Stuart soon realised this, of course, so Chris couldn’t lord it over him for long, the film-maker patronising the academic. To do him justice, Chris didn’t much care. Here was a man who really knew about film, and film was Chris’s first love after me. He could talk to Stuart in his own language. But Stuart’s motives were less transparent.
Stuart liked to see films on his own, because it made the experience more concentrated — that’s what he told Chris, at any rate. So he would recommend films to my husband within striking distance of Toledo, and Chris would drive off across the hot red plain. He would come back full of what he had seen, exhilarated by the long drive home past the fields of sunflowers and the olive-dotted hills. The last time it happened the programme times were wrong; we’d played that little trick once too often; he came back early and nearly caught us, he thought he’d passed Stuart driving down the road from the parador, but I affected ignorance.
‘Not impossible,’ I said. My voice sounded unnatural, my throat was dry. Perhaps Stuart had been having a drink with a friend, since the parador had the best bars in town; but of course those jeeps were very common in Spain. I was directing too much energy to the question. I thought, he must hear I’m lying. But he lit a cigar, and changed the subject.
‘Bloody waste of an afternoon,’ he said. ‘I shan’t trust Stuart’s programme times again. Coming back was rather horrific. I ran into a hanging wall of orange butterflies, you couldn’t miss them, they went on for ever, swarming all over the main road and all across the windscreen. Beautiful but disgusting. I killed a lot of them. Why didn’t they have the sense to get out of the way?’
We always trod a very narrow line. The excitement was treading that very narrow line. It was exciting, too, to have a man with commitments, a man who worked and had a wife and children, a man who wasn’t wholly available to me. We were both actors, both liars. I enjoyed the foursome (occasionally six-some, when I couldn’t dissuade them from bringing the children) outings almost as much as I enjoyed the moments we spent alone. Knowing both he and Chris wanted me. Sailing near the wind in the things we said, the way we looked, the tiny touches, apparently casual, but burning, burning. Whose foot was pushing mine under the table? The electricity ran from my toe to my groin as I eased my legs across one another, carefully avoiding my lover’s eyes, knowing he was looking at me hard.
For me it was partly a game. Stuart was different, more serious, with a gloomy Calvinistic streak. The lying and acting caused him pain. I only felt twinges of fear, not pain.
‘Christopher would kill us if he found out,’ I said to Stuart one afternoon, half an hour after Christopher had left, ten minutes after Stuart and I shrugged our clothes off. Chris thought I was in the El Greco museum, Kirsty thought Stuart was working on his book. But he was working on me, with tender precision, his black head rooted between my legs.
‘Can’t hear,’ he said, coming up for air.
‘Christopher would kill us…’
‘Don’t enjoy it so much. Making them jealous. I feel guilty as hell.’
‘I never feel guilty — don’t stop, I want you — I just feel afraid. He’s always been a jealous man. But why should we feel guilty, anyway? How can something so pleasurable be wrong?’
It began to feel wrong in the end. Partly because he was so agonised about it. We went on meeting for half a dozen years, and only missed one summer. He was hooked on me, but resented me. I suspect Kirsty was a bore in bed, and he’d never been unfaithful before. My orgasms were a drug for him, making him feel like a wonderful lover.
There were moments I shan’t forget. One balmy May evening in the year after we met we were celebrating, in a false little foursome, meeting up again after twelve months apart. We were in the parador’s restaurant, which is staid to look at and rather brightly-lit but offers extremely sensual food; I’d ordered sucking-pig, and it arrived, enormous, luscious pink flesh and a golden crust, enough to feed a city. The smell was wonderful.
‘Is that all for you?’ asked Kirsty, amazed. She had ordered sole; she was semi-vegetarian. ‘How do you stay so scrawny, Alex?’
An awkward silence fell.
‘She isn’t scrawny,’ said Stuart.
Kirsty blushed and covered her mouth. ‘I’m sorry, I meant skinny.’
‘Exercise,’ I said, demurely, but because she had been rude to me I allowed myself a tiny smile at Stuart, a little look, a little longer than it should have been. Actually we hadn’t had a chance to make love; Chris and I had only arrived the night before. When I rang to invite them to eat with us, Kirsty’s voice had been anxious, a little unwilling, despite the friendly postcards we had exchanged.
She watched me tear into it with my teeth. ‘Sucking-pig, you said. Do you think it means they’re still being suckled? Do you think the poor bairns aren’t even weaned?’ Now her face looked rounder and paler than usual. I wanted to give it a little nip.
On cue, the baby-listener howled from the wall — we hadn’t been able to get a babysitter, so the children were sleeping in our bedroom with a listening device plugged in.
‘I’ll go,’ said Kirsty, the perpetual martyr.
‘Don’t be silly, love, I’ve finished, I’ll go.’ Stuart was a very good father.
‘You won’t be able to open the door, it’s tricky,’ I breathed, and saw his face twitch slightly. ‘I can finish this pig in a second.’ And I did. I ate ravenously, looking at Kirsty, taking big bites, with great enjoyment, sucking the juice from the succulent flesh. Then I followed Stuart from the room.
‘Bring me my cigars,’ Christopher called after us.
‘Yes, my darling.’
We kissed in the lift. His tongue was long and thin and deft; he pressed me so hard against the lift controls that we shot to the basement, then up to the sky. By the time we got to our bedroom door there was silence inside. We slipped in quietly. They were both tucked into our double bed, Fiona flat out with her little freckled arms spread wide on the pillow in an attitude of trust, Robert with his head on his sister’s chest.
‘Aren’t they beautiful,’ Stuart said, stricken.
I was irritated by his sudden stillness, his air of a worshipper returning to God. I let my hand slip down to his trousers, I felt his cock, I made it nudge against me, it was my cock, he was my lover, I demanded service, he was ready for me. Something crossed my mind; I began to laugh; I went and pulled out the baby listener that would have broadcast us through the hotel; then we were both laughing and kissing each other.
‘Come into the bathroom, quickly.’ He pushed inside me — I pulled him inside me — with my dress round my waist and his trousers round his ankles, the rim of the basin pressing into my hips, and I cried out softly at the first long thrust and began to fuck like a rider in the saddle, crazed with hunger for my orgasm.
‘You taste of meat,’ he panted, as he finally unclamped his lips from mine, as the moans he had muffled died in my chest.
‘You’re my meat,’ I said, making my dress demure again, running my fingers through my hair.
‘Am I good enough? Am I the best?’
‘You’re good enough. You’re great. I mustn’t forget to get Christopher’s cigars…’
(Actually, after the initial novelty, I knew he wasn’t as good as Christopher. Christopher had always been intensely sensual, and practice had made perfect, over the years. So why did I need Stuart? I like new things. I like a change.)