His friends goggled some more. He had to breathe deeply and think of England to avoid an unbecoming state of arousal. Linda, smiling benignly but watching his expression closely, was in no doubt as to the effect she was having on him. She released his hand, into which she had surreptitiously pressed her card, and then she left him in this state and returned to her friends.
She was an unscrupulous minx, apparently.
“Well,” said Caroline, writhing as usual with envy of Linda, and never one to miss the opportunity to state the bleeding obvious. “That looked like you were coming on to a little boy for a minute, but I’m sure looks can be deceiving.”
“Yeah,” added Skye, lasciviously, “although he is a very, very sexy little boy, isn’t he, Linda?”
Caroline snorted a little, and was not to be discouraged. “You can’t be serious, Linda. For god’s sake. I mean how old is the dear little thing anyway?”
“How old does he look?” asked Linda.
“About twenty or twenty-one,” ventured Skye.
“Then that’s how old he is,” said Linda, and refused to continue talking about it. Later that night she thought about it and felt a little slutty, trampy or harlotty. Or to be exact, she felt like a paedophile. Then her husband came home and made inept and somewhat repulsive love to her, and she felt less guilty about her plans for the young man.
* * *
Billy left it a day or two, perhaps to avoid looking over-eager. “Hi, Linda,” he said. His manner was probably more worldly than he felt. “It’s Billy.”
“Billy!” she said with delight. ‘I was hoping you’d phone. Can we meet? Can you come around to my place on Wednesday? That’s my day off. I have something I’d like to discuss with you.”
He wasn’t absolutely certain that she meant what he hoped she meant, but he turned up as planned. After the minimum of social chit-chat, and to remove any doubt about what she meant, she reached up and kissed him thoroughly. No point in beating around the bush. He responded enthusiastically. Now that was something he was able to do very well, and she felt encouraged. The first time they made love took place as soon as they could get to the bedroom and tear off their clothes. She admitted he was beautifully groomed – no one-day growth in evidence this time – and smelled lovely: soap, cologne and toothpaste, but his bedroom skills left much to be desired.
Linda was happy to combine sex and tutorials, so threw herself wholeheartedly into the task of turning Billy into a lover of formidable finesse. And, of course, the wonderful thing about young men is that although they may come too soon at times, they are ready to begin again really quickly. Furthermore, when they have had their fill of coming, they tend to go, leaving one in peace.
Refining these skills on Wednesday afternoons, and any other time they could manage, kept them busy at their debauchery for six months, until the traumatic day of the dive through the window, when Billy escaped her husband’s ire, but Linda did not. Ben walked into the bedroom just as she finished stuffing Billy’s things under the mattress, and leapt back into bed, feigning a life-threatening illness – a heart attack or seizure probably wasn’t far from the truth.
He had the infernal cheek to pull back the bedclothes and actually, actually sniff. What a classless thing to do! Where are all the gentlemen these days, she asked herself, where are the men who, finding their wife in bed with another man, say “I’m frightfully sorry, carry on”2 and leave the room, shutting the door behind them, only bringing up the matter, apologetically, at some convenient time down the track over a gin and tonic. Even blasting off the erring spouse’s head with a shotgun would be classier than all this searching and sniffing.
2 Although, as Dave Allen used to say, “and if you can, that’s sophistication!”
Not Ben. He continued ratting around in the bed linen until he found not one but two used condoms and hurled them at her. Then he roughed her up a bit, pushing at her as he bawled her out. “Bloody whore!” he bellowed. “I knew you were up to something. Do you know how embarrassing this is, to be warned by my Senior Specialist that my wife is being unfaithful.” Now how could Thompson possibly have known? she thought, somewhere between being scared and getting angry.
“Get out, you fucking pox-infested tart!” he screamed. “Pack your things and move out. You are not spending another night under this roof!”
Linda shot out of the bed, propelled by her own fury. Naked and magnificent – Richard would have approved of the spectacle – she roughed him up in her turn, poking him hard with her finger in the middle of his chest and causing him to step back involuntarily. “You get out!” she shouted, thoroughly incensed, with eyes flashing, boobies jiggling in agitation and hair swinging dramatically. “Go on, get the fuck out! This is not just your house and I am not moving out. And if embarrassed is all you feel, then you don’t deserve me. And by the way, I may be a whore but you are a boring, boring man with as much sexual finesse as an epileptic hamster, and if I’m pox-infested, then so are you, hah!”
And so, in polite hostility, they shared the house, spending a few jolly sessions at their respective lawyers to sort out the legal issues. After inserting huge sums of money on a regular basis into their lawyers – which funded said lawyers’ holidays, tessellated tile bathroom renovations and a Harley – Linda and Ben eventually sold up and each found a place of their own. Linda quit her job and took a holiday; divorce followed with a relieved look on its face and, eventually, things settled.
Linda did not further her relationship with Billy because he was off to university soon; besides, she felt it had been tainted with trauma. She packaged up his shirt, leather coat, socks and boots, and got a courier to deliver them to his house with a short but loving note of regret. Like most teenage boys in similar circumstances, he was depressed for about a week, then started using his new skills on new women, some of them being several years older than him.
Billy reminded Linda a little of Richard, although in what way she was hard-pressed to identify, and she felt she needed to spend some time just being herself and getting Richard out of her head. So she got a job in New York, took a succession of new lovers, and enjoyed herself tremendously, although she did not marry again. She returned to England for good in 2002. At this time she felt she wanted to be home, because the mood in the U.S. was depressed and angry. Like many people she no longer felt safe anywhere. The British were – as Richard would say – grumblebums as usual, but they were her grumblebums, and home was home.
* * *
By April of 2002, condominium prices in New York were stabilising, and Linda was able to offload her apartment without the price slashing she had anticipated. It was a good time to be going back to England, having a holiday in the countryside and making plans.
By the time Linda actually arrived at her holiday cottage in Cumbria, she was worn out and in need of about a hundred years of sleep, and she really didn’t care if a handsome prince was going to be around to wake her up. But the human body being what it is, robust and self-repairing if fed well, she woke up next morning to the sound of birds and the smell of, what was that strange smell … oh yes, fresh air. Wrapped in an eiderdown, she absorbed the scene before her: grass, bright green, several acres, flowing into woodland which in turn bordered Coniston Water. When she went for a walk later, she found that Cumbria Way was nearby and she could walk until she dropped, if she wanted. Few people were in evidence as Easter was over by this time, and she felt her vitality start to return.
But with remoteness and solitude comes thinking. The Curse of Homo sapiens sapiens (cogito ergo sum really miserable), which most of us try to avoid unless it is happy thinking. She thought of Richard. No-one she had been with in the U.S., nice as they were, sexy as they could be,