Maggie Gee - Where are the Snows

‘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.)

When things got difficult, I didn’t need him.

‘You’re fantastic, Alex. Like no one else. Nothing like this has ever happened to me… you’re like a drug. I’m hooked, you know that… but it’s just selfishness. I blame myself. I hate myself.’

‘As long as you don’t blame me. ’

But I knew he did blame me. You could sometimes feel it in the way he fucked, when he’d drunk a little at lunchtime and his dark blue eyes had an angry look. He battered my body into the bed as if he wanted to obliterate me even as he roared in orgasm.

That could be exciting too. Once or twice, but not as a habit. I thought the anger was becoming a habit. I don’t like being blamed, or obliterated.

(And maybe I was just a little peeved that he’d never offered to leave his wife, his large-hipped wife and bad-tempered children — at least, they were always bad-tempered with me. He doted blindly on those kids, sniggering Fiona, beetle-browed Robert… not that I would have left Christopher, but I feel Stuart might have offered to leave. It deprived me of the pleasure of telling him not to.)

After five years I was tired of it. I was forty-seven, I was forty-eight… One year Chris didn’t want to go to Toledo. He’d never shown that he suspected me, but he was very definite; Toledo was over. I found that I agreed with him. And I needed a baby, not a lover.

I arranged to meet Stuart in a little farmhouse I rented in the hills above Malaga. Kirsty thought he was on a lecture tour, Chris thought I needed to be alone after the crisis we’d lived through in Portugal. Stuart thought I needed to make love to him, but I only needed to end the chapter. I was eager to fly on to Christopher in Switzerland, our last port of call in Europe. The desire for a child had made me love him again. Stuart had become irrelevant.

The hills were dusty, lethally dry. The photo of the farmhouse had not included the gigantic pylon ten feet away, so the humming and singing and moaning of the wires almost drowned the frantic chirrups of the crickets.

He arrived tired and thirsty, ecstatic to see me. His face was faintly powdered with dust, which made his eyes very dark, theatrical-looking. I could see how much he wanted me. He hugged me, pulling my hips against him.

‘I thought about this every minute of the journey…’

There wasn’t any point in dragging things out. ‘Stuart, wait — I’m sorry. The fun’s gone out of it, my darling.’

And so the unpleasantness began. We argued for hours; the pylon echoed us, singing mournfully across the baked hillside.

‘I’m glad to hear I was a bit of fun… I’ve been in love with you for seven years —’

‘— Six, actually —’

‘I’ve cheated my wife and let down my children. I did it willingly, but not just for fun. You can’t just drop me, just like that, as if it didn’t mean anything.’

I found he was right, it didn’t mean anything. I always go cold when people bully me. I said I wouldn’t meet him again. He grabbed hold of me by the upper arms and shook me against the wall like a rat. We were miles from anywhere, my head hit the cupboard, my neck whiplashed sickeningly. My heart started thumping. Fear and rage. Don’t dare to touch me, don’t dare to hurt me. I screamed like a banshee and kicked him hard, the satisfying contact of shoe and bone — how often we’d played footsy under the table — and then as I saw his face go pale and he grabbed my hair and yanked me towards him I did what I never thought I could do, for after all they had loved me tenderly — I grabbed his cock and balls and squeezed. I squeezed till the bones of my knuckles ached. His roar of pain was like the echo of an orgasm, it followed me as I ran outside, abandoning my book and my shoes, then Stuart came after me, half-doubled up. I jumped into the Land Rover and slammed the door and stared straight in front as he rapped on the window, trying not to hear the abuse he shouted — the engine caught and I revved like a demon up the slope that led to the long track down. I felt powerful driving barefoot up the hill, saving myself, at one with the machine, but the downhill track was a different matter, a switchback nightmare, narrow and steep, the slippery white surface only inches wider than the wheels of the borrowed Land Rover; I screeched down the hillside like a rally-driver, but giggling and frightened, smelling my own sweat, scattering dust and goats and butterflies, making a blue-clad farmer stare and spray the road instead of his olives.