by Ben Foster
High walls and steel gates guarded the entrance to Frowley Manor. I pressed the call button.
‘You are expected, sir,’ said a male voice that wasn’t posh but clipped, assertive.
The gates opened and I drove through a tunnel of trees to a courtyard paved in York stone – one thing I do know about is paving stones. A black Range Rover, one of the cars I had seen the previous day, stood below an overhanging bush filled with purple flowers. The house was a miniature castle with turrets and arched windows. I could smell horses and assumed there were stables out back. I grabbed my table and crossed the courtyard.
For some reason, I expected to find a butler in an old-fashioned costume, but the man at the door was casual in black trousers and a polo shirt; my height, wiry and strong with cropped grey hair.
‘My van all right there?’ I asked and he nodded.
‘That’ll do just fine, sir. This way.’
I entered a dark panelled hall containing a suit of armour and pewter vases with displays of flowers and ferns. I followed the man along an arched corridor lined with paintings until we reached a room with a high ceiling supported by polished beams. A balcony carved with a coat of arms perched on the bare stone wall like a box at the theatre.
Maggs, Lady Margaret, was standing on the balcony wearing a shiny floor-length white gown.
‘Thank you, Douglas, that will be all,’ she said.
He indicated an alcove beyond a low stone arch. ‘You can place your table over there, sir,’ he said, and about-turned like a soldier on his black Nike trainers.
Lady Margaret appeared beside me as I was setting up.
‘You found us. It’s like we’re in darkest Africa, everyone gets lost,’ she said, and kissed me on both cheeks. ‘How are you, Ben?
‘Very well, actually, Lady Margaret.’
‘Maggs. Maggs. Maggs,’ she repeated.
She smiled. I smiled. This was the moment to ask for my money, as I’d promised Kelly. But the moment passed.
‘Where do you want me?’
As she spoke, she dropped her silk gown over the arm of a chair. She remained with her back to me for a moment longer than was natural, time enough for me to admire her slender back and bottom, then turned, arms outstretched. I must have looked at her for less than a second but took in every contour and curve. She had a girlish body, not an ounce of fat, firm small breasts and her pubic hair was clipped in a landing strip.
My throat went dry when I was embarrassed. Now it had closed over completely. I tapped the top of the table, then took a grip on the sides to steady myself. Lady Margaret climbed nimbly up and sat on the edge swinging her legs. She made a beckoning motion and stared into my eyes as I drew closer.
‘I have so many knots, Ben. So many. Knots and nodules and aches and pains. It’s going to be jolly hard work getting them all out.’
‘I’ll do my best,’ I replied.
She relaxed with her face in the table aperture and her coppery-coloured hair like a ring of fire around her shoulders. I would normally have chosen some ambient music from my iPod and lit some aromatherapy candles, but it went clean out of my head. I coughed and my voice came out in a whisper.
‘Stretch your spine and hold it for ten seconds,’ I said. ‘Relax. Don’t think. Go with the flow.’
‘Oh, I intend to.’
She took deep breaths as I spread oil over her back.
Swedish massage consists of five basic motions: effleurage, petrissage, friction, vibration and tapotement. Effleurage requires long sweeping strokes with open palms, fists and forearms. Beginning at the top of the spine with spread fingers like the branches of a tree, you initiate a treatment with reverse effleurage, running your hands lightly down either side of the spine, over the buttocks, up the sides of body, then back to the top before applying more pressure for the second sweep.
After ten full sweeps, you commence continuous figure of 8 movements over the shoulder blades. You follow this with thumb circles to work out the tension in the triangular area between the shoulders. You apply pressure while your patient is breathing out, you release pressure as they breathe in.
In one of my courses, I had been taught that the mind is like an elephant being led by a monkey. Through massage, you learn how to shoo the monkey away and become an elephant: noble, dignified, in control of your own thoughts and passions. At that moment, I wasn’t an elephant. I was a monkey. I was reciting the massage steps in my head. I knew the sequence by heart, it’s like saying the alphabet, but I was finding it hard to concentrate on anything other than the fact that I was sliding my oiled hands over the buttocks of a beautiful titled woman in an ancient manor house while she moaned and sighed and started to grow wet beneath my fingertips. The monkey liked it and the elephant felt ashamed. I moved away.
‘Don’t stop, Ben. Not now.’ Her voice was deep, rich, sexy, commanding.
‘I’m not,’ I said. My voice, by contrast, was a whisper. ‘Can you turn over?’
As she did so, she parted her legs. Her vagina was moist and she did something hard to believe. She ran her finger between her legs and then licked it.
‘Mmm,’ she said, and stretched out with the back of her head in the aperture.
I was in robot mode. I massaged her feet, calf muscles and inner thighs with alternate diagonal stroking from the inside of her leg across to the outside. She started to moan and it was a relief to get to the end of the sequence and massage her head.
The air in the room was muggy and still. My brow burned. I had an erection. I had massaged women in sensitive areas before, but I had never lost self-control. I was a healer, proud of my skills. I wanted to help people, not take advantage of them. It’s not very nice, but men are men and mates in pubs would size up women and rate them as they passed: she’s a 7, she’s a 5, she’s a 2. She’s a slag. Lady Margaret was a 10 and she knew it.
I had finished. I was exhausted. I wanted to go home.
‘Thank you,’ I said.
‘It is me who should be thanking you.’ She smiled. ‘Now, how much do I owe you?’
‘Fifty pounds, please.’
She slipped down from the table and stepped into her robe. She crossed to the far wall, pressed a call button and Douglas entered with a silver tray containing a red £50 note. Lady Margaret murmured something I couldn’t quite hear and Douglas about turned. As I was folding my table, he strode back into the room with a bottle of champagne in an ice bucket and two glasses. He placed them on a table carved with flowers and leaping deer, then left again.
‘You did say you didn’t drink,’ Maggs said. ‘By that do you mean you don’t touch alcohol, or not very often?’
‘I probably drank too much when I was younger. I sort of stopped . . . ’
As I was speaking, she passed me the bottle.
‘Can you open this for me?’
I don’t think I had ever opened a bottle of champagne before. First I struggled to remove the gold foil, then came a wire mechanism that was awkward to unscrew. As I was trying to pull out the cork, she put her hand on my arm.
‘You have to turn the bottle one way and the cork the other.’
I did so and the cork exploded with a satisfying pop. She took the bottle from me and filled two glasses.
‘When you say no to champagne, you say no to life.’ We touched the rims of our glasses. ‘To you, Ben Foster.’
‘To you, Lady Margaret.’
‘Maggs,’ she replied sternly.
I drank the champagne, the bubbles went up my nose and I immediately felt light-headed.
‘You must open more bottles for me. It’s important to know certain things.’
She smiled and her lips made perfect bows as she sipped her drink. She was glowing, hair lush and shiny, big eyes like green jewels gazing at me in the half light as if she had known me all her life. I wanted to reach out and grab her like we were in a movie, like it was a special moment that I shouldn’t let pass. At the same time, I felt stupid thinking such thought
s and stood there with my throat dry in spite of the champagne. I was sure my knees were trembling.
‘I’ll call you next week,’ she said.
‘That would be great,’ I replied.
She pointed at the silver tray. I put the £50 into my back pocket and did up the zip. I made my way with the table under my arm back along the corridor with its landscapes and seascapes, back across the hall and Douglas opened the door for me. I was floating.
‘Goodbye, sir,’ he said, and closed the door.
It was dark, warm still. A slice of moon was rising. At sea without light pollution you can pick out the constellations and old sailors would guide the trawlers by the stars. I was confused, contented, unsure if what had just happened had actually happened. I pushed the table into the back of the van, climbed in and turned the key.
Nothing. Not even a spark. I tried again.
Nothing.
I hit the steering wheel and tried one more time.
Nothing.
I got out of the car and popped the hood. While I was staring into the mass of greasy cables and pistons, Douglas appeared with a torch.
‘Have you got a problem, sir?’
‘Bloody thing won’t start.’
‘Try again.’
I did so and he shook his head. ‘Dead as a door nail,’ he said, and lowered the bonnet for me. ‘Wait a moment.’
He marched back into the house, I assumed to call a breakdown service. He was gone for a couple of minutes and returned with a reassuring smile.
‘Lady Margaret has asked me to make up one of the guest rooms, sir. She would like to invite you to dinner.’
I remained motionless with my mouth hanging open. If I had a comfort zone, this was so far out I was afraid I would never find my way back again. I thought for half a second about getting a taxi, but it would have cost the best part of the fifty quid I had just earned and there were a lot of needy places for that money. I could have asked Douglas to drive me home in the Range Rover, but it didn’t occur to me at the time.
‘Well, that’s great, thank you,’ I heard myself saying, and crossed the courtyard back to the house. I paused in the hall.
‘This way, sir.’
‘Just a moment, I should text my wife,’ I said, and he stood there waiting while I did so.
Maggs rose from her chair as I entered the room. She must have taken a shower, her hair was combed but wet. She had changed into a green dress that shimmered like fish scales and matched her eyes.
‘I do love surprises,’ she said.
We finished the rest of the champagne and I had a glass of red wine with a dinner of cold chicken, a tomato salad and wedges of brown bread with olive oil served by Douglas. The cook was off for the weekend. I thought about asking where her husband was, but didn’t.
Classical music played through hidden speakers.
‘Do you like Bach?’ she asked.
‘If this is Bach, I like it,’ I replied.
‘The Brandenburg Concertos. They make me feel sad and happy to be alive. Do you know what I mean?’
‘Yes, sort of, I suppose.’
‘People live their lives without ever knowing who they really are. I have a feeling Bach knew exactly who he was and where he was going.’ She paused. ‘Do you?’ she then asked.
‘Absolutely. I want to make a go of the massage business so I’ve got enough money to give my three kids a decent start.’
‘That’s commendable. I like that,’ she said. ‘The secret of success isn’t knowing what you want – that will come. It is knowing what you don’t want.’
‘There are a lot of things people don’t want, they just have to put up with them.’
She thought about that but didn’t reply. We moved away from the table and sat in armchairs set either side of a low coffee table stacked with books that looked as if they had never been opened.
‘There was something I meant to ask you: what exactly is an Oriental twist? Does it come from the Kama Sutra?’
I shook my head. ‘No, nothing like that. Massage in the East is centred more on meditation. It’s about healing the mind as well as the body. That’s what I try to do.’
‘And you do it very well, I must say. I feel almost totally healed.’ She laughed. ‘The ladies of the Committee thought it meant something far more – esoteric.’
‘The Committee?’ I asked her and she churned the air with her fingers to dismiss the question.
‘It doesn’t mean anything,’ she said.
We carried on chatting. I realised that I had never really talked like this before. The nearest I ever got to what you might call intelligent conversation was with Pete.
As she went to pour more wine, I placed my hand over the glass.
‘Always say yes and try before you say no.’
‘I’ve already tried.’
‘Then try some more.’
She was lively, persuasive, as if everything in life were a pleasure and should be ignored if it weren’t. The wine tasted better the more I drank. I felt unsteady as the music reached a crescendo and watched Maggs cross the room to gaze out at the sky.
‘I adore the moon,’ she said. ‘I am one of those flowers that only bloom at night.’
Douglas appeared that second and Maggs waved over her shoulder as she left the room.
‘I’ll show you to your quarters, sir,’ Douglas said, and the way he said it made me smile. I was less self-conscious after that last glass of wine.
‘You weren’t in the army, by any chance?’
He pulled back his shoulders. ‘Man and boy. Twenty years in the Paras. If it moves, I’ve shot it. If it don’t, I’ve jumped on it.’
‘Bit of a change doing this?’
‘If you don’t change, you’re dead. I’m going to give it two more years and open a little boutique hotel down on the Adriatic. Can’t beat Italian women.’ He smiled. ‘Although I’d like to.’
‘Sounds like a plan.’
‘Plan for the worst. Hope for the best. Do that, son, and you can’t go far wrong.’
He led me up a rickety staircase to a bedroom with a slanted roof. There was a big four-poster bed and I wondered if Oliver Cromwell had spent the night there when his coach broke down.
Douglas pointed to the adjoining room. ‘Your bathroom. You’ll find everything you need.’
He was right. There was shampoo from Fortnum & Mason, shower gel, bars of soap still in their packaging. I stood under the hot needles of the shower trying to get my head back on straight. I was exhausted – mentally, physically, whichever way you could be exhausted, that’s how I felt. It had been a long hard week at the care home. Meeting ten beautiful women sounds like every man’s dream, but when it happens, it shakes the foundations of who you are. As for giving Lady Margaret a massage, it was something I didn’t even want to think about. My mind was racing. And I was thrilled to have fifty quid in my back pocket.
I curled up naked in the huge bed. I fell asleep instantly and thought I was seeing things when I suddenly woke up. The curtains were open. Starlight lit the room and Maggs was standing at the end of the bed like a ghost in her white silk gown. She let it fall to the floor. She pulled back the sheet, rubbed her nose against my nose then leaned back with her finger sealing her lips.
She kissed me, a real full-lipped, deep-tongued kiss that drove out any feelings of fatigue and lit my senses until they burned like fire. My cock was instantly hard and she wriggled down over my body to take me into her mouth. She licked my cock, plunged it into her throat, then flicked the tip of her tongue over the groove. She slipped one of my balls into her mouth, then the other. She sucked me until I was on the point of coming and stopped. She looked up.
‘You’re big, Ben,’ she whispered. She smiled. ‘Big Ben.’
As she spoke, she pulled towards me and I slipped up inside her. She rocked back and forth. I could feel the muscles of her sex tightening and releasing. Again I was on the point of orgasm when she slowed and stopped. She turne
d, lowered her vagina over my face and took my cock back down her throat. We came at the same time, long and hard and noisy. She sucked me dry, held my sperm in her mouth and let it trickle down my throat when we kissed.
She slipped over on her back, shuddering and sighing. ‘Big Ben,’ she murmured in a small voice and dipped down to take my softening cock back in her mouth. She sucked me until I was hard again, and we made love without hurry, slowly, gently, savouring every second.
5
IT’S ONLY SEX
The sun made patterns of brilliant light on the bed. I was unsure where I was until I spotted the portrait of Lady Margaret staring down from her position straddling a horse with a coat the same shade of chestnut as her hair. The room was stuffy and I opened the window. I was at the front of the house and could see a church spire over the trees.
How did I feel that morning?
I felt electric. Rewired. Fully charged. I felt as if I had grown two inches taller. I felt pleased with myself. I felt ashamed of myself. But, to be honest, more pleased than ashamed.
Sex with Kelly was natural, uncomplicated. She was a missionary position girl, trusting and inexperienced. She was an only child with elderly parents she had taken care of from the age of twelve. They’d gone quickly three weeks apart the year she turned eighteen. We had met shortly after when I was laying paving stones in the street where she lived. She had walked into a puddle of cement and looked really sad when she realised her shoes were ruined.
‘I’ll have to buy you a new pair,’ I said.
‘I’ll keep you to that.’
‘I’ll come round Saturday, half past ten.’
She shrugged. ‘That’s what they all say.’
‘They might say it, but I mean it. Saturday. You live near here.’
She paused for a moment, then pointed. ‘Number 22.’
I grinned. ‘I’m Ben. Pleased to meet you.’