her arms around them. She lay and listened to the sounds of doors opening and closing, distant hoovering, a car passing outside. She was thirsty and her head felt muzzy.
The door opened. John came in and closed it with a gentle click, before he looked and saw that she was awake. He stood at the side of the bed, peering down at her. Then he sat down heavily on his own side. He was wearing a startling, red paisley dressing gown.
‘I’m sorry,’ he offered at last. ‘That wasn’t a very attractive display, was it? I don’t often drink like that, although it may surprise you to hear it. Can’t afford it, for one thing. And when I did I used to be able to hold it. But I’m an old man now. Failing in every direction.’
Mattie broke into his monologue. ‘Fifty-four isn’t old. Not if you don’t let it be.’
She remembered how he had looked last night, in his underclothes. She felt pain for both of them, but John laughed. He was snorting a little, running his fingers through his hair so that it lay back flat, like a badger’s. He stood up again and walked restlessly around the room, then stopped at the window to stare through the mist of grey net towards the sea.
In a low voice he asked her, ‘Do you want to try again?’
Mattie tried to blot out the room and its depressing furnishings, and the dusty, heavy green folds of fabric shrouding them.
The room didn’t matter. They were here, that was all.
She was troubled more by the sense that nothing else mattered, either. Whether John Douglas made love to her against this shiny wooden headboard, or not. It wouldn’t make any difference. It wouldn’t be a cataclysmic moment, not like in the stories. Except that there had been that moment of tenderness last night. That stayed with her, like warmth and wetness still on her cheek.
Afterwards she had undressed him and he had been vulnerable.
In the restaurant’s sickly warmth, with the wine in her head, she had wanted to come here to his bedroom. This morning she only knew that she liked John Douglas, rumpled and hung-over in his cherry-coloured dressing gown. Liking unclouded by longing or lust.
Mattie thought fleetingly of Julia’s aviator. With his broad back and strong arms and blond head, his potency like a spell cast over Julia. Mattie’s mouth curved. She didn’t long for Josh Flood either.
What difference, then?
Without speaking she lifted her bare arm from the musty shelter of the blankets and held it out to him.
He came to her quickly, pulling at the paisley cloth. He was naked underneath it and Mattie saw white corded flesh and thickly matted grey hair. Then he was beside her, on top of her, his tongue in her hair and in her ears and in her mouth. He pulled at the layer of clothes she had slept in and she helped him where she could, wriggling awkwardly beneath him. He hoisted himself up so that he could see her.
‘Oh God, you’ve got a beautiful body.’
He seized her breasts, kneading and squeezing and bumping them, and then taking them in his mouth with the nipples between his teeth. Mattie lay perfectly still and let him do what he wanted to her. For a moment everything seemed simple. He just does it, she thought with relief. But it wasn’t enough.
‘Hold me,’ he ordered her. He fixed her fist over himself. She felt thin, shiny skin stretched perilously tight over hard flesh. Mattie moved her hand tentatively up and down, wanting to do it right for him. He hissed hotly in her ear, ‘Hold it tighter. And do it hard, like this.’ His hand pumped with hers, big, long strokes that he thrust into.
Is that right? she wanted to ask. Is that right?
His fingers tweaked at her, rubbing and probing. ‘You like, that don’t you?’
‘Yes.’ Her breath came in a suffocating gasp, and she felt him smile.
‘Good. Yes. There’s nothing bloody like it.’
Mattie felt nothing. She had never felt anything with the boys outside the dance halls, or in the back row of the cinema, either.
Suddenly John pulled the pillows down from behind their heads. He thrust them under Mattie’s hips, lifting her into the air. She felt stripped and exposed and tried to roll aside but he bent his head over her, probing with his tongue. Mattie tried to respond. She screwed her eyes up so tightly that stars exploded behind her eyelids. John leaned over the side of the bed and fumbled in his dressing gown pocket. He unrolled the rubber over himself and balanced over her on all fours.
You can do what you want, Mattie repeated childishly inside her starry head. I don’t mind. You can do what you want.
He pushed her legs so far apart that the tendons strained in her groin. Then he took hold of himself with his fist and guided it into her. He did it quite gently, but Mattie felt the resistance inside her, and the pressure of him jabbing in and down. There was a sharp tear and she yelled out, an aggrieved shout of pain.
John held himself still.
‘Jesus Christ. Is this your first time?’
She nodded blindly. ‘I’m sorry.’
He took her face in his hands and kissed it, rubbing her mouth with his lips.
‘You should have told me, you bloody silly girl. Oh, Mattie.’
His gentleness salved her a little, but he seemed to forget it quite quickly. He began to saw up and down inside her, all the way in and then almost out again. Mattie felt nothing. The soft, melting, warm-watery sensations that her father gave her when they were alone in the house together were all that Mattie knew. And she had buried those feelings so deeply and defensively that it would take more than John Douglas to disinter them.
It seemed to go on for a long time. The weight of him ground against her hip-bones, and her soft membranes felt bruised and assaulted. Mattie concentrated on his thick white shoulders sheeny with sweat, on the creases in his neck, and the tufts of grey hair that sprouted from his ears.
He began to move faster, his breath coming in hoarse gasps. He went rigid and shouted out, ‘Jesus,’ and then gave a long, wailing cry. Mattie was afraid for him, and then she realised that it was all over. She held his head between her hands, supporting him until he stopped thrashing over her.
Milky silence folded over the room and they lay limply in the knotted blankets.
There, Mattie thought. I was right it didn’t matter.
She thought that John had fallen asleep again, but he lifted his head to look at her. ‘I wish you’d told me that you were a virgin.’
‘It doesn’t matter,’ she whispered.
His face looked different, she noticed. Softer, perhaps.
‘You made me very happy, this morning, Mattie Banner,’ John said.
She smiled then, a quick flickering smile, but she felt warmer inside.
‘Good,’ Mattie said.
They lay comfortably together, listening to the world moving outside. It was nice, Mattie thought, to share a moment like this. Private,
