by Ian Walker
Which was how the cowl ended up amongst the items being taken to auction.
Nigel pulled out the top drawer of the desk and saw that it was full of papers. He found another copy of Uncle Miles’s will and various folders containing the gas, electricity and numerous other bills relating to the house. Once again, it appeared that their uncle never threw anything away as some of the bills dated back to when the house was built in the 1950s.
“This lot all has to go,” said Nigel who was looking despairingly at over thirty years’ worth of council tax and water rate bills.
“Bloody hell,” he added as he pulled out a file containing all their uncle’s old TV licenses.
It appeared he had continued to pay his annual license fee even though it should have been free for the past seventeen years. Either he hadn’t realised what the situation was or just hadn’t bothered to inform the TV licensing authority that he was over 75.
“Perhaps we could get some money back,” said Molly hopefully.
“I very much doubt it,” Nigel replied.
An hour later Molly and Nigel had cleared out half the drawers in the desk and had filled four black bin liners with rubbish.
“You know, I never would have believed that so much rubbish could hide in one desk,” said Nigel, “and to think that the only useful thing we’ve found is one book of stamps.”
Nigel was just about to make a start on another drawer when he turned to Molly and said, “You know, I’ve seen this type of desk before on TV and sometimes they have a secret drawer.”
With that he started to feel under a small shelf, which was about two inches below the top of the desk. Suddenly, they both heard a click.
“Got it,” said Nigel. Then looking at Molly, he continued, “See I told you so! I wonder if there’s anything in it.”
The secret drawer was only about an inch deep, but it was big enough to contain a bundle of letters tied together with a bow.
“The dirty old bugger,” exclaimed Nigel as he undid the bow and started to read the first letter. “He was a dark horse. They’re love letters. Uncle Miles had a lover.”
*******
I wasn’t looking to start an affair. Far from it. My life was complicated enough at the start of 1960. My father had died only twelve months earlier and I was frantically trying to persuade the bank to lend me the money necessary to launch our new keg beer.
At home? Well, my marriage wasn’t a marriage anymore, which was probably why I was such an easy target for Jane Carghill.
Jane had joined us as a clerk the previous year. She was 27 years old, five years my junior and although not a classic beauty, she was a pretty enough girl. She was married to a purser on a P&O cruise liner who was away from home for months on end.
She certainly knew how to make the most of her attributes as she often came to work in a low-cut top. This made her both popular with the male staff members and unpopular with the female ones in equal measures.
Mind you, she was good at her job. This was why I asked her to stay behind one day in order to help me pull the projections together and to work on the presentation I was due to make to the bank.
The projections were particularly difficult to do and I was extremely grateful for her help. By the time we had finished, it was nearly 9 o’clock and I asked her if she wanted a drink before she left.
“Sure thing,” she said. “Do you have any Scotch?”
Of course I did, I had a whole pallet of it in our wine and spirits store. Still, there was no need for me to go there as I also had a decanter full of whisky in my office. I turned my back on her and went to pour us both a glass.
“So do you miss your husband whilst he’s away?” I asked her.
“Not really,” she replied as I turned around, only to discover that she had undone her blouse revealing her white bra underneath. I said nothing as the blouse dropped to the floor.
She smiled at me before putting her hands behind her back and removing her bra. By this time, my eyes were as big as saucers as she removed her skirt and then very slowly took her knickers off. She was standing there stark naked in my office as bold as brass; naked that was, apart from her stockings and suspenders.
I was shocked, but at the same time I was enthralled as I looked at her beautiful round breasts and her dark pubic hair.
I walked over to her and put the whisky glass in her hand.
“Do you want any water with that?” I asked her.
“I think I’m moist enough as it is,” she replied taking my hand and placing it between her legs.
She wasn’t joking; she was very wet. I tried to remember if I’d ever made Sarah as wet as that and decided I hadn’t.
“Aren’t you a bit overdressed?” she asked me, as she looked me up and down.
I wanted her more than anything at that moment. It had been two years since I’d last had sex and I wasn’t going to turn down an open invitation. So I hurriedly removed my suit, shirt, tie and pants. Normally I was meticulous about hanging them on a hanger in my wardrobe or folding them on a chair, but on this occasion I just threw them on the floor as Jane and I kissed each other passionately.
“I don’t have any condoms,” I whispered in her ear.
“Don’t worry, I’ve got some,” she replied reaching for her handbag before giving me a wink and asking, “Do you think three will be enough?”
“Three,” I thought to myself. “Sarah and I had never made love more than once in an evening let alone three times.”
She took the condoms out of her bag and I suggested that we go to the hop store. It had been fifteen years since Sarah and I had first gone there for a bit a teenage fumbling. Now I was just as excited as I had been that first day with Sarah.
The two of us ran hand in hand through the brewhouse. Both of us were completely naked except for her stockings and my socks. As soon as we got there we started kissing again before Jane broke off and took out one of the condoms, which she gently put on my erect penis.
Then we started making love, and not just in the missionary position. Jane preferred to be on top, controlling the motion and I was happy to let her do so. Finally, I was having the type of sex that I had always dreamed of. Not only that, but Jane was enjoying it as much as I was. She was sticking her nails into my back and moaning when suddenly her whole body started to tremble.
“Bloody hell,” I thought to myself. “So that’s what an orgasm is.”
Chapter 18
“You shouldn’t really be reading those,” said Molly. “They are personal.”
But Nigel couldn’t help it, he was intrigued. The uncle he remembered was an old man without any female friends. He was astonished to discover that he’d had a sex life when he was younger and had embarked on an illicit affair.
“So that’s what Beaky meant when he said that Uncle Miles’s dick had got him into all kinds of trouble over the years,” announced Nigel. “I wonder what happened?”
In total, there were six letters dating between February 1960 and March 1961.
“I think Aunty Sarah died in April 1961,” said Nigel. “Perhaps the two things are connected?”
*******
We used all three condoms. I was never in any doubt that we would.
“That was unbelievably good,” I said to her once we’d finally finished.
“You weren’t too bad yourself,” she replied. “A definite nine out of ten. If you want to do it again, I can go and get another condom from my bag.”
“I don’t think I’d be capable of doing it a fourth time,” I replied. “Anyway, what do you mean nine out of ten? I was fantastic.”
“You weren’t bad,” she said. “Good enough to qualify for a repeat performance if you like. But you still have quite a way to go to match my best ever lover. He managed it six times in one night.”
“Good grief, how many lovers have you had?” I asked her.
She didn’t even have to think about it. She replied straightaway, “You�
��re my 105th.”
“Christ almighty,” I cried. “You’re only my second.”
“Well, you’d better make up for lost time,” she replied, “and you won’t find a better teacher than me. I’ve taught most of the lads at the local rugby club. If any of them are still virgins by the time they reach eighteen then I’m the one who breaks them in. It’s a bit like breaking in a horse, which is ironic as some of them are hung like stallions.”
The more she told me about herself, the more she shocked me. But, to be honest, I was also keen to find out more.
Jane leant over and kissed me.
“Are you absolutely sure that you don’t want me to go back for another condom?” she said.
“No, I’d better be getting home,” I replied. “What about tomorrow?”
“Steady on tiger,” she joked. “Mind you, why not? You can come to my house after work.”
With that the two of us walked back to my office where we both got dressed.
The next day I couldn’t wait for work to end. I could see Jane through my office door and was amazed at how calm she was. She had a large bruise at the top of her arm where I had grabbed hold of her. What if people realised we’d had sex the previous night? Or was I just being paranoid?
Fortunately for me nobody could see the marks on my back where she had dug in her nails whilst having an orgasm.
Was anybody suspicious? I guessed not.
Jane left bang on five o’clock and I waited another half an hour before I set off for her house on Park Road. It was a two-bedroomed mid-terraced property and I wondered what the neighbours would think when they saw my car parked outside.
Jane didn’t seem concerned though as she grabbed me as soon as I went through the door.
“I want you inside of me,” she whispered in my ear, which caused me to get a hard-on straight away.
She took me upstairs to her bedroom where we made love just as passionately as we’d done the previous night. This time I could only manage it twice and when we had finished we decided to take a bath together.
“Does your husband have any idea what you get up to when he’s not here?” I asked her as she laid on top of me in the bath.
“He doesn’t have a clue,” she replied. “You know, sometimes I think I’ve got the perfect life. My husband goes away for months at a time and is absolutely gagging for it when he gets back. Meanwhile whilst he’s away, I’m free to have sex with anybody I want.”
“You know, I’ve never met a woman like you before,” I replied. “You’re a real nymphomaniac.”
“I wouldn’t call myself that. I just like sex, and I’m bloody good at it. It’s my hobby in the same way that other women like knitting.”
I didn’t like a lot of the things that Jane said, but I was absolutely besotted with her. Was I in love or was it just the sex? I was totally confused and only time would tell.
The following day the bank approved a £4,000 loan and Jane’s husband returned for two weeks of shore leave. She wouldn’t have sex with me whilst her husband was at home, not even in the hop store. She ignored me at work and I was beginning to think that our affair was at an end, until I received a note from her ten days later. She told me that her husband was going back to sea the following Tuesday. This would be when her harbour would be looking for the return of my pocket battleship.
The following week we resumed our affair as if nothing had happened. She told me that she would write to me each time her husband left to go to sea, inviting me back into her bed.
I thought it was a strange way to carry on, but I had little choice other than to go along with it.
Chapter 19
After reading the first letter, Nigel decided that he’d read enough. He threw all of them into the nearest black bin liner.
“Well I never! I didn’t know my uncle had an interest in anybody other than my aunt,” he said to Molly. “Now it appears that he was carrying on an affair at the same time as he was married to her. I wonder why the affair ended?”
Nigel didn’t have to wait long to find out. Whilst they were clearing out the next drawer in the desk, they discovered another letter from Jane. It was very short and merely said:
April 20th, 1961
Dear Miles,
We’ve had a lot of fun, but all good things must come to an end. Deep down you must have realised that it wasn’t going to last. You’ve started to ask too much of me and as a result I have decided to end our affair. Since we have to continue working together I hope you will behave like an adult towards me.
Yours truly,
Jane
The reason why this letter was not in the secret drawer soon became apparent. For immediately below it was a cutting from the Derbyshire Times, which was also dated, April 20th, 1961. It was Aunt Sarah’s obituary. Her death meant that Uncle Miles no longer had to hide any details about his affair from his wife.
*******
The affair with Jane continued for several months. I thought nobody realised what was going on, but I was wrong. Eventually, Mark Stephens, our Finance Director, asked if he could have a word with me.
“Look Miles,” he said, “I don’t want you to find out from anybody else, but it’s all over the office that you and Jane Carghill are having an affair.”
I was completely flabbergasted.
“Shit,” I said. “How the hell did they find out about us?”
“Miles, she’s bloody well told everyone,” he replied. “That woman is bloody dangerous. If I were you I would drop her like a stone.”
It couldn’t have been easy for him to have this conversation with me. After all, I was his boss, but I realised that he had done it for my benefit and I thanked him for his honesty.
Later that evening I went around to Jane’s house as previously agreed and we had a blazing row about it.
“How could you be so stupid as to tell everybody about us?” I shouted at her.
“As if they hadn’t guessed anyway,” she replied. “I was only confirming what had been going around the rumour mill for the past four months. Anyway none of them would hold it against you. They all know your wife is a lesbian.”
“What?” I could barely contain myself.
“Well, she’s either a lesbian or she’s frigid, based on what you’ve told me, possibly both. And anyway, one of the other girls spotted her going into the Mucky Duck with that dyke policewoman friend of hers.
The Mucky Duck was the nickname for the White Swan, a pub of ours not far from the brewery. Throughout the early 1960s, it was a popular meeting place for homosexuals of both sexes. And whilst Queen Victoria may have ensured that it wasn’t against the law to be a lesbian, that wasn’t the case if you were a homosexual man. As a consequence, the pub had been raided on several occasions. But each time it had happened nothing illegal was found to be taking place there. Clearly, Lydia had been tipping the licensee off before each raid.
I was shocked but not really surprised. Things hadn’t been right between Sarah and I even before she’d lost the baby.
Jane and I made up by making love and I was able to confirm that Sprout’s theory was absolutely correct. Sex after an argument was the best sex of all. Jane promised not to discuss our relationship in the office any more, but in reality the genie was now well and truly out of the bottle. Deep down I realised she’d only done it to become untouchable at work. After all I was her boss. To be strictly accurate, I was her boss’s boss. Barry Matthews, the office manager who’d taken over from my sister, was her actual boss. How the hell would he ever be able to take her to task whilst she was shagging the Managing Director?
If I thought I had problems, then things were about to get a whole lot worse. Sarah had been feeling unwell over the Christmas holiday and in early January she went to see the doctor.
At first he thought she was anaemic and recommended that she drink a pint of Guinness a day. However, when this had no effect she went back and had some blood tests in February.
The results were not good. They revealed that she was suffering from kidney disease and unless she received treatment it would eventually prove fatal.
Treatment would involve dialysis, but the problem was that Chesterfield Royal Hospital didn’t have a dialysis machine back then. Her only hope was that we would be able to buy one ourselves. But at a cost of over a thousand pounds, we just didn’t have the money.
“But we are one of the wealthiest families in Chesterfield,” she shouted at me. “We must have the money. If you hadn’t wasted your bloody inheritance on that fucking brewery, then we would have been able to buy one tomorrow.”
I had never heard her swear before and I was quite shocked. She was correct, of course, but I couldn’t put the clock back. Installation of the keg racking line had used up all my money and had also increased our loan with the bank.
I told her I had read in the paper of someone who’d been in a similar position to her. On that occasion, the man’s family had raised the money through things like sponsored walks.
“Miles, I’ve only got weeks to live. How are we going to raise a thousand pounds through sponsored walks in that time? Why would anybody sponsor us anyway? Everybody knows how wealthy we are.
Why can’t we borrow the money?”
“Because it has only been six months since we increased our mortgage with the bank,” I replied.
“Well, why can’t we go to another bank then?” she asked me.
We were with the Westminster Bank and her father, although now retired, still had contacts at Williams Deacon’s. But that was immaterial. The truth was we didn’t have any security left.
In the end I told her that the only thing we could do was to sell off one of our pubs. We’d have to pay part of our bank loan back, because they had a charge over our entire estate. But hopefully, we would still have enough money left over to pay for a dialysis machine.
She was not happy, although at least we now had a plan. Of course, in previous years, I’d have just phoned up Joe Maynard and he would have bought one of our pubs from us. He may have been our competitor, but when all was said and done, he was related to us. He probably wouldn’t even have tried to knock the price down. But Joe Maynard had sold out to Whitbread’s for a knockdown price and was now a broken man.