Roald Dahl - The Collected Short Stories of Roald Dahl, Volume 1

And it had always been wonderful.

Three thousand times?

She thought more. Probably a good deal more. Who counts?

Assuming, though, for the sake of argument, that the exact figure (for there has to be an exact figure) was three thousand six hundred and eighty and knowing that every single time it happened it was an act of pure, passionate, authentic lovemaking between the same man and the same woman then how in heaven's name could an entirely new man, an unloved stranger, hope to come in suddenly on the three thousand, six hundred and eighty-first time and be even halfway acceptable?

He'd be a trespasser.

All the memories would come rushing back. She would be lying there suffocated by memories.

She had raised this very point with Dr Jacobs during one of her sessions a few months back, and old Jacobs had said, "There will be no nonsense about memories, my dear Mrs Cooper. I wish you would forget that. Only the present will exist."

"But how do I get there?" she had said. "How can I summon up enough nerve suddenly to go upstairs to a bedroom and take off my clothes in front of a new man, a stranger, in cold blood…?"

"Cold blood!" he had cried. "Good God, woman, it'll be boiling hot!" And later he had said, "Do at any rate try to believe me, Mrs Cooper, when I tell you that any woman who has been deprived of sexual congress after more than twenty years of practice of uncommonly frequent practice in your case, if I understand you correctly-any woman in those circumstances is going to suffer continually from severe psychological disturbances until the routine is reestablished. You are feeling a lot better, I know that, but it is my duty to inform you that you are by no means back to normal… To Conrad, Anna said, "This isn't by any chance a therapeutic suggestion, is it?"

"A what?"

"A therapeutic suggestion."

"What in the world do you mean?"

"It sounds exactly like a plot hatched up by my Dr Jacobs."

"Look," he said, and now he leaned right across the table and touched her left hand with the tip of one finger. "When I knew you before, I was too damn young and nervous to make that sort of proposition, much as I wanted to. I didn't think there was any particular hurry then, anyway. I figured we had a whole lifetime before us. I wasn't to know you were going to drop me."

Her martini arrived. Anna picked it up and began to drink it fast. She knew exactly what it was going to do to her. It was going to make her float. A third martini always did that. Give her a third martini and within seconds her body would become completely weightless and she would go floating around the room like a wisp of hydrogen gas.

She sat there holding the glass with both hands as though it were a sacrament. She took another gulp. There was not much of it left now. Over the rim of her glass she could see Conrad watching her with disapproval as she drank. She smiled at him radiantly.

"You're not against the use of anaesthetics when you operate, are you?" she asked.

"Please, Anna, don't talk like that."

"I am beginning to float," she said.

"So I see," he answered. "Why don't you stop there?"

"What did you say?"

"I said, why don't you stop?"

"Do you want me to tell you why?"

"No," he said. He made a little forward movement with his hands as though he were going to take her glass away from her, so she quickly put it to her lips and tipped it high, holding it there for a few seconds to allow the last drop to run out. When she looked at Conrad again, he was placing a ten-dollar bill on the waiter's tray, and the waiter was saying, "Thank you, sir. Thank you indeed," and the next thing she knew she was floating out of the room and across the lobby of the hotel with Conrad's hand cupped lightly under one of her elbows, steering her toward the elevators. They floated up to the twenty-second floor, and then along the corridor to the door of her bedroom. She fished the key out of her purse and unlocked the door and floated inside. Conrad followed, closing the door behind him. Then very suddenly, he grabbed hold of her and folded her up in his enormous arms and started kissing her with great gusto.

She let him do it.

He kissed her all over her mouth and cheeks and neck, taking deep breaths in between the kisses. She kept her eyes open, watching him in a queer detached sort of way, and the view she got reminded her vaguely of the blurry close-up view of a dentist's face when he is working on an upper back tooth.

Then all of a sudden, Conrad put his tongue into one of her ears. The effect of this upon her was electric. It was as though a live two-hundred-volt plug had been pushed into an empty socket, and all the lights came on and the bones began to melt and the hot molten sap went running down into her limbs and she exploded into a frenzy. It was the kind of marvellous, wanton, reckless, flaming frenzy that Ed used to provoke in her so very often in the olden days by just a touch of the hand here and there. She flung her arms around Conrad's neck and started kissing him back with far more gusto than he had ever kissed her, and although he looked at first as though he thought she was going to swallow him alive, he soon recovered his balance.

Anna hadn't the faintest idea how long they stood there embracing and kissing with such violence, but it must have been for quite a while. She felt such happiness, such…such confidence again at last, such sudden overwhelming confidence in herself that she wanted to tear off her clothes and do a wild dance for Conrad in the middle of the room. But she did no such foolish thing. Instead, she simply floated away to the edge of the bed and sat down to catch her breath. Conrad quickly sat down beside her. She leaned her head against his chest and sat there glowing all over while he gently stroked her hair. Then she undid one button of his shin and slid her hand inside and laid it against his chest. Through his ribs, she could feel the beating of his heart.

"What do I see here?" Conrad said.

"What do you see where, my darling?"

"On your scalp. You want to watch this, Anna."

"You watch it for me, dearest."

"Seriously," he said, "you know what this looks like? It looks like a tiny touch of androgenic alopecia."

"Good."

"No, it is not good. It's actually an inflammation of the hair follicles, and it causes baldness. It's quite common on women in their later years."

"Oh shut up, Conrad," she said, kissing him on the side of the neck. "I have the most gorgeous hair."

She sat up and pulled off his jacket. Then she undid his tie and threw it across the room.

"There's a little hook on the back of my dress," she said. "Undo it, please."

Conrad unhooked the hook, then unzipped the zipper and helped her to get out of the dress. She had on a rather nice pale-blue slip. Conrad was wearing an ordinary white shin, as doctors do, but it was now open at the neck, and this suited him. His neck had a little ridge of sinewy muscle running up vertically on either side, and when he turned his head the muscle moved under the skin. It was the most beautiful neck Anna had ever seen.

"Let's do this very very slowly," she said. "Let's drive ourselves crazy with anticipation."

His eyes rested a moment on her face, then travelled away, all the way down the length of her body, and she saw him smile.

"Shall we be very stylish and dissipated, Conrad, and order a bottle of champagne? I can ask room service to bring it up, and you can hide in the bathroom when they come in."

"No," he said. "You've had enough to drink already. Stand up, please."

The tone of his voice caused her to stand up at once.

"Come here," he said.

She went close to him. He was still sitting on the bed, and now, without getting up, he reached forward and began to take off the rest of her clothes. He did this slowly and deliberately. His face had become suddenly rather pale.