‘The interesting looking ones always are.’
‘Then why aren’t you?’
Her teeth flashed liquid white in an appreciative smile. ‘Ah... marriage can wait.’
‘How long?’ I asked.
‘I suppose... until I find a man I can’t bear to part with.’
‘You’ve parted with quite a few?’
‘Quite a few.’ She nodded and sipped her beer, and looked at me over the rim. ‘And you? Are you faithful to your wife?’
I felt myself blink. I said carefully, ‘Most of the time.’
‘But not always?’
‘Not always.’
After a long considering pause she said one short word.
‘Good.’
‘And is that,’ I asked, ‘a philosophic comment, or a proposition?’
She laughed. ‘I just like to know where I stand.’
‘Clear eyed and wide awake...?’
‘I hate muddle,’ she nodded.
‘And emotional muddle especially?’
‘You’re so right.’
She had never loved, I thought. Sex, often. Love, never. Not what I liked, but what I wanted. I battened down the insidious whisper and asked her, like a good little journalist, about her job.
‘It serves.’ She shrugged. ‘You get maybe one authentic talent in every hundred students. Mostly their ambition is five times more noticeable than their ideas.’
‘Do you design clothes yourself?’
‘Not for the rag trade. Some for myself, and for Sarah, and for the school. I prefer to teach. I like being able to turn vaguely artistic ignorance into competent workmanship.’
‘And to see your influence all along Oxford Street?’
She nodded, her eyes gleaming with amusement. ‘Five of the biggest dress manufacturers now have old students of mine on their design staff. One of them is so individual that I can spot his work every time in the shop windows.’
‘You like power,’ I said.
‘Who doesn’t?’
‘Heady stuff.’
‘All power currupts?’ She was sarcastic.
‘Each to his own corruption,’ I said mildly. ‘What’s yours, then?’
She laughed. ‘Money, I guess. There’s a chronic shortage of the folding stuff in all forms of teaching.’
‘So you make do with power.’
‘If you can’t have everything,’ she nodded, ‘you make do with something.’
I looked down into my beer, unable to stop the contraction I could feel in my face. Her words so completely summed up my perennial position. After eleven years I was less resigned to it than ever.
‘What are you thinking about?’ she asked.
‘Taking you to bed.’
She gasped. I looked up from the flat brown liquid ready for any degree of feminine outrage. I could have mistaken her.
It seemed I hadn’t. She was laughing. Pleased.
‘That’s pretty blunt.’
‘Mm.’
I put down the beer and stood up, smiling. ‘Time to go,’ I said. I’ve a train to catch.’
‘After that? You can’t go after that.’
‘Especially after that.’
For answer she stood up beside me, took hold of my hand, and put my fingers into the gold ring at the top of the zipper down the front of her dress.
‘Now go home,’ she said.
‘We’ve only known each other three hours,’ I protested.
‘You were aware of me after three minutes.’
I shook my head. ‘Three seconds.’
Her teeth gleamed. ‘I like strangers.’
I pulled the ring downwards and it was clearly what she wanted.
Harry and Sarah had a large white fluffy rug in front of their fireplace. I imagined it was not the first time Gail had lain on it. She was brisk, graceful, unembarrassed. She stripped off her stockings and shoes, shook off the dress, and stepped out of the diminutive green bra and panties underneath it. Her tawny skin looked warm in the gathering dusk, and her shape took the breath away.
She gave me a marvellous time. A generous lover as well as practised. She knew when to touch lightly, and when to be vigorous. She had strong internal muscles, and she knew how to use them. I took her with passionate gratitude, a fair substitute for love.
When we had finished I lay beside her on the rug and felt the released tension weighing down my limbs in a sort of heavy languorous weakness. The world was a million light-years away and I was in no hurry for it to come closer.
‘Wow,’ she said, half breathless, half laughing. ‘Boy, you sure needed that.’
‘Mm.’
‘Doesn’t your wife let you...?’
Elizabeth, I thought. Oh God, Elizabeth. I must sometimes. Just sometimes.
The old weary tide of guilt washed back. The world closed in.
I sat up and stared blindly across the darkening room. It apparently struck Gail that she had been less than tactful, because she got up with a sigh and put her clothes on again, and didn’t say another word.
For better or worse, I thought bitterly. For richer, for poorer. In sickness and in health keep thee only unto her as long as you both shall live. I will, I said.
An easy vow, the day I made it. I hadn’t kept it. Gail was the fourth girl in eleven years. The first for nearly three.
‘You’ll miss your train,’ she observed prosaically, ‘if you sit there much longer.’
I looked at my watch, which was all I had on. Fifteen minutes.
She sighed, ‘I’ll drive you along to the station.’
We made it with time to spare. I stepped out of the car and politely thanked her for the lift.
‘Will I see you again?’ she said. Asking for information. Showing no anxiety. Looking out at me through the open window of the estate car outside Virginia Water station she was giving a close imitation of any suburban wife doing the train run. A long cool way from the rough and tumble on the rug. Switch on, switch off. The sort of woman I needed.
‘I don’t know,’ I said indecisively. The signal at the end of the platform went green.
‘Goodbye,’ she said calmly.
‘Do Harry and Sarah,’ I asked carefully, ‘always play golf on Sundays?’
She laughed, the yellow station lighting flashing on teeth and eyes.
‘Without fail.’
‘Maybe...’
‘Maybe you’ll ring, and maybe you won’t.’ She nodded. ‘Fair enough. And maybe I’ll be in, and maybe I won’t.’ She gave me a lengthy look which was half smile and half amused detachment. She wouldn’t weep if I didn’t return. She would accommodate me if I did. ‘But don’t leave it too long, if you’re coming back.’
She wound up the window and drove off without a wave, without a backward glance.
The green electric worm of a train slid quietly into the station to take me home. Forty minutes to Waterloo. Underground to Kings Cross. Three quarters of a mile to walk. Time to enjoy the new ease in my body. Time to condemn it. Too much of my life was a battlefield in which conscience and desire fought constantly for the upper hand: and whichever of them won, it left me the loser.
Elizabeth’s mother said with predictable irritation, ‘You’re late.’
‘I’m sorry.’
I watched the jerks of her crossly pulling on her gloves. Overcoat and hat had already been in place when I walked in.
‘You have so little consideration. It’ll be nearly eleven when I get back.’
I didn’t answer.
‘You’re selfish. All men are selfish.’
There was no point in agreeing with her, and no point in arguing. A disastrous and short lived marriage had left hopeless wounds in her mind which she had done her best to pass on to her only child. Elizabeth, when I first met her, had been pathologically scared of men.
‘We’ve had our supper,’ my mother-in-law said. ‘I’ve stacked the dishes for Mrs Woodward.’
Nothing could be more certainly relied upon to upset Mrs Woodward than a pile of congealed plates first thing on Monday morning.