by Glen Duncan
We look at each other. It’s exciting to both of us that something’s happened. Her sore eyes are wide and her lips are parted. I imagine kissing her will taste of stale humanity, though it’s nice to think of the chill evening just now passing through her lips and nostrils. Behind her head the buildings of Rathbone Place are half attending to us, half given over to the deepening cold and darkening sky.
‘I’ve got a confession to make,’ she says, when I return to the table with drinks, Laphroaig for me and a white wine spritzer for her. I know the way she’s seeing this: her first act of experimental indulgence in the world after the liberating trauma, whatever it was. She’s pretty sure that she can have me, that enough of the goods are intact, that like her I’ve been turned on by the accident, or else why bother suggesting the drink?
Her car, an Audi, was in a car park just off Tottenham Court Road. The compromise after I queasily got to my feet was that she would drive me home, via hospital if I showed en route signs of being about to die. Via, as it turns out, Neon Hallelujah, since when we pulled up at the lights opposite it and I said let’s go and have a drink she said okay, with a smile compressed to acknowledge the inevitability of the last hour’s drift–okay, yes, it’s this–and pulled over. The first intimation had been when I’d said well only if it’s on your way (knowing it couldn’t be) and she’d said well it isn’t but I think I should and I didn’t object further and we let the truncation and silence stand for a while before I said where do you live, and she said, not surprisingly, west. Holland Park. Handy for my dad; he’s in Shepherd’s Bush. Everything after that–not that there was much; she drove confidently, fast, largely without speaking–had carried Eros’ imprimatur. The glaring confirmation was that beyond his postcode we didn’t discuss her father, Raj Rogue, the proposed interview. The mutually intuited danger was that, if we did, something (the truth, for example) might emerge which would compromise her ability to have sex with me, now, with dreamy casualness, courtesy of the long day’s surreal momentum, its surprising amoral necessities.
We sat in the Audi in what might have looked to an observer like a state of mild trance, me, driver of Maude’s cast-off ’92 Fiesta, unused to top-of-the-line car interiors, thinking among other things that now they looked like the cockpit of the Millennium Falcon, and how quickly that had happened, but then no, not quickly, because Star Wars was almost thirty years ago, her with her slightly bulbous wet and pink-prone eyes drinking the road, smiling very slightly as the reality of whatever freedom she’d inherited today shaped its current around her, said yes, there’s all sorts you can do now, screw strangers, just relax into it. This is the brave new world.
I sit down, hand her her drink, take a sip of mine and wait for the single malt flower between the lungs which opening says shshsh, be calm, all is well. There it is, testifying once again to the reliability of alcohol. I imagine it like a Buddhist lotus, a gorgeous manifestation of inner peace smack in the middle of the heart chakra. Neon Hallelujah’s dark and quiet around us. It’s still early. Rowena’s lighting the table candles. The execrable Dido warbles as with deformed oestrogen from the speakers. Janet’s been to the loo while I ordered, touched up her make-up, Optrexed her eyes by the revived look.
‘I’ve got a confession to make.’ She’s smiling again, or rather, with head down and fringe hanging, making a show of not being able to keep a straight face.
‘So have I,’ I say. ‘But you first.’
‘I sold the company.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean today. Signed on the dotted line. Another company, an American company, bought IMS. They’ll make the whole thing international.’
No further explanation needed. That crack from the wing mirror was the icing on the cake, the event that plucked one of the myriad potentialities from the ether and handed it to her as an actual. Go to bed with him if you want to.
‘Which means…you’ve made a lot of money?’
‘Well, yeah. Some. The main thing is I’m out. I don’t have to think about it any more, thank God.’
This is more than a warning for me not to set any store by what might follow; it’s also a reassurance that she’s not, as I might have been wondering, mad.
I raise my tumbler. ‘In that case congratulations.’
She does smile, properly this time, with a little access of genuine pleasure when we clink. Her left upper canine is grey. The promise, as ever, is finite, but there’s no doubt I want her. Her look suggests a repertoire of skills (acquired with the sad diligence of women who know the way the world goes, who’d rather have such skills and not need them than need such skills and not have them) and beyond the repertoire an uneroded part of her sexual self she’s been consciously or unconsciously saving in the hope that one day she’ll have the time and space (not angry, not depressed, not bored, not stressed, not exhausted) to use it. If we go to bed together she’ll be more than sufficiently self-involved for me to enjoy her as an object.
‘What’s your confession?’ she says.
Dad, listen to this. You’ll love it. I’m fucking Skinner’s daughter.
‘I work here,’ I tell her.
Vince, God bless his homosexual soul, is already out when I call him before leaving Neon Hallelujah, and won’t be back until the small hours unless he gets lucky (or unlucky, as we’ve started saying) in which case not until tomorrow. ‘There’s double Friends and double Sex in the City,’ he reminds me, ‘so don’t forget to set the video. Who is she, by the way?’ ‘A rich English businesswoman, but it’s a long story.’
I trip, with clatter, skid and comedy flail, over the bootscrape on the way into the flat, which makes her laugh. (The second drink was a scotch and she drank it pretty fast, still a dash of Dutch courage required. Don’t you have plans for this evening? I’d asked her, eye to eye. She shook her head: the plans were dismissible. After the second drink she said, I’m off to the loo and then I’ll drive you home. She said it with almost innocent briskness. My compressed call to Vince in the five minutes she was gone. When she came out and our eyes met across the room she raised her heavy chin and looked sidelong then back at me and that was the signal that yes, the plans had gone.) ‘Are you always this clumsy?’ she asks in the hall, after I’ve closed the door behind her.
‘Only when I’m not one bit nervous.’
The door’s closing has given us sudden shocking still privacy after the warm bar and the cold street and the flow of traffic around the car. It’s as if we’re in the lift again. Now that it’s come to it having sex with her (going into my room with her, undressing, seeing all the secrets of her broad body spoiled in a twinkling), if having sex with her is what this is, now that it’s come to this it seems ugly and absurd; if I’m not careful, hilarious. But that’s the way it always is if I let my mind go. She hasn’t done quite this before but she’s had sex with people she’s not been sure about, encounters in the raw space she’s had to inhabit around the berg of the failed marriage. I try it, mentally, as an aphrodisiac, Mrs Janet Marsh. Kept the name but not the ring. A ring would have helped, seeing it on her finger when her hand grasped my cock or (with me guiding her wrist) fluttered at the lips of her cunt, the little gold band saying broken promises, failure, death. (This is a recent reversal in my life. It used to be sex made me think of death. Now death makes me think of sex. With Scarlet, but since she’s gone…)
It’s only a few seconds since my line about not being nervous but the silence has fattened between us. Neither of us is up to protracted flirtation. The obvious immediate future, in which I take her coat and laptop and she follows me into the kitchen and I open a bottle of the for-special-occasions Châteauneuf-du-Pape and we clink and drink and have to keep thinking of things to say which will somehow enhance the idea that it’s going to be a good and natural and sensually life-affirming thing for us to go to bed together, this obvious immediate future is in the silence with us like a lump of dangerous energy. The hall’s bits and pieces–coat-stand, fak
e Persian runner, occasional table with topaz-shaded lamp, Maude’s startled self-portrait in oils from art college days–are vivified and attentive. This isn’t what they’re used to. It gives me a flicker of pride that I’ve surprised them.
Janet opens her mouth to say something, thinks better of it, risks one final look at me; if I can’t make it fly from this it won’t fly at all. There’s enough of her unspontaneous self available to haul her off, more than enough memories of men, the countless ways they disappoint. Seeing all this I move towards her and, since she doesn’t flinch, lower my head to kiss her. There’s a split second before she lifts her mouth, cooperatively, then we are, with uncertain pressure and what feels like flaccid lips, kissing, in the flavours of whisky and nicotine and caffeine, the taste, I tell myself, of excitement trying to struggle up through fatigue. Her head when I open my eyes looks huge, great scrolls of mascara’d lash and powdery blue eyelid, tiny white hairs, thread veins, around all the pale blonde corona like a signal of warrantless optimism. Her mouth’s bigger than mine, with a masculine tongue that moves uncertainly, sometimes seeming to back up. We’ll have to go fast from here if the moment isn’t to start leaking spontaneity, but it’s apparent to both of us that a filmic hump right here up against the cold wall, trousers dropped, pinstripe skirt hoiked, isn’t an option. We don’t have the momentum of passion and her body’s already told mine it’s too heavy for that sort of thing or that I’m not heavy enough. I slide my hands inside her coat and jacket, feel through the silk blouse her big rib-cage and strong back. The sexual clinician in me says stocky, keep the high heels on to lengthen those legs, but knows it won’t happen, they’ll have to come off to release the nylons, which I doubt are stockings, never mind never mind just get on with it.
The terrible question of what to say when the kiss comes to its conclusion starts bothering us while the kiss is still going on, makes me think whether I like it or not of that poor bastard who died of a heart attack applauding Stalin because no one once the applauding started wanted to be the first to stop. None the less we separate an inch or two, kiss lengthily again, her tongue livelier now, letting me know that assertiveness is one way she can go, if need be. We do the little after-kisses, as if plucking crumbs from each other’s lips, the friendliness or suggested familiarity of which jars for both of us. Younger versions of ourselves would be tempted to let the first notes of self-congratulation in: When did you first realize? I had a feeling about you. You must have known. But we’re not young any more, make no assumptions. This is just something that’s going on at the moment and could in the next moment or the next or the next be knocked into inertia by any one of a thousand little miscues. Best not to say anything. I nearly say that out loud: best not to say anything.
‘Where’s your bedroom?’ she says.
‘I’ll show you.’
‘I need another drink.’
‘There’s wine or whisky.’
‘Whisky.’
‘I’ve got grass if you prefer.’
‘Grass?’ Then she understands. ‘Oh. No, I don’t have that. It gives me palpitations.’
She moves away from me and goes to the bedroom door. I thank God for the tidiness gene I’ve inherited from my mother. Bed’s made, laundry’s basketed, CDs are cased and shelved, ashtrays empty, porn stashed in the bottom drawer of the dresser, though Janet’s past surprise at that sort of thing. Lesbian Ass Suckers 6. I imagine her tired shrug. She’s one of the women it’s old hat to, the way men are. She knows sex with them is always going to be a negotiation with all that rubbish.
I watch her push the bedroom door open and peer inside.
‘It’s okay,’ I say, passing her on the way to the kitchen. ‘It’s safe to go in.’
In the kitchen I make two quick Jameson’s on the rocks, burra pegs, as Pasha would say (Skinner sits shrivelled somewhere in a winged chair waiting for me, for us, but I don’t want to think about it now; enough of Janet has got through to me to make me feel guilty about the Raj Rogue subterfuge), and turn the central heating up. She’s still at the bedroom door looking in when I return, still with her coat on. Her laptop case stands in the middle of the hall. I hand her the tumbler, and here we are clinking and drinking after all. I squeeze past her, go into the bedroom, turn the bedside lamp on.
‘Not stopping?’ I ask.
She smiles, puts her drink down on the dresser, slips the coat and jacket from her shoulders. I move close to her, put my hands on the soft curve of her waist. I’m wondering if she’s going to want to do anything, go to the bathroom, put a diaphragm in, lay down some rules, I don’t take it up the arse, you can’t come in my mouth. I remember the idealistic days when it was impossible to keep a hard-on through the dismal palaver with the condom. She lifts her mouth again and we kiss. Our breath can’t be great but alcohol and that bowl of Neon Hallelujah’s marinated olives have left us on level terms. The curve of her waist feels good and female between my hands, gives me the first real twinge since the lift. It’s going to work, what she’s got, the heavy whiteness, all the salient womanly bits just past their best, a comma of Andrex left behind in the anus’s crinkle saying shit, human, unethereal. That’s the tack to take, that and the self-made money, the commercial boredom I’ll imagine having detected like a tired odour in her armpits, navel, crotch. Oh yes.
‘No one’s going to walk in, are they?’ she says.
‘No.’
The radiator clanks, twice. Heat’s entering the room like a supernatural manifestation. Awkwardly, since I still have my hands on her waist, she twists to retrieve her drink from the dresser, downs it in one, shudders as it makes its fiery way to her guts.
‘Okay then,’ she says, and kisses me again.
Skinner’s daughter. The soap-operatic beauty of this is like a heaped platter of vulgar food from which I could, if I wanted to, gorge until I was sick. I don’t want to think about it. There are other things to think about. The dilemma at our age is whether to attempt the minefield of mutual undressing. She surprises me: when I sit on the edge of the bed and pull my shoes off she straddles my lap. Her weight’s exciting, suggests (I don’t know if she intends it, likes it, or has been forced by physical type into recognizing it as her strong suit) that submissiveness from me might be the way to go. The natural place for my hands is her bum, so they go there, and after a succession of more aggressive kisses push the pinstripe skirt up to reveal, as suspected, tights rather than stockings. She reaches down and pulls my sweater and T-shirt with a crackle of static off over my head. The exposure of my nipples (there’s the awful second of darkness just before sweater and T-shirt clear my head) makes me think of the comedic gap between Brad Pitt’s chest in Meet Joe Black and mine, here, now. One of Janet’s shoes falls from her foot to the floor with a clomp. I reach up for her breasts, risk the blouse buttons, by the grace of God get all four undone without feeling time too loudly passing. A slight brief frown of excitement wrinkles her powdered brow.
As if with telepathic agreement to quit while we’re ahead, we roll, kiss and separate to remove more clothes, socks and jeans in my case, blouse, bra and tights in hers. We do it quickly because to do it slowly will remind us that we’re complete strangers. Under the duvet (which will be too hot in a minute) we lie on our sides facing each other–which we’re not ready for and so kiss again with ungenuine urgency, teeth bumping.
I think, as Janet Marsh reaches down and pulls my underpants off, of writing a novel narrated by a double bed; that’s the sort of thing you’ve got to do these days, Nick Gough told me. Rain rattles on the window pane, says yes it’s bleak to scrape through the world alone, we move forward into darkness and darkness closes behind us. I think of Vince out there in the hollow of Friday night, imagine him laughing in a twinkling bar, feel such a surge of affection for him I nearly lose my erection.
While I kiss down the length of Janet Marsh’s torso Scarlet’s retribution theory flutters in and out of my head: colonial bastardry takes erotic revenge, fucks Eng
land, Great White Male reinvented for heterosexual accommodation as Great White Bitch. Janet certainly is white, with veins showing in the loose-knit belly and breasts. It occurs to me that my dad will disapprove. Cheh, that bugger’s flesh and blood? The rain is a sad intelligence against the house. Janet Marsh is sad, too, I decide, underneath the new adventurous madness to which her wealth has entitled her. As I pull the duvet down and she bends one knee (the legs make a triangle, the left straight, the right with the knee as apex) I think: You can’t hide sadness. You can’t hide sadness and you can’t hide fear of death. Her current posture reminds me of those Victorian etchings, Britannia and Her Empire. We’re missing, one at her blonde head, the other at her formidable feet, the two smiling female representatives of India and Africa, brown bodies draped with fruit, silks, jewels, ivory.
These and other thoughts twitter. It takes a silent while to get the functional measure of each other. What we do (reciprocally) orally we do with learned patience and calculating hesitations. I haven’t gone this carefully or slowly since Scarlet. It becomes, in my mind, a sort of ethical project, to get Janet Marsh turned on. In the elusive way of these things it’s the breath from her saying, quietly, ‘That’s it,’ close to my glans that at a stroke turns me on, which in spite of everything I’m not expecting.
‘Have you got something?’
Unsixty-nined our perspiring faces meet and surprise each other. She means a condom. With someone else I might make a joke–you mean, like the clap?–but not with her. We’re not ready for jokes. The condoms are in the bedside drawer. I’ve never been one for having a prophylactic put on me by a woman. The idea that something so manifestly unerotic can be made part of foreplay is well-meaning Family Planning clinic idiocy. But she takes the foil packet, slides down, administers a languorous kiss and deftly rubbers me. I now know that after fucking her I’m going to want to fuck her again, in a different position. In all the different positions. Which will mean more time together. Which will mean hoping she doesn’t leave straight away. Which will mean disappointment if she does.