Subtle as a cartload of manure, that was RT. ‘Quite,’ Estelle said, lowering her leg and flexing it backwards and forwards in an attempt to get the circulation flowing again.
‘Not that I need to worry about getting a hole-in-one this afternoon, eh? Already had that!’ And he laughed, reaching out to give her a playful slap on the bum.
Estelle could only manage a weak, grit-toothed smile in response. It wasn’t just the trowelled-on corn, and the blended smells of male body odour and semen pervading the cramped space. It wasn’t really anything to do with RT at all. Her lovers were always slightly abhorrent to her directly after sex.
RT’s allure was his popularity. In the clubhouse, he inevitably drew a crowd, doling out risqué stories to the men and flirtatious innuendo to the women – the official life and soul of the golf club. But post-orgasm, spent, he was nothing to her at all. Just another husk of a man without the least idea that he had quite failed to give her any pleasure.
‘Right then,’ RT said, zipping up his flies decisively. ‘I’d better be off. ‘Until next week?’
Estelle stretched her mouth into a smile. ‘Next week,’ she said, and he was gone.
Managing to leave the store cupboard undetected, Estelle slipped into the Ladies to sort out her hair and make-up. She had deliberately held back from wearing lipstick that morning, because RT was a fierce kisser and it was liable to end up smeared right across her face. Not that she minded, because RT’s kisses were the best thing about their lovemaking sessions. RT was a very good kisser. It was just a shame that the feelings his kisses stirred within her never went any further.
Estelle leant in close to the mirror as she applied Rich Molasses to her lips. Her mouth looked as bruised as her fanny felt, and her hair was flicking out in all the wrong places. Brushing it until it flicked out in all the right places, Estelle examined her hair roots. Time for a touch-up. God, what a bore. In fact, the only thing more boring than having her highlights done was listening to RT talk about his hobby. He collected clocks. Clocks. How did something as unsexy as clocks tally with such good kissing? Horology was surely more suited to a pipe-smoking, slipper-wearing granddad than the golf club Romeo.
After one clock-talking experience, Estelle had done her best to avoid a repeat performance by time-limiting her meetings with RT. After a while, he’d noticed.
‘We never seem to get the chance to talk anymore,’ he complained, running his hand over her thigh and pinging the lacy top of her stockings.
‘I know,’ she said. ‘But it’s better this way, isn’t it? You’re married. You can’t afford to take too many risks. And besides, you’ve got your reputation to think of.’ She didn’t say a thing about her reputation, and nothing at all about clocks. ‘Provided we don’t get greedy, this can be our little secret.’
And so far, despite the various risks they had taken, so it had remained. Soon she might have to start thinking about how she could disentangle herself, but for now, her affair with RT served its purpose, provided, that was, she didn’t try to examine too closely exactly what that purpose was.
Leaving the Ladies, Estelle made her way to the bar. Her Saturday lunches at the Golf Club were one of her indulgences. She ran her own business and worked very long hours – even Sundays seemed to get filled up with paperwork. But on Saturdays she had a round of golf and just lately, a session with RT, followed by a leisurely lunch and a good old wallow in a glossy magazine. The more trivial the magazine was the better.
Ordering a G & T and a bacon sandwich, Estelle gave a table of rowdy women golfers a wide berth, taking her drink over to a table by the window. Outside, she could see RT teeing off with his group of pals. He was throwing back his head to laugh at something one of them had said. If he was talking about her, he was dead meat. Though she didn’t think he would; he enjoyed their little sessions far too much to do anything to put them at risk.
Estelle took a long sip of her drink and sighed with contentment. It was delicious. Surely God himself had invented gin and tonic. It was the perfect drink – if it was made right, and Estelle always insisted that it was made right. The lemon needed to be fresh, and so did the tonic. It was useless if it had lost any of its sparkle. And of course the proportions of gin to tonic were critical. And the amount of ice. A good-quality glass helped too. Happily, at Shelthorpe-on-Sea Golf Club, they normally got it exactly right.
Sighing with pleasure, Estelle took the latest copy of Cosmopolitan magazine from her bag and perused the front cover. A quiz about faking orgasms! How perfect. Stifling a laugh, she was leafing through the pages to find the article when she sensed someone approaching her table. Surely it was too early for her sandwich to be ready?
Looking up, she saw it wasn’t the barman with her sandwich at all. It was Gertrude Bestwick and her sidekick Joan Myers, two of the heartiest lady golfers at the club. Watching them bearing down on her with their identical smiles and their up to-the minute golfing gear stretched hideously across their overweight bodies, Estelle groaned, sensing the perfection of her Saturday lunchtime indulgence beginning to slip away.
‘Estelle!’ Gertrude said with a grin, exposing her horsy teeth to their worst advantage. ‘How lovely to see you. We won’t ask you to join us, we know how you like your peace and quiet!’
‘Gertrude. Joan,’ Estelle greeted them, smiling with difficulty. ‘How are you both?’
‘We’re jolly annoyed with you actually!’ Gertrude said.
Oh, hell. Much as she loathed and detested both women, she thought she’d been reasonably successful at concealing the fact so far. So what had she done wrong?
‘Yes, you’re a naughty, naughty girl!’ Joan put in, grinning in that irritatingly inane way she had.
God, they hadn’t found out about her store cupboard activities had they? Bloody hell, she certainly hoped not. If they had, and they decided to report it, her membership of the club was bound to be withdrawn. Worse still, it was bound to end up in the local paper. Maybe even in the nationals. She could picture the headline now – Lingerie Queen in Golf Club Scandal! And although that wouldn’t be bad for business, Estelle didn’t relish the prospect of being the talking point of the whole town. Anonymity was what she strived for as far as possible. She didn’t even know the first names of many of her neighbours, and she’d lived in her exclusive apartment block on the sea front for two years now.
‘Yes,’ Gertrude was saying. ‘You told us you ran a clothing company.’
‘Well,’ Estelle said warily, ‘I do.’
‘Ah!’ Gertrude’s smile was triumphant. ‘But you forgot to tell us exactly what sort of clothing, didn’t you?’
‘Yes, you didn’t say anything about rubber clothing,’ interjected Joan.
‘Not to mention, clothing with holes in certain vital areas!’ Gertrude added with another laugh.
It was at precisely that moment that the barman arrived with Estelle’s BLT, and it was obvious that he’d overheard Gertrude by the conscientious way he avoided making eye contact with Estelle.
‘One bacon sandwich,’ he said, putting the plate down on the table and making a bolt for it as if she might grab him and force him into a pair of rubber underpants right there and then.
When Joan and Gertrude burst out laughing, coating her BLT, G & T and Cosmo in a fine misting of spittle, something snapped in Estelle’s head.
‘I would rather,’ I said coldly, ‘you didn’t broadcast my private affairs to the entire golf club.’
Joan and Gertrude both sobered a bit at that, but then Gertrude looked at her shrewdly. Besides the horsy teeth and the over-large body, her eyes were slightly bulging. An oil painting Gertrude most definitely was not, but, unlike Estelle, she had been born into money. Later, she had married into more of the stuff, and being wealthy gave her a sheen of self-confidence.
‘Your affairs can’t be that private,’ she said, ‘not if you publicise your company on a website.’
‘Ask her how she found it!’ Joan said, leani
ng forward and chortling. Estelle looked at her, barely managing to conceal her dislike. The stupid woman’s face had probably held exactly the same expression when she’d been a girl at boarding school, engaged in some jolly jape or other. Oh, how she would have liked to tell the pair of them where to get off. But then she remembered that Joan’s husband Charles was one of RT’s closest friends, and that Gertrude’s husband was president of the golf club, and she forced herself to smile.
‘How did you come across the website, Gertrude?’
Uninvited, Gertrude pulled up a chair and parked her over-large bottom onto it. Joan followed suit. ‘Well,’ Gertrude said, leaning in towards Estelle conspiratorially. ‘It’s Kevin’s fiftieth birthday next month, and I wanted to get him something a little special if you know what I mean…’
‘Of course she knows, Gert,’ Joan said in a loud whisper, her body language equally conspiratorial. ‘It’s her business, isn’t it, that sort of thing?’
Gertrude gave her friend a quelling glare. ‘Well anyway, I typed ‘sexy lingerie and Norfolk’ into the internet and hey presto, there you were. Whipcrack Lingerie, Managing Director, Estelle G Morgan.’ She sat back and smiled her buck-toothed smile, as if to say, ‘what have you got to say about that?’
Estelle said absolutely nothing.
‘She wants to order something from you,’ Joan broke the silence helpfully and was rewarded by another one of Gertrude’s glares.
‘Yes,’ Gertrude said, ‘actually, I do. Have you got a pen and paper?’
By the time Estelle had noted down Gertrude’s order (did she look like a travelling saleswoman, for goodness sake?) her BLT was almost cold and the ice had melted in her drink.
‘We’ll leave you to it then,’ Gertrude said, and the pair of them waved their fingers and simpered off to rejoin their friends. Moments later, the bar was filled with the sound of loud, cackling laughter, and since Gertrude’s was the loudest of all, Estelle guessed she had just spilled the beans about Estelle’s line of work to her cronies. Bitch.
Estelle ignored them, pretending to be absorbed in her Cosmo. It wasn’t that she was ashamed of her business. Why the hell should she be? She’d built it up from nothing and now it had a large annual turnover. But she liked the fact that the vast majority of her sales were made via the internet and she could run her business from an unremarkable, unnoticeable second floor office with a simple plaque bearing the name ‘Estelle Morgan Enterprises.’ She liked her anonymity.
Somehow the glossy pages of her magazine seemed unappealing to her now. And she hardly needed to do a quiz on faking orgasms, did she? She already knew what score she was likely to get. It was all too easy to imagine what the quiz-setter’s verdict on her would be. You’ve got so used to faking it, you’ve forgotten you don’t even have orgasms. Isn’t it time you took your sensual pleasure into your own hands? Or words to that effect.
With her Saturday ruined, Estelle abandoned her BLT, deciding to go into work. She had planned to go into Norwich that afternoon to do some shopping, but it was never a good idea to go buy anything when she was feeling irritable. Only the other week she had filled a charity’s plastic collecting sack with clothing mistakes she’d bought when she was in a bad mood.
Gertrude and Joan waved as she walked past their table. ‘Bye, Estelle. Thank you in advance for the… you know whats,’ Gertrude said with a smile.
Estelle merely nodded. Smiling was quite beyond her.
Outside in the bar lobby, there was a poster on the notice board by the exit door. Estelle stopped to examine it. It appeared to be advertising a ten-week course. A Woman’s Garden of Delight, Estelle read. Learn new skills and discover a new sensual outlook on life. Was that what really what she thought it was? Surely not here in sleepy Shelthorpe-on-Sea?
On impulse, Estelle tore the poster from the board, folded it up and put it into her bag. Not that she’d ever consider going along herself. People like Gertrude and Joan might turn up. But on the other hand, women discovering a new sensual outlook on life might well be interested in buying some risqué lingerie. Yes, it would probably be worth connecting with the course leader.
Kate
Kate Mitchell knew the secret of success with drinking games was all in the rhythm. Swallow, swallow, swallow, breathe; swallow, swallow, swallow, breathe. A bit like giving a blowjob really, only with a blowjob you’d substitute suck for swallow. Until the end, of course; and even that was a matter of personal choice, because there was always the spit option.
Once, in a drunken moment, Kate’s friend Grace had told Kate her husband had probably only strayed because she spat instead of swallowing. Since Kate knew that the only way Grace could have got hold of such personal information was by speaking to either Ian or the traitor bitch Jennifer he’d left Kate for, she was beyond furious. Only the close proximity of Bruce, Grace’s bouncer/part-time boxer boyfriend had stopped her from pulling Grace’s hair out by the roots while screaming, ‘I’ll make you swallow, bitch! Swallow your fucking tongue!’
So now Grace was officially an ex-friend too. Which was why Kate was in the Royal Oak with Geoff and Tom, two of her friends from work. The lads. She knew where she was with the lads. OK, so they belonged to the male species like Ian and all the other bastards who’d left her so allergic to relationships. But they were different. At least, they were to Kate. On the rare occasions Geoff and Tom got girlfriends, they were probably just the same as all the rest, but as a pair, they were like… well, they were like family.
‘Way to go, Kate!’ Take Geoff, for instance, who was currently giving her a hearty victory slap on the back; with his folk club beard, gappy teeth and hideous jumper stretched over a straining paunch, Geoff had never gone out with anyone for more than a few dates in all the years she’d known him. When he wasn’t messing about with her and Tom or baking up a storm in the College kitchens, he was the type of bloke who spent all weekend doing DIY jobs for the old lady in the basement flat in his building. One of life’s genuine good guys. And women, it seemed, were allergic to good guys.
It was funny, really. She’d married a policeman and still managed to end up with the biggest bad guy of the lot. Yeah, funny. Except who was laughing? Certainly not Kate. In the year since the split, her life had turned into one long escape attempt. Drink enough, laugh enough, work enough, eat enough, and she might, just might forget the fact that her future had turned out to be about as cast iron as the grubby old tin her granddad used for his roll-ups.
‘Yes!’ Beating Tom in a drinking competition was worthy of a celebration, because Tom always won drinking competitions, and Kate punched the air as if she’d just scored the winning goal in the world cup. Unfortunately, a man was walking behind her at exactly the same moment as her arm moved; a big man holding a full pint glass.
‘Watch what you’re doing, you pissed up pillock!’ he snarled, and by the time Kate looked round to see who’d growled at her, the pint was in the process of distributing a rain shower of beer all the way down the man’s freshly ironed Saturday-night shirt.
Pre Ian betrayal, Kate might have found it in her heart to feel sorry for the guy, even though he was obviously the big-ego-wallet-full-of-cash type of tosser she most despised. But as it was, when he came towards her with his clenched jaw and aggression, the veins standing out in his bull-dog neck, all the ugly, black feelings Kate was constantly trying to suppress bubbled up and over spilled. Before she knew it, she was opening her mouth and saying, ‘Who are you calling a pillock, you bastard?’
The man reacted almost before the words were out of her mouth. ‘You, you sodding dick head!’ he snarled, and gave her a shove.
Kate shoved him right back.
‘Leave it, for God’s sake.’ Geoff was instantly at her shoulder, but there was no way she was going to back down now. Maybe she even wanted to be pulverised into a pulp, to try to blot out one kind of pain with another.
Bull-neck gave her another shove, but this time he came into contact with her rig
ht breast, which, like the left one, was concealed beneath one of the oversized checked shirts Kate had taken to wearing lately. Bull neck froze in disbelief, his eyes scanning her face and her cropped hair. Then his expression changed to one of scorn. ‘It’s a girl!’ he announced to the bar, laughing out loud. ‘It’s a pissing girl!’ And then he looked round at Geoff and Tom. ‘Can’t you lads keep her under control?’ he asked, then walked off to rejoin his mates further along the bar. Moments later they were all laughing their heads off, and only Geoff’s hands clamping down on Kate’s arms stopped her from going after him.
‘Leave it, Kate, for God’s sake!’
Twisting angrily out of Geoff’s grip, Kate sat down and reached for her pint. Which, of course, was empty after the drinking game.
‘Here.’ Geoff shoved his own pint in her direction, but she didn’t want it. Instead she got back to her feet.
‘Kate,’ Geoff said warningly, and she shot him an irritated glare.
‘I’m just going for a wee,’ she said, and slunk off in the direction of the Ladies. As she went, the big man called after her.
‘You’re going in the wrong direction, love! The Gents is that way!’
As his friends laughed their appreciation at the joke, Kate somehow managed not to rise to the bait. Somehow she did what she should have done in the first place; ignored him, walking resolutely on her way, even though her face was burning with humiliation and fury.
But Kate wasn’t fated to escape with dignity, even when the man was out of view. As she reached the Ladies, one hand outstretched to give the door a shove, two tarted-up teenagers tottered out at the same time and the three of them ended up doing one of those little dances you do when you’re trying to get by someone. And what was worse, one of the teenagers recognised her.
The Invitation Page 2