Her skin was as smooth and silken as her shirt but, as he started undoing her buttons, she jumped away.
‘I’m too skinny. Elmer says I’m like an ironing board with two buttons sewn on to tell you which the front is.’
Lysander winced, then drew her back into his arms. ‘All the better to press my suit on.’ Then, as Martha smiled, ‘I’m going to kiss every freckle.’
‘You’ll be here for a thousand years.’
‘Wouldn’t be long enough. Let’s go upstairs.’
‘We shouldn’t.’
‘We can’t fight Mystic Meg.’
Tyson, however, in true Dobermann fashion, refused to let Lysander out of the room until his basket had been carried up to the bedroom and he’d been settled in with strokes and Bonios which gave Martha time to undress and hide herself under the ivy-green silk sheets of the vast emerald and white striped four-poster. Books were piled high on her bedside table. On the other side there stood only a digital clock and a silver-framed photograph of Elmer and George Bush.
‘Elmer only reads balance sheets and the messages on T-shirts,’ said Martha with a sob.
‘Hush, don’t think about him.’
Still in his clothes, Lysander waded through a pampas-grass of long white carpet and gently drew back the sheets. Instantly Martha’s thin arms flew to her tiny breasts. But, like Aladdin stumbling on his cave and touching each gold bar, precious stone and rope of pearls with amazed joy and excitement, Lysander slowly examined her body, stroking her nipples and her concave belly and breathing in the remains of Diorella behind her ears and inside her wrists.
‘Christ, you’re gorgeous!’ He ran his hands up the inside of her long slender legs. ‘I freaked when I first saw these in the stands.’
Dropping his clothes on the floor, he stripped off with total unselfconsciousness and rightly so because he was glorious, with a body as white, firmly curved and inviting on those emerald-green sheets, as early morning mushrooms in a dew-drenched field. His well-developed chest with a slight down of light brown hair narrowed to the flattest stomach and more downy hair from which his cock reared up as jaunty and as confident of bringing joy as a conductor’s baton raised for action.
‘I’ve only been married five months,’ mumbled Martha. ‘We really shouldn’t.’
‘We should, too.’
‘Wouldn’t Dolly be upset?’
‘Probably, but basically I can’t help myself.’
His fake tan was turning orange, his bluey-green eyes were crossing with drink, but, as the big laughing mouth came down on hers, Martha was reduced to the same slobbering ecstasy as Tyson.
Wriggling down the bed, Lysander kissed the arch of her instep, each coral-painted toe, then slowly, slowly up the velvet thighs, feeling the increasing tension as his hands grazed her breasts and shaven armpits, never stopping caressing.
‘We really shouldn’t,’ said Martha faintly.
Reaching out Lysander turned the photograph of Elmer and George Bush to the wall.
‘We don’t need an audience.’
Then, plunging his face into her pubic hair, snuffling as appreciatively as a truffle pig, he mumbled, ‘As I was saying to Martha’s bush.’
Feeling him helpless with laughter, she had to join in, but soon her laughter turned to gasps. Only when he knew she’d come did he keep her pleasure on the boil with half a minute of slowly stabbing fingers.
‘Come inside me,’ urged Martha.
‘Just wait a sec, while I slip into something tight,’ murmured Lysander, reaching for a condom from the back pocket of his jeans. Then as joyously as an otter diving into a summer stream he plunged his cock inside her.
‘Oh wow, that was terrific,’ said Martha as they lay back afterwards, sharing a cigarette.
‘I didn’t get a Christmas bonus because I didn’t sell any houses so it’s been worth waiting till January. You are so lovely.’ Lysander kissed her hand.
‘How come you are such an incredible lover?’
‘Basically, Dolly taught me a lot. One of the advantages of having an older woman.’
‘How old is she?’ Martha snuggled against his chest.
‘Twenty-four.’
‘Ouch.’
‘But she started at fourteen, so there’s a lot of mileage. Look, I just adored sleeping with you.’
‘Me too.’ Martha found she couldn’t keep her hands off him.
Noticing polo bruises darkening his ribs, arms and thighs like the purple markings on a white violet, she wanted to kiss them all better and explore in return his wonderful body.
‘You’re a really sweet guy with the softest heart and the hardest cock.’
‘Better than the other way round.’ Lysander dropped ash on the pampas-grass. ‘I wish I was someone who could go on for hours, but I get so excited, particularly when it’s someone like you. Dolly always makes me stay awake afterwards and stroke her for ages. I find that the most difficult part.’ His voice was slurring, his eyelids drooping. ‘Let’s do it again in a minute. Will you come with me to Disneyland tomorrow? I want to get Donald Duck’s autograph.’
Martha removed the cigarette as he fell asleep.
4
Elmer Winterton’s evening had deteriorated. Bonny, having consumed too much champagne and sucking pig, had suddenly lurched out of the Jacuzzi and for want of a bowl had thrown up in Elmer’s fish-tank. Whereupon his piranhas had swarmed up to the surface and eaten the lot which had turned Elmer’s stomach. Feeling a longing for his shy slender wife, he had been prevented from going straight home by Bonny passing out. Not trusting his guards at the barn not to blab he was reduced to driving her thirty miles home himself.
None of his guards in the gate house felt like telling Elmer he had a houseguest. It was only after he had noticed a T-shirt warning him: Sex is Evil on his bedroom carpet that he glanced up and found his number one player and his wife as enchantingly entwined as Cupid and Psyche.
For the second time in twenty-four hours, Lysander was roused from sleep. But Elmer, red and roaring, was a considerably less attractive alarm clock than the twins.
‘I don’t employ you on my team to hump my wife,’ he howled.
‘Didn’t secure her very well, you fat ape,’ howled back Lysander. ‘How can you chase disgusting slags like that when you’ve got something so beautiful at home?’
That Lysander was right didn’t improve Elmer’s temper. Gathering up a bowl from a table by the door, he was about to hurl it at Lysander.
‘Not the Ming, Elmer,’ wailed Martha.
Elmer paused, which gave Lysander time to wriggle over Martha, scoop up her pale pink silk knickers as a fig leaf, and shoot round the bed out of the room just as a glass bottle of Jolie Madame missing him by inches, smashed against the dragged green wall.
‘Not out,’ squealed Lysander, belting across the landing and down the stairs three steps at a time to find the front door quadrupally locked, whichever way he pulled and tugged it. For an agonizing second he was reminded how his father used to bolt the great oak door at home and his mother used to steal down the back stairs to let him in through the kitchen. Then he jumped out of his totally unprotected skin as shots rang out, shattering the chandelier in the hall. Grabbing a bronze of Elmer astride a polo pony from the hall table, like a weightlifter on a second surge of strength, he hurled it at the window. But the bullet-proof glass didn’t even dent. Instead, like a mass castration of howler monkeys, an ear-splitting alarm blasted the house.