinked up at him.

  ‘Don’t be daft, Jack. Get down. I’ll come round and let you in.’

  But he was half in already. He heaved his arms against the windowsill.

  ‘No problem,’ he grunted. ‘I’m in already.’ And with an extra heave he scraped his hips in along with him, landing, with a thud, by the toilet. She was sitting, one knee up, with her back against the bath, scrutinising her leg.

  ‘Damn,’ she said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I’ve laddered my tights.’

  He gathered himself up, hitting his head against the towel rail. He rubbed it.

  ‘Oh, dear. Sorry about that. But, oh well –’ Sod his head. He was feeling rather jolly. He peered at the ladder. ‘They’re disposable, aren’t they?’

  Her head snapped up. ‘Disposable? What planet are you on?’

  Oh dear. Had he blown it? Weren’t tights disposable? Lydia’s always seemed to be. So much he didn’t know about. He sat back on his heels and smiled sheepishly at her.

  ‘Then I’ll buy you some new ones.’

  And then, without any evident reason or warning, she threw back her head and laughed. The biggest laugh he’d ever heard in his life. From a woman, for sure. If you didn’t count Hil. Which he didn’t. Inexplicable. And though he knew his bathroom wasn’t really the place for it, he knew it was also high time to move in.

  His opening parry, a rather clumsy two-handed approach on his knees, was greeted with more enthusiasm than he’d dared hope for, and in moments he was going at the kissing with gusto, her arms around his back and his hands in her hair. But he had been on the receiving end of enough bangs and scrapes and bruises to know that however urgent and beguiling the idea seemed right now, there would be little satisfaction in having sex with Hope on his bathroom floor. Quite apart from its decidedly bijou nature, it sported all sorts of paraphernalia that were not conducive to libidinous abandon. The dental floss on the side of the sink. The duck-in-flight terracotta plaque on the wall. The faint whiff of Sainsbury’s summer breeze toilet cleaner. The proximity of the loo brush to his left knee. All this he registered while he was still kissing her. As well as something else. That she was kissing him back. Boy, was she kissing him back. It was this, more than anything, that had him decided. Carpe diem. Sod it! Carpe Hope Shepherd! There was a perfectly serviceable bed not five yards from the patch of lino, and it was there, not here, that they needed to be. But it was getting from the one place to the other that was going to be the problem. Hope (being female) that was going to be the problem. Give a man anything vaguely erotic to look at and he was instantly, wholeheartedly, unstoppably aroused. A woman, on the other hand, was wired altogether differently. In Jack’s experience, women were all too prone to getting sidetracked. Give a woman a moment for sober reflection and her neurones could so easily be diverted from their course. From ‘yes, do it now’ to ‘what the hell am I doing?’, or even worse, to ‘oh, God – what knickers am I wearing?’ Or, in Lydia’s case, to ‘Sorry, I’m just not in the mood.’ Hope was in the mood. No question about that one. The sticky bit, the trick, as with tuning a telly, was to get a fix on the signal and keep things that way. He moved exploratory hands over various soft bits of her. He kissed her more. He moaned into her hair. He had to get her to the bed now, but without giving her sufficient time to take stock and engage thought. Eye contact. That was it. Keep her focussed. On task.

  Her hands were round his
neck and she was kissing his whole face now.

  Then she stopped. ‘Jack, you do have a bed, I presume?’

  Bloody hell. Bloody hell, this was going like a bomb now. There was clearly less danger of her going off the boil than there was of him reaching it way too soon. Within seconds of her question, which he had answered with some feeling, she was up on her feet and almost dragging him there.

  He’d made the bed, which was good, but left his pile of dirty washing on it, which wasn’t. But he figured that given another five minutes, she wouldn’t even care. Didn’t care now, by the look of it – his right arm, effecting clearance, only narrowly avoiding being pinioned by her bottom as she threw herself prostrate and panting on the bed. This was becoming surreal. Did women actually do this? He’d anticipated a little more vertical fumbling, a little soupçon of shyness, a little light undressing, a little his ’n hers probing-among-underwear stuff.

  But there was no time for that. She was feral. Like a wild cat. An exquisite mass of glossy (if laddered) legs and black baby-soft wool. He peeled his T-shirt from his torso, all the better to feel it. Then joined her on the bed and disengaged his neocortex, very slightly shot through with performance anxiety, and not quite believing his luck.

  Chapter 12

  ‘I don’t believe we did that,’ said Hope, some half an hour later. She was lying flat on her back on the bed beside him, her naked body, disappointingly, now covered with the duvet. There were some unexpected benefits to long-term abstinence. It had been barely ten minutes since they’d collapsed, panting, against the pillows, yet already Jack could feel the troops massing for more. It was a quarter to ten. The night was still young.

  He turned to face Hope, but she was staring at the ceiling.

  ‘Well, we did,’ he said. They had, he thought. He had. Finally. He couldn’t keep the smile off his face. But her own expression was grim.

  ‘No, actually I don’t mean that.’ She continued to look up at the ceiling. ‘I mean I can’t believe other. All this post-coital analysis. All this gobbledegook. All this squinnying, as his mother would have said. Jesus! How did his mother crop up? Perhaps he’d better put his hand back somewhere pertinent.I did that. Which is different. I mean, well, I don’t mean that to sound… well, you know, I mean you’re a man, obviously, so… I mean, it was great –’ She turned her head and looked at him. Her eyes were slightly smudgy. Mascara, he supposed. He could see now that her irises weren’t as opaque as he’d thought. There were a few amber flecks among the brown. ‘Great,’ she said again. ‘And, I mean, you… you’re so… well, it’s been… well, you know. It’s just that… ’ She stopped again here to emit a heavy sigh. Women. So unfathomable. So very

  He did. ‘It’s just what?’

  Her lips twitched at the contact. She twisted her body towards him a little. Which was encouraging. ‘It’s just, oh, Jack, I don’t know. I feel a bit like… well, like – God, what got into me?’

  ‘Er, me?’ he offered. But she didn’t smile. Instead, she drew her brows together. ‘It’s all right,’ he said. ‘Go on. Tell me I’m utterly incorrigible. I can take it.’

  ‘I wasn’t going to say that,’ she said, as if chiding him. ‘I was just thinking how I came here tonight expecting, well, kind of hoping, I suppose, that you might – well… ’ She looked uncomfortable. ‘You know.’ He didn’t. ‘Which was fine. And… but –’

  And what? But what? She had her chin resting on the palm of her hand, and she was looking across him. To the bedside table. Jack knew, without even having to turn his head, that her eyes had come to rest not on the photo, but on the packet of twelve that was lying open beside it. The packet of twelve that Patti had ceremoniously bought him and that had sat in the drawer for all those months. And that she was thinking. He knew it. Not good. ‘ But you didn’t for a moment imagine you were going to ravish me at any point in the evening,’ he said quickly. ‘Well that makes two of us. I’m still gobsmacked, believe me.’

  She sat up violently now, casting his hand off her breast like a badly lobbed tennis ball. And put her face in her hands. Her back was very smooth.

  ‘God, that’s it. I’m just stupefied. I can’t believe I just did that. Really I can’t.’

  So not the right thing to say, then. Jack sat up too, and put one arm around her shoulder. Which still left one available, which he deployed again pretty smartish.

  ‘Hey, tell you what,’ he said. ‘How about I ravish you now? Even things up a bit. We’ll be quits then, won’t we? Then we can go have that soup.’

  She stared into his eyes for such a long time that he began to feel he was playing the lead in a black-and-white foreign language film. Then she looked down at her hands. They were folded in her lap on the duvet. And then at his hand, which was still moving in circles over her right breast. A tiny smile twitched at the edge of her mouth. He tweaked her nipple encouragingly.

  ‘Hmm?’ he said.

  She looked at him again, but by this time there was something rather different in her expression. A little-girl-in-a-sweet-shop coquettishness, maybe. She moved one of her hands back under the duvet and slid it along the inside of his thigh. ‘It’s just that, well. It’s been such a long time. Such a long time, Jack.’

  ‘For me too.’

  ‘Honestly? Really?’

  He nodded vigorously. ‘Oh, yes. Really.’

  Her hand stopped moving.

  ‘So it’s all right?’ She was doing the staring thing again. ‘I mean, it is all right, isn’t it?’

  Jesus, she was gorgeous. And he didn’t have a clue what the hell she was on about.

  ‘Of course it’s all right, Hope,’ he said.

  Chapter 13

  Hope pulled into her drive to find Suze walking down it towards her.

  It was ten past nine, and if someone had handed her a survey containing the question ‘who would you least like to see at this point in your life?’ this vision of fun-fur and novelty cats ’n dogs umbrella would have been her immediate response. God, what was her sister-in-law doing here?

  Waving at her, at this point. If only Hope had spotted her sooner, she could have driven on down the street. She glanced in the mirror to see her brother sitting in their car, which was parked across the road. Reluctantly, she lowered the window.

  Suze had placed her spare fist on her hip by now. ‘There you are,’ she said, smiling the special smile she had perfected for letting people know she was-not-at-all-impressed. ‘We’d almost given you up. You’re out and about very early this morning.’ She stooped now to peer in at Hope. The car filled instantly with the sort of cloying scent that Hope guessed cost Paul heaps of cash from various in-flight duty-free wagons.

  ‘Um –’

  ‘Where’ve you been? We kept calling.’ Hope wondered if perhaps she’d lost a few days. It had been an awful lot of sex, after all. And why were her brother and sister-in-law here anyway? ‘We called last night,’ Suze went on. ‘Several times. And then we called again first thing this morning –’

  How first was first thing? Suze was looking at her more intently now.

  Hope switched off the ignition and the wipers stopped mid-arc on the windscreen. Iain had always ticked her off about that. Wipers first. Ignition after. Why? What was going to happen to them, for God’s sake? ‘Why?’ she said now, suddenly irritable herself. ‘Is there a problem?’

  ‘Well, no. Not a problem. It’s just that when you didn’t call back… anyway, no matter. We’re off to Ikea.’

  ‘At this time? They don’t open till eleven on a Sunday, do they?’

  ‘We’re stopping for breakfast. And we want to get parked. So are you coming or not?’

  ‘What – to Ikea?’

  ‘Yes, of course to Ikea. I thought you said you wanted to come with us.’

  She had? When was that?

  ‘Um, well actually… I mean, thanks for asking me and everything, but I’ve got –’ God, what? ‘Football. Tom. You know –’

  ‘How come? It�
�s Sunday. Anyway, I thought the children were with their father this weekend.’

  God, she was sharp. ‘They are. Only there’s a –’

  ‘I thought you wanted to get that table.’ Recollection kicked in as Suze pointed towards her husband. ‘Paul’s put the seats down and everything.’

  ‘God, Suze. Sorry. I had completely forgotten.’

  Why was she apologising? They had made no plans to go to Ikea. Ever. They’d just had a conversation a couple of weeks back about the fact that if they were going there sometime in the near future that she might – might – like to go with them. No. That wasn’t how it had been at all. Suze had suggested that she might like to go with them. Hope had thought she rather wouldn’t. Still wouldn’t. And had never said she would. Only nodded at the ‘might’ to be polite, for God’s sake. That was all. No dates. No plans. So why was she acting as if she’d done something wrong?

  Suze sniffed and looked at her watch. Then reached across and opened the car door. ‘Well, no matter. Plenty of time still. Did you have a nice evening?’

  Hope swung her legs out, grateful that the ladder in her tights was hidden under her boot. ‘Evening?’

  ‘Last night. You were out.’

  ‘Yes, I… er… had to deliver some cushions. To a friend.’

  ‘Oh.’

  Hope clamped her lips together while Suze stood to one side to let her out. She looked at her watch again. ‘Well, come on, then,’ she said. ‘Let’s get a move on.’

  For a moment, Hope felt Iain’s absence in her life. And felt it keenly, unwelcome though the realisation was. Had Iain been here, Suze wouldn’t be bullying her like this. God, why did she have to say everything twice?

  ‘It’s very kind of you to think of me, but I really can’t, Suze. I’ve got too much to do.’

  Suze exhaled. ‘Well, it’s a pity you didn’t let little old me know that before we trolled all the way here, isn’t it?’ She said this with a smile, but her eyes blazed fury. She blinked. ‘Eh? So shall we, then?’

  ‘What?’

  She looked exasperated. ‘Pick up the table for you!’