and made them hurry, not looking at one another, on and out to the relative darkness of the green itself. The cathedral was a black perpendicular to their left. They turned right down Dean’s Row, passing the secure doors and curtained windows of Nina’s neighbours. Gordon thought fleetingly of the families behind them, within their domestic defences. He knew that he was about to leave his own married castle with its moat and battlements behind him, and that he was doing it gladly.
They reached Nina’s front door. She unlocked it and turned off the alarm and let him into her house.
They stood in the hallway, with the street door secured behind them. There was a light burning over their heads in a plain glass lantern, too bright for their eyes. Gordon watched her as she unbuttoned her coat and put her bag aside.
It was such a pleasure to be here in this safe place after the prissy constraints of the restaurant. They were both smiling, sidelong, not yet confronting one another.
Then she turned to him and he caught her by the elbows and held her against him. She turned her face up and he kissed her. Her mouth opened at once and he tasted her tongue, and suddenly both of them were full of hot confusion, rubbing their faces together and panting a little. He pushed her backwards so that she was caught against the wall. His fingers fumbled with the frogging of her jacket until somehow it opened and he found a silky layer underneath it with lace and straps, and into his head swam the memory of Vicky’s drawer filled with the same female things. Only they were not the same, and his surprise and pleasure at the difference shot through him like a scalding wire, burning him, so that he closed his eyes and knotted his fingers in her hair while their mouths sucked greedily together.
The light was very bright. When he looked again he saw Nina’s eyes staring into his, with the reflections in the black pupils receding to a point beyond his reach. She wriggled sideways and slipped out of his grasp. With the same movement she shrugged off her coat and left it hanging over the banister rail. The open front of her jacket showed a black slip and some black lace over white skin faintly marked with tea-coloured freckles.
‘Come upstairs,’ she said in her clear voice.
She held her hand out to lead him but he followed at once, watching the swing of her hips and the tightening of her calf muscles as she climbed the stairs.
Her bedroom was on the second floor, above the drawing room, with the same view of the cathedral front. Nina released the shutters from their wooden recesses and folded them across the windows, securing them neatly with the old catches. Gordon waited at the foot of the bed, watching her. She switched on a lamp on a low table and he saw a scrolled wooden headboard and a plain white cover. There were none of the lace-edged pillows or ancestral teddy bears favoured by Vicky.
Nina took off her red jacket and put it aside. She stepped out of her skirt and he saw that she was wearing stockings with lace tops, and ribbon suspenders. Vicky always wore tights, and he recalled how the mesh paled over the half-moons of her buttocks when she bent down in the closed space of their bedroom.
He stumbled to Nina, reaching for her, his mouth dry. But she evaded him, smiling a little, and he was left standing while she bent and stretched to pull her short slip over her head by the lacy hem. Then she raised first one foot and then the other on to a chair to unhook her stockings from the ribbon tongues. He saw the bunching of the gluteal muscles as she peeled the nylon skin down the freckled whiteness of her thighs.
Nina watched him watching her, evidently gauging the impact of this half-ironic sketch of a striptease.
She shook out the wisps of stocking and laid them tidily across her folded skirt and slip. Then she stood upright, in her black knickers and brassiere, with one arm folded across her chest and the other over her belly.
‘It’s a long time since I undressed in front of a man.’
A man not her husband, Gordon translated, a man not connected to her by the daily familiarity of body textures and scents, sweet or stale, in the uncritical and mundane condition of marriage.
‘You are lovely,’ he said, although he had not yet arranged his impressions into an opinion. ‘Let me look at you.’
Wanting to match her, he unbuckled his belt and undid the trousers of his second-best suit, navy blue with a faint pinstripe. Vicky called it his Tory suit because she thought it made him look like the Home Secretary. He put the trousers over the back of another chair and faced her in his socks and shirt-tails, with his erection tenting the white cotton in front of him. Nina unwound her arms and slid against him, quickly, so he only glimpsed her white belly and the blue shadow between the lace cups of her bra. She unbuttoned his shirt and slid her hands inside it, over the lateral muscles and the collar of flesh around his midriff.
‘Getting fat,’ he whispered with his mouth against her hair.
‘Merely acquiring some solidity.’
Her head was bent. She seemed smaller without her high heels, and more fine-boned. Her shoulders were narrow and marked by bigger freckles, almost blotches. She was looking down, sliding her hand under the elastic waistband of his shorts. Her fingers grasped him. Gordon lifted his hands over his head, like a boxer in victory, to give her the freedom to do what she wanted. He tore open his cuffs and dropped his shirt on the floor. She stretched the elastic ribbing and pulled it down over his hips, to expose him. Her mouth was slightly open, her lower lip protruding. It made her appear solemn, judicious. She moved her fist up and down, so that the head of his penis was shrouded and then revealed again. While they looked at it a tear of moisture bled from the open eye.
It was odd, this slow motion, Gordon thought. He could not remember when he had last felt so avid, but at the same time he was held aside from the burning in his balls and the threatened kick at the base of his spine by the woman’s dreamy detachment.
‘You make my dick stand up and touch my chin,’ he said.
That was better. He saw the fastidious twist at the corner of her mouth, but at the same time there was a drooping and thickening of her eyelids, as if a surge of blood had puffed them out, that made him think she liked to hear him say it.
Nina held him in her hand, weighing his balls. She put her thumb under his shaft and ran it upwards, to the tip, feeling the shiver it drew out of him.
The man rocked on his feet, spreading his toes on her polished floorboards, leaving faint, moist prints. Richard had never used words like ‘dick’. His lovemaking had been tender, affectionate rather than headlong. But this man was not Richard, nor was he anything like Richard. That was a good thing.
She knelt down, gazing at him for a moment, at the thick mat of hair that tapered upwards to the umbilicus, the solid thighs and broad slab of belly. Then, using her fingers to guide it to the right place, she took his penis in her mouth. She ran her tongue around the constricted neck, tasting the salt and iron. Gordon cupped his hands at the back of her skull, bracing his legs apart and arching his back so she could attend to him.
He let himself think of staying like that, swelling into her mouth until he came, but it was no more than an idea, an acknowledgement.
‘Let me look at you,’ he repeated.
He tilted her head back so that he saw her foggy eyes, and then lifted her up. He unhooked her bra and drew the straps off her shoulders, then put his mouth against the red chafe line that changed the colour of the freckles from tea to rust. Her breasts were small with bumpy brown nipples, and they pointed downwards and outwards like unripe fruit. He rubbed the nipples in turn between his fingers as she wound her arm around his neck. She drew him backwards,
