“Oh God,” he said, as he softened in my mouth. “Oh God, Ed. If only I could get Claire…” He collapsed next to me on the seat, his arm still around my neck, his pants and trousers around his knees.
“For Christ’s sake,” I snapped. “Do yourself up, unless you want to get us both arrested at South Holt.” As usual, I felt disgusted with myself for allowing him to swan back into my life after all this time, for allowing him to use me like this, and for loving it, for loving the taste and feel of his cock in my mouth, when all he wanted was a replacement for a wife who wouldn’t suck him off. My cock ached, wanting something I couldn’t bear to think about. I wanted more and I had no way of knowing how to get it. I only knew I wasn’t getting it from Phil.
Chapter 2
I can’t say I didn’t suspect that there was something wrong with me when Phil came into my life, but I thought it was something wrong with my marriage. Maybe I just used that as an excuse; it’s hard to look back and be sure of my feelings. When Phil arrived, I’d been married to Valerie four years, we had two children, and if our sex life wasn’t all bells and whistles, well, that wasn’t surprising after four years of marriage, was it? Sex wasn’t a subject most men I knew spoke about, but I heard enough hints and smutty innuendoes to glean a picture. If you were lucky and your wife wasn’t a Think-of-England type, sex might be decent enough when you first got together, but as time went on, the spark died and it became a Saturday night special.
That’s how it was for Valerie and me. It’s not an excuse. Trouble was, the sex wasn’t great to start with; we married because we met at school, because my parents knew her parents, because…well, it was easy, if truth be told. There were no fireworks when we kissed, no music played when we touched, no invisible orchestra chased us when we walked back from dances.
When I went up to university, she took her tennis career on the road, and was hailed as the young English hope. She was good, very good, and she certainly didn’t lack the drive she needed, but after three gruelling years, she was still at the bottom of the ladder, frantic for success, dogged by injury, and her family’s savings were just about drained. We hardly saw each other during those years; we had rare dates around Wimbledon or Queen’s, and one season when, during the summer holidays, I trailed after her around America for four weeks, impressed by her stamina but bored with the circuit, her friends, and the constant talk of nothing but tennis.
We kept our relationship alive with letters. Letters can be a dangerous and deadly illusion; instead of plain old Ed, I could be someone exciting, someone with a future, someone who lived in a more interesting world than one inhabited by logarithms and pi. When she wasn’t training, playing, or working in the gym, she would read constantly. Austen, Eliot, Brontë and other such literary luminaries. She’d fill her letters with her thoughts on the themes and descriptions of times gone by. Maybe it was because her life was so regimented, so sterile, that she wanted something that was not possible. She certainly didn’t seem to see what a gift she had, that her life was one that many people would covet. Looking back at what I thought was nothing more than a mild deception, I see that I was attempting to be the man she wanted me to be…attempting to fit someone else’s mould, even back then.
I didn’t read those books. I had enough books to be reading; my head was filled with binary and tables. So I cheated. I bought the help notes from the university library, cribbed quotes, ideas and themes, and spilled them all out in our correspondence. It worked like a charm; suddenly I was no longer “dear old Ed,” who was studying “something stuffy” at Christ Church, I was a crossover soul. Someone, to her perception, who was trapped beneath a mountain of numbers, but under the equations and tweed, I was Lochinvar and Darcy a warrior-in-hiding, someone that would rescue her from the slavery of the circuit, and someone who understood her utterly.
I should never have done it. She deserved better. The summer I came down from university, she drove her tatty little Citroen 2CV all the way from Wales, where she was playing, to my parents’ house in London. My jaw dropped when I saw her, slender and frantic, her eyes burning with something I didn’t understand. She launched herself at me with heartbreaking sobs and all I could do was take her in my arms. In my room we fell together with awkward kisses and teenage-like fumblings. She was as innocent as me, but she knew the mechanics at least enough to get us started. When instinct took over, we “confirmed our love,” or that’s what she called it. It was hot and hasty, as well as unpleasant (probably for both of us), and not at all what I expected. I doubt she did either. I remember it didn’t take very long, and I lay for a long while afterwards on her immobile body, wondering what the fuss was about. I assumed that it seemed wrong and sordid because we didn’t have the time to dedicate to it, that the fear of discovery was taking away the pleasure that I should have been feeling.
Valerie gave up her professional career the next year. It was a particularly unpleasant time; I had just started in the City, and her parents (quite rightly, for all of Valerie’s protestations to the contrary) blamed me for ruining their daughter’s career. They tried everything to dissuade her, telling her that she could combine the tennis with married life, but she, in a hard-nosed fashion that startled me then but I soon became accustomed to, refused to budge. I think she truly believed that life with me was going to be better.
We married in the autumn, and children, suburbia and boredom followed close afterwards. I never liked to discuss Valerie with Alex, as the bed-time frigidity seemed a life time away from what he offered, what we had. Married sex didn’t improve, for all that I assumed it would when we had our own home, our own bed. It wasn’t her fault, I suppose; she hadn’t been a slut before our marriage—she hadn’t any more experience than I. Maybe with another lover she would have enjoyed the experience, but she didn’t with me, I’m certain of that. It was cold, mechanical. She never touched me intimately and, in return, it didn’t occur to me to do something for her that she was incapable of doing for me. It was all so…methodical, and what I thought was very English. Very traditional.
When Phil came along, we had just about stopped altogether—partly because I didn’t want any more children and, on my side at least, mostly with relief that the unlovely performance could be dispensed with.
Phil and Claire moved in, and life changed almost at once. We were both starved for affectionate company, and we absorbed the new neighbours gratefully. They seemed bright and warm, outwardly similar to us in many ways, but they had a casual ease with each other that Valerie and I had never achieved. Claire and Valerie clicked with each other straight away, and Phil was impossible not to like, of course. Now that I look back on it, our friendship was Valerie’s idea, to see if I could get him a position at my firm; I was embarrassed, Phil grateful, but it all worked out well. He slid into work alongside me as effortlessly as he did anything else.
So when did he and I first…? Not immediately. I think I would have run a mile if that had happened when we’d first met. At first I was just pleased to have a colleague I could socialise with, a friend I could play golf with, a mate I could go to the pub with on Sunday lunchtimes. We were inseparable, always in each other’s houses, on holiday together, working and playing together.
I certainly didn’t see it coming when it did, but then, as I said, I was amazingly naïve about my marriage problems. I thought that if I had married someone else—though I never had a face for this mythical woman who would have made me happy—things might have been different, and sex would have been a delight instead of a chore. Even when I wanked, I didn’t think of anyone. I just concentrated on bringing myself off. I was pretty good at it by the time Phil knocked the bottom out of my world.
It first happened when we were all on holiday in France. Claire’s family owned a
gîte
south of Bordeaux; we were all self-confessed wine snobs and the time we spent there was a wine lover’s saturnalia. In fact, I don’t think any of us, except for Claire, whose family were vintners, could really tell one wine from another, but we used to have fun being pretentious. When it was all four of us together, Val always seemed to have more fun than when it was just us two together.
It was our third night there. We’d spent the day touring about in my Bentley, re-visiting favourite vineyards and stocking up on cases and bottles. When we came back to the
gîte
, it was late afternoon, and we sat on the patio, sampling wines, cheeses and fresh crispy bread. By ten, we were all pretty drunk and the girls retired, giggling and yawning, leaving Phil and I half-cut and relaxed, watching the stars in the warm French night.
I don’t remember much of what we talked about at first—probably work, golf and cricket, particularly the chances of winning the Ashes. How we got onto relationships I don’t know. It wasn’t something we usually discussed. We’d roll our eyes at each other from time to time in the pub; we’d tease each other if we suspected the other was “under the thumb.” But we hadn’t ever discussed the nitty-gritty of what went on behind closed doors. Maybe it was the wine, but whoever started it, in half an hour or so we were discussing women and the good and the bad of living with them.
“It’s not that I’m not happy,” I lied through a cushion of green glass and crystal, “but I thought,” and I dropped my cigarette and bent over the chair on Phil’s side to try and pick it up, “I thought there’d be more.” The cigarette had landed in a pool of spilled wine and was ruined.
“More what?” Phil said, filling up the glasses, ignoring my wave of refusal.
“I don’t know, exactly.” The wine was making the front of my head buzz, and I hadn’t noticed how dark it was until that moment. “I just remember being at university—and school—and I thought that marriage would be a bit like that.”
“Like school?” Phil laughed, he was often laughing at me. “Cold beds and fags? Could be.”
“Idiot. You know what I mean,” I said, waving my glass expansively. “Friends—comradeship—all that sort of thing. Minds understanding each other.”
“Minds? Or bodies?” Phil’s voice was suddenly quieter and deeper.
“No. Yes!” I said in confusion. “Bodies—absolutely, but minds too. That has to be a part of it. I thought a marriage would be a partnership. Like sharing your study with a friend on your own wavelength, but more intimate.”
“Then you are living in another universe,” he said shortly.
“You and Claire,” I said, as my inhibitions continued to slide into the sediment at the bottom of the bottle, “seem pretty evenly matched from where I’m sitting.”
“Then you need to sit somewhere else.”
I was about to throw back a smart comment, but warning bells rang in my head; his voice was serious and razor-dark. I turned my head in surprise, not quite knowing what to say.
Phil stood and walked across to the trolley, selecting another bottle. “Looks can be deceiving, that’s all I’m saying.” He pulled his steamer chair a little closer and sat down, unfolding himself, stretching like a big cat. I remember noticing how long and lean his legs looked in the black trousers that clung to his frame.
The wine had loosened my tongue, and it seemed so easy to speak of things we hadn’t before. “You seem happy enough.”
“Happy?” He puffed smoke straight ahead as he stared up at the sky, “I suppose so, in a lot of ways. But contentment, now that’s another thing. You were talking of an equal partnership, weren’t you? Don’t you think, Eddie, that you can’t be fully content unless physical needs are met as well as the intellectual ones?”
I knew the answer to that, but even with the wine I was loath to answer it. I wanted to pour it all out, but even with him, I couldn’t do it. It takes more than one drunken evening to change a lifetime’s worth of instilled belief that one makes one’s bed and then lies on it. For life.
“I hadn’t thought about it.”
“Liar,” he said.
“You don’t know…” I was getting tongue-tied and annoyed. Phil had always managed to run rings around me, especially when we were drinking.
“No. I don’t,” he said smoothly. “And neither do you.” He pulled his cigarettes from his shirt pocket. I watched him, wondering at the change in him, the way his face had suddenly become so much leaner, his cheekbones making livid shadows on his face. He lit two cigarettes and passed one over to me. No one had ever done something like this for me. It was such a casual gesture that I reacted without thinking, taking the cigarette before I had time to think. Phil certainly didn’t notice my discomposure, and I sat staring at the cigarette, secretly touching the filter where his mouth had been and wondering if he’d notice if I dropped it and asked for another. I almost didn’t smoke it; it seemed too intimate. I realised he was still talking and so put the damn thing in my mouth, almost fiercely, pretending I couldn’t feel the dampness of his lips on the filter. But I could. I could.
“I’ve always wanted to know, Ed,” he continued, “although I think I can guess the answer. It’s something in the crease between your eyes
there
.” He leaned over and flicked a finger between my eyes. “Does she give head?” He half-fell, half-knelt in the space between the two chairs and rested his elbows on the armrest of mine. I could smell his breath, warm and fruity; his eyes were dark and teasing.