“Oh no!”
George heard a plaintive cry from above. He refused to move, remaining rooted in his study chair.
“Oh, George!”
Another cry. Then a clattering of feet downstairs as they came down to confront him. Carol entered his study first and, again, George did not want to face her. But he had to.
It was Sally, however, who spoke up. “Two single beds, George! Not much opportunity for sexual adventures there! What a comment that makes about personal relationships…”
“So don’t comment. Please don’t!” George just sat there with a wooden expression on his face. He was facing two attractive, extrovert and highly sensual women and couldn’t help comparing them to the one with whom he had chosen to spend the rest of his life. Suddenly he felt as miserable as sin.
Carol uttered not a word but her face said it all. Sadness written all over it.
Magical Rosie came forward and licked George’s hand as if in consolation. She knew too. Being married to the Dragon was no fun.
There was a cold, stony silence for a few seconds and the two women looked at each other as George lowered his head. Then Carol changed the subject. Away from the subject that none of them actually wanted to mention.
“Right, George, now we’ve got you here…time to tell us about this morning. You promised you would. So what were you doing at St Bart’s and how did this involve a black greyhound?”
George saw an opportunity to use the depressed silence they were all anxious to avoid as a cover for his early-morning antics.
“Um, erm, I said I’d seen no other dog earlier today…that was not, er, strictly true. I did see a black greyhound in college before I got to your office, Carol…”
“Aha! Now the criminal speaks. What were you doing there, eh? And has this dog got anything to do with you wandering about in pyjamas?”
“My sleeping arrangements, my movements about in pyjamas and my relations with my wife are a private matter and I absolutely refuse to discuss those with you. I did, however, meet up with a spectacularly handsome and fit black greyhound and did encourage him to show off somewhat.” George rubbed his shoulder at this point as the memory of a certain painful collision returned to him. He could still feel the bruising.
“And?”
“And so this remarkable creature did indeed dash about like lightning in a box and spread, erm, a certain amount of confusion about him. He went out of the dining hall and down the corridor towards your office, Carol, where I lost him – to go I know not where. And I didn’t know it was your office, Carol, when I entered it. I was tired and looking for a place to rest, and the door announced that this was the office of the Student Welfare Officer, that’s all. I had no idea that that was you.”
In recounting all this, George made himself sound as sincere as possible – not too difficult since that story was not so very far from the truth.
“George – are you making this all up as you go along?” Carol peered at him, her beautiful eyes searching his own. George’s own eyes flared up in return as he struggled to control his feelings but he held her gaze just long enough to confirm he was telling the truth. Not all the truth, but enough to make his account sufficiently credible.
“No, I’m not making this up. I’m telling you exactly what happened.” He had to look away. Electricity began to sizzle between them; George’s temperature was rising and he was beginning to sweat. God, he thought, this is killing me! I’ve got to get this woman out of this place and away from me as soon as possible or I won’t be responsible for my actions…
Carol saw his eyes looking at her and she hurriedly turned her attention to her friend. “What do you think, Sally? Is he on the level?”
Sally could see George’s reddening face and had no wish to prolong his agony and sexual frustration any further. “Yeah,” she said. “I think he’s telling the truth this time. Let him go!”
George huffed and sat up in his chair. He shook his head as if trying to clear his brain and get a grip on his emotions.
He decided to return to combative mode. “Let me go? Am I your prisoner now? Can I remind you that you are currently sitting in my home and it is I that shall let you go. And please go as far away from here and as quickly as possible now, thank you very much! I have had a very trying morning and am in need of peace, quiet and recuperation which you hyperactive two very clearly have no inkling of how to create.”
Carol grinned as George’s spirit rose and as he went for them on the attack. This was an altogether healthier note to leave him on. She replied in kind, “You are an ungrateful beast, George. Sally and I have saved your bacon this morning and have even left you with an excellent alibi if anyone asks of Barry who was that strange fellow wandering about in pyjamas this morning. We will leave you now – I’ve got a number of students and a pile of paperwork waiting for me in my office that you interrupted earlier – but don’t think you are getting rid of us for long. In fact, give me your mobile number. We shall be back to save your life at some time in the future. You are our project to work on, remember. You have two professional psychologists here just itching to release you from your self-inflicted chains!”
“Save my life? Plague it more likely!” George rose to the bait. But he gave Carol his number and, after another less than subtle reminder, he graciously thanked her for organising her act of rescue. He wouldn’t admit it but he secretly relished the thought of seeing her again – no matter if she and her friend were the most dangerous and disturbing influences he had ever met in his entire life before. Like sirens singing to him from the distance, he was irresistibly drawn towards them, and he knew that, for better or worse, his life was on the cusp of momentous change.
Chapter 7
George was in a very subdued mood that Monday evening when his wife returned home. She, of course, came blustering in from work barely able to contain her fury at what had transpired during the day – an uninvited alien visitor somehow appearing and disappearing in her ordered environment, her college, knocking over all and sundry and upsetting the established routine. George pretended to listen and put on a face of shocked concern as his wife vented her anger but he couldn’t keep it up for long. He thought of trying to deflect her attention as soon as she drew breath in her tirade.
“Have you been watering the patio plants recently, dear? The weather’s been hotting up of late. I seem to remember Stephen Maxwell saying a little while back that they need some attention. Does he mean re-potting?”
Annabel Potts stopped in surprise. Her husband showing some interest in gardening? And he was right to be concerned about the patio plants, too – a fair bit of maintenance was necessary with them to prepare for the summer. She really ought to go seek advice from her neighbour.
“Do you know, I think they might! Thank you, George. So good of you to show an interest at last. I’ll have to ask Stevie to pop around and look at them this weekend and see what he recommends. You can never be too careful. I don’t want to lose any of my beauties…”
George cringed. She spoke of her plants as if they were her pets, as if they had feelings of their own – whereas he knew that any cat or dog in the neighbourhood she would gratefully string up, if given half a chance. And now he’d gone and given her an excuse to have Smarmy Stephen around to visit. He couldn’t stomach that – he’d have to go out for the day.
“Yes, dear,” he agreed. He was racking his brains to think of an excuse to disappear for as long as possible on Saturday or Sunday. Then an idea occurred to him.
“Why don’t you ask him to come over on Saturday? I’ve got to go in to Durham that morning to examine the university’s plans to buy up some council property, so I can get out of your hair and leave you two to the garden. What do you think?”
It was as good a ruse as any. The university’s expansion plans had been talked about for the last year at least and there was still a lot of talking to be done before the project got underway. George could stay out under that pretence for as lon
g as he liked. If the weather was good he would like that very much. A long walk out in the countryside beckoned.
It was decided. Annabel spent the next half hour on the phone, clucking like a contented hen with Smarmy Stephen and arranging a gardening get-together for the weekend, leaving George in his study, solemnly reflecting on the eventful day that he had had and what it all signified.
George’s self-esteem had hit a low point. The contrasting emotions, and bodily forms, he had been through that day had brought him finally to wonder where he was and what he had achieved in his life. Not much, he concluded. The experience of dashing around as a greyhound had pointed out all that he had not done as a man. He was not a dashing sort of fellow, after all. And the sad fact was, he rather preferred being a dog! George wondered idly what concatenation of events had led to him to wake up as a super-fit, black greyhound. He wondered also, if he wasn’t careful somehow, whether or not it would happen again. Equally, if it did, and given the most embarrassing consequences of his later return to human form, he puzzled over whether he might actually be able to control his metamorphoses. If so, all sorts of wild possibilities lay before him. He rather liked that idea. Ensconced in his study, locked into his own thoughts, George found himself most unexpectedly envying a dog’s life rather than that of a fully grown man.
Nothing much happened to him over the next few days, however. George returned to routine at work, apologising for his absence on Monday where he truthfully recounted that he really couldn’t explain exactly what had come over him, only that he wasn’t feeling his usual self that day. Completely out of sorts, he said. He ventured the notion that maybe he had picked up some sort of malarial illness – you know, those bugs that invade your system and that you can never quite quit: they flare up now and again and lay you low unexpectedly for a while. Had he ever been to the tropics? Well no, but he had met any number of people who had and maybe it was catching?
It was only one day off, of course, and his colleagues were not really put out that much. No medical note was requested. It was just George, being a bit idiosyncratic as always and as we all have a right to be – but he was always as regular and reliable and about as full of surprises as an old clock. So it was back to work as before and life in the office maintained its efficient progress with hardly a hiccup such that by Friday, if anyone had asked, no one would have remembered that George had been anywhere else but at his desk all week.
Then, at one pm whilst he was just delving into his packed lunch, George’s mobile rang. It was Carol.
“Hello, Professor, you old rascal, are you in your night wear today? Or is the experiment concluded?”
George spluttered over his ham and cheese sandwich. He looked round hastily. The office was half–empty with those in the nearest workstations away in the canteen. He nonetheless kept his voice down.
“There was never any experiment – that was your own crazy idea,” he whispered.
“It was your crazy idea to appear in college in pyjamas!”
George didn’t want to get into that topic of conversation. “Yes, yes, nice of you to remind me. What do you want? I’m busy at work at the moment.”
“Really? Lion taming, is it? High-wire act? How many other clowns with you?”
“Ha, ha. Very funny. Now suppose you tell me why you called…”
“Well actually, George, Sally and I have been talking…” (I bet they have, thought George, they probably haven’t stopped talking all week.) “…and we’ve decided to take you out this weekend. Give you a run, so to speak, with Rosie. We are going up to a beach on the Northumberland coast, and we are taking a picnic, and we thought that this was just the occasion to invite you to come along. Get you out and liberate you. Shake the dust off you that’s been accumulating for decades. So you have to come. It’s decided.”
“Very kind of you for thinking of me, Carol, but I do not need liberating. You and your friend, on the other hand, need to be locked up, kept off the streets and prevented from ruining other people’s lives. Especially mine.”
“George, that is most ungrateful of you. If you remember correctly it was you that was on the verge of ruin last time we met and it was we who rescued you. Now I come to think of it, I should have just left you to your own devices on Monday; let you run the gauntlet of trying to get out of college without the housekeeper or any of her staff seeing you.”
“Ooof!” George shivered.
Carol smiled. She still didn’t know what he had been up to that morning, wandering around St Bart’s in his pyjamas, but it didn’t matter. She’d struck home with that gibe.
“Come out with us, George. You know you have to.”
She was right. He couldn’t resist. But George wasn’t giving way without a fight.
“Young lady, you are the most sadistic torturess I have ever encountered and I flatly refuse to go anywhere with you, at any time, unless…” George paused for effect and to get his listener’s full attention, “…unless you promise to behave properly and not insult, upset or otherwise offend my company. If you do so promise, I might just accept your offer of a picnic with Rosie. She at least is a responsible companion.”
There was burst of cackling down the line. George surmised that both Carol and Sally were listening in to his reply. He was not similarly amused
“I’m waiting for an answer.”
“Yes, George, we both promise, don’t we, Sal?” Carol couldn’t stop laughing. “We love you to bits really.”
Oh yeah, thought George. They could promise away until they were blue in the face but he knew it didn’t mean anything. They would continue to make his life uncomfortable, whatever he did or said or tried to arrange. He knew he would have to put up with whatever they threw at him. He was actually quite flattered that they wanted to see him, no matter if it was only to see him writhe in agony at their expense.
“As it happens, I was going out for a walk on my own tomorrow morning anyway, so if it’s a picnic with you tomorrow it’s a deal. Not on Sunday, however. I shall need a day to get over you, I’m sure.”
More laughter down the phone. However, arrangements were concluded: George would meet his escorts in town at 9.30 am and they would conduct him, as before with Rosie in the back of the mini, an hour or so’s journey up to Northumberland to embrace its magnificent coastline.
Saturday morning dawned bright and cheerful and George couldn’t wait to finish breakfast and prepare himself for his day’s excursion. He told Annabel that he would lunch out and probably go for a walk in the afternoon if his business concluded satisfactorily before then. He hoped she would enjoy herself gardening and busying about at home after the troublesome week she had had at work. Annabel said thank you, she certainly planned to enjoy herself, that George should do too and he was not to hurry back on her account – though would he call so she could get tea ready? Of course! Everything was so jolly between them. Maybe his married life wasn’t a prison sentence after all?
George left the house ridiculously early and, with an hour before his scheduled meeting time, he decided to walk into Durham rather than take his motor. He would still have plenty of time to stop at the supermarket en route and buy some provisions for the picnic – come to think of it, since he would not be driving he could take the opportunity to indulge in his favourite tipple: malt whisky. Yes – an excellent plan.
When Sally and Carol found him, George was walking along somewhat absent-mindedly with a carrier bag in his hand and a slow smile spreading across his face. As he climbed across to the rear seat of the mini, his carrier bag gave out a revealing clink and…and was there the smell of alcohol on his breath?
“George, have you been drinking already?” Carol looked at him accusingly.
“Me? Would I ever? Hello, Rosie, old girl. Lovely to make your acquaintance again…”
“George, this is simply disgraceful. If you’ve started boozing already then what are you going to be like later in the day? I have no intention of sharing a picnic with a drun
ken old sot!”
“Shall we kick him out before we start, Carol?” Sally joined in.
George settled himself in the back of the mini and arranged Rosie’s head on his lap. He looked up and grinned at the two women who were scowling at him. This was going to be an entertaining day, he could feel it already. He made a point of not attempting to move a muscle.
“Ladies, please forgive me but the thought of spending the next few hours in your company did in fact drive me to drink. Only a small tot, please be assured, but a necessary precaution given what I am undoubtedly going to suffer at your hands. If you can restrain yourselves in my presence however, and refrain from making me a constant source of your amusement then I shall not resort to the bottle every couple of minutes. Indeed, I might even learn to enjoy your friendship…OK?”
Carol elaborately turned her back on him and sat down. “Agreed,” she snorted. “It’s a truce…for now.”
George smiled to himself. Round one to me, he thought. “Come on, Sally,” he cried out, “get moving – we’ve got a long way to go.”
The two girls looked at one another as Sally put the car in gear and they accelerated away. They couldn’t help a slight grin at each other too.
Saturday mornings, the main roads in and around Newcastle were busy so the mini took a little longer than anticipated to get clear of the conurbation and strike out north in the direction of the coast. They wandered a little, looking for byways that were not clogged with parked cars and searching for a side road that would take them to an appropriately deserted beach where they could spread themselves out and relax in the sun. It was gone eleven am when they finally arrived at their destination, and it was getting hot too. By the time they had found the spot they wanted, George was itching to free his long legs from the back seat of the car and go off on a walk over the sand dunes. He took Rosie and left the girls to sort out the blankets and the various bags of food and drink they had brought for the picnic.
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