“You can get out,” she snarls at me.
“I’ve left my stuff in the—”
“Get out! I don’t want you in my house a minute longer. Get out!” She comes towards me with her face screwed up like a piece of red paper and, so help me, I think she’s going to belt me one.
I’m always dead scared when a bird turns nasty because you never know what they’re going to do. A kick in the cobblers might be the least of it. So I don’t wait to say goodbye to Petra but back away quick with Mrs. V. in pursuit. I half fall down the stairs and I’m out of the front door just as fast as any bloke in my situation ought to be. So fast in fact that it’s not till I’m on the other side of the railing that I remember I’ve left all my kit round the back porch. Now I could go back for it but somehow the thought of another brush with Mrs. V. doesn’t appeal so I decide to push off home and give her time to cool off.
The next morning I hang around at home until Sid has gone out and then nip round to the Big House. I’m feeling a lot better now and a little ashamed that I didn’t go back yesterday. Mrs. V. can’t eat me and the only thing I did wrong was to use her bed. Nothing to get stroppy about.
Round the back and I’m hoping to find my stuff where I left it but no such luck. The old bag has probably moved it inside so she can tear me off a strip when I come to collect it. I give the back door a gentle tap and wait for Petra to open it but that’s not the way it goes. When I look up it’s Mrs. V. who’s fixing me with a steely eye.
“So you’ve come to finish the job?” she says.
I wonder what she means for a moment but decide she isn’t trying to be sarcastic.
“You want me to do the windows?”
“That’s the idea. You are a window cleaner aren’t you – I mean as your first line of business.”
“Yes I suppose so.”
“Well, you’d better suppose right, or you won’t get the work again. You’ll find your things in the garage.”
She turns away and just for a moment I wonder whether to kick her up the backside and tell her to stuff it. But as usual my shrewd business brain weighs up the possibilities and I troop off to the garage wondering where Petra is.
I keep my eyes open as I move round the outside of the house but there’s no sign of her and it occurs to me that Mrs. V. might have given her the chop. Up to the scene of my near triumph the day before and I’m gazing fondly through the window imagining how magnificent I must have looked on the job when Petra comes into the room. She’s got her little black dress on with her frilly white apron and the thing in her hair and – wait a minute! She seems to have got plumper overnight. Her upper arms are definitely more rounded and her thighs – Jesus Christ! It isn’t Petra, it’s Mrs. V. My mouth is hanging lower than a coal miner’s balls and it’s a good job I’ve got one foot hooked over the window sill otherwise I’d be down in the garden. What a carve up. Mrs. V. must have gone round the twist. What in God’s name does she think she’s playing at?
I soon get the chance to ask her because she beckons me towards her with her index finger like my old schoolmaster used to do when he was going to clip you round the earhole.
“Come ’ere you naughty boy,” she squeaks. The accent doesn’t sound like her at all and I suddenly realise that it’s like a Frog speaking English.
“You ’ave been a naughty boy but I ’ave been naughty too, so I zink zat perhaps you should punish me.”
“Oh, no, that’s alright” I mumble, thinking that she’s barmy and wondering whether I ought to get the police.
“Ve should never ’ave come in ’ere.”
Mrs. V. picks up a silver backed hairbrush and hands it to me.
“Ven zomebody ’as been wicked girl they should ’av a little smack.”
She looks quite good standing there with her tits pushed up as if they’re being served up to you on a tray. The fact that the costume is a bit on the small side doesn’t do any harm either. It strikes me that she’s not a bad looking bird. Full mouth, good features, she can’t be much over forty.
“Smack you?” I says.
“Zat’s right.” she lowers her eyes and bows her head like a kid owning up for smashing a window. Some kid! I wonder how long she was standing there in the doorway watching Petra and me on the job. She certainly didn’t start coughing or anything.
“I vill lie on ze bed and you give me a little smack. Yes?”
She pulls up her skirt and shows me one of the sauciest pairs of frilly black knickers I’ve seen outside of those shops in Shaftesbury Avenue. I’m admiring them, when she pulls them down to her knees and bends over the bed. Now I’m only human aren’t I, and I can stand so much. This is so much.
I go over to the bed and put my hand between her legs and tickle the thing that is pressed against the bedspread like a warm, black spider. I’ve got a hard on now like a stick of Blackpool rock with the Lords Prayer printed through it – sideways.
“Smack me.”
I’ve still got the hairbrush in my hand and – well, you can’t refuse a lady can you? – I give her a few taps till her bottom is a delicate patterned pink and she’s squealing like feeding time at the piggery. It amazes me how some birds love being walloped.
Well, you don’t have to read a lot of detective stories to know what happens next. Her drawers complete their journey to the floor where they soon chum up with my jeans and I’m into her faster than a stoat into a rabbit hole.
What a performer. In my experience you can’t beat an older woman. Everytime they do it they do it as if they reckon it might be the last. And they’re not inhibited either. Mrs. V’s attraction to things French goes a lot deeper than just dressing up in her maid’s clobber and saying ‘oo la la’ occasionally. About the only thing she doesn’t do is the Can Can.
Then suddenly, it’s all over. She sits up, pats her hair, picks up her knickers and says “I am going to ze bathroom” and walks out. Well, I can take a hint, and sure enough just as I’m dressed and have swung one foot over the window sill she comes in again – but this time wearing the full Mrs. Villiers kit. She gives me a searching glance as if to say “Keep your nose to the grindstone and your hands off the teaspoons” and stalks out. There’s not even a twinkle when she gives me my money and if it wasn’t for the condition of my old man I might think I’d dreamed the whole thing. But when I examine what looks like a peeled grape with anaemia I realise it’s either been belting the arse off somebody or I must have caught it in a mincing machine without noticing.
Now about this time I can hear some of you saying ‘oh yes, very likely, isn’t it. Women dressing up as French maids and having it off with the window cleaner. What a load of cobblers. Who does he think we are, etc. etc.’. Now, I don’t mind. I’m used to this reaction. But I want to warn you against it. Having your doubts is one thing, but complacency is a whore of a different colour. Just because it’s never happened to you, doesn’t mean it isn’t happening to other people. Have a quick butchers at the ‘News of the People’ occasionally if you don’t believe me. I knew a bloke once who came home in the middle of the afternoon and caught his wife curled up in bed with someone else. He went spare. Picked up a lamp to smash the fellow’s face in – and found it was the next door neighbour’s daughter. Now just imagine that; not very nice to find your wife on the job with a bloke, but with a bird? It nearly killed the poor bastard and he’d had no idea his old woman was bent; used to have it away with her whenever he wanted to and she never complained or anything.
It’s