Harry stood, swinging the chair aside. ‘No, you’re not,’ he said. ‘It’s 1909. You haven’t even met him. You’re not even born.’
He took my drained glass and set it down on the washstand with his. He seemed so immense, and the attic so small. He isn’t bulky or lumbering. He’s tall and broad-shouldered, and has big sure hands that make me feel safe. How cruel to keep him up here, I thought. He was like an animal in a zoo, placid and accepting because he knew no alternative.
Clearly, we had a lot in common. I can’t say I was happily married but ‘unhappily married’ wasn’t true either. I was simply married. It was fact much as the sky is blue is fact. After a while, you simply accept. You stop noticing whether you’re happy or not. You just keep turning up each day, cereals for breakfast, Radio 4 when they let you, a fortnight of foreign sun, and family birthdays ticking by. And, suddenly, that’s your life. If I was unhappy, then surely everyone else was.
‘It’s 1909,’ I echoed. His smile made me unusually bold and I plucked at my flimsy dress, murmuring, ‘I imagine I’m somewhat underdressed for the era.’
Grinning, he strolled towards me, hands in his pockets. His eyebrows tipped up. ‘I’d say you were overdressed, Mrs Townsend.’
I could see his intentions and I made to move but he grabbed me around the waist, making me stumble as he pulled me back to the door. His solid bulk sandwiched me to the wood, and his mouth fell on mine, wet and urgent, while his big hand pushed my dress up my leg, higher and higher. His rough palm grazed my skin and he kneaded my thigh with a touch that might have felt tender to him but to me it was dirty and crude, forceful and threatening. I swear, I nearly came on the spot.
‘Oh, Mrs Townsend,’ he whispered, dabbing kisses over my face.
His thumb found the elastic of my briefs, his other hand under my dress, squeezing my bottom.
‘No,’ I moaned. ‘I can’t do this. Please.’
He nudged my briefs down one hip, and then his hand swooped straight in there, parting my lips with one enormous finger. He held still, that finger lying along the crease of my vulva, its tip dipping into my milky entrance.
I rocked my head against the door, dodging his kisses. ‘No,’ I pleaded. ‘No.’
He smeared kisses over my neck, his fingertip rousing my juices.
‘I mustn’t,’ I breathed.
‘No one’ll ever know,’ he said, and pushed his finger in a little deeper.
I moaned, bending my knees and bearing down because I was in agony, so desperate to feel a thickness inside me.
‘I’ll know,’ I said, but I was starting not to care.
I cared even less when Harry dropped to his knees, pulling my underwear down my legs and scrunching my dress up by my hips. I was half-bared for him, conscious of how lewd the exposure was, my hair a wild brown flare beneath the decorum of my summer dress, my lust making me engorged and pink and shockingly sexual. I tilted my hips to him, and his hands spanned my thighs, thumbs running higher to rub my wanton sex-lips. My briefs were stretched tight between my knees and I couldn’t open myself as wide as I wished. But, believe me, it wasn’t a problem. Being dishevelled and half-dressed was sublime. I hadn’t been seduced for years. Robert and I start from naked and horizontal, or we don’t start at all. Mainly, we don’t start at all.
Harry’s big fingers took my lips in a gentle pinch and he peeled me apart, feasting his eyes on me, all spread and scarlet, and gleaming with greed.
‘What a beautiful little quim,’ he said. And then his tongue was right there, spread on my sex, and his two broad fingers twisted inside me.
Oh, what noises I made. I hardly recognised myself. I didn’t give a thought to what lay beyond the door. Quim! I felt like a medieval fruit: quince or medlar, something unusual and precious, and not for the masses. I held my dress high as he plunged and lapped. He nipped my clitoris in his lips, sucking me softly, and then he built me up in a way that makes me eternally grateful, two fingers inside me, two more on my point, circling and circling as if we had all the time in the world. He was so patient, steady and focused, a gentleman of the highest order. My knees were bent open, briefs at full stretch, and I was sliding against the door, gasping and whimpering, my climax rising till I reached a sumptuous convulsive peak that left me fizzing from my toes to my ears.
Gosh. 3.2 on the Richter scale? I beat that hands down.
He held me gently, cupping my head to his chest and mussing my straggly hair. He must have known how much he’d affected me. Years of emptiness and despair were turning into something else. His shirt absorbed a tear or two, and it’s hard to say whether they were tears of joy or sorrow. Each salty droplet held too much emotion to be named as one thing or another.
After a while, I whispered, ‘Now what?’
Harry released me, planted his hands either side of my head and grinned down. ‘Now you have to strip, Mrs T.’
I shook my head. ‘I can’t, I mustn’t. I have to leave. How did I get here? Can I … can I get back to my family?’
‘You can get back,’ he said firmly. ‘Come to bed, why don’t you, and I’ll tell you how.’
Again, I shook my head, pressing my lips shut so as not to say a word but I was thinking of one, a big one: Robert.
Robert would know. He’d find out. He’d see the guilt on my face and smell the man on my clothes. And yet, even as I was thinking this, I was correcting myself. As if Robert would notice! He stopped seeing me a long time ago. I bet he wouldn’t even blink if I sat down to dinner with Harry’s come in my hair.
‘If I leave, can I return or is this it?’ I asked. ‘What happened? How did I get here?’
Harry covered my breast with a hard massaging hand. ‘There’s a temporal faultline around here. It shifts sometimes. A new gap opens up like it did today. You fell into it. And you can fall in again and again and again.’ His hand caressed my flesh in time with his words. Again and again.
‘I really have to go,’ I said. ‘Please, stop. I want to leave.’
He angled his big thigh across mine and began hoiking up my dress again. ‘No, you don’t,’ he said. ‘You want to stay. You want to throw yourself on that bed, naked as a bairn with your legs spread wide so I can fuck you like you’ve always dreamt.’
He was right. My God, he was right! But I fought against him. I’m a married woman. I am Ruth Townsend, mother of two, wife of one. I live in steady respectable Leamington Spa. I am not someone whose dreams come true.
I pushed against him, my hand having no impact on his chest. I pushed at softer bits, at his waist, his belly, his neck. My thigh wriggled under his. I tore at his groping hand. ‘Get off me! Let go! You … you bastard!’ I thumped my fist on his chest, my head rolling like a beast’s. ‘Don’t you dare –’
And then I was back in our attic, slumped against the door, a shirt button in my fist, gasping for breath. Harry was gone. His bedroom had vanished. And instead I was surrounded by great piles of rags and rubbish, and that sodding exercise bike I used to pedal for hours every week. Round and round, staring at the wall, and it never got me anywhere. The kilometres kept mounting and I never fucking moved.
I sank to the floor, head in my hands, and, before long, I was weeping like I hadn’t done for years. All those kilometres and I never fucking moved.
In the lingerie department, I held up a pair of lemon-yellow cami-knickers. In my mind I heard him speak, ending on those two distinct syllables: ‘Mrs Towns End’. The camis went in my basket along with all the others, a watercolour swirl of ivory lace, pale-blue tactel, shrimp-pink silk and three new bras to give me an extra lift.
Lift? I didn’t need an extra lift! I was as high as a kite and I wasn’t coming down.
The beats of my heart kept saying, yes, yes. I didn’t fret about my shoddy morals, or what my sister-in-law might say. I was falling in love and that trumped everything. I was the epitome of devil-may-care. I didn’t even need an alibi because time stood still when I was with Harry. When I’d found m
yself back in the real attic, the hands of my watch hadn’t even moved. Or, if they had, it could only have been by a couple of minutes.
At lunchtimes, I walked around the shops in a daze, trying on clothes I wouldn’t normally dare touch. I preened in front of changing-room mirrors. Is this too low? Will they tut and mutter about mutton dressed as lamb? Do I give a monkey’s if they do?
And no, I jolly well didn’t because for once I believed that I was lamb. I was tender, pink, young and free. I was the lamb to Harry’s huge, masculine, heedless slaughter. And I wanted him to do to me exactly what he said. I wanted him to fuck me like I’d always dreamt, right there on his little cast-iron bed.
But I didn’t go back for a while. It was almost enough that it had happened, a moment out of time I could treasure forever. Almost enough. I wasn’t even sure I’d be able to get back, either. Something peculiar happened around the attic door but details were lacking. Should I simply stand there, wishing for an earthquake? But no. Again and again, he’d said. I could fall again and again. And oh, in so many ways, I believed that.
Before long, I made a decision: I had to return. At the very least, it would be rude not to. He’d brought me to a devastating climax and I hadn’t so much as tickled his button fly or whatever went on down there in 1909. I ought to slip back a century to express my gratitude.
I was alone in the living room, rummaging through the bureau for a notepad to write a letter to Cora’s teacher for the next day. ‘Dear Miss Stevens, I’m afraid Cora doesn’t have her PE kit today because I forgot to wash it, and anyway she hates Games.’ I was wondering what I should wear for my return (another pretty dress and better underwear), and a song was running through my head: ‘I’m just wild about Ha-ree! And Harry’s wild about me!’
We don’t have pets in our family so, when movement caught my eye, I was surprised. I turned to see a woman about the size of a cat on her hands and knees, crawling across the living-room floor. She was wearing a black housemaid’s outfit complete with white apron and mobcap.
I screamed several short blasts because that was the only way I could breathe. The woman kept crawling, oblivious to me, but, by the time Robert arrived, she’d disappeared.
‘A mouse! A mouse!’ I cried.
‘Where?’ asked Robert, slamming the door behind him. ‘Where did it go?’
‘Behind the sofa,’ I said, and it was true, although the mouse part was obviously a lie.
On the other side of the door, Cora and Lucas clamoured to know what the fuss was about. ‘What is it?’ asked Cora, worried. ‘Is Mum OK?’
‘Mum’s fine,’ called Robert. ‘We’ve got a mouse, that’s all.’
‘Cool!’ said Lucas. ‘Can we come in?’
‘Wait!’ ordered Robert as the door handle tipped. ‘We don’t want it to get into the rest of the house.’
Of course, we didn’t find a thing, not even a miniature maidservant.
‘Are you sure you saw a mouse?’ Robert asked later. ‘I can’t see where it would’ve got to. We’ve looked everywhere. How’s your vision? Maybe you ought to get that bump checked out.’
‘The bump’s gone and my vision’s fine,’ I said.
I knocked my head during the earthquake, you see. The house didn’t shake that much but I obviously turned too quickly and caught the edge of the door. Oh, I know what you’re thinking: that I must have conked out and that 1909 is nothing but a dream. I do understand. I might have thought that too if I hadn’t come back with the button from Harry’s shirt. It was a tiny fragile-looking button, at a guess made of bone, white thread dangling through its holes. I would clutch it in my fist, thinking, this button is real and so is Harry. As real as the hunger that’s coursing through my veins.
But I didn’t dare visit him again, not after the housemaid. I thought it was my fault. Either guilt was making me hallucinate or I’d brought some of Harry’s world into ours, managing to shrink it along the way. It was a warning. I had to stop before it was too late. Whenever I thought about returning, I’d imagine lots of little servants crawling around our house. How on earth would I explain that to Robert and the kids?
Oh, but it was impossible. I ached for him so badly I began to feel quite demented. I didn’t know which was worse: the madness of going back to him or the madness of staying away. I was still undecided about this when the walls in Robert’s study started to sweat. I was in there with the intention of closing the curtains one evening, and I’d been standing there a while, not wanting to close them because the sky above the white townhouses was such a beautiful sheet of peach. What sky does Harry look out on tonight, I wondered, and then I noticed a sudden rise in temperature. Moments later, tiny beads of liquid prickled on the surface of a patch of wallpaper. It looked not unlike condensation and, as the droplets began to trickle, another patch appeared behind the computer, and then another below the dado rail, and another and another.
I wiped my hand across the surface and my fingers were wet. I dashed out on to the landing to grab a towel that was hung over the banister (I wish they wouldn’t do that), then began dabbing the walls dry, swabbing at patches as quickly as they formed.
It was hard to keep up and I don’t know how long I was doing it for. I only stopped when I heard Robert’s voice in the doorway. ‘Ruth,’ he said calmly. ‘What’s wrong with you these days?’
The walls had stopped sweating. There wasn’t a drop to be seen. I felt such a fool, puffing and panting, clutching my crumpled towel. I righted the desk lamp and set the computer mouse back on its mat.
‘I really think you ought to go and see Dr Chadwick,’ said Robert. ‘Perhaps you’re overtired.’
Dr Chadwick left the surgery years ago. We have Dr Patel now, but Robert’s not going to know that, is he?
‘Yes, yes,’ I said. ‘I’ll make an appointment.’
I didn’t make an appointment. Instead, I went to hurl myself against the attic door when everyone was out, praying I’d go tumbling into that rabbit hole. It took several attempts and fortunately there was no one to see me because I must have looked a fool, trying to recreate my own earthquake by spinning and falling, the door banging shut as I pretended to stumble. My shoulder was quite sore the following day.
I might have been sobbing slightly when I broke through because I was starting to grow frustrated, fearing I’d never see him again. But suddenly I was in 1909, pressed against his door, and I dashed away a tear, calm settling around me. Harry wasn’t remotely startled.
Standing by the washstand, he was naked from the waist up, splashing water on to his chest and soaping his armpits. I could have stood there all day, watching droplets spill over his pale healthy contours and explode at his feet in a pitter-patter of splashes. I felt such a happy sense of peace, and the urge to tell him about the strange goings-on at home slipped clean away.
Harry crossed the room, rubbing himself briskly with a small towel. His forearms were polished brawn, and his nipples were dusky-pink buttons within a haze of dark hair. His abdomen seemed deliciously old-fashioned, its muscled strength overlaid with a subcutaneous softness I wanted to clamp my fingers and lips to.
‘Mrs Townsend,’ he said, smiling. He flung the towel on to the bed before he reached me, brown twinkly eyes never once leaving mine.
For one tiny instinctive second, that towel irked me, then I remembered it wasn’t my responsibility. To hell with damp towels! To hell with responsibility!
Resting his big hands on my hips, Harry bent to nuzzle under my hair, kissing my neck and making little noises like ‘mmm’. I leant my head back, offering him the stretch of my throat before I tiptoed to suck on the damp skin of his shoulder. He tasted of fresh cool water and I was melting faster than butter in a desert, my hands scooting over the slippery skin of his hard wet back.
‘Oh, Harry,’ I said, adoring his name.
Our kisses were big and wild, his lips so moist and mobile. His body made damp patches on my dress, cooling the skin beneath, and before long I was
practically faint with lust.
‘I’ve been dreaming about you,’ he said, and he undid the first button of my dress.
I’d chosen to wear a slightly shabby dress which for some reason I feel very sexy in. It was apple green with a pattern like creamy sprigs of elderflower, and those colours suit me because I have a pale skin and ash-blonde hair that, admittedly, gets ashier each year. The dress looks better than it sounds. It clings to my figure without being slinky, and I enjoy the way it swings when I walk.
I, however, look worse than I sound. ‘Waxy,’ Robert once said of my wintertime complexion, presumably thinking our marriage was strong enough he could insult me with impunity. He was probably right. Sometimes I do feel waxy, as if I ought to be in Tussauds, smiling blankly and giving the impression of life. But that’s beside the point, isn’t it? You don’t go telling your wife she’s waxy.
‘Were they good dreams?’ I whispered, as Harry undid the second button, big fingers fumbling on little fastenings. It was difficult for me to talk because he was gazing down at my newly boosted cleavage, and a hint of lemon-yellow bra. Let me tell you, there was nothing waxy there!
He raised a glance to my eyes. ‘Bad ones, Mrs Townsend,’ he cooed. ‘Very bad indeed.’
I should perhaps mention that my dress buttons all the way down, so, when Harry undid the third and fourth button, I realised where this was leading. He gazed at my exposed flesh, untied the belt around my waist and continued with five and six. His fingers were ticklish on my belly and I held my stomach in and arched my back because you do, don’t you?
‘In what way were they bad?’ I breathed.
Harry shook his head, feigning reproach. The edge of my pastel-yellow camis were revealed. Button seven, and I knew he could see the gold-brown of my hair crushed beneath the lace.
‘Oh, the things you make me do to you,’ he said, and he dropped to his knees to undo eight and nine. My thighs were on show, right in front of his face, and then, with ten, eleven, twelve, I was split all the way open, my dress parting like a pair of curtains. Harry looked up at me, his hands moving on the back of my knees, his gaze dancing over my near-naked stripe of body. Then he stood, and my heart was galloping as he eased the dress over my shoulders. I let it slide down my arms and fall, the buttons clattering lightly as they hit the wooden floor. The rough wool of his trousers brushed against one thigh as he reached behind me to unfasten my bra. His fingers were devilishly adept, and it was obvious he’d removed bras before.
Love on the Dark Side Page 5