Deborah laughed. ‘A kind thought, but . . .’
‘Just what every girl needs to get her over the seven-year itch. Now, if I find you a sugar daddy, will you do something for me? Take young Alex with you next time you go sightseeing. He sits around here all day doing absolutely nothing but reading. Drives Jock mad with his apathy and laziness. They get on each other’s nerves most frightfully. Jock’s always correcting the way he speaks and going on about how he’s paid for him to go to one of the best schools in the world and why does he talk like a dustman. Most unfair, really. Alex sounds like any other teenager, but you know how pernickety Jock is. Always writing to The Times about grammar.’
Deborah smiled. ‘Maybe he is kind of old-fashioned.’
‘Old-fashioned? Prehistoric is the word. And then he goes on about how it’s a wonder Alex has the energy to get up in the morning. And how is he going to manage when he gets to Oxford and why isn’t he studying more? Though of course Jock disapproves of psychology – that’s what Alex is going to read. He thinks Alex should be studying something sensible like economics. But I said to him, “Jock old thing, just be thankful the boy hasn’t insisted on art school instead.” Alex is quite arty, you know. Did I tell you his mother was a painter of sorts? She used to do rather murky, watery water colours, quite nice if you like that sort of thing.’
‘But you didn’t.’
‘Not much. I put most of her paintings in the attic. Jock never noticed.’ Poppy laughed. ‘Well, anyway, about Alex. Jock thinks I ought to take the boy about more, show him some island culture, but, as you know, sweetie, I do try to be a good step-mama, but I’m not keen on native art and things, and I am so fearfully committed to my bridge – you would have thought a husband would understand that after all these years of marriage.’
‘Yes,’ said Deborah, thinking more about the attractions of Alex than Jock’s general insensitivity.
‘Of course, I’m keen on social life and I did make the effort to introduce Alex to some of the young people here,’ continued Poppy plaintively, ‘but he just said they were boring. I’m at my wits’ end. If you could just inspire him, chuck a tiny bit of culture at him, see some of the less tedious sights, sweetie, I’d be eternally grateful. I know he likes you and the children.’
*
During the weeks that followed, Deborah did as she was asked. She took Alex with her around the city. They visited the museum, the four biggest temples and the bird sanctuary. Sometimes she took the children along too, but mostly she did not. Alex was an attentive and charming companion. Too attentive and too charming at times, thought Deborah. She knew he had a crush on her and was flattered. Of course, he was too young to take seriously, but it was kind of nice to be on the receiving end of so much admiration. It was admiration that would have to be kept at a distance.
All the while that she was telling herself to stand back, Deborah was letting herself grow closer to Alex. The sightseeing trips became more and more lengthy when he decided to take up sketching the scenery. He hadn’t painted for a year, he said, but she inspired him. He even insisted she sit for a pencil portrait, but in the end he refused to show her the result. She took the children to swim at Poppy’s pool three or four times a week, and Alex was always at home. In the company of others, she treated him in a friendly casual manner, but when they were alone she would sometimes find herself acknowledging his unspoken desire. Not with words or touch, just with longish looks from underneath her eyelashes. She hoped that nobody had intercepted one of these looks because, broad-minded though Poppy was, she obviously would not care for her eighteen-year-old stepson to be seduced by a married woman.
It was even possible that Alex was still a virgin. ‘Did you have a girlfriend at school, Alex?’ she asked him one day.
He smiled. ‘There aren’t any women. It’s a boys’ school.’
‘Yes, but there must have been girls around. Didn’t you meet any girls in the town?’
‘Not really.’
‘How about that girls’ school nearby you told me about? You must have met a few of those girls. Didn’t you have a special one?’
‘There were some I liked, but no deep meaningful relationships, if that’s what you’re trying to find out.’
‘I don’t believe you, Alex. You’re a very good-looking boy, you must have a girlfriend.’
‘Maybe I’m a late developer,’ he said with a lazy smile.
Then one evening he came around to her apartment with a plastic duck that Sam had left behind. Deborah did not say that Sam was always leaving toys at Poppy’s and that normally they were retrieved at the next visit. She invited Alex to have a drink.
Accepting a beer, he gulped it down. ‘Where’s your husband?’
‘Oh, he’s not home yet.’
‘Is he coming back for dinner?’
‘No, I guess not.’
Alex began a long earnest, excited talk about the meaning of life, the future and the origins of the universe.
Either he never speaks or he won’t stop, thought Deborah, as she sat and listened, watching his mobile face. No doubt his clothes were the despair of Poppy’s immaculate maids. He wore torn faded black jeans and scuffed sneakers. His white T-shirt was shrunk tight over his muscular arms and chest.
More than anything Deborah wanted to touch him. As if he read her thoughts, he stood up and began to move towards her.
Quickly she forced herself to ask a polite question, something, anything to distract him. ‘D’you have to do much reading to prepare yourself for your psychology degree?’
He stared at her and then sat down again. ‘Well, yes, there’s a reading list and I bought about ten books with terrifying titles. Trouble is, if you can’t understand the titles, you don’t feel you’ve got much hope with the text. Still I’m learning the jargon; like in cognitive science you study the mind through the use of computers. I mean, if you know how computers operate, it may help you to study how the brain works.’
‘Right, so in a year or two, you’ll be analysing us all.’
‘Well, not exactly. I’m not doing psychoanalysis in the way you think. Psychology is the study of the mind and human behaviour, as opposed to psychiatry where you’re a doctor curing sick minds.’
Deborah smiled. She liked his impassioned way of speaking.
‘I’m not going to be a doctor,’ he went on. ‘Or cure people’s minds – just study them, and do research. Though some clinical psychologists go in for psychotherapy, I suppose, but that’s just not me.’
‘But you must eventually make use of your studies – to give advice, in your job, I mean – if only to work out what makes people buy a brand of detergent.’
He looked offended. ‘I’m not interested in the psychology of soap.’
‘So what are you going to be? Are you going to be an educational or maybe an industrial psychologist?’
His shoulders tensed. ‘Don’t you start! That’s what’s nice about you. Normally you don’t ask those sorts of questions. Dad and Poppy are constantly banging on. I just don’t know what I’ll do eventually. Maybe I’ll just drop out, paint, whatever.’
‘Before you drop out, you may as well study a bit. Now just tell me what you’ve read about so far, in those psychology books, I mean.’
‘Do you really want to know? Dad thinks it’s a very phoney subject. He says it’s just chaps sitting about doing crazy experiments to prove something that’s common sense anyway.’
‘I really do want to hear about it. Maybe because I’m American and we have all sorts of crazy ideas. It sounds pretty interesting to me.’
So she sat and listened some more, telling herself that she was doing the right thing in drawing him out, letting him talk in a relaxed kind of way.
‘Did you know,’ he said earnestly, ‘that there’s been some research about happiness in marriage? Some statistics that prove—’
‘Hard to measure with statistics,’ she murmured.
‘Yeah, but the findings were that
marriage is good for men – married men are the happiest, most contented. Divorced and single men aren’t happy at all. But it’s different with women. The majority of married women are less happy with their marriage than men are. So marriage is better for men than it is for women. Surprising, isn’t it?’
‘Mm, I think I read about that survey,’ she said. ‘Maybe it’s a generalization that’s true, or maybe women spend more time sitting about wondering whether they’re happy or not. And people sure don’t seem to like being divorced as much as they think they’re going to – not that I’ve done a whole lot of research.’
‘Yes, and according to a book I’ve read on child development, children of divorced parents . . .’ He went on to tell her some more facts and figures.
She let him talk on, sometimes tempted to agree with his father about psychologists going to a whole load of trouble to prove the obvious. But Alex’s enthusiasm for his subject was so sincere that she refrained from cynical remarks.
Eventually, after listening to a dissertation about toddler behaviour, she said, ‘D’you know, I think I could have written that book myself. A Case Study of Two Kids by Deborah who researches all day and all night.’
He laughed. ‘Yes, but I bet you didn’t know that even a five-week-old baby can recognize his mother’s photograph among several others and can call it up on a screen by learning a pattern of sucking and gestures.’
‘Hey, that’s amazing. But you can tell me more another time. Poppy must be expecting you at dinner.’
He looked at his watch. ‘They were going to a cocktail party first. But I suppose I’d better leave. Dad gets very uptight about mealtimes.’
She led him to the door. ‘I don’t really want to go,’ he said suddenly, his eyes fixed on hers.
‘I think you’d better. Goodnight, Alex.’ Deborah quickly shut the door behind him.
She lay awake that night for a long time, thinking.
Apart from her brief encounter with Howard, she had not been unfaithful to Johnny despite the years of provocation. She felt she had every excuse to take a lover, but Alex was not the right person. As she had already told herself, he was too young, too vulnerable. He might become too emotionally involved, and it was immoral to seduce the young. She’d feel guilty. That would be descending to her husband’s level of behaviour. So she would have to put a stop to the whole thing, before anything happened.
But week after week she continued to meet Alex and he would tell her how much he liked talking to her, how important her friendship was to him, how she was the only person who listened. She could discuss everything he cared about and she was the only one who really understood his artistic efforts. Day after day, she basked in this flattery, and as he gazed into her eyes with increasingly meaningful looks, she began to wonder who was slowly and expertly seducing whom.
*
When Johnny went off to Hong Kong on business later that month, Deborah accepted an invitation to stay at Poppy’s beach house. It’ll be nice for the children, she told herself.
Though Poppy’s beach house was much smaller and rather less luxurious than the city mansion, there was no question of roughing it. Only two maids were taken to the seaside, but there was a resident caretaker who prepared the barbecues and looked after Jock’s motor boat, assisted by the chauffeur.
‘We just camp here – and it’s rather selfish because only my bedroom is air-conditioned, I’m sorry, sweetie,’ said Poppy as she showed Deborah to the guest quarters, a separate wooden bungalow in the grounds.
‘Oh, it’s wonderful to have a sea breeze after the city fumes,’ said Deborah.
But it was very hot that month before the monsoon. Deborah kept the children in the shade of the palm trees, and anointed them with sun cream every half hour.
‘I feel like I’m basting two little chickens,’ she said to Alex, as he lay sprawled on a sunbed nearby. ‘Be careful, Alex, your back is getting red. I’ll baste you too.’
She poured a little cream on to his shoulders and began to rub gently. Then she massaged his back. His skin was warm and quite smooth, apart from the golden hairs that covered his long brown legs. She continued to massage for several minutes, when suddenly she stopped, embarrassed by her own feelings.
‘Go on, please,’ he said in a muffled voice.
‘You can reach the rest yourself, lazy boy,’ she said heartily.
‘Then it’s my turn. Let me put some stuff on your back.’
‘No, I’m going for a swim.’ Abruptly she put down the bottle of Ambre Solaire and ran into the sea. As she turned towards the shore to float on her back, she saw that Alex was swimming towards her.
She smiled. ‘What are you doing in the water? I just put all that oil on you.’
‘I know, but I was hot. I needed to cool down.’
‘Guess you did,’ said Deborah, laughing and swimming away from him.
He followed her and, grabbing her around the waist, pulled her towards him. ‘Deborah.’
‘Let go, Alex,’ she spluttered. ‘I’m too old for seaside games and too old for you.’ With the palm of her hand, she splashed some water at him. ‘Anyway, look, your step-mommy is calling you. I guess it’s time for you two to go to the yacht club.’
*
Alone in the house after lunch, she put the children to rest. Jojo was fractious and Sam cross and balky. If he slept all afternoon, he would be up late tonight, but at least it would be cool. Against her principles, she gave him a cookie to take to bed.
Why wasn’t there a breeze this afternoon? She went to her own room for a siesta. Closing the door behind her, she took off her tight uncomfortable swimsuit and lay down naked on the bed. The buzzing fan was rotating like a whirlwind, but it made no appreciable difference to the temperature in the room. It was almost too hot to think, except that her desire for Alex was on her mind. Her eyes closed.
A little later she opened them again. Alex stood in the doorway gazing at her. Deborah flushed but made no attempt to cover herself. ‘I thought you went sailing,’ she said.
‘Changed my mind. I came back.’
‘And Poppy?’ asked Deborah lightly.
He took one step forward. ‘Oh, she’s still at the club playing bridge. She’ll be there for the rest of the day.’
‘And the servants?’
‘They’re off duty, down in their own quarters.’ He took another step forward and then stopped. ‘What about the children?’
‘They’ll both sleep for a couple of hours.’
‘They don’t wake up?’
‘No, they sleep like logs in the afternoon. Usually I have a problem to wake them.’ She smiled again. ‘Are you just going to stand there, Alex?’
‘Well . . .’
‘Why don’t you come in and close the door behind you?’
He cleared his throat. ‘Right.’ He shut the door, and then locked it, but he remained standing on the other side of the room.
‘I have an idea,’ she said eventually. ‘Maybe you’d kindly rub some more sun cream on to my back. I guess I am a little sore on the shoulders too.’
‘Oh, are you going down to the beach then?’ asked Alex. His voice sounded hoarse and low.
‘Not just yet. Maybe later. But you could put the cream on now, if you want. Use that body lotion, in the white bottle. It’s very soothing.’
Slowly she turned on to her stomach and pressed her face into the pillows.
‘Right, er, OK,’ he said.
He walked over to the dressing table and picked up the lotion. Kneeling on the edge of the bed, he tentatively pushed away her long thick hair and, very gently, stroked a little cream on to her shoulders, and then her arms. He hesitated and then began to anoint her feet, moving, very slowly, to her calves and thighs. Appearing to lose courage as his hands approached the generous mound of her bottom, he skipped over it and began to massage the small of her back and up again to the nape of her neck. The pressure of his fingers became more intense.
‘Shal
l I turn over now?’ she whispered shakily.
He gulped. ‘Oh, yes. Yes, please.’
Thirteen
Claire was not particularly offended that Deborah paid her less attention these days, but she was surprised about how often she bumped into the boy Alex creeping furtively up the stairs of Lotus Court. When she mentioned these visits, Deborah had hurriedly explained that she was coaching him in French literature. Claire knew that Deb had studied at Geneva University and was a qualified language teacher – indeed she still taught English to Maising students – but it was intriguing to observe that Alex’s lessons always took place on evenings when Johnny was out of town.
Could it possibly be a love affair? It seemed unlikely and yet Deborah had been looking different – somehow younger and slimmer, with a new happier glow on her face. And she’d been wearing some snappy new clothes recently. Claire found the situation fascinating and longed to know the truth. She kept her suspicions to herself, for Deborah’s sake.
It was one of many secrets that she did not wish to share with Howard. She was very fond of him, but he seemed to want to take over every aspect of her life, while Claire still preferred to remain as independent as possible, at least in thought.
It was entirely her own fault – she should never, ever have slept with him that night, breaking all her own personal rules about not sleeping with a man you don’t really love and not encouraging false hopes in a man that loves you. And why hadn’t she backed off at the time, why had she allowed the relationship to deepen?
Must be loneliness and the need for love, warmth and human contact, dammit. And the hope that if she got a bit closer to Howard that she might convince herself she loved him after all.
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